The Last Train to Zona Verde (29 page)

“Why bother?” people asked me. But a country that is so hard to enter makes me curious to discover what is on the other side of the fence.

It so happened that I had the letter of invitation in my briefcase,
which (in Portuguese) specified that I was in Angola to visit schools and colleges and give some lectures. I was a writer, it explained. All this tedious detail had the singular merit of being true.

I handed over the letter. The fierce-faced man in the shed did not read it. He placed it on his table with my passport.

I waited, breathing hard in the heat. I spoke to Vickie. The loitering boys laughed. After about twenty minutes, I went back to the shed and raised my hand to indicate,
Here I am, sir
. And seeing me, the immigration official, looking offended, swung himself through the door and screamed at me and flicked his hand: “
Você deve esperar!
You wait! You wait over there!”

This display of needless abuse had its effect on the little mob. Seeing how the man had treated me, the loitering boys in their backward caps and rapper T-shirts, emboldened by the tone, began to crowd me, their clothes stinking, muttering to me in Portuguese and Afrikaans, and to one another in their own language.

Twice more the official screamed, “You wait!” And when, about an hour later, he handed me my passport, keeping my letter, deaf to my request for a copy, I realized that I’d had a valuable lesson in border crossing, in Angolan officialdom, in the ways of traveling today.

The official had scowled at me and said, “
Você é professor?”

“Yes,” I had said. “
Sou professor.”

And he had waved me on. It was a very hot day and the delay was inconvenient, but I could not take it personally. I was an older man of an alien race entering the country by the back door, treated with the casual abuse reserved for the contemptible souls who walked across the remote border. To anyone who breezed through the international airport on the red carpet and praised the country’s manners and modernity, I could say: You do not have the slightest idea.

To someone like myself, intending to write a book, this whole morning of serial futility, spent going from Namibia to Angola —
perhaps fifty yards of travel — could not have been a richer or more enlightening experience.

Next I walked into even greater chaos, the Angolan border town of Santa Clara, Vickie quick-stepping behind me with my bag, the boys on either side of us, all of them moving fast, because I was trotting, hoping to discourage them.

“Bus,” I said. The boys tugged at me. They knew where I could find a bus. Vickie led the way. We found two buses, but neither were leaving for Lubango, my intended destination, until nightfall. And the buses themselves were in such disrepair I doubted they would leave at all.

Vickie, meanwhile, stood by me. She communicated with me in gestures, and she waved the boys away. She was young, but strong-willed and helpful, and whatever curses or warnings she was muttering to the boys kept them at arm’s length.

All I could see of Santa Clara was a potholed main street lined by low shops selling motor oil and Chinese plastic goods — buckets and patio chairs. Here and there stood wooden sheds plastered with signs advertising lottery tickets. The heavily laden women from the Namibian side were mostly traders, and they set out their vegetables by the road or hawked them out of baskets. The town, in its chaos, made Oshikango, just across the border — I could see it through the high border fence — seem peaceful and orderly.

A small boy carrying a bucket filled with bottles of water passed by. I bought one bottle, using Namibian dollars, and the money in my hand attracted a new crowd of jostling men and boys, the moneychangers. As I moved down the street, I found out that the town of Ondjiva was only about twenty miles away. If I got there in a bush taxi or a chicken bus, I could perhaps make a plan.

Then I saw a Land Cruiser ahead, an old one, angular, like a tin breadbox on wheels, and a man beside it. I said, “Ondjiva?”

The man was about thirty and wore a soccer jersey that was already
soaked in sweat from the day’s heat. His harassed face was made more tragic by his missing front teeth, and a ballpoint pen was stuck into the fat frizz of his dense hair, like a hairpin. He indicated yes. He then enumerated the places he was headed: “Ondjiva. Xangongo. Cahama. Lubango.”

Lubango was my destination. I asked when he was leaving. “
Quando vamos?”
In an hour — he indicated on his watch and tapped the time. “
Quanto dinheiro?”

He mentioned a number, then withdrew the pen from his hair and wrote the price in blue ink on his yellow palm, indicating thousands. This was the amount in Angolan kwanzas. I showed him my Namibian money. He wrote another number. It was a reasonable amount. I paid him. I quietly paid Vickie — and, gratefully as with Stephen, more than she had asked for — and was sorry to see her leave. She went back over the border, her floppy hat crushed and misshapen from her having carried my bag. The whole time she’d been with me, she had never smiled.

Pointing to himself, the driver said, “Camillo.”

“Paulo,” I said.

If all went well, I would arrive in Lubango that night. But few things in travel are simple, and everything in Angola, even the most straightforward transaction, was so hard as to be inconceivable. I suspected Camillo wanted more passengers. He did. Over the next three hours, in the heat of this border town, he stood by the car howling the names of towns, and one by one, boys, men, a woman with baskets, got into the back of the vehicle. Since I was the first paying passenger, I had taken the front seat, but a young woman slipped through the driver’s side. So there would be three of us in the front seat for the three-hundred-mile drive to Lubango.

The woman’s name was Paulina, and she was in her early twenties, sweet-faced but silent, wearing a tight black T-shirt and black jeans. She said she was going up the road to her village: “
Minha aldeia está próximo Lubango.”

I sat, keeping my head down, killing time by making notes that began,
Too tedious to recount the delays
 …

The seven or eight boys who had been hanging around my side of the car — pesterers, moneychangers, mere gawkers, “
Senhor
 … meestah” — had wandered away. For me to get out of the car and traipse around would mean being followed, and what was the point? There was no shade. There was nothing to buy. Santa Clara was much worse, more miserable, than Oshikango, fifty yards away. I resigned myself to not eating that day, and I dozed.

In one of those mocking peculiarities of a world I had not gotten used to, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I was still in the telephonic orbit of Namibia. My wife on the line. She missed me. And how was I?

“Lovely day here on the Angolan border. I’m in Santa Clara.”

“What a pretty name.”

Early in the afternoon, Camillo got into the car and began fussing with his cassette tapes. He found one he wanted and slammed in into the player. Later on, when I had a glimpse of the cassette’s label, I saw that it was the Dutch DJ Afrojack, the vocal by Eva Simons, and for the next four hours it played in a loop, Camillo sometimes turning the volume up. Later, when he was drunk and red-eyed and irrational, he played it at a deafening volume and sang along with it, but in a staticky mutter, like a dog gargling at a TV set.
Let’s go take a ride in your car … I want you to take over control … Plug it in and turn me on
.

I came to hate this song, and like many hated songs I could not get the melody or the idiotic words out of my head. We did not leave Santa Clara at once. For reasons Camillo kept to himself, he began the trip by driving along the rutted dirt lanes just off the main road. These contained the slums and squatter camps of the town, with their three-legged dogs and women washing clothes in slop basins of gray water. Perhaps he was looking for someone else to cram into the back of the vehicle. Perhaps he was looking to buy something —
he seemed to make several discreet inquiries. The lanes were so bad the old Land Cruiser swayed back and forth, and the hollow-eyed women and sullen boys watched the vehicle bumping past their shacks. Children played in the dust, and one child tried to maneuver a broken wheelbarrow that held two bruised watermelons. In the heat, the fuzzy stink of human excrement.

I knew that Angola was wealthy, but I did not know then that the country earned billions of dollars a year from its oil, diamond, and gold exports. Later, when I discovered the figures, I recalled that little tour of Santa Clara, in one of the worst slums I had ever seen in my life. I remembered the whole day as an episode of misery; not mine — I was a witness, passing through — but those by the roadside and in the villages, the mute and brutalized Angolans, ignored by the kleptomaniacs in power.

“I’m afraid of what these people will do,” an Angolan man was to tell me in Luanda when I mentioned what I’d seen in the south. “Imagine if they realized how they’d been cheated — what they would do if they decided to take their revenge on the government.”

To anyone collecting money for the poor in Angola, I would say that before you reach into your pocket, consider Angola’s revenues: have a look at the price of a barrel of oil and the fact that the country produces almost two million barrels a day; look at the diamond on your finger, and its gold setting, and reflect that these pretty things also probably originated in Angola.

My first day over the border, and I saw that a lack of money was not the problem in this country — but it seldom is in the hellholes of the world. The paradox was more likely that an excess of money was the problem — or one of them; that, and a government run by thieves.

But I was just learning, and I thought, as one does in such circumstances: Maybe things will improve farther up the road.

This main north-south road, the only one into Namibia and the only one to Angola’s capital, was badly broken. The potholes were
so wide and deep and numerous that Camillo, normally a speed demon, often had to slow the car to a crawl and make detours around them, and often left the road entirely, driving along the shoulder or through a roadside village.

Up ahead, twenty miles farther on, we came to the town of Ondjiva, where we stopped inexplicably, Camillo revving the engine while someone in the back seat hopped out to run an errand for him. I got out too, to stretch my legs, because I had been confined in the car for hours in Santa Clara and it seemed safe to take a break here. Ondjiva looked new, its buildings well kept. The town had an airport. I saw a hotel sign. This place had none of the menacing ruin of Santa Clara.

I asked Paulina about the place. She said in Portuguese, slowly, for my benefit: “This town was destroyed in the war. All ruined. Bombs, Fires. Guns.
Destruição. Extermínio
. Now it is all new.”

Ondjiva, or N’Giva, had been known in Portuguese colonial times as Vila Pereira d’Eça, and after the ghostly and premature independence of 1974 it had been given its old Ovambo name. António Pereira d’Eça (1852–1917) had been a Portuguese colonel, and it was consistent with colonial policy, imposing a culture of famous foreign personalities, that many towns and cities in Angola were named in honor of Portuguese soldiers and statesmen. Pereira d’Eça had been sent on various military expeditions to Mozambique and Cape Verde, and after the outbreak of World War I was appointed commander of the Portuguese expeditionary forces to counter German advances from South-West Africa. But in 1915 the Germans were the least of his troubles, because the Ovambo people in the area, taking advantage of the besieged colonials, rose up under the leadership of their warrior king and went to war with Pereira d’Eça’s battalions. The Kwanyama, a subtribe of the Ovambo, were put down in a succession of massacres, and for his butchery and sustained suppression, Pereira d’Eça was rewarded and rose to the rank of general.

One consequence of this brutality was that Pereira d’Eça’s name was attached to the village, which was the site of the slaughter; another consequence was the beheading of the warrior king, Mandume Ya Ndemufayo, and his severed head was exhibited for many years in the town. It was the sort of colonial decapitation favored by Mr. Kurtz, as Marlow saw in
Heart of Darkness:
“a half a dozen slim posts remained in a row, roughly trimmed, and with their upper ends ornamented with round carved balls.” Not carved balls at all, of course, but the bare, sun-bleached skulls of Kurtz’s enemies, put up to discourage anyone who might be tempted to transgress. In Shakespeare’s time, the severed heads of wrongdoers were hung on London Bridge. In our own time, as revealed by evidence in the International Criminal Court trial of the warlord Charles Taylor, the bloody heads of villagers, cut off by child soldiers, were exhibited in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Mandume’s head was displayed for so many years it too was whitened to bone by the elements and stared with a lipless grin.

The town was renamed, but that was not the end of its troubles. Throughout the 1980s it was the staging post for the South African army’s parachute regiment — the Jackals, as they called themselves — in its war against Namibian guerrillas who launched their attacks from Angola. And Ondjiva saw fighting between Angolan factions and Cuban soldiers, too. It was no wonder that by the 1990s the town had been flattened and that so much of it now looked new. It was well supplied because all its building materials and vehicles, and most of its food, came from Namibia, down the road.

Just out of town, going north, the road deteriorated. For many long stretches it was impassable, and Camillo detoured through villages, allowing me a survey of traditional villages in this province of Kunene, featuring a fenced compound and courtyard known as a
kuimbo
. I had not seen anything like these in Namibia, but here in southern Angola not much had changed in spite of four hundred years of slavery, colonialism, military incursion, guerrilla activity,
oil revenues, and the extensive charitable work by churches and NGOs. The HIV/AIDS figures were high — nearly 20 percent of the people in this province were infected. But otherwise it was the old Africa of mud huts, twig fences, bony cows, strutting roosters, and no lights — of the barefoot and the hard-up.