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Angola The Society and Its Environment
![[GIF]](http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/angola/ao02_00a.gif)
A young Angolan celebrates during a carnival.
IN LATE 1988, ANGOLAN SOCIETY still bore the scars
inflicted by
five centuries of colonial rule and by a
fourteen-year-long
insurgency that had drained the national treasury and
frustrated
the government's efforts to implement Marxist-Leninist
policies.
Complicating the study of contemporary Angolan society was
the
limited information available to researchers. During the
period of
turmoil that began in 1975, few Western observers had been
allowed
access to government-controlled areas. Furthermore, the
Angolan
press was closely controlled by the government and prone
to
propagandistic reporting; antigovernment sources were
equally
slanted.
Despite these limitations, certain features of Angolan
society
could be outlined, if not clearly discerned. In 1988
Angola had an
estimated population of 8.2 million, the great majority of
whom
lived in the western half of the country. Nearly 7 million
Angolans
lived in government-controlled areas. The remainder, an
estimated
1.25 million, resided in rebel-held regions. Most Angolans
inhabited rural areas, although there had been a
significant trend
since the 1970s toward urban growth. By 1988 about a third
of the
population was living in towns and cities. Most of the
urban areas
were in the more populous western half of the country.
Scholars often divided the population into a number of
ethnolinguistic categories, but in many cases these
categories had
been devised by others, both Portuguese and Africans.
Physical
boundaries based on these categories had been established
by the
Portuguese for use in census taking and related
activities.
Although they acquired a certain meaning for the people
included in
them in the course of the colonial period and during the
nationalist struggle, these categories were neither fixed
nor
internally homogeneous, and they were subject to change
under
shifting historical conditions.
The three largest categories--the Ovimbundu, the
Mbundu, and
the Bakongo--together constituted nearly three-quarters of
Angola's
population. Mestiços (persons of mixed European and
African
ancestry; see Glossary), at less than 2 percent of the
population,
had played an important role in the ruling party since
independence, mostly because they were fairly well
educated in a
society in which educated persons were relatively few.
They had,
however, been the target of much resentment, a consequence
of their
former identification with the Portuguese and, often, of
their
expressions of superiority to Africans. The regime of José
Eduardo
dos Santos, who became president in 1979, sought to
dissipate this
resentment by replacing high-ranking mestiço party
and
government officials with individuals of other ethnic
backgrounds.
Little is known of the actual workings of indigenous
social
systems as modified during the colonial period. The most
persistent
of groupings and institutions, such as clans or tribes,
were based
on descent from a common ancestor, in most cases a common
female
ancestor, and were traced through females. (With rare
exceptions,
however, authority lay in male hands.) As enduring as
these had
been, such groupings and institutions were showing signs
of losing
their significance toward the end of the colonial era. In
many
instances, they were further disrupted by the devastating
effects
of the insurgency waged by the National Union for the
Total
Independence of Angola (União Nacional para a
Independência Total
de Angola -- UNITA), which caused massive displacement of
much of
the rural population, particularly from the eastern
provinces.
The Portuguese-imposed national structure was almost
totally
destroyed by the Marxist-Leninist institutions established
after
independence in 1975. There have been significant changes,
however,
in the ideology of the country's leaders in the mid- to
late 1980s.
Although the ruling party, the Popular Movement for the
Liberation
of Angola-Workers' Party (Movimento Popular de Libertação
de
Angola-Partido de Trabalho--MPLA-PT), inveighed against
what it
called petit bourgeois tendencies, its leaders accepted
private
enterprise and a more tolerant attitude toward personal
gain as
means of coping with the country's massive economic and
administrative problems.
Despite its opposition to religion, the
Marxist-Leninist
government did not prohibit the existence of religious
institutions. Many Angolans were Roman Catholics or
Protestants,
and missionaries had been instrumental in providing
education to
Angolans during the colonial era when schooling had been
largely
denied to Africans by the colonial authorities.
Nonetheless, the
government was suspicious of large organized groups that
could
threaten its stability, particularly the Roman Catholic
Church,
because it had not overtly opposed Portuguese colonialism.
There
was less hostility toward the Protestant churches, which
had not
maintained particularly close ties to the Portuguese
colonial
authorities. Indigenous religions continued to influence
the lives
of a large segment of the population, even though some of
these
people also belonged to Christian denominations.
In the late 1980s, there was a tremendous need for
educated
Angolans in both the economic and the governmental
sectors,
especially in technical fields. Although the government
had made
steady progress in providing education at the primary and
secondary
school levels, there were still severe teacher shortages,
mostly in
rural areas, and vast problems in reaching those children
living in
areas where UNITA military actions were most frequent.
There were also shortages of trained Angolan personnel
in the
health field, which had forced the government to bring in
hundreds
of foreign health care personnel to meet the needs of the
population as well as to train Angolans in health care
practices.
Nonetheless, the high infant mortality rate and
proliferation of
diseases, exacerbated by poor sanitation and malnutrition,
attested
to the government's insufficient progress in this area.
Data as of February 1989
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