The Last Train to Zona Verde

by Paul Theroux

  In another class I described the use of dialogue. One of the students, Delcio Tweuhanda, had an idea for a novel. Jumas Chipondo had written a series of essays about his life; he was a Lunda-Chokwe, one of Angola’s most artistic people, and had lived as a refugee in Zambia and Botswana for a decade during the war years. Several others wanted to form a group and write a book together, perhaps an oral history. They asked questions and spoke about their plans, and whenever I was with them I was hopeful, for them and for myself.

  I made a point of asking them where in the world they wanted to go. Not Portugal, they said. Not Cuba. Not any of their bordering countries, the easiest ones to get to — not Namibia, not the Republic of the Congo, not Zambia. South Africa, perhaps. And, with unanimity, America.

  Now the Grand Hotel no longer seemed seedy or abandoned or a place of funereal gloom, as it had when I first moved in; it was my refuge, a peaceful place. Akisha had stayed there for months on her arrival. “It’s like that hotel in The Shining!” I saw her point: a large empty hotel with sinister echoes and ambiguous odors. But I could write there, and so it suited me.

  Every morning at breakfast, I sat before a large painting that covered one wall of the Grand’s dining room like a mural. At first glance, it was a European landscape, rich in picturesque details, showing a village of stucco houses with russet tiled roofs, a white steepled church at the center, and a cluster of dignified municipal offices — all these buildings looking solid and indestructible. A ridge of magnificent mountains rose in the distance, and a sky of fluffy clouds, and in the foreground two peaceful cows grazed in a lush meadow.

  The only human I saw in the picture was a Portuguese man in a frock coat strolling on a path near the cows. The whole painting, with its soft contours, spoke of peace, serenity, abundance, fertility, permanence, even holiness — the shafts of sunlight like a blessing from above.

  The Algarve? No, it was of course a painting of Lubango in its previous incarnation as the colonial town of Sá da Bandeira. Though in style and substance it was a nineteenth-century panorama of a European pastoral, it had been painted (very small date and name in the right corner) by Rolla Tze (perhaps Chinese from Macau?) in 1945, the year of the Grand Hotel’s opening. Nothing of it smacked of Africa — no Africans, no thatched huts, no exotic animals or flowers. At least none was apparent. But standing very close to it one morning — it loomed over me — I found a small black man sitting in tall grass in the deep left-hand corner.

  This was how Portugal idealized Sá da Bandeira, hoping that colonials might see it that way too, as Portugal-across-the-sea, awaiting the settler’s ax and plow, beckoning to a pious congregation for the church, which was the present-day Cathedral de São José. Sá da Bandeira was advertised as the sort of market town that existed in rural Portugal.

  Although it had never found prosperity, Sá da Bandeira lasted as a colonial fantasy right up to the year of independence. Here is the experience of an American traveler, Mrs. Alzada Carlisle Kistner, arriving with her entomologist husband, David, at the Grand Hotel on their beetle-collecting trip through Angola in 1972 (as she recalled it in An Affair with Africa, published in 1998): “A liveried doorman bowed a welcome; the receptionist, dressed in a cutaway coat, was coolly efficient; servants carried our bags. The flower-filled tiled courtyard had a gorgeous swimming pool and a hedgehog curled up like a ball on the lawn. Our suite had parquet floors and a marble bathroom, where we bathed and dressed for an elegant dinner. Surrounded by hovering waiters, we ate as a trio played ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco.’ ”

  Two years after that, all hell broke loose, and the city was today still suffering the effects of the war. It had grown, it sprawled, it was now a city of a million and a half. Nearly all those people lived in hovels — some in a dense shantytown in the heart of the city, which anyone on foot — it was my usual route — had to traverse in order to get to the Millennium Mall, and that meant passing among the shacks, the raucous boys, the beer joints, the mud puddles, and the latrines — and stepping over a dead dog, which was not moved the entire time I was in Lubango.

  Looking for ways to spend the time when I was not teaching or writing, I found the ethnographic museum, housed in a small whitewashed villa on a side street. I visited twice, and on both occasions I was the only person in the place. I hoped to find slit-eyed Chokwe pwo masks used in boys’ initiations or a Chokwe body suit of woven fiber. But what I found were objects that I had seen along the way from the border: wooden staffs that the Kwanyama elders had used in the Efundula village; baskets and wooden bowls like trenchers I’d seen; and finger harps, marimbas, fetishes, and carvings that were still being used in the Angolan bush. The centerpiece at the ethnographic museum was exactly the sort of dugout canoe I’d seen a man paddling and fishing from on the Techiua River south of Cahama a week before — revered here in Lubango as an ancient artifact. So both ways of life persisted in parallel, and it seemed that the old way was, if not the more reliable, then the more common, because it was a necessity.

  I asked Akisha about the Chinese who’d come to Lubango. She said there were many — hundreds here, thousands on the coast, but they kept to themselves. Like their counterparts in Namibia, they had all arrived within the last few years from the People’s Republic. They ran small businesses, they were engaged in construction, some were farmers, and three of them owned a restaurant in a corner of Lubango.

  For our farewell meal, Akisha took me to a Chinese restaurant, which was on a sloping potholed dead-end road. Like many of the other shops, it had a red-painted façade and a wooden porch. But inside, it was China, with sticky plastic tablecloths, a pinkish calendar showing a colorful pagoda, porcelain animal figures, and a small shrine of a gilded, potbellied immortal flanked by a dish of burning joss sticks.

  Eight chain-smoking Chinese men sat at one of the round tables, shouting and drinking beer. They were the sort of tough manual laborers I’d once seen in China lashing bamboo scaffolds or digging ditches — hard-eyed and suspicious, and these were wheezy and red-faced from the alcohol. They yelled for food, they yelled at each other, they yelled for the bill. Outside, in Angola, they had to be deferential or circumspect, but inside, in this version of China, they could howl. “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away.”

  Like us, they were served by a young woman, Mei, from Tsingtao, and the food was cooked by Zhou, a middle-aged man in an apron. The manager was a woman I took to be about thirty-five, Wang Lin, from Yantai, who called herself Irma; but she told me she had a nineteen-year-old son, so she must have been more like forty-five. Akisha and I had spicy mapo dofu with rice and got acquainted with the owners.

  Mei, in her mid-twenties, was a recent arrival. Wang Lin had been in Lubango for a year; she said it was okay — not bad, a little quiet perhaps. But she didn’t miss home.

  “I might go back to China for a visit,” Wang Lin said in Portuguese to Akisha, “but not to stay. I am staying here.”

  Mei said, “I want to go to Spain for a holiday.”

  Zhou said, “This is where I live now.”

  Angolans never came to the restaurant, they said, but that was all right. There were enough Chinese and Europeans and Cubans in Lubango to keep the place busy.

  Every time I encountered Chinese in the hinterland I felt I was seeing the future of Africa — not a happy future, and not a distant one, but the foreseeable future. They were a new breed of settler, practical, unsentimental, mainly construction workers and do-it-yourselfers and small businessmen, hard to please but willing to put up with tougher conditions than any Portuguese.

  Some Africa watchers and Western economists have observed that the Chinese presence in Africa — a sudden intrusion — is salutary and will result in greater development and more opportunities for Africans. Seeing Chinese digging into Africa, isolated in their enterprises, offhand with Africans to the point of rudeness, and deaf to any suggestion that they moderate their self-serving ways, I tend to regard this positive view as a croc
k. My own feeling is that like the other adventurers in Africa, the Chinese are exploiters. They have no compact or agreement or involvement with the African people; theirs is an alliance with the dictators and bureaucrats whom they pay off and allow to govern abusively — a conspiracy. Theirs is a racket like those of all the previous colonizers, and it will end badly — maybe worse, because the Chinese are tenacious, richer, and heavily invested, and for them there is no going back and no surrender. As they walked into Tibet and took over (with not a voice of protest raised by anyone in the West), they are walking into the continent and, outspending any other adventurer, subverting Africans, with a mission to plunder.

  Over the Chinese meal, I mentioned this to Akisha, but she simply said, “We’ll see.”

  When I asked her for horror stories about Lubango, she just smiled her kindly schoolteacher smile and gave nothing away. She missed her family, she said, but she was committed to her students and to being self-sufficient. She was a marvel of serenity and dedication, much stronger perhaps than she realized. But that is the way of the teacher in Africa: you get stronger or you go home. She’d become interested in the Portuguese language and wanted to study it more deeply, perhaps in Brazil. Her contract was soon coming to an end, but with friends in Namibia and some in Cape Town she had no immediate plans to return to the United States.

  She made me feel small and superfluous, and though that was the nature of the sort of traveler I was, I had begun to accommodate myself to Lubango. After all, I had something useful to do here, so for a time I was not merely a voyeur — or at least, with this effort, I could justify my voyeurism.

  I returned each day to the Grand, as if home from a job, and during this time I rejoiced in having gainful employment, both a distraction and a relief, which gave me a greater understanding of the country. If there was any hope here, it lay in these students and teachers, but it was clear that they were underpaid. Some teachers in rural schools, as I read in their essays, were not paid their salaries for months, and had to be supported by donations from the parents of their students. The teachers in Angola, as in much of Africa, were ignored and used badly by their government, which earned billions from its oil and gold exports. Probably many of these teachers would look elsewhere for a future. And this is why foreign teachers are always welcome in Africa — someone else foots the bill.

  The routine of teaching in Lubango suited me, and surprised me too, because I had come to like the predictable day. I had spent my life on the road, waking in a pleasant or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning after breakfast hoping to discover something new and repeatable, something worth writing about. I think other serious travelers do the same, looking for a story, facing the world, tramping out a book with their feet. The traveler physically enacts the narrative, chases the story, often becomes part of the story. This is the way most travel narratives happen.

  I had for a happy period suspended my travel. That made uprooting myself from Lubango all the harder. The best of travel involves short, intense periods of residence. I had enjoyed the routine of being a teacher. But there is no routine in travel, only early starts and insults, and if there is a rhythm, it is a rhythm of disruptions and shocks and uncertainty — and in Africa the godawfulness of dark, early morning starts and filthy buses.

  14

  The Slave Yards of Benguela

  ONCE, LONG AGO, when Lubango was a country town named Sá da Bandeira, a railway regularly served it, clattering around steep valleys and rolling hundreds of miles from the high plateau to the arid coastal settlement of Moçâmedes, now named Namibe. No longer. The train fell into disuse, and the tracks were sabotaged in the post-independence war. Buses have replaced the train, Namibe is off the map, and Benguela is the main destination on the coast now, retaining its old notorious name.

  Benguela was once among the grimmest slave ports on earth. This swampy, low-lying little town helped populate the Americas with its exports of humans sentenced for life to captivity and hard labor. Consider the description of Benguela in The South African Year Book and Guide for 1923: “Straggling town … formerly a busy place … Many of the old houses are substantially built and provided with large encircled compounds, formerly used for slaves awaiting shipment.” It is estimated that as many as four million slaves were shipped out of Angola or died in raids, on marches to the coast, or at sea. Slaves captured from the interior were kept in Luanda’s and Benguela’s holding pens, where they were fattened for the Middle Passage.

  Does any aspect of the Angola slave trade resonate today? Yes, and sometimes in peculiar ways. I was at a café with an Angolan man who said, “Let’s have some peanuts,” and then to the waiter, “Queremos alguns jinguba,” and I caught the word jinguba.

  The Kimbundu word had been brought by Angolan slaves to America, where it persists as “goober.” (“Goodness how delicious / Eating goober peas.”) I was later to learn a Kikongo word from the north of Angola that is even nearer, the word nguba, as in the Kikongo proverb urging discretion: Ku kuni nguba va meso ma nkewa ko, “Don’t plant peanuts while the monkeys are watching.”

  I was headed to Benguela, but it was not a simple matter. In Africa and around the world, trains leave from the city center, and the bus station is generally on the outskirts, in the poorest and dirtiest part of town. The passenger bus business needs an expanse of cheap space — for parking the oversized vehicles, for maneuvering them and turning them around, and especially for providing them leeway for the mobs that mill about and wait with their bundles so they can board these notoriously unpunctual things. You find that kind of space adjacent to the slums. A bus station in sub-Saharan Africa is not really a station; it is a glorified parking lot, and it is one of the unpleasant inevitabilities of overland travel, not just unpredictable but offensive and rowdy, and haunted by stray dogs snarling over the scraps of garbage discarded by the passengers waiting to board.

  It was not yet six in the morning, and a fight was in progress at the Lubango bus station, a bus having just drawn in, rocking in the wide potholes like a ship in a gale: a number of drunks trying to board a bus were resisting their being thrown off by two of the toughs hired to control the crowd.

  The noise had woken the dozing passengers, who, with red eyes and wild hair and creased, sleepy faces gaped from the windows, and then, aroused by the brawl, they began screaming abuse. They had come from another town, south of Lubango. Their mockery was not aimed at the rabble or at the struggling drunks but instead at the heavies who were dragging them to the ground, the easier to kick them senseless.

  A man yelled from a window in Portuguese, “So Lubango is a place where a drunk can’t get on a bus!”

  That owlish observation caused cackling laughter, more abuse, and more of this unrhyming dirty poetry of early morning, but the rest of it was lost in the louder rap music that blared from an amplifier at the ticket office.

  I had risen in the darkness of the hotel. I waited in the darkness and stink of the bus station parking lot. A feeble rubious hint of morning light bled sideways into the sky, each puddling bit of brightness making the place look uglier with sharpened details of its decrepitude, and the shouting made it worse. What am I doing here?

  Broken signs, slumping power cables, burst-open boxes of garbage, a tidemark of muddy litter, a muttonish smell in the air as of goat breath and decayed meat. Added to that were the overburdened women with swollen cloth bundles bound in string and two or three small well-behaved children, the usual Angolan rapper crowd of oafish boys with baseball caps and earphones, and pretty girls standing daintily in the morning-moistened dust. The sight of these girls made me think that a whole study could be made of hairstyles in Angola — not just the extravagant hair extensions and fluffy wigs, but hair strung with beads or woven into cornrows or twisted into snaky locks, and some women’s heads were beautifully shaved to a shining baldness like polished mahogany finials on Victorian staircases.

  The Benguela bus arrived as the sun rose over the
low tin rooftops, the noise and the heat rising at the same time. So the urgency to board was combined with the sweat of pushing, and I was part of that same pushing — odd and obnoxious for me, elbows out, to be part of the scrimmage, but necessary or I wouldn’t get a seat.

  And when we set off I saw that the habitable part of Lubango, the orbit of my teaching duties, was really very small, that the city was a set of small Portuguese plazas surrounded by shanty settlements, just like every other town of any size in Angola. And if you didn’t know any better, you’d never think it was a country floating on a sea of oil. You’d think, as some sentimental people do: Poor little beat-up place — we should do something to help. We should send money, maybe lots of money; Angola (with annual revenues in the billions) seems to need money.

  Outside of town we passed the now familiar roadside rusted and burned-out tanks and military trucks near the fallen-down Olde Worlde Portuguese farmhouses, their tile roofs shattered. This was at a place called Viamba, as we approached the edge of the Serra de Quilengues escarpment. Whose tanks, whose trucks, whose houses? Impossible to tell. Time moves on, no one cares, the scrap yard grows; no one mourns the dead in these rural tableaus of abandonment.

  An hour into the trip, at Cacula, we stopped at a small market where hawkers — pleading women and dusty, spaniel-eyed children mostly — offered food on trays, fat tomatoes, stacks of small bananas, discs of sliced pineapple, loaves of bread, piles of bread rolls, and plastic bags with squished and greasy potato fries. Several women balanced bunches of onions on their heads, and one with a basin of chicken pieces spotted with flies approached me and asked, “Qual?”