Just as most other European countries were beginning to exit or disengage from their African colonies, Portugal dug in, strengthening its connections with and increasing its presence on the continent. Angola was used as a repository for Portugal’s underemployed and impoverished excess population, and settlers continued to flock to urban areas. With the white population increasing from 44,000 in 1940 to 325,000 in 1974, Europeans soon took over not only upper and mid-level positions, but also most low-wage jobs in the city, displacing most of the urban African population. 
The discovery of oil in the exclave of Cabinda in the 1960s and the continued development of coffee, cotton, and diamonds as viable exports, led to Angola having one of the most robust and diversified economies of Africa in this time. Maintenance of these commercial activities was however highly dependent on European technicians and specialists and was almost completely controlled by these groups, preventing the majority of the population, who were largely engaged in subsistence farming or as laborers on commercial farms, from reaping the benefits of this wealth.   
	Starting in Tunisia and Morocco in 1956 and extending to Sub-Saharan Africa with Ghana in 1957	, most African countries had achieved independence from their European colonial masters by the mid-1960s. In the Portuguese colonies independence was a longer and more drawn out experience, as the Portuguese continued to assert their control and encourage new white settlement right until 1974, on the eve of independence. 
	In February of 1961 a large group of Africans armed with knives and clubs attempted to free militants from a Luanda prison. The effort proved unsuccessful and violent reprisals led to hundreds of deaths. This event was widely reported on around the world and marked the beginning of Angola’s fourteen year struggle for independence. 
	On the onset of the war, two main groups challenged the Portuguese, the MPLA and the FNLA (previously UPA). Established in Luanda, the MPLA derived much of its support from Mbundus in the cities and along the coast. Marxist-leaning mestiços and assimilados made up most of the group’s leadership and formed ties with the Soviet Union and other communist countries. Agostihno Neto, an assimilado doctor educated in Lisbon, was the early leader of the MPLA and would later become the first president of independent Angola. The FNLA, led by Holden Roberto, was based in neighboring Congo (Léopoldville) and largely a regional and ethnic group representing the interests of the Bakongo people of northern Angola. The United States and later China provided monetary and material support to the FNLA and under the régime of Joseph Mobutu (later Mobutu Sésé Seko), Zaire would send its own troops into Angola to bolster the FNLA’s ranks.
	Due to differences in ideology and ethnic composition the MPLA and FNLA were unable to unite against the Portuguese and fought each other nearly as much as their common enemy. A third group, UNITA, was founded by Jonas Savimbi in 1966. 