In Postwar Angola, Glimpses of an Emerging Country

By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 27, 2006

On a steamy Monday morning in Luanda, while touring the Angolan capital from the front seat of a beat-up VW station wagon, I absorbed the stories the cityscape could tell.

There were centuries-old buildings -- sad and crumbling in shades of pastel -- that told of this southwest African nation's long rule by the Portuguese. Massive shantytowns teeming with Luanda's poor told of a deep urban desperation, compounded by waves of deslocados, the displaced from the long war.

I gawked, amazed, at a peacetime construction boom of downtown high-rises, fueled no doubt by the country's vast oil and diamond wealth, that suggested renewal and progress, albeit for a few.

And the lovely palm-fringed bay, with its sensuous, inviting air, seemed too beautiful to have played host to Luanda's richly sordid history. Perhaps the perfect bay, it is sheltered by a long spit of land curving out into the Atlantic, offering protection to the fleets of ships that through the ages have brought adventurers and fortune seekers from around the globe.

The stories of three continents converge here, as they do in many other African cities that were ports of entry for the European conquest and pillage of millions of Africans shipped away as slaves. Because I am African American, the vicissitudes of that history are both repugnant and alluring. In fact, it was history that prompted my husband, Phillip, and me to travel to Luanda in June as part of a trip to nearby South Africa. I needed to meet with officials of the Historic Archive of Angola for a nonfiction book I hope to write about a 19th-century slave trader from Luanda -- yet another layer of my fascination with this bewildering city and its history.

Maybe it was the 16th-century Fort of San Miguel that enticed me, with its battlements and cannons overlooking the bay. Or the picturesque churches of the 17th and 18th centuries, especially that small Chapel of the Hill of the Cross that sits on a promontory overlooking an inlet south of the city, which was the private chapel of a slaver whose human cargo was blessed by a priest before the voyage into hell.

I traveled frequently to Luanda in the 1990s when I was based in southern Africa for The Washington Post. But this was my first trip back since 1998, when Angola still was in the throes of its civil war.

Rival liberation groups fought one another even before Angola's 1975 independence from Portuguese colonialism, after which the war drew in troops from South Africa, Zaire (now Republic of Congo) and Cuba, as well as covert operatives sent by Washington. The Cubans helped the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) seize the capital, cementing it as the leading power in the country. The MPLA then won the country's 1992 election, prompting its main rival group, the National Union for the Total Liberation CIA of Angola (UNITA), to launch a new round of war that battered the country for another decade. The war ended in 2002, after the death of the UNITA leader, Jonas Savimbi, and new elections are expected next year.

Though peace has held firm for four years, the country is not yet ready for tourists and does not yet issue tourist visas. There aren't enough hotel rooms, jammed as the city is with visiting investors and businesspeople from the United States, China, Portugal, France, South Africa and elsewhere. And with a new international airport under construction, the country's transport infrastructure isn't quite tourist-ready either.

The long years of war ravaged the country. In some hinterland towns, not a building was left unpocked by bullets and mortars. Agricultural production was decimated, as were the nation's roads, rail lines and bridges. Though the capital had mostly been spared the fighting, it was nonetheless smothered by the effects of war.

During my earlier travels in Luanda, the city smelled moldy and rancid, in part from mounds of fetid garbage pilled high on the streets. By night, I saw legions of street children -- war orphans -- sleeping on sidewalks beneath newspapers or tarps. By day, they darted in and out of traffic, begging along with the ubiquitous mutilados (war amputees mutilated by land mines) who leaned on crutches at roadside.

Now, instead of beggars, the streets are filled with hawkers, selling everything from bras to batteries, key chains to chewing gum, flip-flops to axes, Kleenex to Rattex (rat poison). Our driver, Afonso Kapembe, one day bought car floor mats and an iron while idling at a traffic light. As for the street children, we didn't see any; perhaps they are just less obvious than before. Instead, while searching for an art shop, we stumbled into a school for the arts that was filled with singing and dancing children -- the children of peace.

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.

* * *

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).