by Damien Brown
Only in 2002 did the war end, following the assassination of the UNITA leader. By this time roughly a million people had died, four million had been displaced, and landmines littered thousands of square kilometres of roads and farms. Infrastructure and health care were almost nonexistent; an average parent of the day could have expected one in three of their children to die from malnutrition or disease.
This was the disaster into which MSF and other aid groups arrived to provide assistance, and Mavinga, the town I’d been offered a post in, was reputedly one of the worst affected areas. It had now been four years since the ceasefire although it sounded as if little progress had been made in town. Health care was still provided solely by MSF, and landmines remained problematic. There’d be no possibility of transferring patients, I was told, nor any prospect of moving outside our small security perimeter. Adding to the pitch, MSF were also dealing with a cholera outbreak along the coast, and an Ebola-like virus was killing more than ninety per cent of infected patients in the far north of the country. But, as I read on, with none of this particularly reassuring, it became clear anyway that there was no decision to make. I was in from the start. Because really, fuck it: one could talk about maybe trying to help, of doing something like this in the coming years—when the loans are paid off, when the Master’s degree is under the belt, or when a decent house deposit has been saved—and never actually make it happen. Now was the time. I was ready to roll up my sleeves.
Then I told my girlfriend.
And so, eight flights, two briefings, three continents and several teary goodbyes after leaving Australia, I sat, a single man, immersed in the intoxicating fumes of aviation gas and denial, bumping around in a charter plane. With no idea that the next day I’d be discussing the virtues of mosquito nets. And as we headed due east, leaving the Atlantic coast of West Africa behind us, I tried to correlate what I’d read with what I could see. It wasn’t so easy—the absence of landmarks mandated a little imagination. So I gazed to the right, due south across dry plains, and tried to picture my father standing sentry at a military compound on the nearby Namibian border almost twenty years ago. I looked to the left, due north, and tried to imagine the Congo River snaking past (the setting for Joseph Conrad’s famous novella, Heart Of Darkness, in which Kurtz speaks of ‘The horror! The horror!’) where it forms part of Angola’s border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. There was little chance of seeing the river, though—it was well over a thousand kilometres away. Ahead? Only scrub. Flatness. Nothing. Zambia lay somewhere beyond all that, but below us it was just more of the same: an endless khaki plain, with gnarled trees and knotty vegetation forming a balding covering that thinned as we headed towards the south-east corner of the country. An occasional sandy road was visible, but I could see no other evidence of settlement. Difficult then to comprehend that a war took place for three decades down there, because from above it looked so serene.
We began descending.
‘Already?’ I asked the pilot.
He nodded.
‘Where to?’
He gestured towards the horizon.
‘But where’s the town?’
He laughed. ‘There—’
Jesus, it’s nothing! Just mud huts! We descended quickly and soon made a low pass to check the dirt runway, a crowd of black faces gathering to watch all this, and as we came around and lined up to land I was forced to concede that despite my previous bluster regarding certainties, just getting on with it, I was actually quite nervous all of a sudden. I could see ‘grids’ cut into the bush around town—paths for the de-mining teams, the pilot explained—and there was the hospital, just beside the runway, and it was far bigger than what I expected, this town far smaller, and My God I was actually getting scared and maybe I wasn’t ready for this after all. And of all the things I could think of at that moment—the violence in South Africa, for example, and whether or not as a white man I was going to be safe in the middle of this war-torn piece of Africa—what was bizarrely worrying me most was the note I had seen in the aviation office at the hangar where we boarded the plane; the note that was written in bold red on the Important Information whiteboard of the pilot’s office. The words had caught my attention as the pilot stood metres away on a stepladder, fuelling the plane himself, the other end of the rubber hose dangling into a drum of avgas; it was a note that made my palms sweat and heart pound and head realise more than any of the documents I’d read that this was going to be another world, because really, where else would such words constitute the most vital piece of information for the pilot?
Mavinga—airstrip dry. Watch for stray dog.
• • •
If the wedding gift seemed unusual, the venue is no less so: a large metal shed, one of three, built to temporarily house refugees returning after the war. It’s one of only a dozen buildings in town not made from mud. A dozen intact buildings, that is. The foundations of a few brick structures still peer from the bush in places, but they’re bombed out, shelled, damaged beyond repair. A loose sprawl of huts accounts for most of what I see, their stick frames protruding like ribs through an emaciated mud-and-dung skin. The landscape—flat, dry, brown but for pockets of yellow grass and a defiantly green tree here and there—is broken only by a shallow river meandering past the southern end of town, along which women collect water and lethargic cattle graze. Gone, any resemblance to the Africa I’d known as a child.
We arrive at the shed door. All six of us volunteers—Andrea, a Swiss-German midwife; Pascal, an Italian logistician; Isabella, an Italian nurse; Sofia, a German doctor; Tim, the Swiss-French coordinator; and me. Tim’s the one carrying the mosquito net. He gets nudged in first, but he darts straight back out.
‘We’re late,’ he says, looking back confusedly.
‘What?’
‘Everyone’s already in there, standing quietly. Like they’re waiting for something.’
‘For us?’ asks Sofia.
This shouldn’t be. We’d arrived earlier at the scheduled time—five—only to be confronted by an almost empty shed. Only one person was inside, a man atop a wooden ladder, fixing a length of wiring to the roof. ‘Oh yes,’ he’d laughed. ‘The wedding is here. It is just late!’ He’d suggested that we try again later, although exactly when later was he couldn’t specify. We’d suggested eight. ‘Sure,’ he’d replied. ‘Eight is very good. It should definitely be starting then!’
It’s now seven-thirty. Ostensibly early, but a large group of Angolans are standing quietly beyond the entrance. They turn as we put our heads around the corner.
‘Hi,’ whispers Tim, in Portuguese. ‘Don’t bother moving—we’ll stay here.’
They move. Tim gestures frantically. ‘No, no,’ he says, ‘stay,’ but the crowd parts to create a corridor into the centre of the room. We can now see the bridal party, the emcee, the pastor. They see us.
‘Oh! Boa noite!’ exclaims the emcee—Good evening! ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it’s our expadriados! Please welcome them!’
A hundred-and-something faces turn to look.
‘Please, come to the front,’ calls the emcee. ‘We have been waiting for you. We would not want to begin without our friends from the hospital!’
Solemnly, deeply embarrassed, we follow Tim down this impromptu corridor. No one utters a word. Homemade paper-chains and a Fanta beachball dangle from the roof above, coloured fabric from the steel walls ahead. People press in and stare at us, although the fascination is mutual—for me at least. They’re remarkably handsome, the Angolans; lean, with strong bodies and equally strong faces, their coffee-complexions accentuated by chiselled jawlines, prominent cheekbones and dark, intense eyes. Definitely no office-type physiques in this room. Many of the younger women are utterly gorgeous, too; curvaceous with beautifully shaped hips, their long limbs slim and toned like an athlete’s, although this latter point is no surprise. Every woman I’ve seen during the day has been either carrying something—children, water, food or wood, often several of thes
e simultaneously—or pounding grain.
We arrive at the centre of the room. A half-dozen plastic tables have been arranged around the bare concrete floor to create the ceremonial area, where the bride and groom are already standing. Waiting. Guests crowd closer, the women draped in ornately patterned traditional dresses in an explosion of colours—blues with pinks, reds against greens—their matching headscarves knotted elaborately to one side, although men wear a more eclectic range of Western garb: trousers with any combination of mismatching shirt, jacket and tie, two noteworthy items being a T-shirt advertising a Dublin plumbing company, and what looks suspiciously like a pair of pyjama pants. Clothes that were undoubtedly once donated.
‘Please, our expadriados,’ says the emcee, who’s making far too much of our arrival. ‘Come, take your seats!’ He leads us to a row of plastic chairs near the front—right next to the bridal party. The ceremony begins immediately.
The bride, who’s no older than sixteen, wears a traditional Western gown and is standing before the African pastor, staring ahead nervously. The groom is in his early twenties and wears a neat black suit, appearing equally anxious beside her. I can’t imagine where either of them got their outfits from out here. And I’d argue that this girl is far too young to be getting married, definitely too young to even contemplate motherhood and the risks of childbirth, but in a country where the median life expectancy is thirty-nine, and where a woman bears an average of six children, of which two will likely die before their fifth birthday, I imagine that people see little point in waiting.
The pastor speaks for an hour. Only the sound of a petrol generator drones in the background as it powers the bare bulbs above. No singing, no hymns, no laughter; it all seems remarkably austere. Not what I’d imagined of an African wedding. An arranged marriage, perhaps? The bride and groom stare solemnly at the floor and I see no stolen glances, no hand-holding, so maybe it is. But all of a sudden there’s applause: the couple are man and wife!
‘Senhoras e Senhores!’—Ladies and Gentlemen!—cries the emcee, bounding excitedly back to the centre. ‘Please, let us congratulate our new couple!’
Enthusiastic cheers follow an awkward kiss.
‘And now,’ declares the emcee, ‘our new couple will dance together. Please let us welcome them!’ He leads them to the centre of the shed as onlookers step back, then nods to the DJ in the corner. What follows is a marvel of improvisation: with the flick of a switch and jiggle of a connection, tape player, speakers and car battery unite instantly, unleashing a barrage of crackly sound. A high-pitched wail of a man’s voice fills the shed, the lyrics something about a man loving a wom . . .
Jesus, is this . . .?
It is! Mains electricity hasn’t made it out here, neither plumbed water, sanitation, telephones, nor a school with a roof—but this has? Michael Bolton? I’d laugh but the moment is so sincere, the two of them are enjoying their first dance, and maybe this wasn’t an arranged marriage after all because now the tension of the ceremony is over they’re embracing, they do look to be in love. And maybe Michael Bolton is the newest thing here because I suppose they missed his heyday during the war, missed everything—did they even have weddings at that time? Possibly—but loud music? There’s no way. This must surely be new, this celebrating and planning and doing what the rest of the world has been doing for the last three decades, without fear of another raid or conscription, or of starving to death like a thousand other Angolans on each of the worst days, or of being forced into the sexual servitude of a soldier three times your age as many girls were—
‘Okay, Senhoras e Senhores,’ chimes in the emcee over the second verse. ‘I would like to ask our special guests to come up here, to join for the first dance!’
There’s no way, I think, there’s absolutely no way I’m getting up there to—but the emcee walks to our table and ushers me up, actually guides me by my elbow to the middle of the floor where he brings over one of the young flower girls to dance with me. And now he fetches my colleagues while a hundred pairs of eyes stare from around the room, fascinated by us foreigners—the only six in the entire region—as we begin to dance.
Michael Bolton finishes, which is fortunate: I’m not sure how to slow-dance with a six-year-old. But for this second song we’re blaming it on the boogie with the Jackson Five, so I hold her hands somewhere above her head, below mine, and we step side to side but embarrassingly she does it with more rhythm than I do. Tim nudges me as he bounces past with his partner—a big, voluptuous African aunt of a woman, the first overweight person I’ve seen in here—and Andrea sashays across the concrete, swept around by our sixty-year-old head of Outpatients, who’s really cutting up the floor—straight back, good rhythm, leading well despite his bookish appearance—but the rest of the shed stand transfixed. Children peer from between adults’ legs; adults gape; there’s nothing left to lose, so I go for broke—I pirouette my partner. The room laughs! She loves it, she giggles delightedly in her white frock and wants to go the other way, so we do. A round of applause this time!
‘Okay,’ calls the emcee. ‘Everyone, on the dance floor!’ And now people relax and this wedding is what it should be, and I’ve forgotten all about the hospital, all about those malnourished children and that leopard-attack survivor this morning, and I’m thrilled and excited to be here, and I imagine that this is what my life as an aid worker will be like from now on: gatherings on the weekends, events with the locals, beers, dinners—
‘Fat chance,’ laughs Tim, as we take seats at our undecorated plastic table. Fried pork knuckles and a handful of beers have been placed out for us. ‘You will be at work most of the time,’ he says, ‘and at home you will want to kill your colleagues within two months, because it’ll soon be just four of us. Sofia’s off on Monday and Isabella in a week, and the conversation will quickly run out.’
Pascal and I are unlikely to run out of conversation anytime soon, however. Unlikely to start one either. He speaks Portuguese but no English, I the opposite, so we just clink beers and exchange a few words and laugh. He at least looks to be an amicable guy, bearing no small resemblance to a young Che Guevara. As for Andrea, the new midwife, we seem to get on well, and I suspect she’s going to be very popular out here: attractive, easy laugh, and three male colleagues—all of us locked together in a small compound for six months.
Tim’s whisked back onto the dance floor. Sofia pulls up a chair beside me, grabs a pork knuckle and tells me I’ll settle in quickly—presuming I speak the language. ‘How on earth did they send you if you can’t speak Portuguese?’ she asks, and I tell her that I speak a little Spanish and squeezed in five hurried Portuguese lessons before I left. ‘But that’s not good enough,’ she replies. ‘You need to be conversational. What will you do on the wards? Who will translate?’
Questions not lost on me.
‘Tell me, Damien,’ she asks next. ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’
‘Until a week ago I did. Now, well . . .’
‘Because of this?’ she asks. ‘Because of this posting?’
‘This was the final straw, I guess, but there had been—’
‘You will absolutely get back with her!’ says Sofia. ‘You simply have to. Because out here there is little else to think about. You need someone to care about, Damien, a person to email in the evenings, because . . .’ and now her eyes mist up, ‘because the work out here can be . . .’ God, and now she’s flat out crying! ‘It can be difficult,’ she says. ‘The people, the . . . I’m sorry. Wait—I shouldn’t be saying this. I’m just tired . . . A patient of mine died two days ago, from eclampsia. I knew her well, and I’ve been up a few nights lately . . .’
I look for a tissue but see none. I instead see Tim waving on the dance floor, trying to get our attention as he gestures to the front, pointing to where the bride and groom are opening their small pile of gifts. I’d rather not watch. They’re standing together, going through each package, counting out cash when they find it, slowly, meticulously, and so
on enough they get to ours. Too late to change it now. We even put our names on it! Gently, they peel open the pages of the Italian gossip magazine we used for wrapping, and see the net. They open the plastic and unfurl it, then check the paper. They look again at the net. Check the paper once more, look around at us, and we’re all thinking the same thing: bloody Toyota! Hopefully the couple will feel differently when they climb under it tonight, though—they fold it neatly enough, salvage the paper, and move on to their last gift.
Another dance, and we soon leave. We thank and congratulate a long line of relatives we’ve never met, and wave to those swaying to the Afro-Latin beats of Kisamba the DJ’s found on the radio, hips grinding ever closer under the tangerine orb of that Fanta beachball.
We stroll across the grassless soccer pitch, and as we do I’m forced to contemplate the effectiveness of finding and clearing landmines using trowels. Three thousand have been recovered from town this way—two hundred in just this central square—and walking on it now I wonder how certain they are that they got them all out.
But we survive the crossing. Along the moonlit, sandy main road we wander, talking and laughing, breathing in the smell of wood smoke from the hundreds of cooking fires burning earlier this evening; a camping trip, maybe. Yes! That’s what this is!—an adventurous weekend away with friends. One where you swap stories as you walk, and can see the night sky through the mortar holes in the town’s school building there; where you greet the guard who sits sentry outside your living compound, hunched alone over his fire for the long, cold night, then bury yourself under a pile of musty blankets and fall asleep to candlelight, a teach-yourself-Portuguese book on your lap; and where you get to wake up in a day’s time to make sense of, and somehow supervise, the most daunting, heartbreaking place you’ve ever walked into . . .