The Last Train to Zona Verde (34 page)

The upside of neglect, indifference, contempt, and underdevelopment was a landscape that was green and practically empty of villages — great swaths of grassland, wooded hills, and stretches of
bush that had once been battlefields but had become overgrown and depopulated. Amazing that the centuries of colonization and the decades of war had left no mark; and if you did not take the mood of people and the traumas of their history into account, you could almost be uplifted by the sight of lovely green hills and the apparent purity of the place.

We stopped for beer and hard-boiled eggs at Chibia. Some local traders were heading home from the improvised market. They were cattle-raising Mwila people who lived outside of Chibia, less than thirty miles from Lubango, and still smeared themselves with animal fat, coated their hair with mud and cow dung, creating dreadlocks, and wore necklaces of shells and of hardened mud. Of course there were no wild animals, and the road was a horror, but seen from the green bosom of this huge province, it was all like picture-postcard southern Africa, an Eden.

That was before we climbed the
planalto
— the chilly high plateau of the southern highlands — and rolled into the distant outskirts of Lubango, the shantytowns and cinderblock huts, the shacks and roadside market vendors, the squatter areas that were scoured of all greenery and — fuel-deprived — deforested for firewood. Only slums surrounded this southern city. The word in Angola for slum, or shantytown, or “informal settlement,” is
musseque —
meaning “red earth,” the sandy soil on which the shacks were usually built, a word suggesting an infertile and blighted place, a wasteland. Not a bush or a blade of grass remained among the
musseques
of Lubango, but for miles it was heaving with people.

I thought: I have been here before.

Another African city, another horror, more chaos — glary light, people crowding the roads, the stinking dust and diesel fumes, the broken fences, the vandalized shop fronts, the iron bars on all the display windows, the children fighting, the women heavily laden, and no relief in sight.

By now Camillo was helplessly drunk, legless and incoherent,
and I was glad to get out of the car and away from the quarreling passengers and the hideous music. He began to pick a fight with me as I left him, claiming that I owed him money. He screamed at me on a Lubango back street, but his drunkenness made him distractible, and I simply slipped away down the shattered sidewalks of this cold and overripe-smelling city.

The following day, the Lubango streets were empty. It was a national holiday, Dia de Finados, or Dia de Defuntos — Day of the Deceased, Day of the Defunct. In the socialist revolutionary republic of Angola, holy All Souls’ Day of the Catholic liturgical calendar was a feast day, equal to Easter and Christmas, observed with the same solemnity as Colonial Repression Martyrs’ Day (January 4) or Day of the Armed Struggle (February 4). Every shop was closed. The restaurants were shut. No one worked.

“This is a very Christian country,” an Angolan explained to me that day. “Even during our war the churches were not attacked. People sheltered in them and they knew they would be safe.”

Where am I?, I thought. Nothing to do on the Day of the Defunct except walk around this high sloping city, reflecting on my trip. What am I doing here?

Lubango lay sprawled across a plateau at almost six thousand feet. The weather was pleasant now, in November, but in the Angolan winter of July and August — so the locals complained — it was cold enough in this region for people to wear heavy coats, and some days frost crystals had to be scraped from windows and windshields.

Until independence, the town was called Sá da Bandeira, named for a Portuguese nobleman, Bernardo de Sá Nogueira de Figueiredo, the first marquess of Sá da Bandeira, who in the 1830s became an idealistic (that is, anti-slavery) prime minister. And then the town reverted to its traditional name, Lubango. Toward the end of the colonial period, Sá da Bandeira had attracted emigrants from Madeira
(they didn’t know the colony was doomed), another hurried project and instant failure of Angolan settlement.

Ten miles south, at Humpata, Boer trekkers had put down stakes in the late nineteenth century and farmed, and some were buried there, in a little fenced-in cemetery I found one day in the middle of a cornfield. The
colonos
hated the interior for its remoteness and for the arduous work necessary to grow crops. It was a long, slow trip from the coast. Lubango’s only attraction — and it is still the iconic picture associated with the place — is the precipitous valley, formed of a volcanic fissure, the sheer rock cliffs and the chasm called Tunda-Vale, the view west across the plains: a scenic spot with a lovely panorama that was outside town, on a bad road that was being improved.

My hotel was a pretty good example of the state of the nation. Newly built, it was a walled-in compound of gardens, terraces, and low, elegant-seeming buildings. But half the lights in my room did not work, I could not open any windows, the bathroom stank. In the public areas, some foreign guests conferred in whispers — all businessmen (briefcases, cell phones, brisk mannerisms, handshakes). The restaurant was good, the rooms were expensive, and I was eager to leave after one night. I moved to the rundown, seedy Grand Hotel da Huíla, in the center of town, which was less than half the price of the new hotel.

Only its name was grand. The food was terrible and the hotel was practically empty, even a bit ghostly, but the Grand was friendly and clean, and I could sit on the veranda by the big cracked waterless swimming pool and write undisturbed.

Nothing had been written about travel in the interior of Angola, nothing I had read that described what I had seen on the back roads. The Angola story that reached the world was a condemnation of Portuguese colonial abuses, or a history of the long civil war, or amazement at the phenomenal oil profits. This alone made me glad I was here. The business visitors to Angola were efficient, tactful,
and noncommittal, and many of them were rather tight-faced and (so they intimated to me) anxious to leave. They did not describe the country except to their companies back home. Angola had no other travelers, no backpackers, no birdwatchers, no anthropologists or political scientists, no casual visitors, no idle wanderers like me — none that I could see.

Books about Angola were typically accounts of warfare and crisis, most of them outdated. The best-known one in English, Ryszard Kapusciśski’s
Another Day of Life
, is a breathless narrative of the capital, Luanda, and some desperate excursions into the bush, during the war in the mid-1970s. It is harrowing, very short, partisan, and vague on details.
Bay of Tigers
by Pedro Rosa Mendes recounts a 1997 trans-Angola (and trans-Africa) trip; it is eloquent, impressionistic, surreal in places, but even vaguer on details than Kapusciśski. Most books about Angola are relentlessly political, because its history is a chronicle of violent crises, interspersed with long periods of colonial torpor or brutality. The lengthy civil war was extensively reported by journalists at the time. But I found that it was seldom discussed now. Most Angolans are too young to have experienced the worst of the war and too distracted by their poverty to care. The subject on the minds of most Angolans I met was money — how to get it, where to spend it, and please could they have some of mine?

In this country without foreign travelers, without foreign tourists, I had penetrated to the small city of Lubango and was sitting on the veranda of its old hotel, becalmed by the Day of the Defunct. What now?

I’m beginning to think that this sort of travel experience is mainly fantasy
, I wrote in my notebook that day.
Many travelers are essentially fantasists. Tourists are timid fantasists, the others — risk takers — are bolder fantasists. The tourists at Etosha conjure up a fantastic Africa after their nightly dinner by walking to the fence at the hotel-managed waterhole to stare at the rhinos and lions and eland coming
to drink: a glimpse of wild nature with overhead floodlights. They have been bused to the hotel to see it, and it is very beautiful, but it is no effort
.

My only boast in travel is my effort
 …

It was such a slog, such a lot of trouble to have gotten here, a kind of stumbling and uncertainty, begun at the border, where I was the only distinguishable foreigner — a magnet for the pesterers and touts. I’m conspicuous and solitary, and after two bone-shaking days I make it to the provincial city — a sort of victory if you value that kind of trudging through misery, realizing the fantasy of having seemed to blaze a trail all by myself.

I was lucky, I made it, I saw the initiated girls, I perversely enjoyed the three-pieces-of-chicken metaphor that to me was like a short story. I was fascinated by the rusted tanks and war wreckage along the road, by the ruined huts of vanished colonials, by the nonexistent road and the washerwomen at the river and the still serviceable dugout canoes. But what did all this add up to except a traveler’s tale, something to report, the I-did-it boast, newsworthy to those who don’t travel? And it’s expensive, uncertain, physically difficult, and lonely.

I have always felt that the value of a travel narrative, especially one that detours down back roads, is that it becomes a record of details of how people lived at a particular time and place: how they spoke, what they said, what they ate, how they behaved. The Soviet Union I saw and wrote about in the 1960s doesn’t exist anymore, nor does the South America I saw in the 1970s, nor the China I traveled through in the 1980s. The way of life on many Pacific islands has changed since I paddled around them in 1990, and as I was witnessing on this trip, the Africa of 2001 had undergone significant alterations — a few improvements, many degradations. To console myself, I think: Maybe the incidental details in these narratives will someday be useful for historians. Preserving the texture of life in a
chronicle of travel could help inform the future, just as the diaries of foreign travelers like Smollett or Montaigne helped us understand old Europe.

The French historian Fernand Braudel frequently cites humble diarists and bold travelers in
The Structures of Everyday Life
, his encyclopedic account of how we have come to live the way we do on earth. On November 2, 1492, in Cuba, Christopher Columbus saw an Arawak man puffing on rolled tobacco leaves, a European’s first glimpse of smoking. Tea arrived in England from Holland in about 1657, and Samuel Pepys drank his first cup of tea on September 25, 1660, so he wrote in his diary. The use of the individual fork at a meal dates from the mid-sixteenth century. Until then, all Europeans ate with their hands from a common trencher. Of his manner of eating, Montaigne wrote, “I sometimes bite my fingers in my haste.” Around 1609, an English traveler — one Thomas Coryate, who ate with his hands — saw diners in Italy using forks and ridiculed them. The villagers I saw in January 1964 in southern Malawi, scooping stew into their mouths from a common bowl using hand-shaped lumps of steamed
nsima
dough, now employ spoons and forks.

This argument for the importance of trivial observation is obviously self-justifying, but if you’re alone on the road, you need to be bucked up somehow, and even if the observations are illusions, they are illusions necessary to your existence. And if you aren’t vitalized by fantasies — here I am in this old car speeding through the bush, here I am among tribal people engrossed in a ritual — the experience would be demoralizing. But the implied vanity bothered me, because being a fantasist in travel is simply self-regarding, and much is lost in translation.

I am looking for something to write about, because that’s the nature of this travel, and perhaps of most travel: to see something new — a stimulus; to satisfy curiosity — a pleasure; to follow an itinerary — a narrative. But behind it all, and especially fueling the fantasy,
is the need for the traveler to be at large in an exotic setting, to be far away, to act out a narrative of discovery and risk, to mimic the modes of the old travelers, to find similarities and differences.

My ideal traveler is the person who goes the old, laborious way into the unknown, and it is this belief that lies behind my travel, and drives me. I want to see things as they are, to see myself as I am. And look: I am a seventy-year-old man traveling like a backpacker in the middle of Angola, and the only other foreigners I see — six or eight of them — are businessmen hustling to make a profit off the country’s resources. Maybe that’s me too, another sort of businessman, another sort of huckster, someone hoping to make a living by being here and noting down what I see.

I need to be realistic
, I wrote as the veranda lights came on, so dim that I could hardly see the page of my notebook,
because I have never been more keenly aware of the sadness in wasted time. Angola is perhaps a lesson in wasted time
.

When the fierce immigration official at the Angola border post had bared his teeth, scowled at me, and said, “
Você é professor?
” and I had replied, “Yes.
Sou professor,”
I was not lying. My letter of invitation stated that I would be traveling in Angola to teach in various schools. Since tourists were not welcome — and what would they do if they did visit? — I needed a reason to be here, and lecturing to English-language students was a persuasive one. It was not a ploy.

I was in Lubango to teach a few classes at the Instituto Superior de Ciências da Educação, a set of buildings and a campus within walking distance of the Grand Hotel. My contact and nominal host was an American woman, Akisha Pearman, whom I met soon after I arrived.

Akisha had lived alone in Lubango, teaching as a senior English language fellow at the institute, for almost two years. She lived in a few small rooms in the center of town. She was one of the people who had told me of the frosty July days (“I had to order winter
clothes from the States”), and that nearly every day in the city the electricity went out for three to five hours, that there was a shortage of running water or a similar nuisance. Akisha laughed these off as minor annoyances. Uncomplaining, patient, dedicated, and hard-working, she had been prepared for this life by her two years as a Peace Corps teacher in Mozambique and by her ten years of teaching in the United States, Spain, Korea, and Madagascar. Her Angolan students and colleagues told me they loved her. Akisha had earned that love.