Not long ago, the field where Charlotte Itala picks corn with her friends was a hunting ground where people in her small African village caught antelope, boar and forest buffalo.
Now that land has been plowed over by her new employers, a group of Old Colony Mennonites.
The Mennonites, adherents of a Christian sect founded in the 16th century, number nearly 60 people in all, most of whom set out from Mexico almost a year ago to establish a settlement in northeastern Angola. As part of an agreement with a diamond mining company, they have cleared and cultivated nearly 2,000 acres, hoping to build a community that other Mennonites from the Americas can join.
The new families, who use shipping containers as makeshift homes, have impressed some Angolans but raised fears among others. In Ms. Itala’s village, Cambanze, some worry that the Mennonites may be just the latest outsiders to move in with little regard for the people who live there.
“If they take our land, we won’t be able to grow our cassava — and then what are we going to eat?” said Ms. Itala, who makes $2.50 for seven hours of work in the Mennonites’ field. The money does not make up for the loss of her village’s hunting ground, she said. “We are worried for our future.”
The Mennonites avoid using the word “colony” in their new home. It conjures visions of a brutal past for Angolans, whose country was for centuries exploited by Portuguese colonists trading in resources and human beings.
Calling their settlement the Fields of Hope, the Mennonites describe themselves as enthusiastic partners of the Angolans. They say they will set aside about 12 acres of land for each nearby village and teach people to farm like them.
“Angola needs cultivation, and we need land,” said Jacob Froese, one of the Mennonites. “I see us as a pair.”
Although Angola has immense oil and mineral wealth, the country has long struggled with widespread corruption, high rates of unemployment and poverty. Most of rural Angola has little access to electricity, and hundreds of villages like Cambanze rely on hunting, harvesting cassava and collecting butterfly larvae, which is sold as food.
Hoping to ease dependence on expensive food imports, the government has sought to promote agriculture in northeastern Angola, a region dominated by diamond mining and once devastated by the country’s long civil war.
Typically, mining companies are offered only five-year concessions to explore and excavate land, and they must be renewed with the Angolan authorities. But by investing in agriculture through a government program, a company can acquire much longer concessions.
The Mennonites and a mining company, Minas Gema Angola, made a partnership that appears to have the potential to secure longer land concessions, according to Mennonite leaders and Zeca Cassanguidi, a businessman and retired general.
“In our contract it’s written that if we find a diamond we have to sit down and have a meeting with Minas Gema to discuss how to sell it,” said Benjamin Kauenhofen, the leader of the Mennonite families. “The diamond miners need us. We are helping each other out.”
Mr. Cassanguidi, who helped broker the arrangement, said that the Mennonites were not allowed to infringe on nearby villages’ farming land, and that salaries for the Angolan workers would increase as crops turned into successful harvests.
“It’s important to show that food is coming out of this place that was a place of war,” he said.
The Minas Gema representative named on the contract, Marcos de Oliveira Bacurau, said that there was “enormous potential” for farming in northern Angola. “The diamond mines don’t physically occupy a lot of land, so the area is a great place to introduce agriculture,” he said.
Angola’s state-run diamond authority, Endiama, did not respond to questions about Minas Gema’s operations in the land farmed by the Mennonites. Mr. Cassanguidi said the company had not yet found diamonds in the area.
A wave of Old Colony Mennonites, who largely reject new technology, emigrated from Europe to the Americas about a century ago. They have established a string of colonies into the Amazon and farther south, some of which have prompted protests and investigations.
Opposition from environmentalists and beekeepers in Mexico, upset over deforestation and the Mennonites’ use of Roundup, a weedkiller linked to cancer, helped push a group of Mennonites to Angola in search of land for their rapidly expanding families.
“There is a sentiment that there is no future in Mexico for us,” Mr. Kauenhofen said. “They say trees create oxygen and cutting them down is changing the environment. If we must leave the trees, OK, but what are we going to eat? The world is growing.”
The idea of moving to Angola came to the Mennonites after a group of them met an Angolan delegation at an agricultural event in Mexico City in 2019.
But their first attempt, in 2023, ended in anguish. The Mennonites arrived with only tourist visas, struggled to navigate Angola’s bureaucracy and were left living in tents, losing what little money they had, in an area rife with malaria. Mr. Harder’s 8-year-old daughter, Lucy, died of the disease.
But they decided to try again, in part because of the land concession deal but also because of their emotional ties. “I wanted to be close to Lucy,” said Berta Harder, the girl’s mother.
While the Mennonite families in Angola largely try to live apart from society, they are not as strict in rejecting modernization as other Old Colony settlements.
Like those groups, they speak Plautdietsch, the Low German dialect almost exclusively spoken by Mennonites. But English words pepper their sentences, and most of the men also know Spanish. Tortillas have become a staple of their meals, and they listen to mariachi music on Sundays. And now that they are in Angola, some are learning Portuguese.
Unlike more hard-line Mennonites, the group in Angola uses tractors and other mechanical equipment. But there are limits. “We can’t open up to the internet,” said Abraham Froese Zacharias. “The internet is evil.”
The Mennonites and residents of Cambanze both draw water from the same small river, fetched each day in five-gallon jugs.
The Mennonite children play on the same hillside and fields where Ms. Itala and her friends did when they were younger. Some of the girls have learned to balance loads on their heads, as Angolan women do.
But the Mennonites do not see themselves converting Angolans or trying to integrate them into their community. Instead, they hope that other Mennonites from the Americas will join them.
“If the Bolivians don’t come, we are going to cry,” said Juan Harder, Ms. Harder’s father, about another group. “The kids are going to grow up and who will they marry?”
Like the Mennonites, Ms. Itala’s husband, Tiago Sumixi, is proud of his family’s history. He comes from a long line of Chokwe hunters who fiercely resisted Portuguese colonial rule.
But between the farm and the diamond mine to come, he and others in Cambanze share a growing anxiety that they are being squeezed out.
“We are paralyzed,” he said. “We have nowhere to go.”
Merle Müller contributed research.
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