The Cabinda Province: Incredible resource wealth in tiny pieces of land

As part of an effort to blog more frequently--every other day--I wanted to share something interesting that I read.

I just finished reading Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil by John Ghazvinian.

This book is chalked full of information I never knew anything about. (For now) Rather than go too much into this, I just wanted to give one prime example: the Cabinda Province.

The Cabinda Province is a small sliver of land on the western coast of Africa, sandwiched between the Republic of Congo to the North and the DRC to the South. Despite the fact that it does not touch the rest of Angola, it is a part of Angola. In the late 19th century, the three kingdoms living on this land asked to become a protectorate of Portugal. As they were surrounded by King Leopold's notoriously cruel colony to the east and expanding French colonies to the north, turning to Portugal for protection was perhaps the best option.

The Cabinda Province remained under Portuguese rule until 1975, when Portugal's fascist regime fell at home. With this, Angola (as well as Mozambique) was liberated, and the MPLA (the Marxist party that fought for independence and took over after the Portuguese left) immediately sent troops to the Cabinda province declaring it a part of Angola. Since the people of Cabinda speak Portuguese, shared the same colonial rulers, and are so close to Angola this isn't a huge stretch. However, most Cabindans consider themselves ethnically distinct. They consider themselves culturally more similar to their DRC and Republic of Congo neighbors. The rest of Angola had been a Portuguese colony since the 15th century, but Cabinda had been independent until the later 19th century and even after that had enjoyed more autonomy than the rest of the Angola under Portuguese rule.

And to complicate matters more, 60% of Angolan oil comes (and 71% of Angolan oil revenue) from Cabinda. Like the Katanga Province in the DRC or the Sahel area of Chad, this small province has the majority of its nations natural resources. Thus it is heavily contested.

When the MPLA first declared Cabinda a part of Angola, they did not know this strip of land, making up 1% of Angola's total land area would contribute the majority of the nation's oil. But this integral fact has since made the land even more heavily contested. And for a nation that puts out over 2 million barrels of oil a day--second in Africa only to longtime OPEC-member, Nigeria--the value of this small piece of land for Angola cannot be understated. This small province is the reason why, today, Angola is China's number one source of foreign oil. It's the engine behind Angola's phenomenal double-digit growth over the past few years (insane numbers like 15% growth in 2005), and it is the reason why Angola is one of the few African nations that has never been reliant on foreign aid for its economic survival (Ghazvinian, 148). The future of this small parcel of land largely determines the future of Angola, and whether it will continue its emergence as one of Africa's economic power houses.