Michael Magers

Nobody embodies that quite as much as the young men"many still in their teens"who drive Luanda's motorcycle taxis. It's a dangerous job. Angola's traffic is notoriously treacherous: on my trip to the south of the country, roadsides looked like the Autobot graveyard, with burnt wrecks everywhere. In Luanda, the swirl of moto-taxis defies the risks in order to bring cheap transportation to a city reliant on a mostly informal network of gypsy cabs and micro-buses. And they do it because, as one of the drivers told me, there are simply no better jobs to be had. To be in your late teens or early 20s in Angola means you were too young to have fought in the civil war, but likely too old to have benefited directly from many of the investments the country has made in the past 10 years to develop basic infrastructure, healthcare, education, and a services industry "“ the general building blocks of a middle class.