Angola Guide

The National Police departments are: Public Order, Criminal Investigation, Traffic and Transport, Investigation and Inspection of Economic Activities, Taxation and Frontier Supervision, Riot Police and the Rapid Intervention Police. The National Police are in the process of standing up an air wing, which will provide helicopter support for police operations. The National Police are also developing their criminal investigation and forensic capabilities. The National Police has an estimated 6,000 patrol officers, 2,500 Taxation and Frontier Supervision officers, 182 criminal investigators and 100 financial crimes detectives and around 90 Economic Activity Inspectors.

The National Police have implemented a modernization and development plan to increase the capabilities and efficiency of the total force. In addition to administrative reorganization; modernization projects include procurement of new vehicles, aircraft and equipment, construction of new police stations and forensic laboratories, restructured training programs and the replacement of AKM rifles with 9 mm UZIs for police officers in urban areas.

Cunene Province – is one of the 18 provinces of Angola, located in the southern part of the country.

Khoisan hunter-gatherers are some of the earliest known modern human inhabitants of the area. They were largely replaced by Bantu tribes during Bantu migrations, though small numbers of Khoisan remain in parts of southern Angola to the present day. The geographical areas now designated as Angola first became the subject to incursions by Europeans in the late 15th century. In 1483 Portugal established a base at the river Congo, where the Kongo State, Ndongo and Lunda existed. The Kongo State stretched from modern Gabon in the north to the Kwanza River in the south. Angola became a link in trade with India and Southeast Asia. In 1575 Portugal established a colony at Cabinda based on slave trade. Before the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, slavery was practiced in Africa by many indigenous peoples.

The African slave trade provided a large number of black slaves to Europeans and their African agents. For example, in what is now Angola, the Imbangala had economies which were heavily focused on the slave trade.Within the Portuguese Empire, most black African slaves were traded to Brazilian merchants arrived to Portugal’s African ports from other Portuguese colony – Brazil (South America) – seeking cheap workforce for use on Brazilian agricultural plantations. This trade would last until the first half of the 1800s. The Portuguese gradually took control of the coastal strip throughout the sixteenth century by a series of treaties and wars forming the Portuguese colony of Angola. Taking advantage of the Portuguese Restoration War, the Dutch occupied Luanda from 1641 to 1648, where they allied with local peoples to consolidate their colonial rule against the remaining Portuguese resistance.

The best time to visit Angola is during the cooler, dryer months in June to September. This is because travel is much easier, especially once you get off the main roads – dirt tracks become a sea of mud when it rains. And lounging on the beach in a downpour just doesn’t cut the mustard.

Angola is dry from May/June, gets warm in October, then pretty soggy from November to April/May. Obviously hotel rates are cheaper and popular tourist haunts much quieter during the rainy seasons. The local people are also happier because good rains mean good crops, so traditional festivals are often held at this time.

Angola, officially the Republic of Angola (Portuguese: República de Angola, pronounced IPA: [ʁɛ'publikɐ dɨ ɐ̃'gɔlɐ] Kongo: Repubilika ya Ngola), is a country in south-central Africa bordering Namibia to the south, Democratic Republic of the Congo to the north, and Zambia to the east, and with a west coast along the Atlantic Ocean. The exclave province Cabinda has a border with the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Angola is a former Portuguese colony and has considerable natural resources, most notably petroleum and diamonds.