Huambo

Huambo is the capital of Huambo Province in Angola. It was established by the Portuguese in 1912. It was a thriving city in the colonial period, named Nova Lisboa (New Lisbon), between 1928 and 1975. After independence Huambo was a food processing and a railroad equipment repair station. Huambo was located on the central Angolan railway which runs from the port of Benguela to the Congo border.

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It had a population of 203,800 in 1983, but became the site of a brutal battle during the bloody civil war between the Marxist-backed government and UNITA in the early 1990s. The city was besieged, razed to the ground, and its civilians were massacred en-masse or fled to neighbouring Zambia.

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A returnee camp at Huambo town opened in 2004, and has so far welcomed around 13,000 people. The removal of dangerous explosive mines continues in many areas. Food-for-work programmes are rebuilding schools.

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Huambo Province: Huambo is a province of Angola. With an area of 34,270 km2 it is one of the geographically smaller provinces, situated in the Central Region approximately 450 km south east of the capital, Luanda....

Angola: Angola is a country in southwestern Africa bordering Namibia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Zambia, and with a west coast along the Atlantic Ocean. The exclave province Cabinda has a border with Congo-Brazzaville. A former Portuguese colony, it has considerable natural resources, among w...

1912: 1912 was a leap year starting on Monday....