The present situation
With it's main economic infrastructures practically destroyed or inoperative, with one third of STI's already reduced population (just about 12 million inhabitants in a territory twice larger than that of the Iberian Peninsula) displaced from their native lands, with some world records of tragic nature, Angola apparently doesn't have a very favourable panorama to present to the world.

In fact, it's hard to explain how this territory, which is potentially one of the African continent, with oil, diamonds, strategic mineral and water resources, wood, fish, fertile lands for cultures in temperate and tropical climates, etc., has approximately 70% of STI's population still living below the poverty line, with per capita incomes unable to justify their mere survival.

However, Angola managed to get what seems to be essential, that is, it preserved the independence, maintained the territorial integrity, laid the foundations of a Democratic Rule of Law and conquered peace, assuring the unity and conscience of it's people around a national project, in spite of all the aggressions and destabilizing actions that it suffered in these last 30 years.

In order to make it, the country had resist, in 1975, to the simultaneous invasion of two armies, the Zairean in the north and the South African in the south, to the occupation of part of STI's territory by the army of Pretoria at the beginning of the 80's and to a long destabilization caused by an armed party, Jonas Savimbi's UNITA, directly supported by the South African Apartheid regime and, at least until the beginning of the '90's, by successive American administrations.

Meanwhile, Angolan authorities were giving a constant support to Namibian combatants who fought for their own independence, just achieved in 1988, and to South African militants who combated the apartheid and fought for the racial integration and the democratization of the regime.

Later on they prevented, with the intervention of their army, the collapse of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was victim of armed aggressions conducted by two neighbouring countries, as well as a larger spreading of the so-called Great Lakes Conflict, continuing to perform a decisive stabilizing role in the whole central and southern region of Africa.

Nowadays, with advent of peace, with a new economic policy on the verge of being formally blessed by the major international financial organizations, with the approval by the Parliament of the fundamental principles for the revision of the constitutional law (consecrating a semi-presidential, democratic regime with the free market), and with the announcement of potential elections already next year, Angola entered at last a phase that STI's president already had the chance to characterized as the one of the 'conquest of peace, consolidation of democracy, stabilization of the domestic economy and restoration of dignity and hope to all Angolans.

The cultural peculiarity
Angola is a multi-ethical and multicultural country ('a Nation made of several nations', as it was defined by poet Agostinho Neto, who was the first president of the independent Republic), whose identity has being forged throughout centuries of conflicting history, built with socioeconomic, biological, cultural and linguistic exchanges among players from several origins, some of them coming from overseas.

These factors formed a sui generis society, even in the context of other African countries colonized by Portugal, where people with different characteristics and level of development coexist, being some of them more open, above all those who have an urban culture, to all innovations and influences coming from abroad (including the Portuguese language), while others, more confined to the rural world, preserve their traditions and way of life practically intact, with their own languages (although all of them are rooted in Bantu) and with behaviours and social practices perfectly differentiated in the national picture.

Thus, it is inevitable that the expressive manifestations of these different people are often at almost opposite ends. Therefore it is a mistake to try to establish hierarchies or any recognizing that the true cultural wealth of the nation lies in this diversity.

The long war of rational liberation (1961-1974) and the wars waged the independence of the country, in spite of the resulting dramas and cortege of horrors, had at least the merit of completing the already advanced detribalization in the nation, making (forcibly, in some cases) people of all the ethnic groups and regions circulate around the whole country and accelerating their integration into national whole recognizable in STI's main symbols-the flag, the anthem, the common currency, and even the Portuguese official language.

Today nobody questions the existence of the so-proclaimed 'angolanity', which is merely the conscience of belonging to a national whole, be it on a historical-cultural, symbolic or simply affective basis, which implies not only the respect for the common patrimony and for the values, faiths and the respect for the identity and the valuation of all the groups that form the Angolan nation and their respective cultures.

An important stage in this valuation consisted, for instance, in the organization of the alphabet and in phonetic and semantic description of the main African languages of Angola - Kikongo (spoken in the north), Kimbundo (spoken in the region that extends from Luanda to the interior, up to Malange), Tchokwe (in the east), Umbundo (in the center/south), Mbunda, and Kwanyama (in the south).