LITMIR.BIZ

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that accrue to the Angolan state are deployed to serve the regime’s purposes. Angola’s 2013 budget allocated 18 per cent of public spending to defence and public order, 5 per cent to health, and 8 per cent to education. That means the government spent 1.4 times as much on defence as it did on health and schools combined. By comparison, the UK spent four times as much on health and education as on defence. Angola spends a greater share of its budget on the military than South Africa’s apartheid government did during the 1980s, when it was seeking to crush mounting resistance at home and was fomenting conflict in its neighbours.¹⁹

      Generous fuel subsidies are portrayed as a salve for the poor, but in truth they mainly benefit only those wealthy enough to afford a car and politically connected enough to win a fuel-import licence. Angola’s government has ploughed petrodollars into contracts for roads, housing, railways and bridges at a rate of $15 billion a year in the decade to 2012, a huge sum for a country of 20 million people. Roads are getting better, railways are slowly snaking into the interior, but the construction blitz has also proved a bonanza for embezzlers: kickbacks are estimated to account for more than a quarter of the final costs of government construction contracts.²⁰ And much of the funding is in the form of oil-backed credit from China, much of which is marshalled by a special office that General Kopelipa has run for years. ‘The country is getting a new face,’ says Elias Isaac, one of Angola’s most prominent anticorruption campaigners. ‘But is it getting a new soul?’²¹

      Manuel Vicente was keen to correct the impression that Angola’s rulers have abdicated their duties toward their citizens. ‘Just to assure you, the government is really serious, engaged in combating, in fighting the poverty,’ he told me.²² ‘We are serious people, we know very well our job, and we know very well our responsibility.’ Talking with him, I had no doubt that there was some part of Vicente that wanted to better the lot of his compatriots, or at least to be seen to be trying to do so. ‘I’m a Christian guy,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t work if you are okay and the people around have nothing to eat. You don’t feel comfortable.’

      There are two solutions to that problem: share some food or dump the hungry out of sight. The Futungo’s record suggests it favours the latter.

      António Tomás Ana has lived in Chicala since 1977, before new arrivals fleeing the civil war in the interior turned what had been a sleepy fishing settlement into the profusion of humanity it is today, sandwiched between the ocean and the slopes rising up to the presidential complex. Better known as Etona, he is one of Angola’s foremost artists. At an open-air workshop walled with breezeblocks, his assistants chip away at acacia trunks with chisels and mallets. One of his trademark sinewy wooden sculptures graces the lobby at Sonangol headquarters.

      Among Etona’s sixty-five thousand neighbours in Chicala are military officers and a professional photographer who brings in $5,000 a month, which does not go far in ultra-costly Luanda but has allowed him to build up the corrugated-iron shack he bought twenty-five years ago into the angular but solid edifice around which his grandchildren gallivant today. In June 2012 that house, like Etona’s workshop and the community library he is building, were, along with the rest of Chicala, scheduled to be flattened – and not, this time, by the ocean.

      Given the choice, few people would choose to live with Chicala’s meagre amenities and opportunities. The ruling party promised electricity during the 2008 election campaign, but little arrived, and not much had come of the latest pledge, made in the run-up to the 2012 polls, to provide piped water. But places like Chicala are communities, with their own ways and their own comradeship. An estimated three in every four of Luanda’s inhabitants, out of a total population of between 5 and 8 million, live in slums known as musseques. Although conditions in some, like the precarious settlement on top of a rubbish dump, are dire, Chicala and other central musseques have their advantages. Work, formal or informal, is close at hand in Luanda’s commercial districts.

      Etona spends a lot of time thinking about the betterment of a slum he could easily have afforded to leave. ‘Regeneration is not about roads and sidewalks – it’s in the mind,’ he told me when we met at his workshop, his red shirt pristine despite the afternoon heat.²³ ‘This,’ he said, waving an arm at the bustling slum, where nearby youngsters were furiously duelling at table football, ‘this is also part of the culture, part of the country.’ But Chicala’s days were numbered. Its inhabitants were to be relocated, whether they liked it or not, to new settlements on the outskirts of Luanda. A new luxury hotel and the gleaming offices of an American oil company had risen on the fringes of Chicala, harbingers of what was to take the neighbourhood’s place. A beach that once buzzed with fish restaurants and bars had been fenced off, ready for the developers.

      The Chicala residents I spoke to regarded the authorities’ promises of a better life elsewhere with deep suspicion. About three thousand had already been shipped off, some rounded up by police and packed with their belongings into trucks, any objections ignored. The government has been willing to use force to cleanse the slums, deploying troops by helicopter to conduct dawn evictions.²⁴ But Etona, for one, intended to resist when his turn came. ‘If we don’t speak out, we will be carried off to Zango.’

      Zango lies just over 20 kilometres south of central Luanda, where the capital’s sprawl thins out, giving way to the ochre scrub of the bush. Like a matching settlement to the north, it is supposed to represent a new beginning for Angola’s slum-dwellers. To listen to officials, Zango is the promised land. ‘We are moving them to more dignified accommodation,’ Rosa Palavera, the head of the poverty reduction unit in the presidency, told me.²⁵ ‘There are no basic services [in Chicala]. There is crime.’

      Even if one overlooks the official neglect that lies behind the lack of amenities in Chicala, Zango is hardly preferable. Those who moved to Zango were lucky if they found basic services merely on a par with those they had left behind.²⁶ Sometimes the new houses were even smaller than the old ones. In aerial photographs the new settlements looked like prison camps, with their squat dwellings arranged in unvarying rows. Shacks that were far more rickety than anything in Chicala had sprung up too. Those who tried to make a go of it by commuting back from Zango into the city each departed well before dawn and returned at midnight, scarcely leaving enough time to sleep, let alone see their children. Other new arrivals simply went straight back to Chicala, a daring move given that the slum lies within the purview of the military bureau run by General Kopelipa, the feared security chief.

      On the drive from Zango back toward the centre of Luanda, the road crosses the invisible frontier that separates the majority of Angolans from the enclave of plenty that the petro-economy has created.

      The gleaming new settlement at Kilamba was constructed from scratch by a Chinese company at a cost of $3.5 billion. The guards on duty at the gates adopted an intimidating strut as we drove toward them down the long, curving driveway. They let my companions and me through in exchange for the price of a bottle of water. Inside the atmosphere was eerie, reminiscent of one of those disaster movies in which some catastrophe has removed all trace of life. Nothing stirred in the dry heat. Row after parallel row of gleaming, pastel-coloured apartment blocks between five and ten storeys high stretched to a vanishing point at the horizon, tracked by manicured grass verges and pylons carrying electricity lines. The roads were like silk, the best in Angola. Outside the most affluent parts of South Africa, particularly the gated communities known to their more poetic detractors as ‘yuppie kennels’, I had seen nothing in Africa that looked anything like Kilamba.

      The newly completed units were for sale for between $120,000 and $300,000 apiece to those rich enough to escape the crush of central Luanda. The first residents of Kilamba’s twenty thousand apartments were said to have moved in, but there was no sign of them. About half of Angola’s population live below the international poverty line of $1.25 a day; it would take them each about 260 years to earn enough to buy the cheapest flat in Kilamba.²⁷ The prices came down after an official visit by the president, but nonetheless only the wealthiest Angolans could afford to live there.

      Teams of Chinese labourers in blue overalls and hard hats trundled into view in pickup trucks. Like other Chinese construction projects in Africa, Kilamba was built with Chinese finance and Chinese labour, and it formed part of a bigger bargain

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