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Angola Ethnolinguistic Categories
![[PDF]](http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/pdf.gif)
Figure 5. Ethnolinguistic Groups. 1988
![[JPEG]](http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/jpeg.gif)
Children playing ware, a traditional game
Courtesy UNICEF (Maggie Murray-Lee)
Caveats notwithstanding, a listing of the more commonly
used
ethnic rubrics and an indication of the dimension of the
categories
they refer to is useful as a preliminary description of
Angola's
peoples. The 1970 census did not enumerate the population
in ethnic
terms. The most recent available count, therefore, is
based on
projections of the 1960 census. Most projections assume
that the
rank order of the major ethnolinguistic categories did not
change,
although the proportions may have done so. In particular,
a fairly
large segment of the Bakongo of the northwestern provinces
of Zaire
and Uíge were already refugees in 1970 and were not
included in the
1970 census. Although it is not clear how many Bakongo
subsequently
returned to Angola, it may be assumed that many of them
returned
and that their relative status as the third largest group
was
unchanged. The same is true of other ethnic groups whose
members
fled to Zaire and Zambia in the late 1980s when the
insurgency
intensified in Angola's border regions. This category
would include
many Ovimbundu, who have fled from central Angola to
Zambia, and
many Lunda and Chokwe (also spelled Cokwe), who fled to
Zaire from
eastern and northern Angola.
Data as of February 1989
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![[JPEG]](http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/angola/ao02_03a.jpg)
