Hey Dan,

Overall, your version is well constructed and is a massive improvement over the original. At its core it states: "Ravaged by war, Angola, which is a success, has an economy and has elections."

Still, I think your sentence has some weaknesses:

1) the modifying clause "which is now..." has an opening comma but it should also have a closing comma: Angola, which is a success, has an economy.... In fact, you could remove "which is" to make the sentence shorter without losing any substance.

2) I'm not as sure that this would be a fatal error, but it seems awkward to write that "Angola has elections that will be held". For instance, rather than writing "The US will have elections that will be held in 2014", you would probably write "The US will hold elections in 2014"

3) Using "the civil war" instead of "a civil war" would be right if there was only one civil war, if the civil war in question had already been introduced earlier, or if that was the name of the war (ie the Civil War). Otherwise, "a civil war" is more likely to be correct. For instance, rather than "the citizens of Yugoslavia fought the bitter civil war in the 1990s", you would write "the citizens...fought a bitter civil war in the 1990s".


My own version:
Though it was ravaged by a civil war for many years after it gained its independence from Portugal, Angola is now one of Africa's success stories; the country's economy grew by 20% last year and its parliamentary elections will be held later this week.