The Last Train to Zona Verde (44 page)

“But if there’s work for the Chinese, why isn’t there work for Angolans?” I asked. The day before, I had spoken with a man in the know who said that an accurate figure for the number of Chinese expatriates, businessmen, and settlers in Angola was about seventy thousand, and slowly growing.

“The Chinese are a separate workforce,” Kalunga said. “They keep to themselves. We first began to see them in 2006. They were living on ships anchored in Luanda harbor. You know why?”

“I was told they were criminals, working off their sentences.”

“Right. Slave labor. They worked on the buildings that are now starting to fall apart — there are cracks all over the Chinese buildings. They’re still here. The first generation of Chinese-Angolan babies is starting to appear. You see them in the shantytowns of Luanda, these little half-Asian
mestiços.”

Some of these Chinese former prisoners had served out their sentences, gone into business, and become wealthy, or at least well-off. They ran factories making plastic goods and cinderblocks. Some
had resumed their old criminal professions. Kalunga gave the example of a large counterfeiting ring that had made fake 2,000-kwanza notes. This was a shrewd move; though Angolans could easily spot counterfeit hundred-dollar bills, no one recognized fake kwanzas because no one had seen the point of faking them. These dud bills were used in the markets and shops, and many had been exchanged for real U.S. dollars, the most desirable currency in the country. But the Chinese had their adjustment problems. For one thing, they were ethnically, visibly alien, and Kalunga and others I had met in Luanda told me that the Chinese were targeted for harassment, disliked, jostled, picked on, seen as easy prey, and robbed. The week before I arrived in the city, two Chinese men were stabbed to death in a casual mugging.

“More recently, Chinese women and children have begun to arrive and settle,” Kalunga said. “And I see rich Chinese in the restaurants and gambling casinos. They’re part of the life here.”

“So if it’s as awful as you say, how do you manage to live in Luanda?”

“I don’t live in Luanda!” he said. “And I travel a lot.”

It was then that he’d described his film on the iconic symbol of Angola, the giant sable antelope. When I mentioned that I knew the sable antelope from its picture on the 10-kwanza note, Kalunga laughed. No, he said, that was yet another example of Angolans getting it wrong: the animal depicted on the money was not a sable antelope but another creature entirely, called a bush donkey. Angolans didn’t know the difference, but in any case, there were only about forty of the animals left in the wild, because of the erosion of their habitat and their being poached for their meat and their splendid horns. They were doomed.

“And we’re probably doomed,” Kalunga said. “That’s why I don’t live in Luanda. I moved my family to Lubango so we can get out of the country if there’s trouble. It’s possible from there to get to Namibia by road. In a crisis we’d never get out of Luanda by road
or air. We’d be stuck here, and that, my friend, would not be good.”

His wife, Maria Manuela, whom he called Nela, was a medical doctor in the Angolan army, and they had three young children: Carlos, sixteen; Rafael, nine; and Luena, seven. But his wife was barely getting by; doctors in Angola had no status, he said. Most doctors earned “about three thousand dollars a month — and a clerk in a bank earns about eight hundred.” The government hospital in Lubango was so poorly run his wife could not perform necessary operations — Nela was a plastic surgeon specializing in correcting disfigurements and war injuries — so she had joined the staff of a hospital funded by a Canadian charity.

“Imagine, a private hospital! Because this government, rolling in money, can’t run a hospital itself — that’s how desperate things are,” Kalunga said. “And Angolans don’t make anything. Everything is imported. There’s a lot from Brazil. Food from South Africa. Everything you see in this country — every single thing — has been made somewhere else.”

Meeting Kalunga Lima energized me, because he himself was energetic. He spoke his mind and I could speak mine, and I was free to ask him ignorant questions. He revealed a side of Luanda that had been hidden from me. He introduced me to his friends; some of them were as intense as he was, others were smooth operators — money men, importers of luxury cars, oil executives. Instead of going to the gourmet restaurants — the crowded, expensive places — we went to hole-in-the-wall places that from the outside did not look like restaurants at all — simple shop fronts that were mom-and-pop diners.

This was another aspect of the secret, improvisational city. One of these eateries — no name, no sign — served home-cooked Portuguese food, and a large-screen TV showed a live feed of the Portuguese parliament debating the meltdown of Portugal’s economy. Kalunga said that — given the food, the checkered tablecloths,
and the genial hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Coelho — we might be in Lisbon or Oporto. And by the way, he said, the Portuguese prime minister would be arriving in Luanda within the next few days, hoping to borrow money from the Angolans to save Portugal from declaring bankruptcy. (This happened, just as he’d predicted.)

Kalunga explained to me the origins of the independence struggle. His father, Manuel dos Santos Lima, had been the first MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) military commander, based in Algeria in the 1960s, and had helped found the military wing of the party. Kalunga said with a rueful smile that of all the foreign soldiers, only the Cubans had been idealistic, but in time they too became disenchanted with the corruption and selfishness that had followed the revolution. He detailed the atrocities, the beheadings, the mass killings committed on both sides, and the competition among independence fighters, and described the funding of the war, the slaughter of elephants for their ivory, the sale of blood diamonds.

But corruption was nothing new in Angola, he said. In the late nineteenth century a megalomaniacal chief in Ovamboland, in the south, had impoverished his people, stolen their cows, and built himself a castle in the bush. Other chiefs mimicked the Portuguese and dressed in frock coats. Certain chiefs of the Kwanyama bought imported clothes, drank champagne, studied etiquette, and stuffed themselves with food at a time when their own people were dying in a famine. These extravagances were a distant echo of what was happening in Angola right now.

Speaking of distant echoes, it was Kalunga who had used the word
jinguba
, meaning “peanut,” which reminded me of “goober.” He said the Kimbundu word
mbanza
, a musical instrument, probably became “banjo.” His name, Kalunga, bestowed on him by his proud father, meant “God,” “supreme being,” or “highly intelligent being,” and he laughed when telling me this. He explained that in
this dispirited place many evangelical preachers from Brazil had become successful, turning movie theaters into churches. God-bothering was one of the growth industries of Angola — churches run by flamboyant Brazilian preachers. They were shysters, sweet-talkers, and because they demanded money from new believers and brandished fake diplomas, they were known as sellers of
banha da cobra
— snake oil.

“You’ve heard the word
assimilado
?” Kalunga asked over coffee one day. I had heard the term and thought it indicated a mulatto with an education. But he said no. “They were indigenous people who held the status of citizen. There were three requirements. One, you had to speak Portuguese fluently. Two, you had to sleep in a bed, not on the floor. Three, you had to eat with utensils. What do you think?”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“But what about reading and writing?” He laughed softly. “Literacy wasn’t a requirement! And you know why? Because the Portuguese officials who checked them — many of
them
could not read or write. Ha!”

A habitual blogger, Kalunga often left posts on a documentary makers’ website, Creative Cow. One had been a message to a young filmmaker: “So much of life happens in ways that we can not entirely predict, so having a variety of experiences opens up possibilities you may not have predicted. For example, taking a course in a formal environment will give you a chance to meet individuals with similar goals you would not meet on your own.

“Last piece of advice, set yourself up for the long haul. What ever you do, make sure it is sustainable, it invariably takes longer than you think to get anywhere in life.”

Kalunga put me in touch with a well-traveled friend of his whom I asked about the Angolan president’s personal history, and he said, “I have seen
favelas
in Brazil and slums in Latin America and
Africa. The slum where Dos Santos was born, Sambizanga, is by far the worst of them all. I have never seen anything to compare with it in squalor and poverty.”

We talked about paying a visit there. Kalunga said, “What’s the point?” And the friend agreed: “When Mandela became president, he made a point of fixing up the township where he’d been born, improving the housing and providing water and electricity. But Dos Santos, a multibillionaire and powerful, has done nothing. He has no wish to improve his town or do anything. He has no sentiment, no pity.”

The country was ripe for satire. In 2012, the
New York Times Magazine
ran a multipage advertorial, paid for by the Angolan government (a government that until then had refused to allow any
New York Times
journalist to enter the country), that referred to the “maturity of [Angola’s] young democracy.” “Young democracy” is a curious way to describe a country with a president who appointed himself in 1980 and has been in power ever since. Dos Santos’s portrait is on the money. When a politician’s face is on all the banknotes, you can be sure he is planning to stay in office for life. Young democracy!

I was invited to give a talk at the Viking Club to the Angola Field Group, its membership composed of some Angolans and many expatriates, teachers, oil industry functionaries, aid workers, hangers-on, and hospitable beer drinkers. Though he was not present that evening, Kalunga was a member and had shown his documentary films there.

My talk was preceded by the singing of three diminutive Bakongo men in snap-brim hats, from Uige province in the distant north. They called themselves the Disciples and harmonized to “Go Down, Moses” and “When the Saints Go Marching In,” which they had learned at the mission station in the remote town of Bungo.

Instead of giving a formal talk to the boozy group, I merely described my trip from the border — only 2 of the 250 members of the
club, I learned, had been near the border. I said, “There is nothing I can tell you about Angola that you don’t already know, but I’m sure there are many things you can tell me” — and I invited comments.

One of the men in the audience elaborated on the various euphemisms the officials used to ask for bribes. Another said, “Do you know about
Dia do Homem
? It’s Men’s Day all over Angola — every Friday is Men’s Day. Men meet, get drunk, go out and prowl and chase women. There is no Women’s Day.”

“The motorcycle taxi has a funny name,” a young man said. “It’s called a
cumpapata
— literally, a ‘grab-ass,’ because that’s how the person behind the driver holds on.”

A woman said, “Cuca beer — I will tell you what
Cuca
stands for.
Com um coração Angolano
— with an Angolan heart.”

It was a pleasant evening of congenial foreigners and Angolans who lived in Luanda as if besieged. Afterward they regaled me with stories of how expensive it was to live in the capital. Yet none complained. Simple survival in the city represented a sort of victory.

I met Kalunga the next day, at another restaurant.

“That’s a river fish,” he said, explicating the ingredients of my meal. “It’s called
cachuso
— they catch it in the Dande River north of here. We can go there. We can go so many places! Angola has land and water. All the fresh food is imported from South Africa, yet Angola could feed Africa. This country has not been written about at all!”

So we made plans: to look for more giant sable antelopes; to visit the site of the recently discovered dinosaur the Angola Titan, which he had documented; to go north to Zaire province to see the Bakongo people and the trackless forests of Uige; and to take the train to Malanje. And we would travel by boat along the western limit of Angola, down the Kwango River, which David Livingstone had written about.

“To
zona verde!
” he said, toasting, and as we pored over the map, he said that it was all doable.

We drank to our proposed trip, our venture, as Kalunga put it, to
as terras do fim do mundo
— to the lands at the end of the earth.

I had never envisioned traveling with someone else. I had always extolled the virtues of going alone, putting up with the hassles, taking the risks; that was how I had arrived in Luanda. But I realized I could not go farther on my own — at least not in this country — and I was flattered that Kalunga saw me in the way I saw him, as a good traveling companion, someone fit to take into the bush.

On the day the Portuguese prime minister arrived from Lisbon to ask Angola for money to bail out his failed and bankrupt economy, Kalunga took me on his motorcycle to the Luanda train station at a place called Viana. We made inquiries — the times of the trains to Malanje, the cost. Two trains a week, cheap tickets, an easy trip.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked teasingly.

“No. I want to think about it.”

“Maybe the last train to
zona verde.”
He was still teasing. Teasing is often a sign of trust, of friendship, of a bond.

We were still in sight of the city, with its buildings under construction, its many tall cranes, and the sound of bulldozers and jackhammers. It looked plausible enough as a city on the rise. But it was an illusion. Luanda was a city in decay. We rode out of Bairro Viana to the edge of a dense and ramshackle
musseque
. Better not go in too deeply, Kalunga said; his Kawasaki was new and powerful, just the sort of machine a gang of boys would love to steal. The idle watchful boys were like the idle watchful boys I had seen all over Angola; they had been my first glimpse of the country, the rappers and pesterers on the border at Santa Clara. Pretty girls sidled up to us and admired the motorcycle and flirted with Kalunga. Some girls were dancing with each other in front of a makeshift stall selling Angolan music. This Luanda slum was dense and labyrinthine, so we stayed with the bike, on the perimeter. Still, I could see it was a lively place — loud music, lots of chatter, hurrying crowds, and shrill, shrieking, giddy laughter.