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European colonial powers established the contemporary boundaries of Angola during the Conference of Berlin (1884–1885). However, colonialism dates to the 15th century, when Portuguese merchants first contacted the Kingdom of Kongo along the Congo River and established early settlements in Luanda (1575) and Benguela (1617). Parts of the territories that became known as Angola in the early 20th century have a long history of interaction with the outside world, and as a result European primary sources provide much of the information available to historians. The reports, official correspondence, and diaries were produced by European men and are therefore problematic. However, by reading against the grain scholars can begin to understand how women lived in Angola before the 20th century. Some, such as Queen Njinga, had access to political power, and others, such as Dona Ana Joaquina dos Santos e Silva, enjoyed great wealth. Kimpa Vita was a prophet who led a movement of political and religious renewal and was killed as a result. Most women never appeared in historical documents but were fundamental to the economic and social existence of their communities as farmers, traders, artisans, mediums, and enslaved individuals. The end of the slave trade in the 1850s led to the expansion of the so-called legitimate trade and plantation economies, which privileged male labor while relying on women’s domestic contributions. The arrival of a larger number of missionaries, colonial troops, and Portuguese settlers by the end of the 19th century resulted in new policies that stimulated migration and family separation. It also introduced new ideas about morality, sexuality, and motherhood. Women resisted and joined anticolonial movements. After independence, decades of civil war increased forced displacement, gender imbalance, and sexual violence. The greater stability at the end of the armed conflict may favor the expansion of women’s organizations and internal pressures to address gender inequalities.

South Africa’s barely regulated, murderously competitive, contemporary minibus-taxi industry dates to the turn of the 1980s. It is synonymous with the sixteen-seat (latterly twenty-two- and thirty-two-seat) minibuses, which forced their way onto bus routes and soon displaced government-subsidized public transport services. Nonetheless, the minibus-taxi industry traces its roots to the Black-owned informal transportation sector that first developed on the fringes of South Africa’s segregated cities in the early decades of the 20th century. Heroic stories of these pioneering guerrilla entrepreneurs—who successfully ran unlicensed “pirate” transport operations, while dodging the heavy hand of state regulation and White racism—remain potent memories in parts of South Africa. Academics might pay more attention to the tangled relationship between patterns of urban change, racial segregation, political economy, and public-transport provision. In one sense, South Africa’s minibus-taxi sector shares striking parallels to Kenya’s matatus and Tanzania’s daladalas. At the same time, the distinctive history of South Africa’s minibus-taxi sector is perhaps best understood when placed into the longue durée of urban segregation and transport apartheid, which shares many similarities with the more tightly planned, racially segregated cities of the Americas.