by Paul Theroux
Like the Athenians, the Angolans of the musseque acted as if doomsday was upon them: a shrieking, chaotic, reckless society on the brink of extinction. Not people in despair, but people dancing — doing the kiduru and the kizomba, as Kalunga explained of the pirouetting girls at the shantytown, and sometimes breaking into a jig as they walked. The city was thick with prostitutes, many of them refugees from the Congo, snatching at men at the Pub Royal and the Zanzibar. Most people were giggling crazily because they knew their number was up. That was how Angolan laughter sounded to me — insane and chattering and agonic, like an amplified death rattle. With disaster or death hanging over them, like the Athenians, “they thought to enjoy some little part of their lives.”
Kalunga climbed on his motorcycle, but he didn’t start it. He sat and stared at the city and said, “This is what the world will look like when it ends.”
Two weeks later, Kalunga Lima died of a heart attack at his home in Lubango.
He had been scuba diving off Angola’s southern coast a few days before his death, and that may have caused it, an embolism produced by a hyperbaric event. He had been working on a documentary about the coastal waters for Angola’s national exhibit at Expo 2012 in Korea.
By then I had withdrawn from overpriced Luanda, and, procrastinating, I began to reconsider my onward journey.
17
What Am I Doing Here?
ALL ITS LAMPS BLAZING, its windows alight, its larval contours illuminated, the last train to Malanje had a glowworm’s gleam, trembling in the dusty half-dark and heat of Luanda’s Viana station, when Kalunga Lima had gestured to it and said, “Are you sure you want to do this?”
He was teasing, because since I’d met him he had pegged me as a procrastinator. Normally I am anything but: a leap in the dark is my usual mode of travel, and by the time I met him I had been on the road for many weeks. He was the procrastinator, in my opinion, an Angolan and longtime resident of Luanda who’d moved with his family to the provinces. Angola was doomed, he said, because of the few cheating the many. Kalunga had relocated to distant Lubango, the easier to escape the country by the simpler southern route when the chaos he expected arrived. And it occurred to me that many people shared his fears, that the slums of Luanda, like many in African cities I’d seen, were no more than transit camps for people wishing to flee.
My hesitation was much more of a reversal than he knew. I was the man bewitched by the Chattanooga Choo Choo and the Patagonian Express and the Trans-Siberian, who had written, “Ever since childhood, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it” — yet here was the brand-new Chinese-made train, lit up, on a recently restored line that could bear me in relative comfort east on a safari for 265 miles into zona verde — the green zone of Angola’s bush, the site of the last few wild animals in the country and of the sort of village life that always seemed a consolation. My lifelong idea of supreme happiness was being a passenger on a train rattling through the night to a distant place unknown to me.
But I thought, Not this time. I had no desire to board the train. And, thinking it, I was joyous — a great relief to conclude that this was the end of my trip. No more. The same joy I had always felt on setting off on a long trip now visited me on this decision not to go any farther. Not here, not now.
It was then that Kalunga had taken me to the desperate musseque beyond Viana and, frowning at the loud music and squinting at the scuffling crowds and the shacks — the poverty, the twitching excitement bordering on frenzy, the hopelessness of it — had uttered the devastating pronouncement that stayed with me: “This is what the world will look like when it ends.”
Struck by this doomsday vision, and saddened by his own doom so soon after that, I was left to ponder my next move. I knew that Malanje, the last stop on the railway line, was a dead end: no road led north from there. I’d have to return to hateful Luanda and take the coast road to a place called N’zeto. From the map I could not discern any onward road. I probably could not travel north at all except by air, and even if I spent weeks struggling by back roads to the border, my prize would be the Congolese river town of Matadi, a well-known hellhole. Then I would board a bus to Kinshasa, a rotting city much like Luanda — and rotting for the same reasons: a corrupt government rich on diamonds, gold, and mineral wealth, and on rarefied techniques of embezzlement and trade mispricing.
Rigged elections at this time had provoked rioting in Kinshasa’s streets and a fierce police presence. After that, Brazzaville, Pointe-Noire, and a transit of the squalid cities of the coast, because the Congolese interior was largely made up of no-go areas. Of course, I could put my head down and travel farther, but I knew what I would find: decaying cities, hungry crowds, predatory youths, and people abandoned by their governments, people who saw every foreigner as someone they could hit up for money, since it was apparent that only foreigners seemed to care about the welfare of Africans.
Because I was traveling overland, what lay before me was a grubby and unrewarding itinerary of West African cities — that is, West African shantytowns. No poverty on earth could match the poverty in an African shantytown, and no other place was so bereft of hope. In an African village, poverty was a relative term. I knew that from the humble villages I’d seen in Botswana and Namibia and the Angolan interior, places where people survived, as they always had, in a subsistence economy, growing what they needed, bartering extra food for what they couldn’t grow or buy, living in mud huts, using a slit-trench latrine, practicing slash-and-burn agriculture. It was a life of fetching and carrying and making do: walking an hour for water, washing in the river, scavenging for firewood, killing the occasional chicken, living hand to mouth — not flourishing but eking out an existence in meagerly productive routines.
This hard life in a rural area could not compare with the dog’s life in a shantytown, where gardening was impossible, water was scarce, and fuel — firewood or charcoal — usually unavailable; where there was no muddling through except by a menial job, casual labor, or whoring, or handouts, or crime. But, this being Angola, it was the rich, and only the rich, who appeared to me sluttish and criminal. In the bush there existed the possibility of renewal: a new season, a new crop, a new water source. This extreme rural poverty could be relieved by modes of survival, many of them traditional strategies. But in a city slum, survival was not guaranteed, traditions did not apply, and a cash economy made people peculiarly deprived and rapacious.
The thieving was a tendency that some Marxist economists forgave (Eric Hobsbawm for one, in his book Bandits), by explaining it as the reflex of wronged or oppressed peasants practicing “social banditry,” the politicized poor redressing inequality by stealing from the rich. My experience of credit card fraud in Namibia might have been construed as the act of a social bandit using high technology instead of a machete, but that did not make me feel any better. It left me nearly broke and somewhat demoralized.
Yet the loss of money was nothing compared to the loss of friends. Three people I had gotten to know pretty well, three men I had admired in their passion for Africa, had died — young Nathan violently crushed by an elephant, Kalunga way before his time from a heart attack, and Rui da Câmara, whose skull had been smashed by an intruder. The deaths of others in a time and a landscape you yourself inhabited cannot but remind you of your own mortality.
Travel, especially solitary travel, is a morbid business. “In traveling one is always accompanied by the retinue of Death or his batman,” Henry Miller writes in Remember to Remember. It is a passage well suited to a road trip through Africa. “The quiet village where the river flows so peacefully, the very spot where you choose to dream in, is usually the seat of ancient carnage. What stirs one to reverie is the blood that was spilled more copiously than wine … the historical recitative whistles through the whitened bones of somnolent ruins.”
During my last few long trips I often thought that I might die. I was not alone in that fear; it is the rational conjecture of most travelers I
know, especially the ones about my age. The fears of some of my traveling friends were justified: a number of them had died on the road or become terribly ill. “He died doing what he loved” is a sentiment that might console a survivor, but if the victim had been offered a choice beforehand, what would he or she have done? I sometimes imagined myself dismembered in a car crash in the bush. Often, in an overcrowded bus in Africa, I thought of nothing but death, and hating the trip I let out a ghastly laugh when I thought of anyone saying over my battered corpse, “He died doing what he loved.”
In Cape Town at the start of my journey—though I superstitiously avoided mentioning it to anyone — I had dreamed of ending it in Timbuktu. I was headed in that general direction. I had traced a provisional itinerary on my Africa map that led me northerly, zigzagging from Cape Town to Angola, and (somehow) from there, via the Congo and Gabon and Cameroon, through Nigeria and onward to the fabled city in Mali.
All maps are misleading, and Africa maps are more misleading than most. At one time they were alarming for the great empty areas labeled Cannibals, but these days they were inaccurate for the roads crisscrossing them. Many of the wide multicolored thoroughfares boldly shown on the map of Angola did not exist, and the H symbol designating a hotel was a fiction. It is well known that the Congo has very few usable roads; in spite of its wealth, it is a trackless country, and because of that an insecure one. Yet I had always held to the belief that with enough time you can go anywhere. You just travel slowly, picking your way along, taking detours, walking where necessary, bumming rides, living the stop-and-go life of a vagrant.
This method works in most places. It does not work in Africa — though it did once. The followers in the footsteps of H. M. Stanley through the Congo, of David Livingstone through Angola, and of Samuel Baker through Sudan quickly discover that the trip is impossible in the Africa of today. The hinterlands are now controlled by heavily armed warlords, mercenaries, rebel armies, hostile tribes, secessionists, and religious fanatics — hard-line Islamists (Boko Haram, Ansar Dine) or crazed Christians (the Lord’s Resistance Army). Tim Butcher, who in Blood River recounts trying to re-create Stanley’s overland trans-Africa trip, from east to west, ended up flying.
I could have flown, but what’s the point? You don’t see anything from thirty thousand feet. And now I had an inkling of what I would find — cities that were indistinguishable from one another in their squalor and decrepitude. In the broken unspeakable cities of sub-Saharan Africa, the poor — the millions, the majority — ignored by their governments, live a scavenging existence in nearly identical conditions, in shacks, amid a litter of Chinese-manufactured household junk — plastic basins and buckets — and wearing Chinese-made clothes. They might have a cell phone, but in most cases it is little more than a maddening toy. They all suffer from the same inadequacies — food shortages, no plumbing, no clinics, no schools, no security — and the same illnesses — cholera, malaria, TB, and HIV/AIDS. They wait without much hope for deliverance, if not transformation. Even small, sedate, house-proud Windhoek had Katutura and its squatter camps; lovely Cape Town had Langa, Lwandle, Gugs, and other townships, equally bleak.
Though I was discouraged by the obstacles and appalled by the deaths of Nathan, Kalunga, and Rui, I had clung to my secret dream of traveling onward from Angola and ending up in Timbuktu. But soon two events shattered that dream. A secessionist coup by a faction of low-level army officers in Mali, fueled by rants from Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, meant that Mali was divided into two countries. Timbuktu in the north (a region as large as France) was now a stronghold of Islamic indignation and threats. Foreign travelers were being kidnapped and held for ransom. One had been killed. In time, this power struggle might be sorted out, I was told, but at the moment the fabled city was closed to the outside world.
Nigeria posed a more serious problem, but also a north-south divide. The Muslim-dominated states in the north — directly on my route — were tormented by the Boko Haram movement. The name in the Hausa language means “Western education is sinful.” The group’s official name is Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad, which in Arabic means “People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.” In these northern states in Nigeria, ruled by Sharia law, the Boko Haram jihadis attacked Christians, Christian churches, non-Islamic schools, and just about anyone wearing Western clothes — trouser-wearing Nigerians and foreigners too.
I first heard about this hostile organization during my stay in Lubango, and had made notes to myself on its looming threat on the Day of the Dead, when I began seriously to wonder whether my trip was worth the trouble. Ever since I’d crossed the Angolan border, the question “What am I doing here?” had flashed in my mind. It was not a lament; it was a puzzled inquiry — most thoughtful people on earth ask themselves this question on a regular basis.* I had kept going, as this narrative shows, hoping for an answer. But around the time I was making my decision to put my head down and take the road north, Boko Haram became active again.
A tortuously argued op-ed in the New York Times by the historian and Africanist Jean Herskovits, “In Nigeria, Boko Haram Is Not the Problem,” explained that Boko Haram was “a peaceful Islamic splinter group” that had been exploited “for electoral purposes.” Video footage of the violent death in Nigerian police custody in 2009 of a Muslim cleric had radicalized the movement, though Herskovits pointed out that the “root cause of violence and anger in both the north and south of Nigeria is endemic poverty and hopelessness.”
She warned that, not mullahs and zealots, but criminal syndicates claiming to represent Boko Haram were terrorizing Christians, setting fire to their homes, and bombing hotels and markets, all to destabilize the country. We should not be too quick to label this Islamic terrorism, she wrote, or to hasten into “a rush to judgment that obscures Nigeria’s complex reality.” The complex reality was a narrow-minded president named Goodluck Jonathan, a southerner and a Christian, his corrupt politicians, and the Nigerian people, growing poorer and more numerous daily.
A rush to judgment was the last thing on my mind. But what about the reported violence? After I read the piece, which smacked of special pleading, I kept close track of Boko Haram outrages. Six days after the op-ed piece appeared, 20 people were killed by jihadis claiming to be Boko Haram–related. A week later, 174 murders, and two weeks after that a dozen more, all sectarian. Nigerian troops became involved, killing 20 Boko Haramists. And then, at weekly intervals for the next three months, there were suicide bombs, arson attacks on schools and churches, and targeted killings — the murder of Christians in Maiduguri and Jos. Thousands of deaths by now in the cities and on the bus routes of my proposed trip.
Professor Herskovits had argued for patience but perhaps had not anticipated the multiple massacres that followed her strangely mollifying piece. More recently, a number of scholars have warned the U.S. government against branding Boko Haram a terrorist organization because doing so would “internationalize the sect” and raise its profile, making it bolder. As a Nigerian terrorist group (or a collection of criminal gangs), the thinking went, it was dangerous only to Nigerians.
But, it seemed, dangerous to Western travelers too. The scholars’ line of reasoning (they wanted, among other things, to be in close touch with the Boko Haramists) seemed to me tendentious, self-serving, and unhelpful. If the root cause of the killings was not Islamic jihadism but “poverty and hopelessness,” there would be many more murders, because Nigeria was poor and hopeless. And for a traveler like me who had no choice but to pass overland through northern Nigeria, it hardly mattered whether I was threatened by a Western-hating jihadi or the armed members of a criminal syndicate, both of whom used the name Boko Haram.
Travelers often become celebrated for risking trips through dangerous places. I had taken risks in my time, and endured my own version of the anthropophagi, and the men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders. And so I was faced with the ruined Congolese cities and the fanat
icism of northern Nigeria. It struck me that if I proceeded on my way, it would have been a travel stunt, like riding a pogo stick through the desert. A daredevil effort, and to what end?
“Is it worth it?” Apsley Cherry-Garrard asks at the end of The Worst Journey in the World, in talking about the doomed polar trek by Robert Falcon Scott in the Antarctic. Is life worth risking for a feat, or losing for your country? To face a thing because it was a feat, and only a feat, was not very attractive to Scott; it had to contain an additional object — knowledge.
Traveling north through chaos — what would I find that I had not already learned? As an oil state, Nigeria much resembled Angola in its corruption and destitution. Lagos and Kinshasa were larger versions of Luanda. The rural areas on my route were blighted: idle youths, ailing villagers, beggars, rappers. The lessons I had learned so far were that an itinerary of urban squalor is unrewarding; travel is difficult, and sometimes impossible; a foreign traveler represents wealth, an opportunity for the thief or “social bandit”; and the repetition of squalor is ultimately so futile in its frightfulness as to be banal in the retelling. I imagined my onward journey to be no more than spirited slumming, the usual ordeal of rank smells and bad food, but without a redeeming feature, a toxic tour through the bowels of West Africa, along the Côte d’Ordure.
