The Last Train to Zona Verde (35 page)

In my what-am-I-doing-here? mood, Akisha was a timely lesson. She made a point of staying positive, didn’t grumble, never gossiped, and she expected the best from her students. She was also a passionate photographer, and though her talk was always upbeat, her photographs were a record of all she had seen. She did not judge or talk idly, but her photographs showed that she noticed everything — the disparities in wealth, the vandalized buildings, the contradictions, the humor, the goodwill, the scheming, and the violence in Angola as well as the joy.

When I said that I needed to adapt my cell phone to Angola and buy minutes, Akisha said, “We’ll go to the mall — we actually do have a mall in Lubango!”

The Millennium, as the mall was called, had been plunked down next to a desolate parking lot in Plaça João Paulo II (named for the pope), a large yellow-painted structure with a high vaulted ceiling that mimicked a night sky picked out in dimly lit stars, the whole interior kept in deliberate semidarkness. In dazzling sunlit Angola such darkness was a novelty. The shadowy stores were built to resemble old Portuguese shops and cafés, with bow windows, antique lamps, and Euro-kitsch fittings, and at the mall’s center was a rudimentary fountain and a pool — no water. A single-screen theater occupied one corner, and the shops sold phones, pizza, shoes, clothes. In another zone of the ridiculous place, a nail salon, three banks, and two boutiques selling hair extensions and wigs, which were desired
by many women but (as my friend Kalunga Lima was to tell me later) mocked by Angolan men, who euphemistically laughed them off as
tetos falsos —
fake roofs.

“Let me show you how expensive these things are,” Akisha said. She took me to a men’s clothing shop. A simple polo shirt that would have cost $20 in the States was priced in Lubango at $120. Men’s suits had price tags in the many hundreds of dollars, and pointy-toed shoes were $500 or more. All the merchandise was imported from China.

Business was good, the stylishly dressed (tight black jeans, stiletto heels, frilly blouse, false roof) clerk claimed when I asked. But the store was empty, there were no more than thirty people in the mall itself, and no one was buying a ticket to the movie. The mall had not yet become a hangout, and the only shop that was busy was the one selling cell phones.

For a few dollars, the woman in the cell phone shop got my cheap phone working. The Internet was unreliable in Angola, it was not much use in Namibia either, nor had it been available where I found myself in the Okavango. Perhaps Africa was going to bypass the email and Internet generation, and communication would be, as in Japan and some other countries, based on smart phone technology — texting, social networking, and not much else.

As we walked around the Lubango Millennium — which was an eyesore, already falling apart — Akisha told me a bit about herself. She was the eldest of five children. Her father, a former professional football player, was a successful coach in North Carolina, and both of her brothers were standout college players — one of them a former NFL running back. Akisha was an athletic presence too, radiating health and strength along with her good sense and optimism. Most of all she was independent. She had liberated herself by joining the Peace Corps a year after graduation from college, and as a teacher in Mozambique had become fluent in Portuguese.

Akisha’s example reminded me of how much I admired people who worked humbly in Africa. Like the best of them, Akisha saw herself as more a student than a teacher, looking to be enriched by the experience. And though she never alluded to it, she could not have found it easy to be the only American in Lubango, a young single woman living on her own in this remote and, from what I could see, inhospitable place.

But she had lived and worked for two years in Inhambane, a sleepy seaside town — long ago an important port — in southern Mozambique, so she had come to Lubango with an understanding of isolation and a knowledge of the damaging absurdities of Portuguese colonialism.

Probably more nonsense has been talked about, and more myths have been created around, Portugal’s imperial adventures than any other nation’s. The most ludicrous was “Lusotropicalism,” a cock-amamie theory and mystique of racial harmony proposed in the 1930s, which posited that because of their unique temperament and culture the Portuguese were the Europeans best suited to adapting to other lands and dealing with equatorial natives — finding (so it was argued) common ground in sympathy and like-mindedness. “We understand the natives better than you do” was the Portuguese boast. This implies not only that Portuguese imperialism had been a triumph, but also that Angolans had colluded in their own enslavement and willingly offered up their diamonds and gold.

But the reality is that Angola’s history has been a colonial tragedy, and sometimes a farce, rife with racism, resistance, rebellion, and death. And the briefest glimpse of any Portuguese overseas territory is proof of the mess they made of their colonies. A dramatic fact, pointed out by a historian of Angola, Douglas Wheeler, is that in the four hundred years from 1579 until 1974 there had never been a five-year period in the colony without at least one punitive Portuguese military campaign. The glory of the Portuguese was
their great navigators and discoverers, but they were incompetent administrators, ruthless bosses, and greedy exploiters. The crooked aristocrats and desperate peasants who planted themselves far from home, and finally fled, left nothing behind but derelict slave quarters, empty vinho verde bottles, and gloomy churches.

In Malawi in the 1960s, I met middle-aged Portuguese men across the border, in Vila Cabral, in Mozambique (then a sleepy, underfunded colony popularly known as “Portuguese East”), who had emigrated from poverty-stricken villages in rural Portugal to become carpenters, stonemasons, and barbers in the African bush. Their wives were idle and cranky, screaming at the first servants they’d ever had in their lives. Few of the
colonos
were able to speak the local language, and it was no surprise when revolutionary movements began to harry them, to hasten their departure. Because of the character of the colonizers, this process was inevitable, as Douglas Wheeler also described, noting that the settler from “an archaic rural society, semi-feudal in some provinces, often tries to cheat the African because he is weaker, and because he himself is used to being humiliated in his poverty back home and has come here to get rich.” The settlers got along well enough with the Africans in villages sustained by their traditional ways. The somewhat Westernized Africans were another story: the new settlers resented the ones who could read, who had ambitions and political ideas. Those Africans were despised and belittled as
calcinhas
— wearers of trousers.

When I mentioned that the bumbling and often cruel nature of the colonial Portuguese became clearer only after one had actually traveled through a former Portuguese colony, Akisha said, “I have a great story.”

While working in Inhambane, Mozambique, she had become acquainted with a Portuguese husband and wife who, like the ones I had met as a Peace Corps volunteer long ago in Vila Cabral (Niassa province), had immigrated to Mozambique in the 1960s. This was
a period when the Portuguese government, under the tenacious, long-ruling dictator Antonio Salazar, created incentives for its poorest citizens to seek their fortunes in the colonies. They were given free passage on ships, lessons in husbandry, and seed money to begin new lives. And of course one of the great incentives was the promise of cheap workers, under the forced labor regime then in place that browbeat village Africans into plowing the fields and serving white farmers.

Akisha, during her first stint in Africa, was impressed that forty years earlier these Europeans had left their modern, native land to start a life in humble, distant Mozambique.

“It must have been a great adjustment to travel all that way from Portugal to Africa,” Akisha had said.

“Yes, in a way” was the response of a Portuguese man.

“So different!” Akisha said. “How did you manage?”

“It was easy, really,” the man said.

“How so?” Akisha asked.

“We came from a poor village in Portugal,” the man said. “In Mozambique we had electricity and running water for the first time in our lives.”

Over the following days I became a part-time teacher at the Instituto Superior de Ciências da Educação in Lubango. My students were Akisha’s English-language group, all of them teachers themselves, improving their skills, many of them intending to return to their own schools, or to use their proficiency in English to study abroad for a further degree — two of them wanted to study law elsewhere.

Nothing is more satisfying in travel than to land in a place and assume an occupation, even a temporary one, as a teacher; to cease being a voyeur and have a purpose and a routine, especially one that involved interacting with intelligent students. I had once been a contented teacher in Africa, so I happily slipped into the role and was comforted with a sense of belonging.

“Many of them want to write stories and poems,” Akisha told me.

Without frankly discouraging them from imaginative writing, I extolled the importance of being an eyewitness, of dealing with verifiable facts and the recent visitable past. I mentioned that foreign journalists seldom came to Angola (but did not mention the reason: the Angolan government hated foreign journalists). A number of the students were older — in their thirties. Some of them had seen war. The town of Lubango had changed hands several times during the civil war, so they had experienced occupation and divided loyalties and the hardships of sieges — shelling, shortages, survival, death, the intrusion of soldiers into their lives. And as a result they had known suspense and uncertainty and fear. This was something to write about.

I suggested structures, I told them stories, and I encouraged them to tell me stories, all of them related to the theme of the eyewitness: something they had seen and experienced, perhaps a vivid childhood memory. And so we talked about early memories, to practice English and to rehearse the stories.

“My mother wanted me to go to school,” Miguel said. “She talked about it all the time, and after a while I was eager to go to school. I had no idea what was in store for me.” He described his apprehension — his mother’s urging, his father’s passivity, his utter ignorance of what school entailed. And then came the day for school, which was a long walk from his village in a remote part of Huíla province. “I sat there in the classroom,” he said, the memory of it making him falter a bit, “and I realized I was trapped. I couldn’t go home. I was afraid. I was captive there.”

“I was with my friends some distance outside my village, walking along a path,” Gomes said, standing and gesturing with his expressive hands. “We were about ten or eleven. We saw a woman approaching us. She rushed to us and said, ‘A house is burning in the village. You must do something!’ ”

The small boys asked what they should do. “First, take off your
shoes,” she said. “And please accept this money.” She gave them each a few kwanzas. They were dazzled to have the money, even though it was a pittance. “Now go to the village and help put out the fire.” Taking her for a witch with special powers, they hurried to the village, but found there was no fire. When they returned to look for the woman, they discovered she’d made off with their shoes.

“My earliest memory goes back a long way,” a woman, Dinorah, said in a solemn voice. “I was two years old and lying in my mother’s arms. She held me tight, and I knew she was upset about something, but I didn’t know what. She whispered to me, ‘Kiss your father.’ But I didn’t know where he was. She led me to him and I saw his face. I thought he was sleeping. I kissed him.” She paused for dramatic effect. “He was dead, lying in a coffin.”

In another class I described the use of dialogue. One of the students, Delcio Tweuhanda, had an idea for a novel. Jumas Chipondo had written a series of essays about his life; he was a Lunda-Chokwe, one of Angola’s most artistic people, and had lived as a refugee in Zambia and Botswana for a decade during the war years. Several others wanted to form a group and write a book together, perhaps an oral history. They asked questions and spoke about their plans, and whenever I was with them I was hopeful, for them and for myself.

I made a point of asking them where in the world they wanted to go. Not Portugal, they said. Not Cuba. Not any of their bordering countries, the easiest ones to get to — not Namibia, not the Republic of the Congo, not Zambia. South Africa, perhaps. And, with unanimity, America.

Now the Grand Hotel no longer seemed seedy or abandoned or a place of funereal gloom, as it had when I first moved in; it was my refuge, a peaceful place. Akisha had stayed there for months on her arrival. “It’s like that hotel in
The Shining!”
I saw her point: a large empty hotel with sinister echoes and ambiguous odors. But I could write there, and so it suited me.

Every morning at breakfast, I sat before a large painting that
covered one wall of the Grand’s dining room like a mural. At first glance, it was a European landscape, rich in picturesque details, showing a village of stucco houses with russet tiled roofs, a white steepled church at the center, and a cluster of dignified municipal offices — all these buildings looking solid and indestructible. A ridge of magnificent mountains rose in the distance, and a sky of fluffy clouds, and in the foreground two peaceful cows grazed in a lush meadow.

The only human I saw in the picture was a Portuguese man in a frock coat strolling on a path near the cows. The whole painting, with its soft contours, spoke of peace, serenity, abundance, fertility, permanence, even holiness — the shafts of sunlight like a blessing from above.

The Algarve? No, it was of course a painting of Lubango in its previous incarnation as the colonial town of Sá da Bandeira. Though in style and substance it was a nineteenth-century panorama of a European pastoral, it had been painted (very small date and name in the right corner) by Rolla Tze (perhaps Chinese from Macau?) in 1945, the year of the Grand Hotel’s opening. Nothing of it smacked of Africa — no Africans, no thatched huts, no exotic animals or flowers. At least none was apparent. But standing very close to it one morning — it loomed over me — I found a small black man sitting in tall grass in the deep left-hand corner.