Another Day of Life

ABC

The name “Angola” comes from that of a king, N’Gola, who in the second half of the sixteenth century ruled the Mbundu people, inhabiting the region of today’s Luanda. N’Gola’s kingdom was called Ndongo, and it was the southern neighbor of another great African kingdom, Congo. Both states were brought under the rule of the King of Portugal, and subsequently destroyed.

Present-day Angola occupies 1,246,700 square kilometers. In terms of its area, it ranks fifth among African countries: after Sudan, Congo (Zaïre), Algeria, and Libya. Angola is fourteen times larger than Portugal, and larger than France, former West Germany, Great Britain, and Italy combined. Its borders on land measure 4,837 kilometers, and its coastline stretches for 1,850 kilometers. The land border isn’t clearly demarcated, however, running through uninhabited bush, and one can cross it at will (even drive over it in a car).

For a state surrounded by unfriendly neighbors, this creates serious defensive problems.

Topographical features: the country is divided into three geographical zones running north to south. The Atlantic coastal region (maximum width: 200 kilometers): low lying, semi-arid, and, in the south, desert. Many acacias grow here, dry blackthorn, and baobabs. Continuing east: the highlands, the most picturesque and fertile part of the country, with an eternally springlike climate. The highest peaks: Môco, 2,620 meters, and Lubango, 2,566 meters. Both areas are relatively densely populated, possessing excellent conditions for agriculture and cattle raising. Finally, the easternmost part of the country: a plateau covered with thin, dry bush (400–1000 meters above sea level). It occupies two-thirds of Angola’s entire surface and because of the scarcity of water is only sporadically inhabited, largely by pastoral tribes.

Angola is a country of many rivers, the most important of which are the Okavango (in the southeast), 975 kilometers long, and the Cuanza (in the north), 960 kilometers long. Along the latter once ran the largest slave route in the history of the world. The slaves were marched to Luanda, which in turn was the world’s principal port of slave embarkation. The other important river: Cunene (in the south), 945 kilometers long. Constructed along it is a system of twenty-nine hydroelectric dams, which supply energy to South Africa and especially to Namibia. Namibia was a South African colony until 1990; the official motive for the intervention by South African troops in Angola was the protection of the Cunene dam system, without which the Namibian economy would collapse.

The country is divided into four climatic spheres, which vary significantly in temperature and humidity: semi-tropical, in the northeast; moderately hot in the southeast; desert in the southwest; tropical in the west.

There are two seasons in Angola: the rainy season, from November to May, with most rainfall coming between January and April; and the dry season, the so-called cacimbo, from June until October. Activity throughout the country is at its peak during the dry season, and subsides during the rainy months (especially in areas without paved roads, and where traditional agriculture is still practiced).

A significant part of Angola’s surface is covered with forests: thick, humid, tropical (mainly in the north), or sparse, low, dry bush (in the east and south). There are many wild animals: elephants, giraffes, lions, leopards, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, antelopes, hyenas, jackals, monkeys. There are also lots of kinds of birds: parrots, pelicans, marabous, vultures, hornbills, barbets, flycatchers, etc. Reptiles abound: crocodiles, pythons, rattlesnakes, spectacled snakes, mambas, anacondas, green and black cobras. And where the soil is rich and the climate warm, all manner of flowers and fruit grow.

Angola is a country of enormous natural riches, possessing all the major raw materials needed for the modern economy. A number of them had begun to be mined in the years before independence, although on a relatively small scale. In 1973, in the order of their contributions to the country’s GNP, the main export products were: oil (30 percent), coffee (21 percent), diamonds (10 percent), iron ore (6 percent). Furthermore, Angola exports cotton, sisal, corn, hides, fruit products. The last years before independence saw a rapid increase in foreign capital, especially North American, being poured into the country. Between 1969 and 1973, the value of Angola’s exports doubled, especially as a result of the extraction of oil in the province of Cabinda, known as the African Kuwait.

Angola is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. In 1970, it had 5,673,046 inhabitants, including more than half a million European settlers, mainly Portuguese. The number of European inhabitants increased rapidly after World War II, especially during the last phase of colonialism. In 1940, 44,000 Europeans lived in Angola; in 1960, there were 170,000; in the next fourteen years, that number grew by another 350,000. Some were soldiers in the Portuguese army, which in the final years of the colonial war numbered more than 70,000. A significant percentage were landless peasants and impoverished members of the lower middle class, whom the governments of Salazar and Caetano dispatched to Angola so they could improve their lot in the colony, trying thereby to defuse social tensions in the metropolis. A portion of these people continued to live in poverty, however; in Luanda one could see white children begging in the streets, a sight unimaginable in other African states.

More than 95 percent of Angola’s European inhabitants left in 1975, going to Portugal and other countries, especially Brazil. Some of them are now returning.

Angola’s African population is overwhelmingly Bantu and is divided into more than one hundred tribes, of which the main ones are Ovimbundu, Kimbundu, Bakongo, Lunda, and Nganguela. These five tribes constitute about 80 percent of Angola’s population. The remaining tribes are small, some of them numbering barely several thousand people, others ten thousand or so. More than half of Angola’s inhabitants are followers of various African religions, 35 percent are Catholics, and 13 percent are Protestants. Intertribal conflicts and wars make up a large chapter in this country’s history. They played a significant role in the Angolan war of 1975–76.

There are many reasons for Angola’s low population. For three centuries, a substantial number of inhabitants were enslaved and exported to the other hemisphere. In Angola itself, various forms of slavery survived as late as 1962, in the guise of a system of forced labor. Another cause of the country’s depopulation was the emigration of large numbers of its African inhabitants — around 700,000— mainly to Congo (Zaïre), Namibia, and the Republic of South Africa. Universal malnutrition and the lack of even the most rudimentary health care also contributed to the country’s low demographics.

Angola’s African population was profoundly neglected and abused for centuries. The colonial powers maintained it at the lowest possible nutritional and cultural level. The Angolans constitute one of the poorest societies in Africa. More than 90 percent are illiterate. Only 10 percent of blacks live in cities. Angola is a land of indigent and hungry peasants. A significant portion of these people continue to live in a subsistence economy, an economy of so-called selfsufficiency — or rather, of near-destitution.

Angola’s population is unevenly dispersed. More than half its inhabitants live in an area that constitutes barely nine percent of the country’s territory. Ninety-one percent live on lands that occupy less than half (47 percent) of its terrain.

The main cities, according to the 1970 census, are: Luanda (“the oldest European city in Africa south of the Sahara”— John Gunther), approximately half a million inhabitants; Huambo (62,000); Lobito (60,000); Benguela (41,000); Lubango (32,000); Malanje (32,000); Cabinda (22,000).

It is worth pointing out, since it is not widely known, that Angola is a multiracial society, including many white people, as well as many mulattos of all shades. There are several white ministers in Angola’s government, one frequently encounters white soldiers in the army, and whites constitute a sizeable portion of the inhabitants of cities and villages.

In 1482, the Portuguese captain Diogo Cão arrived at the mouth of the Congo River. At the time, the great African kingdom of Congo flourished here, with its capital at Mbanza known in Portuguese times as São Salvador and today called M’banza Congo. In 1975, São Salvador was a small, provincial town, the capital of the Angolan province of Zaïre, from which hails Holden Roberto and nearly the entire leadership of the FNLA. The year in which Diogo Cão reached the kingdom of Congo can be said to be the start of Portuguese expansion in this part of Africa, although the de facto conquest of Angolan territories began ninety years later, when Paulo Dias de Novais established a settlement named Luanda in 1573 and set off with a group of soldiers down the Cuanza River.

Ten years after Diogo Cão set foot upon the Congo-Angolan land, Christopher Columbus reached the shores of the American continent. The two events are closely related. European emigrants in America begin to establish plantations of sugar cane and cotton: demand develops for a large and cheap labor force, because the cultivation of sugar especially requires a huge number of hands. The slave trade starts. The history of sugar and the history of slavery are part of the same chapter in the history of the world. Africa becomes the principal supplier of slaves — and especially Angola. According to historians, 3–4 million slaves were shipped out from the territories that lie within the borders of present-day Angola. This number might not appear so shocking today, but one must consider it in the light of contemporary population figures. In the days when Portugal was a world power and had large possessions on several continents, it boasted barely one million inhabitants. For nearly four hundred years, slavery is the cornerstone of Angolan history. As late as the first half of the nineteenth century, the export of slaves constitutes more than 90 percent of the overall value of Angola’s exports. A significant portion of the population of today’s Brazil, Dominican Republic, and Cuba are the descendants of Angolan slaves. It is also no coincidence that despite fundamental political differences, the first state to recognize the People’s Republic of Angola was Brazil, and that Cuba gave the greatest assistance to the Angolan liberation forces.

To understand our world, we must use a revolving globe and look at the earth from various vantage points. If we do so, we will see that the Atlantic is but a bridge linking the colorful, tropical Afro — Latin American world, whose strong ethnic and cultural bonds have been preserved to this day. For a Cuban who arrives in Angola, neither the climate, nor the landscape, nor the food are strange. For a Brazilian, even the language is the same.

The export of slaves was the main reason for the Portuguese presence in Angola. To round up as many of them as possible, the Portuguese conducted ceaseless wars here. “The Portuguese contact with Angola,” write the historians Douglas L. Wheeler and René Pelissier in their book Angola, “began with war and, as some believe, will end with war.

The Portuguese politics of penetrating Angola began with a military expedition which was to be the start of a series of wars lasting for centuries. The state of war did not abate by the end of the seventeenth century; to the contrary: war was the rule rather than the exception during the entire period between 1579 and 1921. Unpublished documents in Portuguese archives prove that in the course of 350 years there were barely five during which the Portuguese did not conduct war in one place or another in Angola.”

This rapacious theft of human beings brought Angola to such ruin that at the beginning of the twentieth century England and Germany actually conducted secret negotiations to take the colony from Portugal and divide it between themselves. In any case, the Germans occupied southern Angola until 1915, and the Afrikaners (the so-called Boers) occupied the southern province of Huíla (with its capital of Lubango) until 1928.

For several centuries Portugal directed its best elements to Brazil, its worst to Angola. Angola was a penal colony, the place of deportation for all manner of criminals and outcasts, for all those on society’s fringe. In old Lisbon, Angola was referred to as the país dos degredados , the country of the deported, the expelled, the finished. The low quality of Angola’s colonists helped Angola become one of the most backward of African countries.

The struggle for the liberation of Angola begins on a significant scale only in the middle of the twentieth century. Here are a few of the more important dates:

1948

The creation of the cultural movement “Vamos descobrir Angola” (Let us discover Angola). It is the brainchild of a group of young Angolan intellectuals. They publish two issues of the literary periodical Mensagem (“The Message”), subsequently closed down by the police. Its editor, and the leader of the movement, was the eminent Angolan poet Viriato da Cruz. His closest associates were two other poets, Agostinho Neto and Mario de Andrade. The rise of the Angolan liberation movement is attributable to these three poets.

1953

The creation of Angola’s first liberation organization, PLUA (Partido da Luta dos Africanos de Angola, “Party of the Struggle of the Africans of Angola”). Like all other subsequent organizations in Angola, PLUA comes into being and operates in conditions of conspiracy.

1954

The creation, in Kinshasa, of the organization UPNA (União das Populações do Norte de Angola, “Union of the Peoples of Northern Angola”). It is the tribal organization of the Bakongo, the germ of the later FNLA.

DECEMBER 10, 1956

From the union of PLUA with other, small liberation groups, the MPLA (Movimento Popular para a Libertação de Angola, “Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola”) arises in Luanda. At its head stands the thirty-four-year-old doctor and poet Agostinho Neto.

1958

UPNA changes its name to UPA (União das Populações de Angola, “Union of the Peoples of Angola”).

During this period, as a result of the stormy events in neighboring Congo (Zaïre), many Angolan tribal parties and organizations, mostly small ones, come into being. Until 1967, 58 such parties and 26 organizations appeared on the political stage and then disappeared. The fragmentation of Angola’s political life was greater than Congo’s.

FEBRUARY 4, 1961

The armed attack of MPLA fighters on the prison in Luanda (the so-called Casa de Reclusão Militar), where Angolan patriots are incarcerated. It is the commencement of the armed struggle for the liberation of Angola.

MARCH 15, 1961

In the north, the UPA gives the signal for a racist uprising of the Bakongo against all non-Bakongo. Armed bands of Bakongo murder Portuguese civilians, Angolan mulattoes, members of the Ovimbundu and Kimbundu tribes. The insurrection is suppressed by the Portuguese army and ends with a dreadful massacre of the Bakongo and the emigration of large numbers of Bakongo to Zaïre.

MARCH 23, 1962

The UPA changes its name to FNLA (Frente Nacional da Libertação de Angola, “National Front for the Liberation of Angola”). Its leader is the president of the UPA, a longtime employee of a Belgian company in Congo, Holden Roberto. Roberto was born in 1925 in Angola (in São Salvador), although he spent his whole life in Congo, where he still lives and where he possesses vast business holdings: hotels, restaurants, etc. FNLA was and remains a strictly tribal organization, the party of the Bakongo, whose ambition is the rebirth of the kingdom of the Bakongo and the incorporation into it of the rest of Angola. In 1970 the Bakongo made up eight percent of Angola’s population. Holden Roberto’s group, whose members belonged to the Protestant Church, was always bankrolled, through the Baptist Church, by the American Committee on Africa. The struggle between the FNLA and the MPLA had the additional overtones of religious conflict: the FNLA are Protestants; the MPLA counts many Catholics in its ranks.

NOVEMBER 1963

The government of Zaïre ousts from Kinshasa the headquarters of the MPLA, moved here from Luanda in 1961 after the Portuguese repressions. Conakry, Guinea, becomes the MPLA’s new seat, and then Brazzaville. Beginning in 1965, Brazzaville is home to a one-hundred-strong Cuban military unit, which acts as a security force for the then-president of the People’s Republic of Congo, Massemba-Debat. It is in Brazzaville that the MPLA establishes its first contacts with Cubans.

1964

A split in the so-called Government of the Republic of Angola in Exile (GRAE), created two years earlier by the FNLA. Among those quitting the GRAE is the minister of foreign affairs, Jonas Savimbi, who, in the periodical Remarques Africaines of November 25, 1964, publishes a letter accusing Holden Roberto of corruption and nepotism. First, Savimbi cites the names of CIA agents working within the FNLA, then lists the roster of the FNLA leadership, which is worth quoting: “Holden Roberto, president, born in São Salvador; John Edouard Pinock, born in São Salvador, Holden’s cousin; Sebastião Roberto, born in São Salvador, Holden’s brother; Joe Peterson, born in São Salvador, Holden’s brother-in-law; Narciso Nenaka, born in São Salvador, Holden’s uncle; Simão de Freitas, born in São Salvador, Holden’s nephew; Eduardo Vieira, born in São Salvador, Holden’s cousin.”

MARCH 13, 1966

UNITA comes into being (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola, “National Union for the Total Independence of Angola”). The creator and leader of this organization is Jonas Savimbi, born in 1934 in the province of Bié, the son of a railroad worker. He had studied in Europe for a time. He underwent military training in Beijing (1964–1965). UNITA was financed by Portuguese settlers, who later created the organization Frente de Resistência Angolana: FRA. The leaders of the FRA were Colonel Gilberto Santos e Castro, the subsequent commander of the mercenaries fighting alongside the FNLA, as well as the millionaire and banker Antonio Espírito Santo. They wanted to wrest Angola from Portugal and create a state of white settlers (as Ian Smith had done in Rhodesia). UNITA, like the FNLA, is a tribal organization. Its members are recruited from the people of the Ovimbundu tribe. Savimbi, who for years quarreled with Holden Roberto, later created with him a common front against the MPLA. I remember the poster on which Savimbi and Roberto are embracing each other. The words: “Two leaders — one sun of freedom!”

1968

The MPLA moves its headquarters from Brazzaville to the forests of eastern Angola. The armed conflict intensifies.

APRIL 25, 1974

Revolution in Portugal.

JANUARY 15, 1975

The signing of an accord in Alvor, Portugal, between the MPLA, FNLA, UNITA, and the Portuguese government, creating a provisional coalition government in Angola and granting it independence on November 11, 1975.

JANUARY 30, 1975

The provisional government goes into effect in Luanda. Five months later, the FNLA and UNITA resign from it.

MARCH 1975

Bloody riots in Luanda. The civilian population of the capital, declaring itself for the MPLA, is attacked by the troops of the FNLA.

APRIL 17, 1975

A split in the MPLA. The chief of staff of the MPLA army, Daniel Chipenda, goes over to the FNLA. One of the founders of the organization, Mario de Andrade, also leaves the directorate of the MPLA.

JULY 1975

The MPLA liberates Luanda from the divisions of the FNLA. The majority of Angola’s territory comes under the control of the MPLA.

AUGUST 27, 1975

The troops of the Republic of South Africa first enter Angolan territory in the Cunene region. In a skirmish with them the commander of the southern front of the MPLA, Comandante Kalulu, is killed.

OCTOBER 19, 1975

The first Cuban army unit arrives in Luanda.

NOVEMBER 11, 1975

The creation of the People’s Republic of Angola. In accordance with the MPLA program, the new republic is to be a people’s democracy, in which the principal natural resources, as well as the principal elements of the economy, will be the property of the state. All citizens have a right to employment and education. Angola will conduct a politics of positive neutrality. Agostinho Neto becomes the republic’s first president.

NOVEMBER 1975

The start of the counteroffensive by the army of the MPLA, supported by units of the Cuban army. During December and January the armies of the FNLA and UNITA are destroyed.

JULY 3, 1976

The destruction of a detachment of mercenaries commanded by the so-called Colonel Callan.

MARCH 27, 1976

The last South African army units withdraw from Angolan territory. They return along the same road that I once drove with Diogenes, and later with Farrusco, eaten by a fear I will never forget. Where is Farrusco now? Alive, probably. People in Lubango hid him during the invasion, he lay there for a long time, his wounds finally healed. He was a tough man. I don’t know what happened to Diogenes. I would like to think that he’s alive, too. Antonio was killed. Carlos was killed. It is calm on all fronts.

Those British mercenaries who escaped from the northern front are already in London, telling what they did in Angola. “Some people,” one of them says in a BBC report, “think that war is a nice, light flesh wound in the leg. They’re wrong. War is a head smashed to pulp, legs blown off, guys crawling in a circle with their guts spilling out, a guy soaked in napalm but still alive. It hardens you. For instance, you find a wounded Cuban and turn him over on his back, he makes some sort of movement. You think he’s going for a gun so you shoot him dead. But maybe he only wanted to pull out a photograph of his wife and say ‘Help me.’ And you shot him. You just didn’t want to take the risk. If a person fires into a moving wall of people he doesn’t look at their faces, doesn’t look at the people. He simply shoots at the silhouettes and doesn’t connect them with any human beings. When you come up directly on somebody and fight hand to hand, then you see plainly that it’s a person just like you, but then your life is usually at stake. You have to kill him before he kills you. I killed my first man when I was seventeen, seventeen and a half, maybe eighteen, in Aden. Later, I had nightmares — battle shock — and I woke up screaming, but now, now I can’t even remember what that guy looked like.”

Pieter Botha, the defense minister of the Republic of South Africa, passes his army in review as it returns from war across the border bridge over the Cunene River. Although the soldiers cross the bridge in silence, there is a lot of shouting and screaming in the vicinity, since at the same time the FNLA and UNITA units that until that moment had accompanied the white South African soldiers are throwing themselves into the river en masse and splashing across toward Namibia. Many drown in crossing. But the war has ended, the democracy of the front has ended; and the law of segregation applies again: Passage across the bridge is for whites only.

The years 1976–2000: the war continues. It is one of the longest-lasting armed conflicts in the contemporary world. Has anything changed? Unfortunately, not much. Yes, the Cubans have departed. As have the South Africans. But the Angolans are still there — it is their country: a country divided, torn apart, ruined by civil war, whose central government has been consumed for three decades by the rebellion of Jonas Savimbi.

The government has plentiful deposits of oil. Savimbi: great diamond mines. Each side reaps substantial revenues from these riches, which allow them to wage war into infinity. Maybe a million have already died in the fighting, but there are several million still alive; the list of victims will continue to grow.

I return in my thoughts to those I had met then. What has become of them? If Diogenes is no longer alive, it may well be that his sons are fighting. And strong, stocky, courageous Farrusco? Even if he did survive, he would be too old now to be in the trenches. But I remember him saying that a son had just been born to him. So if I were to meet a young officer on the Angolan front these days, ask him his name, and hear that it’s Farrusco, I would answer: Years ago, I rode in a jeep with someone who had the same last name. Yes, the young officer would concur, that was my father.

And tall, silent Comandante Ndozi? Ndozi is no longer alive. He was blown up by a mine. Monti was also blown up by a mine. Powerful, cheerful Batalha as well. In these wars, enemies see each other face-to-face less and less frequently. They perish as they walk, while everything around them is empty and quiet. Death comes at them covertly, lying in wait under some sand, beneath a stone, under a clump of blackthorn. The earth was once the source of life, a granary, something desirable. Now, in these parts, man regards the earth suspiciously, distrustfully, with fear and loathing.

What happened to Oscar? Perhaps he survived, and has retired. I would so much like him to have a good and peaceful old age. And Gilberto? I don’t know, I cannot say. Felix? I also don’t know. People disappear without a trace, so completely and irretrievably, first from the world, and then from our memory.

And Dona Cartagina? I am almost afraid to think about it. What if she is no more? But this seems impossible. Without Dona Cartagina, I cannot imagine either Luanda, or Angola, or this whole war. That is why I am convinced that should you be in Luanda, sooner or later you will meet a gray-haired old woman walking in the morning toward the Hotel. Tivoli She will be hurrying, because, just like every other day, a lot of cleaning awaits her. If you stop her and inquire, “Excuse me, are you Dona Cartagina?” the woman will stop for a moment, look at you with surprise, and then politely answer, “Yes, it is I.”

And she will continue briskly on her way.