The Last Train to Zona Verde (37 page)

Broken signs, slumping power cables, burst-open boxes of garbage, a tidemark of muddy litter, a muttonish smell in the air as of goat breath and decayed meat. Added to that were the overburdened women with swollen cloth bundles bound in string and two or three small well-behaved children, the usual Angolan rapper crowd of oafish boys with baseball caps and earphones, and pretty girls standing daintily in the morning-moistened dust. The sight of these girls made me think that a whole study could be made of hairstyles in Angola — not just the extravagant hair extensions and fluffy wigs, but hair strung with beads or woven into cornrows or twisted into snaky locks, and some women’s heads were beautifully shaved to a shining baldness like polished mahogany finials on Victorian staircases.

The Benguela bus arrived as the sun rose over the low tin rooftops, the noise and the heat rising at the same time. So the urgency
to board was combined with the sweat of pushing, and I was part of that same pushing — odd and obnoxious for me, elbows out, to be part of the scrimmage, but necessary or I wouldn’t get a seat.

And when we set off I saw that the habitable part of Lubango, the orbit of my teaching duties, was really very small, that the city was a set of small Portuguese plazas surrounded by shanty settlements, just like every other town of any size in Angola. And if you didn’t know any better, you’d never think it was a country floating on a sea of oil. You’d think, as some sentimental people do: Poor little beat-up place — we should do something to help. We should send money, maybe lots of money; Angola (with annual revenues in the billions) seems to need money.

Outside of town we passed the now familiar roadside rusted and burned-out tanks and military trucks near the fallen-down Olde Worlde Portuguese farmhouses, their tile roofs shattered. This was at a place called Viamba, as we approached the edge of the Serra de Quilengues escarpment. Whose tanks, whose trucks, whose houses? Impossible to tell. Time moves on, no one cares, the scrap yard grows; no one mourns the dead in these rural tableaus of abandonment.

An hour into the trip, at Cacula, we stopped at a small market where hawkers — pleading women and dusty, spaniel-eyed children mostly — offered food on trays, fat tomatoes, stacks of small bananas, discs of sliced pineapple, loaves of bread, piles of bread rolls, and plastic bags with squished and greasy potato fries. Several women balanced bunches of onions on their heads, and one with a basin of chicken pieces spotted with flies approached me and asked, “
Qual?”

Again the existential question: Which of these old, dark, flyblown, and inedible chicken legs do you desire,
senhor?

After that, everyone was eating on the bus and arguing in a jeering and companionable way. We traveled under jacaranda trees
that were shedding their violet blossoms, the blooms bursting and crackling under our wheels, and we slowed for the cows that crowded the road.

At greater intervals a general cry was raised from the back of the bus, and then the driver shouted what sounded like an order and bumped to a stop. Fifteen or so people got out to piss. They did not go far. All pissed in full view of the bus and its seated passengers. There was no indecency in this, no urgency either. Perhaps their staying close to the roadside was not laziness but a result of the land mines that, everyone knew, had been laid — and never deactivated —just off Angolan roads, especially here in the southern provinces. The men stood, feet apart, and hosed the tall grass. The women lowered their tracksuit bottoms, squatted, and spattered; some used a shawl, shrouding themselves a few feet from the bus and dripping like leaky tents. As on the trip with Camillo, it was more like a pissing contest than a call of nature, and it was accompanied by continual chatter — the pissers cheerfully calling out to one another, holding conversations as they casually whizzed, laughing and teasing.

The paved road was too good to last. It gave way to gravel and sent us sideways. And then, two hours into the journey, we left the gravel road for a detour through woods and bush and clusters of hot, exposed mud huts of poor villages. In some places the road was under construction, in others it had washed out in the recent rains. The delay didn’t matter much. We had left the escarpment and were tipped downhill into the heat. Bumping over bony tree roots, near a ramshackle hut on one of these bush tracks, a small, misshapen, paralytic boy struggled forward, hanging on to his stick, stabbing it into the dust and hobbling. The bus driver slowed down — as Camillo had done a week before. He handed over a package of bread, thrusting it through the window, and the skinny boy touched his heart in thanks.

Whatever inconvenience it was to be riding this way, slowly and uncomfortably, at least I was privileged to witness this impulsive act of human kindness toward a crippled and abandoned soul, propped up on a stick in the middle of the bush.

Traveling overland, as I had from the border, I saw that Portuguese Angola had been a colony not of towns but of outposts, most of them failures. And independent Angola was not much better — still a country of isolated outposts, but bigger ones, and just as hungry. Around noon, five hours into the trip and not even halfway to the coast, we came to Quilengues, which was a haunted little town, frozen in its period, perhaps the assisted-immigrant 1950s. Quilengues had a church, colonial houses, and shops beside the road. It seemed a whole intact place, but two of the student teachers I’d known in Lubango had taught in a school here, and told me they often were not paid for months — eleven months in one year — and when finally some money did come in, it was apportioned in small installments. So the teachers were held hostage: they could either stay and wait or leave and forfeit everything they were owed. A pretty place, Quilengues, but the inner story was of cheated teachers, underfunded schools, and severe water shortages. Again, this in a country immensely rich in oil revenue.

In most African travel along bush tracks of this sort you’d expect to see animals. As I had noticed earlier, not in Angola. Not a gazelle, not a monkey. It was as though, from the conspicuous absence of game, its soul had been stolen. There was plenty of room for animals to range, enough habitat and fodder, and many waterholes. On the way to the coast we rode through distinct landscapes and climates, descending from the cool highlands to great sloping bush to grassy plains. But they were landscapes without any animals except a cow or a goat, only the occasional village of thatch and mud.

The day growing hotter, we entered a belt of bush areas that had seen violent fighting, based on the evidence of half-buried, rusted,
and blown-up tanks. Many represented old battles, but one at Chongoroi, which we rolled through, had taken place only a dozen years before. In March 1998, a hundred armed men from Jonas Savimbi’s
UNITA
forces descended on Chongoroi, burning the vehicles of UN monitors and the vans of the World Food Program, killed two people and injured three, before making their escape. Instead of a memorial marking the dead and wounded, there were overturned trucks with shell holes in their sides.

Nearer the coast, the villages were larger, and one town, Catengue, a former Portuguese settlement, had been rebuilt — the first rural town I’d seen that looked habitable, with old, smooth-sided buildings and mended roofs. One reason for this might have been that it had become a railway town again, the train from Benguela passing through twice a week, but not today.

More food stops, piss stops, fuel stops, roadside markets with chickens, oranges, bananas, and greasy fries, with more angry yelling from the back of the bus, the driver responding by yelling back and laughing. The man next to me shrugged at the shouts, and explained, “
Muito lento,”
which, like a tempo indication on a musical score, was easy enough to understand. The bus was going too slowly for the impatient passengers.

At one of the food stops, as I searched for a cup of coffee, a man from the bus asked me in English, “
Senhor
, can I help you?” I was the only
branco
on the bus, and perhaps also the oldest. When I told him I was looking to buy coffee, he said, giggling a little, “No coffee here.”

“But Angola grows coffee.”

“Yes, but,” and he laughed again, shrugging, “this is …” His gesture meant: We are nowhere, we are in the bush, there is nothing here. Then, “What is your country?”

I told him what he wanted to know.

“What you think about Angola?”

I said, “Angola very nice.”

And at that moment I waved away a woman who held out a basin holding some sticky, shapeless mess, as if showing me a sample of stagnant pond life.

The man translated my compliment for his friend beside him, who practically gagged on the banana he was eating — two Angolans by the roadside, sharing the Americano’s hilarious joke.
He said Angola very nice!

They were Miguel and Delfino — Miguel was the English-speaker. They had been at a wedding in Lubango and were headed to Benguela to catch another bus to Lobito, where they lived. They too complained that our bus was slow. We should have been in Benguela by now, Miguel said. And he shrugged.

“In Angola we have bad situation,” he said. “Nothing is right. Nothing is justice. You see the road? Bad. You see the food? It’s …” He made a sour face. “Lobito is good. My home is good. But we have slow business. Everyone want” — he fidgeted his fingers, making the money sign.

I said, “Angola has oil. Angola has gold and diamonds. Angola has money.”

“Big people has money,” Miguel said. “Big people has too much of money. But not” — he nodded at the market activity, the women with trays on their heads and infants on their backs, the children with buckets of plastic water bottles or baskets of oranges, pleading for customers, the girls swinging bags of fries, the basins brimming with shapeless, sticky pond creatures, everyone jostling to sell their wares, smilingly destitute, competing and elbowing forward before the bus left and a great sunlit silence descended on their market once more — “not leetle people.”

“But you’re a big person, Miguel,” I said. And he was — physically imposing, fat-faced, with a potbelly, perspiring in a blue-striped sweater-vest that he’d probably put on that morning in chilly
Lubango and hadn’t yet taken off. Delfino was smaller, dapper in a black leather waistcoat and pointy-toed shoes, listening attentively, watching me with close-set eyes.

“Me, I am big” — and Miguel clapped a hand to his belly — “but I has no money.” He leaned toward me and said, “Government people has money — and their friend, and their family. Politician people has money.” He was whispering now. “They keep. They don’t geeve.”

I made a sympathetic noise in my sinuses.

“Is bad,” Miguel said, and after explaining in Portuguese to his friend, Delfino muttered something Miguel agreed with: “Is trouble.”

“Big trouble?”

He nodded and, sticking out his lower lip for emphasis, said, “Big trouble. Leetle people not happy.”

I wasn’t that happy myself. I was thinking: I have heard this before. I have seen this before. The unending echo of underdevelopment, but with a difference — more people, more squalor, a greater disconnect between the governing rich and their parasitic friends, and the poor who live without hope.

We came to a weird plain of bush, with maybe a thousand baobab trees, more than I had ever seen in one place, no other trees near them to diminish the power of their swollen bagginess, their fat bulgy trunks and stubby, wrinkled, rootlike branches. Because baobabs are a favorite of elephants, for the water stored in the pith of their trunks and branches, they are often stripped, splintered, and gored by the great beasts’ powerful tusks. But in the absence of elephants this baobab forest remained intact.

The long straight road down sandy slopes to the coast, the last twenty miles of this ten-hour trip, offered a panorama of the scoops of shoreline bristling with palm trees, the Bay of Benguela, and the South Atlantic Ocean, an expanse of shimmering blue silk on this sunny day. And then we were in honking, screeching traffic on narrow tropical streets.

Hot, flat, coastal Benguela was the opposite of cool, hilly, high Lubango. But both were ramshackle and disorderly, praised by people who lived in them by saying, “You should have seen this place ten years ago!” — the sort of backhanded compliment you hear in Calcutta. But they had reason to say so. The American journalist Karl Maier, in
Angola: Promises and Lies
, described how in 1992 pro-government forces shelled the Benguela headquarters of the occupying
UNITA
army, which had dynamited the central market. “Both sides carried out summary executions,” Maier wrote. “Bulldozers were brought in to scoop up hundreds of bodies that had been left rotting in the streets.”

The bloodshed in Benguela had been horrific and relatively recent. But I had come for a reason. I had agreed to teach English classes here, too.

“Benguela of the slave yards,” the Angolan novelist Pepetela writes in his family saga,
Yaka
. Pepetela, which means “eyelash” in Kimbundu, is his nom de plume; his real name is Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos. This novel is a good introduction to the town, an account of the immigrant Semedo family over four generations, beginning in the nineteenth century, the family growing as Benguela grows, first with the slave trade, then in commerce and shopkeeping and farming, but always exploiting African labor.
Yaka
opens with two vivid memories of young Alexandre Semedo: the first, his fear of the slave yards, “monotonous songs and mysterious drumming mingled with the sound of chains,” and the second, the sound of lions roaring at night. “Lions never frightened me, they were my first lullaby.”

Fiction gives life to places in expressive ways that no history book can begin to suggest. Characters in novels admit us to intimacies — not true of scholarly chronicles, no matter how detailed. We know the people in novels better than we know our friends. Without underlining the racial complexity of colonial Angola, Pepetela takes
for granted the various strata of white society; in
Yaka
, Alexandre’s mother refers to herself as belonging to “the lowest class of whites” because she has no servants or slaves, and says, “I’m a second-class white because I was born here.” This sort of coloration gives Angolan fiction an odd texture and emphasis — neither Zimbabwean nor South African fiction, which is often full of white settler families, strays into such racial classifications, or describes whites as so poor they work as menials and don’t have servants.