The Last Train to Zona Verde

  “You wouldn’t know the name. My town is in Cabinda — I love this town. But it’s hard to get to. For one thing, I can’t go by road to Cabinda, because that means passing through the Congo, and that is not possible.”

  One of the geographical anomalies of Angola is that oil-rich Cabinda is a separate, isolated province surrounded by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a weird result of Portuguese colonial expansion. But it has proven valuable only recently. When John Gunther traveled in Angola for his Inside Africa (1955), he was unimpressed by anything in the country, and he dismissed Cabinda entirely, as a remote area without any resources. “One geographical curiosity is Cabinda,” Gunther wrote, “an enclave of Portuguese territory separated from the rest of Angola by the mouth of the Congo. Not much is known — or is worth knowing — about Cabinda.” Cabinda is the source of virtually all (95 percent of the national revenue in 2011) of Angola’s immense wealth. Being prosperous and cut off, with some educated people, the province even has its own secessionist movement, which now and then sets off a bomb or sabotages a building.

  José didn’t want to talk about that, and I couldn’t blame him — after all, I was a foreigner with perhaps too many questions. And I was a noncommittal American. The CIA had a long history of meddling, its covert operations designed to further Angola’s instability, as I knew from reading In Search of Enemies by a former CIA operative in Angola, John Stockwell. Yet José seemed eager to unburden himself.

  “Angola,” he said, shaking his head. “There’s something wrong. You can’t treat people like this!” He sighed in exasperation and looked at me closely.

  “You have traveled here?”

  “A bit.”

  “You see how poor are the people? But others are so rich. Some people in big cars, just sitting, expensive watch, jewels, suits from Lisbon. And outside the car, the women on the street, no shoes. You see them, they carry things on their head.”

  “And they live in the musseques.”

  “Yes. This city is so dirty! I am here for a business meeting, but if my company asks me to come here and live, I will have to pay three or four thousand dollars a month for a little room. It’s a problem for me. I can’t do it. I would go anywhere but here.”

  “So what do you think is the problem, José?”

  “The government is the problem,” he said without hesitating. “They don’t care. They are just stealing money from the oil business.”

  “Like Nigeria.”

  “Worse! Much worse — and Nigeria is terrible,” he said. “We need a change — the whole government should just go away. We should get a new one that will use the money better.”

  A bit breathless from having spoken his mind, he seemed to have surprised himself with his own candor. He asked me what I was doing in the country.

  I said, “I’m just visiting.”

  He said, “I’m sorry it looks like this.”

  No foreign newspaper reported the weirdness of Luanda, though the writer Pepetela had published a hallucinatory novel about the city. Perhaps to avoid censorship, his 1995 book The Return of the Water Spirit is oblique, depending for its effect on the strange collapse, week by week, of tall modern buildings in Luanda, as if from the effects of a curse. The manner of destruction is a mystery, seemingly bound up with the violation of the serene habitat of a resident spirit — possibly the disturbance of “the old African identity.” But the curse is simple enough to understand: it is the blight of incomplete and misdirected modernity. Urbanization has so upset the natural order of things that the land itself has become seismic and unstable.

  This fanciful fiction is penetrated by occasional glimpses of reality, as when Pepetela describes daily life in wartime Luanda: “ ‘How much lower can we sink?’ people asked while standing in the queue, either for the bus, or in front of the store with goods that few of them could afford to buy, or at the hospitals that had neither medicine, cotton nor gauze, or in the schools that had no books and no desks. Luanda was filling up with people fleeing from the war and hunger — at a rate that was as fast as it was suicidal. Thousands of homeless children loitered in the streets, thousands of youths sold and resold things to those that drove past in their cars, countless numbers of war amputees begged for alms at the market. At the same time, important people had luxury cars with smoked glass. No one saw their faces. They drove past us and perhaps they didn’t even look so as not to have their consciences made uneasy by the spectacle of all that misery.”

  This description of Luanda in the early 1990s can easily stand for the Luanda I saw almost twenty years later. So, for all its obliqueness, the novel is prescient. And two characters who make cameo appearances in the narrative are other living Angolan writers, Arnaldo Santos and José Luandino Vieira. Vieira, who was born in Sambizanga, the same slum where the current president, Dos Santos, first saw the light of day, celebrates the slum as a vortex of energy. Santos is a minimalist poet, Vieira one of the first novelists of the revolution and himself an early political prisoner.

  All three writers — Pepetela, Santos, Vieira — are white, but identify themselves as fully Angolan. White writers in South Africa also identify themselves as South African, and they are, but they come from a privileged, or at least an educated, class, whereas these Angolans are from the poorest level of society, slum born and bred. Another important Angolan writer, but much younger, is Sousa Jamba, born in a rural village near Huambo in 1966. Jamba spent much of his youth as a war refugee in Zambia, then shuttled between Britain and the United States, where he was educated. After publishing three novels, Jamba returned to his home village in 2004 and reported to the BBC that the place was in much worse shape than it had been when he left it decades before, during the war years: “The school has fallen apart … [The students] have to bring their own chairs, the windows are completely broken. They have no pens or pencils. I find it very sad that one of the wealthiest countries in Africa can have kids who don’t have pencils.”

  I’d previously met Jamba in London, and Vieira in Portugal, where he had rusticated himself to a small village. Both men were likable and intelligent but had the stunned and rather solitary air of exiles: a look of lostness. Born in a slum in Luanda in 1935 and raised in poverty, José Vieira was an early target of the Portuguese, arrested by the colonial authorities as a dissident when he was twenty-four. Two of his novels, The Real Life of Domingos Xavier and The Loves of João Vêncio, and his short story collection Luuanda, are expressive, written in an almost untranslatable patois (so the translators attest; I read them in English), a combination of Kimbundu and Portuguese peculiar to the Luanda shantytowns, the ghetto idiom Vieira had learned, a “literary eloquence founded on slang, patois, and pimp terminology.”

  Over coffee in the Portuguese town of Matosinhos, Vieira told me that he was still routinely turned down for a U.S. visa because of his old political beliefs, his imprisonment by the Portuguese, and his former militancy. Since Pepetela and Santos still lived and wrote in Luanda, I made an attempt, through an intermediary, to meet them. And I said that if they were interested, I would be happy to speak at the Angola Writers’ Union or meet them there for a cup of coffee.

  This quaintly named organization, a bureaucratic collection of like-minded (that is, approved) writers, was a cultural throwback to the Soviet Union’s adoption in the 1960s of Angola’s liberation struggle. The Agostinho Neto Mausoleum in central Luanda was another Soviet throwback, inspired by the mummification in Lenin’s tomb. Because of the avowed Marxism of one faction, many Angolans in the sixties and seventies were more inclined to study in the Soviet Union than anywhere else, and were offered Soviet scholarships. President Dos Santos was a Russian-speaker who had been educated as an engineer in Baku, Azerbaijan, and whose first wife had been Russian. (It was their daughter, Isabel, who had become a billionaire investor in Angola, and was touted as one of Africa’s five richest women.)

  “They don’t want to meet you,” my intermediary said of my proposal of a cup of cof
fee with the Angolan writers at the writers’ union.

  “What about my giving a talk? Did you mention it?”

  “They had a problem with that.”

  “What sort of problem?”

  “They don’t see the point of it.”

  “Of my speaking to them?”

  “Of listening to other writers. They’re funny that way.”

  “Writers like me?”

  “Any foreign writers.”

  “So what did they say?”

  “That they didn’t think there was anything you could tell them that they didn’t already know.”

  “Probably true! But maybe they could tell me something,” I said. “And what about literary curiosity — or any curiosity?”

  “I guess they don’t have it.”

  What they had — their chief trait, the affliction of Angolan officialdom — was xenophobia, a bit awkward in any writer and rather a burden. It made much of their writing humorless, self-righteous, and provincial, which was another reason their writers’ union was necessary to them, because it legitimized them as writers. They had an engraved certificate they could frame and hang on the wall, the way dentists and massage therapists did. And, precious in that politically protected way, they could go on writing their fantasies, and be rewarded by the dictatorship, while the whole country was falling to pieces before their eyes.

  Yes, they probably would not have wanted to hear me say this sort of thing to them.

  In the meantime, I rattled around the city. The traffic was unmoving, the gridlock incessant. “It takes hours to go a few miles!”

  people said. “I have a two-hour commute!” The sidewalks were broken and obstructive. Blue-and-white jitneys called candongueiros, which followed no fixed route, roamed from street to street picking up fares. Some streets were named in the solemn way of political dogmatists — Rua Friedrich Engels, Boulevard Comandante Che Guevara, and even Rua Eça de Queiroz—honoring the author of, among other novels, Cousin Basilio, for which he is sometimes referred to as the Portuguese Flaubert.

  One Luanda street I happened upon in the course of an evening walk was Rua de Almeida Garrett (off Avenida Ho Chi Minh). It was named for João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida Garrett, a nineteenth-century Portuguese writer and politician, little known in the United States and perhaps even lesser known in Angola. I knew of him only from an epigraph quoted in a novel by José Saramago, an assertion that resonated in Luanda: “I ask the political economists and the moralists if they have ever calculated the number of individuals who must be condemned to misery, overwork, demoralization, childhood, rank ignorance, overwhelming misfortune and utter penury in order to produce one rich man.”

  Many streets in the city had no name, a topic of satire among people from whom I solicited directions, a sort of you-can’t-get-there-from-here paradox. But Luandans — the working ones, the foreigners, the businessmen — lived with all this inconvenience, and laughed about it, because enduring it meant they could make money. The weak went home, the poor died, the strong stayed and got rich.

  Billions of dollars were routinely embezzled by Angolan politicians and oil executives. Martin Meredith devotes an enlightening chapter in The Fate of Africa (2006) to the gross cheating by Angolan officials, which is an extensive catalogue of klepto schemes. Some businessmen engaged in a mechanism known as “trade mispricing.” This funny-money ploy was explained by Ed Stoddard in a 2011 Reuters report on corruption in Angola. “In this case, the way it typically works is that Angolan importers pretend to pay foreigners more for imports than they actually spend. The difference provides cash that can be discreetly put into banks or other assets abroad.” It worked best with oil, but also with simple import transactions. “An Angolan importer overpays the exporter, say in the United States, and asks the exporter to deposit the excess payment in the importer’s offshore account or a Swiss bank,” said Dev Kar, a senior economist at the International Monetary Fund. Through this trade mispricing many billions vanished in an average year.

  You’d expect such a place to be moribund, yet Luanda was abuzz. A current throbbed through it like a rapid pulse — a blare of car horns, zungeiros (street vendors), hawkers selling lottery tickets, shouting women with baskets of fruit on their heads, children and amputees loudly calling out — more demanding than beseeching. The days were also very hot — low-lying Luanda is noted for its enervating humidity. There was not enough space in the city for all the cars and impromptu markets, and the constant spillover of people, crowding the streets and sidewalks, made it a jammed and harassed place.

  Because only cash was accepted, banks were besieged by people withdrawing money, and most high-end shops or businesses of any size had an ATM machine on the premises — my hotel had two in the lobby, and they were in constant use. The fact that so many people walked around with stacks of kwanza notes made it a city of muggers and thieves. An American woman told me that in order to make arrangements for her family of four to fly back to the States, she’d had to bring a bag filled with $4,000 in cash to the airline office to buy the tickets.

  Because Luanda was dysfunctional and subject to sudden power cuts and water shortages, people with money — Angolans and foreigners alike — created small hermetic settlements, walled compounds, where they had their own generators, water sources, and amenities: tennis courts, swimming pools, golf and social clubs, and of course armed sentries and guard dogs.

  The International School of Luanda was one of these salubrious compounds, an oasis behind a wall, catering to the children of expatriates, diplomats, oil people, and wealthy Angolans. Unwelcome at the state schools and rejected by the writers’ union, I visited the school out of curiosity, to observe a sealed community in action. In return for their hospitality, I gave a talk to the students.

  After a long and far-from-simple drive to the south of the city, through the improvised neighborhoods, the grim precincts of poverty, the International School was something of a surprise: orderly, well planned, spacious, clean, and surrounded by flower gardens. Healthy children of all races were gathered in congenial groups — 630 students, 91 teachers — and what was singular about the school was the presence of books. Apart from Akisha Pearman’s department in the Instituto Superior in Lubango, books had not figured much in any of the schools I’d visited. Please send us books from America, I was implored, and my routine reply was to refer them to the billionaires in their government.

  The newly built library at the International School was worthy of a small college. And the students were bright sparks, with the confident air that comes of being well taught, taken seriously, and — it must be said — wealthy, sheltered from the hideosities of Luanda. I gave my talk and answered questions and was shown around the school by the teachers, who were earnest and upbeat. It all seemed marvelous and almost unbelievable that such a place could exist amid the encircling gloom.

  “So,” I asked casually, “what’s the tuition here?”

  “Forty-seven thousand dollars a year,” I was told by a teacher, who gulped as she managed to utter the words.

  At the time, this was roughly the cost of tuition at Harvard University. Because many of the students were the children of oil industry employees, the existence of such a good school was an incentive for foreign workers to stay with their families in Luanda. An oil executive was later to tell me that Angolans simply did no work, and he added, “Forty thousand workers in the oil industry support twenty-three million Angolans.”

  The residential compounds and other amenities were the foreigners’ way of turning their backs on the reality of the place, of shutting out the chaos, of being secure. In many respects this pattern was no different from the urban planning in Palm Springs or the gated communities around Phoenix and elsewhere, but in Luanda what lay outside the compounds were slums of extreme danger and pure horror.

  * And in the world: 215th out of 224 countries, according to the CIA World Factbook for 2012. There are 84 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in
Angola.

  16

  “This Is What the World Will Look Like When It Ends”

  THE INTENSITY OF A TRIP — bad food, hard travel, slow buses, hot weather, jeering locals — can induce a mood of isolation, provoking episodes of alienation that resemble out-of-body experiences. I think: Am I imagining this? And I have no answer, because no one hears the question. But then I found someone to ask.

  Dazed with Luanda and dispirited by my trip, I was fortunate around this time to have met the clear-sighted Angolan Kalunga Lima, who had told me many things I needed to know — and most of all that my sense of Angola, and Luanda in particular, was not the consequence of travel fatigue. I was first introduced to Kalunga at a photographic exhibition one evening in Luanda. He assured me that I was not overdramatizing the situation. He was impressive, intelligent, and straight-talking, and his gift for satire was a relief to me.

  I said, “A man in Namibia told me, ‘Angola’s a nightmare!’ ”

  Kalunga said, “Namibians have a gift for understatement.”

  Perhaps a clue to his speaking his mind was his unusual history. The son of a politically passionate Angolan father and an adoring Portuguese mother, he had been born in Algeria, where his father, a committed revolutionary, was a soldier in exile. Kalunga had been educated in Canada and the United States, and later, on a whim, he taught on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. He had traveled widely in Africa and Europe, was well read, responsive, funny, and hip. Seeing a Hummer stalled in traffic on a Luanda street, the African driver wearing thick gold chains around his neck, Kalunga said, “He got bling!” He was a maker of documentary films, and his latest project was chronicling the discovery of the “Angola Titan,” a dinosaur whose fossil remains had been discovered in the southern desert near Namibe. He had also made a documentary about Angola’s elusive and little-known giant sable antelope (palanca negra gigante), apparently its last living wild game.