The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari

12. Three Pieces of Chicken

IN THE LAST SLANTED softening of late afternoon light, against the squealy repeated note of one small insect’s cheep, under the bird-haunted acacia tree towering over the bare trampled compound, and near Camillo’s derelict-looking car — dirt footprints on its doors: Camillo had been kicking it barefoot in fury for its refusal to start — an old woman approached through the sunlit risen dust.

She held a chipped enamel bucket in one hand and a long pair of metal tongs in the other. Her hair was wrapped like a bowl in a yellow cloth, this turban making her an unusual presence, giving her height and dignity and a look of quiet anticipation. She wore a limp blue dress that fell to her ankles ending in a tattered hem, and an apron that had once been white. She was barefoot, but her feet — her only indelicate feature — were as big and battered as shoes. No one paid any attention to her or to what she was carrying. In fact, Camillo stood aside, gripping a Cuca beer bottle as though he were about to throw it. His eyes were empty, and he looked less than futile. His body seemed uninhabited.

We had come north, crossing from Kunene province into Huíla province, but what did it matter? We were stuck for the night at least, and maybe longer. Light was leaking sideways from the sky from membranes of cloud, leaving purpled tissue just above the horizon.

The old woman made directly for me. “Old” was probably inaccurate: she was undoubtedly much younger than me, sixty or less, but had the aged face of a kindly crone. I was standing apart from the others, who were drinking, and perhaps drunk. I looked for a log to rest on, but saw nowhere to sit, and the car seemed cursed.

Holding the bucket up so I could examine its contents, the woman smiled at me and worked the jaws of her rusty tongs.

“Boa tarde,” she said, but it seemed more like evening to me.

At the bottom of the bucket were three pieces of chicken — legs attached to thighs. They were skinless, shiny-sinewed, and dark as kippers, as if they’d been smoked. Each one was covered by busy black flies, and flies darted around the hollow of the bucket. It was more a bucket of flies than a bucket of chicken.

Squeezing her rusty tongs again, the woman asked, “Qual?”

Which one?

Though I was hungry, I waved her away, retching at the thought of eating any of those chicken legs. Yet I had not eaten all day, and it had been a long and tiring journey, of harassment, of the border crossing, of the sight of misery and naked children playing in dust, flies crawling on their eyes and in the sores on their bodies. The off-road detours had been especially exhausting from the bucking and bumping of the vehicle. And the checkpoints, the shakedowns, the roadblock dictators.

The woman was smiling because I was smiling. The absurdity of “Which one?” had just struck me — three identical pieces of chicken in the dirty bucket, each of them specked by skittering flies; an existential question to the stranger in a strange land.

“Não,” I said. “Obrigado.”

Something in my smile encouraged her and kept her there, rocking a little, flexing her bruised toes, running her tongue against her lips to show patience. She was gaunt, and she herself looked hungry. But I said no again and, shoulders slackening in resignation, she turned away, making for the others, who were standing in a group still drinking bottles of Cuca beer.

A muscle twisted sharply in my stomach and yanked at my throat: the whip of hunger.

“Olá!” I said, and she turned to me, looking hopeful.

“That one,” I said, pointing at the one with the fewest flies on it.

“Frango,” she said in a gummy voice, as though naming a delicacy, and she wet her lips with her tongue and swallowed, as people often do when handling food. Then the word spoken all over Angola for cool or okay, “Fixe” — feesh.

She folded my dollar and tucked it into her apron.

I borrowed Camillo’s cigarette lighter and made a small fire of dead grass at the corner of the compound, and I passed the piece of chicken through the fire, believing like a Boy Scout that I was killing the fly-borne germs. Then I found the log I’d been looking for, and sat, and slowly ate the chicken. It was like chewing leather. The straps and thongs of sinew wouldn’t break down, and its toughness made it almost indigestible, my chewing turning the meat into a rubber ball. Queasy over a meal he called a “mess of bouillabaisse,” Henry James said that it was “a formidable dish, demanding French digestion.” Maybe I needed that. I was defeated by the food, and disgusted with myself for being in this position, and I mocked myself with a pompous phrase I’d heard a foodie use on a TV show: “I regret to say this dish is not fully achieved.” But it was something in my stomach, and that was a victory in this hungry province.

Then I replayed my first glimpse of the bucket — the chicken, the flies, and the old woman asking “Which one?” It was the sort of choice you were faced with in Africa, but I had never seen it so stark, in the extravagant splashes of a florid sunset.

From the moment we arrived, this nameless place had seemed no more than a roadside clearing, the sort where locals might gather and linger because of its great sheltering tree. But we were alone. Only we entered the bar, which had perhaps started as a shop and run out of things to sell; it was a bar counter of warped planks, with beer bottles warming on a wooden shelf on the back wall. The man behind the counter sat with his chin resting on the planks and his arms wrapped around his head, cradling it.

What seemed vague and undefined in the failing light became distinct after sunset. In the dark, the kerosene lamp in the shed transformed the shed into a wide square lantern, sharpened its windows, casting bright shafts of light across the ground where a lame dog lay. The underside of the tree was brightened by the lamplight, and the road — which was a main road — was hidden in shadow. We were becalmed in the darkness of the bush, surrounded by chittering insects.

In the thin woods behind the shed there was a village, more audible than visible, for though I could see only the topmost licks of a high flaming bonfire, I could hear the rhythm of drumming, first as a patter and then what seemed a reply to the stuttering thud on a thick drumhead. The drums and not the fire made the village come alive.

The drumming was so insistent I needed only to jerk my thumb at its sound for the barman to reply, “Cerimônia,” and he smiled a little and caressed his head with his spidery fingers.

Though the word was plain enough, I did not speak more than a few words of Portuguese. This was a handicap, not merely because the country was generally Portuguese-speaking, but also because of its isolation from the world. Angola was an anomaly: apart from Portuguese, nothing else was spoken except for its many tribal languages, and these differed from province to province. Swahili and Chichewa, both of which I spoke, were usable in the western and northern provinces, but here I was linguistically lost.

Remembering that Cuban soldiers had fought all over Angola, and especially in the south, I said, “Habla Español?” The barman smiled. I said, “English?” He smiled again and patted his head. As a joke, I said, “Parla Italiano?”

Behind me, I heard, “Io parlo.”

It was Gilberto, one of my fellow passengers. I said in Italian, “Really — you speak Italian?”

“Sono stato in Italia per sei mese,” he said. “Anno passato.” Six months, that was something. And his friends began to laugh because Gilberto was fairly drunk, and bare-chested, standing with his blue jeans tugged down so that his underwear showed. Whether this was street style or bush slovenliness I did not know. “A priest took me, with some other boys.”

The priest was Italian, Gilberto said, a missionary in Angola, whose hometown was in Calabria, in the south of Italy, but whose friary was in Rome. Six boys went on the trip; Gilberto was about eighteen, and I assumed the others were the same age. They prayed at the Vatican, they visited the antique sights of Rome, they ate pasta, and they stayed at the friary.

I asked Gilberto whether the other priests talked to the Angolan boys.

“Yes. They were so nice to us! They took us to the beach” — to Ostia, the coast outside Rome. “They played football with us.”

Sometimes a person tells you a story and you seem to hear it in stereo. The storyteller is enthusiastic and gives details and believes he is persuading you of its truth. But as the monologue continues, you hear a parallel story, translating the details differently, and in your imagining you see something else.

Gilberto’s version was a jolly six months in Italy, paid for by the priest, a vacation from Angola. In my version, Gilberto was on a recruiting trip, the priest like a college coach showing football players around a campus, in order to dazzle them so they’d sign up for a place on the team. It is well known that parish priests are in short supply, and missionary priests even fewer, and that the next generation of Catholic vocations will not come from Europe or America but from Christian Kerala in south India, the Philippines, Latin America, and Africa.

After Rome, Gilberto and his friends traveled by train to southern Italy and stayed on a small farm, where they worked in the gardens, prayed, and went to church. They studied Italian most evenings, and were encouraged to speak it in the daytime.

“Lots of words in Italian are the same as Portuguese,” Gilberto said, “so we didn’t have a problem.”

But Portuguese — notoriously nasal and slushy — lacks the crisp dentals and subtle labials of Italian, even if it shares an approximate Latinate vocabulary.

“You speak it well,” I said. “Did the priest want you to join the missionaries?”

“He mentioned it a little. He said for us to think about it. Doing good work, helping Angola. God would tell us the rest.” But Gilberto said this in passing. What he loved about Italy was the food, and he recounted the meals he’d eaten with such energy, describing the ingredients, that the others with us — João, Ronaldo, Camillo — listened with hungry, drunken impatience. I looked for Paulina but did not see her.

“What did you think about becoming a priest?”

“Angola is a Christian country. Most of the people are Catholic. We have so many churches!”

“Do you want to be a priest?”

He laughed. “I can’t, because of this.” He wagged his bottle of beer. “And I like women!” He repeated this in Portuguese for his friends, making them laugh.

We were standing outside, in the light that shot from the windows of the shed, the darkness all around us, the smell, which was a sharp hairiness of foul and turdy dirt. Cars had ceased to pass on the road as soon as night fell, though now and then someone wobbled by on a bicycle, the chain rattling in its sprockets.

“Ask that man where we are,” I said, indicating the barman. “What town?”

He asked, the man explained. Gilberto said, “No town. We are near Uia. The big market and the petrol station are at Xangongo.”

Camillo said, “Zona verde.”

I understood that, and liked it as a euphemism for the bush. Zona verde — everything that was not a city — summed up the Africa that I loved.

“What about the music?” I couldn’t remember the Italian word for drumming, but he got the point when I imitated the sound: it was still loud. “Where is that coming from?”

“The village,” Gilberto said, after conferring. “They are having a celebration. He told me what it is, but I don’t know the word in Italian. It is Efundula” — and he spoke to the other boys. “Even in Portuguese we don’t have the word Efundula. It is Oshikwanyama. These are Kwanyama people.”

“Is it circumcision?”

“No. They don’t do such things to girls here. Efundula is just for girls.” He spoke again to the barman for guidance. “It goes on for four days. Yesterday was the last day, but they are still dancing. Sometimes they dance all night.”

“Initiation?”

“Something like that.”

The barman went on talking, and his explanation became elaborate, because he had unwrapped his hands and arms from his head and was gesturing, speaking in his own language and in Portuguese. Gilberto was smiling, the others were listening with interest, and then Gilberto put up his hand so he could tell me what the man had said.

“The dancing is strong because if a girl is pregnant, she won’t be able to continue, and she will stop.”

“They don’t want pregnant girls?”

“Not for this Efundula, no.”

“Ask him if we can go to the village and see it.”

Gilberto didn’t ask; he knew what the answer would be. “It is just for them. But you can listen.”

We drank beer, we muttered, we listened, and then it occurred to me that if I didn’t claim a place in the car I would have nowhere to sleep. While they were talking I went to the Land Cruiser. I cranked the seat back into a reclining position, covered myself with my jacket, and to the drumming in the distance and the muttering of the boys sitting on the steps of the shed I subsided into sleep. From time to time I awoke, and I was surprised by the gusto of the drumming, but in the darkest hours of the morning it ceased, and the silence, which was like apprehension, kept me awake until sunlight and heat filled the clearing.

In daylight the place was ugly, more littered and beat-up than it had seemed the day before. The boys had tossed their empty beer bottles aside and they lay scattered in the dust. Some grease-stained plastic wrappers were stuck to withered tufts of grass. And the tree that had seemed noble in its height and overhang looked vandalized — the lower trunk had been hacked at and carved with initials and numbers and names.

The look of Angola was not just the ugly little town and the slum of shacks but also the ruin of a brutalized landscape, of the stumps of deforestation and the fields littered with burned-out tanks, of rivers and streams that seemed poisoned — black and toxic. And not the slightest glimpse of any animal but a cow or a cringing dog. In most parts of the southern African bush you at least saw small antelopes or gazelles tittuping in the distance on slender legs. The impala was everywhere, and it was almost impossible to imagine a stretch of savanna without the movement of such creatures. And wherever there were villages, there were always scavengers, hyenas or intrusive baboons.

But no wild animals existed in the whole of Angola. One effect of the decades-long civil war here was that the animals that had not been eaten by starving people had been blown up by old land mines. The extermination of wild game had been complete. Now and then cows in pastures were shredded by exploding mines, and so were children playing and people taking shortcuts through fields.

A country without wild animals seems inconceivable, because many animals in Africa, antelopes especially, are prolific, reproducing in such large numbers they are able to establish sustainable herds in the unlikeliest places. But the long war had wasted them, the hungry Angolans had eaten them, eaten the hippos, even the crocs, and if there were snakes, I did not see any. Oddly, the bird life was thin too. Even where the landscape was not picked apart, where some trees had been spared, the absence of animals — and the presence of squatting, oppressed, if not defeated-looking, humans — made these places in zona verde seem mournful, violated, with an After-the-Fall atmosphere. Something inexplicably deleted from them had sapped their vitality.

In the land without animals, humans were more conspicuous and seemed to exist in greater variety, many of them, in their destitution, taking the place of wildlife, living at the edges of settlements in low simple shelters that were like the twiggy brakes that some animals huddled against.

Walking around this compound in the early morning saddened me and made me impatient. With the sun striking from above the tall grass, the heat took hold, and I had the fugitive thought again: What am I doing here?

I heard the dull clink of metal against metal, and saw the old woman in the yellow turban approaching with her bucket and tongs. I welcomed the sight of her, and said good morning. She swung her bucket up and lifted her tongs over it with the panache of a magician producing a little miracle out of the container.

“Frango.” The two remaining pieces at the bottom were more flyblown than the day before, perhaps because I had eaten one of them and the flies, deprived of their meat, had settled on the other two pieces: less chicken, more flies.

I gave the women a dollar and clumsily asked her name.

“Ana Maria,” she said.

Seeing that Gilberto was up and stumbling, I called him over to translate.

He greeted the woman politely and smiled at my brushing flies from the chicken leg in my hand.

“Gilberto, ask her if she knows about the ceremony in the village.”

“She knows,” he said, translating my question. “She says it is the Efundula.”

“Did she see the dancing and drumming?”

“She heard it. It is for the girls. But the important person is an old man. This old man comes from another village.”

“What does Efundula mean?”

The old woman’s explanation in Portuguese was lengthy, but Gilberto listened with recognition. He said, “We have this in my home village, but it has a different name. It means the girls become women — ready for marriage. They are decorated, they dance, they sing, sometimes they cook some food.” Now I couldn’t tell whether he was describing the ceremony at his village or the one here. “The girls wear special clothes, they rub them with a certain oil from a tree. They decorate their hair, they wear shells in the hair.”

“Ask this woman how long the ceremony lasts.”

“It is four days.”

He hadn’t asked the woman. He was speaking from his own experience, so I encouraged him to ask the woman for details.

“Four days,” he said, after she explained. “Each day has a name. She tells me in Oshikwanyama, but I don’t know the words.” He conversed with her some more, nodding as she spoke, then he nodded and said to me, “Yes. The first day is ‘the Sleeping of the Chickens.’ Yesterday they call ‘the Day of Love.’ The music we heard was that.”

To have arrived by accident in this remote and stricken place and to have discovered myself in the presence of a traditional initiation rite was just wonderful, the kind of luck I had always depended on in travel. I knew nothing of the region. I did not know then that the Kwanyama people were related to the Ovambo in Namibia, and that they dominated this province. All I knew was that the war had been fought here — the wrecked vehicles were everywhere; that the villagers had been routed and the towns destroyed; that South Africans, Cubans, and the guerrilla army of Jonas Savimbi, UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), had crept back and forth, torching villages, massacring and beheading civilians; and that this had gone on for almost thirty years.

How amazing after all that chaos and death to find, in the persistence of memory, this enduring ceremony with its particular names and purpose. A girl’s initiation into womanhood was common all over sub-Saharan Africa. In Malawi, the ceremony for girls who had experienced their first menstruation (and thus were regarded as ready for childbearing) was called Ndakula (“I have grown up”) and included a course of sexual instruction — how to please your man. As for Kenya, I was walking with a Masai man in the Masai Mara Reserve one September a few years ago, near the hot springs settlement in the Loita Hills called Maji Moto, and we came across a group of young girls out fetching water. They whooped when they saw us. One of them came boldly forward, laughing; she wore an ornate headpiece, partly a coronet that had a fringe of white beads that jiggled against her forehead. I remarked on this to the Masai spearman who was guiding me, and he told me that this headpiece advertised the fact that she had been emuratare — circumcised, he explained — the word was the same for both males and females. He said that the other girls with her were children, but that she was a woman. “She can be married now.” He became indignant when I questioned the cutting, the purpose of which was to eliminate a woman’s sexual pleasure.

But clitoridectomy, also known as female genital mutilation, widespread among the Masai and many other African peoples, was not a feature of the Kwanyama initiation ceremony in the nearby village. The practitioners of genital mutilation nearest to this settlement were the Himba people, who straddled the Angola-Namibia border, a hundred miles southwest of where we were squatting.

Gilberto was still talking to the old woman, and was so engrossed that he had stopped translating into Italian so I could follow it. I sat and made another small fire, trying to kill the germs on the piece of chicken, then I ate it slowly. Afterward I joined Gilberto and the old woman again. When I interrupted, Gilberto smiled and, seeming to remark on what the woman had been telling him, said, “Very interesting!”

Hardly eight o’clock and the day was already hot, and the sunbaked soil yielded a strong smell of decay. Camillo was yawning. He lifted the front of his shirt and wiped the sweat from his face, then he nodded at me, indicating hello. The red Land Cruiser sat immobilized in the center of the compound, dusty footprints on its doors. It was now part of the scene, the wrecked vehicle that seemed a feature of every Angolan settlement. I had no idea why it wouldn’t start, but I did not notice any urgency in the others to fix it.

A few cars and motorcycles had begun to pass by on the road. I was tempted to hitchhike to Xangongo, and though on my map it seemed a sizable place, my maps had misled me many times before: a boldfaced name on the road map was often no more than a name. If I saw a bus, I could flag it down, and then I could continue on my way to Lubango.

But I was in no particular hurry. I felt sure that the nearby village, the one of the drums and the dancing, would have some food. And I was curious to know more about the ceremony, apparently having finished its last ritual the night before. My phone didn’t work here; I had not bought an Angola SIM card or minutes. But even if it had worked, it would not have helped — it would only have reminded me of my predicament. Anyway, I knew that Camillo wanted to get his vehicle and the rest of the passengers to Lubango eventually; all I had to do was stay with him. These people needed to eat too, so something was bound to turn up.

“I’m going for a walk,” I said to Gilberto. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

“We won’t leave without you,” he said.

Needing to rouse myself, and seeing that there was a small river marked on my map (and with a name: Techiua), I walked north along the road to see whether I could find it. My bag was in the car, but I carried my small briefcase with my passport, my important papers, and my money. If someone stole my bag with my clothes inside, I could easily buy more. Some children tagged along (“Senhor! Senhor!”), and when I asked them about the river, they ran ahead, urging me to follow.

It wasn’t far, and it ran under a bridge on the road. Hardly a river, it was more like a stream, about as wide as a two-lane road. Several things interested me about it. The first was that women were washing clothes at the edge of it, slapping and twisting them and cramming them into plastic basins. Another was that some children were bathing in it. And midstream, a man was standing in a dugout canoe, poling it along, seemingly on a fishing trip. It was a scene from old Africa — not the Africa of rappers and cell phoners, but the idyllic-seeming Africa of rural serenity.

But of course it was not idyllic at all. It was the Angola of hardship and penury. More than half the country’s population of twenty-three million lived below the poverty line, and I was looking at about thirty of those people. If there were any edible fish of a good size in the river, I would have been surprised, and the river itself was so muddy that laundering and bathing seemed pointless activities. The smell of the river, the pong of stagnation, penetrated the air and clouded the bridge with stink. Yet the sunlight was beautiful, scattering the surface of the water with gold flakes.

“Senhor!” The children wanted me to go down the embankment with them. They saw that I was studying it closely, and when I got there they’d demand money for having guided me.

But I’d seen enough — and the dugout canoe looked like the sort of tribal artifact you’d find in a museum. If anyone boasted of Angola’s oil-rich prosperity, I could say that I’d seen this: hungry, half-naked people on the stinking banks of a muddy river.

The children stopped following me when I returned to the clearing, to the log where I’d been sitting to eat the chicken leg. Camillo had opened the hood of the Land Cruiser and was picking distastefully at greasy wires. Now that I had something to write, I took out my notebook. I continued my abbreviated narrative, picking up from where I’d left off, describing the hotel on the Namibian side of the border at Ondangwa and the business of the crossing, the harassment, and the shakedowns. As usually happens when I am writing, several hours passed without my noticing it, and while I worked some children approached me with baskets of bananas.

I was still writing when Gilberto came over and said, “You have a camera?”

Not a real camera, just the one in the iPhone I’d brought on the trip. But I could not access the Internet or make a call. I had the $20 phone I’d bought from Mr. Khan in Otjiwarongo, and had hopes of using it sometime when I’d fitted it with an Angola connection card. In the meantime, I occasionally played music that I’d stored on my iPhone. I seldom took pictures, but I often paged sadly through photos of my loved ones, feeling like an astronaut reminding himself of Earth.

“Yes,” I said, and thought: Why do I so seldom take pictures? I was glad he had reminded me.

Behind him, a man in a red soccer jersey and brown trousers, wearing stylish glasses, was looking at me. He was young, probably in his twenties, and would have seemed very tough except for his hopeful smile. An older, fleshier woman in a black dress, with tightly braided hair and a necklace of blue beads, stood near him, and she seemed to have an imploring expression too.

I noted the way they were dressed because of what I saw next: three skinny girls, bare from the waist up, but childlike, almost boyish. Their most striking feature was an extravagant coiffure of beads and shells; it was as though they did not have hair at all but thick multiple strings and loops of beads hanging from their heads, cascades of tiny white shell-like beads, woven into their hair so densely their hair was invisible. They wore knee-length wraparound skirts of brightly patterned cloth, and necklaces too, thick clusters of strands.

They pressed in close, the way kittens sidle up to you and rub against your legs, with an obliging head movement. They laughed with the boldness that costumed people often have, the finery or the disguise giving them confidence. They were like children at a fancy dress party, even if all the beads made them seem pharaonic, gotten up in an ancient style. They were admired by the much-younger girls, the urchins who surrounded these compliant and unlettered nymphs.

The man said something to Gilberto, who relayed it to me, this time in English: “Take photo.”

Children at a fancy dress party — that’s exactly what they were. They were the girls — so the man in the sunglasses said — who had been initiated in the village over the past four days, and for some weeks before that. None looked older than thirteen, but it was their fate to have menstruated — it is said to happen earlier to girls in the bush — so they had been selected for the ceremony.

“What’s that word for the ceremony, Gilberto?”

“Efundula,” he said.

The others heard, and laughed. Now a crowd had gathered — people from the village, older women and men, and the much younger girls looking adoringly at these decorated initiates, as if proudly at big sisters.

I used my iPhone camera to get close to them, so I could examine the beaded coiffures, and I showed the pictures to the man in the soccer jersey, who smiled at them approvingly. Then I touched the beads, with a querying expression.

“Elende,” the man said, giving me the word for the decorated hair.

Their alikeness was a thrill: three nymphs, the Three Graces, a trio of skinny girls standing side by side, their arms around one another, representing beauty, charm, sweetness. The ordeal of their initiation was over, and now they were in the world, pleased with themselves, approved of by their elders. The smallest of the three — she seemed a mere child, an androgynous one; she could have been a skinny boy — had loops of green and blue beads in her hair and a yellow necklace.

I asked their ages. Gilberto translated — “Fourteen or fifteen” — yet none of them seemed that age. They had to be younger. I pressed him again, and he talked to the older people.

“They want to be married,” Gilberto said. He spoke in Portuguese, to the crowd. The people laughed and pointed at me. Gilberto said, “You can take one!”

Seeing my expression, the people laughed harder.

“I have some questions,” I said. I asked Gilberto to relay them to the man who’d requested photos. He didn’t want copies of the photos; he merely wished to formalize the event in pictures — and the girls were gloating over the pictures as I put my questions to him. “Can I visit the village?”

He said yes, and we filed past the shed and through the trees on a narrow path that led across hacked-open furrows that seemed like gardens in preparation. I smelled the dead embers of the fire and saw the first row of huts, most of them woven in a latticework of intertwined sticks and stripped boughs, some of them with tin roofs and others thatched with hay bundles. This was the traditional fenced compound known as a kuimbo, which I’d seen from a distance farther south. I looked for a place to sit, because I wanted to write, and when I found a tree stump, the three ornamented girls pressed against me again, laughing, and a woman brought me a bunch of bananas.

“What will happen to the girls now?” I asked Gilberto, who repeated the question.

“They will look for a husband. They will have children. They are women now.”

Nevertheless, they looked like children to me — young children, three schoolgirls. I asked if the ceremony was over.

“No,” the man said. There was more, but it was for fun, not a test, not the all-night dancing to exhaust them. They would rub themselves with powdered ash to whiten their skin. And this, part of the masquerade, would allow them privileges. He implied that with their freshly coated faces they could assert themselves. I tried to imagine these three girls whitened with ash, with their coiffure of beads and their heavy necklaces and short skirts, and it seemed a vision in tribal maquillage of pretty painted coquettes — which was in fact the whole intention. Beautify them, get them dancing, give them approval and some instruction, and send them flashing out of the village to snare a husband. But a husband was merely a means to an end. As in much of the region, the object of womanhood was to bear a child: a woman without a child was not really a woman, and had no status. A man could get rid of her, send her back to her parents, if she proved to be barren.

In Angola, as in many societies I knew, you were not an adult until you got married, but the marriage was only speculative; it became real when you gave birth to a child. Maybe this sort of thinking was an underlying factor in teen pregnancies in the United States, which were often seen as accidental. Perhaps there was something calculated in it, a wish to have a place in the world, in the sense it was regarded here in Angola: the fast track to adulthood was finding a likely man and having a child. The anthropologist Merran McCulloch put it nicely, writing of a related Angolan people, the Ovimbundu: “A child or an adolescent is only a ‘potential’ person (omunu)” (The Ovimbundu of Angola). Motherhood and fatherhood made them whole. But there was an unintended consequence: complications associated with childbirth were the leading cause of death (“maternal death”) among girls thirteen to sixteen years old in this part of Africa (World Health Organization report, March 2012).

I sat and nibbled bananas while a woman boiled water in a blackened pot and put some dry leaves in it and pronounced it tea. Gilberto had wandered away, so it was impossible for me to communicate except in gestures. Instead, I hauled out my iPhone and we went through the photos again, and the Three Graces smiled at themselves and twiddled their beaded locks with slender fingers and seemed to me birdlike and beautiful.

The cliché for them was nubile. And nubile was exactly what they were: in their case it was not a cliché at all but a precise description, because nubility denotes adulthood; “nubile” means marriageable. The word comes from the Latin nubere, to marry, and this rite of passage, the Efundula, was a nubility ceremony that recognized their capacity to bear children and made them eligible for marriage. The event itself, more than a coming-of-age ritual, was a sort of marriage initiation. But the taking of a husband, an inevitable consequence, involved much less drama. That could happen any time now, and the sooner the better, because these girls had achieved the desired condition. Our word “nuptial,” which people tend to smile at as pretentious, is derived from the same glowing word “nubile.”

Some details I discovered afterward, in books on kinship of the Kwanyama and related tribal groups, such as the nearby Kwamatwi, who hold a similar ceremony in which a ranking woman cries out “Wafukala!” — “You became nubile!” That in one of the rituals on the second day (“the Day of the Little Jackal”) the girls drink beer mixed with the semen of the man presiding over the ceremony. That the profusion of beads has a purpose beyond ornament, because beads are seen to promote fertility. That, as an elaboration of the whitening of the skin, the initiates repeat a saying: “To a white person” — that is, one powdered with ashes — “nothing is prohibited.”

They’d find husbands soon enough. They were very pretty, and being young, they were strong; they’d be useful working in the gardens and raising children, and this being sub-Saharan Africa, they’d be doing both at the same time. The fiancé would pay a dowry, of money or a cow, and for this he’d have his own field hand for life. Once this transaction is settled, the wedding is understood; the man takes her home.

“There is no solemn nuptial procession,” Carlos Estermann writes in his definitive study of the Kwanyama people, The Ethnography of Southwestern Angola, which was first published in Portuguese in 1956. Estermann was an Alsatian priest, linguist, photographer, and anthropologist who sailed from Lisbon to Angola in 1923, did field-work in the southern provinces, became a full-time ethnographer in 1951, lived for nine years among the Kwanyama, and, undaunted by the civil war, remained in Angola. He noted that in the Kwanyama court the royal jester or buffoon was always a tiny Bushman. As late as 1976, Estermann was studying spirit possession in the region, his anthropological investigations far exceeding his missionary zeal.

Estermann goes on: “That night she shares the bed of her betrothed, who is now considered to be her husband. The consummation of the marriage is not accompanied by any ritual, nor is it made known, unless very discreetly. In this connection it may be said that the Kwanyama do not concern themselves with the bride’s virginity. It is a thing that is not spoken of, and there is no word in their language to express that quality or the physiological sign of it.”

I found that informative book later, and it clarified some aspects of the ritual, but at the time I was content with what I’d seen. The man in the red soccer jersey, whose name was João, brought me a chair, and in comfort I stayed in the village until early afternoon. I was happy. I wasn’t hungry anymore. I was just tired enough to be relaxed. Seeing that I was fascinated, the three girls stayed teasingly, almost flirtatiously, in my orbit. It seemed that this was my purpose in coming to Africa, to spend a night and day like this, and I would have been delighted to stay longer. I liked being in a village; they had food here, and shade, and places to rest. I knew enough of the scavenging and precarious life of the road to hate it.

In the heat of the afternoon, around two o’clock, Gilberto called out to me, “Andiamo!” His speaking Italian made the villagers laugh.

I said goodbye, thanked the elders, and quietly gave each of the girls some dollars.

Leaving the perimeter of the village, I saw blue-black smoke blowing from the exhaust pipes of the Land Cruiser, Camillo revving the engine.

Nearby, staring at me, the old woman Ana Maria stood with her bucket, and I knew what was in it. Out of politeness, I looked in, and now the mass of flies covered the remaining piece of chicken, which was familiar to me in all its contours, but more dark-specked and bitten by the flies, which were familiar too.

“Frango,” Ana Maria said in her hungry juicy way, swallowing a little.

She was gaunt. She looked hungry and tired. I gave her a dollar. I took her tongs and ceremonially removed the last piece of chicken from the bucket. I made a formal business of waving it around and brushing the flies from it. Then I gestured with it to her, as though flourishing a scepter, and put it back in the bucket. She understood: this would be her next meal. She smiled with gratitude and touched her heart with her skinny fingers.

Camillo blew his horn, calling me from this happy little chicken interlude: back to the road.