by Paul Theroux
Wandering the city one day, I happened upon a church built in 1748 and dedicated to the city’s patron saint, São Filipe de Benguela. It was a weekday, but even so, a dozen people were earnestly praying inside, a group of women near the altar loudly declaiming a service together as a sort of chorus. The church was cool, shadowy, a refuge from the heat and noise and dust, and the eight praying women — black, white, brown — seemed to assert a continuity of belief that had survived the centuries, because in addition to their search for rubber and copper and gold and slaves, the Portuguese had also wanted to find souls to convert. Along with fattening them, the colonizers ritually baptized every slave and forced laborer in kneeling groups before being chained and rowed out to the ships.
Another place I saw soon after I got to Benguela was an area in the southern part of town where Chinese developers and laborers were putting up six big, ugly multistory buildings, some of them pale pink, others canary yellow, still others pastel blue. Chinese industry, Chinese people, Chinese effort, Chinese paint, and Chinese investment are evident everywhere in the port cities of Benguela and Lobito.
The first Chinese workers to arrive in Angola were criminals, prisoners of the Chinese justice system — thieves, rapists, dissidents, deserters, and worse, an echo of the earliest immigration from Portugal. Characters in Yaka speak of being exiled to Angola to work off ten-year sentences. The first workers the Chinese sent were convicts shipped in chains, to work off their sentences in forced labor. Angola, having begun as a penal colony of the Portuguese, became just recently a penal colony for the Chinese. These Chinese convicts were the labor force for China-Angola development projects — the ugly oversized pastel buildings, the coastal roads, the dredging of the deep-water port of Lobito — and after they had served their sentences, the agreement was that they would remain in Angola. Presumably, like the Portuguese degredados, they would elevate themselves to the bourgeoisie or a higher class of parvenu.
Possibly, again like the Portuguese convicts, the Chinese would become the loudest racists, and for the same reason. “The inferiority complex of the uneducated criminal settler population contributed to a virulent form of white racism among the Portuguese, which affected all classes from top to bottom,” the political historian Lawrence Henderson wrote of the early settlers. The Portuguese convicts became the most brutal employers and the laziest farmers, and a sizable number turned furiously respectable, in the way atoning whores become sermonizing and pitiless nuns.
After the first wave of Chinese convicts (“We started seeing them around 2006,” a man in Luanda was later to tell me), more shiploads of semiskilled Chinese workers arrived. As with the early Portuguese convicts, they were all men. Then, a few years later, women were allowed to work in Angola, like Wang Lin and Mei, whom I had met in Lubango. Now there were Chinese marriages, Chinese children with Angolan nationality, Chinese shopkeepers, and Chinese stonemasons, plumbers, carpenters, and heavy-machinery operators up and down the country.
How many Chinese were there in Benguela and Lobito? Everyone I spoke to had a different figure, but always a high one. One estimate — wrong, it turned out — was a quarter of a million. I put these high figures down to fear. As in Namibia, Chinese businessmen were at the low end of the construction industry — for example, manufacturing cinderblocks to sell to Africans to make slum houses.
One of the newest buildings I saw in Benguela was the railway station, a fenced-off, flat-roofed, one-story building; it had been designed and put up by the Chinese in 2011 to replace the old bombed-out one. The Benguela Railway, Caminho de Ferro de Benguela, had been formed over a century ago to create an 835-mile link to the town of Luau, at the eastern edge of Angola, near the Congo border and the copper mines in Congolese Katanga. An Englishman, Robert Williams (after whom a rural station is named), had been the moving force behind the railway, a concession granted by the Portuguese. Work on the tracks began in 1903, at a time when there were fewer than 10,000 whites in the whole of Angola, most of them degredados — convicts, deserters, dissidents. But the railway was not in full operation until 1928, when the Portuguese boasted that it was a money-earning transcontinental line, taking Congolese minerals to the Atlantic coast and part of the overland route to Mozambique, on the other side of Africa.
Over the years, the Benguela Railway became a target for saboteurs, until it was totally destroyed during the long civil war. One challenge to rebuilding was that land mines had been laid up and down the line. Over a recent ten-year period, 2,000 mines had been found in the rail corridor and removed by a British charity called the HALO Trust. (In all, 68,000 mines in Angola have been cleared by this gallant organization, which is still uncovering land mines in the country.) The Chinese, loaning $300 million to the Angolan government and providing both skilled and convict labor, helped with some of the mine removal, relaid the track, put up new stations, and rebuilt the infrastructure as far inland as Huambo, with the intention of reaching the Congo border.
The word was that the line was working. But the new, glass-fronted Benguela station was shut, and no one knew when it would open. No schedule was posted, nor did anyone know when the next train to Huambo would be leaving.
“What’s Huambo like?” I asked.
“It’s like Lubango, but not as nice.”
I have been known for saying that I never saw a train without wishing to board it. I could have tried harder to find information about the Benguela line, and I might have managed to buy a ticket to Huambo. But having just arrived from the central plateau, where some of the same towns were linked by the line, I had an intimation of the trip. I already knew the railway towns of Catengue and Binga, and I had a pretty good idea of what Huambo would be like. So — almost unknown in my experience — I shocked myself by saying, “I don’t think I’ll take that train.”
“I thought you’d jump at it,” the American woman who’d brought me there said.
“I’m not jumping.”
“I’ve heard you love trains.”
Yes — what happened? Why was this trip going flat? Was it because I always had to fight for a seat, and kept seeing the same dreary sights, the same bad roads, the same sorry market women, the same slums? In Africa every rural village is different, but every city is the same, and a perfect fright.
The American woman was Nancy Gottlieb. She had lived in Angola, mostly in Benguela, off and on for seventeen years, and she swore that the city was improving. One of her several projects was running an English-language school. I taught a few classes for her and also gave classes at the Instituto Superior de Ciências da Educação in the center of town.
The institute’s name was grand, and the students and teachers were attentive. They spoke English fairly well — English was their subject, and half of them were employed as teachers in schools in and around Benguela. They were fond of books, they said, but when I pressed them, none could tell me the difference between fiction and nonfiction; a novel, a history book, a memoir of family life, a short story about an atrocity, an animal fable — they were all pretty much the same (“stories”). This slender grasp of definition and form seemed something of a handicap in teachers of literature, like a chef having no sense of smell.
“Books are so expensive,” Sylvia volunteered when I urged them to read a bit more. Sylvia was stylishly dressed and a college teacher. True, everything was expensive in Angola except bananas, but the people were scholars. The rest of the class agreed: books were unaffordable.
“What do you read?” I asked.
They named some decades-old Nigerian paperbacks they’d been given. They were unfamiliar with the Angolan novelists I’d been reading.
Domingo said, “Can you give us some of the books you wrote?”
“I didn’t bring any with me,” I said. “Why don’t you ask the Ministry of Education, or one of your billionaires!”
My lessons were mainly an effort to encourage them to write about events they had witnessed, economic changes, the progress of a weddin
g or a funeral, the novelty of Chinese settlers, even (I delicately suggested) political repression and intimidation — because the government reacted violently to any rallies, demonstrations, or protests, beating and arresting people, deploying dog squads and water cannons.
The great irony, if not outright farce, of human rights in Angola was that one of the first prisoners of conscience selected by Amnesty International, at its founding in 1961, was Dr. Agostinho Neto, who was named “political prisoner of the year” because he’d been locked up by the Portuguese. After he was released from prison, Neto went on to become the first president of Angola, and soon he began jailing his opponents, who themselves became prisoners of conscience. So Amnesty was in the paradoxical position of appealing for justice for the victims of the very man they had successfully championed. I mentioned this to the students at the institute, who weren’t impressed, responding blandly and probably with some truth that worse things happened in Angola.
After I got to know them better, I asked them where they had been in their country. Apart from visits to Luanda and Lubango, they had not traveled much, and none had been south of Lubango. They had no desire to see Angola’s rural areas, nor any African country. Where in the world did they wish to go, I asked. Like the students in Lubango, they were unanimous in choosing the United States. They were specific about places — New York, Chicago, Florida, California. On the rare days when the Internet worked in Benguela, these students trawled it for images of America. They were certain about what they’d find there.
“And Texas,” Francisco said.
“Why Texas?”
“Because everything is bigger in Texas.” This caused laughter, but after class, when I asked him if he was serious, Francisco said confidentially, as though giving me a travel tip, “Austin, Texas, is the best place for parties. Lots of bars, lots of music and women. You can have fun there.”
“Can’t you have fun in Benguela?”
“Not that kind of fun.”
Money was on their minds. Money was on mine, too, because only cash, preferably U.S. dollars, was acceptable in Angola. No hotel or restaurant would accept a credit card. Not having enough cash was not an excuse — an ATM machine would be pointed out. “Use that.” And it was in Benguela that I used my card with the highest credit limit and found that it was repeatedly turned down. This was the card that had been hacked in Namibia, my identity stolen. The card was unusable, so I depended on the dwindling stock of dollars in my bag. I had not known about the credit card fraud; I assumed that there was something wrong with the Angolan ATM machines, since there was so much wrong with everything else in Angola.
My money worry added to the melancholy of Benguela, the complacencies and longueurs of hot afternoons, stifling even next to the ocean, the turbid greeny-brown sea and the yellowish froth from its short breaking chop, the ruined pier to which the fattened and baptized slaves had been marched before being taken out to the slave ships.
Added to this was news of unrest in the Congo and the continuing Boko Haram massacres in Nigeria — the killings by fanatical Muslims of anyone who looked Christian or Westernized or foreign. I had thought I might head that way. But hundreds of Nigerians had been killed in the north of their country, and every week brought another bloody attack.
I was restless, and that made me curious about Nancy Gottlieb, who had stayed in Benguela and ran the English school. I asked her bluntly how it was that she had landed here. She said she had a degree in business, but had become disenchanted with the companies she’d worked for in the States. She had learned of a Danish charitable organization with a “people-to-people” philosophy. She joined it and was sent to Benguela in 1994 to help run a school. In the following years she had lived through a rough period; for instance, in 2001 the school was attacked and some of the students were kidnapped by anti-government soldiers. The uncertainty, deprivation, and occasional violence lasted until the end of the war.
I asked what kept her — a slight, single woman — for so long in a provincial town in Angola. She said that after spending time in India doing Vipassana meditation, she’d had an insight. “I sort of said to myself, ‘If I don’t find the man qualified to be the father of my children, I think I would rather spend my time helping children in Africa.’ You know, a kind of thought that you just have and keep to yourself, but you know that you had it.”
And after seventeen years she still found her life here rewarding, and felt safer than in many cities she’d known in the States.
“Everyone I meet has problems that are so much bigger than mine,” she said. “And yet for the most part they’re almost always happy, laughing, energetic, smiling.”
I was told there was a man in Lobito whom I should meet. Lobito was only sixteen miles up the coast, and on the way I stopped at a ruined fort on a high mound outside the town of Catumbela, just above its namesake river. Nearby, but at a greater height, on a hilltop, the luxury Riomar Hotel was being finished by Chinese laborers — one of the many projects of the president’s billionaire daughter, Isabel. The mansion of the governor of Benguela — it, too, looked like a hotel — was also a feature of the hilltop.
The old fort, on the flat-topped Catumbela mound of yellow clay, had dense stone walls, with interior cells and apartments, square and squat, commanding a view of the surrounding countryside. The mansion and the hotel were exceptional. All the other dwellings along the river were slum huts or shanties.
A notice on the fort gave its name as Reducto de São Pedro, reducto indicating a redoubt or a stronghold. The text in Portuguese ran as follows: “This [fort] was made at the cost of the inhabitants of Benguela, in honor of the municipal administration [because of] the continual insults made to the white people by the indigenous people of the district” — os continuous insultos feitos aos brancos pelos indigenas deste districto. “First stone placed on 5 October 1846.”
It was quite an indictment. Because of your threats and insults, we had to build and pay for this fort. Look what you made us do!
I discovered afterward that in 1836 a settlement of free whites had been founded nearby on the river, but it had failed. Still, a handful of Portuguese remained, and punished the upstart locals. Later in the 1800s, a trader named António da Silva Porto lived on the river near here. He was a sertanejo, or backwoodsman, a trader who circulated from the coast to the interior. Polygamous, with a number of African wives and many mestiço children, and with an uncertain business, Silva Porto was a Portuguese Mr. Kurtz, but jollier, less successful, and, judging from one of his diary entries, realistic about his residence in Angola. Porto wrote, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed are king. As poor as I am now, if I retired to Portugal today, I would amount to nothing; on the other hand, I am who I am around here as long as I possess one piece of trade cloth.”
That neatly sums up the entire Portuguese adventure in Angola — hopeless, shiftless, horny Europeans exploiting Africans who they believed to be more hopeless and more shiftless. And it was a legacy, the corrupt Angolan president, Eduardo dos Santos, still in power after thirty-two years, continuing to exploit the people and accusing his critics of spreading confusão — chaos.
Lobito, just across the Catumbela River and up the road, was the brightest place I had seen so far in Angola — a deep-water port that was being improved by the Chinese, a large oil depot, a town center that was only mildly vandalized, and an older restored hotel, the Terminus, which had once been connected to the Benguela Railway.
The hotel and this somewhat salubrious part of Lobito was on a narrow spit of land called the Restinga, a Portuguese word for sandbar, which it much resembled. This finger-shaped peninsula protruding from Lobito was an upscale ghetto, with beaches on both sides, lined with palm trees and grand villas, modest bungalows and two-story apartment houses. A few of these buildings dated from the 1920s, but most of them had been put up in the 1950s, the time when Portuguese immigration to the colony had been encouraged with generous subsidies. And you could see that
on this piece of land a colono might feel safe, since it gave the impression of being an offshore island.
The person I’d come to see was a tall, handsome man of about sixty with the sonorous name of Rui da Câmara e Sousa. It turned out that he had read some of my books and was happy to sit and tell me about his distinguished family. He was a descendant of a well-known governor of Benguela, and was himself a college professor and a real estate entrepreneur. His villa, built in 1954, was a pretty place, but as with all the homes on the Restinga, there was a continual clamor of shouts and music from boom boxes of the people picnicking on the beach just across the narrow road, some of them swimming, others eating or dancing under the palms and ironwood trees, many of them screaming at each other. Rui said he was used to it. He’d been born in Angola.
His earliest ancestors, having sailed from Madeira to Moçâmedes, down the coast, had been pioneers on the Huíla Plateau — in Sá da Bandeira, still fresh in my mind as Lubango — and Humpata. When I had hiked around Humpata one day, and seen the Boer graves from the 1920s, I had been struck by how hilly, cool, and fertile the land had been, how like a farming community in Portugal, the very qualities that had attracted the Boers and the Portuguese. Madeira at the time was poverty-stricken, like many of the places (the province of Bragança in Portugal, the Azores) from which Portuguese peasants emigrated. In Angola these people were largely subsistence farmers, most of whom cultivated sweet potatoes.
