In Postwar Angola, Glimpses of an Emerging Country

On the roads, minibus taxis painted a spiffy blue and white are everywhere, beeping their horns to attract passengers. So uncontrolled is traffic that intersections, where there rarely are traffic lights or signs, are a game of chicken. And when not weaving wildly through traffic, cars sit or crawl in a monstrous gridlock.

A city of 4 million, Luanda is massively overcrowded. That's part of the reason for its ongoing outbreak of cholera. The shanties lack proper water and sewage services. During our visit, the cholera death toll reached nearly 2,000 from an epidemic raging in the Luanda shanties and around the country since February. In a northern province near the Congo border, an outbreak of Marburg hemorrhagic fever was quelled just last year.

I'm happy to say that we didn't get the slightest bit sick on our five-day trip. But we did encounter the odd saga of the worm in the hand of Afonso, our guide.

We met Afonso on a referral from a staffer at our hotel, the Alvalade. We don't speak much Portuguese, the national language, so we badly needed a translator. An affable young man who spoke great English and had experience translating for some American oilmen, Afonso agreed to escort us around the city for $150 a day. We were relieved to have our worries about transport and language put to rest -- until we noticed the nasty-looking, two-inch-long incision on his swollen hand.

He'd recently had surgery, he explained, to remove a worm that had grown beneath the skin of his right hand. The surgery had happened only days before our arrival. This was unnerving, to say the least. But Afonso said he'd be fine and that driving, for that day at least, was not a problem.

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About 20 miles south of the city, that 18th-century chapel where slaves had been blessed was transformed in 1977, along with its adjoining house, into the National Slavery Museum. Slaves were loaded up and down the Angola coast, and the chapel on the hill was but one of them.

When I'd first visited in 1997, I felt its sad history and paid a silent tribute to those who, like my forebears, made the always-hellish departure from Africa's coast, bound mostly for the Americas and the Caribbean. At moments such as those, and they've happened often in my Africa travels, I heard their ancestral whisper.

Now, on the day of our visit, a work crew was busy with renovations and the museum officially was closed. But the man in charge of the site suggested that, for a "cold drink," he'd allow us to walk the grounds and take photos. There were no shops around, no vending machines; the "cold drink" was a euphemism for a bribe. We gave him 10 bucks, and when we asked if the exhibits still were inside, he led us in, no drink required.

The museum's collection is small, but contains items that once did great harm. A neck yoke, used as part of a slave coffle, or caravan, for the march from the interior to the coast. Ankle chains. A strange thing called a palmatoria , a wooden paddle for beating the palms of slaves' hands. A ball and chain. Stockades. Maps of the Atlantic. Yellowed ships' manifests. Engravings of slave life, including a portrait of a master or overseer branding a kneeling slave.

The exhibit had a sobering impact on what had already been a long and exhausting day. We retreated to our hotel and its balcony overlooking the city and sea. It suddenly felt like an oasis despite our annoyance at the exorbitant rate, $265 a night. (Business with international visitors is conducted in dollars, not kwanzas, the local currency). The hotel's expansive buffet also was pricey ($50 a head), though it was possible to order from the menu for significantly less.

Alone now, Phillip and I returned to the subject of the worm. We speculated that an insect must have bitten Afonso and laid eggs in his hand. But later, when we finally had the nerve to ask how he had contracted the worm, he said it came from a dog bite. Afonso hadn't taken the bite very seriously. He did not go to a doctor or properly care for the wound. So it degenerated, got infected and produced, voila, the worm. (Rabies crossed my mind; I refused to entertain the thought.)

The worm started a chain reaction of troubles in our well-laid travel plans. When Afonso went back to the doctor on Tuesday and sent an uncle and a cousin to escort us around town, the car broke down. We were, for several tense minutes, marooned on the streets -- until a kind cop got the car started and sent us on our way (no bribe required).

And we discovered that neither Afonso nor his relatives -- Esdras Fundanga and Ekundy Tchissolokombe -- knew the city's streets very well, hailing as they did from the interior city of Huambo. Jokingly and privately, Phillip dubbed them Manny, Moe and Jack, though we ended up liking them and appreciated their earnest efforts.

Later, at the National Museum of Anthropology, curator Mbunga Kifietete showed off the voluminous exhibits depicting the lives of the Chokwe, Bakongo, Ovimbundu, Ngangela and Mbundu peoples: their masks and elaborate headdresses; their huge wooden gongs; the netted traps of the fishermen; the variety of poisoned arrowheads that the Khoisan, or Bushmen, shaped and sized for killing different animals; the regalia of the chiefs, including a hat festooned with leopard claws.

Kifietete took his time narrating our tour, careful not to leave out a detail. The items were not shiny or polished or well-preserved. They were far less glamorously arranged than you'd find in the Smithsonian. But they were far more impressive for being authentic, as if a fisherman had just arrived from the distant past and lent his fishing traps solely for us to see.

Lynne Duke, a reporter for The Post's Style section, was the newspaper's Johannesburg bureau chief from 1995 to 1999. She is author of "Mandela, Mobutu and Me: A Newswoman's African Journey" (Doubleday).