Bernardo Mussonde Family Garden

Slow Food in Angola

Angola is a mostly mountainous Southern African country, covered in highlands and with a lengthy coastline that stretches down to the south where the Namib Desert begins. It is still home to a number of different indigenous populations, descended from the Bantu linguistic macrofamily. A three-decade-long civil war ended in 2002, and a few years later petroleum gave a vertiginous boost to a certain type of economy, evidenced by the country’s many oil rigs. Slow Food took its first steps in Angola in 2014 thanks to the G.L.o.B. project, which involved the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, the Region of Veneto, the Fondazione di Venezia, the Brazilian state of Bahia, the municipality of Maputo in Mozambique, the province of Namibe in Angola and the NGO Cospe. The network has developed in particular around the 10,000 Gardens in Africa project and the small-scale fishing sector. Many of the Angolan food gardens are found around Cavelocamue and Bibala, in the southern municipality of Virei, and focus on safeguarding the traditional foods of the Mucubal culture. The fishing activities are based mostly in the southwestern province of Namibe and tend to involve communities of women who process fish and seafood.