by Paul Theroux
Camillo blew his horn, calling me from this happy little chicken interlude: back to the road.
13
Volunteering in Lubango
THAT AMBIGUOUS, SOMEWHAT startling, stumbled-into occasion of the Efundula ceremony of the Kwanyama stayed with me, for its unexpectedness and its vitality — for its ritual aspects too, because so much that I saw in Angola was improvised or imported or crooked. Angola’s rich — the few — were greedy walled-in plutocrats and dandies, while its poor — the many — were exhausted and cynical and living in squalor. But in the Angolan bush I had found remnants of traditional life radiating energy, even if (as in the case of the Kwanyama people) that energy consumed its maidens, turning young girls into coquettes so that they might attain a life of domestic drudgery and a brood of malnourished children.
Back on the road — but not really a road at all — we made a succession of detours, the usual Angolan snakes-and-ladders route along arbitrary tracks, many of them deep troughs of muck, flooded in this mud season of sudden rains. The zigzagging did not take us quickly, but it was all a revelation to me. We coursed through villages mostly. We were seldom near the notional road, part of which was being graded by enormous loud chewing-and-rolling machines, and the rest abandoned or nonexistent, a waste motion (creation, destruction) that was brought to perverse perfection in many areas of Angolan life. It was as if this mechanism imitated Portuguese colonial futility, for surely no colonial power was ever so politically arrogant and culturally insufficient — Portugal’s obsolescence, bumbling, and antique mind-set producing a rarefied and conceited cruelty that was Angola’s inheritance.
And it was strange in this vehicle to be traveling so intimately with village people, passing at times in a ten-foot space between a mud hut and a clothesline, and just missing the big yellow woven mats on which fat red peppers were drying in the sun, arrayed like firecrackers, a surprised face in the hut window or a scowling one from a man with his pants at his ankles, squatting at the trench edge of his open-sided latrine.
A different Camillo emerged on this stretch of the trip, a kindlier one. At a village remote from the road he slowed down, recognizing a familiar figure ahead, and it had to have been someone he knew: a crippled man, one leg missing, possibly a land mine victim, who swayed under a tree. Rolling to a stop, Camillo gave him some crushed kwanza notes and a handful of mangled bread slices — the first indication I’d had that he had squirreled away food in the car. It happened again some miles later, another mutilated man, this one wearing a red smock, Camillo pausing in the drive to hand over bread crusts.
Deeper in the bush at a cluster of huts, a boy approached with a bird, a green parrot he wanted to sell. Camillo took it and examined it closely, wiggled one of the parrot’s legs, demonstrating that it was broken (probably in the boy’s snare), and gave it back as unacceptable. Soon Camillo reverted to his old crapulous self, becoming a loud, red-eyed drunk.
On the slabs of torn-up mud and the deep, water-filled potholes and wallows of these bush tracks, we traveled slowly, to my relief. And a new song was playing in the car, this one sweeter than “Take Over Control.” The words were “Marry me,” sung in an Angolan accent: Meddy me, meddy me, I love you.. .
And so we went bouncing and swerving, cross-country, through the villages of Huíla province, music blaring. At intervals of twenty miles or so Camillo stopped, I thought so that we could find food — some villagers ran toward us with bananas — but it was for him to buy more beer. Camillo drank steadily, and fifty miles into the trip he was drunk, drooling, shouting to the music.
At several stops the villagers appeared with small bags of fried potatoes, slick with grease in the tight dirty plastic. I said no, but was hungry, and like the pieces of chicken that had turned my stomach the day before, the slimy potatoes began to look appetizing. So I gave in and ate, and disgusted myself, and surrendered to the noise, the bad driving, and the heat.
New passengers had gotten on, the vehicle was overloaded, and in the back a crying baby and a screaming woman — the baby’s mother, I assumed — were quarreling with two shouting boys. You naturally wonder at such a time whether this trip was necessary, and answering my own question, I concluded, Yes. I had vowed not to take a plane, vowed to travel overland, and although it was uncomfortable in this beat-up Land Rover, and the fighting among the passengers was annoying (and made worse by Camillo’s drunken swerving), I was passing through the hinterland of Angola, which I had always longed to see because so little had been written about it — nothing, really, except out-of-date war stories.
Beyond the town of Cahama, where the road improved, we were at a higher altitude — cooler, greener, taller trees, hills in the distance that were lumpy and flat-topped, some like anvils, others like plump loaves of bread, some with green skirts. Bellied-out spinnakers of clouds blew along, high in the blue sky. The great surprise to me were the few signs of colonial buildings — a scattering of ruined shops, an occasional abandoned farmhouse, the thick walls and tile roofs of the sort of rustic peasant construction you might see in the cottagey countryside of northern Portugal. In a way, that was the whole story of the Angolan hinterland: Portugal had exported its brutalized criminals and illiterate peasants and made them into colonos, first to enslave and deport Africans and then to lord it over the Africans who remained. The walls of the small farmhouses were broken, the roofs fallen in, and the tiles smashed. Yet there were only a handful of such buildings in fifty or seventy-five miles of travel — this in a country that had been a colony for more than four hundred years.
Some of the houses were smashed to pieces because their occupants had bolted, or had been driven away, as independence approached in the 1970s. But also, like the whole of southern Angola, this had been a war zone for decades. Here, between Cahama and Xangongo, the South African army, in a major offensive in 1983 (Operation Askari), had battled Namibian SWAPO guerrillas who were massing, intending to push south across the border to liberate their own country, South-West Africa. And many of these houses had been booby-trapped, and the fields strewn with land mines. It is estimated that twenty million mines were planted in Angola by all sides during the long conflict.
But white settlement in Angola had never been great, and in the bush, white colonos had always been thin on the ground. Almost from the beginning, its first landfall by the great Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão, in 1482, Angola was viewed as nasty, unhealthy, and violent, filled with poisonous air and savage people — “the white man’s grave” of the cliché. What the Portuguese wanted from Angola was what nearly all colonialists wished for: gold and slave labor. The weirdness of Portuguese settlement is well described by Gerald Bender in Angola Under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality (1978). Angola began as a penal colony. From the late fifteenth century to the 1920s, Angola was a dumping ground for Portuguese criminals, convicts known as degredados — exiles. These men were Angola’s civilizers and colonists.
It is impossible to understand Angola without knowing something of the Portuguese character. Like Ireland, Portugal was for centuries an exporter of its peasants, a maker of exiles — fugitives from the mother country and so oppressive in its colonies that it turned Africans into exiles too. Portugal has been described by the English traveler and literary critic V. S. Pritchett as “practical, stoical, shifty, its pride in its great past, its pride in pride itself raging inside like an unquenchable sadness.” To that list of qualities I would add archaic and obsolete. As for Portugal being practical, it should also be said that Angola was the only African country that began its colonial existence as a penal settlement, Angola being Portugal’s own version of Siberia, a jail.
Bullying and predatory criminals are natural despots, and many of the exiled Portuguese convicts became important slave traders. They were well suited to the diabolical task, since they had been schooled in Portugal (and its other colonies) as thieves, con men, and murderers, efficient as persecutors and intimidators. The convicts were not a mere ragt
ag oppressed element who had been (like the exiles in early Australia) persecuted in their poverty and convicted of petty crimes. They were ruthless villains, all male (a third of the exiles to Australia were female), who formed the core group of Angola’s colonists, promoted, after the long voyage, from the criminal class to the ruling class. The crooks had to be the colonizers of Angola because so few other Portuguese wanted to live there. They served as slave traders until Portugal outlawed slavery in 1878, and then they transitioned as exploiters by engaging in the forced labor system (bamboozling Africans, burdening them with indebtedness), which was in most cases more abusive than slavery.
Since slaves could not be exported abroad, where slavery was illegal, other forms of slavery or imposed servitude remained in place within the colony. Forced labor in Angola continued until 1961 (a year of uprising in Angola for that very reason), and it was then that devastating reports were published about the punitive labor conditions. “ ‘I need to be given Blacks’ is a phrase which I frequently heard from colonos,” Marcelo Caetano (later to be Portugal’s prime minister) wrote in 1946. “As if the Blacks were something to be given!” None of this is ancient history. In the early 1960s, around the time I became a teacher in soon-to-be-independent Nyasaland, a colonial high inspector in Angola, Henrique Galvão, wrote with passionate contempt, “Only the dead [in Angola] are really exempt from forced labor.”
Before 1900 virtually all Portuguese settlers remained in the coastal towns, decrying the interior as dangerous for its wild animals and hostile Africans. As late as 1950 there were fewer than three thousand Portuguese farmers in the entire country, some of them upcountry in smallholdings. But they were unproductive and demoralized, dependent on Portuguese government assistance and African forced labor.
Although over many years Portugal tried numerous rural settlement plans to encourage colonos to take up farming, nearly all the attempts ended in failure, and only the (foreign-operated) diamond mines, and later (foreign-operated) oil production, allowed Angola to be viable. The white population, predominantly male and coastal, aspired to petty trade, shop owning, and bar-keeping. The Portuguese had tried to create a capital, Nova Lisboa (now Huambo), in the center of the country, but that too had not amounted to much. The proof that the Angolan interior was largely unsettled by colonos was obvious here on the main road in Huíla province — empty, undeveloped, the few colonial houses (none dating from earlier than 1950) tumbled to the ground or bombed out.
The upside of neglect, indifference, contempt, and underdevelopment was a landscape that was green and practically empty of villages — great swaths of grassland, wooded hills, and stretches of bush that had once been battlefields but had become overgrown and depopulated. Amazing that the centuries of colonization and the decades of war had left no mark; and if you did not take the mood of people and the traumas of their history into account, you could almost be uplifted by the sight of lovely green hills and the apparent purity of the place.
We stopped for beer and hard-boiled eggs at Chibia. Some local traders were heading home from the improvised market. They were cattle-raising Mwila people who lived outside of Chibia, less than thirty miles from Lubango, and still smeared themselves with animal fat, coated their hair with mud and cow dung, creating dreadlocks, and wore necklaces of shells and of hardened mud. Of course there were no wild animals, and the road was a horror, but seen from the green bosom of this huge province, it was all like picture-postcard southern Africa, an Eden.
That was before we climbed the planalto — the chilly high plateau of the southern highlands — and rolled into the distant outskirts of Lubango, the shantytowns and cinderblock huts, the shacks and roadside market vendors, the squatter areas that were scoured of all greenery and — fuel-deprived — deforested for firewood. Only slums surrounded this southern city. The word in Angola for slum, or shantytown, or “informal settlement,” is musseque — meaning “red earth,” the sandy soil on which the shacks were usually built, a word suggesting an infertile and blighted place, a wasteland. Not a bush or a blade of grass remained among the musseques of Lubango, but for miles it was heaving with people.
I thought: I have been here before.
Another African city, another horror, more chaos — glary light, people crowding the roads, the stinking dust and diesel fumes, the broken fences, the vandalized shop fronts, the iron bars on all the display windows, the children fighting, the women heavily laden, and no relief in sight.
By now Camillo was helplessly drunk, legless and incoherent, and I was glad to get out of the car and away from the quarreling passengers and the hideous music. He began to pick a fight with me as I left him, claiming that I owed him money. He screamed at me on a Lubango back street, but his drunkenness made him distractible, and I simply slipped away down the shattered sidewalks of this cold and overripe-smelling city.
The following day, the Lubango streets were empty. It was a national holiday, Dia de Finados, or Dia de Defuntos — Day of the Deceased, Day of the Defunct. In the socialist revolutionary republic of Angola, holy All Souls’ Day of the Catholic liturgical calendar was a feast day, equal to Easter and Christmas, observed with the same solemnity as Colonial Repression Martyrs’ Day (January 4) or Day of the Armed Struggle (February 4). Every shop was closed. The restaurants were shut. No one worked.
“This is a very Christian country,” an Angolan explained to me that day. “Even during our war the churches were not attacked. People sheltered in them and they knew they would be safe.”
Where am I?, I thought. Nothing to do on the Day of the Defunct except walk around this high sloping city, reflecting on my trip. What am I doing here?
Lubango lay sprawled across a plateau at almost six thousand feet. The weather was pleasant now, in November, but in the Angolan winter of July and August — so the locals complained — it was cold enough in this region for people to wear heavy coats, and some days frost crystals had to be scraped from windows and windshields.
Until independence, the town was called Sá da Bandeira, named for a Portuguese nobleman, Bernardo de Sá Nogueira de Figueiredo, the first marquess of Sá da Bandeira, who in the 1830s became an idealistic (that is, anti-slavery) prime minister. And then the town reverted to its traditional name, Lubango. Toward the end of the colonial period, Sá da Bandeira had attracted emigrants from Madeira (they didn’t know the colony was doomed), another hurried project and instant failure of Angolan settlement.
Ten miles south, at Humpata, Boer trekkers had put down stakes in the late nineteenth century and farmed, and some were buried there, in a little fenced-in cemetery I found one day in the middle of a cornfield. The colonos hated the interior for its remoteness and for the arduous work necessary to grow crops. It was a long, slow trip from the coast. Lubango’s only attraction — and it is still the iconic picture associated with the place — is the precipitous valley, formed of a volcanic fissure, the sheer rock cliffs and the chasm called Tunda-Vale, the view west across the plains: a scenic spot with a lovely panorama that was outside town, on a bad road that was being improved.
My hotel was a pretty good example of the state of the nation. Newly built, it was a walled-in compound of gardens, terraces, and low, elegant-seeming buildings. But half the lights in my room did not work, I could not open any windows, the bathroom stank. In the public areas, some foreign guests conferred in whispers — all businessmen (briefcases, cell phones, brisk mannerisms, handshakes). The restaurant was good, the rooms were expensive, and I was eager to leave after one night. I moved to the rundown, seedy Grand Hotel da Huíla, in the center of town, which was less than half the price of the new hotel.
Only its name was grand. The food was terrible and the hotel was practically empty, even a bit ghostly, but the Grand was friendly and clean, and I could sit on the veranda by the big cracked waterless swimming pool and write undisturbed.
Nothing had been written about travel in the interior of Angola, nothing I had read that described what I had seen on t
he back roads. The Angola story that reached the world was a condemnation of Portuguese colonial abuses, or a history of the long civil war, or amazement at the phenomenal oil profits. This alone made me glad I was here. The business visitors to Angola were efficient, tactful, and noncommittal, and many of them were rather tight-faced and (so they intimated to me) anxious to leave. They did not describe the country except to their companies back home. Angola had no other travelers, no backpackers, no birdwatchers, no anthropologists or political scientists, no casual visitors, no idle wanderers like me — none that I could see.
Books about Angola were typically accounts of warfare and crisis, most of them outdated. The best-known one in English, Ryszard Kapusciśski’s Another Day of Life, is a breathless narrative of the capital, Luanda, and some desperate excursions into the bush, during the war in the mid-1970s. It is harrowing, very short, partisan, and vague on details. Bay of Tigers by Pedro Rosa Mendes recounts a 1997 trans-Angola (and trans-Africa) trip; it is eloquent, impressionistic, surreal in places, but even vaguer on details than Kapusciśski. Most books about Angola are relentlessly political, because its history is a chronicle of violent crises, interspersed with long periods of colonial torpor or brutality. The lengthy civil war was extensively reported by journalists at the time. But I found that it was seldom discussed now. Most Angolans are too young to have experienced the worst of the war and too distracted by their poverty to care. The subject on the minds of most Angolans I met was money — how to get it, where to spend it, and please could they have some of mine?
