The Last Train to Zona Verde

by Paul Theroux

  Nine hours of this, with cows, goats, and dogs to steer around, and with stops. But a stop would be fifteen minutes in a muddy courtyard of a coastal town, yellow sludge up to my ankles as I sloshed to the shack selling — what? Greasy bags of poxy fries and piles of flyspecked frango (“Which one, senhor?”) and no bananas. And a chat with Agostinho.

  “What your country?” was a question I could answer, but “You tourist?” was a hard one.

  I said, “I don’t know.”

  “You business?”

  “No business.”

  “You teacher?”

  “Sometimes.”

  He poked me in the chest with a big blunt finger and laughed, saying, “Why you come here?”

  “To see this,” I said. I pointed to the heaps of garbage, the market women squatting against their baskets of bruised fruit and fanning away flies, the children whining for food, the rapper boys, the beaten dogs, the bullet-scarred shop fronts, the stacks of pirated DVDs, the strangely overdressed girls in tight slacks and curly gleaming hair extensions, eyeing me with disapproving pouty faces.

  And Agostinho welcomed me in the national language.

  I was surprised to see the wide empty beaches. Perhaps close-up they would look as befouled as the towns, but at this distance, seen from the higher coast road, they appeared wave-washed and clean and desolate. In Luanda I was to meet a young, athletic Portuguese diplomat who told me that on most weekends he drove down the coast to surf the waves here at Cabo Ledo and Cabo de São Bráz. He surfed alone, he never saw other surfers.

  From the coast, some inland stretches were green, villages showing through the trees, some of them clusters of small thatched huts, others tracts of one-room cinderblock houses with tin roofs. Areas of the landscape had been burned out or deeply eroded, and looked blasted by time and the elements (and artillery shells), but no matter what lay inland, the seashore beneath the sloping hills was lovely — remained lovely, probably, because it was uninhabitable. No one could live on or near the beach. Nothing would grow in the sand. The water was undrinkable. The traditional knack for small-scale sea fishing had apparently been lost.

  In the afternoon we crossed the Kwanza, a wide river for which the Angolan unit of currency is named (kwanza, a Kimbundu word, should not be confused with the Swahili word kwanzaa, meaning “first”). The bridge over the Kwanza had been blown up many times and was being improved again — Chinese design, Chinese laborers, Chinese money.

  Though I didn’t know it at the time, this was a significant boundary, the river somewhat mystical for Angolans, a setting of myths and folktales and many battles. The land surrounding the Kwanza seemed almost idyllic. But not long after we passed it — thirty miles from the capital — the Luanda blight began. Soon there were no trees, only shacks and people and bare soil. The blight was not simply the small shacks, cement-block houses, roadside dumps, and stricken villages sitting in a sea of mud; blight was also evident in the new, larger cement structures, unfinished or abandoned or vandalized and sitting in seas of mud.

  What appeared to be a modest building boom was in reality cutthroat opportunism, random and shoddily put-together real estate ventures — ugly houses and grotesque skeletal structures projected to be hotels. Why would anyone stay in these hideous buildings surrounded by slum huts? The building boom had been outstripped by the growth of squatter camps, hillsides of shacks. Buildings were rising, but slums were also growing — the buildings vertically, the slums horizontally. Like the South African pattern of migration, people from rural areas kept coming — the burgeoning shantytowns outstripping any slum improvements, the low mean city of new arrivals visibly sprawling.

  In a bus that stopped in traffic for twenty minutes at a time, and with the continual dropping off of passengers, I thought I must be near the center of Luanda, so I got off with some other riders. The place was called Benfica, a district of heavy traffic and ugly buildings, stinking of dust and diesel fumes. Africa, yes, but it was also a version of Chechnya and North Korea and coastal derelict Brazil, places without a single redeeming feature, places to escape from.

  As I stood at the roadside, tasting the grit, a small car intending to avoid the clogged traffic sped past, banged into a road divider, flew sideways, and, deformed by the crash, swerved off the road. A man with a bloody face and hands pushed the driver’s side door open and, seeing him, bystanders laughed. The bloody-faced man staggered, his arms limp, his mouth agape, like a zombie released from a coffin. He was barefoot. No one went to his aid. He dropped to his knees and howled.

  “Idiota,” a man next to me said, and spat in the dust.

  I became conscious of entering a zone of irrationality. Going deeper into Luanda meant traveling into madness. Everything looked crooked or improvisational, with a vibration of doomsday looming. I would have been happy to get on a bus going in the opposite direction, but I had a dutiful sense of needing to follow through on my plans, continuing north into the insanity.

  Many places I’d been in the bush — Tsumkwe or Grootfontein or Springbok — had been described as “nowhere.” Yet that was not how I saw them. They were distinctly themselves, isolated though they might be, settlements with a peculiar look—the look of home. But this Benfica was the very embodiment of nowhere, and on the way to nowhere, the twitching decrepitude of urban Africa. Standing next to the sheet-metal shop, the blowing dust, the big trucks and fumes, the noise and the heat, I thought how this was in microcosm the whole of the city experience in most of Africa, though up to now I had avoided facing the fact. And at that point I hadn’t yet seen the full extent of Luanda’s awfulness.

  From the immensity of the slums, the disrepair of the roads, and the randomness of the building, I could tell that the government was corrupt, predatory, tyrannical, unjust, and utterly uninterested in its people — fearing them for what they saw, hating them for what they said or wrote. Though the regime was guilty of numerous human rights violations, it was not outwardly a politically oppressive place. The police were corrupt, but casually so — Angola was too busy with its commercial extortions to be a police state. It was a government of greed and thievery, determined to exclude anyone else from sharing, and Angolan officialdom had an obsession with controlling information.

  I knew of many instances when investigative journalists were arrested for doing their jobs — two of them around the time I was in Luanda. In one case, a print journalist, Koqui Mukuta, was beaten and locked up for reporting on a peaceful demonstration, and twenty of the activists were also arrested. In another example, a radio journalist, Adão Tiago, was jailed for reporting episodes of “mass fainting,” possibly caused by the release of toxic industrial fumes. But the Angolan government does not actively persecute the majority of its people; it is a bureaucracy that impoverishes them by ignoring them, and is indifferent to their destitution and inhuman living conditions.

  A society of shakedowns and opportunism is inevitably a society of improvisation. That came across vividly in Luanda: the improvised bridge or road, the improvised hut or shelter, the improvised government, the improvised excuse. Angola was a country without a plan, a free-for-all driven by greed. It was hard to travel through the country and not feel that the place was cursed — not cursed by its history, as observers often said, but cursed by its immense wealth.

  A sense of hopelessness had weighed me down like a fever since I’d stepped across the border weeks before. And with this fever came a vision that had sharpened, coming into greater focus, as if inviting me to look closer. My first reaction was a laugh of disgust at the ugliness around me, like the reek of a latrine that makes you howl or the sight of a dirty bucket of chicken pieces covered with flies. After the moment of helpless hilarity passed, what remained was the vow that I never wanted to see another place like this.

  The xenophobia that characterizes Angolan officialdom in the remote provinces, small towns, and coastal cities is the prevailing mood in the capital, where hatred of outsiders seemed intense. Individual
ly Luandans were friendly enough, sometimes crazily so, screeching their meaningless hellos. Nancy Gottlieb, in Benguela, saw this as “happy, laughing, energetic, smiling,” but it seemed to me nearer to frenzy. In crowds they pushed and jostled with the mercilessness of a mob, and anyone with a uniform or a badge or any scrap of authority was unambiguously rude or downright menacing.

  Friendliness is helpful to a stranger, yet I could manage without it. Being frowned upon or belittled is unpleasant, but not a serious inconvenience — no writer or traveler is a stranger to hostile or unwarranted criticism. But xenophobia of the sort I found in Luanda, and on an official scale, institutionalized alien-hating, was something new to me. It seemed odd to be disliked for being a stranger, and while the foreigners I met in the capital had their own explanations for this behavior (slavery, colonialism, civil war, the class system, tribalism, poverty, the cold-hearted oil companies) and had ways to cope with it, I found it inconvenient to be so conspicuous and developed a general aversion to being despised.

  Luanda was a surprise because it had been to me, like much of Angola, a foreign land without a face. The reason for this silence or absence of description was that the Angolan government severely restricts the entry of foreign journalists, pretending to be contemptuous, accusing them, in their favorite buzzword of paranoia, of spreading confusão; outsiders disrupting the smooth back-and-forth of bureaucratic thievery. But contempt was the wrong word — contempt is inspired by superiority. A truer word was fear; politicians and businessmen alike were terrified of being found out, of anyone telling the truth about this corrupt country.

  When Luanda does get into the news, it is usually a hooting headline to the effect that the city is practically unaffordable to foreigners: “The most expensive city in Africa!” The Economist, the BBC, and other media outlets have run such stories, with grotesquely colorful details, about the unreasonable sums you had to pay to get very little, which caused expatriates to complain. The people who suffered most from Luanda’s high cost of living were not the expatriates but, of course, the urban poor, the people huddled in the musseques. They were mainly a silent class. Not a sullen class, though; Luanda’s slums were characterized by blaring music and high spirits bordering on hysteria.

  And when I heard of the foreign expatriate couple who paid many thousands of dollars for a tiny room in which the electricity often failed, or hundreds of dollars for a modest restaurant meal, I suspected that they were obliquely boasting, because what kept them in Luanda were their huge salaries. “My rent is seven thousand dollars a month,” an expatriate in the oil industry told me. “And there are people who pay eight thousand a month who don’t have water half the time.” The only reason foreigners came to the city was to make money, and they stayed because their salaries kept growing as oil profits increased. Oil production figures had just been revised upward, output approaching two million barrels a day, at $100 a barrel: a billion dollars of gross revenue every five days, an almost unimaginable cash flow.

  Luanda was a hardship post — it had been that way throughout its history — but it had become a boomtown based on oil. No traveler had ever praised Luanda in its poor days of the past, but it was much the worse more recently for its wealth: the bad restaurants where it was impossible to get a table, the stinking bars where it was hard to order a drink, the expensive neighborhoods with potholed streets, the traffic jams in which people sat for hours in their unmoving BMWs, Mercedes, or Hummers — I saw more bulky, overpriced Hummers in an average day in Luanda than I saw in a month in the States. Or the bad hotels where locals said I’d be lucky to get a room.

  I found my way to the city center, and at the reception desk of a newish but already seedy hotel I was told they might be able to fit me in for three nights. I thanked the clerk for her hospitality.

  Unsmiling, being busy, looking away from me, she said, “Pay in advance. Three nights. That will be eleven hundred dollars. Cash please. No credit cards.”

  “And you might not have hot water,” came a teasing voice behind me.

  I had no alternative. The whole of Luanda was a convergence of oil and mining interests, vying for the city’s few hotels and restaurants (and prostitutes). The guests at my hotel were foreign workers in the national industries — some rough types in old clothes, especially rowdy in the evening, and the slicker, nastier-looking operators of all nationalities in their new suits, making deals in oil, diamonds, and gold. The words “oil, diamonds, and gold” have such allure, and suggest glitter and wealth in a fabled city fattening on its profits. But this was not the case. The city was joyless, as improvisational as its slums — hot and chaotic, inhospitable and expensive, grotesque and poor.

  It had always been a city of desperation and exile. No one went to Luanda for pleasure. Criminal exiles were succeeded by slavers, and later by traders in rubber and ivory, like King Leopold’s Belgians next door in the Congo. When the rubber and ivory trades declined, Angola returned to slavery and then forced labor. But these cruel roles were never mentioned. Ask any Portuguese to explain his country’s relationship to Angola and you’ll be given a version of Lusotropicalism, how the Portuguese had a natural affinity for the dusky people in these warm, sun-kissed lands. But the reality was that Portugal, having imposed itself on the land, was completely out of touch, socially and culturally, with Angola. One small example: Angolan music was not allowed to be played on the national radio station — the only radio station in the country—until 1968.

  The city had never elicited any praise. A traveler in Luanda in 1860, quoted by the historian Gerald Bender, reported a town “ankle-deep in sand … Oxen are stalled in the college of Jesuits.” You might say, “But it was 1860!” That’s true, but it was the premier city in the colony, and the colony had existed for more than two centuries. Later in the nineteenth century another traveler reported Luanda as “a burning furnace [with a] cohort of mosquitoes, spiders, lizards, and cockroaches — an infernal scourge.” In the mid-1920s, “Luanda was described by a Portuguese commentator as cidade porca — ‘pig city’ ” (Douglas Wheeler and René Pélissier, Angola). At that time, only two places in Angola, Luanda and Benguela, could claim a skilled, working populace of “trousered blacks” — caminhos, as they were known in Angola. No Africans wore trousers elsewhere. Not that it really mattered, but the Portuguese boast — largely a self-flattering fiction — was that, as inspired imperialists, they had created a whole class of assimilados — indoctrinated, educated, assimilated Angolans.

  Even in the 1940s Luanda was small, with a mere 61,000 inhabitants. The population increased rapidly in the 1950s and ’60s. Most Portuguese were happy to get away from the mother country then, a time when only 30 percent of households in Portugal had electricity and less than half had running water. Migration was a step up, and continued into the mid-seventies, when whites numbered well over 300,000. We know that figure because just before independence there was a frantic scramble of Portuguese to flee Angola, and that was the number that left — virtually all of them. One vivid urban myth still making the rounds of Luanda describes the fate of a young Portuguese girl abandoned by her parents in their urgency to escape the country. The girl was raised by the family’s former maid in a musseque, the solitary white waif in a black slum.

  In 1974, the year of freedom and bolting colonos, the serious fighting began, bitter warfare that had never been seen in the history of this embattled country, as two main factions and their foreign supporters (Cuba on one side, South Africa on the other) skirmished to possess the land. The nearly thirty-year war finally ended in 2002 with the killing of the opposition commander, Jonas Savimbi, with an Israeli-made rocket (Israelis were said to be complicit in the assassination). Angola was the embodiment of Rebecca West’s dictum in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: “It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of a skunk.”

  A country that has been so besieged, battle weary, and burned out, subjected to decades of fighting and uncertainty, can
perhaps be forgiven for being half mad and dysfunctional. The Luanda of 1991 and ’92, which seems to me like only yesterday, is described in Karl Maier’s Angola: Promises and Lies as a city under attack, a ghost town of artillery damage and corpse-strewn streets, its population of refugees supported by food drops from the UN’s World Food Program. Without calling attention to his own bravery, Maier reports intimidation, persecution, massacres, and limpeza (murder under the name of “cleansing”). In Luanda, Maier finds evidence of mass executions and hidden graves: “I detect movement, a scurrying among the graves we pass. Closer inspection reveals small tunnels the width of a beer can. There are tiny passageways everywhere among the tombs — rats are burrowing into the graves.”

  This, then, was the heritage of Luanda. Without oil wealth, it would have remained just another rotting African city by the sea, like Freetown or Monrovia or Abidjan, the horror capitals of West Africa. But it was floating, bobbing, buoyant on a lake of oil, and so it was busy. More than busy: it was out of its mind.

  Don’t listen to me. Listen to José, a man of thirty-five or so, a middle-level functionary in the oil industry, born in the province of Cabinda — site of the oil wells, most of them offshore. A serious, slightly flustered, and candid soul, José confided his doubts to me. He didn’t know me, I didn’t know him; we had met casually in a Luanda bar over a Cuca beer, and my direct questions provoked him.

  “There is something wrong with this country,” he said. “I have been to the U.S. on oil business. I was in Texas. I could see how different it was from this.”

  “Weren’t you tempted to stay in Texas?”

  “Yes. Because it was so nice. But how could I stay? It’s not home.

  Your country is not my country.”

  “Where exactly do you live?”