The Last Train to Zona Verde (33 page)

Estermann goes on: “That night she shares the bed of her betrothed, who is now considered to be her husband. The consummation of the marriage is not accompanied by any ritual, nor is it made known, unless very discreetly. In this connection it may be said that the Kwanyama do not concern themselves with the bride’s virginity. It is a thing that is not spoken of, and there is no word in their language to express that quality or the physiological sign of it.”

I found that informative book later, and it clarified some aspects of the ritual, but at the time I was content with what I’d seen. The man in the red soccer jersey, whose name was João, brought me a chair, and in comfort I stayed in the village until early afternoon. I
was happy. I wasn’t hungry anymore. I was just tired enough to be relaxed. Seeing that I was fascinated, the three girls stayed teasingly, almost flirtatiously, in my orbit. It seemed that this was my purpose in coming to Africa, to spend a night and day like this, and I would have been delighted to stay longer. I liked being in a village; they had food here, and shade, and places to rest. I knew enough of the scavenging and precarious life of the road to hate it.

In the heat of the afternoon, around two o’clock, Gilberto called out to me, “
Andiamo!
” His speaking Italian made the villagers laugh.

I said goodbye, thanked the elders, and quietly gave each of the girls some dollars.

Leaving the perimeter of the village, I saw blue-black smoke blowing from the exhaust pipes of the Land Cruiser, Camillo revving the engine.

Nearby, staring at me, the old woman Ana Maria stood with her bucket, and I knew what was in it. Out of politeness, I looked in, and now the mass of flies covered the remaining piece of chicken, which was familiar to me in all its contours, but more dark-specked and bitten by the flies, which were familiar too.

“
Frango,”
Ana Maria said in her hungry juicy way, swallowing a little.

She was gaunt. She looked hungry and tired. I gave her a dollar. I took her tongs and ceremonially removed the last piece of chicken from the bucket. I made a formal business of waving it around and brushing the flies from it. Then I gestured with it to her, as though flourishing a scepter, and put it back in the bucket. She understood: this would be her next meal. She smiled with gratitude and touched her heart with her skinny fingers.

Camillo blew his horn, calling me from this happy little chicken interlude: back to the road.

13
Volunteering in Lubango

T
HAT AMBIGUOUS, SOMEWHAT
startling, stumbled-into occasion of the
Efundula
ceremony of the Kwanyama stayed with me, for its unexpectedness and its vitality — for its ritual aspects too, because so much that I saw in Angola was improvised or imported or crooked. Angola’s rich — the few — were greedy walled-in plutocrats and dandies, while its poor — the many — were exhausted and cynical and living in squalor. But in the Angolan bush I had found remnants of traditional life radiating energy, even if (as in the case of the Kwanyama people) that energy consumed its maidens, turning young girls into coquettes so that they might attain a life of domestic drudgery and a brood of malnourished children.

Back on the road — but not really a road at all — we made a succession of detours, the usual Angolan snakes-and-ladders route along arbitrary tracks, many of them deep troughs of muck, flooded in this mud season of sudden rains. The zigzagging did not take us quickly, but it was all a revelation to me. We coursed through villages mostly. We were seldom near the notional road, part of
which was being graded by enormous loud chewing-and-rolling machines, and the rest abandoned or nonexistent, a waste motion (creation, destruction) that was brought to perverse perfection in many areas of Angolan life. It was as if this mechanism imitated Portuguese colonial futility, for surely no colonial power was ever so politically arrogant and culturally insufficient — Portugal’s obsolescence, bumbling, and antique mind-set producing a rarefied and conceited cruelty that was Angola’s inheritance.

And it was strange in this vehicle to be traveling so intimately with village people, passing at times in a ten-foot space between a mud hut and a clothesline, and just missing the big yellow woven mats on which fat red peppers were drying in the sun, arrayed like firecrackers, a surprised face in the hut window or a scowling one from a man with his pants at his ankles, squatting at the trench edge of his open-sided latrine.

A different Camillo emerged on this stretch of the trip, a kindlier one. At a village remote from the road he slowed down, recognizing a familiar figure ahead, and it had to have been someone he knew: a crippled man, one leg missing, possibly a land mine victim, who swayed under a tree. Rolling to a stop, Camillo gave him some crushed kwanza notes and a handful of mangled bread slices — the first indication I’d had that he had squirreled away food in the car. It happened again some miles later, another mutilated man, this one wearing a red smock, Camillo pausing in the drive to hand over bread crusts.

Deeper in the bush at a cluster of huts, a boy approached with a bird, a green parrot he wanted to sell. Camillo took it and examined it closely, wiggled one of the parrot’s legs, demonstrating that it was broken (probably in the boy’s snare), and gave it back as unacceptable. Soon Camillo reverted to his old crapulous self, becoming a loud, red-eyed drunk.

On the slabs of torn-up mud and the deep, water-filled potholes and wallows of these bush tracks, we traveled slowly, to my relief.
And a new song was playing in the car, this one sweeter than “Take Over Control.” The words were “Marry me,” sung in an Angolan accent:
Meddy me, meddy me, I love you
.. .

And so we went bouncing and swerving, cross-country, through the villages of Huíla province, music blaring. At intervals of twenty miles or so Camillo stopped, I thought so that we could find food — some villagers ran toward us with bananas — but it was for him to buy more beer. Camillo drank steadily, and fifty miles into the trip he was drunk, drooling, shouting to the music.

At several stops the villagers appeared with small bags of fried potatoes, slick with grease in the tight dirty plastic. I said no, but was hungry, and like the pieces of chicken that had turned my stomach the day before, the slimy potatoes began to look appetizing. So I gave in and ate, and disgusted myself, and surrendered to the noise, the bad driving, and the heat.

New passengers had gotten on, the vehicle was overloaded, and in the back a crying baby and a screaming woman — the baby’s mother, I assumed — were quarreling with two shouting boys. You naturally wonder at such a time whether this trip was necessary, and answering my own question, I concluded, Yes. I had vowed not to take a plane, vowed to travel overland, and although it was uncomfortable in this beat-up Land Rover, and the fighting among the passengers was annoying (and made worse by Camillo’s drunken swerving), I was passing through the hinterland of Angola, which I had always longed to see because so little had been written about it — nothing, really, except out-of-date war stories.

Beyond the town of Cahama, where the road improved, we were at a higher altitude — cooler, greener, taller trees, hills in the distance that were lumpy and flat-topped, some like anvils, others like plump loaves of bread, some with green skirts. Bellied-out spinnakers of clouds blew along, high in the blue sky. The great surprise to me were the few signs of colonial buildings — a scattering of ruined
shops, an occasional abandoned farmhouse, the thick walls and tile roofs of the sort of rustic peasant construction you might see in the cottagey countryside of northern Portugal. In a way, that was the whole story of the Angolan hinterland: Portugal had exported its brutalized criminals and illiterate peasants and made them into
colonos
, first to enslave and deport Africans and then to lord it over the Africans who remained. The walls of the small farmhouses were broken, the roofs fallen in, and the tiles smashed. Yet there were only a handful of such buildings in fifty or seventy-five miles of travel — this in a country that had been a colony for more than four hundred years.

Some of the houses were smashed to pieces because their occupants had bolted, or had been driven away, as independence approached in the 1970s. But also, like the whole of southern Angola, this had been a war zone for decades. Here, between Cahama and Xangongo, the South African army, in a major offensive in 1983 (Operation Askari), had battled Namibian SWAPO guerrillas who were massing, intending to push south across the border to liberate their own country, South-West Africa. And many of these houses had been booby-trapped, and the fields strewn with land mines. It is estimated that twenty million mines were planted in Angola by all sides during the long conflict.

But white settlement in Angola had never been great, and in the bush, white
colonos
had always been thin on the ground. Almost from the beginning, its first landfall by the great Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão, in 1482, Angola was viewed as nasty, unhealthy, and violent, filled with poisonous air and savage people — “the white man’s grave” of the cliché. What the Portuguese wanted from Angola was what nearly all colonialists wished for: gold and slave labor. The weirdness of Portuguese settlement is well described by Gerald Bender in
Angola Under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality
(1978). Angola began as a penal colony. From the late
fifteenth century to the 1920s, Angola was a dumping ground for Portuguese criminals, convicts known as
degredados
— exiles. These men were Angola’s civilizers and colonists.

It is impossible to understand Angola without knowing something of the Portuguese character. Like Ireland, Portugal was for centuries an exporter of its peasants, a maker of exiles — fugitives from the mother country and so oppressive in its colonies that it turned Africans into exiles too. Portugal has been described by the English traveler and literary critic V. S. Pritchett as “practical, stoical, shifty, its pride in its great past, its pride in pride itself raging inside like an unquenchable sadness.” To that list of qualities I would add archaic and obsolete. As for Portugal being practical, it should also be said that Angola was the only African country that began its colonial existence as a penal settlement, Angola being Portugal’s own version of Siberia, a jail.

Bullying and predatory criminals are natural despots, and many of the exiled Portuguese convicts became important slave traders. They were well suited to the diabolical task, since they had been schooled in Portugal (and its other colonies) as thieves, con men, and murderers, efficient as persecutors and intimidators. The convicts were not a mere ragtag oppressed element who had been (like the exiles in early Australia) persecuted in their poverty and convicted of petty crimes. They were ruthless villains, all male (a third of the exiles to Australia were female), who formed the core group of Angola’s colonists, promoted, after the long voyage, from the criminal class to the ruling class. The crooks had to be the colonizers of Angola because so few other Portuguese wanted to live there. They served as slave traders until Portugal outlawed slavery in 1878, and then they transitioned as exploiters by engaging in the forced labor system (bamboozling Africans, burdening them with indebtedness), which was in most cases more abusive than slavery.

Since slaves could not be exported abroad, where slavery was illegal, other forms of slavery or imposed servitude remained in place
within the colony. Forced labor in Angola continued until 1961 (a year of uprising in Angola for that very reason), and it was then that devastating reports were published about the punitive labor conditions. “ ‘I need to be given Blacks’ is a phrase which I frequently heard from
colonos,”
Marcelo Caetano (later to be Portugal’s prime minister) wrote in 1946. “As if the Blacks were something to be given!” None of this is ancient history. In the early 1960s, around the time I became a teacher in soon-to-be-independent Nyasaland, a colonial high inspector in Angola, Henrique Galvão, wrote with passionate contempt, “Only the dead [in Angola] are really exempt from forced labor.”

Before 1900 virtually all Portuguese settlers remained in the coastal towns, decrying the interior as dangerous for its wild animals and hostile Africans. As late as 1950 there were fewer than three thousand Portuguese farmers in the entire country, some of them upcountry in smallholdings. But they were unproductive and demoralized, dependent on Portuguese government assistance and African forced labor.

Although over many years Portugal tried numerous rural settlement plans to encourage
colonos
to take up farming, nearly all the attempts ended in failure, and only the (foreign-operated) diamond mines, and later (foreign-operated) oil production, allowed Angola to be viable. The white population, predominantly male and coastal, aspired to petty trade, shop owning, and bar-keeping. The Portuguese had tried to create a capital, Nova Lisboa (now Huambo), in the center of the country, but that too had not amounted to much. The proof that the Angolan interior was largely unsettled by
colonos
was obvious here on the main road in Huíla province — empty, undeveloped, the few colonial houses (none dating from earlier than 1950) tumbled to the ground or bombed out.