Angola has produced diamonds for more than a century, first from river gravels in the northeast and later from large kimberlite pipes. Its stones are known for good size and a high share of gem quality. Its history is also bound up with a long civil war that made Angolan rough a central case in the campaign against conflict diamonds.
Where Angola's diamonds are found
Most of Angola's diamond country lies in the northeast, in the provinces of Lunda Norte and Lunda Sul near the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Rivers such as the Chicapa, Cuango and Cuilo cross this region and carry diamonds eroded from kimberlites upstream. Over millions of years the rivers sorted the stones and concentrated them in gravel beds, terraces and old buried channels.
Prospectors have identified hundreds of kimberlites across the country. Many line up along a long belt of deep fractures in the crust that geologists call the Lucapa corridor, which appears to have guided the magma toward the surface. Only a small fraction of those pipes carry enough diamonds to mine. For background on how kimberlites form and how rivers rework them into gravels, see the page on diamond geology.
The colonial alluvial era
Diamonds were first found in the Lunda region in 1912, in stream gravels close to the border with what was then the Belgian Congo. In 1917 the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola, known as Diamang, was formed with foreign capital to work the find. Diamang held exclusive rights over a huge concession and ran it for decades from its company town at Dundo.
Production in this period came almost entirely from alluvial deposits. Crews stripped away the overburden, dug out the diamond-bearing gravel and fed it through washing plants that concentrated the heavy minerals for hand sorting. Much of the labor was recruited under the Portuguese colonial labor system, which relied heavily on compulsory work. Diamang sold most of its output through the London-based selling organization linked to De Beers, part of the arrangement described in the page on the history of the diamond trade.
Independence and the civil war
Angola became independent from Portugal in 1975 and fell almost at once into civil war between the governing MPLA and rival movements, above all UNITA. The fighting lasted, with pauses and failed peace deals, until 2002. After independence the state took control of Diamang, and in 1981 it created the national diamond company Endiama to run the sector.
UNITA held much of the diamond country for long stretches of the 1990s and sold rough to pay for weapons, fuel and supplies. Investigators who studied the trade estimated that UNITA's diamond income over that decade ran into billions of dollars. In 1998 the UN Security Council banned the purchase of Angolan diamonds that lacked a government certificate of origin, a measure aimed squarely at the rebels. A UN panel report in 2000, often called the Fowler report after the Canadian ambassador who chaired the sanctions committee, named governments and middlemen that had helped UNITA move stones and arms in breach of the embargo.
Angola's experience, together with the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, led to the Kimberley Process, the certification scheme for rough diamonds that began in 2003. Angola took part from the start. The war itself ended after UNITA's leader, Jonas Savimbi, was killed in February 2002. The wider story is on the conflict diamonds page, and the companion page on Liberia's diamond mines covers a neighboring case in West Africa.
Catoca
The Catoca kimberlite, in Lunda Sul near the provincial capital Saurimo, turned Angola from a mostly alluvial producer into a kimberlite producer. It is one of the largest kimberlite pipes ever mined. Commercial production began in the 1990s from an open pit run by a joint company whose shareholders for many years included Endiama and the Russian miner Alrosa.
From the late 1990s Catoca produced large volumes of rough every year, and for much of its life it supplied most of Angola's output by carat weight. The ore is drilled, blasted and hauled to a processing plant, where it is crushed and the diamonds are recovered with dense media separation and X-ray sorting. Those steps are explained on the page about how diamonds are mined. Kimberlite stones from Catoca include many smaller and industrial-grade diamonds, so the mine's average value per carat has tended to be lower than that of Angola's river gravels.
Lulo and big alluvial stones
The Lulo concession in Lunda Norte, along the Cacuilo River, is an alluvial project run by the Australian-listed Lucapa Diamond Company together with Endiama and a private Angolan partner. Lulo became known for very large stones. In 2016 it produced a diamond of about 404 carats, the largest recorded from Angola at that time. In 2022 it yielded a 170-carat pink diamond, which was described when announced as the largest pink rough found in roughly three centuries.
Stones of this size suggest that the kimberlites feeding the Lulo rivers carry large, high-quality diamonds, and the operators have searched the area for those source pipes. Pink color in diamonds usually comes from distortion of the crystal lattice, a topic covered in fancy colored diamonds. The page on diamond carat weight explains why large rough commands such a premium.
Artisanal digging
Alongside the industrial operations, large numbers of independent diggers have worked Angola's riverbeds with shovels, sieves and small pumps. Many came across the border from the DRC. Informal digging has been a long-running source of tension. The government has run periodic campaigns against unlicensed mining and expelled foreign diggers, and human rights groups have reported abuses during some of those operations. The state has also tried to bring diggers into licensed cooperatives that sell through official buyers, so that their stones can enter the certified export system.
Angolan rough on the market
River transport tends to break up flawed diamonds and leave the tougher, cleaner crystals behind, so Angola's alluvial production has historically fetched high average prices per carat. Since the 2000s the government has reorganized diamond sales several times, moving between a single state marketing company and more open tenders and auctions. Angolan rough then moves through the diamond pipeline to cutting and trading centers such as Antwerp and Surat. Rough that is too small or heavily included goes to industrial uses or to the low end of the polished market.
Frequently asked questions
Where are most diamonds found in Angola?
Most come from the northeast, in Lunda Norte and Lunda Sul provinces. The region holds both diamond-rich river gravels and kimberlite pipes such as Catoca.
What is the largest diamond found in Angola?
Among the largest recorded is a stone of about 404 carats recovered at the Lulo alluvial project in 2016. Lulo also produced a 170-carat pink diamond in 2022.
Were Angolan diamonds conflict diamonds?
During the civil war, UNITA sold diamonds from areas it controlled to fund its forces, and the UN placed sanctions on that trade in 1998. Since the war ended in 2002, Angola's official exports have gone through the Kimberley Process certification system.
What kind of deposit is Catoca?
Catoca is a kimberlite pipe, a carrot-shaped body of volcanic rock that carried diamonds up from deep in the mantle. It is mined as an open pit.