The Last Train to Zona Verde

by Paul Theroux

  To someone like myself, intending to write a book, this whole morning of serial futility, spent going from Namibia to Angola — perhaps fifty yards of travel — could not have been a richer or more enlightening experience.

  Next I walked into even greater chaos, the Angolan border town of Santa Clara, Vickie quick-stepping behind me with my bag, the boys on either side of us, all of them moving fast, because I was trotting, hoping to discourage them.

  “Bus,” I said. The boys tugged at me. They knew where I could find a bus. Vickie led the way. We found two buses, but neither were leaving for Lubango, my intended destination, until nightfall. And the buses themselves were in such disrepair I doubted they would leave at all.

  Vickie, meanwhile, stood by me. She communicated with me in gestures, and she waved the boys away. She was young, but strong-willed and helpful, and whatever curses or warnings she was muttering to the boys kept them at arm’s length.

  All I could see of Santa Clara was a potholed main street lined by low shops selling motor oil and Chinese plastic goods — buckets and patio chairs. Here and there stood wooden sheds plastered with signs advertising lottery tickets. The heavily laden women from the Namibian side were mostly traders, and they set out their vegetables by the road or hawked them out of baskets. The town, in its chaos, made Oshikango, just across the border — I could see it through the high border fence — seem peaceful and orderly.

  A small boy carrying a bucket filled with bottles of water passed by. I bought one bottle, using Namibian dollars, and the money in my hand attracted a new crowd of jostling men and boys, the moneychangers. As I moved down the street, I found out that the town of Ondjiva was only about twenty miles away. If I got there in a bush taxi or a chicken bus, I could perhaps make a plan.

  Then I saw a Land Cruiser ahead, an old one, angular, like a tin breadbox on wheels, and a man beside it. I said, “Ondjiva?”

  The man was about thirty and wore a soccer jersey that was already soaked in sweat from the day’s heat. His harassed face was made more tragic by his missing front teeth, and a ballpoint pen was stuck into the fat frizz of his dense hair, like a hairpin. He indicated yes. He then enumerated the places he was headed: “Ondjiva. Xangongo. Cahama. Lubango.”

  Lubango was my destination. I asked when he was leaving. “Quando vamos?” In an hour — he indicated on his watch and tapped the time. “Quanto dinheiro?”

  He mentioned a number, then withdrew the pen from his hair and wrote the price in blue ink on his yellow palm, indicating thousands. This was the amount in Angolan kwanzas. I showed him my Namibian money. He wrote another number. It was a reasonable amount. I paid him. I quietly paid Vickie — and, gratefully as with Stephen, more than she had asked for — and was sorry to see her leave. She went back over the border, her floppy hat crushed and misshapen from her having carried my bag. The whole time she’d been with me, she had never smiled.

  Pointing to himself, the driver said, “Camillo.”

  “Paulo,” I said.

  If all went well, I would arrive in Lubango that night. But few things in travel are simple, and everything in Angola, even the most straightforward transaction, was so hard as to be inconceivable. I suspected Camillo wanted more passengers. He did. Over the next three hours, in the heat of this border town, he stood by the car howling the names of towns, and one by one, boys, men, a woman with baskets, got into the back of the vehicle. Since I was the first paying passenger, I had taken the front seat, but a young woman slipped through the driver’s side. So there would be three of us in the front seat for the three-hundred-mile drive to Lubango.

  The woman’s name was Paulina, and she was in her early twenties, sweet-faced but silent, wearing a tight black T-shirt and black jeans. She said she was going up the road to her village: “Minha aldeia está próximo Lubango.”

  I sat, keeping my head down, killing time by making notes that began, Too tedious to recount the delays …

  The seven or eight boys who had been hanging around my side of the car — pesterers, moneychangers, mere gawkers, “Senhor … meestah” — had wandered away. For me to get out of the car and traipse around would mean being followed, and what was the point? There was no shade. There was nothing to buy. Santa Clara was much worse, more miserable, than Oshikango, fifty yards away. I resigned myself to not eating that day, and I dozed.

  In one of those mocking peculiarities of a world I had not gotten used to, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I was still in the telephonic orbit of Namibia. My wife on the line. She missed me. And how was I?

  “Lovely day here on the Angolan border. I’m in Santa Clara.”

  “What a pretty name.”

  Early in the afternoon, Camillo got into the car and began fussing with his cassette tapes. He found one he wanted and slammed in into the player. Later on, when I had a glimpse of the cassette’s label, I saw that it was the Dutch DJ Afrojack, the vocal by Eva Simons, and for the next four hours it played in a loop, Camillo sometimes turning the volume up. Later, when he was drunk and red-eyed and irrational, he played it at a deafening volume and sang along with it, but in a staticky mutter, like a dog gargling at a TV set. Let’s go take a ride in your car … I want you to take over control … Plug it in and turn me on.

  I came to hate this song, and like many hated songs I could not get the melody or the idiotic words out of my head. We did not leave Santa Clara at once. For reasons Camillo kept to himself, he began the trip by driving along the rutted dirt lanes just off the main road. These contained the slums and squatter camps of the town, with their three-legged dogs and women washing clothes in slop basins of gray water. Perhaps he was looking for someone else to cram into the back of the vehicle. Perhaps he was looking to buy something — he seemed to make several discreet inquiries. The lanes were so bad the old Land Cruiser swayed back and forth, and the hollow-eyed women and sullen boys watched the vehicle bumping past their shacks. Children played in the dust, and one child tried to maneuver a broken wheelbarrow that held two bruised watermelons. In the heat, the fuzzy stink of human excrement.

  I knew that Angola was wealthy, but I did not know then that the country earned billions of dollars a year from its oil, diamond, and gold exports. Later, when I discovered the figures, I recalled that little tour of Santa Clara, in one of the worst slums I had ever seen in my life. I remembered the whole day as an episode of misery; not mine — I was a witness, passing through — but those by the roadside and in the villages, the mute and brutalized Angolans, ignored by the kleptomaniacs in power.

  “I’m afraid of what these people will do,” an Angolan man was to tell me in Luanda when I mentioned what I’d seen in the south. “Imagine if they realized how they’d been cheated — what they would do if they decided to take their revenge on the government.”

  To anyone collecting money for the poor in Angola, I would say that before you reach into your pocket, consider Angola’s revenues: have a look at the price of a barrel of oil and the fact that the country produces almost two million barrels a day; look at the diamond on your finger, and its gold setting, and reflect that these pretty things also probably originated in Angola.

  My first day over the border, and I saw that a lack of money was not the problem in this country — but it seldom is in the hellholes of the world. The paradox was more likely that an excess of money was the problem — or one of them; that, and a government run by thieves.

  But I was just learning, and I thought, as one does in such circumstances: Maybe things will improve farther up the road.

  This main north-south road, the only one into Namibia and the only one to Angola’s capital, was badly broken. The potholes were so wide and deep and numerous that Camillo, normally a speed demon, often had to slow the car to a crawl and make detours around them, and often left the road entirely, driving along the shoulder or through a roadside village.

  Up ahead, twenty miles farther on, we came to the town of Ondjiva, where we stopped inexplicably, Camillo revving the en
gine while someone in the back seat hopped out to run an errand for him. I got out too, to stretch my legs, because I had been confined in the car for hours in Santa Clara and it seemed safe to take a break here. Ondjiva looked new, its buildings well kept. The town had an airport. I saw a hotel sign. This place had none of the menacing ruin of Santa Clara.

  I asked Paulina about the place. She said in Portuguese, slowly, for my benefit: “This town was destroyed in the war. All ruined. Bombs, Fires. Guns. Destruição. Extermínio. Now it is all new.”

  Ondjiva, or N’Giva, had been known in Portuguese colonial times as Vila Pereira d’Eça, and after the ghostly and premature independence of 1974 it had been given its old Ovambo name. António Pereira d’Eça (1852–1917) had been a Portuguese colonel, and it was consistent with colonial policy, imposing a culture of famous foreign personalities, that many towns and cities in Angola were named in honor of Portuguese soldiers and statesmen. Pereira d’Eça had been sent on various military expeditions to Mozambique and Cape Verde, and after the outbreak of World War I was appointed commander of the Portuguese expeditionary forces to counter German advances from South-West Africa. But in 1915 the Germans were the least of his troubles, because the Ovambo people in the area, taking advantage of the besieged colonials, rose up under the leadership of their warrior king and went to war with Pereira d’Eça’s battalions. The Kwanyama, a subtribe of the Ovambo, were put down in a succession of massacres, and for his butchery and sustained suppression, Pereira d’Eça was rewarded and rose to the rank of general.

  One consequence of this brutality was that Pereira d’Eça’s name was attached to the village, which was the site of the slaughter; another consequence was the beheading of the warrior king, Mandume Ya Ndemufayo, and his severed head was exhibited for many years in the town. It was the sort of colonial decapitation favored by Mr. Kurtz, as Marlow saw in Heart of Darkness: “a half a dozen slim posts remained in a row, roughly trimmed, and with their upper ends ornamented with round carved balls.” Not carved balls at all, of course, but the bare, sun-bleached skulls of Kurtz’s enemies, put up to discourage anyone who might be tempted to transgress. In Shakespeare’s time, the severed heads of wrongdoers were hung on London Bridge. In our own time, as revealed by evidence in the International Criminal Court trial of the warlord Charles Taylor, the bloody heads of villagers, cut off by child soldiers, were exhibited in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Mandume’s head was displayed for so many years it too was whitened to bone by the elements and stared with a lipless grin.

  The town was renamed, but that was not the end of its troubles. Throughout the 1980s it was the staging post for the South African army’s parachute regiment — the Jackals, as they called themselves — in its war against Namibian guerrillas who launched their attacks from Angola. And Ondjiva saw fighting between Angolan factions and Cuban soldiers, too. It was no wonder that by the 1990s the town had been flattened and that so much of it now looked new. It was well supplied because all its building materials and vehicles, and most of its food, came from Namibia, down the road.

  Just out of town, going north, the road deteriorated. For many long stretches it was impassable, and Camillo detoured through villages, allowing me a survey of traditional villages in this province of Kunene, featuring a fenced compound and courtyard known as a kuimbo. I had not seen anything like these in Namibia, but here in southern Angola not much had changed in spite of four hundred years of slavery, colonialism, military incursion, guerrilla activity, oil revenues, and the extensive charitable work by churches and NGOs. The HIV/AIDS figures were high — nearly 20 percent of the people in this province were infected. But otherwise it was the old Africa of mud huts, twig fences, bony cows, strutting roosters, and no lights — of the barefoot and the hard-up.

  Off the road, weaving among the trees, we seemed to make good time. On the road, we were stopped by policemen or soldiers manning roadblocks. These were not the jolly, I-want-to-go-to-Chicago sort of sentries I’d seen in Namibia, but mean-faced, in some cases drunken, and well-armed men to whom Camillo — normally so jaunty and offensive — groveled.

  “Tu-passaporte,” one of them always said to me, with a clawing of his greedy upraised fingers.

  When we pulled off the road, the occupants of the car got out to relieve themselves. No one went far, not more than ten feet or so, all elbow to elbow, like a pissing contest, men with their feet apart and their pants open, women squatting with their skirts hiked up, the spattering sounds against the roadside gravel like water splashing from an old faucet and rivulets running from under them. Amid all this drizzling I saw Camillo conferring with the cops, handing over his papers, covertly passing money to one of the soldiers or policemen. Then I was given my passport back, and off we went.

  This happened eight times, and Camillo, whom I had seen as an irritating person and a bad driver, shrank to a pathetic cringing size, and more toothless and poorer with each shakedown. Bribery is a way of life in Angola — the petty intimidation on the dirt road in the south being a reflection of the million-dollar bribes demanded by government ministers of the oil companies and the gold and diamond concessions. For a bribe you get nothing but a perfunctory assurance of safe passage, more like an entry fee or a toll than a payment for services. The sight of bribery on the back road of any country is a clear indication that the whole place is corrupt and the regime a thieving tyranny, as Angola has been for the thirty-five years of its independence — and likely much longer, since Portuguese colonial rule was also an extortion racket.

  “Roadblock dictators,” the brave journalist Karl Maier calls these men at checkpoints in his account of Angola’s recent history of conflict, Angola: Promises and Lies (2007). “The [Angolan] checkpoint consists of two small red ‘stop’ signs facing opposite directions, two pieces of string.” And the man there “sports that arrogant half-smile that is typical of Africa’s roadblock dictators who have the power to decide whether unfortunate passers-by escape with their money, clothes and even their lives. From his swagger, he would be at home in Liberia, Nigeria, Mozambique or a dozen other countries where the line between police work and banditry is very fine indeed.”

  The roadblocks and bribes were blatant crookery, but they served a useful purpose too, because I was able to get out of the car, stretch my legs, and check our progress on the map. We had not gone far — I always asked the policemen where a certain town was, and I was surprised at how slowly we were going, how far we were from Lubango. I doubted we would get there anytime soon — certainly not tonight. I want you to take over control, take over control …

  All this while we were passing the residue of the war — blown-up and burned tanks, tipped-over army trucks, rusted-out jeeps. The Cubans had been here, so had the South Africans, and the Namibians with their liberation army, SWAPO, the South West Africa People’s Organization. Battles had been fought along this road and in various small towns. The South Africans had held some of the towns for long periods, and so had the Cubans — the Fidel Castro 50th Brigade. And with what result? Death on a huge scale, of course; thousands in Kunene province had died. Destruction too. And this twisted metal, the sort of expensive junk you see in the aftermath of all wars — the litter of it always seems like a deliberate memorial, left there to indicate the uselessness of the whole business. But no, it’s just a junkyard with no larger significance, and in time it will all rust to nothing. The young men in this vehicle, Gilberto and João, told me that they had no memory of the war except the loud noises of artillery in the distance.

  Then, as we made another stop — “Cerveja!” Camillo shouted — I was sure we wouldn’t get to Lubango that day. At a small shop, a blockhouse faced with yellow stucco, under a spreading acacia tree, Camillo parked the car and bought a Cuca beer. I bought a soft drink, and would have bought more but there was nothing else, no other drinks, nothing to eat.

  It was about five in the afternoon, the sun beginning to slant through the trees, dribbling gilded tints on the leaves and c
ones of light filled with gold dust. As we stood in the shade of the shop, Camillo began to curse. He walked angrily toward the Land Cruiser, and now I noticed that the Afrojack music had stopped, the idling engine had cut out, and apart from his cursing and the hum of insects we stood in unaccustomed silence.

  This Land Cruiser had a diesel engine, was not easily pushable, and was perhaps impossible to restart without another battery. I saw Camillo at the wheel and the others kneeling behind and heaving. They put their shoulders against the rear of the vehicle and shoved it around the bare ground. The engine did not even flutter.

  “Ajuda!” Camillo called out to me, asking for help, wanting me to kneel and push.

  I shook my head and smiled. Sorry, pal.

  They kept at it, failing at each attempt. There were no other cars nearby to boost the battery. I was not dismayed. I was sick of this trip and hated the music and now saw that Camillo was half drunk.

  The day had gone quiet, the air was mild, the sun dimmed as it had dropped beneath the trees. I knew from the map that we were perhaps at a village called Uia, about thirty miles north of the settlement of Xangongo, which had been no more than a blur when we’d passed it. Too far to walk. Using what remained of the light, I walked to the road, hoping to flag down a car to take me south to Xangongo or north to Cahama — anywhere out from under this tree. But night was falling. I saw the man in the shop light a kerosene lamp, and I knew we were stuck in the bush.

  12

  Three Pieces of Chicken

  IN THE LAST SLANTED softening of late afternoon light, against the squealy repeated note of one small insect’s cheep, under the bird-haunted acacia tree towering over the bare trampled compound, and near Camillo’s derelict-looking car — dirt footprints on its doors: Camillo had been kicking it barefoot in fury for its refusal to start — an old woman approached through the sunlit risen dust.