Luanda

It smells of gas, sewers and homemade food. The traffic is hallucinating, even by African standards. Everybody owns a SUV-like vehicle (offered by the regime to regime friends, whispers my very dear Angolan friend on the picture above). People on the streets want to sell you everything: from room deodorisers to fancy suits (of the striped kind).

And there are so many of these vendors. You’re either unemployed or a street vendor. Nobody produces anything in this country that was once a top exporter of coffee, cotton and sisal. I travelled the road to the Kilamba Kiaxi slum (7km in more than one hour) and they were everywhere. Weting their feet in the dirty water that flooded the road after a pipe was damaged during construction work. How much weight can women carry on their heads?

We meet a happy group of MPLA partisans on scooters. They propably came from one of those popular meetings with half-price beer and free DVDs:

Cars everywhere. In the slum, their carcasses decorate the streets are provide accommodation for hens. I speak to two thirty-something women whose life changed after they received a 250 dollar loan from a microcredit agency. It allowed them to become… vendors. Now they want to expand their businesses and aim at a 1,000 dollar loan from the same Canadian-funded project, Kixicrédito. And so they come here:

The national oil company, Sonangol, has slightly better quarters:

They keep the light on all night. I suppose the idea is to attract all the mosquitoes that carry malaria and other evil diseases. If they stay away from the slums maybe life expectation at birth will rise above 42 years.

Fortunately, I have only one mosquito to fight in my room before I go to sleep, after all these strenuous and happy hours.