by Paul Theroux
All serious travelers arrive at this doubting, why-bother juncture, stalling on the road, sometime or other. The next question concerned whether there was any point in going on. I had never felt more like an old man, a highly visible alien in a place where no one looked remotely like me, a sitting duck. Perhaps this would provide a good lesson in understanding the vulnerability of a minority, but was it worth the trouble?
In the small hotel, having seen how the little town looked in its dirt and disrepair, I became curious to know how bad things might be farther on, perhaps at the border town of Oshikango and beyond. So far, I could not imagine anything more disorderly or unpromising than the town of Ondangwa.
I write “small hotel” and “little town” and “dirt and disrepair” and it’s possible to read into those words a certain seedy charm, as if I am describing a tropical locale in a novel of intrigue — the dark saloon, the warren of back streets, the overhanging foliage, the colorful inhabitants of Ovamboland.
It was not like that at all. The sultry backwater of fiction is never a total slum; it always has a cozy refuge — a hotel with a veranda, a riverboat tied up at a jetty, a quaint old house, a compliant woman or wisecracking local. And here in the comfortable shadows, the hero sips a drink, and eyes the woman, and contemplates the derelict town. This fantasy is complete because as a romance (and much of Graham Greene’s fiction, for example, is misleadingly romantic in this flawed way) it includes a safe place to hide and maybe someone to fall in love with, or depend on. The stink of the place, the hopelessness, the vile indifference, do not rise from the page.
There was no refuge here, no vantage point. Ondangwa was a blight of shacks, old cars, and empty shops, of skinny dogs chewing at heaps of trash, of crowds of people, some staring, some casually quarreling. The people had the air of temporariness you see in the desperate poor; they did not appear to belong here, but rather that they were just passing through. Ondangwa was not in any visible sense a community, and its randomness and disorder and bad smell seemed threatening. There was no place to hide, nothing for me to grasp at, and this made me feel somewhat insecure. In fiction, only Paul Bowles writes of such places, and convincingly, because they are truly ugly and uninhabitable, except by his mournful, self-destructive characters who are usually at the end of their tether, and they nearly always die in the awful place.
Ondangwa was built on sand and scrub. There were no trees; it was a town without shade; its people dressed in castoff clothes; nothing worked. The very sunshine made it seem much worse, more bleak and hopeless in its hideous glare, naked to the sky. It was not a destination; it was a place to expire in, or leave quickly. And it was on the way to nowhere.
Ondangwa was near enough to the border for the chaos of Angola to have seeped through and added to its derangement. After his howl of “It’s a nightmare!” Moses had dropped me on the town’s main road near the only hotel, and raising his large admonitory hand like a cautioning uncle, he gave me repeated warnings: Don’t trust anyone. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t answer questions from any of the boys or men you see. Keep your hand on your money or your pocket will be picked. Hold on to your bag or it will be stolen. Be careful.
And then he spoke that ominous and fear-inspiring pronouncement that penetrates to the vitals: “There are bad people here.”
Moses, a trusted friend of Oliver’s, was a shrewd, helpful man; he regarded me as a naïve stranger and a potential victim. He took me for a credulous traveler, and possibly a fool. In these assessments he was perhaps not far wrong. But then he lived in the region and was constantly in the company of aliens and refugees, the usual transients found in border areas. He had been born in, and lived just to the west of, the town of Oshakati.
All national boundaries attract temporary people, as well as rejects and immigrants and fixers. At this, the limit of the country, far from the capital, normal rules did not apply. People did whatever they could get away with. The very presence of a border fence meant that no one really belonged there. Such a fringe area lacked any identity except its own fraying face, and attracted mostly fugitives and hustlers. I was one of the desperadoes, a fugitive. I had no business there. I was just passing through and hoping for the best.
Before he drove away Moses said, “Keep your head down. Don’t make eye contact with these people.”
This advice was strangely prescient. Eye contact produces aggression. Animal behaviorists agree: Stare at a chimp and he is likely to attack you. Locking eyes with a dog can create hostility. Prolonged eye contact “taps into pack-animal fears.” Malevolence is manifested in the gaze. Not just a dirty look but merely meeting a stranger’s eyes may be taken as confrontational. “Stink eye,” as they say in Hawaii; malocchio in Italy. Looking down or averting your eyes signifies submission. You escape from an animal in the wilderness by avoiding eye contact, because a stare is perceived as a challenge, if not an outright threat.
In fact, I felt I was turning into an animal, or perhaps using my animal instincts more than ever. This seemed to shut off a part of my brain, the spongy, gelatinous, reflective part I used for the sake of serenity.
When I checked into the hotel, the back-and-forth with my credit card was clumsier than usual: “The machine’s not working” and “I’ll be right back with it.” In retrospect, it was highly probable that my identity was stolen that day, my last in Namibia, at the Protea Hotel, also known as the Hotel Pandu Ondangwa, a hot cheerless building surrounded by gravel and withered plants, and staffed by a single sly ingratiating man with a toothy smile.
While the day was still light I followed my long shadow to the main road, which was also the main road to Angola. I was stalked by ragged men.
“Mynheer, mynheer …”
Rural Namibians tended to revert to Afrikaans in the presence of whites.
“I need a ride to the border tomorrow.”
Several said, “I can take you, mynheer.”
I looked at their cars and, finding one that was in reasonably good shape, began haggling over the cost for the sixty-mile ride.
“Petrol, mynheer — so expensive!” This was Joshua, who was fairly presentable and said he could take me to the border. He looked to be in his mid- to late twenties, and there was something reassuring in his manner.
He wasn’t exaggerating about the expense — the cost of fuel all over Africa was exorbitant. In Ondangwa that day it was almost $5 a gallon, or about twice what it cost in the United States. I asked him to meet me at seven so we could be at the border at eight, when it opened. Then I took him aside and talked with him about his family — his three children, his home village, his ambitions — and I told him about my wife and children. I wanted us to be human to each other. We shook hands on it, and I repeated the details about the drive, the time, the cost.
Joshua did not appear the following morning. I had risen early and checked out of the hotel. I had my small bag and my briefcase and stood waiting by the entrance for almost an hour.
Then a stranger appeared. “I am Stephen. Joshua is my cousin. His car won’t start.”
“How will I get to the border?”
“I will take you, mynheer.”
This had all the earmarks of a setup. I had no idea who this young man was. He was more ragged than Joshua. His car was such a jalopy, one door had to be held closed with a bent wire coat hanger. The seats were torn, their stuffing exposed. Stephen seemed uneasy, not to say nervous. He did not live in this area but some distance away, at Ogongo, in western Ovamboland. Still — what choice did I have? — I got in and threw my bag into the back seat.
By degrees, it became apparent that Stephen was a good soul — gentle, honest, a proud father, and ambitious to further his education. Like many other young men and women I met in Namibia, he badly wanted to leave the country and find work in the United States. What would he do? I asked. “Anything,” he said. I believed him, and I could imagine his coworkers praising him in an American city where Stephen might be a taxi driver or a furni
ture mover or a functionary in a speedy-oil-change business. “The guy’s a ball of fire!” And they would not be able to imagine where Stephen had come from — the poverty and disorder of Ondangwa — and how grateful someone like Stephen would be to have work and a life in that American city.
I was reminded that along borders, populated by transients and opportunists and predators, there were also — and perhaps for the same reason — protectors, shielding the innocent from harm. He was one of those angels. I had encountered many in my life, and I was to meet more of them on this trip.
Like Moses, Stephen was full of warnings, but he assured me that if I followed his advice I would get over the border without a problem.
“What’s it like on the other side?”
He shook his head and smiled. No idea. He had never been there.
“Chinese business,” he said as we passed warehouses and small factories.
Off to the left, a two-story yellow-painted building with a crimson sign: DRAGON CITY HOTEL AND RESTAURANT. I said, “I think that’s a Chinese business. But who goes there?”
“Maybe people from Angola,” Stephen said. Then, as we passed more businesses, he enumerated: “Indian man — plastics. Palestinian man — tin sheets for house roofs. Chinese man — textiles — he makes them there. Car and lorry business — South African man. German over there.”
All of it because of the proximity to Angola, most of the goods sold to people who traveled across the border. I asked Stephen if this assumption was correct.
“They have nothing in Angola,” he said. He thought again. “But they have money.”
The shop fronts and businesses became denser, closer together, as we approached the border town of Oshikango, but of course, being a frontier, it was only half a town, walled off from its other side by a high chainlink fence running at a right angle across the main street. Parked on that street, waiting to go through Namibian customs, was a long line of trucks, several cars, even some loaded pushcarts and wheelbarrows. They looked as though they had been sitting there for a year, and the scene was of great, almost riotous disorder.
People milled around the stalled vehicles, shouting, selling food out of baskets — small bread rolls, fried cakes, cold drinks, wilted vegetables, and trays of chewing gum and candy. Beyond the crush of these vendors I could see another large crowd pressing toward an open shed with a high roof. Some of those people, mostly teenage boys, the Artful Dodgers that haunt frontiers, hurried toward us. In such circumstances, you sense being singled out and stalked like a lamed prey animal.
“Be careful,” Stephen said. “There are thieves here — and on the other side, many thieves. Don’t get out of the car until I give you a signal. I will find someone to help you.”
He slipped out of the car and was accosted by a group of boys. He made a circuit of the blocked-off street, returned to the car, and opened the door.
“Lock the door. Don’t talk to these boys. Don’t look at them.”
Then he was gone, hurrying through the mass of people pushing into the shed. Outside the car (my door fastened by the coat hanger), the boys were pressed against the windows, some calling out, others pleading, “Mynheer! Mynheer!”
Stephen returned with a girl of about nineteen or twenty, hardly more than five feet tall. She had a serious face set in a scowl, her jaw thrust out, and wore a blue blouse and a pink skirt, and on her head a floppy-brimmed knitted hat of white wool, like a picturesque peasant in a folktale or nursery rhyme.
“This is Vickie,” Stephen said. “She will help you.”
Seeing her, hearing this, the crowd of boys began to laugh, provoking Vickie to say something sharp to them, which shut them up.
“How much do I owe you?”
“Don’t show any money,” Stephen said. He palmed the payment — in gratitude for shepherding me, I had given him twice what he asked. He handed Vickie my canvas duffel.
She hoisted my bag onto her head and hung on to it with both hands. I clung to my briefcase. As we walked down the hot street and fought through the crowd to the customs shed, the boys snatched at my shirtsleeves. “Mynheer!”
Apart from the pestering boys — and more joined them as we went along — the formalities on the Namibian side were straightforward: presentation of signed forms and passport and the usual bag search, with the singular diversion of a Namibian customs inspector lifting my copy of Benito Cereno, squinting at it, then paging through it, his dancing eyes indicating that his head was a hive of subtlety, as if he were looking for an offensive passage.
“You can go.” He directed me to the back of the shed, where a narrow walkway with high sides led into a maze.
The same boys followed, about ten of them. I knew their faces by now: the one in the soccer jersey, the one with the woolly Rasta hat, the one with the Emporio Armani T-shirt, the one with the wicked face and broken teeth, the one who kept bumping up against me — his plastic sandals were cracked and his feet were bumped and bruised; several boys had their hats turned backward in the gang-banger style. Customs and immigration did not apply to them, apparently; they pushed and jostled along the narrow passageway, which, I saw afterward, represented no man’s land.
At the end of the passageway, Angola was another shed, with a wooden window flap propped open, more people in line, all of it enclosed by chainlink fences and razor wire.
Vickie, surrounded by the mocking boys, pointed to the window and indicated that I should hand in my passport. As I did so, I heard a howl.
“You!” It was a man inside the shed, in a blue uniform. “Get away!”
He meant that I should get in line, which I was happy to do, though I was startled by his snarling tone. I was to hear this same intentionally intimidating voice for the next few weeks, always by policemen or soldiers or petty officials. The Angolan voice of authority is severe, often bitter, usually reproachful, sometimes cruel. When I commented on it or complained, people said, “They’ve had almost thirty years of war.” The war has been over for more than a decade, I would say. “But they were fighting South African soldiers” was the rejoinder. Actually, the South African soldiers had collaborated with one large Angolan faction. It was my belief that the hostility in all this bluster and obstruction usually meant that a bribe was being suggested.
The nastiness was always from an official, seldom from an Angolan civilian, yet the civilians had suffered too. I could not remember having been spoken to with such deliberate rudeness — not in Africa, not anywhere. But of course I was not in an international airport. I was a mere pedestrian in old clothes who had walked across the border from Namibia with old women carrying sacks of vegetables and baskets of chickens, old men shuffling behind them, and loud boys yelling to each other. Also, on that morning I was the only visible alien seeking to enter.
When my turn at the window came, the Angolan immigration official with the mean face and the abusive voice snatched at my passport and found my visa. But instead of stamping it, he put it aside.
“Where is your letter of invitation?”
No foreigner can enter Angola without a formal (and notarized) letter of invitation. I urge anyone in the United States who believes that we treat visitors bureaucratically and with suspicion to consider the obstacle course that Angola (and many other countries) presents to its foreign visitors: a seven-page application, a prepaid hotel reservation, a prepaid round-trip airline ticket, a set of character references, and an invitation letter from a resident of Angola stating exactly what the visitor will be doing in the country. Then you pay $200 for the visa. And you wait for several months. And you might be turned down, as I was, twice, before getting this visa.
“Why bother?” people asked me. But a country that is so hard to enter makes me curious to discover what is on the other side of the fence.
It so happened that I had the letter of invitation in my briefcase, which (in Portuguese) specified that I was in Angola to visit schools and colleges and give some lectures. I was a writer, it explained.
All this tedious detail had the singular merit of being true.
I handed over the letter. The fierce-faced man in the shed did not read it. He placed it on his table with my passport.
I waited, breathing hard in the heat. I spoke to Vickie. The loitering boys laughed. After about twenty minutes, I went back to the shed and raised my hand to indicate, Here I am, sir. And seeing me, the immigration official, looking offended, swung himself through the door and screamed at me and flicked his hand: “Você deve esperar! You wait! You wait over there!”
This display of needless abuse had its effect on the little mob. Seeing how the man had treated me, the loitering boys in their backward caps and rapper T-shirts, emboldened by the tone, began to crowd me, their clothes stinking, muttering to me in Portuguese and Afrikaans, and to one another in their own language.
Twice more the official screamed, “You wait!” And when, about an hour later, he handed me my passport, keeping my letter, deaf to my request for a copy, I realized that I’d had a valuable lesson in border crossing, in Angolan officialdom, in the ways of traveling today.
The official had scowled at me and said, “Você é professor?”
“Yes,” I had said. “Sou professor.”
And he had waved me on. It was a very hot day and the delay was inconvenient, but I could not take it personally. I was an older man of an alien race entering the country by the back door, treated with the casual abuse reserved for the contemptible souls who walked across the remote border. To anyone who breezed through the international airport on the red carpet and praised the country’s manners and modernity, I could say: You do not have the slightest idea.
