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Outside Magazine September 2002

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

LATER THAT DAY, our last in the country, we decided to take a ride down the coast. The road is considered safe until the town of Sumbe. That's about 180 miles, the longest stretch of open road in the Angolan archipelago, plenty of time to crank up the radio (Nelly's rap with the refrain "It must be the money" was huge) and pretend you're driving any coastline, anywhere. We weren't going far, just an hour past the hideous garbage mountains of the Rocha Pinta musseque and the massive fenced-in estate of Futungo, where Dos Santos lives, to the slave museum.

Set out on an ocean point, the slave museum does not have many exhibits—some rusted neck irons, a corkscrew-shaped whip known as a chicotte—but these few objects are chilling. A haphazardly hung line drawing of a manacled African beseeching a diffident Portuguese trader, "Am I not a man and a brother?" is enough to set you weeping. You pay your five kwanzas to the attendant, who does not look up from his comic book, and walk out into the late afternoon sunlight feeling shame, anger, and humility.

A group of Pentecostals were dancing and singing on the beach that afternoon. Watching them, I got into a conversation with Belmiro Teixeira, who had hitched a ride down to the beach from Rocha Pinta along with his wife, Milla. They were a slick pair. Belmiro was marvelously attired in yellow shoes, green-and-black check slacks, and a snazzy tangerine guayabera. Milla, sleek and long-legged in chartreuse capri pants with a stretchy aqua top, had her hair done up in crisscrossing cornrows.

Belmiro listened closely to the singers for a moment and shook his head. "They say the next world is better, but how do they know?" he asked. He went to church too, but he was "an optimist...a believer in the future. Right here, right now."

It was a lesson he had learned from "my own life," he said. After failing to make the Angolan national basketball team, which played the American Dream Team in the 1992 Olympics, Belmiro had been drummed into the UNITA army. He ran away, only to be caught by government forces and made to fight for them. Wounded near Ondjiva, he hung around the Namibian border for two years before coming up to Luanda. "If I could live through that," Belmiro said, "I knew everything will be good."

Now 32, Belmiro had a five-year plan to become a millionaire in the rebuilding of a new Angola. His first instinct was to go into the glass business. There was a shortage; almost every plate-glass window in the country had been shattered. "Glass is smart," he'd thought."I'll make glass." But glass cannot be made in a musseque backyard. A factory is needed. This meant money and permits—always a problem.

Then the unfinished building that Milla's family had been living in burned down. Her brother, who died in the fire, had rigged an illegal electrical hookup to the power lines and something had gone wrong. This got Belmiro thinking. If the government could not provide safe power to everyone, Angolans could make their own. At the time, Internet access was becoming more widespread, so Belmiro found some Web sites selling solar energy panel kits. A place in Finland had good prices. If he could sell these kits cheaply enough, he could distribute them around the country. If anything in Angola was truly free, it was sunlight. The MPLA, Chevron, UNITA, and the rest could not control the sun.

It was all still in "the planning stage," though, Belmiro said. He needed some investment. But this was an excellent time to be thinking solar. Everyone was talking about the upcoming total eclipse. Its path would pass right over Angola.

"The sun will go out. It will make a big hole in the sky," Belmiro said. "But it will come back. Like Angola. At least, that is the hope."

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