Luanda & the North

The north was the heart of the Kingdom of Kongo, whose capital at Mbanza Kongo ruled a wide belt either side of the lower Congo river when Portuguese ships arrived in the 1480s. Its kings converted to Christianity, and under Afonso I in the early 16th century the capital, later named São Salvador, gained stone churches and a Portuguese-speaking court, even as the slave trade drained the kingdom. Further south, Kimbundu-speaking peoples formed the Ndongo kingdom inland.

Paulo Dias de Novais founded Luanda in 1576, and the city became the main port of the Atlantic slave trade from Angola, with the Fortaleza de São Miguel guarding its bay. The Dutch held Luanda from 1641 to 1648 before a fleet from Brazil retook it, a reminder of how closely the colony was tied to Brazil. Kongo itself fractured after its defeat by the Portuguese at Mbwila in 1665, and São Salvador declined to a small town.

In the 20th century the Uíge hills were taken over for settler coffee farms worked by forced labour, and in 1961 two events opened the independence war here: an attack on Luanda's prisons in February and a violent uprising across the northern coffee districts in March, followed by severe reprisals. The MPLA held Luanda at independence in 1975, and the capital's population swelled as people fled the civil war in the interior. Since 2002 oil revenue has rebuilt the city's waterfront, while in 2024 part of greater Luanda's hinterland became a separate province, Icolo e Bengo, which includes Kissama National Park.

Two old identities meet in this region. In Zaire and Uíge most people are Bakongo, speaking Kikongo and sharing culture, churches and family ties with neighbours in the two Congos; many spent the war years in Kinshasa and returned speaking Lingala and French. Around Luanda and Bengo the older language is Kimbundu, though Portuguese is now the first language for most young Luandans.

Luanda is the birthplace of much of Angolan popular music. Semba became popular from the 1950s, kizomba followed around 1980, and kuduro's fast electronic beats and dance moves were developed in the city in the late 1980s. Carnival, held on the Marginal before Lent, is a competition between neighbourhood groups in costume, and the Ilha's fishing community keeps its own festivals for the sea.

Religion is strongly Christian, and the north has a distinctive Protestant and prophetic tradition: Protestant churches have long been strong among the Bakongo, and the Tokoist church, modelled on the Kimbanguist movement, was founded by Simão Toco, a Protestant from Uíge province. The Kongo past carries great prestige in Mbanza Kongo, where the king's former court and burial places are treated with respect.

Greater Luanda is home to an estimated eight to nine million people, and its growth outruns housing, water and power. Glass towers, the reclaimed Baía de Luanda and gated condominiums in Talatona sit beside vast informal settlements such as Cazenga, and many families rely on water bought from tanker trucks. New satellite towns like Kilamba were built with Chinese credit to ease the pressure.

The capital runs on oil money — company offices, the port, government ministries and services — but most people make their living informally, from zungueiras carrying goods on their heads to stallholders in the big markets. Days start very early to beat the traffic, and weekends move to the beaches of the Ilha, Mussulo and the coast south of the city.

The north is poorer and more rural. Uíge, the main town of the coffee hills, and Caxito in Bengo are regional centres, farming cassava, bananas and some coffee, while Soyo, at the mouth of the Congo in Zaire province, is an oil and liquefied natural gas town. Cross-border trade with the DR Congo is a mainstay along the frontier.

Luanda's signature is mufete, a platter of grilled fish with beans cooked in palm oil, boiled cassava, sweet potato and plantain, often topped with a raw onion-and-vinegar sauce and eaten at the Ilha's beach restaurants. Calulu, dried and fresh fish stewed with greens, tomato and palm oil, and muamba de galinha, chicken in palm-oil sauce, are served with funge, the smooth, elastic porridge that here is usually made from cassava flour.

In the Bakongo north, cassava rules: leaves are pounded into kizaka, a green stew often cooked with peanuts or fish, and the root becomes funge and kikwanga, a fermented cassava bread steamed in leaves and shared with the Congos. Palm wine, maluva, is tapped in the villages, and grilled goat and bushmeat appear at roadside stalls.

Luanda has a strong bar and street-food culture, from grilled chicken and skewered meat to jindungo chilli sauce on everything. Cuca, the country's best-known beer, is brewed in the city, and the Uíge hills still produce robusta coffee, a fraction of the colonial-era harvest.

In Luanda, the Marginal promenade curves round the bay beneath the Fortaleza de São Miguel, a 16th-century fortress that now houses the armed forces museum. The baixa keeps colonial churches and the prefabricated Palácio de Ferro, the towering Agostinho Neto mausoleum dominates the skyline, and the Ilha's sandbar is lined with restaurants and beach clubs. The National Museum of Slavery stands beside a 17th-century chapel at Morro da Cruz on the southern outskirts.

South of the city, boats cross to the long sandy spit of Mussulo, and the coast road passes the Miradouro da Lua, a lookout over red and white eroded cliffs, before reaching the surf beach at Cabo Ledo. Kissama National Park, just beyond the Cuanza river mouth, covers nearly 10,000 square kilometres of savanna, baobabs and riverine forest, and elephants and other animals were brought in after the war to restock it.

To the north, Mbanza Kongo's UNESCO-listed remains include the ruined 16th-century cathedral known as Kulumbimbi, the old royal enclosure and a museum of the Kongo kings. Soyo stands at the mouth of the Congo river, and inland Uíge's coffee hills, around the towns of Uíge and Negage, are green, cool and little visited.