Lubango is the capital city of the Angolan province of Huíla. Its last known population was 100,757. Until 1975, the city's official name was Sá da Bandeira.

In 1882 approximately one thousand of Portuguese settlers came from the island of Madeira to the area of current-day Lubango, Angola. These Portuguese farmers successfully developed the whole region and founded the settlement. The city, originally established in 1885 to serve colonists from the Madeira Islands, lies at an elevation of 1,760 metres in a valley of the Huíla Plateau and was surrounded by a scenic park spreading up the mountain slopes.

In 1885, about 40 Boer families from the north-west of South Africa settled at Grootfontein. Part of the Dorslandtrekker, they were heading towards the area currently known as Lubango, in Angola, which was claimed by Portugal. When that territory officially fell under Portuguese control due to the Conference of Berlin, they turned back and tried to establish the "Republic Upingtonia" at Grootfontein.

Jonas Malheiro Savimbi (August 3, 1934 – February 22, 2002) was an Angolan political leader. He founded and led UNITA, a movement that first waged a guerrilla war against Portuguese colonial rule, 1966–1974, then confronted the rival MPLA during the decolonization conflict, 1974-75, and after independence in 1975 fought the ruling MPLA in the Angolan Civil War until his death in a clash with government troops in 2002.

Savimbi was born on August 3, 1934, in Munhango, Moxico Province, a small town on the Benguela Railway, and raised in Bié Province. Savimbi's father, Lote, was a stationmaster on Angola's Benguela railway line and a preacher of the Protestant "Igreja Evangélica Congregacional de Angola", founded and maintained by American missionaries. Both his parents were members of the Bieno group of the Ovimbundu, the people who later served as Savimbi's major political base.