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Outside Magazine September 2002

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This is the Situation. This is the Confusion. This is Angola. (Cont.)


	A lone Baobab stands guard on the Angolan coast near Quiçama Park. (Antonin Kratochvil)

IT IS A FABLE YOU HEAR TOLD all over this country, about how when God made Angola, he was in a very happy mood. Tucking it into the southwest coast of Africa, with Congo to the north, Zambia to the east, and Namibia and Botswana to the south, he gave Angola every manner of gift: vast diamond fields, huge oil deposits, numerous rivers flowing throughout the countryside. He gave it savannas teeming with wildlife and farmland second to none, with wide and rambling meadows for grazing animals.

When the other African nations saw what God had given Angola, they protested. Why did Angola have so much, when we have only this pile of dust, these rivers of disease? God agreed. He'd been too generous to Angola, but there was no changing it now. What was done was done. As recompense, God made the Angolan people so contentious, so disputatious, that they would never be able to enjoy the riches he had given them.

So present-day Angola came to be: a perpetually war-torn (basket) case of extreme underdevelopment, even in a continent known for underdevelopment; a Marxist reverie of contradiction in a land run by former Marxists. The fighting there has spun out in stages, each one a devaluation of moral imperative. What began in 1961 as a heroic war of liberation against Portuguese dictator Alberto Salazar's bankrupt, teetering colonial regime degenerated into a messy, ethnic-based shootout even before independence was gained, in 1975.

The short history: Holden Roberto, leader of the populist National Liberation Front of Angola (the FNLA, primarily composed of Bakongo people from the north), was backed by Zaire and, until he lost, the United States. Agostinho Neto, a Marxist poet turned revolutionary, led the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (the MPLA, largely Portuguese-speaking urban elites from the Mbundu tribe), and was supported by the Soviet Union and 50,000 Cuban troops. The MPLA vanquished the FNLA, but in 1979, when Neto died, he was succeeded by a 37-year-old oil engineer named José Eduardo dos Santos, who has retained power ever since, reconfiguring the formerly Marxist MPLA government into a capitalist kleptocracy. Dos Santos was, in turn, opposed by the ruthless, charismatic Jonas Savimbi and his agrarian army of Ovimbundu tribesmen—the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA)—which received money and arms from the United States and active military support from apartheid-era South Africa.

In the late 1970s and 1980s Angola became a roaring, orgiastic Cold War proving ground. Despite a fitful series of cease-fires and three failed United Nations peacekeeping missions, including a highly disputed 1992 election in which Dos Santos defeated the much-feared Savimbi, the war ebbed and flowed, killing upwards of 500,000 people. Now it appears to have sputtered out, though Angolans are justifiably leery about its closure. When the 67-year-old Savimbi was killed last February—reportedly shot 15 times in an ambush led by Angolan army troops in Moxico—the Dos Santos government had to unleash what The New York Times termed a "press offensive" to convince the populace and the world that the long-demonized UNITA chief was really dead. It took several minutes of TV footage showing Savimbi's lifeless body—still decked out in his olive-drab UNITA fatigues, his pants falling down, a bullet hole in his neck—to do the trick.

My journey, which took place before Savimbi was killed and his tattered, malnourished UNITA troops straggled in from the bush to sign a cease-fire agreement, was originally conceived as a mission of sorts: to see what the future held for Angola, once so lush and beautiful, as it re-emerged from a quarter-century of ruination. Twenty-seven years of civil war can generate a raft of impressively gruesome statistics. As of 2000, according to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization, 62 percent of Angolans were without access to safe drinking water, 56 percent lacked adequate sanitation, and 16 percent (2.1 million people) were afflicted with malaria. As much as 30 percent of the population live as deslocados, internally displaced people, in refugee camps run by the government and aided by the UN World Food Program; currently, half a million are starving due to famine. Almost a third of the country's children die before the age of five. More than 54 percent of Angolans are younger than 18, and life expectancy hovers around 36. According to the latest statistics, only 50 percent of school-age children attend classes, and nearly half the population is illiterate.

In 1999, UNICEF declared Angola, of all the ravaged spots on the globe, the single worst country in which to be born.

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