ANGOLA MINORITY PROFILE
Profile
The Bakongo people of Central Africa comprise around 13 per cent of Angola’s population, and the majority of the inhabitants of the northern Angolan province of Cabinda. The Cabinda exclave is separated from the rest of Angola by the sliver of the Democratic Republic of Congo that runs to the Atlantic.
Despite its huge oil reserves, Cabinda’s population itself is very poor and has little economic development. As a result, many Cabindans feel exploited by the central government and foreign oil companies.
Historical context
A separatist movement for independence for Cabinda has been in existence since 1961, when in Bakongo coffee estate workers created the largest colonial uprising in any part of tropical Africa during the entire colonial period. The Front for the Liberation of Cabinda (FLEC) was subsequently formed in 1963.
In multi-ethnic Luanda, a place of ‘savage capitalism’, Bakongo men and especially women found success in trade, virtually all of which is unregulated, and hugely dependent on untaxed and pilfered merchandise. Other Angolans resented this, and during the war scapegoated Bakongo as ‘Zairians’, implying both illegitimate citizenship and unfairly gained wealth. In January 1993 armed civilians killed over 60 Bakongo in Luanda marketplaces. Police and judicial protection of Bakongo people was at best half-hearted. A Bakongo-based movement, Movimento para Auto-Determinação de Bakongo (MAKO), with an active armed wing, emerged in the early 1990s, advocating an independent Bakongo federation including Cabinda. It has since dissolved, and the main separatist militants are organized under the FLEC and its various splinter factions.
Cabinda comprises only a tiny fraction of Angola’s territory, but accounts for the majority of the country’s oil output. Ordinary Cabindans have not benefited from this wealth any more than other Angolans. Despite efforts by both of the main Angolan political movements, the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) and the União para a Independencia Total de Angola (UNITA), to recruit them into privileged ranks, aspiring Cabindan politicians set up various separatist movements down through the years, most with tacit backing from the neighbouring Republic of Congo and Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo), and from French military and multinational oil interests. These groupings tended to split up and regroup, some in alliances of convenience with either the MPLA or UNITA, neither of which wished to see an independent Cabinda. With the end of Angola’s civil war in 2002, fighting in Cabinda between separatists and the Angolan army intensified, resulting in widespread human rights abuses against Cabindans. The resulting insecurity made many refugees from the region reluctant to attempt a return, as many were doing in other parts of the country.
From March 2006, an umbrella organization, the Cabinda Forum for Dialogue (FDC), entered into discussions with the government. In July 2006, the government banned one element of the FDC: Cabinda’s only human rights organization, Mpalabanda. In August one Cabindan rebel leader signed a separate peace with the government that was disavowed by other Cabindan factions. The head of Mpalabanda was arrested in September 2006 and released one month later, pending trial for ‘instigating, inciting and condoning crimes against the security of the state’. In 2011 the organisation submitted a petition calling for their appeal of the ban to be heard without delay; the case has yet to be resolved.
In 2007 a staff member with international NGO Global Witness, in Cabinda on a government-authorized mission to discuss transparency in oil revenues with civil society members and local officials, was detained by security forces but eventually allowed to leave the country. Reports of arbitrary detention, ill-treatment and torture in detention and due process failures for those arrested in military operations carried out in the wake of FLEC attacks on armed forces or accused of state security crimes continued; one of the victims, Fernando Lelo, a former Voice of America journalist who had previously reported on human rights violations in the province, was tried before a military court in a procedure that reportedly fell far short of fair trial standards. He was released from prison in 2009.
Cabinda saw a number of highly publicized incidents, including an ambush on a bus of Togolese footballers participating in the African Cup of Nations in January 2010 and an attack of Chinese mine workers some months later. Several human rights defenders, including former members of Mpalabanda, were among those detained on state security charges in the aftermath of the attacks. They were found guilty of state security charges and sentenced to between three and six years in prison, but were released at the end of 2010.
Current issues
In 2013 the UN Human Rights Committee expressed concern at arbitary arrests and detention of suspected FLEC sympathizers and human rights activists by security forces. Reported incidents of political repression in the region continue: in one example, José Marcos Mavungo, a former Mpalabanda activist, was arrested in March 2015 for attempting to organize a demonstration on human rights and governance in Cabinda. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention subsequently found that he had been unlawfully detained. He was eventually acquitted by the Supreme Court of state security charges in May 2016 and released.
Violence in Cabinda has continued, driven in part by resentment against the Angolan government and the corruption surrounding the management of its oil revenue: in a highly controversial move in June 2016, for example, then President dos Santos appointed his daughter as head of the state oil company Sonangol, responsible for managing the country’s largest source of revenue. Foreign oil companies, particularly Chevron, the largest oil operator in Cabinda, have also been heavily criticized for contributing to the endemic graft in the country’s oil industry, the process depriving the local population from any economic benefits from its extraction. The death in June 2016 in Paris of FLEC’s longstanding leader, Henrique N’zita Tiago, is also believed to have resulted in a spike in violence by armed separatists in the region, with dozens of Angolan soldiers killed in the months that followed and foreign workers targeted with abduction.
Profile
Ovimbundu constitute the largest ethnic group in Angola and are concentrated in the country’s highland plateau. A largely rural people whose farming systems were once highly productive, Ovimbundu became migrant wage-earners in large numbers as Portuguese settlers began taking over their lands in the 1940s and 1950s.
Historical context
In the face of privilege, corruption and arrogance among the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) nomeklatura, the leadership of the opposition group União para a Independencia Total de Angola (UNITA), frustrated at being shut out of power, successfully played on feelings of humiliation and resentment among Ovimbundu and other minorities. As less than 2 per cent of the MPLA’s members in 1980 were small farmers (a category comprising about three-quarters of Angola’s population at the time) and as its policies neglected rural residents and enriched urban elites, there was ample basis for discontent. However, UNITA’s leadership sought to channel this bitterness chiefly into anti-mestiço and anti-white feeling. Yet for the Ovimbundu community, the war brought suffering on a scale and depth felt by no other ethnic group.
National elections in 1992 revealed a strong but by no means universal Ovimbundu allegiance to UNITA; in the three Ovimbundu-dominated provinces it gained two-thirds of the parliamentary vote. The elections also revealed an even stronger fear among Angolans of UNITA’s barbarism and ruthlessness; two-thirds of the national parliamentary vote went against it. UNITA’s rejection of the election results and its return to war provoked countermeasures: waves of ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Ovimbundu (and Bakongo) broke out in several cities, and the MPLA itself returned to war, with terrible blood-letting on both sides.
Current issues
Since 2002, UNITA has transitioned into a political party, reducing the threat of violence between the Ovimbundu and other communities. UNITA is now the second largest party in the country.
Profile
Ambo, Nyaneka-Nkumbi (Nyaneka-Humbe), Herero and other semi-nomadic cattle-keeping peoples live in the south-western provinces. Himba and related pastoralist groups such as Kuvale and Zemba speak Herero-derived languages.
Some scattered groups of San and related peoples, who live chiefly by hunting, gathering and small-scale trade, continue their nomadic existence on their ancestral lands in the southernmost provinces of Huíla, Cunene, Cuando Cubango and Moxico. Others have settled among Bantu neighbours, engaging in agriculture, or have moved to urban centres.
Historical context
Himba and other pastoralists of the south-west have long faced de facto denial of grazing rights, expropriation of land, unfair terms of trade and lack of respect for their traditions.
The long civil war was particularly difficult on San, who lacked land rights amid increasing encroachment by other peoples, suffered from widespread use of landmines, found it difficult to maintain adequate food security and lacked access to medical services. The end of the war eased some of these problems and allowed humanitarian organizations to deliver food aid, although this itself can threaten traditional culture.
Current issues
For decades, the governments of Angola and Namibia have been planning to build a hydroelectric dam along the Cunene River between the two countries. Himba communities on both sides of the border would be severely affected. Previous reports have indicated that the Angolan government had abandoned plans to locate the dam at the highly contested site of Epupa, but there is also cross-border opposition to plans to site the dam at a location in the Baynes Mountains due to the impact on traditional Himba lands, culture, heritage and way of life.
For their part, the traditionally hunter-gatherer San continue to face widespread societal discrimination, extreme poverty, food insecurity, gaps in birth documentation, lack of title to their ancestral land and limited access to services, as well as low levels of participation in Angolan political life. However, awareness of their situation has grown, in part due to advocacy by NGOs such as the Organização Cristã de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento Comunitário (OCADEC) and the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA). In 2007 Angola saw its first San Conference, with representatives of San communities in Angola and neighbouring countries, international community representatives, NGOs and local and regional authorities.
While some Angolan officials have made efforts on behalf of the San, for instance in the area of disaster mitigation following floods, overall the approach has been inconsistent and somewhat piecemeal, revealing the lack of a coherent policy on indigenous peoples and their rights. However, serious issues around their rights to their ancestral lands and resources have increased in the face of conflicts over land use stemming from development initiatives and other factors. Angola’s constitutional and legal framework still lacks explicit recognition, protection and promotion of indigenous peoples’ rights. These issues, compounded by the impact of climate change on seasonal rain patterns, are leading increasing numbers of San to settle and opt for agriculture-based livelihoods while trying to maintain elements of their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Many San, having been forced to flee Angola during the country’s protracted civil conflict, remain displaced in Namibia, South Africa and Zambia.
ABOUT ANGOLA
Main languages: according to the 2014 Census, while the majority (71 per cent) of Angolans speak Portuguese – the only official language – at home, other languages spoken include Umbundu (23 per cent), Kikongo (8 per cent), Kimbundu (8 per cent), Chokwe (7 per cent), Nhaneca (3 per cent), Nganguela (3 per cent), Fiote (2 per cent), Kwanhama (2 per cent), Muhumbi (2 per cent), Luvale (1 per cent), others (4 per cent)
Main religions: indigenous beliefs, Christianity
Angola’s 2014 Census, the first since 1970, included information on language most used in the home, but not on ethnicity. Other sources indicate that Angola’s ethnic groups include Ovimbundu (37 per cent), Mbundu (25 per cent), Bakongo (13 per cent) and mestiço (2 per cent), Lunda-Chokwe (8 per cent), Nyaneka-Nkumbi (3 per cent), Ambo (2 per cent), Herero (up to 0.5 per cent), San 3,600 and Kwisi (up to 0.5 per cent). However, the international indigenous peoples’ rights organization IWGIA puts the number of indigenous people including San, Himba, Kwepe, Kuvale and Zwemba at around 25,000, amounting to 0.1 per cent of the total population, with San alone numbering between 5,000 and 14,000.
The majority of today’s Angolans are Bantu peoples, including Ovimbundu, Mbundu and Bakongo, while the San belong to the indigenous Khoisan people.
Traditionally a largely rural people of the central highlands, Ovimbundu migrated to the cities in large numbers in search of employment in the twentieth century.
The Mbundu are concentrated around Angola’s capital, Luanda, and the north-central provinces. While some Mbundu still speak kiMbundu, many among this minority speak Portuguese as a first language.
Spanning both sides of the Congo River, Bakongo people predominate in Angola’s impoverished but oil-rich north-west, including the Atlantic enclave of Cabinda. Bakongo are known for being organizers of businesses, syncretic churches or political movements.
In south-western provinces are semi-nomadic cattle-keeping peoples, most of whom are Ambo, Nyaneka-Nkumbi (also known as Nyaneka-Humbe) or Herero.
Scattered communities of San and Kwisi peoples, which live chiefly by hunting, gathering and small-scale trade, continue their nomadic existence in the southernmost provinces. Some have settled in rural areas and taken up farming, while others can be found in urban areas.
The legacy of colonial rule is also reflected in the existence of Europeanized assimilados (those Africans classified as Westernized) including mestiços (people of mixed African and European ancestry). These different classifications played a role in Angola’s civil conflict: while the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) was assembled under mestiço and assimilado leadership and the Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola (FNLA) was formed under traditional and assimilado leadership, for example, União para a Independencia Total de Angola (UNITA) was formed as an anti-mestiço movement with some younger assimilado leadership.
Decades of conflict in Angola, first in the form of the anti-colonial insurgency beginning in the 1960s and then the brutal civil conflict that consumed the country from independence in 1975 until 2002, have left a legacy of poverty, inequality and political factionalism. While the violence was rooted in a range of factors, ethnic and regional divisions played a significant role, with the three main factions – the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), the Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola (FNLA) and União para a Independencia Total de Angola (UNITA) – all drawing on varying degrees of support and leadership from different regions and communities in the country. With a diverse population that includes Ovimbundu, Mbundu, Bakongo and a variety of other communities, including a mixed Portuguese-Angolan mestiço population and indigenous San, identity and geography continue to play a role in Angola’s politics. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the MPLA’s continued dominance of the government and increasing repression against human rights activists, journalists and political opposition members, the country has managed to avoid a return to civil conflict.
Angola also struggles with persistent corruption in its oil sector, a situation that has contributed to its governance challenges and entrenched the majority of Angolans in deep poverty, despite the billions of dollars in revenue generated every year through its extractive industries. This has had particularly negative impacts in Cabinda region, an area that comprises just a small fraction of Angolan territory but contains the majority of its oil. Despite this, however, the local Cabindan population have little in the way of development opportunities and like other Angolans have not benefitted from the country’s oil revenue. This has contributed to the continued insecurity in the area, even after the end of the civil conflict in 2002. Separatist violence has spiked on a number of occasions in recent years, including 2010 and 2016/17, when thousands of Angolan troops were brought into the region after a series of attacks on Angolan soldiers and the abduction of Chinese workers by armed separatists.
Angola does not officially recognize the indigenous peoples living in its territory, and as a result the discrimination these communities frequently experience in accessing health care, education and basic needs such as food and water remains unaddressed. Its indigenous population, including San, Himba, Kwepe, Kuvale and Zwemba, together are estimated at around 25,000 (0.1 per cent of the total population) and given their dependence on their traditional lands are especially vulnerable to environmental stresses such as drought. In addition, however, they also contend with the dispossession of their ancestral territory to accommodate tourism, logging and other developments, in the process devastating their way of life. Many were displaced to neighbouring countries such as Namibia, South Africa and Zambia during the civil conflict and have yet to return.
Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have in the past carried out repeated tit-for-tat violent expulsions of thousands of each other’s nationals. Concern over Angola’s treatment of undocumented migrants has continued in recent years, with the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants calling in 2016 for a national strategy to promote and protect their rights in the face of discrimination, harassment, intimidation, arbitrary detention and other abuses after expressing concerns at the detention and expulsion of foreigners, including refugees and asylum seekers. Beginning in October 2018, following an expulsion order by the Angolan government, at least 360,000 Congolese nationals crossed back into DRC, with many reportedly being subjected to violence, extortion and other human rights abuses.
Environment
South of the equator on Africa’s Atlantic coastline, Angola borders the Republic of Congo in the north, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the north and east, Zambia in the east, and Namibia in the south. Angola’s climate ranges from the tropical north, to its dry central plateaus and desert in the south. Angola’s tiny Cabinda province, in the northwest, is separated from the rest of Angola by a sliver of the DRC that follows the Congo River’s run to the sea. Cabinda is predominantly home to the Bakongo minority and is also where the preponderance of the country’s oil wealth lies. In its northern and central areas, Angola has high quality diamonds: both easily accessible alluvial diamonds (found in riverbeds) and kimberlite pipes, exploitation of which requires industrial equipment. Desertification and deforestation have worsened soil erosion in the country, but Angola still has large swathes of arable land, much of which remains unused as a result of the long civil war, even though an estimated 70 per cent of Angolans are farmers.
History
It is thought that over 2,000 years ago Bantu peoples migrating from the north largely displaced the original Khoisan hunter-gatherer population in what is today Angola. The country takes its name from the head of the former Mbundu kingdom of Ndongo that dates back at least as far as the sixteenth century, and whose king carried the title ‘Ngola’.
Greed and violence, often inspired by outside interests, have driven the history of Angola since Portuguese colonists first arrived in the area in 1483. Slaves, land, oil and diamonds have generated streams of wealth, enriching foreign and domestic elites, and provoking bloody conflicts. The manipulation of racial and ethnic fears and resentments helped to mobilize and direct the armed forces behind the violence. At the bottom were the indigenous communities, as well as the officially undifferentiated mass of non-Westernized Africans. Above them, together with the white colonialists were thin strata of Europeanized assimilados (those Africans certified as Westernized) including mestiços (people of mixed African and European ancestry). Living mainly in cities, they fulfilled intermediate roles in an economy based largely on the cheap labour of a rural unskilled lower class.
The Europeanized assimilados provided leadership to Angola’s nationalist movements in varying degrees. Broadly corresponding to the main ethno-linguistic clusters, these crystallized in the 1950s and 1960s in three blocs: the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) assembled under mestiço and assimilado leadership with a strong following among Mbundu people of the centre-north, but also embracing smaller ethnic groups in the east and south; the Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola (FNLA), formed under traditional and assimilado leadership and rooted almost exclusively among Bakongo people in the north-west; and União para a Independencia Total de Angola (UNITA), formed as an anti-mestiço movement with some younger assimilado leadership, drawing its main following among Ovimbundu people, the pre-eminent ethnic group of the central highlands.
At the time of the Portuguese withdrawal in 1975, a three-way tussle for power was in progress. Despite vigorous backing from the United States, abetted by Zaire and South Africa, the FNLA and UNITA lost out. The winner, the MPLA, took all. Its upper echelon – the nomenklatura – was composed disproportionately of mestiços, Europeans and much of the educated middle class. It became the party of a ‘state class’ reliant on multinational oil companies and Eastern bloc and Western suppliers of hardware and advice. At the urging of the Soviets, the MPLA chose not to revive the agrarian economy and not to rely on the majority farming population, but rather to pursue rapid urban industrialization and feed the cities and wage-earners largely with imported food.
The Cold War largely fuelled the ensuing conflict that began in earnest around 1980. The world powers took sides, which then parroted their ideology. While the US backed UNITA, the Soviet Union and Cuba pursued their brand of proxy warfare by backing the MPLA, whose vulnerabilities stemmed from its neglect of rural residents, compounded by long-standing ethnic and racial resentments. With the Cold War over and South African apartheid on the wane, Cuban and South African forces left Angola in 1989. But when the MPLA won elections called for under a 1991 peace agreement, UNITA rejected the results and returned to the battlefield. The 1994 Lusaka Protocol also proved unsuccessful, despite deployment of UN peacekeepers, and a 1997 government of national unity was also fleeting, as UNITA resumed the war again in 1998 and the UN withdrew its peacekeepers the following year. UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi’s erstwhile backers in the West grew weary of his role as spoiler. Fighting continued until 2002, when Savimbi was killed in the fighting – reputedly targeted with US, South African and Israeli assistance. A cease-fire was agreed shortly thereafter, with UNITA demobilizing to become a political party.
The 27-year war is thought to have cost the lives of up to two million people, and, along with government economic policy, transformed Angolan society. Whereas in 1970 about 85 per cent of the population lived in rural areas, by 2005 less than half lived there; lives of urban squalor were the lot of most Angolans. An estimated 10 million land-mines were left behind when the war was over, and millions of weapons still circulated in the hands of jobless and uprooted youth.
Since then, while the country has avoided a return to large-scale civil conflict and seen significant investment from China, the country has also witnessed growing corruption and a wider climate of political repression against activists and opponents of the government. Despite significant reserves of oil and diamonds, producing billions of dollars in public revenue each year, many Angolans remain mired in poverty while billions of dollars are believed to have been syphoned off by former President José Eduardo dos Santos during his decades of rule.
Governance
Portuguese rule ended officially in 1975, followed by 27 years of civil conflict fuelled by the Cold War until 1989, and continuing until 2002 on its own inertia amid a scramble for control of natural resources. The MPLA’s President José Eduardo dos Santos, in power since 1979, continued to hold on to power while imposing increasing restrictions on the political opposition. Dos Santos finally stepped down from power in 2017.
The MPLA government has long tried to curb centrifugal political tendencies by drawing discontented ethnic elites into well-oiled systems of clientelism, and by recruiting its armed forces from all ethnic groups. Radio and television broadcasts in national languages and programmes about local music and dance have drawn attention to local cultural expression. But this hardly adds up to proper respect for the rights of minorities and indigenous peoples. Key minority and indigenous issues are deeply entangled with struggles among elites over state power and especially shares of state-controlled export revenues.
The gravest problems affecting members of minorities and indigenous communities in Angola stem at least in part from the tensions ultimately traceable to Western dependency on cheap oil and taste for diamonds, the divide between Angola’s people and their corrupt governing elites, and longstanding neglect of rural and diamond mining areas.
Angola has consistently ranked low in UNDP’s Human Development Index. Since 2000, the country has made some progress in education, gross national income per capita and life expectancy. The global drop in oil prices has adversely affected Angola’s economy, already afflicted by severe inequalities, under-development of key sectors and lack of transparency around oil revenues.