Angola Emoji & Symbols

The Angolan flag is split into two horizontal bands, red over black, with a yellow emblem in the middle: half a cog wheel crossed by a machete, topped by a five-pointed star. Red stands for the blood shed in the struggle for independence, black for Africa, and yellow for the country's wealth. The cog wheel represents industrial workers, the machete the farmers and the armed struggle, and the star progress and international solidarity. The flag was raised on independence day, 11 November 1975.

The Angola flag emoji 🇦🇴 is not a picture stored in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, 🇦 and 🇴, spelling AO, Angola's ISO country code; phones and apps that know the pair draw the flag. Full country flags arrived in emoji in 2015, so every current phone shows it. Windows is the exception: its own emoji font draws no country flags, so on a Windows PC the same character often appears as the letters AO, while the person you send it to on a phone sees the flag.

No emoji shows the machete, so people rebuild the flag from parts. ❤️🖤💛 is a popular Angola colour string in bios and comments, and ⚙️⭐ adds the cog and the star. Both work next to 🇦🇴 or on their own where flags do not display.

Angola national symbols and places in emoji

Angola's best-loved national symbol is the palanca negra gigante, the giant sable antelope with sweeping curved horns, found only in Angola. It gives the national football team its nickname, the Palancas Negras. There is no antelope emoji, so fans write the name and add 🇦🇴⚽. The 🌳 stands in well for the imbondeiro, the baobab that dominates the landscape around Luanda, and 🕊️ is the emoji for 4 April, the Day of Peace and National Reconciliation that marks the end of the civil war in 2002.

For places, 🏖️ 🏝️ 🌊 are Luanda's coast: the long sand spit of the Ilha de Luanda and the Mussulo peninsula. 🏙️ is the capital's skyline along the bay, 🏰 the Fortress of São Miguel above it, built by the Portuguese in the 16th century. Inland, 🏞️ covers Kissama National Park and the Kalandula Falls on the Lucala River, among the largest waterfalls in Africa; ⛰️🛣️ is the hairpin road of the Serra da Leba in Huíla; 🏜️ is the Namib Desert in the south-west, home of the strange welwitschia plant; 🚂 is the Benguela Railway, which runs from the Atlantic port of Lobito ⚓ deep into the interior.

🛢️ and 💎 are the two words of Angola's economy: it is one of Africa's largest oil producers and a major diamond producer. Wildlife emoji 🐘 🦁 🐆 🦒 🦓 🦛 🐊 fit its parks, and 🐢 🐋 its Atlantic coast, where sea turtles nest and humpback whales pass offshore.

Angolan food emoji: muamba, funge and mufete

The national dish is muamba de galinha, chicken stewed in a red palm-oil sauce, often with okra and squash and a kick of gindungo, the local hot pepper. Send it as 🍗🌶️🥘, or 🐔🍲. It comes with funge, a smooth, stiff porridge of cassava flour in the north and around Luanda, or of maize flour in the south. There is no cassava emoji: 🫜 (root vegetable) and 🍠 are the closest, and 🌽 covers the maize kind.

Mufete is the Luanda Sunday plate, especially on the Ilha: grilled fish with beans cooked in palm oil, sweet potato, plantain and cassava, which reads as 🐟🫘🍠🍌. Calulu is a stew of dried and fresh fish with vegetables, kizaca (cassava leaves) is the green on the side 🥬, and ginguba, the Angolan word for peanuts, turns up as snacks and sauces 🥜. For dessert there is cocada amarela, a yellow coconut and egg sweet 🥥, plus mango, banana and pineapple 🥭🍌🍍.

☕ belongs here too: before independence Angola was one of the world's biggest coffee exporters, and its coffee is making a comeback. A cold beer 🍺 on the beach is another favourite drink; Cuca is a classic local brand.

Kizomba, semba and kuduro: Angola music and dance emoji

Angola has given the world three dances. Semba is the older, joyful couple dance and song style of Luanda, often called a cousin of Brazilian samba, sung by stars like Bonga. Kizomba grew out of semba in the 1980s into a slow, close partner dance that is now taught in dance schools from Lisbon to Paris and beyond. Kuduro is fast, hard electronic dance music born in Luanda in the 1990s. The emoji for all three are 💃🕺🎶, with 🎤 for the singer and 🥁🪘🎸 for the drums and guitar under them.

🎭 is the Carnaval de Luanda, the parade of neighbourhood groups along the Marginal before Lent, and it also suits the carved masks of the Chokwe people of the north-east, one of Angola's best-known art traditions.

Sport and holidays: 🏀 ⚽ 🎉

Basketball is where Angola rules its continent: the men's national team has won the AfroBasket, the African championship, 12 times, so 🇦🇴🏀🏆 is a very Angolan combo. Football is the most played sport; the Palancas Negras reached the World Cup in 2006 and Angola hosted the Africa Cup of Nations in 2010 ⚽. The women's handball team 🤾 has won the African championship more often than any other country, and roller hockey 🛼, a sport shared with Portugal and Brazil, has a loyal following.

The big day is 11 November, Independence Day, sent as 🇦🇴🎉🎆 with "Feliz Dia da Independência!". 4 February marks the start of the armed liberation struggle in 1961, 4 April is Peace Day 🕊️, and 17 September is National Heroes' Day. Most Angolans are Christian, so Christmas ✝️🎄 is a family holiday, and New Year's Eve fills Luanda's bay with fireworks 🎆.

How to type Angolan Portuguese letters and the kwanza

Portuguese is Angola's official language; the 2024 census counted it as the mother tongue of about 15.7 million Angolans aged two and older. The largest African-language mother-tongue groups are Umbundu (about 5.9 million, the central highlands around Huambo and Benguela) and Kimbundu (about 3.7 million, around Luanda and Malanje); Lingala is heard in the north near the Congo border. The special letters you need are Portuguese ones: á é í ó ú (acute, stress), â ê ô (circumflex, stress on a closed vowel), ã õ (tilde, nasal vowels, as in nação, nation), à (grave, a contraction, as in à praia) and ç (cedilla, an s sound before a, o and u, as in praça, square). See our Portuguese, Umbundu, Kimbundu and Lingala collections for each language's full set.

On Windows, hold Alt and type on the number pad: 0227 ã, 0245 õ, 0231 ç, 0199 Ç, 0225 á, 0233 é, 0234 ê, 0237 í, 0243 ó, 0244 ô, 0250 ú, 0224 à. On a Mac, Option + E then the vowel gives an acute, Option + I a circumflex, Option + N then a or o a tilde, Option + ` a grave, and Option + C gives ç. On a phone, long-press the vowel or the c. A Portuguese keyboard layout has its own keys for ç and the accents.

The currency is the kwanza, named after the Kwanza River, with the code AOA. It has no symbol of its own in Unicode: official Angolan notation uses Kz before the amount, as in Kz 5 000. For money talk in emoji, the general 💵 💰 do the job.