Bram Vermeulen travels along the old front line of a forgotten war, in the hinterland of the most expensive city in the world. What does the rest of Angola notice about the oil and diamond dollars that flow to Luanda?
It is the most expensive city in the world. Renting a two- or three-room apartment costs you six or seven thousand US dollars a month here. New York? No, Luanda, the capital of Angola. The skyscrapers have sprung up like mushrooms in recent years and along the water there is a brand new promenade. Bram looks his eyes out. What a difference with six years earlier!

Angola was recently a poverty-stricken country, devastated by a civil war that began when the country became independent of Portugal in 1975 and which ended in 2002. Now the oil money is pouring in, and diamonds also bring in money. The economy has grown by more than 11 percent a year since the end of the fighting. This is clearly visible in the center of the capital, but what about the rest of the country?

The train track is in any case beautiful. Completely restored, thanks to China. And a train passenger tells Bram that Angola is now a new country, albeit in an embryonic phase. And indeed, traces of the civil war can still be seen everywhere: a rusted tank, a derailed train, countless ruins full of bullet holes. Mine fields that have to be stripped centimeter by centimeter of their explosive charge. And victims of violence, who lack limbs.
The war was eventually lost by Unita, a movement that fought with support from South Africa and the US against the Marxist government of the MPLA, when their leader Jonas Savimbi was killed. Yet Unita still has many supporters in the city of Huambo, where Savimbi lived.

Unita has not really lost the war, one of them thinks. "Because Unita always stood for a free market economy and free elections. The MPLA wanted something else. And what do we see today? "Exactly: a country where the free market rules, and democracy. Unita has won in a certain way.

End well, all right? There is something to wonder about that. Only 20 percent of the population benefits from the new wealth, says the brother of the famous doctor David Bernardino, who was murdered in the war. The rest of the people are poor and live, for example, in slums, or meager huts in the countryside.

Life is tough here, say the young players of a football team. They each have only one leg, so that makes it extra difficult to find work and seduce girls. But there is no point in fostering resentment, a boy thinks. "I will have to live without that leg, and do the things that I can do."
Episode 7. Behind the skyscrapers

Bram Vermeulen travels along the old frontline of a forgotten war, in the hinterland of the world’s most expensive city. What does the rest of Angola see of the oil and diamond dollars that are flowing into Luanda?

Director: Doke Romeijn and Stefanie de Brouwer
© VPRO October 2014

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