By John McDermott, Chief Africa correspondent, The Economist
To walk around Luanda, Angola’s capital, is to tour a graveyard of another era. Half-finished or empty skyscrapers loom over the sun-kissed corniche. Some of the bars along the beach are gaudy monuments to when the price of oil was consistently above $100 and the elites partied in sub-Saharan Africa’s second-largest producer country. You can still see the odd bottle of Château Pétrus gathering dust on a supermarket shelf, a relic of a headier time.