Pensativities: Selected Essays

Flying Places

The plane seems to hesitate, surrendering to the landscape down below that lazily reveals itself to us as we gaze at it from our position as temporary birds. It is not flying over places that marks our memory. It is the extent to which those places will continue flying within us.

Here’s Luanda, the Angolan next to me murmurs. He speaks with the excitement of someone making a first discovery. For me, it’s not the first time. But it is the first time I have sat on a flight next to an Angolan who has just visited Maputo and has admitted that the capital of Mozambique left him at a loss for words.

My friend and travelling companion confessed that while he found it difficult to accept, Mozambican cities were inspiring. Now, as we fly over his hometown, he finds reasons to avoid comparisons. They aren’t fabricated reasons: the war, the refugees, the galloping urban expansion that swallows the city and steals its civic symmetry. All this has turned Luanda into an unmanageable space which, now that peace has returned, has to face the challenge of overcoming its predicament. In the end, Luanda’s problems aren’t so distinct from those of Maputo. The difference merely lies in the degree of intensity with which, and the lapse of time since, each country put its respective war behind it.

The city’s streets confirm that impression of chaos common to large African cities. The hectic traffic, the thousands of youths who have transformed their bodies into showcases for goods, the intense colours, the mutilated figures who preserve the scars of a time of suffering: these are the brush strokes of an initial portrait. Gradually, however, the city breaks free of this first impression, and we see how old Luanda, what remains of one of the oldest African cities, hasn’t yet been swallowed up.

This is a marked difference with Mozambique: our cities that face the Indian Ocean are much more recent. We’re not just talking about civic construction. We are talking about internal architecture, an architecture of the soul that, in Angola, forged a Creole elite. A small part of the city was the possession of this Angolan elite even before Independence occurred. This social phenomenon occurred later and more prosaically in Mozambique. I have visited Luanda on a number of occasions over the last thirty years. What I have seen, and still see, is a city that awakens and moves in an unconstrained way. The weight of its long history and its more recent wounds haven’t dampened the energy of Luanda’s inhabitants and their capacity for resistance.

My last visit left me very surprised, and in a positive way: the problems, some of which were structural, were still there, but dynamic changes were making themselves visibly felt.

“Things are happening here,” an Angolan writer told me.

It’s true that the modernization occurring here is sometimes carried out to the detriment of that which should be sacrosanct: the cultural and historical heritage, the deepest roots of the place. Whoever has travelled the world knows that this isn’t a local phenomenon. It’s a kind of absurd price, a deal that has to be negotiated in the face of the greed of those who think of quick profits at all costs.

Late in the afternoon, I stroll alone along the corniche and contemplate the jumble of houses looking out over the bay. It’s impossible not to be left with this image in one’s memory. And at night, they take me through the turmoil of the “Ilha,” the Island of Luanda. I was already familiar with the vitality of its nightlife, and the parties that only finish the next morning. A playful way of overcoming all constraints. We walk in a limbo of effervescence, and feel this area justifies the creativity that forged semba, kizomba, kuduru, the way these rhythms proved able to travel and mingle in other distant lands. The same thing happened with local expressions such as bué, cota, and estamos juntos. All made in Angola.

But there’s something of Maputo in all this nocturnal merrymaking, and I love the similarity that occasionally shows its distinctive quality. My travel companion — who is having dinner with me — contemplates the lights on the other side of the bay, and sighs before saying:

“It reminds you of your hometown, doesn’t it?”

I nod in agreement, knowing only too well that the question has another meaning. And I smile not so much at my interlocutor, but because I seem to see the lights of Maputo mirrored in the bay of Luanda. After all, my friend and I know that places cannot be compared. Like people, each one of them occurs at one single moment in time, in one single, unrepeatable life.

Article published in İndico, July 2008.