Angola carry emotional baggage into Portugal game

BIELEFELD, Germany, June 9 (Reuters) For Angola, Sunday's World Cup Group D clash against former rulers Portugal means so much more than three points in a football game.

The southwest African country was under Portuguese control for 400 years and when independence finally came in 1975, after Angolans had sought for 14 years, it was anything but peaceful.

The messy transfer of power to bickering nationalist movements sparked a bloody civil war which lasted for almost three decades and claimed about a million lives.

There is thus a lot at stake for both teams when they meet in their opening group game in Cologne.

''It is very important for Angola to win this game because of the colonial relationship,'' said Nato dos Santos, who works at Luanda's tennis club. ''It is a chance for us to prove that we are independent and we are strong in our own right.'' The civil war ended in April 2002 but left a legacy of poverty and disease, with most of Angola's 13 million people living on less than 2 dollar a day and one child in four dying from a preventable disease before their fifth birthday.

THAWED RELATIONS Frosty relations between the two countries have slowly thawed and today Angolans embrace Portuguese business, culture and sport, while retaining the language and a sense of pride at having seen off the colonialists.

Immigration both ways is on the rise, with corporate Portugal keen to capitalise on Angola's post-war reconstruction and oil and mineral wealth, while Angolans are grasping better educational opportunities in Lisbon and beyond.

So their World Cup clash will carry more emotional baggage than many dysfunctional families.

''The relationship between Angola and Portugal has always been incredibly complicated,'' said Mario, who works for an oil services company in Luanda. ''Angola has always felt like a son, with Portugal the father he didn't like very much.'' Like a child eager to show off in front of his parents, Angola wants to show the world -- and the Portuguese in particular -- that it has put its past firmly behind it and is well on the road to recovery.

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