Even by the standards of oil states, Angola is almost laughably unfair. Oligarchs leave €500 tips in posh Lisbon restaurants, while about one in six Angolan children dies before age five — the worst rate on earth, says the United Nations. Angola has the same Gini coefficient for inequality as apartheid South Africa (though a touch better than today’s Manhattan).
Yet this little-studied kleptocracy is an accepted part of the western system. Expat western workers keep Angola ticking. Angolan oligarchs inhabit the global luxury economy of British public schools, Swiss asset managers, Hermès stores etc. In fact, argues the Oxford political scientist Ricardo Soares de Oliveira in his marvellous new book, Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola Since the Civil War, we live in “an oligarch’s ideal world”. Western countries barely even pretend to disapprove of kleptocrats any more.
Foreigners have run most things in Angola since the 250-year transatlantic slave trade. Later, Portuguese settlers did almost all skilled and even semi-skilled jobs here. When the Portuguese left in the mid-1970s, there probably weren’t 100 Angolan university graduates. The new Marxist regime therefore relied on eastern European economic advisers (not so good), American oil companies such as Chevron (more helpful) and Cuban soldiers (handy too) to fight their civil war against the Unita rebels.