Biden visits Angola, pledges deeper U.S.-Africa ties

Joe Biden pledged lasting US engagement with Africa on Africans' own terms as he met his Angolan counterpart Joao Lourenco in Luanda as part of his only visit to sub-Saharan Africa as US president.

Fulfilling a pledge to visit the continent during his term in office, which ends in January, Biden said the United States was "all in on Africa," a phrase he had used during a US-Africa summit in Washington in December 2022.

Lourenco said Angola wanted to work with the United States to attract foreign investment and improve defense and security ties, including joint military exercises and cooperation in the Gulf of Guinea and South Atlantic.

Joe Biden will use his visit to Angola, the first by a US president to the sub-Saharan African country, to mark the two nations' shared history in the transatlantic slave trade. Biden is not expected to talk about US reparations over the slave trade during his trip.

Biden's Angola trip will also tout a major, US-backed railway project that aims to divert critical minerals away from China. It fulfills a promise to visit Sub-Saharan Africa on what could be his final foreign trip before leaving office in January.

Speaking of “our nation’s original sin,” President Joe Biden toured a slavery museum in Angola and inspected shackles and a whip but also addressed Africa’s future, saying Africans will make up one in four people by 2050 and the world’s fate rests in their hands.

Biden’s visit, the first to Angola by a US president, is meant to promote billions of dollars of commitments to the sub-Saharan African nation for what he called the largest ever US rail investment overseas.

The trip was meant to counter China’s influence on the African continent of over 1.4 billion people by showcasing a US commitment of $3 billion for the Lobito Corridor railway redevelopment linking Zambia, Congo and Angola.