The Last Train to Zona Verde (27 page)

“So we put an operational hold on the compact,” Oliver said. “And then the Malawians hosted Sudan’s al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court.”

“And what happened?”

“The MCC questioned Malawi’s commitment to the principles.”

“So no money?”

“No money.”

“That’s how it should be.” But I was not sure what “investment in the energy sector” meant — perhaps speeding the flow of foreign oil, or subsidizing it, or creating alternative sources. One of the problems with the whole discussion was the vagueness of the terms. Even the millions seemed like abstractions.

I remembered the tourist herds at the Etosha lodges and Oliver’s showing us the places to be upgraded. Were U.S. funds invested in Namibia’s tourism industry?

“Yes.” And Oliver elaborated by saying that the tourism project allotment was $67 million, which was for the improvement and management of Etosha National Park and to help in marketing Namibian tourism. The intention was to promote Namibia as a splendid, game-rich, tourist-worthy destination. Some of the money was allotted to develop an interactive website for the Namibia Tourism Board. It was also used to help Namibia in the areas of conservation, ecotourism, and poverty reduction in households within conservancy areas.

All of this was well intentioned in terms of development — even if vague in description — and laudable in the efforts made to ensure the funds weren’t stolen or wasted. If the money was misused, the grant would be cut off. But money for
tourism?
Many tourist destinations in the United States, which get nothing from the U.S. government for infrastructure or websites or training, would have been glad to get the $67 million grant Namibia had been awarded. Places I knew well got no money from the government to prop up tourism — Hawaii got nothing, Cape Cod got nothing, but they struggled along. Maine’s tourist industry was still in serious trouble in the aftermath of the 2008 economic slump, with high unemployment, high gas prices, and a lack of awareness outside New England of the
delights of Downeast Maine, one of the noblest and best-preserved seacoasts on earth.

Were the hard-pressed residents of Maine, many of whom worked in the state’s hotels and restaurants, contributing to the improvement of the Namibian tourist industry, helping to lure the herds to Etosha and the Skeleton Coast?

“Let’s say I happen to be a Maine lobsterman,” I said. “I get up at four-thirty every morning, go out in my boat, and haul hundreds of traps. Some days, fuel is so expensive and there are so few lobsters that I lose money. But I keep hauling, and steering my boat in circles. I pay my stern man. I pay my taxes. I’m wet and cold most of the time.” Oliver was smiling, knowing what was coming. “What would you say to my friend Alvin Rackcliff of Wheeler Bay, in Midcoast Maine, about the use of his tax money to attract tourists to Namibia?”

“I’d say we’re trying to help create countries that are stable,” Oliver said as I scribbled.

“I don’t think Alvin would care too much about that. He’d say” — as Alvin said to me once — “human life means nothing in Africa.”

“It’s less than one percent of the total U.S. budget,” Oliver said.

“It’s still a lot of money. Alvin is heavily taxed and works very hard and he’s pretty old. But he needs to keep working.”

“Aid builds good relationships,” Oliver said.

“Alvin would want to know what Namibia is doing for itself.”

“Each country contributes, up to a half of the total,” Oliver said, then, seeing that I was impressed, he added that low-income countries were not required to contribute any money. “Look, it helps make countries viable. It builds infrastructure. Ghana is a good example of how loans and investment help. We had a successful compact there.”

At this point Trevor piped up. He had been listening intently throughout my needling interrogation. He said, “How about these politicians in Windhoek who are living like kings? Why are we giving
free drugs to the country if they’re spending money on themselves for luxuries?”

“Namibia has had regular elections since 1990,” Oliver said. “As well as tourist-based development, we’re doing education and agriculture. Hey, it’s five years, and we keep checking that no one steals.”

“I get it,” I said, because of all the foreign aid programs I’d come across, this one seemed to be operated in the most efficient way. I remembered the highly critical book
Dead Aid
, and asked, “What does Dambisa Moyo think about it?”

“She’s skeptical. She’s taken some shots at us,” Oliver said. “But the whole idea is that we shouldn’t be here forever. There shouldn’t be a long-term-donor drip feed.”

I was persuaded that the Millennium Challenge Corporation was doing its work well. (And to put the $67 million figure in perspective, soon after my talk with Oliver I heard on the radio that the European Union and the IMF had voted to give a 110-billion-euro bailout loan to Greece, to help write off its debt.) I liked the idea that the MCC would cut off funds to countries that did not live up to their word, and that tyrannies did not qualify. The best news was the close monitoring of the projects and the cash flow. Some nations benefited, and were perhaps grateful and more stable as a result. What did all this mean to the U.S. taxpayer? Not much, I felt.

What did it mean to sorely taxed and hard-working Alvin Rackcliff in Maine? He was well over eighty now and still fishing, still hauling traps. I could see him in his yellow slicker, gloves, and rubber boots in his lobster boat,
Morning Mist
, laughter ringing in my ears.

“If you believe that, Paulie,” he would say, “you’re crazy as a shit-house rat!” Or perhaps, “The only free cheese is in a mousetrap.”

The next day, Oliver dropped me off in the town of Omuthiya, which was so small it did not appear on my map. We met his friend Moses there. Moses was an Ovambo, from Oshikati, near the border. He
said he’d take me fifty miles up the road to Ondangwa, where there was a hotel.

I thanked Oliver for enlightening me about his projects, and for putting up with my needling questions, and thanked Trevor for his good humor.

Trevor said, “We’re going to miss you, man.”

“You’ll be fine from here on,” Oliver said.

I threw my bag into the back of Moses’s truck and climbed into the front seat.

On the road, Moses said, “You’re going to the border tomorrow?”

“Yes,”

“You’ve been to Angola before?”

“No.”

“You speak Portuguese?”

“No.”

“You have friends there?”

“None.”

Moses was a handsome man, but his scowl gave him a fierce mask. He held the steering wheel in both hands, hanging on, ruminating.

“What do you think?” I asked.

He turned his scowling, pained face toward me and said, “It’s a nightmare!”

Moses didn’t know the half of it, nor did I. Though I was not aware of it until a month later, that day in Namibia, or perhaps earlier, in one of the hotels where I had used my credit card (I had used it only fourteen times in Namibia, always for hotel bills) my personal information was stolen. My name and numbers were printed on a duplicate card, identical to mine (“It’s easy,” the fraud squad told me), and beginning on my last day in Namibia, and for the next month, this duplicate card was used in more than a hundred fraudulent transactions.

Some of the purchases were substantial ($4,000 worth of furniture
from OK Furniture in Windhoek, almost as much at Edgar’s Furniture); some were tiny (a $3 meal at an Olympia Quick Shop, $20 for beer at Shoprite). Much more furniture, lots of sunglasses from the Sunglass Hut, numerous computers, a used car, tinted windows, new alloy wheels, $800 worth of new shoes, and many supermarket bills. The total came to just over $48,000 — U.S. dollars.

11
The Frontier of Bad Karma

I
TRAVELED
up
THE ROAD
, the road grew more tortured, and even before I got to Ondangwa, forty miles south of the Angola frontier, I knew I was in a different country, but a nameless one, an ill-defined borderland, a zone of decrepitude and hunger.

Having crossed the Vet Fence again, I was over the Red Line, in the land of skinny cows and poor housing and trash heaps and shredded plastic bags blown against wire fences and fluttering from thornbushes. It was also a land of drunken men, idle boys, and overworked women. Nearly everyone on the other side of the Vet Fence was hard-up, and the best houses were square, miserable, flat-topped huts made of cinderblocks. Most of the blocks were fabricated by recently arrived Chinese immigrants for whom this was a profitable business of simple routines, and they worked in open-sided sheds just off the road using crude mixing machinery and rubber molds. The Chinese employed Namibians, who were coated with cement dust, making them look like an alien race, like exploited, gray-skinned Martians. That was appropriate, because
this area seemed like another nation altogether, and at times another planet, the dark star of my anxious dreams.

Though I had heard about them endlessly, I had seen just a few Chinese settlers in Namibia. But here in the north they were numerous (and anonymous), their shops and enterprises shoved up against the border of Angola, the source of much of their business — and they were evasive, usually ducking out of sight when I attempted to ask any questions. Their presence here made me wonder about China’s prosperity, because most of the Chinese I was to meet were escapees from the Chinese miracle who in Africa believed themselves to be in a promised land of no regulation, under-the-counter cash transactions, and improvisation. Here, where no one breathed down their necks, they found cheap labor and easy pickings. This free, happy, capitalistic situation is a blessed rarity the Chinese traditionally refer to by intoning a ritual formula (as many must have done in Africa): “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away.”

I was soon in a world of roadblocks and mobs, of terrible roads or no roads at all, a world of lies and scamming and crooked policemen. It was also a world of abuse, a world of “Meester, why are you here?” Which was a good question — why
was
I here? Over the following legs of my trip I attempted to answer the question. At first glance, it seemed sheer perversity for me to be here, and foolishness to go farther north.

No tourists ventured into this border area — why would they? The hotels were terrible, the food was filthy, the people were suspicious and occasionally hostile. The roadside was littered with broken glass and crushed soda cans. A foul smell hung over it all — the stink of the latrines of poverty, smoking garbage heaps, diesel fumes, and, at roadside stands, yellow dough balls frying in hot fat. The weather was exhausting — very hot, no shade, no rain.

Still in Namibia, in the ramshackle town of Ondangwa, I looked
for travelers but saw none from Angola nor any heading there, except for the desperate people whose extended family or tribe had been bisected by the border, for this was Ovamboland and Ovambo lived on both sides. It was a world of abruptness and rudeness. I was startled when an official would scream “You!” at me and raise a fist, as though on the verge of hitting me in the face.

Until a month after I left, when I learned — too late — that I had been defrauded as a result of identity theft, Namibia had struck me as fairly orderly and reasonably polite. But the farther I traveled on this north-trending road, order and politeness deteriorated, and I began to wonder what I might find at the border and across it. It seemed a hot African world of bad karma, near anarchy, and opportunism. I saw poverty and desperation everywhere, a scavenging culture, and ultimately it made me question the whole purpose of my sentimental journey.

All serious travelers arrive at this doubting, why-bother juncture, stalling on the road, sometime or other. The next question concerned whether there was any point in going on. I had never felt more like an old man, a highly visible alien in a place where no one looked remotely like me, a sitting duck. Perhaps this would provide a good lesson in understanding the vulnerability of a minority, but was it worth the trouble?

In the small hotel, having seen how the little town looked in its dirt and disrepair, I became curious to know how bad things might be farther on, perhaps at the border town of Oshikango and beyond. So far, I could not imagine anything more disorderly or unpromising than the town of Ondangwa.

I write “small hotel” and “little town” and “dirt and disrepair” and it’s possible to read into those words a certain seedy charm, as if I am describing a tropical locale in a novel of intrigue — the dark saloon, the warren of back streets, the overhanging foliage, the colorful inhabitants of Ovamboland.

It was not like that at all. The sultry backwater of fiction is never
a total slum; it always has a cozy refuge — a hotel with a veranda, a riverboat tied up at a jetty, a quaint old house, a compliant woman or wisecracking local. And here in the comfortable shadows, the hero sips a drink, and eyes the woman, and contemplates the derelict town. This fantasy is complete because as a romance (and much of Graham Greene’s fiction, for example, is misleadingly romantic in this flawed way) it includes a safe place to hide and maybe someone to fall in love with, or depend on. The stink of the place, the hopelessness, the vile indifference, do not rise from the page.