by Paul Theroux
In this country without foreign travelers, without foreign tourists, I had penetrated to the small city of Lubango and was sitting on the veranda of its old hotel, becalmed by the Day of the Defunct. What now?
I’m beginning to think that this sort of travel experience is mainly fantasy, I wrote in my notebook that day. Many travelers are essentially fantasists. Tourists are timid fantasists, the others — risk takers — are bolder fantasists. The tourists at Etosha conjure up a fantastic Africa after their nightly dinner by walking to the fence at the hotel-managed waterhole to stare at the rhinos and lions and eland coming to drink: a glimpse of wild nature with overhead floodlights. They have been bused to the hotel to see it, and it is very beautiful, but it is no effort.
My only boast in travel is my effort …
It was such a slog, such a lot of trouble to have gotten here, a kind of stumbling and uncertainty, begun at the border, where I was the only distinguishable foreigner — a magnet for the pesterers and touts. I’m conspicuous and solitary, and after two bone-shaking days I make it to the provincial city — a sort of victory if you value that kind of trudging through misery, realizing the fantasy of having seemed to blaze a trail all by myself.
I was lucky, I made it, I saw the initiated girls, I perversely enjoyed the three-pieces-of-chicken metaphor that to me was like a short story. I was fascinated by the rusted tanks and war wreckage along the road, by the ruined huts of vanished colonials, by the nonexistent road and the washerwomen at the river and the still serviceable dugout canoes. But what did all this add up to except a traveler’s tale, something to report, the I-did-it boast, newsworthy to those who don’t travel? And it’s expensive, uncertain, physically difficult, and lonely.
I have always felt that the value of a travel narrative, especially one that detours down back roads, is that it becomes a record of details of how people lived at a particular time and place: how they spoke, what they said, what they ate, how they behaved. The Soviet Union I saw and wrote about in the 1960s doesn’t exist anymore, nor does the South America I saw in the 1970s, nor the China I traveled through in the 1980s. The way of life on many Pacific islands has changed since I paddled around them in 1990, and as I was witnessing on this trip, the Africa of 2001 had undergone significant alterations — a few improvements, many degradations. To console myself, I think: Maybe the incidental details in these narratives will someday be useful for historians. Preserving the texture of life in a chronicle of travel could help inform the future, just as the diaries of foreign travelers like Smollett or Montaigne helped us understand old Europe.
The French historian Fernand Braudel frequently cites humble diarists and bold travelers in The Structures of Everyday Life, his encyclopedic account of how we have come to live the way we do on earth. On November 2, 1492, in Cuba, Christopher Columbus saw an Arawak man puffing on rolled tobacco leaves, a European’s first glimpse of smoking. Tea arrived in England from Holland in about 1657, and Samuel Pepys drank his first cup of tea on September 25, 1660, so he wrote in his diary. The use of the individual fork at a meal dates from the mid-sixteenth century. Until then, all Europeans ate with their hands from a common trencher. Of his manner of eating, Montaigne wrote, “I sometimes bite my fingers in my haste.” Around 1609, an English traveler — one Thomas Coryate, who ate with his hands — saw diners in Italy using forks and ridiculed them. The villagers I saw in January 1964 in southern Malawi, scooping stew into their mouths from a common bowl using hand-shaped lumps of steamed nsima dough, now employ spoons and forks.
This argument for the importance of trivial observation is obviously self-justifying, but if you’re alone on the road, you need to be bucked up somehow, and even if the observations are illusions, they are illusions necessary to your existence. And if you aren’t vitalized by fantasies — here I am in this old car speeding through the bush, here I am among tribal people engrossed in a ritual — the experience would be demoralizing. But the implied vanity bothered me, because being a fantasist in travel is simply self-regarding, and much is lost in translation.
I am looking for something to write about, because that’s the nature of this travel, and perhaps of most travel: to see something new — a stimulus; to satisfy curiosity — a pleasure; to follow an itinerary — a narrative. But behind it all, and especially fueling the fantasy, is the need for the traveler to be at large in an exotic setting, to be far away, to act out a narrative of discovery and risk, to mimic the modes of the old travelers, to find similarities and differences.
My ideal traveler is the person who goes the old, laborious way into the unknown, and it is this belief that lies behind my travel, and drives me. I want to see things as they are, to see myself as I am. And look: I am a seventy-year-old man traveling like a backpacker in the middle of Angola, and the only other foreigners I see — six or eight of them — are businessmen hustling to make a profit off the country’s resources. Maybe that’s me too, another sort of businessman, another sort of huckster, someone hoping to make a living by being here and noting down what I see.
I need to be realistic, I wrote as the veranda lights came on, so dim that I could hardly see the page of my notebook, because I have never been more keenly aware of the sadness in wasted time. Angola is perhaps a lesson in wasted time.
When the fierce immigration official at the Angola border post had bared his teeth, scowled at me, and said, “Você é professor?” and I had replied, “Yes. Sou professor,” I was not lying. My letter of invitation stated that I would be traveling in Angola to teach in various schools. Since tourists were not welcome — and what would they do if they did visit? — I needed a reason to be here, and lecturing to English-language students was a persuasive one. It was not a ploy.
I was in Lubango to teach a few classes at the Instituto Superior de Ciências da Educação, a set of buildings and a campus within walking distance of the Grand Hotel. My contact and nominal host was an American woman, Akisha Pearman, whom I met soon after I arrived.
Akisha had lived alone in Lubango, teaching as a senior English language fellow at the institute, for almost two years. She lived in a few small rooms in the center of town. She was one of the people who had told me of the frosty July days (“I had to order winter clothes from the States”), and that nearly every day in the city the electricity went out for three to five hours, that there was a shortage of running water or a similar nuisance. Akisha laughed these off as minor annoyances. Uncomplaining, patient, dedicated, and hard-working, she had been prepared for this life by her two years as a Peace Corps teacher in Mozambique and by her ten years of teaching in the United States, Spain, Korea, and Madagascar. Her Angolan students and colleagues told me they loved her. Akisha had earned that love.
In my what-am-I-doing-here? mood, Akisha was a timely lesson. She made a point of staying positive, didn’t grumble, never gossiped, and she expected the best from her students. She was also a passionate photographer, and though her talk was always upbeat, her photographs were a record of all she had seen. She did not judge or talk idly, but her photographs showed that she noticed everything — the disparities in wealth, the vandalized buildings, the contradictions, the humor, the goodwill, the scheming, and the violence in Angola as well as the joy.
When I said that I needed to adapt my cell phone to Angola and buy minutes, Akisha said, “We’ll go to the mall — we actually do have a mall in Lubango!”
The Millennium, as the mall was called, had been plunked down next to a desolate parking lot in Plaça João Paulo II (named for the pope), a large yellow-painted structure with a high vaulted ceiling that mimicked a night sky picked out in dimly lit stars, the whole interior kept in deliberate semidarkness. In dazzling sunlit Angola such darkness was a novelty. The shadowy stores were built to resemble old Portuguese shops and cafés, with bow windows, antique lamps, and Euro-kitsch fittings, and at the mall’s center was a rudimentary fountain and a pool — no water. A single-screen theater occupied one corner, and the shops sold phon
es, pizza, shoes, clothes. In another zone of the ridiculous place, a nail salon, three banks, and two boutiques selling hair extensions and wigs, which were desired by many women but (as my friend Kalunga Lima was to tell me later) mocked by Angolan men, who euphemistically laughed them off as tetos falsos — fake roofs.
“Let me show you how expensive these things are,” Akisha said. She took me to a men’s clothing shop. A simple polo shirt that would have cost $20 in the States was priced in Lubango at $120. Men’s suits had price tags in the many hundreds of dollars, and pointy-toed shoes were $500 or more. All the merchandise was imported from China.
Business was good, the stylishly dressed (tight black jeans, stiletto heels, frilly blouse, false roof) clerk claimed when I asked. But the store was empty, there were no more than thirty people in the mall itself, and no one was buying a ticket to the movie. The mall had not yet become a hangout, and the only shop that was busy was the one selling cell phones.
For a few dollars, the woman in the cell phone shop got my cheap phone working. The Internet was unreliable in Angola, it was not much use in Namibia either, nor had it been available where I found myself in the Okavango. Perhaps Africa was going to bypass the email and Internet generation, and communication would be, as in Japan and some other countries, based on smart phone technology — texting, social networking, and not much else.
As we walked around the Lubango Millennium — which was an eyesore, already falling apart — Akisha told me a bit about herself. She was the eldest of five children. Her father, a former professional football player, was a successful coach in North Carolina, and both of her brothers were standout college players — one of them a former NFL running back. Akisha was an athletic presence too, radiating health and strength along with her good sense and optimism. Most of all she was independent. She had liberated herself by joining the Peace Corps a year after graduation from college, and as a teacher in Mozambique had become fluent in Portuguese.
Akisha’s example reminded me of how much I admired people who worked humbly in Africa. Like the best of them, Akisha saw herself as more a student than a teacher, looking to be enriched by the experience. And though she never alluded to it, she could not have found it easy to be the only American in Lubango, a young single woman living on her own in this remote and, from what I could see, inhospitable place.
But she had lived and worked for two years in Inhambane, a sleepy seaside town — long ago an important port — in southern Mozambique, so she had come to Lubango with an understanding of isolation and a knowledge of the damaging absurdities of Portuguese colonialism.
Probably more nonsense has been talked about, and more myths have been created around, Portugal’s imperial adventures than any other nation’s. The most ludicrous was “Lusotropicalism,” a cock-amamie theory and mystique of racial harmony proposed in the 1930s, which posited that because of their unique temperament and culture the Portuguese were the Europeans best suited to adapting to other lands and dealing with equatorial natives — finding (so it was argued) common ground in sympathy and like-mindedness. “We understand the natives better than you do” was the Portuguese boast. This implies not only that Portuguese imperialism had been a triumph, but also that Angolans had colluded in their own enslavement and willingly offered up their diamonds and gold.
But the reality is that Angola’s history has been a colonial tragedy, and sometimes a farce, rife with racism, resistance, rebellion, and death. And the briefest glimpse of any Portuguese overseas territory is proof of the mess they made of their colonies. A dramatic fact, pointed out by a historian of Angola, Douglas Wheeler, is that in the four hundred years from 1579 until 1974 there had never been a five-year period in the colony without at least one punitive Portuguese military campaign. The glory of the Portuguese was their great navigators and discoverers, but they were incompetent administrators, ruthless bosses, and greedy exploiters. The crooked aristocrats and desperate peasants who planted themselves far from home, and finally fled, left nothing behind but derelict slave quarters, empty vinho verde bottles, and gloomy churches.
In Malawi in the 1960s, I met middle-aged Portuguese men across the border, in Vila Cabral, in Mozambique (then a sleepy, underfunded colony popularly known as “Portuguese East”), who had emigrated from poverty-stricken villages in rural Portugal to become carpenters, stonemasons, and barbers in the African bush. Their wives were idle and cranky, screaming at the first servants they’d ever had in their lives. Few of the colonos were able to speak the local language, and it was no surprise when revolutionary movements began to harry them, to hasten their departure. Because of the character of the colonizers, this process was inevitable, as Douglas Wheeler also described, noting that the settler from “an archaic rural society, semi-feudal in some provinces, often tries to cheat the African because he is weaker, and because he himself is used to being humiliated in his poverty back home and has come here to get rich.” The settlers got along well enough with the Africans in villages sustained by their traditional ways. The somewhat Westernized Africans were another story: the new settlers resented the ones who could read, who had ambitions and political ideas. Those Africans were despised and belittled as calcinhas — wearers of trousers.
When I mentioned that the bumbling and often cruel nature of the colonial Portuguese became clearer only after one had actually traveled through a former Portuguese colony, Akisha said, “I have a great story.”
While working in Inhambane, Mozambique, she had become acquainted with a Portuguese husband and wife who, like the ones I had met as a Peace Corps volunteer long ago in Vila Cabral (Niassa province), had immigrated to Mozambique in the 1960s. This was a period when the Portuguese government, under the tenacious, long-ruling dictator Antonio Salazar, created incentives for its poorest citizens to seek their fortunes in the colonies. They were given free passage on ships, lessons in husbandry, and seed money to begin new lives. And of course one of the great incentives was the promise of cheap workers, under the forced labor regime then in place that browbeat village Africans into plowing the fields and serving white farmers.
Akisha, during her first stint in Africa, was impressed that forty years earlier these Europeans had left their modern, native land to start a life in humble, distant Mozambique.
“It must have been a great adjustment to travel all that way from Portugal to Africa,” Akisha had said.
“Yes, in a way” was the response of a Portuguese man.
“So different!” Akisha said. “How did you manage?”
“It was easy, really,” the man said.
“How so?” Akisha asked.
“We came from a poor village in Portugal,” the man said. “In Mozambique we had electricity and running water for the first time in our lives.”
Over the following days I became a part-time teacher at the Instituto Superior de Ciências da Educação in Lubango. My students were Akisha’s English-language group, all of them teachers themselves, improving their skills, many of them intending to return to their own schools, or to use their proficiency in English to study abroad for a further degree — two of them wanted to study law elsewhere.
Nothing is more satisfying in travel than to land in a place and assume an occupation, even a temporary one, as a teacher; to cease being a voyeur and have a purpose and a routine, especially one that involved interacting with intelligent students. I had once been a contented teacher in Africa, so I happily slipped into the role and was comforted with a sense of belonging.
“Many of them want to write stories and poems,” Akisha told me.
Without frankly discouraging them from imaginative writing, I extolled the importance of being an eyewitness, of dealing with verifiable facts and the recent visitable past. I mentioned that foreign journalists seldom came to Angola (but did not mention the reason: the Angolan government hated foreign journalists). A number of the students were older — in their thirties. Some of them had seen war. The town of Lubango had changed hands severa
l times during the civil war, so they had experienced occupation and divided loyalties and the hardships of sieges — shelling, shortages, survival, death, the intrusion of soldiers into their lives. And as a result they had known suspense and uncertainty and fear. This was something to write about.
I suggested structures, I told them stories, and I encouraged them to tell me stories, all of them related to the theme of the eyewitness: something they had seen and experienced, perhaps a vivid childhood memory. And so we talked about early memories, to practice English and to rehearse the stories.
“My mother wanted me to go to school,” Miguel said. “She talked about it all the time, and after a while I was eager to go to school. I had no idea what was in store for me.” He described his apprehension — his mother’s urging, his father’s passivity, his utter ignorance of what school entailed. And then came the day for school, which was a long walk from his village in a remote part of Huíla province. “I sat there in the classroom,” he said, the memory of it making him falter a bit, “and I realized I was trapped. I couldn’t go home. I was afraid. I was captive there.”
“I was with my friends some distance outside my village, walking along a path,” Gomes said, standing and gesturing with his expressive hands. “We were about ten or eleven. We saw a woman approaching us. She rushed to us and said, ‘A house is burning in the village. You must do something!’ ”
The small boys asked what they should do. “First, take off your shoes,” she said. “And please accept this money.” She gave them each a few kwanzas. They were dazzled to have the money, even though it was a pittance. “Now go to the village and help put out the fire.” Taking her for a witch with special powers, they hurried to the village, but found there was no fire. When they returned to look for the woman, they discovered she’d made off with their shoes.
“My earliest memory goes back a long way,” a woman, Dinorah, said in a solemn voice. “I was two years old and lying in my mother’s arms. She held me tight, and I knew she was upset about something, but I didn’t know what. She whispered to me, ‘Kiss your father.’ But I didn’t know where he was. She led me to him and I saw his face. I thought he was sleeping. I kissed him.” She paused for dramatic effect. “He was dead, lying in a coffin.”
