THE FUSE

There is a particular irony in the fact that one of Angola's most ambitious industrialists grew up not in Luanda, the city of oil money and political networks, but in Huambo, a highland province in the country's center that spent most of his childhood under siege. The civil war that ravaged Angola from 1975 to 2002 hit Huambo with particular brutality. UNITA forces and the MPLA traded the city back and forth across two decades of fighting, leaving infrastructure destroyed and a population that learned to build with whatever was available because waiting for outside help was not a reliable strategy. Agostinho Kapaia grew up watching adults reconstruct what conflict kept destroying. When the war finally ended in 2002 and Angola began its post-war reconstruction, he was ready. He had been watching this problem his entire life.