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

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Outside Magazine September 2002

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


	"I have lived many lifetimes in this hole": Chyngandangaly, a diamond mine outside Saurimo. (Antonin Kratochvil)

THE WORST PLACE IN THE WORLD you might have the misfortune to be born—this is what most people in Angola refer to as "the situation," or the situacão.

The situacão is what passes for everyday life in this nation of 13 million relentlessly buffeted souls. In the marketplaces of Luanda—the suffocating seaside capital where four million people live (up from 750,000 in 1970) without power or water, in unfinished, roofless high-rises graffitied with names of gangs like the Young Squad and the Disgusting Blades—the street poets sing in lilting hip-hop about the situacão, low and under their breath, so that government spies do not hear.

"Angola, my Angola," they sing, "once so beautiful, always so fucked up."



	(Illustration by Mike Regan)

Still, Angolans tell you, they can deal with the situacão. What cannot be dealt with is the confusão, the second and more deadly half of the Angolan existential equation.

An example: Angola is one of the most heavily land-mined countries on earth. Any given former cow pasture or cassava field might contain a Soviet-issue POMZ-2 stake-mounted fragmentation mine, a Type 72 antitank mine made in China, a PP-MI-Sr II "Bouncing Betty" from the former Czechoslovakia, or an East German-made PPM2 antipersonnel blaster. Above the surface, the nearly invisible trip wires of American Claymores are set off by passing trucks. All it takes is one innocent foot stepping on one mine, as dozens do every month, to have the situacão rapidly mutate into the confusão.

But confusão happens. And the great ironic geology-is-destiny application of the situacão/confusão is that if Angola wasn't so naturally rich, it would be at peace. Angola remains one of the ten poorest nations on earth. Yet it has the fourth-largest diamond industry in the world, controlled by the government and various foreign diamond cartels, which generated 5.1 million carats in 2001, worth in excess of $650 million. That's not counting the proceeds from the "informal" market, which traffics in "conflict" or "blood" diamonds, often mined or stolen by UNITA forces. According to Rough Trade, a 1998 report on the Angolan diamond industry by the nongovernmental watchdog group Global Witness, UNITA realized an estimated $3.7 billion from the sale of conflict diamonds from 1992 to 1998.

Then there's the Angolan oil industry, which according to Global Witness will likely soon surpass Nigeria's as the largest producer in sub-Saharan Africa. Controlled by the Dos Santos government, the oil industry is projected to produce more than 900,000 barrels a day by the end of 2002. In 2001, oil sales accounted for 87 percent of state revenue—that is, $3 to $5 billion. Currently 3.4 percent of all crude oil imported by the U.S. comes from Angola, nearly three times the amount imported from Kuwait before the Gulf War.

So the civil war became, to a large extent, a contest of environmental plunder—UNITA's diamonds against the MPLA's oil. The dense rainforest once covering the central and northern sections of the country has been nearly logged out. Wildlife, 50 years ago among the most abundant in Africa, has been decimated, primarily by poaching and hunting for food. Offshore oil drilling threatens the remarkably fecund Atlantic fishing grounds, fed by the cold-water Benguela Current. Numerous bird species, such as the Pulitzer's longbill and the grouse-like Gabela akalat, are beginning to disappear. In the countryside, days can go by without a bird appearing in the sky. "Everything has been eaten," people say.

To put it mildly, the effort to return Angola to any kind of environmental normality is going to be difficult. This was obvious the day the photographer Antonin Kratochvil and I visited Quiçama National Park—prewar, the crown jewel of the country's 12 national parks and game reserves, 5,850 square miles of treed savanna and coastline, 44 miles south of Luanda.

We spoke to park ranger Eduardo Benguela, a large, boisterous man in a snappy uniform and pith helmet. Eduardo was happy to see us, since the park had not had any visitors in several days. Did the park have zebras? I asked. No, Eduardo replied. Were there giraffes? No. How about antelope or leopards? No, none of them. Lions? Nope. Hippos? No, they were disruptive. The Cubans shot them years ago.

Then what animals did Quiçama have? "Elephants," he replied. He said he had 15 elephants, which had been flown in from South Africa as part of a conservation program called Operation Noah's Ark (see "Incoming Elephants," page 118). None of the park's few visitors had seen any of these elephants recently, Eduardo allowed, but he was reasonably sure they were still there. If any of the pachyderms had stepped on an antitank mine, he would have heard the explosion.

This, Eduardo said, was "the situacão."

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