Angola holds one of the oldest Christian histories in sub Saharan Africa. When Portuguese ships reached the Kongo kingdom's coast in the 1480s, its king chose baptism, and in 1491 the court at Mbanza Kongo, in today's northern Angola, became Christian; his successor Afonso I made Catholicism a royal religion with Kongolese priests, letters to Lisbon and Rome, and a cathedral whose ruins still stand in the city UNESCO listed in 2017.
Kongo Christianity was no simple import: it grew around older understandings of the dead, of minkisi power objects and of a cosmos divided by water from the land of the ancestors, and it produced its own prophets, most famously Kimpa Vita. The colonial centuries layered Portuguese Catholicism along the coast while Baptist, Methodist and Congregational missions in the north, centre and south educated the very elites who would lead the rival independence movements.
The Marxist state after 1975 was officially atheist and confiscated church property, but faith outlasted the doctrine, and the long civil war made congregations the strongest surviving social fabric. Since peace in 2002 the map has diversified fast, with Brazilian Pentecostal churches, Angolan prophetic movements such as the Tocoists, and a Catholic Church still influential enough that the state negotiates with it as a public power.