In Luanda, the Rich Feast, the Poor Scramble

“My wheelbarrow is my life,” says Jacinto Baltazar. He makes a living by pushing his wooden cart, crafted out of planks and a Toyota Corolla tire, down a dirt road by a market on the outskirts of Luanda, Angola, and asking women if he can carry their groceries home. The 40-year-old father of eight charges 300 kwanzas ($3) per trip. On a good day he finds as many as 15 customers in the Viana municipality. During the rainy season he ferries people across pools of stagnant water. “I know I can’t make a lot of money as a wheelbarrow man,” he says, “but it keeps me busy, and I also feed my family.”

Baltazar is one of millions of Angolans left behind by the tenfold expansion of the economy since the end of a 27-year civil war in 2002. Two-thirds of the Angolan capital’s 6 million residents live on $2 a day even as the country boasts Africa’s second-biggest oil industry after Nigeria. It’s attracted billions of dollars in Chinese, U.S., and European investment. The influx of foreign workers has pushed rents for one-bedroom apartments in the city center to as high as $10,000 a month.