Angola: a giant awakes.

For the first time in decades, the telephone system works in Angola, rubbish gets collected and, thanks to a significant injection of foreign money, the country's long-suffering transport network--a cratered wreck just four years ago--is getting back to normal. Peaceful, rejuvenated and halfway along the path to political and economic atonement, the reality on the ground suggests that a corner has, at last, been turned. Brendan Sainsbury reports.

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Huambo had never known a night like it. When the Angolan striker, Flavio Amado, leapt up to head in his country's first and only goal in the 2006 football World Cup finals in Germany, a whole nation of glory-starved sports fanatics took to the streets in feisty celebration. It was as if 40 years of war, heartache and perennial bad times had been temporarily erased from the public consciousness. Suddenly, the country had hope again. Suddenly the future looked bright. For the first time in a generation, it was as if 13 million shell-shocked and war-embattled football fiends had been united patriotically behind a single unanimous cause.

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Founded by the Portuguese in 1912 and known formerly as Nova Lisboa (New Lisbon), Huambo was once renowned for its attractive parks and elegant colonial buildings. Indeed, in 1928, it was briefly touted by the Angolan high commissioner, Antonio Vicente Ferreira, as the country's capital-in-waiting. But then came the war and, in 1993, a gruesome 55-day siege reduced the city to little more than a pile of pock-marked rubble.

Cut off from the rest of the country and locked in a desperate battle for survival, Huambo descended into anarchy with MPLA government troops facing off on one side and Jonas Savimbi's rebel UNITA movement taking aim on the other.

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For the city's beleaguered inhabitants, the consequences were catastrophic. With food provisions in short supply and a deluge of refugees pouring in from the surrounding countryside, the crisis reached its apex in January 1993 when government troops and foreign aid agencies made a hasty withdrawal, leaving Huambo in the hands of the UNITA militia.

Wracked by regular shelling and surrounded by a deathly ring of landmines, the fighting continued unabated throughout the late 1990s as the MPLA wrested control from UNITA and UNITA tried desperately to win the city back. And then finally, a reprieve.

Football was not the only tipping point in Angola's unlikely 21st century rebirth. Just as important as the country's inspirational World Cup performance was the ignominious death of the rebel leader Jonas Savimbi in a well-planned government operation in February 2002. With the great spoiler removed from the political stage after more than 30 years of behind-the-scenes meddling, the rusty wheels of an ambitious and oft-stalled peace process were finally allowed to creak into action.

"Savimbi used to live here," growls an old man, as I stand contemplating the charred skeleton of the notorious UNITA leader's one-time Huambo residence, now an improbable refugee camp. Lines of washing hang from the ceiling, kids play boisterously amid the rubble, and a bevy of local women in floral wraps gossip in the street outside.

It is the day after Angola's memorable World Cup game against Iran and I am holed up in jaded Huambo waiting patiently for Reuben, an expatriate Korean, who has generously promised to escort me around the ruined city on the back of his motorbike.

As far as sightseeing tours go, I could not have chosen a worse location. Viewed through the prism of an acrimonious two-decade long civil war, the 21st century incarnation of Huambo is a shocking mixture of the grisly and the grotesque. With over 50,000 people killed or missing in the fighting and all but a handful of the city's once illustrious buildings speckled with bullet holes, historical monuments are few and far between.

Rolling up late on his asthmatic motorbike, Reuben offers his apologies and warns me that our excursion will be brief. Huambo's lack of any discernible infrastructure means that options for extra-curricular activities are depressingly thin on the ground.

In the circumstances, it is hard not to admire Reuben's devil-may-care confidence, even if the odds are firmly stacked against him. To the untrained eye, Huambo's business prospects look about as tenable as the Angolan football team winning the World Cup. But hope springs eternal. Spend more than 48 hours in this compact and surprisingly industrious little city and you slowly start to sense a mood of guarded optimism, a whiff of hope amid all the surrounding decrepitude.

So are things really getting better? Breaking free of Reuben after dinner, I elect to trudge the streets of the withering cidade alta (upper city) on my own, in the hope of discovering some of Huambo's less obvious sights, the hidden soul that makes this indomitable city tick.

"Forca Palancas," yells a skinny youth skidding past on a cacophonous motorbike, hailing the glories of Angola's much-lauded national football team--nicknamed the Palancas Negras (Black Antelopes)--whose heroic World Cup performance has done more to unite this country than almost half a dozen failed peace treaties.

Signed on 4 April 2002, Angola's long-awaited military ceasefire marked an important new chapter in the country's violent and bloody history. Negotiated in the wake of Savimbi's ignoble demise, and bringing to an end a war that had lasted for more than a generation, the accord called for the demobilisation of UNITA's 50,000-strong rebel army and its integration into Angola's regular army and police force.

For skeptics, the proposals were a tall order. Angola had known countless scuppered peace deals in the years following independence but, riddled with distrust and beset by internal bickering, none of the truces had ever held. So what was the difference this time around?

"UNITA are finished for good," explains an amiable middle-aged man emphatically in the city's main internet cafe a few hours later. "They simply don't have the resources anymore, much less the leadership. Besides, outside of political circles, a continuation of the war is in nobody's interests."

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It is a bold and largely truthful assertion. Weary of ethnic infighting and happy to dispose of long-standing regional antagonisms, Angola today is a country in transition. In the capital, Luanda, new shops have opened, glass-panelled tower blocks crane skywards, and the never-ending army of street children that used to traipse around after visitors like gulls behind a fishing trawler, is notably less evident.

And they are not the only surprises. With UNITA's once illicit diamond fields now back under government control and Angola's lucrative oil industry churning out over one million barrels of crude a day, the economy is positively buoyant.

But what is the knock-on effect among the Angolan people? After 40 years of war, chaos and spectacularly bad governance, how does the average person-on-the-street view the country's apparent transformation from international "basket case" into the shape of things to come?

Survivalists by nature, most Angolans are cautious of speculating too wildly about the future. It is an understandable defence mechanism, given their history. While skyscrapers reach new heights in Luanda and oil-obsessed government ministries continue to forge investment deals with China and India, poverty in the countryside remains rampant. Spend more than a week in any Angolan city and the huge financial chasm between rich and poor is shockingly evident.

Angolas new war is not of the conventional military variety; rather it is a subtle and far more complicated battle against corruption, extortion and officials who have often been more concerned with squirreling money away into Swiss bank accounts than forking out on health and education for its long-suffering and impoverished people.

For regular Africa-watchers, the discrepancies have not gone unnoticed. In 2005, the anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International damningly rated Angola as one of the 10 most corrupt countries in the world. The charge was nothing new.

Following the disappearance of over US$4bn of national oil revenue in the early 2000s, IMF officials have long been suspicious of huge-scale financial irregularities on the part of the Angolan government. In 2003, the IMF even sent out a team of investigators to look into it.

Flying with Diexim Expresso--one of a handful of private Angolan airlines--from Huambo to the city of Benguela a few days later, I ponder philosophically over the much-anticipated achievements of a country on the brink of a new era.

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The visit is poignant for another reason. Four years ago, I worked in Benguela as a teacher at the tail end of Angola's civil war. It was a hopeful yet volatile period. Less than a week before the 9/11 atrocity in September 2001 in the USA, the school in which I was stationed was attacked by UNITA rebels.

Two females from our new intake of young students were kidnapped and marched off into the bush. Sudden and brazen in its savagery, the incursion took both staff and students by surprise and the shock inside the local community resonated everywhere. And then--quite unexpectedly--everything changed.

The Benguela I returned to in June 2006 was a markedly different place to the battered city of yore. Here amid the scruffy apartment blocks and wasp-like motorcycles of the downtown shopping district, local business honchos stroll around with mobile phones pressed to their ears while animated street salesmen ply red and black World Cup memorabilia to an eager audience of young, fashion conscious football addicts.

But football is not the only beneficiary of Angola's remarkable economic upturn. For the first time in decades, the telephone system works, rubbish gets collected and, thanks to a significant injection of foreign money, the country's long-suffering transport network--a cratered wreck just four years ago--is getting back to something like normal.

Ironically, many of the long-term solutions to Angola's war-battered economy lie portentously to the east--the Far East, to be more precise.

Camped 20km outside Benguela's splayed suburbs on the road to Catumbela in a mini-city of tents and trailers, 2,000 Chinese workers are busy coordinating the rebuilding of Angola's 690km Benguela-Luanda highway. Vast in its scope and far-reaching in its long-term goals, this pioneering and highly technical construction project is living testament to the opportunistic business ambitions of a looming Asian superpower. China's relations with Angola go back decades, but it is only in the last few years that a more formalised way of doing business between the two countries has reaped mutually beneficial results.

Addicted to development and driven by an almost unquenchable thirst for African energy, China has bought up vast amounts of Angolan oil stocks since the late 1990s in return for over $2bn in credit. Among the so-called economic "gifts" Angola has received from China is a pledge of $400m for its nascent telecoms industry, a $100m investment in military communications, and a $300m plan to rehabilitate the 850km Benguela railway.

But it is not all boardroom back-slapping and golden handshakes. Many economic critics claim Chinese-Angolan construction deals are lacking in foresight and sustainability, with numerous mega-projects--such as the building of dams, highways and shopping centres--pressing ahead without regard for their long-term maintenance.

Other observers take a more conspiratorial viewpoint. Angola's recent rapprochement with its Chinese allies is merely a vote-winning measure in anticipation of President Dos Santos' long-awaited elections--claim the hard-core cynics--or, even worse, a smokescreen to allow Angolan government officials to dodge any further awkward questions from the IMF.

Reserving a seat on the early morning bus to Luanda 24 hours later, I hunker down in the back, amid chicken-wielding village farmers and hymn-singing evangelicals, for nine hours of badly-paved purgatory.

Four years ago, this classic north-south highway was deemed permanently impassable due to a combination of landmines, regular guerrilla incursions and shocking disrepair. Now it forms part of a sweeping coastal vista replete with prickly cacti and gnarly baobab trees that extends for hundreds of kilometres in either direction with nary a town or village in sight.

Make no mistake; Angola is a geographical masterpiece. Here in the untamed heart of sub-Saharan Africa, expansive sandy beaches lie juxtaposed with virgin wildlife parks, cascading waterfalls and rich snippets of colonial history--to say nothing of the country's well-documented oil and diamond deposits.

Terrorised by war and stifled economically by a caustic blend of state pilfering and woefully transparent government, the country has struggled to show off its positive features to a world worn down by negative and often inaccurate news stories. But the on-the-ground reality suggests that a corner has, at last, been turned. The country is peaceful, rejuvenated and halfway along the path to political and economic atonement. Ignore it at your peril.