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Outside Magazine September 2002

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


	"In this sad life": Pentecostal worshipers dance on the beach south of Luanda after a funeral. (Antonin Kratochvil)

PROBABLY IT WASN'T the smartest thing, a chindele walking the streets of Luanda alone before dawn. But I couldn't sleep.

We'd only gotten back from Cabinda the day before, and then spent the better part of the evening driving the deeply rutted streets of Luanda, looking for some good music. We first stopped in at the Chihuahua disco, where the well-dressed sons and spectacularly beautiful daughters of the MPLA elite do the kizomba, Angola's elegant tango-like dance. Victor, of course, was outraged by this cologne-drenched panorama of privilege. "Afro-trash! This is no place for a journalist!" he fumed above the din, demanding we leave.

So we headed to an open-air party spot frequented by Bakongo refugees from the north, where we sat, listening to the music and buying Castle beers for the girls. Bakongo music is more forgiving than the kizomba. This suited the former FAA soldier standing near us. He was a land mine victim, his left leg blown off at the knee. Still, his disability did not prevent him from gyrating mightily on his crutch. Before his injury, he and his girlfriend had been kizomba champions, he told us, "but now if I do the kizomba, I fall over."

It was still dark when I went out, the stars bright in the sky. Astronomy is always improved by bad power grids. Looking up, I thought of a comment made to me by Moty Kramash, an Israeli who ran the ASCORP office downtown. It was an outrage that international groups made such a fuss over "conflict" diamonds when the oil was worth so much more, Moty had said.

He understood it, he supposed, because "there is something about a diamond." If you looked at the sky, he said with sudden sentimentality, the black oil would surround the diamond stars. "But oil is slimy. You pour it into an engine, wipe your hands to get it off," Moty said. "People don't wish on oil, they wish on stars, and maybe those wishes will come true, even in Angola."

Maybe. Amid the early morning cool and quiet, Luanda looked serene, even airy. A bowl of hills set around a perfect sweep of bay, the city had more than a hint of Rio about it. There was even talk of gentrification. Recently the government had forcibly removed thousands from the Boa Vista musseque on the seaside cliffs near Roque Santeiro. The cliffs were eroding, authorities said. But everyone knew the boa vista—good view—was too beautiful to leave to slum dwellers. The words "real estate" had begun to dot polite conversation. The aim was to buy at "before-peace prices."

The sun was edging up as I reached the Marginal, the once-grand boulevard that skirts Luanda Bay. I walked around awhile and then went by the Biqer bar for a coffee. A rundown place with unwashed windows that reach to the 25-foot ceilings, the Biqer (pronounced "BEE-ker") is known as "the journalist bar." One table, its six chairs leaning against the coffee-stained top, is eternally reserved for "the dead scribblers." Ricardo Manuel was already there, sitting in his usual seat, wearing his argyle vest and beret, eating breakfast. Manager of a bookshop down the street and author of numerous works, including the recent Cronica de Uma Cidade, Vol. 2, sketches of "the unusual people I meet in a day in Luanda," the 65-year-old first came to Angola from Lisbon in 1964.

"I was a settler," he said, gently mocking the term the Portuguese used to describe themselves. I asked Ricardo about the famous episode in Another Day of Life, Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski's account of the approach of the rebels and the hasty Portuguese evacuation in 1975.

"The city was closed and sentenced to death," Kapuscinski wrote. "People ran around nervously, in a hurry.... They didn't want Angola. They had had enough of the country, which was supposed to be the Promised Land but had brought them disenchantment and abasement.... Everybody was busy building crates. Mountains of boards and plywood were brought in," which made dusty Luanda "smell like a flourishing forest...the city of crates."

Ricardo's eyes lit behind quarter-inch-thick glasses. "My things were in those crates," he said. But he decided to stay in Angola when 350,000 people, including almost everyone he knew, left.

"I liked Angola," he said, explaining why he stayed, "but there was so much panic, so much fear...I remember sitting in my house trying to decide what to do. From the TV I heard the voice of Agostinho Neto. He was giving a speech declaring Angola's independence. But I could not see him. The screen was totally white.

"That's where I was when my friend came to see me. Peter. My black friend. He'd gone to the coast and caught several fish. He brought them to me, as a gift, because I was leaving. I invited Peter in and he sat down. We were there together and the TV fixed itself. It wasn't only white now, it was black and white. You could see the picture: Agostinho Neto giving his speech. So we cooked the fish, had some beers, and sat there watching.

"I made up my mind to stay in Angola," he said. "I have been here almost 40 years now, some good, many, many bad. But this is my place." Whenever the situacão threatens to become the confusão, Ricardo thinks of the time he decided to stay in Angola. "It helps," he said.

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