The Last Train to Zona Verde (38 page)

In the Benguela of
Yaka
, Alexandre reflects on how “his mother died with a complex about being a second-class white; she had wanted a first-class white [to marry] her son.” Status is everything in the remote colony — exiled criminals looking for respectability are “offended when their rotten past is recalled.” But no one plays by the rules, only thieves win, and physical passion dominates characters’ lives: Father Costa, a rural priest, has defiantly fathered fifteen mulatto children.

Since Angola is so seldom written about, and fiction is always so revealing, I made a point of boning up on Angolan authors. The Angolan novel is unusual; it is unlike the typical African novel of tribal life, of the yearning for freedom and an awakening political identity and the coming of independence. The Angolan novel is an anarchic and multicultural hodgepodge, as self-referential, incestuous, and homegrown an artifact as everything else in isolated and xenophobic Angola. Its theme is often disappointed expectations.

Such novels are not for the literary critic or the connoisseur of fiction. They aren’t much fun, and it’s tedious work to finish them. But I wasn’t interested in whether these books were well or poorly written. I only wanted to know if they gave any clue to the inner life of the country, and even badly written or clumsily translated books often manage that. The Angola of Angolan fiction (of Pepetela, of José Luandino Vieira, of Arnaldo Santos and Sousa Jamba) encompasses the lives of black Africans, usually Kimbundu-speaking people, but also of white peasants and white slum dwellers, many
of whom speak a shantytown slang of mixed Kimbundu and Portuguese words.

Yaka
portrays a Benguela of rednecks, rich landowners, racism, family secrets, impartial cruelty, casualties of war, family strife, litigious yokels, brutal sex, hard drinking, and the long shadow of the past hanging over all of this fictional hothouse. It sounds like Faulkner, down to the Southern Gothic sweep and scope, but it is not so felicitous as Faulkner, and like many African novels it is sententious and lacking in humor. Yet the book gives access to Benguela.
Yaka
is a chronicle of the country seen through the eyes of a large multigenerational family whose first ancestor, Oscar, is a convict sent to Angola in 1880 for killing his wife — ten years in Angola is his punishment, as well as banishment to the colony for life.

The strict chronology of the novel is helpful, like a flesh-and-blood history book: the early settlement, the slavery and forced labor, the growing family, the fierce wars, the tribal battles, the uprising of 1961 that led to clandestine networks of rebels, the departure in 1975 of the Portuguese from Lobito, the port “cluttered up with crates of every possible size … All of Angola is going in those crates, the lieutenant said. Dismantled machinery, diamonds in the petrol tanks of cars, textiles, appliances of every kind, the most incredible things … even things not thought to be valuable, wooden statues and masks, everything sells in Europe, leopard skins and mats, ivory and baskets, it’s a case of plunder.”

The last section of
Yaka
concerns the shaky independence and the subsequent war, when Alexandre Semedo’s great-grandson (adopted by some Cuvale people from southwest Angola) fights in the guerrilla war “that will be famous, behind the enemy troops, and the occupation of Benguela will only last a hundred days, one hundred dark days.”

The reference is not to occupation by the Portuguese, but after independence by the South Africans, whose soldiers commandeered
the city, intimidated its people, and handed it over to the government opposition after a major battle in 1975, which took place in the area I traveled through, from Lubango to Benguela. Most of Pepetela’s fictional locations (among them Dombe Grande, and Capangombo on the plateau, near Humpata) can be found on a map — where the characters moved, where they farmed and owned shops, where they looked for wives, where (near the coast road and the Caporolo River, which I had crossed late in the day) the Portuguese in the 1940s set off in hunting parties to provoke Africans and massacre them after they’d managed to engage them.

The first place I saw in Benguela, because I had rushed to the sea-front for relief and a breeze, was the central slave quarters. It’s one of the city’s landmarks, an old, low prisonlike fortress, a stockade in stone, facing the ocean. Because it is so near the water, the slave quarters is a popular place for youths to gather, and though some of them were selling ice cream and candy and chewing gum, all of them looked hungry.

Benguela was not a natural place for the Portuguese to settle, yet it was identified as a prime site for development in 1615 by Manuel Cerveira Pereira, who named it São Filipe de Benguela after his patron, King Philip II of Spain and Portugal. But it was swampy, unhealthy, and inhospitable. As the novel
Yaka
dramatizes, it was for centuries a town of petty shopkeepers and slave traders, nearly all of them, of course, exiled convicts.

From its beginnings as a small slave port in the late 1600s, Benguela would a hundred years later rival Luanda in importance. It never had an extensive settler population. Even into the twentieth century the number of whites in Benguela and Lobito was still tiny (the “native town” of the 1920s guidebooks). But then the white population of Angola was relatively modest. Until 1940 ethnic Portuguese constituted less than 1 percent of Angola’s inhabitants, and it was not until 1950 that their proportion approached 2 percent.

The government of Portugal, attempting to stabilize the white population, tried to create an agricultural colony near Benguela in 1885. It failed because it was run by ex-convicts who hated farming and were tyrannical toward their workers. The failed farmers were pressed into the army, but they failed at soldiery too, because of their mindless brutality or their simple desertion. The historian of Angola Gerald Bender noted that by 1907 the majority of crimes in Benguela were committed by these ex-convicts.

All eyewitness accounts of Benguela through the years describe a small miserable town supported by the slave trade. After slavery ended, forced labor was instituted. The practice was the same; it was just a change of name, from slave (
esclava
) to servant (
serviçal
). Like the slaves, the servants were bartered for guns and cloth, marched to Benguela and Lobito, and sent to other Portuguese colonies that needed labor, among them São Tomé and Principe. An average of three thousand people a year were shipped out in the 1920s. Some Portuguese observers objected, and in the 1940s one of the harshest critics, Captain Henrique Galvão, a long-serving government official, compiled a report of abuses committed against the Africans who had been forced into servitude. The Salazar government responded by arresting Galvão for treason and banning his report. Despite the introduction of some labor reforms in the late 1940s through the late 1950s, as I learned in Lubango, forced labor continued into the 1960s. So you could say that until just the other day, Benguela had been no more than a depot for human trafficking.

Wandering the city one day, I happened upon a church built in 1748 and dedicated to the city’s patron saint, São Filipe de Benguela. It was a weekday, but even so, a dozen people were earnestly praying inside, a group of women near the altar loudly declaiming a service together as a sort of chorus. The church was cool, shadowy, a refuge from the heat and noise and dust, and the eight praying women — black, white, brown — seemed to assert a continuity of belief that had survived the centuries, because in addition to their search for
rubber and copper and gold and slaves, the Portuguese had also wanted to find souls to convert. Along with fattening them, the colonizers ritually baptized every slave and forced laborer in kneeling groups before being chained and rowed out to the ships.

Another place I saw soon after I got to Benguela was an area in the southern part of town where Chinese developers and laborers were putting up six big, ugly multistory buildings, some of them pale pink, others canary yellow, still others pastel blue. Chinese industry, Chinese people, Chinese effort, Chinese paint, and Chinese investment are evident everywhere in the port cities of Benguela and Lobito.

The first Chinese workers to arrive in Angola were criminals, prisoners of the Chinese justice system — thieves, rapists, dissidents, deserters, and worse, an echo of the earliest immigration from Portugal. Characters in
Yaka
speak of being exiled to Angola to work off ten-year sentences. The first workers the Chinese sent were convicts shipped in chains, to work off their sentences in forced labor. Angola, having begun as a penal colony of the Portuguese, became just recently a penal colony for the Chinese. These Chinese convicts were the labor force for China-Angola development projects — the ugly oversized pastel buildings, the coastal roads, the dredging of the deep-water port of Lobito — and after they had served their sentences, the agreement was that they would remain in Angola. Presumably, like the Portuguese
degredados
, they would elevate themselves to the bourgeoisie or a higher class of parvenu.

Possibly, again like the Portuguese convicts, the Chinese would become the loudest racists, and for the same reason. “The inferiority complex of the uneducated criminal settler population contributed to a virulent form of white racism among the Portuguese, which affected all classes from top to bottom,” the political historian Lawrence Henderson wrote of the early settlers. The Portuguese convicts became the most brutal employers and the laziest farmers,
and a sizable number turned furiously respectable, in the way atoning whores become sermonizing and pitiless nuns.

After the first wave of Chinese convicts (“We started seeing them around 2006,” a man in Luanda was later to tell me), more shiploads of semiskilled Chinese workers arrived. As with the early Portuguese convicts, they were all men. Then, a few years later, women were allowed to work in Angola, like Wang Lin and Mei, whom I had met in Lubango. Now there were Chinese marriages, Chinese children with Angolan nationality, Chinese shopkeepers, and Chinese stonemasons, plumbers, carpenters, and heavy-machinery operators up and down the country.

How many Chinese were there in Benguela and Lobito? Everyone I spoke to had a different figure, but always a high one. One estimate — wrong, it turned out — was a quarter of a million. I put these high figures down to fear. As in Namibia, Chinese businessmen were at the low end of the construction industry — for example, manufacturing cinderblocks to sell to Africans to make slum houses.

One of the newest buildings I saw in Benguela was the railway station, a fenced-off, flat-roofed, one-story building; it had been designed and put up by the Chinese in 2011 to replace the old bombed-out one. The Benguela Railway, Caminho de Ferro de Benguela, had been formed over a century ago to create an 835-mile link to the town of Luau, at the eastern edge of Angola, near the Congo border and the copper mines in Congolese Katanga. An Englishman, Robert Williams (after whom a rural station is named), had been the moving force behind the railway, a concession granted by the Portuguese. Work on the tracks began in 1903, at a time when there were fewer than 10,000 whites in the whole of Angola, most of them
degredados
— convicts, deserters, dissidents. But the railway was not in full operation until 1928, when the Portuguese boasted that it was a money-earning transcontinental line, taking Congolese minerals to the Atlantic coast and part of the overland route to Mozambique, on the other side of Africa.

Over the years, the Benguela Railway became a target for saboteurs, until it was totally destroyed during the long civil war. One challenge to rebuilding was that land mines had been laid up and down the line. Over a recent ten-year period, 2,000 mines had been found in the rail corridor and removed by a British charity called the
HALO
Trust. (In all, 68,000 mines in Angola have been cleared by this gallant organization, which is still uncovering land mines in the country.) The Chinese, loaning $300 million to the Angolan government and providing both skilled and convict labor, helped with some of the mine removal, relaid the track, put up new stations, and rebuilt the infrastructure as far inland as Huambo, with the intention of reaching the Congo border.

The word was that the line was working. But the new, glass-fronted Benguela station was shut, and no one knew when it would open. No schedule was posted, nor did anyone know when the next train to Huambo would be leaving.

“What’s Huambo like?” I asked.

“It’s like Lubango, but not as nice.”

I have been known for saying that I never saw a train without wishing to board it. I could have tried harder to find information about the Benguela line, and I might have managed to buy a ticket to Huambo. But having just arrived from the central plateau, where some of the same towns were linked by the line, I had an intimation of the trip. I already knew the railway towns of Catengue and Binga, and I had a pretty good idea of what Huambo would be like. So — almost unknown in my experience — I shocked myself by saying, “I don’t think I’ll take that train.”

“I thought you’d jump at it,” the American woman who’d brought me there said.

“I’m not jumping.”

“I’ve heard you love trains.”

Yes — what happened? Why was this trip going flat? Was it because I always had to fight for a seat, and kept seeing the same
dreary sights, the same bad roads, the same sorry market women, the same slums? In Africa every rural village is different, but every city is the same, and a perfect fright.

The American woman was Nancy Gottlieb. She had lived in Angola, mostly in Benguela, off and on for seventeen years, and she swore that the city was improving. One of her several projects was running an English-language school. I taught a few classes for her and also gave classes at the Instituto Superior de Ciências da Educação in the center of town.

The institute’s name was grand, and the students and teachers were attentive. They spoke English fairly well — English was their subject, and half of them were employed as teachers in schools in and around Benguela. They were fond of books, they said, but when I pressed them, none could tell me the difference between fiction and nonfiction; a novel, a history book, a memoir of family life, a short story about an atrocity, an animal fable — they were all pretty much the same (“stories”). This slender grasp of definition and form seemed something of a handicap in teachers of literature, like a chef having no sense of smell.