A hot and humid Sunday night in Luanda. In a poor neighbourhood near the centre of the Angolan capital, bats wheel in the darkness and loud techno drowns out the traffic on the potholed road.
A young crowd has packed into a cavernous and crumbling concrete church in search of comic, rather than spiritual, relief. Angola receives little global attention, despite an extraordinary recent history of war , boom and bust. The country of 30 million people is now on the brink of a brighter future after decades of chaos, corruption and violence. Yet challenges are multiple β and could easily derail any tentative progress. Costa, 34, remembers two main turning points during his life.
The first was the end of the bloody and destructive civil war in This ushered in an economic boom fuelled by high oil prices β Angola is a major producer β and then an equally spectacular crash five years ago. Now the atmosphere is more free. We can say the president is ugly and everyone will laugh. Life in Angola today is like a good barbecue sauce The economy is only just recovering from the crash, with government budgets still crippled by massive debts. Dos Santos was widely accused of nepotism and industrial-scale corruption.
Huge sums remain unaccounted for. But analysts say the pace of reform has slowed and frustration is mounting. The bloody conflict that followed independence from Portugal in is also material for the comics. Emmanuel Quituto, a video producer who was 10 years old when the war ended with the death of Jonas Savimbi, the leader of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola Unita , agrees.
His body was never found. The conflict ruined Angola, and today, while a small elite enjoys the fruits of the economic boom, millions of Angolans remain mired in deep poverty. The profound inequality is evident to the most casual visitor to Luanda. At the marina, yachts manned by Italian crews are moored next to an infinity pool.
