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.)


	The Soba (Antonin Kratochvil)

IT IS WRONG TO SAY THAT CONSUMER GOODS are unavailable in Luanda. Get stuck in a traffic jam and the mall will come to you. During a stoppage at a street corner near the Prenda slums—a dead body under a bloody sheet led to much rubbernecking—our vehicle was approached, in a five-minute period, by vendors of toothpaste, surge protectors, windshield wiper blades, condoms, baby carriages, window blinds, many kinds of lights and batteries, a Mr. Coffee, a case of yogurt, and many loaves of bread, which are always hot, since the women stack the baguettes in buckets that they balance on their heads in the noonday sun.

We were looking for where they sold the people. Or rather, for where we'd been told people were sold. The place to look was Roque (pronounced "rock") Santeiro, the largest open-air market, or candonga, in Angola, a crowded warren of makeshift wooden stalls built upon a beachfront rubbish dump that once served as a public execution ground.

Victor made inquiries and eventually found Daniel Damingos, a sleepy-eyed, ruddily handsome 14-year-old in a soiled Garth Brooks T-shirt. Daniel, who had no idea who Garth Brooks was except that he liked his hat, had been living at the Roque for six years, ever since walking here from Benguela Province after UNITA thugs killed his parents. Sleeping on the ground behind various stalls, he sometimes sold vegetables, but mostly he sniffed gasoline—except on Mondays, when the market was closed and the wooden tables were cleared away and piled 20 feet high, allowing everyone not too stoned to play soccer.

Mostly it was newborn babies who were sold at the Roque, usually to people from Senegal and Mali, said Daniel, leading us to where the trade supposedly took place. It made sense, he said. Families were big, there was no food or health care, and in this Roman Catholic country, abortion was not an option. Prices varied widely; he said he'd seen babies sold for anywhere from $20 to $100, as many as five in a day. (Daniel's account of baby-selling was anecdotal, of course; although it's talked about among relief workers and journalists in Luanda, I could find no organization that had investigated such allegations.)

But the cops had been by several times that week, he said, demanding gasosas—"soft drinks," slang for bribes—and chased everyone away. Daniel, very apologetic, suggested an alternative. Perhaps we might like to buy him.

We thought he couldn't be serious, but he was. Well, then, how much did he want for himself?

"Quanto?" Victor demanded, asserting his Mbundu class prerogatives for the moment, seemingly ready to bargain hard on our behalf.

It was a dislocating, appalling moment, considering that not far from this spot, on the docks of Luanda, whole populations looking roughly like Daniel had been sold to people looking roughly like us. If instead of 2001 it had been 1601, 1701, or 1801—even 1901, forced labor having not been abolished here until 1962—we might have been peering into Daniel's mouth to check the quality of his teeth.

"Quanto?" Victor shouted again. Daniel shrugged.

"Quanto?" Now Victor pushed him in the chest, screaming for him to stand up straight. Surely he knew how much he was worth. And just as surely, Victor shouted, he knew he was worth more than any man, no matter how rich, could pay. It was no disgrace to be a street kid in Angola. There were thousands in Luanda alone. But you had to show some self-respect. You couldn't hold yourself cheap. "Don't sit here all day sniffing gasoline!" Victor exhorted.

Then Victor told us to give Daniel 100 kwanzas, about $5. He'd taken us around, given information; he deserved to be paid for his work. Daniel pocketed the money with a nod and walked off into the clouds of dust and cooking smoke.

"Angola," Victor whispered, looking up into the thickening gray clouds. "What a stupid country."

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