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61 Angola
(and Enclave of Cabinda)From 1575 to 1975, Angola was a colony of Portugal. Located in west-central Africa, this colony has been one of the largest, most strategically located, and richest in mineral and agricultural resources in the continent. At first, Portugal's colonial impact was largely coastal, but after 1700 it became more active in the interior. By international treaties signed between 1885 and 1906, Angola's frontiers with what are now Zaire and Zambia were established. The colony's area was 1,246,700 square kilometers (481,000 square miles), Portugal's largest colonial territory after the independence of Brazil. In Portugal's third empire, Angola was the colony with the greatest potential.The Atlantic slave trade had a massive impact on the history, society, economy, and demography of Angola. For centuries, Angola's population played a subordinate role in the economy of Portugal's Brazil-centered empire. Angola's population losses to the slave trade were among the highest in Africa, and its economy became, to a large extent, hostage to the Brazilian plantation-based economic system. Even after Brazil's independence in 1822, Brazilian economic interests and capitalists were influential in Angola; it was only after Brazil banned the slave trade in 1850 that the heavy slave traffic to former Portuguese America began to wind down. Although slavery in Angola was abolished, in theory, in the 1870s, it continued in various forms, and it was not until the early 1960s that its offspring, forced labor, was finally ended.Portugal's economic exploitation of Angola went through different stages. During the era of the Atlantic slave trade (ca. 1575-1850), when many of Angola's slaves were shipped to Brazil, Angola's economy was subordinated to Brazil's and to Portugal's. Ambitious Lisbon-inspired projects followed when Portugal attempted to replace the illegal slave trade, long the principal income source for the government of Angola, with legitimate trade, mining, and agriculture. The main exports were dyes, copper, rubber, coffee, cotton, and sisal. In the 1940s and 1950s, petroleum emerged as an export with real potential. Due to the demand of the World War II belligerents for Angola's raw materials, the economy experienced an impetus, and soon other articles such as diamonds, iron ore, and manganese found new customers. Angola's economy, on an unprecedented scale, showed significant development, which was encouraged by Lisbon. Portugal's colonization schemes, sending white settlers to farm in Angola, began in earnest after 1945, although such plans had been nearly a century in the making. Angola's white population grew from about 40,000 in 1940 to nearly 330,000 settlers in 1974, when the military coup occurred in Portugal.In the early months of 1961, a war of African insurgency broke out in northern Angola. Portugal dispatched armed forces to suppress resistance, and the African insurgents were confined to areas on the borders of northern and eastern Angola at least until the 1966-67 period. The 13-year colonial war had a telling impact on both Angola and Portugal. When the Armed Forces Movement overthrew the Estado Novo on 25 April 1974, the war in Angola had reached a stalemate and the major African nationalist parties (MPLA, FNLA, and UNITA) had made only modest inroads in the northern fringes and in central and eastern Angola, while there was no armed activity in the main cities and towns.After a truce was called between Portugal and the three African parties, negotiations began to organize the decolonizat ion process. Despite difficult maneuvering among the parties, Portugal, the MPLA, FNLA, and UNITA signed the Alvor Agreement of January 1975, whereby Portugal would oversee a transition government, create an all-Angola army, and supervise national elections to be held in November 1975. With the outbreak of a bloody civil war among the three African parties and their armies, the Alvor Agreement could not be put into effect. Fighting raged between March and November 1975. Unable to prevent the civil war or to insist that free elections be held, Portugal's officials and armed forces withdrew on 11 November 1975. Rather than handing over power to one party, they transmitted sovereignty to the people of Angola. Angola's civil war continued into the 21st century. -
62 Byron, Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace
SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology[br]b. 12 December 1815 Piccadilly Terrace, London, Englandd. 23 November 1852 East Horsley, Surrey, England[br]English mathematician, active in the early development of the calculating machine.[br]Educated by a number of governesses in a number of houses from Yorkshire to Ealing, she was the daughter of a hypochondriac mother and her absent, separated, husband, the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron. As a child a mysterious and undiagnosed illness deprived her "of the use of her limbs" and she was "obliged to use crutches". The complaint was probably psychosomatic as it cleared up when she was 17 and was about to attend her first court ball. On 8 July 1835 she was married to William King, 1st Earl of Lovelace. She later bore two sons and a daughter. She was an avid student of science and in particular mathematics, in the course of which Charles Babbage encouraged her. In 1840 Babbage was invited to Turin to present a paper on his analytical engine. In the audience was a young Italian military engineer, L.F.Menabrea, who was later to become a general in Garibaldi's army. The paper was written in French and published in 1842 in the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève. This text was translated into English and published with extensive annotations by the Countess of Lovelace, appearing in Taylor's Scientific Memoirs. The Countess thoroughly understood and appreciated Babbage's machine and the clarity of her description was so great that it is undoubtedly the best contemporary account of the engine: even Babbage recognized the Countess's description as superior to his own. Ada often visited Babbage in his workshop and listened to his explanations of the structure and use of his engines. She shared with her husband a love of horse-racing and, with Babbage, tried to develop a system for backing horses. Babbage and the Earl apparently stopped their efforts in time, but the Countess lost so heavily that she had to pawn all her family jewels. Her losses at the 1851 Derby alone amounted to £3,200, while borrow-ing a further £1,800 from her husband. This situation involved her in being blackmailed. She became an opium addict due to persistent pain from gastritis, intermittent anorexia and paroxys-mal tachycardia. Charles Babbage was always a great comfort to her, not only for their shared mathematical interests but also as a friend helping in all manner of small services such as taking her dead parrot to the taxidermist. She died after a protracted illness, thought to be cancer, at East Horsley Towers.[br]Further ReadingD.Langley Moore, 1977, Ada, Countess of Lovelace: Byron's Legitimate Daughter, John Murray.P.Morrison and E.Morrison, 1961, Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engine, Dover Publications.Biographical history of technology > Byron, Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace
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