The Last Train to Zona Verde

by Paul Theroux

  “It took about two months to travel from the coast to Humpata,” Rui said, meaning a journey by ox cart. “But it was a good place to settle — the Portuguese there called themselves ‘the white tribe of Angola.’ ”

  Rui ran through the rest of his pedigree, not boastfully but rounding out the family portrait. His great-grandfather Captain António Barrada de Câmara had been military governor in 1900, and he died in a hunting accident. Rui’s grandfather Hortensio de Sousa, governor of the province, had not been forgotten; a bridge and a park in Benguela had been named for him. Hortensio had been very poor in Portugal, a law student, and then a lowly employee in a Lisbon bank in 1914. When the First World War started he became involved with a dubious man in Luanda.

  “The crooked man was Alves do Reyes,” Rui said. “He wanted to be like Cecil Rhodes but was more like Bernie Madoff in his scheme to make counterfeit notes. His business was good, of course. When Reyes was arrested for fraud, my grandfather became prosperous.”

  Though the province was in constant turmoil in the 1920s, Hortensio flourished in Benguela. He was one of the few men in the small white population who was not a criminal exile and who did not become a shopkeeper or a trader. As an administrator, he rose to be governor and had lived in that huge mansion I had seen on the heights of Catumbela.

  “It took a long time for the Portuguese to have continuity here,” Rui said. “It is a recorded fact that it was not until 1906 that the first Portuguese person was born in Angola, and survived. All the other babies died.”

  I said, “But very few women came to Angola.”

  “No women came!” Rui said. “That’s why I say that the greatest contribution Portugal made to Angola were the pombeiros.”

  The word was new to me.

  “They were the indigenous people who wore shoes,” Rui explained — agents, free men of color, all of them mulattos. “Pombeiros made the country. They were the ones who contacted the Europeans and facilitated the commerce. They supplied the slave traders with captives. They traveled into the interior. In some cases they traveled deep into Africa. Long before Livingstone made his famous trip to Angola, the Portuguese traveled on foot to Mozambique.”

  David Livingstone not only traversed the continent, walking 1,500 miles in six months, arriving in Luanda in 1854, but he also refused to abandon his men, the Makololos who’d been his porters and guides. His unstated reason was that he still needed the men as guides and porters, and so instead of accepting passage on a ship, he turned around and walked back, eastward, to the coast of Mozambique, describing and mapping and naming Victoria Falls on the way.

  Rui was hospitable, and as a builder, speculator, and Angolan citizen he was optimistic about the country’s future. Nonetheless, it was baffling to hear him extol the influence of the pombeiros. In his eagerness to explain one of the permanent institutions that the Portuguese had created in Angola, he settled on these mestiços, these pombeiros, who’d made their living as slave traders, commission agents, and middlemen, swapping cloth and beads, copper wire and rifles, for humans, who were rounded up, handed over to the slave master, then shipped out in chains.

  We talked a little about the word pombeiro. I wondered if it came from the Swahili word pombe, for alcoholic liquor; someone who sold pombe might be called a pombeiro. The Portuguese adopted many Swahili words, and there are Portuguese words in Swahili: meza for table, sapatu for slipper, and the word gereza — prison — is derived from igreja, church. Later in my trip, an Angolan of my acquaintance said that pombe meant “pigeon roost” — a euphemism for slave quarters. But Fernand Braudel writes, “The word pombeiro may come from pumbo, the busy market in what is now Stanley Pool” — today called Malebo Pool, on the Congo River. Whatever the origin of the name, Braudel added, pombeiros “exploited their African brothers even more cruelly than the whites had.”

  My black Angolan friend didn’t agree with Rui, and said that the mestiços were disliked by blacks and regarded as collaborators.

  Still, it was a novelty to be sitting in a pleasant house on a sunny day in Lobito, hearing the family history of a man whose ancestors had settled the country. Arrayed on tables and on shelves were African artifacts — household objects, masks, stools, fetishes, and baskets — created by the masters of Angolan carving, the Lunda-Chokwe and the Yaka people. Even the most mundane wooden implement, such as a stirring spoon or a headrest or a pestle, was finely made, chip-carved and ornamented, and Rui handled them with a connoisseurship that suggested inner knowledge. There was no pretense to this Angolan-born white man, who considered himself a member of the white tribe. He was full of plans, too, for business deals and local opportunities. He was an optimist, he said. The country had a great future and he saw himself sharing in the coming prosperity.

  The conversation came to a sudden halt, though, when Rui’s cell phone rang, and he raised his hand to me and showed his palm in a wait-just-a-minute gesture.

  Then he began speaking efficiently and rapidly, and the voice on the other end was a near-hysterical weeping, easily audible, though I was six feet from the phone.

  “Filipa,” Rui said, trying to interrupt. “Filipa … Filipa … Calma, por favor, ouça, Filipa …”

  He soothed the disturbed voice, spoke a little more, and hung up. Then he said, “That was my daughter. She has just had a bad automobile accident on the road from Luanda. I think she’s all right, but she is very upset and her car is destroyed. They happen very frequently on that road — terrible car crashes. I must go to her now. You will excuse me?”

  On the Restinga in Lobito, at an outdoor seaside café, I was given a celebratory meal, because I would be leaving in a few days for Luanda. The others at the table were American expatriates, with whom I had spent the day.

  It was a beautiful evening, festive with strolling lovers holding hands, diners, Angolan families, youths on cell phones or tapping out text messages, all well dressed, their big cars and SUVs parked nearby.

  At our table we were talking about a man we’d met, Jim, a Texan, who worked for Exxon Mobil in the design and manufacture of steel platform legs for offshore oil rigs.

  “There’s more oil in Cabinda than in Nigeria,” he’d said.

  Jim did nothing but work—ninety days straight was normal, and on his few days off he drank beer. His wife and six children were in Houston. For safety reasons, his company did not allow him to travel after dark even the short distance to Benguela, and he was accompanied by bodyguards whenever he went out in the evening in Lobito. An odd working life, but he’d seen odd places before — “oil countries are always the weirdest” — Algeria, Pakistan, the Persian Gulf states. Jim didn’t complain. This was one of the wealthiest countries he’d ever been in, though not many Angolans did the work; his employees were British, Filipino, and Bangladeshi. He’d be leaving Angola soon. Jim said without much interest that he had never traveled the sixteen miles from Lobito to its sister city of Benguela.

  “The oil people are subjected to strict travel rules,” one of my expatriate friends said. “They can’t cross the Catumbela Bridge after dark.”

  We had pizza, drank beer, and talked about how pleasant this meal was, how like a café on the Mediterranean, a light breeze from the ocean, the laughter, the fragrance of the food, the lovers, the drinkers.

  And that was when I saw the children sidling near. At first I thought they were polishing the luxury cars — one was flicking a rag at a new Mercedes parked five feet away. But it was a ruse: the boy with the rag seemed to be busying himself so that he could have a plausible reason to approach us.

  He was about nine or ten, extremely thin, barefoot, in a torn T-shirt and ragged trousers. He had the large bright eyes of someone either very sick or very hungry. The boy inched forward as we finished the meal, a third of a pizza still remaining on one plate, an unfinished crêpe on another.

  The boy remained watching, the others behind him, all of them looking hopeful. Then the boy dared the question in a whisper, a wo
rd that sounded like termina, easily translated, and the woman who spoke Portuguese said we were indeed finished, and pushed the plates of scraps nearer to him.

  He took the food from the plates into his skinny fingers and walked a few feet, and there, in the happiest and wealthiest enclave I had seen so far in Angola — the stylish Restinga — I saw the boy wolf down the food and then stumble away, and in this desperate expression of hunger, gasping from the effort of it.

  Rui’s daughter Filipa survived the crash. Rui was not so lucky. Nine months later, alone in his house — his wife and children were on vacation in Portugal — he was found by his maid, murdered in his bed, “his head smashed to pieces,” it was reported in Correio da Manhã. “A trail of blood.” There was no sign of forced entry, “which leads police to believe that the entrepreneur had opened the door to acquaintances.” The police also speculated that the motive might have been robbery. “It was a house with many valuables but all that could be said for sure to be missing were a television, a computer, and a mobile phone.”

  “My father had no enemies,” his son Ricardo told the newspaper Sol. “He will be buried here in Lobito. He was born here, like his father and grandfather. This is his land and where he wanted to be.”

  The person who had introduced me to Rui told me one gruesome detail that resonated. “He was bludgeoned to death by a big stick, the kind used to pound corn to flour — it was in his house.” The stick was one of the finely made, heavy village pestles he had shown me in his collection of African artifacts, which he had held lovingly, as though they were family heirlooms.

  15

  Luanda: The Improvised City

  ROLLING NORTH ALONG the coast, past the twisted wrecks of car crashes (I stopped counting at forty), and churning through towns clogged with yellow sludge washed from the sand cliffs by the rains, the roadside itself a tidemark brimming with litter, I seemed to be traveling into greater misery. Not my misery — as a flitting bird of passage, I had nothing to complain about — but the misery of Africa, the awful, poisoned, populous Africa; the Africa of cheated, despised, unaccommodated people; of seemingly unfixable blight: so hideous, really, it is unrecognizable as Africa at all. But it is, of course — the new Africa.

  Angolans lived among garbage heaps — plastic bottles, soda cans, torn bags, broken chairs, dead dogs, rotting food, indefinable slop, their own scattered twists of excrement — and in one town a stack of dead cows, bloated from putrefaction, looking like a forgotten freightload of discarded Victorian furniture, with the sort of straight stiffened legs you see fixed to old uncomfortable chairs. This blight was not “darkness,” the demeaning African epithet, but a gleaming vacancy, the hollow of abandonment lit by the pitiless tropical sun, appalling in its naked detail. Nothing is sadder than squalor in daylight.

  Never mind, there is more squalor down the road in the next town, looking exactly the same, yet in spite of its familiarity just as frightening. The point beyond which you cannot find any more words for the squalor is the point at which you think: Why go any farther? It is like the futile feeling of describing a vastation, the ultimate ruination, a bomb crater, an earthquake, a war, or a massacre: your sigh echoes the despair you’ve just witnessed. Some of the South African townships I’d seen inspired this feeling and perhaps could have prepared me for what I was seeing now. But a nightmare does not prepare you for the next one. Each new nightmare is singular in its own ghastly way. And so it is with African cities.

  For some weeks now I had been thinking that, in the overcrowded cities of Africa, I learned nothing except that people who had come to those places endured the dirt and discomfort because they were buoyed by their hopes of leaving and felt safer in the dense anonymity of a slum. A sense of temporariness made the squalor bearable. It was the same rationale that travelers had in the bus stations, which were merely filthy, oil-soaked parking lots: “Yes, dreadful. But, senhor, a bus will come to take us away!” No one conceived of living for any length of time in an African slum — without light or water it wasn’t possible — only of going away, and the ultimate wish was to be delivered to another, less pestilential country.

  “Where do you want to go?” I always asked the students.

  “Away from here” was the inevitable answer.

  An Angolan was not someone working, but someone waiting. You couldn’t blame them for wishing to flee, though some were remarkably conceited in one respect. When Angolan students were awarded a scholarship to study in the United States, or were offered a three-month, get-acquainted, five-city tour there, they often insisted on flying first class — so I was assured by the officials who processed these travel grants. And when the demand for a first-class ticket was turned down (for even the American ambassador flew economy), the student applied to the Angolan government for an upgrade, which was routinely approved. After all, the Angolans in power traveled first class.

  When I confided to the few foreigners I met on the road that I found all this dreary and unpromising, they either disagreed with me or were noncommittal. Some said they had hopes. I felt they couldn’t bear to look hard, or perhaps were more idealistic than me. Or maybe they saw something I had missed. Some argued convincingly that Angolans had been brutalized by their past, or had seen much worse in their colonial history and in their wars — this part of the coast had been a chain of battlefields in the fight for Luanda. My own hopes were dwindling, and I thought the slow, wearisome trip might be making me delusional. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I expected too much.

  In that inquiring mood I met Kalunga Lima, an Angolan, younger than me, whose sentiments echoed my own — but he knew much more about the country than I did. In my relief, and in this spirit of agreement, he became my friend. He articulated what I felt.

  “Something is coming here, something I fear,” Kalunga said. “This is a country of young people, and very few of them have jobs. All were born after Dos Santos took power. They don’t know any other government. They don’t know their history. They have no idea of what happened in the war.”

  He glanced down at me writing this in my notebook. I said, “Can I quote you?”

  “Someone has to say it.” He went on talking. “These young people will show their anger — at prices, at corruption, at injustices. This is an intensely corrupt country. Everyone in power gets a commission.”

  I asked him for examples.

  “You can’t get a diploma or a certificate at any school without bribing or paying off the teachers. Everyone in the government takes bribes. The whole country is based on bribery. It will end badly.”

  He was talking fast. I was still writing, and looked up for more.

  “I think the tide will turn,” he said. “Look at all these idle youths. They sit around in the slums, but they see what’s happening. The government lets the Chinese put up their buildings. They let the foreign oil workers earn their income and pay their bills. These youths are not involved. All they do is watch from the musseques” — the slums. “They are getting angrier.”

  “Yes?”

  “Paul, listen. The infant mortality rate here is among the highest in Africa.* The roads are terrible, the housing is awful, the schools are useless. People don’t have water. And it’s a government of multimillionaires. Profits from oil alone are forty billion dollars a year!”

  Kalunga said everything that was on my mind, and was thoughtful and eloquent. In his indignation he had the authority that came of living and working in the country. He shrugged when I pointed out a nearby group of tough-looking policemen, and said that maybe they’d arrest him for sedition, or spreading alarm and despondency.

  “Those cops?” We were at a sidewalk café. It was nine at night and the traffic was heavy; the street, Rua da Missão, was one of the city’s busiest. “They’re waiting to stop a car so they can get a bribe. They call it a gaseosa. ‘Give me a soda.’ ”

  Within five minutes they had pulled over a van and were huddled with the driver, demanding the payoff Kalunga had predicted.<
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  An Angolan in his mid-forties, Kalunga was heavyset, balding, and physically powerful. He had an intense gaze and the sort of face that seemed lit from within, suggesting high intelligence. He was a scuba diver, a professional photographer, and a filmmaker. He usually rode a big Kawasaki motorcycle. One of the first things he told me was that he often traveled on this bike from Luanda to Lubango, stopping only for food and fuel — almost six hundred miles on bad roads and bush tracks. He was unlike anyone I had met in Angola, and I could not remember having encountered an African of his insight and objectivity, who spoke so freely and with such candor.

  That was in Luanda, a few days after I had arrived from the road. The trip north from Benguela had started at five on a dark morning, at the bus station, as usual a bleak oily field. As we swung north toward Lobito, I noticed things I’d missed before: a huge new (Chinese-built) soccer stadium, a vanity project for a Pan-African tournament and a reminder of how many schools could have been built or improved with the money; a new (Chinese-built) airport, not yet opened; a new (Chinese-built) bridge over the Catumbela River; and the deepening of Lobito’s port, Chinese workers doing the dredging.

  Farther on, the garbage and the sight of wrecked lives, people existing like castaways at Xilip, Cangulo, Sumbe, and Porto Amboim: the slum dwellers crowded and immobile like their own trash heaps. Why did they fling away all this garbage, fouling the very places they lived? Between the towns, the river valleys were green, still wooded, and most of the beaches empty, glittering scoops of looping bays and headlands, no fishing boats onshore, no boats at all, just the running carpet of yellow sand next to the glare of water.

  The main road was narrow but straight and paved, and this symmetry created a greater danger than rutted, potholed gravel because it emboldened drivers to speed. The consequences littered the roadside — burned-out trucks, minivans, and crashed cars the whole way to Luanda. One of the most recent wrecks, I now knew, belonged to Rui’s daughter, Filipa.