Angola was both a new experience and a bit of a surprise.  We did not expect to see a modern city filled with cranes building new high rises.   The city was clean with good roads and trimmed gardens.  

That said, as the ship gained entry to the harbour the water shimmered with oil on the surface.  Later in town we saw evidence of the oil with black goop lining the surfaces of the retaining wall around the bay.  

Yet we almost didn’t dock.  The prior day the captain mentioned that there are limited docking spaces at the port so if there are already cargo ships in place we might not be able to dock.  On arrival we learned that this was not the case but rather that they had failed to put out the proper bumpers along the dock to ensure the ship did not smash into the pier.  After about a 45-minute delay they complied, manually carried out huge bumpers, and we docked. 

Finally we arrived in the capital and largest city of Angola, Luanda.

Angola is the second-largest Portuguese-speaking country after Brazil and the population is the seventh largest in Africa with a population of 37+ million.  

Portuguese explorer Paulo Dias de Novais founded the city on January 25, 1576.  The city served as the center of the slave trade to Brazil from 1550 to 1836.  Over one-hundred years later, still under the Portuguese, black Angolans were forbidden from forming political parties or labour unions.   In the early sixties an armed conflict against the Portuguese began and the fight for independence lasted twelve years.  The country became independent on November 11, 1975.  Subsequently the Angolan Civil War began in 1975 and continued until 2002.  It was a power struggle between two former anti-colonial guerrilla movements, the communist People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the anti-communist National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).

The 27-year war can be divided roughly into three periods of major fighting—from 1975 to 1991, 1992 to 1994 and from 1998 to 2002—with fragile periods of peace. By the time the MPLA achieved victory in 2002, between 500,000 and 800,000 people had died and over one million had been internally displaced. The war devastated Angola's infrastructure and severely damaged public administration, the economy, and religious institutions.

The Angolan Civil War was notable due to the combination of Angola's violent internal dynamics and the exceptional degree of foreign military and political involvement. The war is widely considered a Cold War proxy conflict, as the Soviet Union and the United States, with their respective allies Cuba and South Africa, assisted the opposing factions.

Human Rights Watch estimates UNITA and the government employed more than 6,000 and 3,000 child soldiers, respectively, some forcibly impressed, during the war. Additionally, human rights analysts found that between 5,000 and 8,000 underage girls were married to UNITA militants

This is also the period of the Blood Diamonds from Angola.  

• Blood diamonds (also called conflict diamonds, brown diamonds, hot diamonds, or red diamonds) are diamonds mined in a war zone and sold to finance an insurgency, invasion, terrorism, or warlordism. The term is used to highlight the negative consequences of diamond trade in certain areas, or to label an individual diamond as having come from such an area. Diamonds mined during the 20th- and 21st-century civil wars in Angola, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau have been labeled as such.

Today Angola is nominally a multi-party republic but is widely classified as an authoritarian regime rather than a functioning democracy.  

All this history had set our expectations. Yet we found a dynamic, clean, organized and growing city.  

Our tour was panoramic with the first stop at the bay for photos.  The cathedral was under renovation so we couldn’t visit.

We next visited Fortaleza de Sao Miquel built in 1576 by Paulo Dias de Novais. It became the administrative center of the colony in 1627. It was a major site for slave traffic that was exported to Brazil.  The fort is well maintained and contains various weapons, as expected.  The room in the center of the fort is beautiful, lined with original blue and white Portuguese tiles.  They have likely been restored as the colours are vivid and alive.  Surprising to see such beauty inside a military fort.

We walked the ramparts and took photos over the city.

We then drove to the Ilha de Luanda (which is really a peninsula).  It’s a seven-kilometer stretch of beautiful beaches.  

We drove by the Unknown Soldier Memorial, the Mausoleum of Antonio Agostinho Neto (the first president of the country) and the National Assembly building.

We returned to the ship (note no souvenir shop stops- clearly not many tourists visit the country).   Other friends visited a resort and said it was beautiful.  The smell in the city isn’t pleasant.  You can see the oil refinery from the ship.  But our friends said their couple of hours at the beach were pleasant.

After returning we analyzed the situation further.  First, the guide shared very little on the history, income or other pertinent facts about the country which most trained tour guides typically focus upon. 

The city has a population of almost 10 million (-- a quarter of the entire country’s population).  Yet the streets were empty, very odd for a working day. 

We had a police escort for the buses on our tour—was that to keep the roads open (which seemed unnecessary) or something else?  We left our conversation with the thought that perhaps our experience had been sanitised. 

All an all perhaps not the most interesting or dynamic experience but we are glad to have had a small glimpse into this country.