The Africans (33 page)

To refer to Portugal’s colonial history as disgraceful would be to give Lisbon the benefit of the doubt. Portugal stood for all the evils of colonialism and none of the good. It took but did not give. It milked its two largest African colonies, Angola and Mozambique, as dry as a dead cow and bequeathed them nothing but the guarantee of economic disaster.

Today you can still stand on the patio of the Panorama Hotel and
gaze out across the bay at Africa’s most beautiful skyline. But not much else is the same. The hotel’s entrance is guarded by a young woman wearing fatigues and double-buckle Soviet combat boots and carrying an AK-47 assault rifle. The harbor is full of Soviet ships, but cargo stands rotting on the piers while dock workers doze in the shadows nearby.

The mosaic sidewalks have cracked, exposing large gaps of stones and dirt, and garbage fills the streets. The high-rise apartments are occupied by squatters; the corridors reek of urine, and laundry hangs from the balcony railings. Rats scurry through the deserted restaurants, torn and filthy awnings hang limply in the stifling afternoon heat. The parks are overgrown, rusting frames of wrecked cars litter the alleys, and promptly at 5
A.M
., when the curfew ends, women start queuing for a loaf of bread or a can of powdered milk imported from Brazil.
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By noon, the lines stretch for blocks.

Walking through Luanda alone one afternoon, I was struck by the eerie notion that I had entered a living ghost town, that here was the African city of the twenty-first century. It had people but no sense of life or purpose. Block after block of stores were closed, their windows broken and boarded up. Neon signs flashed mysteriously above IBM, Sony and Singer showrooms that had been empty for years. Hotel employees snoozed at the reception counters, and government workers slouched behind desks that were barren of telephones, typewriters, pencils or paper. Elevators were stuck where they had jammed two or three years earlier, and air conditioners coughed and sputtered and threw out blasts of hot air.

In my $40-a-day hotel room a sign advised: “The great difficulty we are finding in replacing lost or deteriorated objects forces us to make this special request. Should you need a towel, please request same at the porter’s desk.” But the hotel had no porter, no porter’s desk, no running water, no food in the dining room except soup and bread.

One morning from my hotel window I noticed what appeared to be a Peugeot convertible, moving ever so slowly along the beachfront road. When it finally drew even with the hotel, I saw that the owner had cut off the car’s top, gutted the inside and attached a
yoke to the front axle. The $10,000 Peugeot had been turned into a cart and was being pulled by oxen.

“I’d grant you that we’re not in a very happy state of affairs,” a senior police official told me. “I wouldn’t suggest for a minute that anyone would want colonialism and the Portuguese back, but certainly, unless you’re an important party official, you were a lot better off in 1970 than you are in 1980.”

His conclusion seemed reasonable enough, for Angola was a wounded and fragile country in a state of utter deterioration. Yet, like so many African countries, its resources were immense and its possibilities for development great.

Angola (the name comes from an early king, N’gola) is fourteen times the size of Portugal, or as big as Spain, France and Italy combined. Once you leave the flat narrow strip along the coast, the land rises quickly into a shrub-covered plateau, often a mile high or more, which forms one of Africa’s great watersheds. The rains are generous throughout much of Angola and the climate is temperate. Though there are millions of acres of fertile, unused farmland, agricultural development has been retarded by a variety of tsetse fly whose bite is so painful that domestic animals become uncontrollable. As a result, there are no horses or beasts of burden in all of southern Angola, an area twice the size of Colorado.

In terms of natural resources, Angola is one of the two or three potentially wealthiest countries in black Africa. Its offshore oil platforms, operated by Gulf, earn Angola about $5 million a day. (Sixty percent of the oil ends up in the United States, even though Washington has never recognized the Marxist government in Luanda.) Its exported coffee crop and its diamond mines (which are covertly run by South African interests) were at independence among the world’s most productive. Its iron ore exports used to bring in $75 million annually, its sisal and cotton crops another $51 million. Additionally, Angola earned $100 million a year from traffic fees paid by Zaire and Zambia on the Benguela Railroad. But by 1980, Angola had little more than its petroleum income, and most of that was being used to pay for its war against antigovernment guerrillas in southern Angola.
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Angola had been crippled by its abrupt transition into independence and by the Portuguese exodus, by the continuing civil war against South African-backed guerrillas, by a bewildered Marxist government which thought the nation’s problems would go away if it recited enough slogans, by a bored, obedient population that was not trained to provide the skills a new nation required. Angola had become a victim of both past and present, exploited by the colonialists and misled by the nationalists. It was the tragic symbol of what Africa is and a case study of what, with luck and planning, it could be. One day, perhaps, the chasm between those two extremes will no longer be worlds apart.

The first European to reach Angola was the Portuguese explorer Diogo CāTo, who landed at the mouth of the Congo River in 1483. The people he found there were of Bantu stock, representing a hundred different tribes, and the land was under the rule of an African monarch, the King of the Kongo. Seven years later the Portuguese sent a small fleet of ships to the kingdom, carrying priests, skilled workers and tools. The mission was received warmly and in return for the Portuguese favors, the king accepted Christianity and agreed to send his son, the future King Afonso, to Lisbon for schooling. Thus began, on a note of mutual respect, Portugal’s African presence. It would end nearly five hundred years later with the Portuguese losing liberation wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau and fleeing the continent in panic.

Relations between Lisbon and King Afonso soon deteriorated. The Kongo kingdom was racked by internal revolt and gradually disintegrated. The slave traders came and military clashes were frequent. The Portuguese meanwhile extended their contacts southward along the coast and in 1575 founded Luanda. In 1641 a Dutch fleet seized Luanda and another slaving port, Benguela, forcing the Portuguese to retreat into the interior. Seven years later an expedition from Brazil returned the coast to Portuguese control.

Why had Lisbon fought so determinedly for a coastal strip on a primitive, mysterious continent? Its incentive was economic—slaves. For during three centuries an estimated three million Angolans were shipped to plantations in Brazil, providing the foundation of that Portuguese colony’s economic growth. The slaving industry
in Angola was made possible by the willing participation of chiefs from two tribes: the Chokwe, a mobile, aggressive group living in eastern Angola, and the Ovimbundu, the largest ethnic group, which ranged through central and southern Angola and represented 40 percent of the total population.

Portuguese soldiers and settlers faced sporadic but continuous warfare in Angola for more than a century after the founding of Luanda, and it was not until the late 1800s that Lisbon was able to extend its control into the high plateaus of the interior. By then the European imperial powers had begun their “scramble for Africa.” Portugal, industrially and technologically backward, was the lightweight of the group which met in Berlin in 1884–1885 to establish the boundaries of Africa. Largely because of Britain’s support, Portugal was granted the “right of occupation” in Angola. At the same time it was forbidden to move into the central African lands of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and Nyasaland (Malawi), all of which were placed in Britain’s sphere of influence.

Most of the white settlement before this century was comprised of
degredadas
—criminals sentenced to Angola rather than to jail in Portugal. As recently as 1950, half the white population in Angola had never attended school, and another 40 percent had completed no more than four years of primary school. Unlike, say, the Kenyan highlands, which were settled by upper- and middle-class Britons, Angola had become a dumping ground for illiterate European peasants. And a miserable lot they were. Unable to find suitable work in the cities, many drifted into the villages, took up with African peasant women and “went native,” living as bare a subsistence existence as the poorest black farmer.

The Portuguese did two things unique to European colonialism in Africa: they built beautiful cities, such as Luanda and Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) in Mozambique, and they intermarried to such an extent that their former colonies today are among the most multiracial countries in Africa.

“God created the whites and the blacks,” old settlers in Angola used to say, “but the Portuguese created the
mestiço
[person of mixed blood].” The racial mix, however, probably had more to do with promiscuity and sexual ratios than tolerance. There were, for instance, eleven white men for every white woman in Angola in 1846.

Ninety-nine of every 100 Portuguese in Angola lived in the cities.
This meant that Lisbon’s influence in the countryside was limited and Angola’s farmlands were not developed to anything approaching their full potential. The Portuguese did not have the attachment to the land or the commitment to national development that the British had in Kenya. Their emotional ties belonged to another continent, and it was as easy for them to leave as it had been for them to come. Lisbon tried numerous schemes to reverse the white urbanization. At one point in the 1950s it even offered every married Portuguese farmer over thirty years of age a free fifty-acre plot with a cow, sheep, a pig, six chickens, six ducks and some rabbits. Scarcely more than a hundred Portuguese a year took advantage of the opportunity.

By the early 1960s, France and Britain were cutting their colonial ties to Africa. But Portugal’s premier, António de Oliveira Salazar, the last of the West European dictators, refused to even consider eventual independence for his African colonies, contending that they formed an integral part of Portugal. (A sign outside the city hall in Lourenço Marques announced: “Here is Portugal.”) In 1961, black nationalists took up arms against the colonial authorities, and Lisbon found itself fighting two separate independence wars in Angola, one against a movement advocating Marxism, the other against an organization whose orientation was pro-Western and capitalistic. As so often happens in Africa, the nationalists themselves were divided by tribal and ideological differences, and once the Portuguese were defeated, they turned their guns on one another, Three movements figured in the liberation war and the civil war that followed:

The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), Marxist and supported by the Soviet Union, was formed in 1956 with the help of the Portuguese Communist Party. Its principal guerrilla bases during the fourteen-year independence war were named Hanoi II and Ho Chi Minh. Its key figures were mostly
mestiço
urban intellectuals. Agostinho Neto, the MPLA leader and later the first president of Angola, visited Washington in 1962, seeking economic help from the West. But U.S. economic and political interests in Africa had always lain with the colonial powers, not the black liberation movements, and the Kennedy Administration snubbed Neto. The slight pushed this man, who would become one of Africa’s most important revolutionary leaders, further into the Soviet camp.

The National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) was
formed in 1962 and soon set up a government-in-exile in neighboring Zaire. It was backed by Western countries, including the United States, and led by Holden Roberto, who was named for a British Baptist missionary and was a descendant of the Kongo monarchy. It had the largest guerrilla army in the independence war, about 15,000 men.