Angola's low population and historical depopulation

Angola’s low population and historical depopulation are presented as the accumulated result of human removal and deprivation, not as a simple matter of geography. The book traces the loss of people through centuries of enslavement and emigration, then shows how the 1975 conflict emptied communities and strained the systems on which the remaining population depended.

Population and settlement

In 1970, Angola had 5,673,046 inhabitants, including more than half a million European settlers, mainly Portuguese. The European population had grown rapidly after the Second World War: 44,000 Europeans lived in Angola in 1940, 170,000 in 1960, and about 350,000 more arrived over the following fourteen years. This growth was partly shaped by colonial policy. The governments of Salazar and Caetano sent landless peasants and impoverished members of the lower middle class to the colony in an effort to ease social tensions in Portugal. Migration did not guarantee prosperity: some settlers remained poor, and white children could be seen begging in Luanda.

The demographic picture changed abruptly in 1975. More than 95 per cent of Angola’s European inhabitants left, travelling to Portugal and other countries, especially Brazil; the account notes that some later returned. Their departure was part of a larger wartime flight. Portuguese residents from across the country converged on Luanda in cars carrying people and belongings, then gathered around the airport when hotel accommodation ran out. The resulting open-air refugee settlement was expected to be served by an air bridge carrying half a million people. This exodus was a sudden reversal of the colonial-era influx, though it did not undo the much older population losses described elsewhere in the book.

Historical sources of depopulation

The account identifies several causes of Angola’s sparse population. For three centuries, a substantial number of its inhabitants were enslaved and exported across the ocean. Forms of slavery persisted within Angola as forced labour until 1962. Emigration also removed large numbers of African inhabitants: around 700,000 left, mainly for Zaïre, Namibia, and the Republic of South Africa. Widespread malnutrition and the absence of even basic health care further contributed to low population levels.

These causes are described alongside enduring poverty and social neglect. More than 90 per cent of Angolans were illiterate, only 10 per cent of black inhabitants lived in cities, and many people depended on subsistence agriculture or lived close to destitution. The account links these conditions to centuries of colonial neglect and abuse, in which African inhabitants were kept at the lowest possible nutritional and cultural level. Low population and poverty thus appear together as connected historical conditions, rather than as separate statistics.

Uneven distribution and migration

Angola’s inhabitants were not spread evenly across the country. More than half lived in an area amounting to barely 9 per cent of its territory; 91 per cent lived on land covering less than half of the country. These figures describe a concentrated settlement pattern within a country whose total population was already low. The major urban centres included Luanda, with approximately half a million inhabitants in the 1970 census, followed by Huambo, Lobito, Benguela, Lubango, Malanje, and Cabinda.

The wartime movement toward Luanda sharpened this contrast between concentration and dispersal. Refugees travelled in groups for safety, and people with nowhere else to go crowded around the airport, uncertain when they would leave or where they would be sent. The account describes repeated disputes over who should board first. Pregnant women and women with children were assigned priority, but others challenged the criteria; at one point, women lay on the runway to prevent a plane from taxiing until the army intervened and they were allowed aboard. The scene makes population movement visible as a struggle over scarce passage, not merely a change in census totals.

Wartime abandonment and essential services

As the exodus continued, Luanda’s decline became apparent in the withdrawal of ordinary services. The narrator describes a city losing residents and businesses while its water supply became precarious: pumping stations stood near the front lines and were repeatedly damaged after repairs. With water running short, a breakdown in the system threatened the city’s ability to endure. In one episode, the hotel tap gives nothing; a clerk reports that the city has been without water for three days and that the last wells are drying up. A cook provides water from a tin barrel, a small act of assistance amid institutional failure.

The abandonment extended beyond water. The police had left, then the firemen, and then the garbage collectors. Soldiers later put a fire engine to use carrying water to the front, but it was struck and left in a ditch. As refuse accumulated in streets and squares, the few remaining residents had neither functioning services nor adequate medical provision: hospitals and pharmacies were closed. The breakdown did not stem from population sparsity alone. Rather, the account shows how war, departure, and damage to infrastructure made a shrinking urban population increasingly vulnerable, while the loss of workers and services turned the city’s emptiness into a practical crisis.

Significance

The book places demographic facts beside scenes of departure and service failure to show that population loss is both historical and immediate. Enslavement, forced labour, emigration, malnutrition, and inadequate health care shaped Angola’s sparse settlement over generations; in 1975, mass flight and the collapse of basic services gave that longer history a visible urban form. The result is a distinction between an enduring pattern of uneven settlement and a sudden wartime evacuation, with each exposing how much of the country’s social life depended on people and systems that could be removed, displaced, or destroyed.