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.)


	Mealtime at an orphanage in Huambo (Antonin Kratochvil)

WE THOUGHT CABINDA, the small province on the north side of the mouth of the Congo River where more than 70 percent of Angola's oil comes from, would be a tropical Klondike full of horny roustabouts, hookers, cheap fun, and easy money. We were misinformed. By 7 p.m. on the evening we arrived, we had the dining room of the Maiombe Hotel, the only place to stay in the town of Cabinda, completely to ourselves—not counting the ten underemployed waiters dressed in frayed suit jackets and black ties.

The oilmen were down the road in Malongo, at the Chevron-Texaco compound, one of those self-contained golf course/multiplex/multinational nirvanas. As per insurance requirements, the American and European drillers fly in from Luanda on the government's 727s and are choppered over to the Malongo landing pad. If any Tony LamaÐwearing Houstonian had ever set foot in Cabinda town, the clerk at the Maiombe had never seen one.

The day before, back in Luanda, we'd gone by Chevron's swank offices, amusingly located on Rua Salvador Allende (Rua Karl Marx and Rua Che Guevara are around the corner). No problem to visit Malongo, they said; our names were on the list. But when we rolled up to the gates, they weren't. We told Victor to inform the lumpen gatekeepers that as Chevron shareholders (my mother gave me ten shares for my birthday many years ago) we expected to be shown the facility immediately. Instead, they called in the guards from Teleservices, the private military force that protects Malongo. We made a stink, but it got us nowhere, and Teleservices turned us away.

Not that we really needed to see Malongo. You could guess what they had in there, down to the iceberg lettuce and jars of French's mustard. The reaction of the few Cabindans who had actually been inside the stucco walls was more to the point. Our driver, a morose part-time schoolteacher named Antonio, said it was a veritable zoo. "They have many animals," he marveled. Monkeys ran wild inside the compound, swinging from trees. One had even run alongside his car, jumped on the hood, and pressed its red butt flush against the windshield. Cabinda, formerly a densely covered rainforest, had once been overrun by monkeys, but Antonio hadn't seen one since he was a child.

Driving back to town, we came upon several people crowded around a large, metal-framed bed. Almost lost in the folds of a frilly pink-and-blue blanket lay the body of an eight-year-old boy, dead of malaria. This wake was a last chance to see the boy "in this sad life," said a squat man sitting by the boy's body. "Many children die of malaria here," the man added. "This is why AIDS is not as bad here as the rest of Africa. With war and mosquitoes, people die before they have a chance to die of having sex."

The man introduced himself as "Mr. Belichnor Tati, relative of the deceased, political officer of FLEC." FLEC is the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda, which has been fighting a low-level war to secede from Angola since 1963. What distinguishes the province's claim to self-determination is its tremendous offshore oil reserves. If Cabinda—twice the size of Rhode Island, with a population of 168,000—achieved independence, it would instantly be transformed from a poor, embittered possession into a nation with the highest per capita income in Africa.

Worst to first: This was Cabinda's unprecedented version of the situacão, Tati explained, as we left the wake and walked across the highway to the Atlantic shoreline. The sky was gray. A dozen offshore rigs dotted the misty horizon, interspersed with plumes of fire jumping from the ocean's surface to vent flaring gas, which often attends offshore drilling. "Fire on the water," said Tati, shaking his shaved head at what he took to be an affront to nature. Off in the distance was a giant tanker.

"They take the oil straight from the rigs, put it in the boat, and sail away. We never see it, except for this," Tati said, looking down at the rainbow-slicked waves and the blackened sand. Only a few weeks before there had been a major spill. It was particularly galling to him that the MPLA used the enclave's oil money to beat UNITA. "Without Cabinda the MPLA is nothing," he said.

FLEC was patient, but they couldn't wait forever. Recently they'd captured several Portuguese construction workers involved with a logging operation to the north. "Two are still in the bush," Tati said, an unsettling smile crossing his broad face. Kidnapping foreign nationals was "a good tactic" for FLEC, he added, since it brought revenue and attention. Until now, the group had preferred to snatch Portuguese, "because of history," he said. But history had changed, bringing new enemies.

"It is the Americans now," he said. "We will have to put fire on American cars, like the flames out in the ocean. We have to make them listen." (No Americans have been attacked or kidnapped in Cabinda since 1992.) Then Tati turned to us. "You have American passports, and you come here as tourists. Alone, without the Teleservice guards? Without weapons? Is that brave, or stupid?" It was a question left unanswered as we got back into the car, drove to the deserted hotel, and locked the door, for all the good it might have done.

Page: