Resting in its shade is a group of street children. None is older than 12, some have distended bellies and all are trying to hustle a bread roll for breakfast from passers-by. One of the children, Fernando, is usually on parking duty next to the Hotel Tropico. The small tips he gets from businessmen for keeping an eye on their cars are enough for one decent meal a day. Occasionally he manages to get a little extra by saying he needs money for school fees.
He distributes some of the cash among his friends, who provide protection in numbers from older hucksters keen to chase the boys off their patch. When the Portuguese left Angola, Luanda was a city of half a million people. Since then, with the influx of a steady stream of refugees from the war-torn interior, it has grown into a sprawling conurbation with an estimated population of five million.
A cholera epidemic that began in Boavista has spread across the country, killing more than two thousand people. In the centre of Boavista a man is collecting water from a pothole.
At the nearby emergency clinic a doctor tells me that the disease has already moved hundreds of miles south, to the port of Benguela. The linguistic divide is also political, dating back hundreds of years to when mulatto families on the coast acted as intermediaries in the slave trade between the Portuguese and the interior tribes. In the city of Huambo, a centre of the old Ovimbundu kingdom high in the Planalto region, a guide drove me to the place where Savimbi lived in the early s.
Now a motorcycle factory is all that remains. The buildings in the old industrial park on the outskirts of the city are surrounded by overgrown grass, their insides long since gutted by bombs.
