It may be counter-intuitive to suggest that countries with the most natural resources are among the poorest in the planet. But that is and has been Angola's experience since oil was found off its coast over 30 years ago. And in that respect Angola is not alone. In 1970, just before the oil boom in Nigeria 19 million Nigerians lived below the poverty line. Now nearly $400 billion later 90 million or more Nigerians live below the poverty line. Oil is currently being pumped out of the waters off the Atlantic coast at a rate of 1.3m barrels a day generating a whopping $10 billion income for the country. Despite that enormous reservoir of wealth, Angola is ranked as the 15th poorest country in the world where few people live beyond the age of 40 and where nearly half the children under five years suffer from malnutrition. Its capital city Luanda originally built for a quarter of a million now holds four million people, most of whom live in desperate squalor. But poverty and misery are never random. For centuries Angola's wealth has been plundered by outside forces. First Portugal took what it could before it fled in 1975 and then Angola became the Cold War's hottest battle site in all of Africa. The Soviet Union, Cuba, the United States and South Africa were all scrambling for their piece of the action in Angola. And when the Cold War warriors came, they did not come empty-handed. Cuba arrived with 50,000 soldiers; the US and the Soviet sent weapons of war. Nobody knows for sure how many South Africans were operating in Angola. Their arrival marked the unraveling of a nation in what the United Nations described at the time as the world's worst war. The war threw up one of the greatest of all war-time ironies. Communist Cuba defended US oil facilities, the revenue from which allowed Angola purchase Soviet weapons to fight a US-backed militia. Once the Cold War ended in 1990, Russia, the United States, Cuba and South Africa lost interest in Angola and drifted aw