The Last Train to Zona Verde

  How amazing after all that chaos and death to find, in the persistence of memory, this enduring ceremony with its particular names and purpose. A girl’s initiation into womanhood was common all over sub-Saharan Africa. In Malawi, the ceremony for girls who had experienced their first menstruation (and thus were regarded as ready for childbearing) was called Ndakula (“I have grown up”) and included a course of sexual instruction — how to please your man. As for Kenya, I was walking with a Masai man in the Masai Mara Reserve one September a few years ago, near the hot springs settlement in the Loita Hills called Maji Moto, and we came across a group of young girls out fetching water. They whooped when they saw us. One of them came boldly forward, laughing; she wore an ornate headpiece, partly a coronet that had a fringe of white beads that jiggled against her forehead. I remarked on this to the Masai spearman who was guiding me, and he told me that this headpiece advertised the fact that she had been emuratare — circumcised, he explained — the word was the same for both males and females. He said that the other girls with her were children, but that she was a woman. “She can be married now.” He became indignant when I questioned the cutting, the purpose of which was to eliminate a woman’s sexual pleasure.

  But clitoridectomy, also known as female genital mutilation, widespread among the Masai and many other African peoples, was not a feature of the Kwanyama initiation ceremony in the nearby village. The practitioners of genital mutilation nearest to this settlement were the Himba people, who straddled the Angola-Namibia border, a hundred miles southwest of where we were squatting.

  Gilberto was still talking to the old woman, and was so engrossed that he had stopped translating into Italian so I could follow it. I sat and made another small fire, trying to kill the germs on the piece of chicken, then I ate it slowly. Afterward I joined Gilberto and the old woman again. When I interrupted, Gilberto smiled and, seeming to remark on what the woman had been telling him, said, “Very interesting!”

  Hardly eight o’clock and the day was already hot, and the sunbaked soil yielded a strong smell of decay. Camillo was yawning. He lifted the front of his shirt and wiped the sweat from his face, then he nodded at me, indicating hello. The red Land Cruiser sat immobilized in the center of the compound, dusty footprints on its doors. It was now part of the scene, the wrecked vehicle that seemed a feature of every Angolan settlement. I had no idea why it wouldn’t start, but I did not notice any urgency in the others to fix it.

  A few cars and motorcycles had begun to pass by on the road. I was tempted to hitchhike to Xangongo, and though on my map it seemed a sizable place, my maps had misled me many times before: a boldfaced name on the road map was often no more than a name. If I saw a bus, I could flag it down, and then I could continue on my way to Lubango.

  But I was in no particular hurry. I felt sure that the nearby village, the one of the drums and the dancing, would have some food. And I was curious to know more about the ceremony, apparently having finished its last ritual the night before. My phone didn’t work here; I had not bought an Angola SIM card or minutes. But even if it had worked, it would not have helped — it would only have reminded me of my predicament. Anyway, I knew that Camillo wanted to get his vehicle and the rest of the passengers to Lubango eventually; all I had to do was stay with him. These people needed to eat too, so something was bound to turn up.

  “I’m going for a walk,” I said to Gilberto. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

  “We won’t leave without you,” he said.

  Needing to rouse myself, and seeing that there was a small river marked on my map (and with a name: Techiua), I walked north along the road to see whether I could find it. My bag was in the car, but I carried my small briefcase with my passport, my important papers, and my money. If someone stole my bag with my clothes inside, I could easily buy more. Some children tagged along (“Senhor! Senhor!”), and when I asked them about the river, they ran ahead, urging me to follow.

  It wasn’t far, and it ran under a bridge on the road. Hardly a river, it was more like a stream, about as wide as a two-lane road. Several things interested me about it. The first was that women were washing clothes at the edge of it, slapping and twisting them and cramming them into plastic basins. Another was that some children were bathing in it. And midstream, a man was standing in a dugout canoe, poling it along, seemingly on a fishing trip. It was a scene from old Africa — not the Africa of rappers and cell phoners, but the idyllic-seeming Africa of rural serenity.

  But of course it was not idyllic at all. It was the Angola of hardship and penury. More than half the country’s population of twenty-three million lived below the poverty line, and I was looking at about thirty of those people. If there were any edible fish of a good size in the river, I would have been surprised, and the river itself was so muddy that laundering and bathing seemed pointless activities. The smell of the river, the pong of stagnation, penetrated the air and clouded the bridge with stink. Yet the sunlight was beautiful, scattering the surface of the water with gold flakes.

  “Senhor!” The children wanted me to go down the embankment with them. They saw that I was studying it closely, and when I got there they’d demand money for having guided me.

  But I’d seen enough — and the dugout canoe looked like the sort of tribal artifact you’d find in a museum. If anyone boasted of Angola’s oil-rich prosperity, I could say that I’d seen this: hungry, half-naked people on the stinking banks of a muddy river.

  The children stopped following me when I returned to the clearing, to the log where I’d been sitting to eat the chicken leg. Camillo had opened the hood of the Land Cruiser and was picking distastefully at greasy wires. Now that I had something to write, I took out my notebook. I continued my abbreviated narrative, picking up from where I’d left off, describing the hotel on the Namibian side of the border at Ondangwa and the business of the crossing, the harassment, and the shakedowns. As usually happens when I am writing, several hours passed without my noticing it, and while I worked some children approached me with baskets of bananas.

  I was still writing when Gilberto came over and said, “You have a camera?”

  Not a real camera, just the one in the iPhone I’d brought on the trip. But I could not access the Internet or make a call. I had the $20 phone I’d bought from Mr. Khan in Otjiwarongo, and had hopes of using it sometime when I’d fitted it with an Angola connection card. In the meantime, I occasionally played music that I’d stored on my iPhone. I seldom took pictures, but I often paged sadly through photos of my loved ones, feeling like an astronaut reminding himself of Earth.

  “Yes,” I said, and thought: Why do I so seldom take pictures? I was glad he had reminded me.

  Behind him, a man in a red soccer jersey and brown trousers, wearing stylish glasses, was looking at me. He was young, probably in his twenties, and would have seemed very tough except for his hopeful smile. An older, fleshier woman in a black dress, with tightly braided hair and a necklace of blue beads, stood near him, and she seemed to have an imploring expression too.

  I noted the way they were dressed because of what I saw next: three skinny girls, bare from the waist up, but childlike, almost boyish. Their most striking feature was an extravagant coiffure of beads and shells; it was as though they did not have hair at all but thick multiple strings and loops of beads hanging from their heads, cascades of tiny white shell-like beads, woven into their hair so densely their hair was invisible. They wore knee-length wraparound skirts of brightly patterned cloth, and necklaces too, thick clusters of strands.

  They pressed in close, the way kittens sidle up to you and rub against your legs, with an obliging head movement. They laughed with the boldness that costumed people often have, the finery or the disguise giving them confidence. They were like children at a fancy dress party, even if all the beads made them seem pharaonic, gotten up in an ancient style. They were admired by the much-younger girls, the urchins who surrounded these compliant and unlettered nymphs.

  The ma
n said something to Gilberto, who relayed it to me, this time in English: “Take photo.”

  Children at a fancy dress party — that’s exactly what they were. They were the girls — so the man in the sunglasses said — who had been initiated in the village over the past four days, and for some weeks before that. None looked older than thirteen, but it was their fate to have menstruated — it is said to happen earlier to girls in the bush — so they had been selected for the ceremony.

  “What’s that word for the ceremony, Gilberto?”

  “Efundula,” he said.

  The others heard, and laughed. Now a crowd had gathered — people from the village, older women and men, and the much younger girls looking adoringly at these decorated initiates, as if proudly at big sisters.

  I used my iPhone camera to get close to them, so I could examine the beaded coiffures, and I showed the pictures to the man in the soccer jersey, who smiled at them approvingly. Then I touched the beads, with a querying expression.

  “Elende,” the man said, giving me the word for the decorated hair.

  Their alikeness was a thrill: three nymphs, the Three Graces, a trio of skinny girls standing side by side, their arms around one another, representing beauty, charm, sweetness. The ordeal of their initiation was over, and now they were in the world, pleased with themselves, approved of by their elders. The smallest of the three — she seemed a mere child, an androgynous one; she could have been a skinny boy — had loops of green and blue beads in her hair and a yellow necklace.

  I asked their ages. Gilberto translated — “Fourteen or fifteen” — yet none of them seemed that age. They had to be younger. I pressed him again, and he talked to the older people.

  “They want to be married,” Gilberto said. He spoke in Portuguese, to the crowd. The people laughed and pointed at me. Gilberto said, “You can take one!”

  Seeing my expression, the people laughed harder.

  “I have some questions,” I said. I asked Gilberto to relay them to the man who’d requested photos. He didn’t want copies of the photos; he merely wished to formalize the event in pictures — and the girls were gloating over the pictures as I put my questions to him. “Can I visit the village?”

  He said yes, and we filed past the shed and through the trees on a narrow path that led across hacked-open furrows that seemed like gardens in preparation. I smelled the dead embers of the fire and saw the first row of huts, most of them woven in a latticework of intertwined sticks and stripped boughs, some of them with tin roofs and others thatched with hay bundles. This was the traditional fenced compound known as a kuimbo, which I’d seen from a distance farther south. I looked for a place to sit, because I wanted to write, and when I found a tree stump, the three ornamented girls pressed against me again, laughing, and a woman brought me a bunch of bananas.

  “What will happen to the girls now?” I asked Gilberto, who repeated the question.

  “They will look for a husband. They will have children. They are women now.”

  Nevertheless, they looked like children to me — young children, three schoolgirls. I asked if the ceremony was over.

  “No,” the man said. There was more, but it was for fun, not a test, not the all-night dancing to exhaust them. They would rub themselves with powdered ash to whiten their skin. And this, part of the masquerade, would allow them privileges. He implied that with their freshly coated faces they could assert themselves. I tried to imagine these three girls whitened with ash, with their coiffure of beads and their heavy necklaces and short skirts, and it seemed a vision in tribal maquillage of pretty painted coquettes — which was in fact the whole intention. Beautify them, get them dancing, give them approval and some instruction, and send them flashing out of the village to snare a husband. But a husband was merely a means to an end. As in much of the region, the object of womanhood was to bear a child: a woman without a child was not really a woman, and had no status. A man could get rid of her, send her back to her parents, if she proved to be barren.

  In Angola, as in many societies I knew, you were not an adult until you got married, but the marriage was only speculative; it became real when you gave birth to a child. Maybe this sort of thinking was an underlying factor in teen pregnancies in the United States, which were often seen as accidental. Perhaps there was something calculated in it, a wish to have a place in the world, in the sense it was regarded here in Angola: the fast track to adulthood was finding a likely man and having a child. The anthropologist Merran McCulloch put it nicely, writing of a related Angolan people, the Ovimbundu: “A child or an adolescent is only a ‘potential’ person (omunu)” (The Ovimbundu of Angola). Motherhood and fatherhood made them whole. But there was an unintended consequence: complications associated with childbirth were the leading cause of death (“maternal death”) among girls thirteen to sixteen years old in this part of Africa (World Health Organization report, March 2012).

  I sat and nibbled bananas while a woman boiled water in a blackened pot and put some dry leaves in it and pronounced it tea. Gilberto had wandered away, so it was impossible for me to communicate except in gestures. Instead, I hauled out my iPhone and we went through the photos again, and the Three Graces smiled at themselves and twiddled their beaded locks with slender fingers and seemed to me birdlike and beautiful.

  The cliché for them was nubile. And nubile was exactly what they were: in their case it was not a cliché at all but a precise description, because nubility denotes adulthood; “nubile” means marriageable. The word comes from the Latin nubere, to marry, and this rite of passage, the Efundula, was a nubility ceremony that recognized their capacity to bear children and made them eligible for marriage. The event itself, more than a coming-of-age ritual, was a sort of marriage initiation. But the taking of a husband, an inevitable consequence, involved much less drama. That could happen any time now, and the sooner the better, because these girls had achieved the desired condition. Our word “nuptial,” which people tend to smile at as pretentious, is derived from the same glowing word “nubile.”

  Some details I discovered afterward, in books on kinship of the Kwanyama and related tribal groups, such as the nearby Kwamatwi, who hold a similar ceremony in which a ranking woman cries out “Wafukala!” — “You became nubile!” That in one of the rituals on the second day (“the Day of the Little Jackal”) the girls drink beer mixed with the semen of the man presiding over the ceremony. That the profusion of beads has a purpose beyond ornament, because beads are seen to promote fertility. That, as an elaboration of the whitening of the skin, the initiates repeat a saying: “To a white person” — that is, one powdered with ashes — “nothing is prohibited.”

  They’d find husbands soon enough. They were very pretty, and being young, they were strong; they’d be useful working in the gardens and raising children, and this being sub-Saharan Africa, they’d be doing both at the same time. The fiancé would pay a dowry, of money or a cow, and for this he’d have his own field hand for life. Once this transaction is settled, the wedding is understood; the man takes her home.

  “There is no solemn nuptial procession,” Carlos Estermann writes in his definitive study of the Kwanyama people, The Ethnography of Southwestern Angola, which was first published in Portuguese in 1956. Estermann was an Alsatian priest, linguist, photographer, and anthropologist who sailed from Lisbon to Angola in 1923, did field-work in the southern provinces, became a full-time ethnographer in 1951, lived for nine years among the Kwanyama, and, undaunted by the civil war, remained in Angola. He noted that in the Kwanyama court the royal jester or buffoon was always a tiny Bushman. As late as 1976, Estermann was studying spirit possession in the region, his anthropological investigations far exceeding his missionary zeal.

  Estermann goes on: “That night she shares the bed of her betrothed, who is now considered to be her husband. The consummation of the marriage is not accompanied by any ritual, nor is it made known, unless very discreetly. In this connection it may be said that the Kwanyama do no
t concern themselves with the bride’s virginity. It is a thing that is not spoken of, and there is no word in their language to express that quality or the physiological sign of it.”

  I found that informative book later, and it clarified some aspects of the ritual, but at the time I was content with what I’d seen. The man in the red soccer jersey, whose name was João, brought me a chair, and in comfort I stayed in the village until early afternoon. I was happy. I wasn’t hungry anymore. I was just tired enough to be relaxed. Seeing that I was fascinated, the three girls stayed teasingly, almost flirtatiously, in my orbit. It seemed that this was my purpose in coming to Africa, to spend a night and day like this, and I would have been delighted to stay longer. I liked being in a village; they had food here, and shade, and places to rest. I knew enough of the scavenging and precarious life of the road to hate it.

  In the heat of the afternoon, around two o’clock, Gilberto called out to me, “Andiamo!” His speaking Italian made the villagers laugh.

  I said goodbye, thanked the elders, and quietly gave each of the girls some dollars.

  Leaving the perimeter of the village, I saw blue-black smoke blowing from the exhaust pipes of the Land Cruiser, Camillo revving the engine.

  Nearby, staring at me, the old woman Ana Maria stood with her bucket, and I knew what was in it. Out of politeness, I looked in, and now the mass of flies covered the remaining piece of chicken, which was familiar to me in all its contours, but more dark-specked and bitten by the flies, which were familiar too.

  “Frango,” Ana Maria said in her hungry juicy way, swallowing a little.

  She was gaunt. She looked hungry and tired. I gave her a dollar. I took her tongs and ceremonially removed the last piece of chicken from the bucket. I made a formal business of waving it around and brushing the flies from it. Then I gestured with it to her, as though flourishing a scepter, and put it back in the bucket. She understood: this would be her next meal. She smiled with gratitude and touched her heart with her skinny fingers.