The Last Train to Zona Verde (42 page)

It had always been a city of desperation and exile. No one went to Luanda for pleasure. Criminal exiles were succeeded by slavers, and later by traders in rubber and ivory, like King Leopold’s Belgians next door in the Congo. When the rubber and ivory trades declined, Angola returned to slavery and then forced labor. But these cruel roles were never mentioned. Ask any Portuguese to explain his country’s relationship to Angola and you’ll be given a version of Lusotropicalism, how the Portuguese had a natural affinity for the dusky people in these warm, sun-kissed lands. But the reality was that Portugal, having imposed itself on the land, was
completely out of touch, socially and culturally, with Angola. One small example: Angolan music was not allowed to be played on the national radio station — the only radio station in the country—until 1968.

The city had never elicited any praise. A traveler in Luanda in 1860, quoted by the historian Gerald Bender, reported a town “ankle-deep in sand … Oxen are stalled in the college of Jesuits.” You might say, “But it was 1860!” That’s true, but it was the premier city in the colony, and the colony had existed for more than two centuries. Later in the nineteenth century another traveler reported Luanda as “a burning furnace [with a] cohort of mosquitoes, spiders, lizards, and cockroaches — an infernal scourge.” In the mid-1920s, “Luanda was described by a Portuguese commentator as
cidade porca
— ‘pig city’ ” (Douglas Wheeler and René Pélissier,
Angola
). At that time, only two places in Angola, Luanda and Benguela, could claim a skilled, working populace of “trousered blacks” —
caminhos
, as they were known in Angola. No Africans wore trousers elsewhere. Not that it really mattered, but the Portuguese boast — largely a self-flattering fiction — was that, as inspired imperialists, they had created a whole class of
assimilados
— indoctrinated, educated, assimilated Angolans.

Even in the 1940s Luanda was small, with a mere 61,000 inhabitants. The population increased rapidly in the 1950s and ’60s. Most Portuguese were happy to get away from the mother country then, a time when only 30 percent of households in Portugal had electricity and less than half had running water. Migration was a step up, and continued into the mid-seventies, when whites numbered well over 300,000. We know that figure because just before independence there was a frantic scramble of Portuguese to flee Angola, and that was the number that left — virtually all of them. One vivid urban myth still making the rounds of Luanda describes the fate of a young Portuguese girl abandoned by her parents in their urgency to escape the country. The girl was raised by the family’s
former maid in a
musseque
, the solitary white waif in a black slum.

In 1974, the year of freedom and bolting
colonos
, the serious fighting began, bitter warfare that had never been seen in the history of this embattled country, as two main factions and their foreign supporters (Cuba on one side, South Africa on the other) skirmished to possess the land. The nearly thirty-year war finally ended in 2002 with the killing of the opposition commander, Jonas Savimbi, with an Israeli-made rocket (Israelis were said to be complicit in the assassination). Angola was the embodiment of Rebecca West’s dictum in
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon:
“It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of a skunk.”

A country that has been so besieged, battle weary, and burned out, subjected to decades of fighting and uncertainty, can perhaps be forgiven for being half mad and dysfunctional. The Luanda of 1991 and ’92, which seems to me like only yesterday, is described in Karl Maier’s
Angola: Promises and Lies
as a city under attack, a ghost town of artillery damage and corpse-strewn streets, its population of refugees supported by food drops from the UN’s World Food Program. Without calling attention to his own bravery, Maier reports intimidation, persecution, massacres, and
limpeza
(murder under the name of “cleansing”). In Luanda, Maier finds evidence of mass executions and hidden graves: “I detect movement, a scurrying among the graves we pass. Closer inspection reveals small tunnels the width of a beer can. There are tiny passageways everywhere among the tombs — rats are burrowing into the graves.”

This, then, was the heritage of Luanda. Without oil wealth, it would have remained just another rotting African city by the sea, like Freetown or Monrovia or Abidjan, the horror capitals of West Africa. But it was floating, bobbing, buoyant on a lake of oil, and so it was busy. More than busy: it was out of its mind.

Don’t listen to me. Listen to José, a man of thirty-five or so, a middle-level functionary in the oil industry, born in the province
of Cabinda — site of the oil wells, most of them offshore. A serious, slightly flustered, and candid soul, José confided his doubts to me. He didn’t know me, I didn’t know him; we had met casually in a Luanda bar over a Cuca beer, and my direct questions provoked him.

“There is something wrong with this country,” he said. “I have been to the U.S. on oil business. I was in Texas. I could see how different it was from this.”

“Weren’t you tempted to stay in Texas?”

“Yes. Because it was so nice. But how could I stay? It’s not home.

Your country is not my country.”

“Where exactly do you live?”

“You wouldn’t know the name. My town is in Cabinda — I love this town. But it’s hard to get to. For one thing, I can’t go by road to Cabinda, because that means passing through the Congo, and that is not possible.”

One of the geographical anomalies of Angola is that oil-rich Cabinda is a separate, isolated province surrounded by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a weird result of Portuguese colonial expansion. But it has proven valuable only recently. When John Gunther traveled in Angola for his
Inside Africa
(1955), he was unimpressed by anything in the country, and he dismissed Cabinda entirely, as a remote area without any resources. “One geographical curiosity is Cabinda,” Gunther wrote, “an enclave of Portuguese territory separated from the rest of Angola by the mouth of the Congo. Not much is known — or is worth knowing — about Cabinda.” Cabinda is the source of virtually all (95 percent of the national revenue in 2011) of Angola’s immense wealth. Being prosperous and cut off, with some educated people, the province even has its own secessionist movement, which now and then sets off a bomb or sabotages a building.

José didn’t want to talk about that, and I couldn’t blame him — after all, I was a foreigner with perhaps too many questions. And I
was a noncommittal American. The CIA had a long history of meddling, its covert operations designed to further Angola’s instability, as I knew from reading
In Search of Enemies
by a former CIA operative in Angola, John Stockwell. Yet José seemed eager to unburden himself.

“Angola,” he said, shaking his head. “There’s something wrong. You can’t treat people like this!” He sighed in exasperation and looked at me closely.

“You have traveled here?”

“A bit.”

“You see how poor are the people? But others are so rich. Some people in big cars, just sitting, expensive watch, jewels, suits from Lisbon. And outside the car, the women on the street, no shoes. You see them, they carry things on their head.”

“And they live in the
musseques.”

“Yes. This city is so dirty! I am here for a business meeting, but if my company asks me to come here and live, I will have to pay three or four thousand dollars a month for a little room. It’s a problem for me. I can’t do it. I would go anywhere but here.”

“So what do you think is the problem, José?”

“The government is the problem,” he said without hesitating. “They don’t care. They are just stealing money from the oil business.”

“Like Nigeria.”

“Worse! Much worse — and Nigeria is terrible,” he said. “We need a change — the whole government should just go away. We should get a new one that will use the money better.”

A bit breathless from having spoken his mind, he seemed to have surprised himself with his own candor. He asked me what I was doing in the country.

I said, “I’m just visiting.”

He said, “I’m sorry it looks like this.”

No foreign newspaper reported the weirdness of Luanda, though
the writer Pepetela had published a hallucinatory novel about the city. Perhaps to avoid censorship, his 1995 book
The Return of the Water Spirit
is oblique, depending for its effect on the strange collapse, week by week, of tall modern buildings in Luanda, as if from the effects of a curse. The manner of destruction is a mystery, seemingly bound up with the violation of the serene habitat of a resident spirit — possibly the disturbance of “the old African identity.” But the curse is simple enough to understand: it is the blight of incomplete and misdirected modernity. Urbanization has so upset the natural order of things that the land itself has become seismic and unstable.

This fanciful fiction is penetrated by occasional glimpses of reality, as when Pepetela describes daily life in wartime Luanda: “ ‘How much lower can we sink?’ people asked while standing in the queue, either for the bus, or in front of the store with goods that few of them could afford to buy, or at the hospitals that had neither medicine, cotton nor gauze, or in the schools that had no books and no desks. Luanda was filling up with people fleeing from the war and hunger — at a rate that was as fast as it was suicidal. Thousands of homeless children loitered in the streets, thousands of youths sold and resold things to those that drove past in their cars, countless numbers of war amputees begged for alms at the market. At the same time, important people had luxury cars with smoked glass. No one saw their faces. They drove past us and perhaps they didn’t even look so as not to have their consciences made uneasy by the spectacle of all that misery.”

This description of Luanda in the early 1990s can easily stand for the Luanda I saw almost twenty years later. So, for all its obliqueness, the novel is prescient. And two characters who make cameo appearances in the narrative are other living Angolan writers, Arnaldo Santos and José Luandino Vieira. Vieira, who was born in Sambizanga, the same slum where the current president, Dos Santos, first saw the light of day, celebrates the slum as a vortex of
energy. Santos is a minimalist poet, Vieira one of the first novelists of the revolution and himself an early political prisoner.

All three writers — Pepetela, Santos, Vieira — are white, but identify themselves as fully Angolan. White writers in South Africa also identify themselves as South African, and they are, but they come from a privileged, or at least an educated, class, whereas these Angolans are from the poorest level of society, slum born and bred. Another important Angolan writer, but much younger, is Sousa Jamba, born in a rural village near Huambo in 1966. Jamba spent much of his youth as a war refugee in Zambia, then shuttled between Britain and the United States, where he was educated. After publishing three novels, Jamba returned to his home village in 2004 and reported to the BBC that the place was in much worse shape than it had been when he left it decades before, during the war years: “The school has fallen apart … [The students] have to bring their own chairs, the windows are completely broken. They have no pens or pencils. I find it very sad that one of the wealthiest countries in Africa can have kids who don’t have pencils.”

I’d previously met Jamba in London, and Vieira in Portugal, where he had rusticated himself to a small village. Both men were likable and intelligent but had the stunned and rather solitary air of exiles: a look of lostness. Born in a slum in Luanda in 1935 and raised in poverty, José Vieira was an early target of the Portuguese, arrested by the colonial authorities as a dissident when he was twenty-four. Two of his novels,
The Real Life of Domingos Xavier
and
The Loves of João Vêncio
, and his short story collection
Luuanda
, are expressive, written in an almost untranslatable patois (so the translators attest; I read them in English), a combination of Kimbundu and Portuguese peculiar to the Luanda shantytowns, the ghetto idiom Vieira had learned, a “literary eloquence founded on slang, patois, and pimp terminology.”

Over coffee in the Portuguese town of Matosinhos, Vieira told
me that he was still routinely turned down for a U.S. visa because of his old political beliefs, his imprisonment by the Portuguese, and his former militancy. Since Pepetela and Santos still lived and wrote in Luanda, I made an attempt, through an intermediary, to meet them. And I said that if they were interested, I would be happy to speak at the Angola Writers’ Union or meet them there for a cup of coffee.

This quaintly named organization, a bureaucratic collection of like-minded (that is, approved) writers, was a cultural throwback to the Soviet Union’s adoption in the 1960s of Angola’s liberation struggle. The Agostinho Neto Mausoleum in central Luanda was another Soviet throwback, inspired by the mummification in Lenin’s tomb. Because of the avowed Marxism of one faction, many Angolans in the sixties and seventies were more inclined to study in the Soviet Union than anywhere else, and were offered Soviet scholarships. President Dos Santos was a Russian-speaker who had been educated as an engineer in Baku, Azerbaijan, and whose first wife had been Russian. (It was their daughter, Isabel, who had become a billionaire investor in Angola, and was touted as one of Africa’s five richest women.)

“They don’t want to meet you,” my intermediary said of my proposal of a cup of coffee with the Angolan writers at the writers’ union.

“What about my giving a talk? Did you mention it?”

“They had a problem with that.”

“What sort of problem?”

“They don’t see the point of it.”

“Of my speaking to them?”

“Of listening to other writers. They’re funny that way.”

“Writers like me?”

“Any foreign writers.”

“So what did they say?”

“That they didn’t think there was anything you could tell them that they didn’t already know.”