Angola and Angola Avante

Today, we embark on an enlightening journey to Angola, a nation with a remarkably youthful population and a rich tapestry of history shaped by colonialism and resilience. As we traverse over 4,000 miles, we’ll explore not just the geographical landscape of this vibrant country but also the profound impact of its colonial past on its present identity. Our central theme revolves around the Angolan national anthem, a powerful symbol that reflects the struggles and aspirations of its people. We’ll dive into the life of Roy Alberto Vieira Diaz Rodriguez Mingus, the composer behind the anthem, and unpack the political context that birthed this musical piece during a pivotal moment in Angola’s quest for independence. Alongside this, I’ll share some intriguing culinary insights that showcase Angola’s fusion of flavors, all while weaving in a bit of humor to keep our spirits high as we navigate the complexities of history and culture. Get ready to discover the beauty, the struggles, and the pride that define Angola, as we march forward together!

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Anthems Podcast. I'm Patrick and I'm here to tell you the story of a song that helps to tell the story of a nation.

Today we are making a straight line trip of 4,155 miles from or 6,687 kilometers and we're not in a hurry. Because of that.

We're going to stow away on a container ship and take a trip that's actually like 2,000 miles longer than what I just told you, which of course led me to investigate what France ships to our country. Of interest if I had a show about economics, There is an entire series of episodes worth of potential discussion here.

The top three categories in descending order, miscellaneous articles of base metal machinery, such as nuclear reactors or boilers and ships, boats, other floating structures.

It's a list that doesn't surprise me, but one that I never would have guessed at because I have very little knowledge of international commerce trends. But if you are the sort of person that closely follows trade and shipping, maybe you knew that I'm going to be talking about Angola.

Officially the Republic of Angola. Today we are headed to one of the countries with the youngest population of people.

They have a median age of 16 and half of all the people living there are under 25. And we're headed there because it's in Africa and there is much to talk about in Africa.

Yet, as with most of the rest of the continent, I came into reading about Angola with essentially no prior knowledge. Shrinking the set of things that I'm ignorant of is very much a life goal for me and one of my favorite parts about taking on this show.

Sometimes it means that I learn about a place that has been desperately cheated out of its potential glory by a colonial power.

This part of the series on the downfall of colonialism focuses on another victim of Portugal and explains why the official language of a West African country is Portuguese.

I've tried to be clear that I'm not a fan of situations where people are taken advantage of for hundreds of years or even less than a year, but it's still the reason that I'm going to tell you about Angola. Avante. Or in English, onwards, Angola. I've not yet eaten anything directly Angolan, but I'm excited to cook some of these dishes.

Their cuisine is a fusion of Portuguese traditional African foods and methods with a healthy dose of Brazilian influence, which will seem less odd later.

It's heavy on fish, chicken, root vegetables, spices and soups, but there are some very interesting things in there, such as the Cunean Province specialty called Mafuma made with frog meat. It's a protein that I have eaten and enjoyed. Like I hope that you're going to enjoy this song.

Beautiful Sham My initial reaction was a little bit of confusion because I looked this song up pretty early in the process and it's in Portuguese and it made me think I played the wrong thing. That's just because I started in a different spot than I usually did.

It's a good song that I wish had more recordings of on the Internet for me to pick through because there's like nothing out there thing we'll sort of get to the why of in a bit. It sings sort of like a hymn, but the music is almost certainly a march. I'll get back to you on that.

Further in the episode though, as it has been for every place in Africa I read about, there is a wide selection of places with unmatched natural beauty.

For someone like me that likes a good hike but likes a great view even more, it was honestly difficult to land on a specific spot to tell you about until I saw a picture of the view from the Tundavala Gap. Look up some photos because my description will definitely fail to convey the pure majesty of this canyon.

From the rim you look down into a 10,000 square kilometer. This is about 3,900 square miles plain from a height of more than a half of a mile.

It makes the Grand Canyon in the U.S. state of Arizona look like a trench that I dug in my backyard. So where is this thing?

Angola is not so hard to find because it is a coastal country in Africa that's pretty close to the equator, specifically about 500 miles or 805 kilometers south of it, past the shorelines of Gabon, the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which I will call the drc.

If we're heading north up the west coast of the continent, it is third country up the nearly 48 million people there enjoy almost a half million square miles of land bordered to the north by the drc, to the east by more of the drc, along with Zambia, and to the south by Namibia. The western border is entirely the southern Atlantic Ocean.

Angola also has an exclave territory along the western coast of the continent, just to the north and in between the Republic of Congo and the DRC. Interestingly enough, this province, named Cabinda, has roughly 71% of the country's oil reserves in it, the 18th largest in the world.

The country itself is not small at all and gets to be the seventh largest in Africa, meaning that there are a variety of landscapes and relative climates to pick from if you looking to move there.

Average temperatures vary quite a bit, but generally it is warmest in the north on the shoreline and coldest in the opposite corner with the north to south going savannah forest and to desert in the very furthest reaches of the south, there is a rainy season that varies but can be as long as seven months with the amount again decreasing north to south and increasing as you head inland and towards higher elevations.

Because the ocean has played an important role in the history of Angola and we're going to hear so little about it in the rest of the episode, today's geology diversion is simply the coast of the country.

Understanding why is easy because this shoreline represents the only place on earth where we have an on land and completely exposed geological record of the split between South America and Africa that resulted in the formation of the South Atlantic Ocean. The breakup was long and dramatic at times and began around 140 million years ago.

The tectonic plates moved apart and the supercontinent Gondwana itself, once a part of the much larger Pangea, began to break at the fault line.

Not only are we able to see all the stages of a new ocean growing and two continents drifting apart, but it's also the only place that paleontologists have found certain kinds of large marine reptile fossils.

They were able to thrive in the young and growing ocean, but that is so much further back than where we are really going to get started on this story.

If you've been here a little while, you probably guessed that despite the incredible historical backdrop, available in a place that's had people in it as long as we've had people. We're gonna have to start with colonialism again in a different timeline.

I'm just running through everything we know about this place, but calling my show the Anthems podcast strongly implies that I have a point. And driving one of them home requires something of measured length.

The first European contact here happened with Portuguese ships exploring the future northernmost coast of Angola and then part of the Kingdom of the Congo.

Trading started pretty soon after, and the Portuguese brought firearms, 15th century technology, and Christianity to exchange for ivory, slaves and minerals.

uropean presence grew, and in: 1575

In events that I will not get into here and may Actually never mention again on the show.

ative seat of angola. Then in: 1665

The 18th and 19th centuries in Angola were a long and halting series of the colonizers making expansion and trade based warfare with essentially anyone in and around the region that were not Portuguese.

Even with that full administration was not established until early in the 20th century, despite a push from migrated Brazilian farmers to modernize agriculture by increasing trade and introducing cassava along with other crops.

There was a high volume of trade and interplay between Brazil, another Portuguese colony in Angola, such that it was almost like the latter was a colony of the former and not Portugal.

s not legally abolished until: 1830

iversity in the country until: 1962

Well, drop back into the timeline in a little bit in order to get Angola into independence, but we're going to skip ahead a few years and talk about a composer.

th in: 1939

All of his siblings also became prominent members of Angolan society, and between them they are singers, composers, a linguist, a researcher, an athlete and administrator, a police commander, writers and a politician. Quite the interesting and motivated family.

pretty serious athlete in the: 1950

In July of: 1960

oy started releasing music in: 1970

Just between that and him training to join the faculty for human motricity, which is a very fun word I just learned, meaning an organism's ability to move the body and limbs around. I think that it is safe to assume that he had some sort of a degree.

All that was put on hold in: 1974

and Sports. He was there from: 1979

Ambassador to Portugal until: 1995

Later on in his career, Roy became a shareholder in a basketball franchise, founded a corporate intelligence company, a record label, and was a university lecturer in the sports program at Luciata University.

revitalization program until: 2015

th in: 1941

from Commembra University in: 1969

He was a student and participated in pre Portuguese revolutionary activism and it got him two months in prison.

Upon graduation, he started practicing law in Coimbra and Vesou, which are both cities in Portugal, while he was also a member for the center for Literary Studies and on the board of a literary journal. It was during this period that he published his first work. I think all of his work was fiction.

In the aftermath of the Portuguese revolution, he returned to Angola and was appointed as the MLPA Minister of Information for the Transitional Government and then went on to be Angola's first representative to the Organization for African Unity and the United Nations. He was also the director of the Department of Revolutionary Orientation and Foreign affairs.

And he wrote a lot of stuff, including the national anthem, having published two plays, two poetry collections, six books, along with countless magazine essays and articles, and has been described as the chronicler du jour of post independent Angola.

this writing, in September of: 2025

Now we jump back to the: 1960

All and predictably also it led to the start of what historians call the Portuguese colonial war, although in Portugal it was called the overseas war, and in the colonies it was called the war of Liberation. Here we deal mostly in the consequences of war. That is, on this show we do that and not the details of the war itself.

orementioned military coup in: 1974

And that led to a pretty terrible civil war that took more than 25 years to resolve and is still being cleaned up after a quarter of a century after its end. But that's way ahead of where we end our story. Remember that this is a podcast about a song. Well, yes, it is this time.

Though very little is actually known about the circumstances of the writing of the anthem.

th in: 1975

We know that both the poet and the composer had prominent roles in the party and the transitional government and were both also known for their creative talents.

As was the case with the Irish anthem, the party that gained power found they needed national symbols, although Angola got it done immediately, while Ireland did drag their feet a bit. That's all we know, though. The civil war that happened after independence consumed a huge amount of the available information about the country.

I may never know if it was a contest or a direct Request or whatever. Just the records certainly might exist, and if you know, please tell me. I'll tell you how at the end of the show.

But I'm on the other side of the world from most of the places I talk about or different parts of the world anyway, and I, you know, if it's not on the Internet, I probably cannot learn it. I can infer that this was planned ahead given the immediate adoption of it and given the single party nature of things.

They're there at the time, and I'll guess that the men involved were directly asked, but speculation. It might even have been their idea for all I know. Either way, with that, we've got our anthem, and I will now go down to discuss the song itself.

Musically speaking, we are in a very familiar European style, proclamatory and almost march genre that many anthems have landed in. We've got a piece written in diatonic major mode, and the music I've seen, it's always in a C major key. Very on brand stuff.

For national anthem songs, there are some very deliberate climactic points that line up with some of the more inflammatory political words in a tune that is clearly designed for choral singers.

Despite the straightforward 44 and the musical similarities to something like La Marseillaise, it doesn't feel aggressive to me, even though there's a for sure martial and uplifting tone about the thing.

There is not a lot of Angolan influence in the music, which makes a lot of sense given the man that composed it lived in Portugal for years, but there are some strong socialist influences that you can read out of this thing. Since the MLPA was a democratic socialist single party state, that's probably where the binary tertiary structure of the piece comes from.

And it's quite a listenable song, and one that was clearly composed in concert with the person writing the lyrics. Lyrically speaking, we have something that is refreshingly easier to digest than some of the recent songs on the show.

Again, I will remind you that context matters a great deal with these things, and here the context is a particular political party with definite authoritarian tendencies.

ate under the Emmett PA until: 1992

There is a version sung in Kikongo, spoken by 2 million Angolans, mostly in the northwest of the country, that is more of a contextual translation, given that that's a bento language. We're not going to talk about that though, because it's not an official version.

Here we have two verses at six lines, a piece with the last third repeated and a repeated refrain of four lines. Sing after each verse. I will read through in English without the repeated portions. And I will read through as verse, chorus, verse.

Indicate where the chorus is. O Fatherland, we shall never forget the heroes of the 4th of February. O Fatherland, we support your children who died for our independence.

We honor the past and our history as by our work we build the new man. Here's the chorus. Forward Angola revolution through the power of the people, a united country, Freedom, one people, one nation.

Let us raise our liberated voices for the glory of the peoples of Africa. We shall march, Angolan fighters in solidarity with oppressed peoples.

We shall fight proudly for peace along with the progressive forces of the world. And then again, the chorus.

Compared to the last few anthems that I covered, this one is kind of short, but it still manages to make a coherent point about a country and the people in it. Again, the context of these things is important, and as I said before, the context here is a one party state that controls things.

There is more, though.

Recall that this was released as the anthem immediately upon Angolan independence, and that implies that this was written in preparation for that event. I feel like that sets the tone for the song a little bit better. Here we have something that is written as an anthem and not just adopted as one.

And as such it does check off a bunch of boxes for me. We have some historical references to specific events.

the start of the rebellion in: 1961

But the line about creating a new man can sound a little odd without clarification.

The MLPA wanted to create an entirely new society, changed from the days of colonialism and wrought through a collective effort from the Angolan people. So remaking of the country with the new vision in mind, not so much making a new man.

Even though this is a vision of one political party, it resonates kind of well. The song looks forward to the larger struggle of helping to liberate the rest of the world with the help of other free nations.

By alluding to the people, a united country and the future, the writing seeks to proclaim Angola as a proud and free people.

It's all very anthem appropriate stuff, even if it does seem a little simple or formulaic given the overall brevity of the piece for something written in this way. There are some interesting misses though, and I'm surprised that there's nothing in there about the natural beauty of the country.

It has so many stunning looking places and and an abundance of resources that the citizens have access to.

I think, and to be clear, this is speculation, this might be a result of the overt political nature of an anthem that was probably a request from a committee and highly formalized in nature.

It gives some teeth to the gripes that people have had with the thing, but as with some of the other anthems that we've covered, repeated efforts at ousting Angola Avante as the national anthem have failed. Why?

I don't know, not specifically, but historical momentum comes to mind as well as national anthems being nationalistic things, and despite what political discussions may make us think in the moment, most people are not really all that nationalistic. Really, though, I mostly think that it's because I was not around to popularize national anthems, which is a good note to end this one on.

We need some self deprecating jokes here and there. It was sometimes a wildly frustrating thing to do the reading on for this country because I found it hard to get reliable information on Angola.

There's so much more I could tell you about this place that is probably true, but it was not sourced well enough for me to include it.

I'm starting to understand that one of the very first casualties of warfare and intersectional violence that occurs through a long period of time is the reliable information that you can get afterwards.

Despite that, we're able to learn quite a bit about another fascinating country and if nothing else, I am for sure left interested and on the lookout for even more knowledge regarding this place. Credits the writing, recording and production for the show are done by me and I wrote and played the theme music.

The music was used with my permission.

Unless otherwise noted, the anthems I play are free to play because most anthems are this time, despite my sustained effort, I have been unable to identify the group that sings this version of the anthem. But I did try.

My sources are in the show notes and they live@anthemspodcast.com I can be found on Facebook and WhatsApp as the Anthems podcast I post about the show and the rare anthem relevant news story, but most mostly I'm depending on word of mouth to get this thing into ears. That means that I am asking you to help me by using the hashtag anthems pod.

in: 2025

-: 9375

-: 9255

Maybe you completely forgot to write an ending to this episode of your show, and what you're hearing right now is me ad libbing this in real time and it inspires you to go ad lib a conversation with somebody where you include at least two facts that you have learned about Angola from this very episode. Or maybe you just go and listen to another one. Either way, thanks. I'll see you next month. Sam.

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