The Last Train to Zona Verde

by Paul Theroux

  Again the existential question: Which of these old, dark, flyblown, and inedible chicken legs do you desire, senhor?

  After that, everyone was eating on the bus and arguing in a jeering and companionable way. We traveled under jacaranda trees that were shedding their violet blossoms, the blooms bursting and crackling under our wheels, and we slowed for the cows that crowded the road.

  At greater intervals a general cry was raised from the back of the bus, and then the driver shouted what sounded like an order and bumped to a stop. Fifteen or so people got out to piss. They did not go far. All pissed in full view of the bus and its seated passengers. There was no indecency in this, no urgency either. Perhaps their staying close to the roadside was not laziness but a result of the land mines that, everyone knew, had been laid — and never deactivated —just off Angolan roads, especially here in the southern provinces. The men stood, feet apart, and hosed the tall grass. The women lowered their tracksuit bottoms, squatted, and spattered; some used a shawl, shrouding themselves a few feet from the bus and dripping like leaky tents. As on the trip with Camillo, it was more like a pissing contest than a call of nature, and it was accompanied by continual chatter — the pissers cheerfully calling out to one another, holding conversations as they casually whizzed, laughing and teasing.

  The paved road was too good to last. It gave way to gravel and sent us sideways. And then, two hours into the journey, we left the gravel road for a detour through woods and bush and clusters of hot, exposed mud huts of poor villages. In some places the road was under construction, in others it had washed out in the recent rains. The delay didn’t matter much. We had left the escarpment and were tipped downhill into the heat. Bumping over bony tree roots, near a ramshackle hut on one of these bush tracks, a small, misshapen, paralytic boy struggled forward, hanging on to his stick, stabbing it into the dust and hobbling. The bus driver slowed down — as Camillo had done a week before. He handed over a package of bread, thrusting it through the window, and the skinny boy touched his heart in thanks.

  Whatever inconvenience it was to be riding this way, slowly and uncomfortably, at least I was privileged to witness this impulsive act of human kindness toward a crippled and abandoned soul, propped up on a stick in the middle of the bush.

  Traveling overland, as I had from the border, I saw that Portuguese Angola had been a colony not of towns but of outposts, most of them failures. And independent Angola was not much better — still a country of isolated outposts, but bigger ones, and just as hungry. Around noon, five hours into the trip and not even halfway to the coast, we came to Quilengues, which was a haunted little town, frozen in its period, perhaps the assisted-immigrant 1950s. Quilengues had a church, colonial houses, and shops beside the road. It seemed a whole intact place, but two of the student teachers I’d known in Lubango had taught in a school here, and told me they often were not paid for months — eleven months in one year — and when finally some money did come in, it was apportioned in small installments. So the teachers were held hostage: they could either stay and wait or leave and forfeit everything they were owed. A pretty place, Quilengues, but the inner story was of cheated teachers, underfunded schools, and severe water shortages. Again, this in a country immensely rich in oil revenue.

  In most African travel along bush tracks of this sort you’d expect to see animals. As I had noticed earlier, not in Angola. Not a gazelle, not a monkey. It was as though, from the conspicuous absence of game, its soul had been stolen. There was plenty of room for animals to range, enough habitat and fodder, and many waterholes. On the way to the coast we rode through distinct landscapes and climates, descending from the cool highlands to great sloping bush to grassy plains. But they were landscapes without any animals except a cow or a goat, only the occasional village of thatch and mud.

  The day growing hotter, we entered a belt of bush areas that had seen violent fighting, based on the evidence of half-buried, rusted, and blown-up tanks. Many represented old battles, but one at Chongoroi, which we rolled through, had taken place only a dozen years before. In March 1998, a hundred armed men from Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA forces descended on Chongoroi, burning the vehicles of UN monitors and the vans of the World Food Program, killed two people and injured three, before making their escape. Instead of a memorial marking the dead and wounded, there were overturned trucks with shell holes in their sides.

  Nearer the coast, the villages were larger, and one town, Catengue, a former Portuguese settlement, had been rebuilt — the first rural town I’d seen that looked habitable, with old, smooth-sided buildings and mended roofs. One reason for this might have been that it had become a railway town again, the train from Benguela passing through twice a week, but not today.

  More food stops, piss stops, fuel stops, roadside markets with chickens, oranges, bananas, and greasy fries, with more angry yelling from the back of the bus, the driver responding by yelling back and laughing. The man next to me shrugged at the shouts, and explained, “Muito lento,” which, like a tempo indication on a musical score, was easy enough to understand. The bus was going too slowly for the impatient passengers.

  At one of the food stops, as I searched for a cup of coffee, a man from the bus asked me in English, “Senhor, can I help you?” I was the only branco on the bus, and perhaps also the oldest. When I told him I was looking to buy coffee, he said, giggling a little, “No coffee here.”

  “But Angola grows coffee.”

  “Yes, but,” and he laughed again, shrugging, “this is …” His gesture meant: We are nowhere, we are in the bush, there is nothing here. Then, “What is your country?”

  I told him what he wanted to know.

  “What you think about Angola?”

  I said, “Angola very nice.”

  And at that moment I waved away a woman who held out a basin holding some sticky, shapeless mess, as if showing me a sample of stagnant pond life.

  The man translated my compliment for his friend beside him, who practically gagged on the banana he was eating — two Angolans by the roadside, sharing the Americano’s hilarious joke. He said Angola very nice!

  They were Miguel and Delfino — Miguel was the English-speaker. They had been at a wedding in Lubango and were headed to Benguela to catch another bus to Lobito, where they lived. They too complained that our bus was slow. We should have been in Benguela by now, Miguel said. And he shrugged.

  “In Angola we have bad situation,” he said. “Nothing is right. Nothing is justice. You see the road? Bad. You see the food? It’s …” He made a sour face. “Lobito is good. My home is good. But we have slow business. Everyone want” — he fidgeted his fingers, making the money sign.

  I said, “Angola has oil. Angola has gold and diamonds. Angola has money.”

  “Big people has money,” Miguel said. “Big people has too much of money. But not” — he nodded at the market activity, the women with trays on their heads and infants on their backs, the children with buckets of plastic water bottles or baskets of oranges, pleading for customers, the girls swinging bags of fries, the basins brimming with shapeless, sticky pond creatures, everyone jostling to sell their wares, smilingly destitute, competing and elbowing forward before the bus left and a great sunlit silence descended on their market once more — “not leetle people.”

  “But you’re a big person, Miguel,” I said. And he was — physically imposing, fat-faced, with a potbelly, perspiring in a blue-striped sweater-vest that he’d probably put on that morning in chilly Lubango and hadn’t yet taken off. Delfino was smaller, dapper in a black leather waistcoat and pointy-toed shoes, listening attentively, watching me with close-set eyes.

  “Me, I am big” — and Miguel clapped a hand to his belly — “but I has no money.” He leaned toward me and said, “Government people has money — and their friend, and their family. Politician people has money.” He was whispering now. “They keep. They don’t geeve.”

  I made a sympathetic noise in my sinuses.

  “Is ba
d,” Miguel said, and after explaining in Portuguese to his friend, Delfino muttered something Miguel agreed with: “Is trouble.”

  “Big trouble?”

  He nodded and, sticking out his lower lip for emphasis, said, “Big trouble. Leetle people not happy.”

  I wasn’t that happy myself. I was thinking: I have heard this before. I have seen this before. The unending echo of underdevelopment, but with a difference — more people, more squalor, a greater disconnect between the governing rich and their parasitic friends, and the poor who live without hope.

  We came to a weird plain of bush, with maybe a thousand baobab trees, more than I had ever seen in one place, no other trees near them to diminish the power of their swollen bagginess, their fat bulgy trunks and stubby, wrinkled, rootlike branches. Because baobabs are a favorite of elephants, for the water stored in the pith of their trunks and branches, they are often stripped, splintered, and gored by the great beasts’ powerful tusks. But in the absence of elephants this baobab forest remained intact.

  The long straight road down sandy slopes to the coast, the last twenty miles of this ten-hour trip, offered a panorama of the scoops of shoreline bristling with palm trees, the Bay of Benguela, and the South Atlantic Ocean, an expanse of shimmering blue silk on this sunny day. And then we were in honking, screeching traffic on narrow tropical streets.

  Hot, flat, coastal Benguela was the opposite of cool, hilly, high Lubango. But both were ramshackle and disorderly, praised by people who lived in them by saying, “You should have seen this place ten years ago!” — the sort of backhanded compliment you hear in Calcutta. But they had reason to say so. The American journalist Karl Maier, in Angola: Promises and Lies, described how in 1992 pro-government forces shelled the Benguela headquarters of the occupying UNITA army, which had dynamited the central market. “Both sides carried out summary executions,” Maier wrote. “Bulldozers were brought in to scoop up hundreds of bodies that had been left rotting in the streets.”

  The bloodshed in Benguela had been horrific and relatively recent. But I had come for a reason. I had agreed to teach English classes here, too.

  “Benguela of the slave yards,” the Angolan novelist Pepetela writes in his family saga, Yaka. Pepetela, which means “eyelash” in Kimbundu, is his nom de plume; his real name is Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos. This novel is a good introduction to the town, an account of the immigrant Semedo family over four generations, beginning in the nineteenth century, the family growing as Benguela grows, first with the slave trade, then in commerce and shopkeeping and farming, but always exploiting African labor. Yaka opens with two vivid memories of young Alexandre Semedo: the first, his fear of the slave yards, “monotonous songs and mysterious drumming mingled with the sound of chains,” and the second, the sound of lions roaring at night. “Lions never frightened me, they were my first lullaby.”

  Fiction gives life to places in expressive ways that no history book can begin to suggest. Characters in novels admit us to intimacies — not true of scholarly chronicles, no matter how detailed. We know the people in novels better than we know our friends. Without underlining the racial complexity of colonial Angola, Pepetela takes for granted the various strata of white society; in Yaka, Alexandre’s mother refers to herself as belonging to “the lowest class of whites” because she has no servants or slaves, and says, “I’m a second-class white because I was born here.” This sort of coloration gives Angolan fiction an odd texture and emphasis — neither Zimbabwean nor South African fiction, which is often full of white settler families, strays into such racial classifications, or describes whites as so poor they work as menials and don’t have servants.

  In the Benguela of Yaka, Alexandre reflects on how “his mother died with a complex about being a second-class white; she had wanted a first-class white [to marry] her son.” Status is everything in the remote colony — exiled criminals looking for respectability are “offended when their rotten past is recalled.” But no one plays by the rules, only thieves win, and physical passion dominates characters’ lives: Father Costa, a rural priest, has defiantly fathered fifteen mulatto children.

  Since Angola is so seldom written about, and fiction is always so revealing, I made a point of boning up on Angolan authors. The Angolan novel is unusual; it is unlike the typical African novel of tribal life, of the yearning for freedom and an awakening political identity and the coming of independence. The Angolan novel is an anarchic and multicultural hodgepodge, as self-referential, incestuous, and homegrown an artifact as everything else in isolated and xenophobic Angola. Its theme is often disappointed expectations.

  Such novels are not for the literary critic or the connoisseur of fiction. They aren’t much fun, and it’s tedious work to finish them. But I wasn’t interested in whether these books were well or poorly written. I only wanted to know if they gave any clue to the inner life of the country, and even badly written or clumsily translated books often manage that. The Angola of Angolan fiction (of Pepetela, of José Luandino Vieira, of Arnaldo Santos and Sousa Jamba) encompasses the lives of black Africans, usually Kimbundu-speaking people, but also of white peasants and white slum dwellers, many of whom speak a shantytown slang of mixed Kimbundu and Portuguese words.

  Yaka portrays a Benguela of rednecks, rich landowners, racism, family secrets, impartial cruelty, casualties of war, family strife, litigious yokels, brutal sex, hard drinking, and the long shadow of the past hanging over all of this fictional hothouse. It sounds like Faulkner, down to the Southern Gothic sweep and scope, but it is not so felicitous as Faulkner, and like many African novels it is sententious and lacking in humor. Yet the book gives access to Benguela. Yaka is a chronicle of the country seen through the eyes of a large multigenerational family whose first ancestor, Oscar, is a convict sent to Angola in 1880 for killing his wife — ten years in Angola is his punishment, as well as banishment to the colony for life.

  The strict chronology of the novel is helpful, like a flesh-and-blood history book: the early settlement, the slavery and forced labor, the growing family, the fierce wars, the tribal battles, the uprising of 1961 that led to clandestine networks of rebels, the departure in 1975 of the Portuguese from Lobito, the port “cluttered up with crates of every possible size … All of Angola is going in those crates, the lieutenant said. Dismantled machinery, diamonds in the petrol tanks of cars, textiles, appliances of every kind, the most incredible things … even things not thought to be valuable, wooden statues and masks, everything sells in Europe, leopard skins and mats, ivory and baskets, it’s a case of plunder.”

  The last section of Yaka concerns the shaky independence and the subsequent war, when Alexandre Semedo’s great-grandson (adopted by some Cuvale people from southwest Angola) fights in the guerrilla war “that will be famous, behind the enemy troops, and the occupation of Benguela will only last a hundred days, one hundred dark days.”

  The reference is not to occupation by the Portuguese, but after independence by the South Africans, whose soldiers commandeered the city, intimidated its people, and handed it over to the government opposition after a major battle in 1975, which took place in the area I traveled through, from Lubango to Benguela. Most of Pepetela’s fictional locations (among them Dombe Grande, and Capangombo on the plateau, near Humpata) can be found on a map — where the characters moved, where they farmed and owned shops, where they looked for wives, where (near the coast road and the Caporolo River, which I had crossed late in the day) the Portuguese in the 1940s set off in hunting parties to provoke Africans and massacre them after they’d managed to engage them.

  The first place I saw in Benguela, because I had rushed to the sea-front for relief and a breeze, was the central slave quarters. It’s one of the city’s landmarks, an old, low prisonlike fortress, a stockade in stone, facing the ocean. Because it is so near the water, the slave quarters is a popular place for youths to gather, and though some of them were selling ice cream and candy and chewing gum, all of them looked hungry
.

  Benguela was not a natural place for the Portuguese to settle, yet it was identified as a prime site for development in 1615 by Manuel Cerveira Pereira, who named it São Filipe de Benguela after his patron, King Philip II of Spain and Portugal. But it was swampy, unhealthy, and inhospitable. As the novel Yaka dramatizes, it was for centuries a town of petty shopkeepers and slave traders, nearly all of them, of course, exiled convicts.

  From its beginnings as a small slave port in the late 1600s, Benguela would a hundred years later rival Luanda in importance. It never had an extensive settler population. Even into the twentieth century the number of whites in Benguela and Lobito was still tiny (the “native town” of the 1920s guidebooks). But then the white population of Angola was relatively modest. Until 1940 ethnic Portuguese constituted less than 1 percent of Angola’s inhabitants, and it was not until 1950 that their proportion approached 2 percent.

  The government of Portugal, attempting to stabilize the white population, tried to create an agricultural colony near Benguela in 1885. It failed because it was run by ex-convicts who hated farming and were tyrannical toward their workers. The failed farmers were pressed into the army, but they failed at soldiery too, because of their mindless brutality or their simple desertion. The historian of Angola Gerald Bender noted that by 1907 the majority of crimes in Benguela were committed by these ex-convicts.

  All eyewitness accounts of Benguela through the years describe a small miserable town supported by the slave trade. After slavery ended, forced labor was instituted. The practice was the same; it was just a change of name, from slave (esclava) to servant (serviçal). Like the slaves, the servants were bartered for guns and cloth, marched to Benguela and Lobito, and sent to other Portuguese colonies that needed labor, among them São Tomé and Principe. An average of three thousand people a year were shipped out in the 1920s. Some Portuguese observers objected, and in the 1940s one of the harshest critics, Captain Henrique Galvão, a long-serving government official, compiled a report of abuses committed against the Africans who had been forced into servitude. The Salazar government responded by arresting Galvão for treason and banning his report. Despite the introduction of some labor reforms in the late 1940s through the late 1950s, as I learned in Lubango, forced labor continued into the 1960s. So you could say that until just the other day, Benguela had been no more than a depot for human trafficking.