The Angola Diaries: Firing Blanks and Dodging Mines Up Africa's Arse

In January 2008 Neill Manley, who didn't want a boring job and was tired of sitting around being useless, answered an ad in the paper and got his lucky break. Before he knew it, the 24-year-old Durbanite was on a plane to Angola and found himself with three misfit housemates, a 35-year-old Russian map, a mind-bending bore of a job and a really big dick. Neill's job was to survey the roads of this wreck of a country in an old Land Cruiser with Mr Angola himself for company.
In between dodging landmines, getting lost and thrown into jail, dealing with eccentric Greeks, fighting off elections and bribing anyone with a uniform or a gun, Neill kept a diary and, barely, his sanity.
Lessons out here tend to come backward arse or not at all because it's hard to focus your eyes. Two civil wars, oil for Africa and greed that's hard and superficial like the diamonds can leave you shell-shocked all right.
Neill questions every vacant gaze candidly and searches for solace in the horizon, looking for meaning in a place that's hard on the synapses.