The Last Train to Zona Verde (43 page)

“Probably true! But maybe they could tell me something,” I said. “And what about literary curiosity — or any curiosity?”

“I guess they don’t have it.”

What they had — their chief trait, the affliction of Angolan officialdom — was xenophobia, a bit awkward in any writer and rather a burden. It made much of their writing humorless, self-righteous, and provincial, which was another reason their writers’ union was necessary to them, because it legitimized them as writers. They had an engraved certificate they could frame and hang on the wall, the way dentists and massage therapists did. And, precious in that politically protected way, they could go on writing their fantasies, and be rewarded by the dictatorship, while the whole country was falling to pieces before their eyes.

Yes, they probably would not have wanted to hear me say this sort of thing to them.

In the meantime, I rattled around the city. The traffic was unmoving, the gridlock incessant. “It takes hours to go a few miles!”

people said. “I have a two-hour commute!” The sidewalks were broken and obstructive. Blue-and-white jitneys called
candongueiros
, which followed no fixed route, roamed from street to street picking up fares. Some streets were named in the solemn way of political dogmatists — Rua Friedrich Engels, Boulevard Comandante Che Guevara, and even Rua Eça de Queiroz—honoring the author of, among other novels,
Cousin Basilio
, for which he is sometimes referred to as the Portuguese Flaubert.

One Luanda street I happened upon in the course of an evening walk was Rua de Almeida Garrett (off Avenida Ho Chi Minh). It was named for João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida Garrett, a nineteenth-century Portuguese writer and politician, little known in the United States and perhaps even lesser known in Angola. I knew of him only from an epigraph quoted in a novel by José
Saramago, an assertion that resonated in Luanda: “I ask the political economists and the moralists if they have ever calculated the number of individuals who must be condemned to misery, overwork, demoralization, childhood, rank ignorance, overwhelming misfortune and utter penury in order to produce one rich man.”

Many streets in the city had no name, a topic of satire among people from whom I solicited directions, a sort of you-can’t-get-there-from-here paradox. But Luandans — the working ones, the foreigners, the businessmen — lived with all this inconvenience, and laughed about it, because enduring it meant they could make money. The weak went home, the poor died, the strong stayed and got rich.

Billions of dollars were routinely embezzled by Angolan politicians and oil executives. Martin Meredith devotes an enlightening chapter in
The Fate of Africa
(2006) to the gross cheating by Angolan officials, which is an extensive catalogue of klepto schemes. Some businessmen engaged in a mechanism known as “trade mispricing.” This funny-money ploy was explained by Ed Stoddard in a 2011 Reuters report on corruption in Angola. “In this case, the way it typically works is that Angolan importers pretend to pay foreigners more for imports than they actually spend. The difference provides cash that can be discreetly put into banks or other assets abroad.” It worked best with oil, but also with simple import transactions. “An Angolan importer overpays the exporter, say in the United States, and asks the exporter to deposit the excess payment in the importer’s offshore account or a Swiss bank,” said Dev Kar, a senior economist at the International Monetary Fund. Through this trade mispricing many billions vanished in an average year.

You’d expect such a place to be moribund, yet Luanda was abuzz. A current throbbed through it like a rapid pulse — a blare of car horns,
zungeiros
(street vendors), hawkers selling lottery tickets, shouting women with baskets of fruit on their heads, children and
amputees loudly calling out — more demanding than beseeching. The days were also very hot — low-lying Luanda is noted for its enervating humidity. There was not enough space in the city for all the cars and impromptu markets, and the constant spillover of people, crowding the streets and sidewalks, made it a jammed and harassed place.

Because only cash was accepted, banks were besieged by people withdrawing money, and most high-end shops or businesses of any size had an ATM machine on the premises — my hotel had two in the lobby, and they were in constant use. The fact that so many people walked around with stacks of kwanza notes made it a city of muggers and thieves. An American woman told me that in order to make arrangements for her family of four to fly back to the States, she’d had to bring a bag filled with $4,000 in cash to the airline office to buy the tickets.

Because Luanda was dysfunctional and subject to sudden power cuts and water shortages, people with money — Angolans and foreigners alike — created small hermetic settlements, walled compounds, where they had their own generators, water sources, and amenities: tennis courts, swimming pools, golf and social clubs, and of course armed sentries and guard dogs.

The International School of Luanda was one of these salubrious compounds, an oasis behind a wall, catering to the children of expatriates, diplomats, oil people, and wealthy Angolans. Unwelcome at the state schools and rejected by the writers’ union, I visited the school out of curiosity, to observe a sealed community in action. In return for their hospitality, I gave a talk to the students.

After a long and far-from-simple drive to the south of the city, through the improvised neighborhoods, the grim precincts of poverty, the International School was something of a surprise: orderly, well planned, spacious, clean, and surrounded by flower gardens. Healthy children of all races were gathered in congenial groups — 630 students, 91 teachers — and what was singular about the school
was the presence of books. Apart from Akisha Pearman’s department in the Instituto Superior in Lubango, books had not figured much in any of the schools I’d visited.
Please send us books from America
, I was implored, and my routine reply was to refer them to the billionaires in their government.

The newly built library at the International School was worthy of a small college. And the students were bright sparks, with the confident air that comes of being well taught, taken seriously, and — it must be said — wealthy, sheltered from the hideosities of Luanda. I gave my talk and answered questions and was shown around the school by the teachers, who were earnest and upbeat. It all seemed marvelous and almost unbelievable that such a place could exist amid the encircling gloom.

“So,” I asked casually, “what’s the tuition here?”

“Forty-seven thousand dollars a year,” I was told by a teacher, who gulped as she managed to utter the words.

At the time, this was roughly the cost of tuition at Harvard University. Because many of the students were the children of oil industry employees, the existence of such a good school was an incentive for foreign workers to stay with their families in Luanda. An oil executive was later to tell me that Angolans simply did no work, and he added, “Forty thousand workers in the oil industry support twenty-three million Angolans.”

The residential compounds and other amenities were the foreigners’ way of turning their backs on the reality of the place, of shutting out the chaos, of being secure. In many respects this pattern was no different from the urban planning in Palm Springs or the gated communities around Phoenix and elsewhere, but in Luanda what lay outside the compounds were slums of extreme danger and pure horror.

16
“This Is What the World Will Look Like When It Ends”

T
HE INTENSITY OF A TRIP
— bad food, hard travel, slow buses, hot weather, jeering locals — can induce a mood of isolation, provoking episodes of alienation that resemble out-of-body experiences. I think: Am I imagining this? And I have no answer, because no one hears the question. But then I found someone to ask.

Dazed with Luanda and dispirited by my trip, I was fortunate around this time to have met the clear-sighted Angolan Kalunga Lima, who had told me many things I needed to know — and most of all that my sense of Angola, and Luanda in particular, was not the consequence of travel fatigue. I was first introduced to Kalunga at a photographic exhibition one evening in Luanda. He assured me that I was not overdramatizing the situation. He was impressive, intelligent, and straight-talking, and his gift for satire was a relief to me.

I said, “A man in Namibia told me, ‘Angola’s a nightmare!’ ”

Kalunga said, “Namibians have a gift for understatement.”

Perhaps a clue to his speaking his mind was his unusual history. The son of a politically passionate Angolan father and an adoring Portuguese mother, he had been born in Algeria, where his father, a committed revolutionary, was a soldier in exile. Kalunga had been educated in Canada and the United States, and later, on a whim, he taught on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. He had traveled widely in Africa and Europe, was well read, responsive, funny, and hip. Seeing a Hummer stalled in traffic on a Luanda street, the African driver wearing thick gold chains around his neck, Kalunga said, “He got bling!” He was a maker of documentary films, and his latest project was chronicling the discovery of the “Angola Titan,” a dinosaur whose fossil remains had been discovered in the southern desert near Namibe. He had also made a documentary about Angola’s elusive and little-known giant sable antelope (
palanca negra gigante
), apparently its last living wild game.

I instantly took to Kalunga, for his warmth, his candor, his enthusiasm, and soon after we met, we made plans to travel in the Angolan bush, a safari on which he would be the photographer and I the writer. He wanted to show me the habitat of the endangered antelope.

“We’ll collaborate! It’ll be a major magazine piece!”

A major magazine piece was less of an incentive for me than delving deeper into rural areas. What convinced me that we’d be a good team was that we seemed to share certain crucial ideas, as aid skeptics and as disbelievers in the current political process, with a curiosity about traditional tribal culture and a general feeling that any salvation, or simple hope, in Angola was likely to be found not in Luanda but in the landscapes of the distant countryside.

The sable antelope was an animal unique to Angola, and because of that was an icon in the country—the symbol of the national airline, the name of Angola’s national football team. It had the longest
horns of any antelope in the world, and existed nowhere else in the world except a place called Cangandala.

“I thought there were no wild animals left in Angola,” I said.

“Just this one, and it’s doomed,” Kalunga said. “You have to see it soon, before it becomes extinct.”

“Where is Cangandala?”

“East of here. Near Malanje.”

“That’s where I want to go. On the train.”

“
Zona verde,”
he said.

“I love that expression. I heard a guy use it when we got stuck on the way to Lubango. The green zone.”

“The bush.”

“Why is it I always feel hopeful in the bush?”

Thoreau had written in his essay “Walking”: “I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.” I too believed in those verities.

“Because they haven’t made a mess of it,” he said. And being Kalunga, and gray-eyed, he smiled and added, “Yet.”

It was true, he said, that Luanda was a city of idle millions. Three quarters of the country’s population was under the age of twenty-five, and very few had jobs. A quarter of Angolans lived in Luanda. Unemployment he estimated at about 90 percent. But these were wild guesses, since statistics were nonexistent. No one knew the size of the population. The last general census had been taken almost forty years ago, in 1974.

“The people from the countryside flock to Luanda — and what for?” he said. “There’s no work. It’s just one slum after another. They don’t go to school, they don’t have jobs. They have no idea of the war that ended just nine years ago.”

It so happened that I was in Luanda on Angola’s Independence Day. It was a national holiday, but for an unemployed and cynical populace, whom the government regarded as “the mutable and rank-scented many,” this was meaningless. There was no celebration,
no music, no flags flying; there were no parades. It was just a day off, an empty day.

Kalunga mentioned a great battle, the siege in 1994 of Cuito Cuanavale in the south, a town held by Angolan and Cuban soldiers that was attacked by armored columns of the South African army. In forty days of shelling, Soviet tanks against Mirage fighter planes, the result was the deaths of more than fifty thousand people and defeat on both sides, the whole bloody business fought to a stalemate. I had heard it called “Angola’s Gettysburg” and “Angola’s Stalingrad.”

“It was the biggest conventional battle fought anywhere on earth since World War Two,” Kalunga said, “and these Angolan kids you see have no idea that it happened. There are land mines in Caxito” — sixty miles north of Luanda — “that are still blowing up farmers, but no one seems to care. People just sit around. Other people clean them up — foreign agencies.”