Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"In Angola the transition from Portuguese rule turned into a major disaster. As the Portuguese administration there disintegrated, three rival nationalist factions competed for power, transforming a colonial war into a civil war, causing the flight of almost the entire white population and drawing the Soviet Union and the United States into a perilous confrontation by proxy." [The Fate of Africa, p. 312-5] "Angola, Southern Africa’s most resource-dependent country, has been the region’s star economic performer in this decade. This country of 26 million , , , had a thriving (colonial) economy based on a wide range of mineral and agricultural exports at the time of independence from Portugal in 1975. But the Portuguese did not prepare the country for self-rule, and soon Angola fell victim to the Cold War, with its northern peoples opting to follow a communist course and the southerners falling under the sway of a rebel movement backed by South Africa and the United States. The results included devastated infrastructure, abandoned farms, looting of diamonds, hundreds of thousands of casualties, and millions of landmines that continue to kill and maim." [Geography: Realms, Regions, and Concepts, 17th Edition, p. 318]