Pope Leo XIV arrived in Angola on Saturday after celebrating a morning Mass in Yaounde, Cameroon, opening the third leg of his four-nation trip through Africa and heading straight into a country shaped by colonial extraction, civil war, and entrenched inequality. He was expected to meet President Joao Lourenco and deliver his first speech before Angolan government authorities, a reminder that even a papal visit moves through the channels of official power first.
Who Gets Heard First
Leo’s plane touched down at Luanda’s international airport after the flight from Cameroon, where he had wrapped up the Cameroon leg of his trip with a Mass before an estimated 200,000 people. In Cameroon, he had sought to encourage young people to have hope and demanded that elites stop exploiting the land and its people for profit. The same message was expected in Angola, another mineral-rich former European colony where many people live in poverty.
In his homily Saturday, delivered in French, Leo said respect for human dignity was a cornerstone of every society. He said, “For this reason, every community has the obligation to create and sustain structures of solidarity and mutual aid in which, when faced with crises — be they social, political, medical or economic — everyone can give and receive assistance according to their own capacity and needs.”
That line lands differently in a country where the official story of development has long run alongside extraction, war, and corruption. Angola today is the fourth-largest oil producer in Africa and among the world’s top 20 producers, according to the International Energy Agency. It is also the world’s No. 3 diamond producer and has significant deposits of gold and highly sought after critical minerals. Yet despite those resources, the World Bank estimated in 2023 that more than 30% of the population lived on less than $2.15 a day.
The Scars Left by Power
Angola, a southern African country of around 38 million, gained independence from Portugal in 1975. The country still bears the scars of a devastating civil war that began straight after independence, raged on and off for 27 years, and ended in 2002. More than 500,000 people are believed to have been killed.
The article said the civil war was for years a Cold War proxy conflict, with the United States and apartheid South Africa backing one side and the Soviet Union and Cuba backing the other. Ordinary people paid the price while outside powers and local factions treated the country as a battleground for influence.
A Luanda resident, Sergio Jose, said, “I would like to hear a message of peace, a message of reconciliation. I would also like to hear good political messages, and I would also like to hear that the pope would also talk about the upcoming elections in Angola.” The wish for peace sits beside the reality that elections are still being folded into a political order where power remains concentrated at the top.
Corruption, Control, and the Familiar Script
Former President Jose Eduardo dos Santos led Angola for 38 years from 1979 to 2017 and was accused of diverting billions of dollars of public money to his family, largely from the country’s oil revenue, as millions struggled in poverty. After Joao Lourenco took over as president, his administration estimated that at least $24 billion was stolen or misappropriated by dos Santos.
Lourenco’s administration has vowed to crack down on corruption and has worked to recover funds allegedly stolen during the dos Santos era, though critics say Angola still has deep corruption problems and have questioned whether Lourenco’s actions were aimed more at political rivals to consolidate his power. That is the usual reform theater: a promise to clean up the mess without touching the machinery that keeps producing it.
Angola, on the southwest coast of Africa, was considered the epicenter of the trans-Atlantic slave trade as a Portuguese colony. More than 5 million of the roughly 12.5 million enslaved Africans were sent across the ocean on ships departing from Angola, more than any other country, though not all of them were Angolans. The Church of Our Lady of Muxima, built by Portuguese colonizers at the end of the 16th century as part of a fortress complex, became a hub in the slave trade and remains a reminder of the link hundreds of years ago between Roman Catholicism and the exploitation of the African continent.
Leo, history’s first U.S.-born pope, has Black and white ancestors who included both enslaved people and slave owners, according to genealogical research. He was going to Muxima to pray the Rosary, in recognition of the site becoming a popular pilgrimage destination after believers reported an appearance by the Virgin Mary around 1833. The visit, like the rest of the trip, moves through layers of history where empire, church, and state have long worked in tandem while the people at the bottom are left to survive the wreckage.