Luanda

One million people shipped out as cargo. That is Luanda's founding ledger. Established in 1576 as São Paulo da Assunção de Loanda by Portuguese coloniser Paulo Dias de Novais, the city spent its first 250 years as the Western Hemisphere's largest slave-export terminal, funnelling captives from Angola's interior to the sugar plantations of Brazil. When the slave trade collapsed in the 1820s, the same port pivoted to palm oil, ivory, coffee, and cotton—extraction of a different kind, but the same directional flow: resources out, wealth concentrated in a colonial elite. Luanda's economy has been path-dependent on extraction since before the concept had a name.

Portuguese rule ended abruptly after Lisbon's 1974 Carnation Revolution, triggering an exodus of nearly all 340,000 Portuguese settlers and a civil war that lasted from 1975 to 2002. The departure stripped the city of its professional class overnight—a mass die-off of organisational memory comparable to a termite colony losing its queen caste. Meanwhile, Luanda's population exploded as war refugees poured in from every province, a source-sink dynamic that turned a city of 475,000 into a megacity of over 8.8 million. Informal settlements called musseques sprawled outward like termite mounds—self-organised, structurally ingenious, but built without the infrastructure that formal planning provides.

Oil changed everything and nothing. Petroleum discovered near Luanda Bay in 1955 eventually made Angola sub-Saharan Africa's second-largest oil producer. The boom-bust cycles hit with desert-locust regularity: oil prices surge, GDP swells, skyscrapers rise along the Marginal waterfront; prices crash, government revenues halve, construction freezes mid-pour. At peak oil wealth, Mercer ranked Luanda the world's most expensive city for expatriates—$6,800 monthly rents, $31 for a tub of ice cream—while half the population survived on less than $2 a day. The same city simultaneously topped global cost-of-living indices and poverty rankings, a metabolic paradox where the organism hoards resources in one tissue while starving another.

Diversification remains Angola's stated priority, but oil still accounts for over 90% of exports and roughly 60% of government revenue. Like a baobab storing water in its trunk for dry seasons, Luanda has accumulated enormous reserves from oil booms—but unlike the baobab, it has struggled to develop the root network needed to draw sustenance from multiple sources. Agriculture, fisheries, and manufacturing remain underdeveloped despite decades of stated intent. The kwanza's 2018 devaluation dropped Luanda from 1st to 26th on expat cost rankings, but for locals, the arithmetic barely changed.

Four and a half centuries of exporting what the land holds—people, then ivory, then oil—have built a capital that is simultaneously one of Africa's richest and most unequal cities. Luanda's question is the resource-dependent economy's central dilemma: can extraction ever become cultivation? Every boom reinforces the extraction pathway; every bust punishes the neglected alternatives. The pattern breaks only when the resource flowing outward generates more value than the resource itself—a metabolic transition that Luanda, after 450 years, has yet to make.