Luanda

Paulo Dias de Novais landed on the bay in 1576 and founded São Paulo da Assunção de Loanda, with the Fortaleza de São Miguel rising on the hill above the anchorage and a lower town spreading along the shore. The sandbar of the Ilha supplied the nzimbu shells used as currency in the region, and the sheltered bay made a natural harbour on an otherwise open coast.

For three centuries the city's business was the Atlantic slave trade. Luanda became the largest port of embarkation for enslaved Africans in the South Atlantic, shipping people above all to Brazil, and the connection ran both ways: when the Dutch seized the city in 1641, it was a fleet from Brazil that retook it in 1648. The trade shaped the whole settlement, from the baptism chapel at Morro da Cruz to the merchant houses of the baixa and a Luso-African elite that dominated the town.

Luanda became the capital of Portuguese Angola and grew quickly in the twentieth century as settlers arrived and the interior was opened to export agriculture. An armed attack on the city's prisons in February 1961 marked the start of the independence war; at independence in November 1975 the Portuguese population left almost overnight and the MPLA held the capital while civil war spread inland. Refugees from the fighting multiplied the population many times over, filling the hillsides with musseques. Since 2002 oil revenue has paid for a new bayfront, towers along the Marginal, satellite towns such as Kilamba and an airport out on the southern plain.

Luanda is where most of Angola's popular music was made. Semba, the swaying dance music that carries the city's sense of humour and commentary, was popular long before independence and is the forerunner of the styles that followed; kizomba, slower and romantic, followed around 1980 and is now danced across the world; and kuduro, fast, electronic and built for dancing, was developed in the musseques in the late 1980s. Live music is part of ordinary weekends, in bars on the Ilha as much as in concert halls.

Carnival is the city's great set piece. Neighbourhood groups spend months preparing costumes, drumming and choreography, then parade and compete along the Marginal in the days before Lent, an event with roots in both Angolan and Brazilian practice. The Ilha's fishing families keep their own observances for the sea, and church services, Catholic and Protestant alike, fill Sunday mornings.

Manners are formal by the standards of many capitals: people greet before they ask, titles are used, and elders are shown deference. Portuguese is the first language of most young Luandans, with Kimbundu words threaded through city slang. Residents are frank about the gap between the towers and the musseques, and sensitive to the city being photographed only as poverty or only as oil money; asking before taking someone's picture is expected.

Luanda's population passed 8.8 million in 2024, about a third of the national population, and the city is still growing faster than housing, water mains and power lines can follow. Glass towers, the reclaimed bay and gated condominiums in Talatona stand a short drive from dense musseques such as Cazenga, where families often buy water from tanker trucks and run generators through power cuts. New towns built with Chinese credit, Kilamba among them, were meant to relieve the pressure.

The formal economy runs on oil, the port, government ministries, banks and telecommunications, but most people earn a living informally — zungueiras selling food and goods from trays carried on the head, stallholders in the big markets, mechanics and builders working from yards. Days begin very early to get ahead of the traffic, and school runs in two or three shifts because there are not enough classrooms.

Costs are the constant complaint: rents, imported food and transport are high for local wages, and the kwanza's slides push prices up again. Weekends move to the water, to the Ilha, Mussulo and the beaches south of the city, and to football, church and family meals. Flooding after heavy rain, unreliable electricity and long commutes are the practical burdens of city life.

The dish most associated with the city is mufete: grilled fish, usually cacusso, served with beans cooked in red palm oil, boiled cassava, sweet potato, plantain and a raw onion-and-vinegar sauce, eaten at the beach restaurants of the Ilha and Mussulo. Alongside it come the national standards — muamba de galinha, chicken stewed in palm oil with okra and garlic, and calulu, dried and fresh fish cooked with greens, tomato and palm oil — both served with funge, the smooth cassava-flour porridge eaten with the hand.

Street food is everywhere: grilled chicken and skewered meat from roadside braziers, fried cassava and sweet potato, grilled corn, fish fried at market edges, and bags of mango, papaya and small sweet bananas sold in the traffic. Jindungo, the local chilli, appears as a sauce on almost everything, and kitaba, spiced ground peanut paste, is spread on bread.

The Portuguese inheritance is strong in the bakeries and cafés — crusty bread, small strong coffee, pastéis de nata — and in the churrasco grills. Luanda also eats a great deal of imported and Brazilian food in its restaurants. Cuca, the best-known Angolan beer, is brewed in the city, palm wine known as maluva comes in from the countryside, and kissângua, a lightly fermented maize drink, is sold at markets.