The Road Ahead

Walking Around

Afraid I didn't take pictures this time. I'll try later, because where we went today was worth it.

Over breakfast Marina, the Italian woman who's here on behalf of the European Community, said she was going to a bookstore and did I want to come along. Having nothing but the prospect of reading, eating and sleeping on what promised to be a beautiful Sunday, I agreed. A little while later we set off.

Down the main street we went, dodging cars and random shafts that opened at our feet and dropped into dark, stench-filled caverns--really, I'm not kidding--we made our way down the main avenue here, past the national congress, past the justice department (still under construction after five years, and recently taken over by a Chinese firm), until we reached the bottom of the hill and could see the bay ahead of us.

This was the old, original part of town, the port where the Portuguese began building their city. There are still scores of beautiful old buildings there, some still wearing their pastel paint, though most of them are in poor condition. The bookstore, for instance, is in a corner space of a fine old art deco building, with wrought iron panels over the main doors that show a sunburst and waves. The old customs house, a fine old church from at least the 1700's, stores, old mansions: it's all still here, under the grime and rust and decay.

We walked south along the cross street, parallel to the waterfront a couple of blocks farther down, and passed a six-story building, a cream colored wreck standing behind a tall construction barrier. Even before Marina said it my eyes had been drawn to the unmistakable marks of bullets that stitched across the walls and clustered around the glassless window openings: 'That was the UNITA headquarters and hotel during the war. My friends who were here said the sound of the firing down here was incredible, when the building was taken. It went on at least a full day and night.'

Our next stop was a little garden restaurant Marina had found during one of her earlier stays in the city. We entered and found a table under the palm trees and an arbor, a peaceful, clean nook in a busy city that was growing hotter as the sun climbed the sky. We ordered juice and a raisin cake, and sat and talked. 'Who do you think owns this place,' she asked, noting that it was one of a chain throughout the city. I didn't know. 'The president's son,' she said. I said I thought he was doing a good job. 'Yes, he is,' was the reply, 'especially since he took over the business when he was about three years old.' Bright boy, we agreed.

Refreshed, we decided to go up the hill, to the old Portuguese fort. Bright white, it stands above the port, commanding what had been the heart of the city, presiding over an incredible flow of coffee, cotton, slaves that went to both the new world and the old. The reason, I was told a while ago, that Brazil and Angola share so many ties of language and culture is that the first slave population in Brazil came from here.

To get to the cobble-stoned lane that climbs between whitewashed cement walls to the fortress entrance, we must first pass the old soap factory. It's a huge structure, a full city block and more, a once-proud building whose front proclaims, in fading black letters over the stained white facade, '1926. National Soap and Oil Factory. An Angolan Company.'

The tall double iron doors are long gone from their frame at the top of the broad staircase. The steps are chipped, some are missing, and all are covered in garbage, dried palm fronds and dirt. People come and go from the entrance in a constant stream, or sit on the steps and watch us as we come toward them. Squatters moved in an age or so ago, and their numbers have increased every year, but one imagines they aren't comfortable; the authorities must tolerate them, but there must always be the risk of forced eviction from this place should someone with the necessary power decide the land is too valuable to be wasted on them.

When we got to the top of the hill and looked down, we could see the full extent of the transformation of what must once have been a bustling business: the roofing materials had gone, no doubt fallen in or taken down and built into the shacks that spread everywhere across the shop floors, under the tracery of girders that had once helped keep the rain out. Save for a few open spaces, what now greets the eye is a honeycomb of mud colored shacks with corrugated tin roofs, and people moving, moving. 'I can't imagine how they live there,' Marina said. 'No electricity, no water, no sewers. It's not so much a building any more as an open slum within the old walls.'

And then we lifted our eyes and saw the blue ocean all around us, and the graceful sweep of the Marginal, the once-elegant Corniche of this hopeless place, now falling into ruin and neglect; the buildings raised by the colonizers and their successors, buildings that had channeled work and wealth in a seemingly endless stream, all built, then as now, on the backs of the simple people, the ones who are kept down, optionless, uneducated, a malleable mass that has been used over and over again for the benefit of the few. What a paradox, this beauty and this misery that live so closely together here.

Fooba

We were in the Estalagem market when I saw a tarpaulin full of what looked like white clay. I asked Júnior, our driver and market researcher, what the material was. In the same sort of voice you might use to say 'The light in the sky comes from the sun', he said 'Oh, that's bombo to make fooba,' and turned back to quizzing a decidedly unfriendly-looking woman about the price of her cabbages.

Puzzled by this apparently nonsensical response, I decided to bide my time. A few minutes later, opportunity presented, in the form of Esther, the other member of our little expedition. Cunningly, I decided to phrase the question differently. 'What's that white stuff over there used for, Esther,' I inquired as I held the car door open for her.

'That's bombo; it's used to make fooba,' she replied, and climbed into the car.

Oh, right. That's much clearer.

What are these guys, a double act?

Esther's Story

We went today to one of the main open, informal markets around

Luanda

. The idea was for me to get a sense of where and how business is transacted here among farmers and those in the capital who either wholesale or retail farm goods. We left my boarding house at 6 am, without breakfast, and drove about 45 minutes to the Viana district, to the Estalagem market.

As with so much in this country, I can again say that I’ve never seen or imagined anything quite like this place in my (sheltered, I guess) life.

First, there is the press of people. We drove up a narrow street—a term to be used here charitably: the dirt surface was deeply rutted, a reminder of the recently-ended rainy season, and the middle portion was piled high with garbage of all descriptions. In some places the accumulation looked to be almost a foot deep, spread across the middle section of the street, and in more than one place, it was on fire. The trick was to negotiate the narrow space along one or another side, but what made it sporting was that there was oncoming traffic—cars, vans, even buses—and a constant press, a river really, of people of all ages. Every second doorway was a church of some kind, every third a pharmacy, and every fourth a photo shop, though what folks here might wish to preserve on film escapes my imagination.

Eventually we turned into a break in the cement wall on our left, and crossed a wide open space toward what seemed like an utterly chaotic agglomeration of people and trucks. We pulled up next to a mound of garbage, got out, and walked to the nearest truck.

They were unloading cabbages. The ragged green heads rolled off the flatbed and across the packed, filthy earth like the heads of a shabby aristocracy from a guillotine, and into the hands of women waiting to mound them into sale-sized piles. I’ve never been a fan of cabbage, really, and this experience didn’t change that: the smell was dizzying.

The truckers had driven all night from Gabela, a provincial capital not three hours away by car (and less than

100 miles

, I think, to give some idea of the state of roads here). Along the way they had liberally interleaved beer bottles amongst the cabbages; a surfeit of beer would help with the bumps and ruts, wouldn’t it then? The men had ridden on the truck; their wives and girlfriends, most of whom were pregnant and infected with malaria, had come up the night before. The women  actually transact the business, while the men visit with each other and keep an eye out for the various authorities, some self-appointed, who must be appeased with bribes of various sizes.

We circulated among these folks, walking on refuse of all kinds and hanks of human hair—it seems to be everywhere, and I don’t understand it—checking on the buy and sell prices of the goods, shipping costs, conditions at home, conditions in the fields. Some of the women were open and willing to speak; others were stone-faced and close-mouthed, suspicious of our questions, probing for the false note that would label us as competitors, police snitches, enemies. There are lots of enemies in this country, so recently and still incompletely escaped from the clutch of civil war. You looked in the eyes and you saw an encyclopedia of experience: bright eyes, hooded eyes, squinted and crafty eyes, open and guileless eyes, curious eyes, dead eyes, hostile eyes, empty eyes.

And children everywhere. Babies toddling around, babies nursing, babies playing with their tiny pink feet; young boys playing, horsing around, or crowding around you with wide, inquiring eyes; older boys and some girls, helping out with the produce; and one little boy lifting a cabbage half his size, with the same expression of concentrated effort as an Olympic weightlifter, pushing this great mass past his chin with both chubby hands before he let it crash to the ground.

We walked among these people for about an hour, and at the end Esther bought some cabbage for her mother, who lived about two miles of potholed sandy road from here. We left the market and went to her Mom’s house, passing through a neighborhood liberally sprinkled with Quonset shaped tents that had ‘U.N.’ sewn on them. These were the luxury homes. ‘Everyone here is displaced,’ Ester said from the back seat. There was a military tent of some kind in her Mom’s front yard, too, a flat open sandy space littered with motor parts; we dropped off the cabbages, said hello to her 68-year old mother who looked at least 15 years older, and went on. It was on our way back in to the city that Esther told part of her story.

‘I lost my parents during the war, Senhor Bill,’ she said, ‘and they were missing for four years. They lived in the south, where UNITA forces controlled things. I had already gone to

Portugal

to live with my two sons, and my husband had stayed here because he couldn’t get a visa to leave.

‘He called me one day to tell me UNITA had come in the night and had taken my parents and both my grandmothers. Nobody knew where they had been taken. Nobody knew whether they were still alive. We couldn’t imagine why UNITA had been interested in these old people, but they were gone.

‘I got in touch with the UN and with the Red Cross right away, but for a long time there was no news. Nobody knew anything. I came back to

Angola

because I thought there wasn’t anything I could do from so far away. My sons stayed in

Lisbon

, and I came back.

‘Finally, we had news of them. They were living away out in the jungle, a place nobody had known really existed. The Red Cross, bless them, helped very much but UNITA wouldn’t let them go. They wanted to separate my parents from my grandmothers; they would only let my grandmothers go, back to

Luanda

. My grandfather had already died, right after they were taken, he just couldn’t take it. No food, all the tension of being prisoners, the walking and the work…he just couldn’t take it and he died pretty soon after they were taken.

My mother scolded UNITA. She said, “These are old women; what do you know about taking care of them. They have to be given baths. Are you men going to do that? Do you think it is all right for men to be giving baths to old women, taking away their dignity?” So they let the three women go, and my Mom never went back.

It was hard on my father. UNITA were very angry that she had gotten away. They made my father pay; they took reprisals against him because he was the only one they could put their hands on. It wasn’t until some time after the peace that we saw him again, that he could get away.

I bought that house for them. It’s not much, but they’ve never lived in a city. They’re much better off out here, away from all the agitation of the city. You saw that street, those trees: I did that. When we moved here there was nothing, not even one house. I hired a grader to make the street, because I knew that more people would come and they wouldn’t care. Build their houses right in front of my parents’ gate, they would, and I couldn’t let that happen. So I made the street and I planted all those trees along the block, along both sides. It’s the best I can do for my mother. Maybe someday I can do more, but for right now it will have to be enough.’

On a Less Majestic Note

Leaving the mountains and the vast panoramas for a moment, here are a few images a little more on a human scale.

Is she a gazelle? The locals couldn't tell me. We met just after lunch at this place, on the outskirts of Lubango:

The food was good; the place is run by a frantic chef who, when he saw the meat they had served me, insisted on snatching it away and replacing it with something a little easier to gnaw on...

Here is a type of tree that seems so inviting and wonderful, as it spreads its thick shade over the grass and under the hot sun. It's hard to gauge in this picture, but the trunk was about five feet thick. We saw others in the surrounding countryside, some of them with seats or stones underneath, as they are obviously used as gathering places, and one especially elegant one, that we passed when my camera was too deeply buried to reach, had a trunk easily eight feet thick.

The colors here are quite something, too, like the velvety violet color of the grasses in this nearby picture. This was a fallow field adjacent to other fields worked by a woman farmer. She had been a model producer and quite outspoken in farmers' association meetings, until her husband became jealous of the attention she was getting. Now she sits quietly in the meetings and never walks or stands in front of him; but her fields continue to flourish under her care.

Everyone here works really hard. When you see this picture, of two women hoeing in their field, one with a small baby strapped on her back with a length of cloth, you have to know that it's already 85 degrees in the midmorning, and humid; the strength is just leached out of you by the steaming air.

Below is one family's living compound. See the corral on the right, for their oxen. Oxen are a form of wealth here, and make people's lives so much easier when they are used to turn the soil in a field rather than having to do it by hand.

These three young women, in their bright dresses, are on the way home from the market, or perhaps from selling their goods along the road. you have to click on the picture so it blows up, to appreciate the vividness of their clothing. Driving here we saw people selling corn and fruit and eggs and rocks and, just flashing past, a small, long-tailed, very indignant grey monkey.

The guy in the funny hat is me. The young woman is a technical advisor for CLUSA; Buyo is the only woman in this provincial team. I talked with her at some length about her work and the chances of elevating the participation of women in these areas. She said that the culture is changing a little, allowing war widows to hold land title and make decisions and play a more public role in their communities. Here, though, she said the war had not hit as hard (though we saw a Norwegian Jeep going through town, 'Anti-Mine' painted on its side), so there weren't as many widows....

I learned today that the average life expectancy in Angola is 40. I had to stop the person who told me this, the enormity of that statement requiring a moment or two to process. 'There are hardly any old people here,' she said, 'and if you ask the ones who look old, how old they actually are, they are often not nearly as old as you think. Especially the women. The war has destroyed so much in these communities.'

Humpata, da Leva and Tundavala

Here is an idea of the richness of this place:

First, the Humpata market, a swirl of color and motion; filled with people and the murmur of women's voices as they bargain with each other.

I liked these women's hair, and the bright yellow of the lemons:

Here is the Serra da Leva, an engineering feat of which the local people are very proud. This is the same view my Cuban friend showed me, minus the soldiers and  the artillery piece. It's strange, standing here where they did, just 20 years ago, waiting for UNITA soldiers to come into range along the switchbacks:

And if you go a little farther west, you can look out over the valley. The Atlantic is out there, just beyond the blue hills on the horizon.

Finally, here's the Tundavala Plateau, looking northwest toward the village of Bibala:

If you turn to the right of this picture and go back up the sandy trail about a thousand yards, you find yourself looking at Bibala through these two thousand foot portals:

More later......