The Last Train to Zona Verde (39 page)

“Books are so expensive,” Sylvia volunteered when I urged them to read a bit more. Sylvia was stylishly dressed and a college teacher. True, everything was expensive in Angola except bananas, but the people were scholars. The rest of the class agreed: books were unaffordable.

“What do you read?” I asked.

They named some decades-old Nigerian paperbacks they’d been given. They were unfamiliar with the Angolan novelists I’d been reading.

Domingo said, “Can you give us some of the books you wrote?”

“I didn’t bring any with me,” I said. “Why don’t you ask the Ministry of Education, or one of your billionaires!”

My lessons were mainly an effort to encourage them to write about events they had witnessed, economic changes, the progress of
a wedding or a funeral, the novelty of Chinese settlers, even (I delicately suggested) political repression and intimidation — because the government reacted violently to any rallies, demonstrations, or protests, beating and arresting people, deploying dog squads and water cannons.

The great irony, if not outright farce, of human rights in Angola was that one of the first prisoners of conscience selected by Amnesty International, at its founding in 1961, was Dr. Agostinho Neto, who was named “political prisoner of the year” because he’d been locked up by the Portuguese. After he was released from prison, Neto went on to become the first president of Angola, and soon he began jailing
his
opponents, who themselves became prisoners of conscience. So Amnesty was in the paradoxical position of appealing for justice for the victims of the very man they had successfully championed. I mentioned this to the students at the institute, who weren’t impressed, responding blandly and probably with some truth that worse things happened in Angola.

After I got to know them better, I asked them where they had been in their country. Apart from visits to Luanda and Lubango, they had not traveled much, and none had been south of Lubango. They had no desire to see Angola’s rural areas, nor any African country. Where in the world did they wish to go, I asked. Like the students in Lubango, they were unanimous in choosing the United States. They were specific about places — New York, Chicago, Florida, California. On the rare days when the Internet worked in Benguela, these students trawled it for images of America. They were certain about what they’d find there.

“And Texas,” Francisco said.

“Why Texas?”

“Because everything is bigger in Texas.” This caused laughter, but after class, when I asked him if he was serious, Francisco said confidentially, as though giving me a travel tip, “Austin, Texas, is the best
place for parties. Lots of bars, lots of music and women. You can have fun there.”

“Can’t you have fun in Benguela?”

“Not that kind of fun.”

Money was on their minds. Money was on mine, too, because only cash, preferably U.S. dollars, was acceptable in Angola. No hotel or restaurant would accept a credit card. Not having enough cash was not an excuse — an ATM machine would be pointed out. “Use that.” And it was in Benguela that I used my card with the highest credit limit and found that it was repeatedly turned down. This was the card that had been hacked in Namibia, my identity stolen. The card was unusable, so I depended on the dwindling stock of dollars in my bag. I had not known about the credit card fraud; I assumed that there was something wrong with the Angolan ATM machines, since there was so much wrong with everything else in Angola.

My money worry added to the melancholy of Benguela, the complacencies and longueurs of hot afternoons, stifling even next to the ocean, the turbid greeny-brown sea and the yellowish froth from its short breaking chop, the ruined pier to which the fattened and baptized slaves had been marched before being taken out to the slave ships.

Added to this was news of unrest in the Congo and the continuing Boko Haram massacres in Nigeria — the killings by fanatical Muslims of anyone who looked Christian or Westernized or foreign. I had thought I might head that way. But hundreds of Nigerians had been killed in the north of their country, and every week brought another bloody attack.

I was restless, and that made me curious about Nancy Gottlieb, who had stayed in Benguela and ran the English school. I asked her bluntly how it was that she had landed here. She said she had a degree in business, but had become disenchanted with the companies
she’d worked for in the States. She had learned of a Danish charitable organization with a “people-to-people” philosophy. She joined it and was sent to Benguela in 1994 to help run a school. In the following years she had lived through a rough period; for instance, in 2001 the school was attacked and some of the students were kidnapped by anti-government soldiers. The uncertainty, deprivation, and occasional violence lasted until the end of the war.

I asked what kept her — a slight, single woman — for so long in a provincial town in Angola. She said that after spending time in India doing Vipassana meditation, she’d had an insight. “I sort of said to myself, ‘If I don’t find the man qualified to be the father of my children, I think I would rather spend my time helping children in Africa.’ You know, a kind of thought that you just have and keep to yourself, but you know that you had it.”

And after seventeen years she still found her life here rewarding, and felt safer than in many cities she’d known in the States.

“Everyone I meet has problems that are so much bigger than mine,” she said. “And yet for the most part they’re almost always happy, laughing, energetic, smiling.”

I was told there was a man in Lobito whom I should meet. Lobito was only sixteen miles up the coast, and on the way I stopped at a ruined fort on a high mound outside the town of Catumbela, just above its namesake river. Nearby, but at a greater height, on a hilltop, the luxury Riomar Hotel was being finished by Chinese laborers — one of the many projects of the president’s billionaire daughter, Isabel. The mansion of the governor of Benguela — it, too, looked like a hotel — was also a feature of the hilltop.

The old fort, on the flat-topped Catumbela mound of yellow clay, had dense stone walls, with interior cells and apartments, square and squat, commanding a view of the surrounding countryside. The mansion and the hotel were exceptional. All the other dwellings along the river were slum huts or shanties.

A notice on the fort gave its name as Reducto de São Pedro,
reducto
indicating a redoubt or a stronghold. The text in Portuguese ran as follows: “This [fort] was made at the cost of the inhabitants of Benguela, in honor of the municipal administration [because of] the continual insults made to the white people by the indigenous people of the district” —
os continuous insultos feitos aos brancos pelos indigenas deste districto
. “First stone placed on 5 October 1846.”

It was quite an indictment. Because of your threats and insults, we had to build and pay for this fort. Look what you made us do!

I discovered afterward that in 1836 a settlement of free whites had been founded nearby on the river, but it had failed. Still, a handful of Portuguese remained, and punished the upstart locals. Later in the 1800s, a trader named António da Silva Porto lived on the river near here. He was a
sertanejo
, or backwoodsman, a trader who circulated from the coast to the interior. Polygamous, with a number of African wives and many
mestiço
children, and with an uncertain business, Silva Porto was a Portuguese Mr. Kurtz, but jollier, less successful, and, judging from one of his diary entries, realistic about his residence in Angola. Porto wrote, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed are king. As poor as I am now, if I retired to Portugal today, I would amount to nothing; on the other hand, I am who I am around here as long as I possess one piece of trade cloth.”

That neatly sums up the entire Portuguese adventure in Angola — hopeless, shiftless, horny Europeans exploiting Africans who they believed to be more hopeless and more shiftless. And it was a legacy, the corrupt Angolan president, Eduardo dos Santos, still in power after thirty-two years, continuing to exploit the people and accusing his critics of spreading
confusão
— chaos.

Lobito, just across the Catumbela River and up the road, was the brightest place I had seen so far in Angola — a deep-water port that was being improved by the Chinese, a large oil depot, a town center that was only mildly vandalized, and an older restored hotel,
the Terminus, which had once been connected to the Benguela Railway.

The hotel and this somewhat salubrious part of Lobito was on a narrow spit of land called the Restinga, a Portuguese word for sandbar, which it much resembled. This finger-shaped peninsula protruding from Lobito was an upscale ghetto, with beaches on both sides, lined with palm trees and grand villas, modest bungalows and two-story apartment houses. A few of these buildings dated from the 1920s, but most of them had been put up in the 1950s, the time when Portuguese immigration to the colony had been encouraged with generous subsidies. And you could see that on this piece of land a
colono
might feel safe, since it gave the impression of being an offshore island.

The person I’d come to see was a tall, handsome man of about sixty with the sonorous name of Rui da Câmara e Sousa. It turned out that he had read some of my books and was happy to sit and tell me about his distinguished family. He was a descendant of a well-known governor of Benguela, and was himself a college professor and a real estate entrepreneur. His villa, built in 1954, was a pretty place, but as with all the homes on the Restinga, there was a continual clamor of shouts and music from boom boxes of the people picnicking on the beach just across the narrow road, some of them swimming, others eating or dancing under the palms and ironwood trees, many of them screaming at each other. Rui said he was used to it. He’d been born in Angola.

His earliest ancestors, having sailed from Madeira to Moçâmedes, down the coast, had been pioneers on the Huíla Plateau — in Sá da Bandeira, still fresh in my mind as Lubango — and Humpata. When I had hiked around Humpata one day, and seen the Boer graves from the 1920s, I had been struck by how hilly, cool, and fertile the land had been, how like a farming community in Portugal, the very qualities that had attracted the Boers and the Portuguese. Madeira at the time was poverty-stricken, like many of the places (the province
of Bragança in Portugal, the Azores) from which Portuguese peasants emigrated. In Angola these people were largely subsistence farmers, most of whom cultivated sweet potatoes.

“It took about two months to travel from the coast to Humpata,” Rui said, meaning a journey by ox cart. “But it was a good place to settle — the Portuguese there called themselves ‘the white tribe of Angola.’ ”

Rui ran through the rest of his pedigree, not boastfully but rounding out the family portrait. His great-grandfather Captain António Barrada de Câmara had been military governor in 1900, and he died in a hunting accident. Rui’s grandfather Hortensio de Sousa, governor of the province, had not been forgotten; a bridge and a park in Benguela had been named for him. Hortensio had been very poor in Portugal, a law student, and then a lowly employee in a Lisbon bank in 1914. When the First World War started he became involved with a dubious man in Luanda.

“The crooked man was Alves do Reyes,” Rui said. “He wanted to be like Cecil Rhodes but was more like Bernie Madoff in his scheme to make counterfeit notes. His business was good, of course. When Reyes was arrested for fraud, my grandfather became prosperous.”

Though the province was in constant turmoil in the 1920s, Hortensio flourished in Benguela. He was one of the few men in the small white population who was not a criminal exile and who did not become a shopkeeper or a trader. As an administrator, he rose to be governor and had lived in that huge mansion I had seen on the heights of Catumbela.

“It took a long time for the Portuguese to have continuity here,” Rui said. “It is a recorded fact that it was not until 1906 that the first Portuguese person was born in Angola, and survived. All the other babies died.”

I said, “But very few women came to Angola.”

“No women came!” Rui said. “That’s why I say that the greatest contribution Portugal made to Angola were the
pombeiros.”

The word was new to me.

“They were the indigenous people who wore shoes,” Rui explained — agents, free men of color, all of them mulattos. “
Pombeiros
made the country. They were the ones who contacted the Europeans and facilitated the commerce. They supplied the slave traders with captives. They traveled into the interior. In some cases they traveled deep into Africa. Long before Livingstone made his famous trip to Angola, the Portuguese traveled on foot to Mozambique.”

David Livingstone not only traversed the continent, walking 1,500 miles in six months, arriving in Luanda in 1854, but he also refused to abandon his men, the Makololos who’d been his porters and guides. His unstated reason was that he still needed the men as guides and porters, and so instead of accepting passage on a ship, he turned around and walked back, eastward, to the coast of Mozambique, describing and mapping and naming Victoria Falls on the way.

Rui was hospitable, and as a builder, speculator, and Angolan citizen he was optimistic about the country’s future. Nonetheless, it was baffling to hear him extol the influence of the
pombeiros
. In his eagerness to explain one of the permanent institutions that the Portuguese had created in Angola, he settled on these
mestiços
, these
pombeiros
, who’d made their living as slave traders, commission agents, and middlemen, swapping cloth and beads, copper wire and rifles, for humans, who were rounded up, handed over to the slave master, then shipped out in chains.

We talked a little about the word
pombeiro
. I wondered if it came from the Swahili word
pombe
, for alcoholic liquor; someone who sold
pombe
might be called a
pombeiro
. The Portuguese adopted many Swahili words, and there are Portuguese words in Swahili:
meza
for table,
sapatu
for slipper, and the word
gereza
— prison — is derived from
igreja
, church. Later in my trip, an Angolan of my acquaintance said that
pombe
meant “pigeon roost” — a euphemism
for slave quarters. But Fernand Braudel writes, “The word
pombeiro
may come from
pumbo
, the busy market in what is now Stanley Pool” — today called Malebo Pool, on the Congo River. Whatever the origin of the name, Braudel added,
pombeiros
“exploited their African brothers even more cruelly than the whites had.”