Angola

The struggle

Angola fought a fourteen-year liberation war from 1961, waged by three rival movements — MPLA, FNLA and UNITA — with Queen Njinga's seventeenth-century resistance as national memory behind them. Portugal's collapse in 1974 left no agreed successor, and South African and Cuban forces intervened as the handover approached. The MPLA proclaimed independence in Luanda on 11 November 1975, and civil war continued until 2002.

Key people

• Agostinho Neto

  1922–1979

  Poet and MPLA leader; first president

• Njinga Mbande

  1583–1663

  Queen who fought Portuguese expansion for four decades

• Deolinda Rodrigues

  1939–1967

  MPLA militant and writer, captured and killed in 1967