Lubango
| Lubango | |||
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| Coordinates | 14 ° 55 ′ S , 13 ° 30 ′ E | ||
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| Basic data | |||
| Country | Angola | ||
| Huíla | |||
| Município | Lubango | ||
| ISO 3166-2 | AO-HUI | ||
| Comuna | Lubango | ||
| surface | 3140 km² | ||
| Residents | 903,000 (2019) | ||
| density | 287.6 Ew. / km² | ||
| Website | www.huilaweb.org | ||
| politics | |||
| mayor | Vigílio Tyova | ||
| Political party | MPLA | ||
 View over Lubango
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Lubango [ ˌlubañgu ], until 1975 Sá da Bandeira , is a city in southwest Angola and the capital of the Huíla Province . The city is located about 750 km south of Luanda on a plateau (Huíla Plateau). In the 2014 census, Lubango had 776,249 inhabitants, in the 2019 estimate it was 903,564. It is the second largest city in the country. The nearest town is Moçâmedes , about 150 kilometers away, on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. Most of the city's population belongs to the Nyaneka-Khumbi ethnic conglomerate , who predominate in the Huíla Province. The proportion of Ovimbundu who fled here because of the civil war has also risen sharply. The Ovambo represent a minority. The Angola Portuguese group, which was numerous in colonial times, has melted to a few hundred after independence.
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Geographical location
Lubango, the capital of the Huíla Province, is located around 1000 kilometers south of the Angolan capital Luanda. Thanks to its location on the Huila plateau, Lubango has a mild and balanced climate.
climate
At an altitude of 1770 meters above sea level, Lubango is one of the highest cities in Angola. The typical weather is warm and humid during the day and cool at night. The average annual temperature is 18 ° C, with the extremes fluctuating between freezing point and 34 ° C. The coldest month is June, when temperatures occasionally drop below 0 ° C. The warm summer months, from October to May, bring the rainy season with the greatest amounts of rainfall, between January and March.
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Average monthly temperatures and rainfall for Lubango
Source: climate-data.org
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history
Before the arrival of the Portuguese
The area around the later Sá da Bandeira (Lubango) was originally inhabited by nomadic Khoisan groups and only very sparsely populated. At the beginning of the last millennium, apart from residual groups, they were displaced by various Bantu peoples who came from the north - above all by shepherd farmers who belong to the Nyaneka-Khumbi family. In addition, there were smaller groups that are related to the Herero and infiltrated from what is now Namibia .
Colonial times
In 1482, the Portuguese navigator Diego Cão landed as the first European on the Atlantic coast near Moçâmedes , which in the following years led to the establishment of trading posts along the Atlantic coast. Many of these branches served the slave trade with Brazil . The hinterland was relatively poorly explored at the time and hardly populated by Europeans.
After the ban on the slave trade, agriculture became increasingly important in Angola and the hinterland was also developed at the instigation of the Portuguese colonial government. Around 1882 about 1000 settlers came from Madeira Island to the area of today's Lubango, which up to that time - apart from a few wandering Khoisan groups - was virtually uninhabited. These Portuguese farmers developed the whole area very quickly and established several settlements. In order to supply the settlers in the area, the place was founded as Sá da Bandeira in 1885 at 1700 meters above sea level on the Huíla plateau.
Around 1885 around 40 Boer families came from the north-west of South Africa , from the area around Upington , as part of the so-called Dorslandtrekkers (Durstlandtrekkers) in the region of Sá da Bandeira. When the resolutions at the Congo Conference , which took place in Berlin from November 15, 1884 to February 26, 1886 , stipulated that all of Angola should remain under Portuguese rule in the future, they moved back south and tried in the area of Grootfontein , in what is now Namibia , to build the " Republic of Upingtonia ".
Around 1910, over 1700 Portuguese settlers were already living in Sá da Bandeira and as early as 1923 the city could be connected to the Moçâmedes Railway , which connected the Portuguese port of Moçâmedes (also Mossamedes) with the hinterland. Also in 1923, the town named after Bernardo de Sá Nogueira de Figueiredo, the first margrave of Sá da Bandeira , was elevated to the status of a city.
Since the semi-nomadic Nhaneka-Humbe in the area did not want to live in the city, Sá da Bandeira remained for decades the only larger city in Angola with a predominantly white population and the main settlement center in the southern hinterland of Angola.
Sá da Bandeira experienced a rapid economic boom in the 20th century while it belonged to the Portuguese empire , which was also expressed in the rich architecture and spacious layout of the city. In addition to a large number of different supply facilities, Sá da Bandeira had a cathedral, modern administrative buildings, hospitals, chambers of industry and commerce, schools, post and telecommunications centers (CTT), banks and insurance companies as well as a branch of the national overseas bank - the Banco Nacional Ultramarino (BNU) and developed into a regional traffic center with a rail hub, well-developed roads and regional airport and a location for the food industry.
In 1951 the status of Angola was changed from a Portuguese colony to the Portuguese overseas province of Angola , which now also enabled the black inhabitants of Angola, under certain conditions, as assimilados , to be legally equated with the whites.
Colonial war
The colonial war , which escalated from 1961, initially affected the regions in southern Angola much less than the regions in the north and along the border with the Congo . It was not until the mid-1960s that Zambia's support for the rebels began to make the south less secure, although the area around Sá da Bandeira remained largely quiet until the 1970s and continued to prosper economically.
Socialist dictatorship and civil war
After independence as a result of the Portuguese Carnation Revolution , the conflict between the rival black liberation movements MPLA under Agostinho Neto , UNITA under Jonas Savimbi and the FNLA under Holden Roberto broke out openly and quickly escalated into a proxy war between East and West. When the last Portuguese security forces of the transitional government withdrew from Sá da Bandeira on the day of the Carnation Revolution on April 25, 1974, the predominantly white population left the city in a hurry, public life and supplies collapsed almost completely within a very short time.
After the socialist MPLA claimed sole power for itself after a few weeks, the fighting escalated in the previously quiet south of the country and Sá da Bandeira, which was renamed Lubango, became one of the focal points of the Angolan civil war . In the further course of the war, Lubango was developed by the MPLA government troops and their Cuban allies as one of their main bases in the south, while the surrounding area (especially in the north, east and south of the city) was almost entirely developed by the rebels of UNITA under their leader Jonas Savimbi , and their South African allies was ruled. For the troops of the MPLA and Cuba, Lubango became a front-line city and it was only thanks to the massed concentration of Cuban combat units from ground troops and air force units in the city and in its western surroundings that at least the land connection to the Atlantic coast, with the port of Moçâmedes , could be kept free.
During the decades of armed conflict, large parts of the once flourishing city with its rich infrastructure were destroyed. A regulated economic life and supply facilities for the population practically no longer existed. Large stretches of land in the outskirts of the city and on the entire Huíla plateau were mined (from both sides) .
The center of SWAPO
In addition to the Cubans and military advisers from other Eastern Bloc countries , the SWAPO, under its leader Sam Nujoma , was involved in the Angolan civil war as an ally of the then socialist MPLA with its own combat units - the People's Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN) - and built Lubango into one their military centers in Angola. In the 1980s Lubango was expanded as the location of a center of the SWAPO security apparatus, the direction of which was subordinate to the later chief of the Namibian army , Solomon Hawala , and where SWAPO dissidents were mistreated in dungeons. Such events at this location earned its commanding officer the nickname "butcher of Lubango" (German: "Butcher of Lubango"). He is accused of torture and mass arrests of exiled SWAPO supporters in his role at the time.
During the political cleansing of the 1980s, mainly members of national minorities who did not belong to the Ovambo people and intellectuals were arrested there. Most of the prisoners were sentenced on the basis of fabricated charges. The "confessions" are said to have been obtained through torture (sometimes lasting for months).
After the end of the civil war
Since the ceasefire agreement of April 4, 2002, a regulated public life has slowly started to develop again in Lubango, although supply facilities, hospitals and schools can only be rebuilt with foreign help, because a large part of the income from Angola's rich mineral resources is omnipresent Corruption in the country is being consumed.
Agriculture, trade and commerce are also beginning to develop cautiously in the city and on the Huíla plateau, although the current level of living conditions in Lubango cannot be compared with the once flourishing Portuguese regional center Sá da Bandeira.
Even today, as a legacy of the civil war, landmines pose a latent threat to the local rural population of the entire Huíla highlands.
In 2001 there was a serious aircraft accident when a Beechcraft 1900 of the Angolan charter company Sociedade de Aviação Ligeira (SAL) rammed a mountainside while approaching the airport, killing 17 people.
administration
Lubango is the seat of a district of the same name ( Município ) in the province of Huíla , of which it is also the capital. The district has about 1 million inhabitants (2012 estimate) on an area of 3140 km². From now on, the 2014 census will provide reliable population data.
The district of Lubango is made up of five municipalities (Comunas):
economy
Lubango's economy is based on the agricultural wealth, fertility and relatively good water supply of the Huíla Plateau, although the current crop yields are only a fraction of what was produced annually by white farmers in the region until the mid-1970s. The main agricultural products in the region are beef, grain, sisal, tobacco, fruits and vegetables.
Slowly developing food processing, tanneries and the new beginnings of a consumer goods industry are slowly gaining in importance.
The banking system and with it the supply of credit to the local economy is also beginning to develop. Various banks are now offering their services - including the African Investment Bank (Banco Africano de Investimentos, BAI), which has been active in Cape Verde for a long time with predominantly Portuguese capital , and the Angolan savings and credit bank (Banco de Poupança e Crédito ( BPC)), which is predominantly state-owned. Meanwhile, in the inner city and in the outskirts of Lubango there are also ATMs that only issue the local currency, the Kwanza . In business in the region, the US dollar and the South African rand are also accepted. The euro , on the other hand, is rarely used as a means of payment .
In recent years the large Millennium Shopping Center has been built in the city center, where most of the everyday goods are available.
Transportation
Lubango has an airport with the IATA airport code SDD (for Sá da Bandeira), which is also served daily by various international airlines from the region:
- Air Gemini (Luanda, Namibe, Ngiva)
- Air Namibia (Luanda, Windhoek)
- Sonair (Catumbela, Luanda)
- TAAG Angola Airlines (Catumbela, Huambo, Luanda, Onjiva, Windhoek)
In addition, the command of a bomber regiment of the Angolan armed forces is located on the airport premises .
In recent years, the Namibebahn (Caminho de Ferro de Moçâmedes (CFM)), which connects Lubango with the Atlantic port of Moçâmedes and was badly damaged during the civil war, has also been resumed. A branch line connects the Namibebahn and Lubango with Chiange from here . The construction of a railway line from Namibia via Ondjiva to Lubango is planned for the future ; On the Namibian side, the railway to the Oshikango border crossing has already been completed.
The city and its surroundings have a dense network of private taxi providers and various bus routes connect Lubango via Caconda and Huambo (Nova Lisboa) with Luanda , Lobito and Benguela on the Atlantic coast. In the other direction, bus routes connect the city with Namibia via a route that is relatively well developed by Angolan standards, via Cahama , Xangongo and Ondjiva.
education
During the colonial period, Lubango, which was then still called Sá da Bandeira, was one of the first cities in the interior of Angola to have secondary schools, such as the Liceu Nacional Diogo Cão , the Escola Industrial e Comercial Artur de Paiva or the Instituto Agrícola do Tchivinguiro . Lubango is the seat of the Universidade Mandume Ya Ndemufayo , which began in 1963 as a pedagogical university under the name Estudos Gerais Universitários and got its current name in 2009. There are also five private universities in the city with a total of 15,000 students.
Sports
There are numerous sports clubs in Lubango, most of which are dedicated to football and basketball. The most famous club is the Clube Desportivo da Huíla (CD Huíla) founded in 1955 . He plays his home games at the Estádio do Ferrovia with 20,000 seats. The Ferroviário da Huíla , who won the Angolan Cup in 1985 and 1989, the Taça Angolana de Futebol, is also based there . The club Benfica Lubango , founded in 1932 and a subsidiary of Benfica Lisbon , will compete in the top division of Angola in 2014 , in Girabola 2014 . He plays his home games in the 21,000-seat Nossa Senhora do Monte stadium .
The Estádio Nacional da Tundavala was newly built by a Chinese company and is one of the most modern football stadiums in Africa. In the Tundavala Stadium of Lubango with 20,000 seats, some matches of the African Cup of Nations 2010 in Angola took place. The CD Huíla occasionally plays championship games here.
sons and daughters of the town
- Mário Alberto (1925–2011), painter, theater director and playwright
- Luís Cília (* 1943), Portuguese songwriter and composer
- Emídio Rangel (* 1947), Portuguese journalist
- Ana Paula Tavares (* 1952), Angolan poet
- Gabriela Canavilhas (* 1961), pianist and politician, Minister of Culture in the Sócrates II cabinet
- Pedro Proença (* 1962), Portuguese painter and author
- Paulo Salvador (* 1965), Portuguese journalist
- João N'Tyamba (* 1968), Olympic track and field athlete
- Bárbara Guimarães (* 1973), Portuguese television presenter
- Luís Vidigal (* 1973), Portuguese football player and coach
- Marco Abreu (* 1974), football player
- Ary (* 1986), Kizomba and R&B singer
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Angola: Administrative Division ( Memento of July 13, 2019 in the Internet Archive ) citypopulation.de , accessed on May 21, 2019.
- ↑ City Population: Population of Lubango ( Memento from March 24, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ See Carlos Estermann, Etnografia do Suoeste de Angola , 3rd volumes, Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1961/62
- ↑ António Henrique de Oliveira Marques : History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 385). Translated from the Portuguese by Michael von Killisch-Horn. Kröner, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-520-38501-5 .
- ↑ SáDaBandeiraAnosOuro.wmv , a film of Sá da Bandeira, Overseas Province of Angola , before 1975th
- ↑ Student thesis of the TU Chemnitz, The Portuguese Colonial Wars summer semester 2006.
- ↑ Walther L. Bernecker, Horst Pietschmann: History of Portugal. From the Middle Ages to the present. CH Beck., Munich 2001.
- ↑ Wars and Genocides of the 20th Century CorpWatch (accessed October 9, 2007)
- ↑ Report alleges US Role in Angola Arms-for-Oil Scandal Corp Watch (Accessed October 9, 2007)
- ↑ Inge Tvedten: Angola: Struggle for Peace and Reconstruction 1997, pp. 38-40.
- ↑ Where only hunger wins (article in Stern No. 27/2002)
- ↑ Médecins Sans Frontières: MSF in the 'gray zones' of Angola ( Memento of July 20, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) (Eng.)
- ^ The Namibian : Highest Honor for Hawala . News from March 23, 2004 on www.namibian.com.na (English)
- ↑ Die Zeit : One year after independence: In the spirit of reconciliation . Report in 1990, No. 46. on www.zeit.de
- ^ Rolf Hofmeier, Institute for Africa Customer (Ed.): Africa Yearbook 1990: Politics, Economy and Society in Africa south of the Sahara . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 1991, p. 388, ISBN 978-3-322-92637-1
- ^ Welt am Sonntag from September 1, 2002 (Namibians want to chase Germans away)
- ^ Justine Hunter: Prisoners of Their Solidarity - The Swapo Internment Question and the Namibian Churches . In: afrika süd, No. 4, 2003, pp. 33–35
- ↑ Allgemeine Zeitung Windhoek of November 20, 2006 (I will never let the Lubango topic rest as long as I live)
- ↑ Allgemeine Zeitung Windhoek from August 30, 2007 (ya Nangoloh justifies himself)
- ↑ (A study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation on the subject of corruption and reconstruction in Angola - 2005) (PDF; 285 kB)
- ↑ Der Spiegel from October 20, 2002 (IMF billions seep into Angola's desert sand)
- ↑ Global Witness - Press Release of November 4, 2005 (return of Angolan funds must not mean impunity for corruption) ( Memento of June 2, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Die Welt of February 10, 2008 (bribery affair about German warships)
- ↑ Brief profile of the Lubango district on the company website of Gauff Engineering Nürnberg, accessed on April 15, 2014
- ↑ Publication of the Foreign Office on the subject of economic development in Angola
- ↑ Publication of the Angolan Embassy on the subject of economic development in Angola ( Memento from May 28, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ various studies on Angola ( Memento from August 25, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Lubango completa hoje 93 anos como cidade angop.ao , May 31, 2016, accessed on May 21, 2019.
- ↑ the CD Huíla at www.fussballzz.de, accessed on April 15, 2014
- ↑ Ferroviário de Huíla on www.fussballzz.de, accessed on April 15, 2014