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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 garimpeiro at work. (Antonin Kratochvil)

ANGOLA, NEARLY TWICE the size of Texas, has become an archipelago, each city its own island, or ilha. Our plan was to drive from ilha to ilha—to start in Luanda and move out into the countryside, to see if the land and the animals could come back from the war, the rapacious diamond mining, the no-holds-barred oil exploration. But driving was going to be almost impossible. Outside Luanda, few remember when anyone drove to anywhere from anywhere else in Angola. International demining organizations, such as the Mines Advisory Group, say it will be years before the explosives are cleared from the few remaining highways. So the only way to get around is by air. But there are no commercial flights—that's the situation.

No one had seen any of the imported elephants recently, but Eduardo was reasonably sure they were still there. If any had stepped on a mine, he would have heard the explosion.

To get to Saurimo, the tumbledown provincial capital of Lunda Sul, 450 miles east of the Big Ilha of Luanda, you need to get to the airport at four in the morning. Several men will then run from the shadows screaming, "Cabinda!" "Lubango!" "Huambo!" When someone yells "Saurimo!" you follow him into the sprawling barrio nearby, through narrow, garbage-strewn streets, to a tiny office lit only by a Coleman lantern, where a big, smiling man named Jorge waves a price list covered with wrinkled plastic like a truck-stop menu. Saurimo costs $150; there is no bargaining. You hand over the bills in return for a piece of tissue paper stamped, simply, "received from."

As roosters crow, you are put on a Boeing 727 cargo plane—a good thing, since the other plane on the tarmac is a Russian-made Antonov being stocked with 55-gallon drums of gasoline. Notoriously poorly maintained and unable to stay out of the range of the shoulder-launched, heat-seeking U.S.-issue Stinger missiles favored by UNITA gunners, an Antonov carrying gas is like a flying bomb. The Boeing only has four seats, already occupied by an FAA soldier, his sleeping girlfriend, and a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses assiduously underlining passages in the Book of Ezekiel. You must ride in the windowless cargo section, where your fellow travelers are splayed out on giant sacks of sugar. With no seats, there are no seat belts, and you lie there in freezing darkness hoping the Korean-made pickup trucks in the back are properly lashed down, in case of short stops.

Saurimo is where the diamonds are. Lunda Sul is home to a large deposit of kimberlite, the pipe-shaped igneous rock formations in which diamonds take shape, and 70 percent of the stones found there are considered gem quality; diamond for diamond, that makes it one of the richest fields in the world.

However, staring down into a 100-foot-deep pit a few miles east of Saurimo, where 200 or so garimpeiros—independent prospectors—work 12 hours a day with sieves and pickaxes in 95-degree heat, sifting through red mud for whatever they can find, Breakfast at Tiffany's seemed very far away.

"Welcome to hell," said a dreadlocked man in a yellow soccer shirt with Brazilian star Ronaldo's number 9 on the back. He introduced himself as Da Consciencia das Pedras, the Conscience of the Rocks. Now 39, twice the age of most of his fellow garimpeiros—who, at the first sight of us, had raised their shovels to the sky and shouted, "Chindele! Charuto! Chindele!" (White man! Give me a cigarette!)—the Conscience of the Rocks said he had "lived many lifetimes in this hole."

The best of it was back in 1994. "I found several stones in my first month," the Conscience reported. "You are supposed to give the first stones to the foreman, but I did not. He slept all day and his food was shit.

"I was a king," the Conscience went on. "I had a Toyota and a quintal in Luanda, a nice house." But it did not last. "I spent it all and my wife stole the rest." He returned to Chyngandangaly—which is what the pit is called, after the first prospector to score there—but hadn't found a diamond in over two years.

The Conscience of the Rocks is like Chyngandangaly itself, because this hole is close to played out. Some garimpeiros have moved north, to a new and bigger hole, called Samuhondo. The digging is better there, but there are complications. Samuhondo is on the other side of the Rio Chicapa, and FAA soldiers control the rubber boats. Lazing in thatch-roofed huts, playing cards and listening to Destiny's Child tapes on their boom boxes, the FAA guys, with Vietnam-era rubrics like SUCK ON THIS scrawled on the butt ends of their Kalashnikovs, exact a heavy surcharge, usually in diamonds. Attempts to cross the river in non-army craft invite a hail of gunfire. Swimming the muddy 100-yard-wide expanse is likewise out, on account of crocodiles.

"So I am stuck. This hole is my grave," said the Conscience of the Rocks, the reddish walls rising above him. "I only hope I am dead before I am buried in it."

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