Angola Adventure Travel - Angola - This is the Situation. This is the Confusion. This is Angola. (Cont.)

You Are Here:

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

Today's Question
What should you do if you run into a cougar in the backcountry? answer

What is the number one backcountry skill people should learn? answer

Today's Question
What are the five best environmental movies of all time? answer

What are the greenest colleges? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine September 2002

Page:

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


	Refugees loiter around a supply truck. (Antonin Kratochvil)

NONE OF THIS IS A PROBLEM AT CATOCA, another Lunda Sul diamond mine, about nine miles to the north. In 2001, Catoca, which is overseen by the Angola Selling Corporation (ASCORP, owned by the state and a conglomerate of foreign firms), produced 2.6 million carats, worth close to $200 million. It is the biggest kimberlite diamond mine in Angola, with its own airstrip and a well-stocked commissary, and the fourth-largest in the world.

We were under the impression that we would be allowed to enter Catoca. We had letters, one personally written by the governor of Saurimo Province, with whom we'd had a brief audience. But this was not good enough. We would need permission from "the company," we were told.

"Quanto?" Victor shouted. The street kid shrugged. "Quanto?" Now Victor pushed him in the chest, screaming for him to stand up straight. Surley he knew how much he was worth.

Being barred from Catoca enraged Victor Vunge, the 30-year-old journalist we had hired as our fixer. Other journalists and NGO workers said that we should fire Victor, that he was reckless, déclassé, and possibly fatally self-dramatizing. But we liked him. Born in Malanje, he claimed to be a leading son of local Mbundu royalty. His mother had been killed during the war, when the MPLA mistakenly bombed the hospital where she lay ill; his father had been stricken with cerebral malaria and was now "crazy." Living in Angola did that to you, said Victor, who admitted to voting for Savimbi in the 1992 election on the premise that any change had to be for the better. This was the ultimate idiocy of Angola, he said, that "a man of the people" like himself had to cast the only vote he'd been allowed in his entire life for a murdering psychopath like Savimbi.

"Why can we not go in? Who does this mine belong to?" Victor demanded of the ASCORP representative and a government man. "You cannot allow them to steal these diamonds! This is Angola! Not Brazil! Not Russia! Not Israel! Angola!"

Now, however, peering through the barbed-wire fence into Catoca, watching truckloads of soldiers in crisply creased uniforms whiz by, Victor settled into a sullen calm. It was an outrage that all these gems were leaving the country without the building of a single hospital or school. But constant railing about the situacão could only go so far. Simply that the government man appeared to be a grinning idiot meant nothing. You needed to know when to shut up.

We got Victor out of there before the situacão degenerated any further, got back in the car, and drove to a nearby refugee camp, where 5,000 people were lined up to receive their monthly ration of maize, salt, oil, and six dried fish. There is a numbing sameness to refugee camps. The same tents and mud-brick huts, the same stunned, staring children, the same quarantined area for the lepers, the same demoralizing array of T-shirt iconography—Tweety Bird, Princess Di, Nike, Mštley CrŸe, and Michael Jordan, the all-time refugee-T-shirt king.

But mostly people sit and wait. Indeed, the camp, which received aid from the World Food Program, was generically tagged Lugar de Reassentamento ("resettlement camp"), but the people called it A Place to Wait.

Over a cup of dense tea, Antonio Franciteo Nuadjidji—the soba, or traditional leader, a tall, distinguished-looking 57-year-old man in a high-crowned ten-gallon hat with marlboro spelled out on the band—explained that he and his people were from Dala, about 150 miles to the south. They'd always lived there, working as shepherds and cow-herders, but after UNITA burned their village for the fourth time since 1984, they left and walked here. Boatless boat people marching across the waterless sea of the Angolan archipelago, many died on the way, mostly from malaria and land mines. It was humiliating, being forced to go into the fields to plant cassava and hang around waiting for handouts from stingy relief organizations, the soba said with obvious disgust.

I asked him if he could characterize what had been lost by having to leave his home to come here. The soba sat still for several moments, deep in thought. "No," he finally said. The question was "too big." His mind "couldn't even decide where to begin to think about" what had been lost.

Then he mentioned a dream he'd had a few nights before. He was out walking in the fields and he found a diamond. It was a giant diamond, he said, making a tennis-ball-size shape with his weathered hand. He sat and looked at the diamond for "a long time," wondering what he would buy.

"I bought a plane. It landed over there," the soba said, pointing to the field beyond the huts where the lepers stayed. He loaded his people on the plane and flew it back to Dala, where he built a high wall to keep UNITA out. Then he bought an armored truck, the sort the relief groups use to clear antipersonnel mines, and drove it back to the camp.

"I used that truck to smash down this place, starting here," he said, pointing to his own thatched hut. In his dream, he drove that truck "around and around," flattening everything, until Lugar de Reassentamento was just an empty hole in the ground. That's what the soba did with the diamond of his dreams.

Page: