LUANDA, the coastal capital of Angola, looks like a war zone which is odd, because Angola's 20 year civil war never really reached the city. Nor did the preceding liberation struggle against the colonial Portuguese.
Apart from a brief flurry of fighting in 1992, when UNITA rebels rejected the result of UN sponsored elections and their representatives had to fight their way out of the city, Luanda has had a relatively quiet time.
Two decades of state Marxism failed to eradicate the Latin joie de vivre, with the city's music and culture owing much to Portuguese speaking Brazil. But most travellers still agree that Luanda is one of the most decrepit and difficult capitals in Africa.
It is not that Luanda looks particularly run down. Its peeling buildings, broken pavements, litter strewn dirt verges and cratered roads would be par for the course in many African capitals. The trouble with Luanda is the smell.
Built originally for 30,000 people, the city has seen its population swell to perhaps two or three million as the war has forced refugees in from the countryside. Many crammed their way into existing accommodation or sprawling slums some even moved into the concrete skeletons of half completed apartment blocks, building walls for their own few square feet with whatever came to band.
Plumbing was an optional extra and the old colonial sewerage infrastructure, or what was left of it, could not cope. Even in the centre of town pedestrians have to pick their way around pools of liquid excrement.
At low tide people wade out in the palm fringed Baia de Luanda and forage on the sand banks in the centre, while ships and off shore oil platforms, towed in for maintenance, vent their bilge into the busy anchorage at the Baia's mouth. It is not advisable to eat shellfish in Luanda.
At night, two or three rats can often be seen in the street at one time, plying their trade around the piles of rubbish, while giant high velocity cockroaches swarm out on to the pavements. By day the rats are replaced by gangs of street children many of them orphans from the war who pick through the city's wheelie bins in search of food. The bins are too large for a small child to reach into, so they often go in head first. In Luanda it is common to see a pair of child's legs protruding from a bin. Child bandits roam the streets.
At other times the main hazard is the government police who are in the habit of searching foreigners and "confiscating" their money. The corruption is open and shameless, even by African standards. Leaving Luanda, you are advised to hide your hard currency to prevent airport officials stealing it.
The fact that Angola should not be a poor country makes the corruption and decay harder to tolerate. The influx of foreign entrepreneurs and, latterly, UN personnel, coupled with the availability of cash, have made Luanda one of Africa's most expensive cities. The asking price for renting a one room apartment is now $1,500 a month. A can of Coke can cost up to $3.
True, up to 80 per cent of the state's budget is supposedly spent on the prosecution of its war against UNITA, but last year that budget still included $3.8 billion in oil revenue and millions more from those diamond producing areas not under UNITA's control. Even businesses which pay their own way are allowed to fall into neglect. For example, rooms in the towering, state owned Meridien Hotel cost at least $190 a night, but the lifts don't work above the sixth floor.
Foreign observers complain that even with the war the government still has more cash available to it than many other African regimes it just isn't willing to invest it in people and infrastructure. Corruption is said to reach the highest level.
In 1994, 58 per cent of government spending was made outside normal treasury accounting procedures.
All this is not lost on ordinary Luandans. Although they voted overwhelmingly for President Eduardo dos Santos and the ruling MPLA in the abortive 1992 elections, they are increasingly critical of the government's failure to help them in their ordinary lives.
"People only earn $10 a month here, and it is hard," said a mini bus driver. "Provincial government has made promises to clean up Luanda and improve sanitary and water conditions, but it is just promises."
Like many Luandans he still accepts government assurances that the war is to blame. But with that struggle apparently winding down, the MPLA may soon be looking for another excuse.