Sao Paulo de Loanda was founded on 25th January 1575 by Portuguese explorer Paulo Dias de Novais and it served as the centre of the Portuguese slave trade to Brazil until 1836. By the time of independence from Portugal in 1975 the city, now known as Luanda, was mainly populated by white Portuguese, however, the Angolan civil war that broke out in that year saw most of the Portuguese fleeing the city back to Portugal or South Africa and the Angolan people flooded in ~ but without any of the requisite knowledge to run and maintain a city whose population was growing to the five million today. This mass influx created mass slums flowing out from the centre of Luanda which was simply not able to cope with the millions heading towards it.