The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari

11. The Frontier of Bad Karma

ITRAVELED up THE ROAD, the road grew more tortured, and even before I got to Ondangwa, forty miles south of the Angola frontier, I knew I was in a different country, but a nameless one, an ill-defined borderland, a zone of decrepitude and hunger.

Having crossed the Vet Fence again, I was over the Red Line, in the land of skinny cows and poor housing and trash heaps and shredded plastic bags blown against wire fences and fluttering from thornbushes. It was also a land of drunken men, idle boys, and overworked women. Nearly everyone on the other side of the Vet Fence was hard-up, and the best houses were square, miserable, flat-topped huts made of cinderblocks. Most of the blocks were fabricated by recently arrived Chinese immigrants for whom this was a profitable business of simple routines, and they worked in open-sided sheds just off the road using crude mixing machinery and rubber molds. The Chinese employed Namibians, who were coated with cement dust, making them look like an alien race, like exploited, gray-skinned Martians. That was appropriate, because this area seemed like another nation altogether, and at times another planet, the dark star of my anxious dreams.

Though I had heard about them endlessly, I had seen just a few Chinese settlers in Namibia. But here in the north they were numerous (and anonymous), their shops and enterprises shoved up against the border of Angola, the source of much of their business — and they were evasive, usually ducking out of sight when I attempted to ask any questions. Their presence here made me wonder about China’s prosperity, because most of the Chinese I was to meet were escapees from the Chinese miracle who in Africa believed themselves to be in a promised land of no regulation, under-the-counter cash transactions, and improvisation. Here, where no one breathed down their necks, they found cheap labor and easy pickings. This free, happy, capitalistic situation is a blessed rarity the Chinese traditionally refer to by intoning a ritual formula (as many must have done in Africa): “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away.”

I was soon in a world of roadblocks and mobs, of terrible roads or no roads at all, a world of lies and scamming and crooked policemen. It was also a world of abuse, a world of “Meester, why are you here?” Which was a good question — why was I here? Over the following legs of my trip I attempted to answer the question. At first glance, it seemed sheer perversity for me to be here, and foolishness to go farther north.

No tourists ventured into this border area — why would they? The hotels were terrible, the food was filthy, the people were suspicious and occasionally hostile. The roadside was littered with broken glass and crushed soda cans. A foul smell hung over it all — the stink of the latrines of poverty, smoking garbage heaps, diesel fumes, and, at roadside stands, yellow dough balls frying in hot fat. The weather was exhausting — very hot, no shade, no rain.

Still in Namibia, in the ramshackle town of Ondangwa, I looked for travelers but saw none from Angola nor any heading there, except for the desperate people whose extended family or tribe had been bisected by the border, for this was Ovamboland and Ovambo lived on both sides. It was a world of abruptness and rudeness. I was startled when an official would scream “You!” at me and raise a fist, as though on the verge of hitting me in the face.

Until a month after I left, when I learned — too late — that I had been defrauded as a result of identity theft, Namibia had struck me as fairly orderly and reasonably polite. But the farther I traveled on this north-trending road, order and politeness deteriorated, and I began to wonder what I might find at the border and across it. It seemed a hot African world of bad karma, near anarchy, and opportunism. I saw poverty and desperation everywhere, a scavenging culture, and ultimately it made me question the whole purpose of my sentimental journey.

All serious travelers arrive at this doubting, why-bother juncture, stalling on the road, sometime or other. The next question concerned whether there was any point in going on. I had never felt more like an old man, a highly visible alien in a place where no one looked remotely like me, a sitting duck. Perhaps this would provide a good lesson in understanding the vulnerability of a minority, but was it worth the trouble?

In the small hotel, having seen how the little town looked in its dirt and disrepair, I became curious to know how bad things might be farther on, perhaps at the border town of Oshikango and beyond. So far, I could not imagine anything more disorderly or unpromising than the town of Ondangwa.

I write “small hotel” and “little town” and “dirt and disrepair” and it’s possible to read into those words a certain seedy charm, as if I am describing a tropical locale in a novel of intrigue — the dark saloon, the warren of back streets, the overhanging foliage, the colorful inhabitants of Ovamboland.

It was not like that at all. The sultry backwater of fiction is never a total slum; it always has a cozy refuge — a hotel with a veranda, a riverboat tied up at a jetty, a quaint old house, a compliant woman or wisecracking local. And here in the comfortable shadows, the hero sips a drink, and eyes the woman, and contemplates the derelict town. This fantasy is complete because as a romance (and much of Graham Greene’s fiction, for example, is misleadingly romantic in this flawed way) it includes a safe place to hide and maybe someone to fall in love with, or depend on. The stink of the place, the hopelessness, the vile indifference, do not rise from the page.

There was no refuge here, no vantage point. Ondangwa was a blight of shacks, old cars, and empty shops, of skinny dogs chewing at heaps of trash, of crowds of people, some staring, some casually quarreling. The people had the air of temporariness you see in the desperate poor; they did not appear to belong here, but rather that they were just passing through. Ondangwa was not in any visible sense a community, and its randomness and disorder and bad smell seemed threatening. There was no place to hide, nothing for me to grasp at, and this made me feel somewhat insecure. In fiction, only Paul Bowles writes of such places, and convincingly, because they are truly ugly and uninhabitable, except by his mournful, self-destructive characters who are usually at the end of their tether, and they nearly always die in the awful place.

Ondangwa was built on sand and scrub. There were no trees; it was a town without shade; its people dressed in castoff clothes; nothing worked. The very sunshine made it seem much worse, more bleak and hopeless in its hideous glare, naked to the sky. It was not a destination; it was a place to expire in, or leave quickly. And it was on the way to nowhere.

Ondangwa was near enough to the border for the chaos of Angola to have seeped through and added to its derangement. After his howl of “It’s a nightmare!” Moses had dropped me on the town’s main road near the only hotel, and raising his large admonitory hand like a cautioning uncle, he gave me repeated warnings: Don’t trust anyone. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t answer questions from any of the boys or men you see. Keep your hand on your money or your pocket will be picked. Hold on to your bag or it will be stolen. Be careful.

And then he spoke that ominous and fear-inspiring pronouncement that penetrates to the vitals: “There are bad people here.”

Moses, a trusted friend of Oliver’s, was a shrewd, helpful man; he regarded me as a naïve stranger and a potential victim. He took me for a credulous traveler, and possibly a fool. In these assessments he was perhaps not far wrong. But then he lived in the region and was constantly in the company of aliens and refugees, the usual transients found in border areas. He had been born in, and lived just to the west of, the town of Oshakati.

All national boundaries attract temporary people, as well as rejects and immigrants and fixers. At this, the limit of the country, far from the capital, normal rules did not apply. People did whatever they could get away with. The very presence of a border fence meant that no one really belonged there. Such a fringe area lacked any identity except its own fraying face, and attracted mostly fugitives and hustlers. I was one of the desperadoes, a fugitive. I had no business there. I was just passing through and hoping for the best.

Before he drove away Moses said, “Keep your head down. Don’t make eye contact with these people.”

This advice was strangely prescient. Eye contact produces aggression. Animal behaviorists agree: Stare at a chimp and he is likely to attack you. Locking eyes with a dog can create hostility. Prolonged eye contact “taps into pack-animal fears.” Malevolence is manifested in the gaze. Not just a dirty look but merely meeting a stranger’s eyes may be taken as confrontational. “Stink eye,” as they say in Hawaii; malocchio in Italy. Looking down or averting your eyes signifies submission. You escape from an animal in the wilderness by avoiding eye contact, because a stare is perceived as a challenge, if not an outright threat.

In fact, I felt I was turning into an animal, or perhaps using my animal instincts more than ever. This seemed to shut off a part of my brain, the spongy, gelatinous, reflective part I used for the sake of serenity.

When I checked into the hotel, the back-and-forth with my credit card was clumsier than usual: “The machine’s not working” and “I’ll be right back with it.” In retrospect, it was highly probable that my identity was stolen that day, my last in Namibia, at the Protea Hotel, also known as the Hotel Pandu Ondangwa, a hot cheerless building surrounded by gravel and withered plants, and staffed by a single sly ingratiating man with a toothy smile.

While the day was still light I followed my long shadow to the main road, which was also the main road to Angola. I was stalked by ragged men.

“Mynheer, mynheer …”

Rural Namibians tended to revert to Afrikaans in the presence of whites.

“I need a ride to the border tomorrow.”

Several said, “I can take you, mynheer.”

I looked at their cars and, finding one that was in reasonably good shape, began haggling over the cost for the sixty-mile ride.

“Petrol, mynheer — so expensive!” This was Joshua, who was fairly presentable and said he could take me to the border. He looked to be in his mid- to late twenties, and there was something reassuring in his manner.

He wasn’t exaggerating about the expense — the cost of fuel all over Africa was exorbitant. In Ondangwa that day it was almost $5 a gallon, or about twice what it cost in the United States. I asked him to meet me at seven so we could be at the border at eight, when it opened. Then I took him aside and talked with him about his family — his three children, his home village, his ambitions — and I told him about my wife and children. I wanted us to be human to each other. We shook hands on it, and I repeated the details about the drive, the time, the cost.

Joshua did not appear the following morning. I had risen early and checked out of the hotel. I had my small bag and my briefcase and stood waiting by the entrance for almost an hour.

Then a stranger appeared. “I am Stephen. Joshua is my cousin. His car won’t start.”

“How will I get to the border?”

“I will take you, mynheer.”

This had all the earmarks of a setup. I had no idea who this young man was. He was more ragged than Joshua. His car was such a jalopy, one door had to be held closed with a bent wire coat hanger. The seats were torn, their stuffing exposed. Stephen seemed uneasy, not to say nervous. He did not live in this area but some distance away, at Ogongo, in western Ovamboland. Still — what choice did I have? — I got in and threw my bag into the back seat.

By degrees, it became apparent that Stephen was a good soul — gentle, honest, a proud father, and ambitious to further his education. Like many other young men and women I met in Namibia, he badly wanted to leave the country and find work in the United States. What would he do? I asked. “Anything,” he said. I believed him, and I could imagine his coworkers praising him in an American city where Stephen might be a taxi driver or a furniture mover or a functionary in a speedy-oil-change business. “The guy’s a ball of fire!” And they would not be able to imagine where Stephen had come from — the poverty and disorder of Ondangwa — and how grateful someone like Stephen would be to have work and a life in that American city.

I was reminded that along borders, populated by transients and opportunists and predators, there were also — and perhaps for the same reason — protectors, shielding the innocent from harm. He was one of those angels. I had encountered many in my life, and I was to meet more of them on this trip.

Like Moses, Stephen was full of warnings, but he assured me that if I followed his advice I would get over the border without a problem.

“What’s it like on the other side?”

He shook his head and smiled. No idea. He had never been there.

“Chinese business,” he said as we passed warehouses and small factories.

Off to the left, a two-story yellow-painted building with a crimson sign: DRAGON CITY HOTEL AND RESTAURANT. I said, “I think that’s a Chinese business. But who goes there?”

“Maybe people from Angola,” Stephen said. Then, as we passed more businesses, he enumerated: “Indian man — plastics. Palestinian man — tin sheets for house roofs. Chinese man — textiles — he makes them there. Car and lorry business — South African man. German over there.”

All of it because of the proximity to Angola, most of the goods sold to people who traveled across the border. I asked Stephen if this assumption was correct.

“They have nothing in Angola,” he said. He thought again. “But they have money.”

The shop fronts and businesses became denser, closer together, as we approached the border town of Oshikango, but of course, being a frontier, it was only half a town, walled off from its other side by a high chainlink fence running at a right angle across the main street. Parked on that street, waiting to go through Namibian customs, was a long line of trucks, several cars, even some loaded pushcarts and wheelbarrows. They looked as though they had been sitting there for a year, and the scene was of great, almost riotous disorder.

People milled around the stalled vehicles, shouting, selling food out of baskets — small bread rolls, fried cakes, cold drinks, wilted vegetables, and trays of chewing gum and candy. Beyond the crush of these vendors I could see another large crowd pressing toward an open shed with a high roof. Some of those people, mostly teenage boys, the Artful Dodgers that haunt frontiers, hurried toward us. In such circumstances, you sense being singled out and stalked like a lamed prey animal.

“Be careful,” Stephen said. “There are thieves here — and on the other side, many thieves. Don’t get out of the car until I give you a signal. I will find someone to help you.”

He slipped out of the car and was accosted by a group of boys. He made a circuit of the blocked-off street, returned to the car, and opened the door.

“Lock the door. Don’t talk to these boys. Don’t look at them.”

Then he was gone, hurrying through the mass of people pushing into the shed. Outside the car (my door fastened by the coat hanger), the boys were pressed against the windows, some calling out, others pleading, “Mynheer! Mynheer!”

Stephen returned with a girl of about nineteen or twenty, hardly more than five feet tall. She had a serious face set in a scowl, her jaw thrust out, and wore a blue blouse and a pink skirt, and on her head a floppy-brimmed knitted hat of white wool, like a picturesque peasant in a folktale or nursery rhyme.

“This is Vickie,” Stephen said. “She will help you.”

Seeing her, hearing this, the crowd of boys began to laugh, provoking Vickie to say something sharp to them, which shut them up.

“How much do I owe you?”

“Don’t show any money,” Stephen said. He palmed the payment — in gratitude for shepherding me, I had given him twice what he asked. He handed Vickie my canvas duffel.

She hoisted my bag onto her head and hung on to it with both hands. I clung to my briefcase. As we walked down the hot street and fought through the crowd to the customs shed, the boys snatched at my shirtsleeves. “Mynheer!”

Apart from the pestering boys — and more joined them as we went along — the formalities on the Namibian side were straightforward: presentation of signed forms and passport and the usual bag search, with the singular diversion of a Namibian customs inspector lifting my copy of Benito Cereno, squinting at it, then paging through it, his dancing eyes indicating that his head was a hive of subtlety, as if he were looking for an offensive passage.

“You can go.” He directed me to the back of the shed, where a narrow walkway with high sides led into a maze.

The same boys followed, about ten of them. I knew their faces by now: the one in the soccer jersey, the one with the woolly Rasta hat, the one with the Emporio Armani T-shirt, the one with the wicked face and broken teeth, the one who kept bumping up against me — his plastic sandals were cracked and his feet were bumped and bruised; several boys had their hats turned backward in the gang-banger style. Customs and immigration did not apply to them, apparently; they pushed and jostled along the narrow passageway, which, I saw afterward, represented no man’s land.

At the end of the passageway, Angola was another shed, with a wooden window flap propped open, more people in line, all of it enclosed by chainlink fences and razor wire.

Vickie, surrounded by the mocking boys, pointed to the window and indicated that I should hand in my passport. As I did so, I heard a howl.

“You!” It was a man inside the shed, in a blue uniform. “Get away!”

He meant that I should get in line, which I was happy to do, though I was startled by his snarling tone. I was to hear this same intentionally intimidating voice for the next few weeks, always by policemen or soldiers or petty officials. The Angolan voice of authority is severe, often bitter, usually reproachful, sometimes cruel. When I commented on it or complained, people said, “They’ve had almost thirty years of war.” The war has been over for more than a decade, I would say. “But they were fighting South African soldiers” was the rejoinder. Actually, the South African soldiers had collaborated with one large Angolan faction. It was my belief that the hostility in all this bluster and obstruction usually meant that a bribe was being suggested.

The nastiness was always from an official, seldom from an Angolan civilian, yet the civilians had suffered too. I could not remember having been spoken to with such deliberate rudeness — not in Africa, not anywhere. But of course I was not in an international airport. I was a mere pedestrian in old clothes who had walked across the border from Namibia with old women carrying sacks of vegetables and baskets of chickens, old men shuffling behind them, and loud boys yelling to each other. Also, on that morning I was the only visible alien seeking to enter.

When my turn at the window came, the Angolan immigration official with the mean face and the abusive voice snatched at my passport and found my visa. But instead of stamping it, he put it aside.

“Where is your letter of invitation?”

No foreigner can enter Angola without a formal (and notarized) letter of invitation. I urge anyone in the United States who believes that we treat visitors bureaucratically and with suspicion to consider the obstacle course that Angola (and many other countries) presents to its foreign visitors: a seven-page application, a prepaid hotel reservation, a prepaid round-trip airline ticket, a set of character references, and an invitation letter from a resident of Angola stating exactly what the visitor will be doing in the country. Then you pay $200 for the visa. And you wait for several months. And you might be turned down, as I was, twice, before getting this visa.

“Why bother?” people asked me. But a country that is so hard to enter makes me curious to discover what is on the other side of the fence.

It so happened that I had the letter of invitation in my briefcase, which (in Portuguese) specified that I was in Angola to visit schools and colleges and give some lectures. I was a writer, it explained. All this tedious detail had the singular merit of being true.

I handed over the letter. The fierce-faced man in the shed did not read it. He placed it on his table with my passport.

I waited, breathing hard in the heat. I spoke to Vickie. The loitering boys laughed. After about twenty minutes, I went back to the shed and raised my hand to indicate, Here I am, sir. And seeing me, the immigration official, looking offended, swung himself through the door and screamed at me and flicked his hand: “Você deve esperar! You wait! You wait over there!”

This display of needless abuse had its effect on the little mob. Seeing how the man had treated me, the loitering boys in their backward caps and rapper T-shirts, emboldened by the tone, began to crowd me, their clothes stinking, muttering to me in Portuguese and Afrikaans, and to one another in their own language.

Twice more the official screamed, “You wait!” And when, about an hour later, he handed me my passport, keeping my letter, deaf to my request for a copy, I realized that I’d had a valuable lesson in border crossing, in Angolan officialdom, in the ways of traveling today.

The official had scowled at me and said, “Você é professor?”

“Yes,” I had said. “Sou professor.”

And he had waved me on. It was a very hot day and the delay was inconvenient, but I could not take it personally. I was an older man of an alien race entering the country by the back door, treated with the casual abuse reserved for the contemptible souls who walked across the remote border. To anyone who breezed through the international airport on the red carpet and praised the country’s manners and modernity, I could say: You do not have the slightest idea.

To someone like myself, intending to write a book, this whole morning of serial futility, spent going from Namibia to Angola — perhaps fifty yards of travel — could not have been a richer or more enlightening experience.

Next I walked into even greater chaos, the Angolan border town of Santa Clara, Vickie quick-stepping behind me with my bag, the boys on either side of us, all of them moving fast, because I was trotting, hoping to discourage them.

“Bus,” I said. The boys tugged at me. They knew where I could find a bus. Vickie led the way. We found two buses, but neither were leaving for Lubango, my intended destination, until nightfall. And the buses themselves were in such disrepair I doubted they would leave at all.

Vickie, meanwhile, stood by me. She communicated with me in gestures, and she waved the boys away. She was young, but strong-willed and helpful, and whatever curses or warnings she was muttering to the boys kept them at arm’s length.

All I could see of Santa Clara was a potholed main street lined by low shops selling motor oil and Chinese plastic goods — buckets and patio chairs. Here and there stood wooden sheds plastered with signs advertising lottery tickets. The heavily laden women from the Namibian side were mostly traders, and they set out their vegetables by the road or hawked them out of baskets. The town, in its chaos, made Oshikango, just across the border — I could see it through the high border fence — seem peaceful and orderly.

A small boy carrying a bucket filled with bottles of water passed by. I bought one bottle, using Namibian dollars, and the money in my hand attracted a new crowd of jostling men and boys, the moneychangers. As I moved down the street, I found out that the town of Ondjiva was only about twenty miles away. If I got there in a bush taxi or a chicken bus, I could perhaps make a plan.

Then I saw a Land Cruiser ahead, an old one, angular, like a tin breadbox on wheels, and a man beside it. I said, “Ondjiva?”

The man was about thirty and wore a soccer jersey that was already soaked in sweat from the day’s heat. His harassed face was made more tragic by his missing front teeth, and a ballpoint pen was stuck into the fat frizz of his dense hair, like a hairpin. He indicated yes. He then enumerated the places he was headed: “Ondjiva. Xangongo. Cahama. Lubango.”

Lubango was my destination. I asked when he was leaving. “Quando vamos?” In an hour — he indicated on his watch and tapped the time. “Quanto dinheiro?”

He mentioned a number, then withdrew the pen from his hair and wrote the price in blue ink on his yellow palm, indicating thousands. This was the amount in Angolan kwanzas. I showed him my Namibian money. He wrote another number. It was a reasonable amount. I paid him. I quietly paid Vickie — and, gratefully as with Stephen, more than she had asked for — and was sorry to see her leave. She went back over the border, her floppy hat crushed and misshapen from her having carried my bag. The whole time she’d been with me, she had never smiled.

Pointing to himself, the driver said, “Camillo.”

“Paulo,” I said.

If all went well, I would arrive in Lubango that night. But few things in travel are simple, and everything in Angola, even the most straightforward transaction, was so hard as to be inconceivable. I suspected Camillo wanted more passengers. He did. Over the next three hours, in the heat of this border town, he stood by the car howling the names of towns, and one by one, boys, men, a woman with baskets, got into the back of the vehicle. Since I was the first paying passenger, I had taken the front seat, but a young woman slipped through the driver’s side. So there would be three of us in the front seat for the three-hundred-mile drive to Lubango.

The woman’s name was Paulina, and she was in her early twenties, sweet-faced but silent, wearing a tight black T-shirt and black jeans. She said she was going up the road to her village: “Minha aldeia está próximo Lubango.”

I sat, keeping my head down, killing time by making notes that began, Too tedious to recount the delays …

The seven or eight boys who had been hanging around my side of the car — pesterers, moneychangers, mere gawkers, “Senhor … meestah” — had wandered away. For me to get out of the car and traipse around would mean being followed, and what was the point? There was no shade. There was nothing to buy. Santa Clara was much worse, more miserable, than Oshikango, fifty yards away. I resigned myself to not eating that day, and I dozed.

In one of those mocking peculiarities of a world I had not gotten used to, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I was still in the telephonic orbit of Namibia. My wife on the line. She missed me. And how was I?

“Lovely day here on the Angolan border. I’m in Santa Clara.”

“What a pretty name.”

Early in the afternoon, Camillo got into the car and began fussing with his cassette tapes. He found one he wanted and slammed in into the player. Later on, when I had a glimpse of the cassette’s label, I saw that it was the Dutch DJ Afrojack, the vocal by Eva Simons, and for the next four hours it played in a loop, Camillo sometimes turning the volume up. Later, when he was drunk and red-eyed and irrational, he played it at a deafening volume and sang along with it, but in a staticky mutter, like a dog gargling at a TV set. Let’s go take a ride in your car … I want you to take over control … Plug it in and turn me on.

I came to hate this song, and like many hated songs I could not get the melody or the idiotic words out of my head. We did not leave Santa Clara at once. For reasons Camillo kept to himself, he began the trip by driving along the rutted dirt lanes just off the main road. These contained the slums and squatter camps of the town, with their three-legged dogs and women washing clothes in slop basins of gray water. Perhaps he was looking for someone else to cram into the back of the vehicle. Perhaps he was looking to buy something — he seemed to make several discreet inquiries. The lanes were so bad the old Land Cruiser swayed back and forth, and the hollow-eyed women and sullen boys watched the vehicle bumping past their shacks. Children played in the dust, and one child tried to maneuver a broken wheelbarrow that held two bruised watermelons. In the heat, the fuzzy stink of human excrement.

I knew that Angola was wealthy, but I did not know then that the country earned billions of dollars a year from its oil, diamond, and gold exports. Later, when I discovered the figures, I recalled that little tour of Santa Clara, in one of the worst slums I had ever seen in my life. I remembered the whole day as an episode of misery; not mine — I was a witness, passing through — but those by the roadside and in the villages, the mute and brutalized Angolans, ignored by the kleptomaniacs in power.

“I’m afraid of what these people will do,” an Angolan man was to tell me in Luanda when I mentioned what I’d seen in the south. “Imagine if they realized how they’d been cheated — what they would do if they decided to take their revenge on the government.”

To anyone collecting money for the poor in Angola, I would say that before you reach into your pocket, consider Angola’s revenues: have a look at the price of a barrel of oil and the fact that the country produces almost two million barrels a day; look at the diamond on your finger, and its gold setting, and reflect that these pretty things also probably originated in Angola.

My first day over the border, and I saw that a lack of money was not the problem in this country — but it seldom is in the hellholes of the world. The paradox was more likely that an excess of money was the problem — or one of them; that, and a government run by thieves.

But I was just learning, and I thought, as one does in such circumstances: Maybe things will improve farther up the road.

This main north-south road, the only one into Namibia and the only one to Angola’s capital, was badly broken. The potholes were so wide and deep and numerous that Camillo, normally a speed demon, often had to slow the car to a crawl and make detours around them, and often left the road entirely, driving along the shoulder or through a roadside village.

Up ahead, twenty miles farther on, we came to the town of Ondjiva, where we stopped inexplicably, Camillo revving the engine while someone in the back seat hopped out to run an errand for him. I got out too, to stretch my legs, because I had been confined in the car for hours in Santa Clara and it seemed safe to take a break here. Ondjiva looked new, its buildings well kept. The town had an airport. I saw a hotel sign. This place had none of the menacing ruin of Santa Clara.

I asked Paulina about the place. She said in Portuguese, slowly, for my benefit: “This town was destroyed in the war. All ruined. Bombs, Fires. Guns. Destruição. Extermínio. Now it is all new.”

Ondjiva, or N’Giva, had been known in Portuguese colonial times as Vila Pereira d’Eça, and after the ghostly and premature independence of 1974 it had been given its old Ovambo name. António Pereira d’Eça (1852–1917) had been a Portuguese colonel, and it was consistent with colonial policy, imposing a culture of famous foreign personalities, that many towns and cities in Angola were named in honor of Portuguese soldiers and statesmen. Pereira d’Eça had been sent on various military expeditions to Mozambique and Cape Verde, and after the outbreak of World War I was appointed commander of the Portuguese expeditionary forces to counter German advances from South-West Africa. But in 1915 the Germans were the least of his troubles, because the Ovambo people in the area, taking advantage of the besieged colonials, rose up under the leadership of their warrior king and went to war with Pereira d’Eça’s battalions. The Kwanyama, a subtribe of the Ovambo, were put down in a succession of massacres, and for his butchery and sustained suppression, Pereira d’Eça was rewarded and rose to the rank of general.

One consequence of this brutality was that Pereira d’Eça’s name was attached to the village, which was the site of the slaughter; another consequence was the beheading of the warrior king, Mandume Ya Ndemufayo, and his severed head was exhibited for many years in the town. It was the sort of colonial decapitation favored by Mr. Kurtz, as Marlow saw in Heart of Darkness: “a half a dozen slim posts remained in a row, roughly trimmed, and with their upper ends ornamented with round carved balls.” Not carved balls at all, of course, but the bare, sun-bleached skulls of Kurtz’s enemies, put up to discourage anyone who might be tempted to transgress. In Shakespeare’s time, the severed heads of wrongdoers were hung on London Bridge. In our own time, as revealed by evidence in the International Criminal Court trial of the warlord Charles Taylor, the bloody heads of villagers, cut off by child soldiers, were exhibited in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Mandume’s head was displayed for so many years it too was whitened to bone by the elements and stared with a lipless grin.

The town was renamed, but that was not the end of its troubles. Throughout the 1980s it was the staging post for the South African army’s parachute regiment — the Jackals, as they called themselves — in its war against Namibian guerrillas who launched their attacks from Angola. And Ondjiva saw fighting between Angolan factions and Cuban soldiers, too. It was no wonder that by the 1990s the town had been flattened and that so much of it now looked new. It was well supplied because all its building materials and vehicles, and most of its food, came from Namibia, down the road.

Just out of town, going north, the road deteriorated. For many long stretches it was impassable, and Camillo detoured through villages, allowing me a survey of traditional villages in this province of Kunene, featuring a fenced compound and courtyard known as a kuimbo. I had not seen anything like these in Namibia, but here in southern Angola not much had changed in spite of four hundred years of slavery, colonialism, military incursion, guerrilla activity, oil revenues, and the extensive charitable work by churches and NGOs. The HIV/AIDS figures were high — nearly 20 percent of the people in this province were infected. But otherwise it was the old Africa of mud huts, twig fences, bony cows, strutting roosters, and no lights — of the barefoot and the hard-up.

Off the road, weaving among the trees, we seemed to make good time. On the road, we were stopped by policemen or soldiers manning roadblocks. These were not the jolly, I-want-to-go-to-Chicago sort of sentries I’d seen in Namibia, but mean-faced, in some cases drunken, and well-armed men to whom Camillo — normally so jaunty and offensive — groveled.

“Tu-passaporte,” one of them always said to me, with a clawing of his greedy upraised fingers.

When we pulled off the road, the occupants of the car got out to relieve themselves. No one went far, not more than ten feet or so, all elbow to elbow, like a pissing contest, men with their feet apart and their pants open, women squatting with their skirts hiked up, the spattering sounds against the roadside gravel like water splashing from an old faucet and rivulets running from under them. Amid all this drizzling I saw Camillo conferring with the cops, handing over his papers, covertly passing money to one of the soldiers or policemen. Then I was given my passport back, and off we went.

This happened eight times, and Camillo, whom I had seen as an irritating person and a bad driver, shrank to a pathetic cringing size, and more toothless and poorer with each shakedown. Bribery is a way of life in Angola — the petty intimidation on the dirt road in the south being a reflection of the million-dollar bribes demanded by government ministers of the oil companies and the gold and diamond concessions. For a bribe you get nothing but a perfunctory assurance of safe passage, more like an entry fee or a toll than a payment for services. The sight of bribery on the back road of any country is a clear indication that the whole place is corrupt and the regime a thieving tyranny, as Angola has been for the thirty-five years of its independence — and likely much longer, since Portuguese colonial rule was also an extortion racket.

“Roadblock dictators,” the brave journalist Karl Maier calls these men at checkpoints in his account of Angola’s recent history of conflict, Angola: Promises and Lies (2007). “The [Angolan] checkpoint consists of two small red ‘stop’ signs facing opposite directions, two pieces of string.” And the man there “sports that arrogant half-smile that is typical of Africa’s roadblock dictators who have the power to decide whether unfortunate passers-by escape with their money, clothes and even their lives. From his swagger, he would be at home in Liberia, Nigeria, Mozambique or a dozen other countries where the line between police work and banditry is very fine indeed.”

The roadblocks and bribes were blatant crookery, but they served a useful purpose too, because I was able to get out of the car, stretch my legs, and check our progress on the map. We had not gone far — I always asked the policemen where a certain town was, and I was surprised at how slowly we were going, how far we were from Lubango. I doubted we would get there anytime soon — certainly not tonight. I want you to take over control, take over control …

All this while we were passing the residue of the war — blown-up and burned tanks, tipped-over army trucks, rusted-out jeeps. The Cubans had been here, so had the South Africans, and the Namibians with their liberation army, SWAPO, the South West Africa People’s Organization. Battles had been fought along this road and in various small towns. The South Africans had held some of the towns for long periods, and so had the Cubans — the Fidel Castro 50th Brigade. And with what result? Death on a huge scale, of course; thousands in Kunene province had died. Destruction too. And this twisted metal, the sort of expensive junk you see in the aftermath of all wars — the litter of it always seems like a deliberate memorial, left there to indicate the uselessness of the whole business. But no, it’s just a junkyard with no larger significance, and in time it will all rust to nothing. The young men in this vehicle, Gilberto and João, told me that they had no memory of the war except the loud noises of artillery in the distance.

Then, as we made another stop — “Cerveja!” Camillo shouted — I was sure we wouldn’t get to Lubango that day. At a small shop, a blockhouse faced with yellow stucco, under a spreading acacia tree, Camillo parked the car and bought a Cuca beer. I bought a soft drink, and would have bought more but there was nothing else, no other drinks, nothing to eat.

It was about five in the afternoon, the sun beginning to slant through the trees, dribbling gilded tints on the leaves and cones of light filled with gold dust. As we stood in the shade of the shop, Camillo began to curse. He walked angrily toward the Land Cruiser, and now I noticed that the Afrojack music had stopped, the idling engine had cut out, and apart from his cursing and the hum of insects we stood in unaccustomed silence.

This Land Cruiser had a diesel engine, was not easily pushable, and was perhaps impossible to restart without another battery. I saw Camillo at the wheel and the others kneeling behind and heaving. They put their shoulders against the rear of the vehicle and shoved it around the bare ground. The engine did not even flutter.

“Ajuda!” Camillo called out to me, asking for help, wanting me to kneel and push.

I shook my head and smiled. Sorry, pal.

They kept at it, failing at each attempt. There were no other cars nearby to boost the battery. I was not dismayed. I was sick of this trip and hated the music and now saw that Camillo was half drunk.

The day had gone quiet, the air was mild, the sun dimmed as it had dropped beneath the trees. I knew from the map that we were perhaps at a village called Uia, about thirty miles north of the settlement of Xangongo, which had been no more than a blur when we’d passed it. Too far to walk. Using what remained of the light, I walked to the road, hoping to flag down a car to take me south to Xangongo or north to Cahama — anywhere out from under this tree. But night was falling. I saw the man in the shop light a kerosene lamp, and I knew we were stuck in the bush.