The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari

13. Volunteering in Lubango

THAT AMBIGUOUS, SOMEWHAT startling, stumbled-into occasion of the Efundula ceremony of the Kwanyama stayed with me, for its unexpectedness and its vitality — for its ritual aspects too, because so much that I saw in Angola was improvised or imported or crooked. Angola’s rich — the few — were greedy walled-in plutocrats and dandies, while its poor — the many — were exhausted and cynical and living in squalor. But in the Angolan bush I had found remnants of traditional life radiating energy, even if (as in the case of the Kwanyama people) that energy consumed its maidens, turning young girls into coquettes so that they might attain a life of domestic drudgery and a brood of malnourished children.

Back on the road — but not really a road at all — we made a succession of detours, the usual Angolan snakes-and-ladders route along arbitrary tracks, many of them deep troughs of muck, flooded in this mud season of sudden rains. The zigzagging did not take us quickly, but it was all a revelation to me. We coursed through villages mostly. We were seldom near the notional road, part of which was being graded by enormous loud chewing-and-rolling machines, and the rest abandoned or nonexistent, a waste motion (creation, destruction) that was brought to perverse perfection in many areas of Angolan life. It was as if this mechanism imitated Portuguese colonial futility, for surely no colonial power was ever so politically arrogant and culturally insufficient — Portugal’s obsolescence, bumbling, and antique mind-set producing a rarefied and conceited cruelty that was Angola’s inheritance.

And it was strange in this vehicle to be traveling so intimately with village people, passing at times in a ten-foot space between a mud hut and a clothesline, and just missing the big yellow woven mats on which fat red peppers were drying in the sun, arrayed like firecrackers, a surprised face in the hut window or a scowling one from a man with his pants at his ankles, squatting at the trench edge of his open-sided latrine.

A different Camillo emerged on this stretch of the trip, a kindlier one. At a village remote from the road he slowed down, recognizing a familiar figure ahead, and it had to have been someone he knew: a crippled man, one leg missing, possibly a land mine victim, who swayed under a tree. Rolling to a stop, Camillo gave him some crushed kwanza notes and a handful of mangled bread slices — the first indication I’d had that he had squirreled away food in the car. It happened again some miles later, another mutilated man, this one wearing a red smock, Camillo pausing in the drive to hand over bread crusts.

Deeper in the bush at a cluster of huts, a boy approached with a bird, a green parrot he wanted to sell. Camillo took it and examined it closely, wiggled one of the parrot’s legs, demonstrating that it was broken (probably in the boy’s snare), and gave it back as unacceptable. Soon Camillo reverted to his old crapulous self, becoming a loud, red-eyed drunk.

On the slabs of torn-up mud and the deep, water-filled potholes and wallows of these bush tracks, we traveled slowly, to my relief. And a new song was playing in the car, this one sweeter than “Take Over Control.” The words were “Marry me,” sung in an Angolan accent: Meddy me, meddy me, I love you..

And so we went bouncing and swerving, cross-country, through the villages of Huíla province, music blaring. At intervals of twenty miles or so Camillo stopped, I thought so that we could find food — some villagers ran toward us with bananas — but it was for him to buy more beer. Camillo drank steadily, and fifty miles into the trip he was drunk, drooling, shouting to the music.

At several stops the villagers appeared with small bags of fried potatoes, slick with grease in the tight dirty plastic. I said no, but was hungry, and like the pieces of chicken that had turned my stomach the day before, the slimy potatoes began to look appetizing. So I gave in and ate, and disgusted myself, and surrendered to the noise, the bad driving, and the heat.

New passengers had gotten on, the vehicle was overloaded, and in the back a crying baby and a screaming woman — the baby’s mother, I assumed — were quarreling with two shouting boys. You naturally wonder at such a time whether this trip was necessary, and answering my own question, I concluded, Yes. I had vowed not to take a plane, vowed to travel overland, and although it was uncomfortable in this beat-up Land Rover, and the fighting among the passengers was annoying (and made worse by Camillo’s drunken swerving), I was passing through the hinterland of Angola, which I had always longed to see because so little had been written about it — nothing, really, except out-of-date war stories.

Beyond the town of Cahama, where the road improved, we were at a higher altitude — cooler, greener, taller trees, hills in the distance that were lumpy and flat-topped, some like anvils, others like plump loaves of bread, some with green skirts. Bellied-out spinnakers of clouds blew along, high in the blue sky. The great surprise to me were the few signs of colonial buildings — a scattering of ruined shops, an occasional abandoned farmhouse, the thick walls and tile roofs of the sort of rustic peasant construction you might see in the cottagey countryside of northern Portugal. In a way, that was the whole story of the Angolan hinterland: Portugal had exported its brutalized criminals and illiterate peasants and made them into colonos, first to enslave and deport Africans and then to lord it over the Africans who remained. The walls of the small farmhouses were broken, the roofs fallen in, and the tiles smashed. Yet there were only a handful of such buildings in fifty or seventy-five miles of travel — this in a country that had been a colony for more than four hundred years.

Some of the houses were smashed to pieces because their occupants had bolted, or had been driven away, as independence approached in the 1970s. But also, like the whole of southern Angola, this had been a war zone for decades. Here, between Cahama and Xangongo, the South African army, in a major offensive in 1983 (Operation Askari), had battled Namibian SWAPO guerrillas who were massing, intending to push south across the border to liberate their own country, South-West Africa. And many of these houses had been booby-trapped, and the fields strewn with land mines. It is estimated that twenty million mines were planted in Angola by all sides during the long conflict.

But white settlement in Angola had never been great, and in the bush, white colonos had always been thin on the ground. Almost from the beginning, its first landfall by the great Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão, in 1482, Angola was viewed as nasty, unhealthy, and violent, filled with poisonous air and savage people — “the white man’s grave” of the cliché. What the Portuguese wanted from Angola was what nearly all colonialists wished for: gold and slave labor. The weirdness of Portuguese settlement is well described by Gerald Bender in Angola Under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality (1978). Angola began as a penal colony. From the late fifteenth century to the 1920s, Angola was a dumping ground for Portuguese criminals, convicts known as degredados — exiles. These men were Angola’s civilizers and colonists.

It is impossible to understand Angola without knowing something of the Portuguese character. Like Ireland, Portugal was for centuries an exporter of its peasants, a maker of exiles — fugitives from the mother country and so oppressive in its colonies that it turned Africans into exiles too. Portugal has been described by the English traveler and literary critic V. S. Pritchett as “practical, stoical, shifty, its pride in its great past, its pride in pride itself raging inside like an unquenchable sadness.” To that list of qualities I would add archaic and obsolete. As for Portugal being practical, it should also be said that Angola was the only African country that began its colonial existence as a penal settlement, Angola being Portugal’s own version of Siberia, a jail.

Bullying and predatory criminals are natural despots, and many of the exiled Portuguese convicts became important slave traders. They were well suited to the diabolical task, since they had been schooled in Portugal (and its other colonies) as thieves, con men, and murderers, efficient as persecutors and intimidators. The convicts were not a mere ragtag oppressed element who had been (like the exiles in early Australia) persecuted in their poverty and convicted of petty crimes. They were ruthless villains, all male (a third of the exiles to Australia were female), who formed the core group of Angola’s colonists, promoted, after the long voyage, from the criminal class to the ruling class. The crooks had to be the colonizers of Angola because so few other Portuguese wanted to live there. They served as slave traders until Portugal outlawed slavery in 1878, and then they transitioned as exploiters by engaging in the forced labor system (bamboozling Africans, burdening them with indebtedness), which was in most cases more abusive than slavery.

Since slaves could not be exported abroad, where slavery was illegal, other forms of slavery or imposed servitude remained in place within the colony. Forced labor in Angola continued until 1961 (a year of uprising in Angola for that very reason), and it was then that devastating reports were published about the punitive labor conditions. “ ‘I need to be given Blacks’ is a phrase which I frequently heard from colonos,” Marcelo Caetano (later to be Portugal’s prime minister) wrote in 1946. “As if the Blacks were something to be given!” None of this is ancient history. In the early 1960s, around the time I became a teacher in soon-to-be-independent Nyasaland, a colonial high inspector in Angola, Henrique Galvão, wrote with passionate contempt, “Only the dead [in Angola] are really exempt from forced labor.”

Before 1900 virtually all Portuguese settlers remained in the coastal towns, decrying the interior as dangerous for its wild animals and hostile Africans. As late as 1950 there were fewer than three thousand Portuguese farmers in the entire country, some of them upcountry in smallholdings. But they were unproductive and demoralized, dependent on Portuguese government assistance and African forced labor.

Although over many years Portugal tried numerous rural settlement plans to encourage colonos to take up farming, nearly all the attempts ended in failure, and only the (foreign-operated) diamond mines, and later (foreign-operated) oil production, allowed Angola to be viable. The white population, predominantly male and coastal, aspired to petty trade, shop owning, and bar-keeping. The Portuguese had tried to create a capital, Nova Lisboa (now Huambo), in the center of the country, but that too had not amounted to much. The proof that the Angolan interior was largely unsettled by colonos was obvious here on the main road in Huíla province — empty, undeveloped, the few colonial houses (none dating from earlier than 1950) tumbled to the ground or bombed out.

The upside of neglect, indifference, contempt, and underdevelopment was a landscape that was green and practically empty of villages — great swaths of grassland, wooded hills, and stretches of bush that had once been battlefields but had become overgrown and depopulated. Amazing that the centuries of colonization and the decades of war had left no mark; and if you did not take the mood of people and the traumas of their history into account, you could almost be uplifted by the sight of lovely green hills and the apparent purity of the place.

We stopped for beer and hard-boiled eggs at Chibia. Some local traders were heading home from the improvised market. They were cattle-raising Mwila people who lived outside of Chibia, less than thirty miles from Lubango, and still smeared themselves with animal fat, coated their hair with mud and cow dung, creating dreadlocks, and wore necklaces of shells and of hardened mud. Of course there were no wild animals, and the road was a horror, but seen from the green bosom of this huge province, it was all like picture-postcard southern Africa, an Eden.

That was before we climbed the planalto — the chilly high plateau of the southern highlands — and rolled into the distant outskirts of Lubango, the shantytowns and cinderblock huts, the shacks and roadside market vendors, the squatter areas that were scoured of all greenery and — fuel-deprived — deforested for firewood. Only slums surrounded this southern city. The word in Angola for slum, or shantytown, or “informal settlement,” is musseque — meaning “red earth,” the sandy soil on which the shacks were usually built, a word suggesting an infertile and blighted place, a wasteland. Not a bush or a blade of grass remained among the musseques of Lubango, but for miles it was heaving with people.

I thought: I have been here before.

Another African city, another horror, more chaos — glary light, people crowding the roads, the stinking dust and diesel fumes, the broken fences, the vandalized shop fronts, the iron bars on all the display windows, the children fighting, the women heavily laden, and no relief in sight.

By now Camillo was helplessly drunk, legless and incoherent, and I was glad to get out of the car and away from the quarreling passengers and the hideous music. He began to pick a fight with me as I left him, claiming that I owed him money. He screamed at me on a Lubango back street, but his drunkenness made him distractible, and I simply slipped away down the shattered sidewalks of this cold and overripe-smelling city.

The following day, the Lubango streets were empty. It was a national holiday, Dia de Finados, or Dia de Defuntos — Day of the Deceased, Day of the Defunct. In the socialist revolutionary republic of Angola, holy All Souls’ Day of the Catholic liturgical calendar was a feast day, equal to Easter and Christmas, observed with the same solemnity as Colonial Repression Martyrs’ Day (January 4) or Day of the Armed Struggle (February 4). Every shop was closed. The restaurants were shut. No one worked.

“This is a very Christian country,” an Angolan explained to me that day. “Even during our war the churches were not attacked. People sheltered in them and they knew they would be safe.”

Where am I? I thought. Nothing to do on the Day of the Defunct except walk around this high sloping city, reflecting on my trip. What am I doing here?

Lubango lay sprawled across a plateau at almost six thousand feet. The weather was pleasant now, in November, but in the Angolan winter of July and August — so the locals complained — it was cold enough in this region for people to wear heavy coats, and some days frost crystals had to be scraped from windows and windshields.

Until independence, the town was called Sá da Bandeira, named for a Portuguese nobleman, Bernardo de Sá Nogueira de Figueiredo, the first marquess of Sá da Bandeira, who in the 1830s became an idealistic (that is, anti-slavery) prime minister. And then the town reverted to its traditional name, Lubango. Toward the end of the colonial period, Sá da Bandeira had attracted emigrants from Madeira (they didn’t know the colony was doomed), another hurried project and instant failure of Angolan settlement.

Ten miles south, at Humpata, Boer trekkers had put down stakes in the late nineteenth century and farmed, and some were buried there, in a little fenced-in cemetery I found one day in the middle of a cornfield. The colonos hated the interior for its remoteness and for the arduous work necessary to grow crops. It was a long, slow trip from the coast. Lubango’s only attraction — and it is still the iconic picture associated with the place — is the precipitous valley, formed of a volcanic fissure, the sheer rock cliffs and the chasm called Tunda-Vale, the view west across the plains: a scenic spot with a lovely panorama that was outside town, on a bad road that was being improved.

My hotel was a pretty good example of the state of the nation. Newly built, it was a walled-in compound of gardens, terraces, and low, elegant-seeming buildings. But half the lights in my room did not work, I could not open any windows, the bathroom stank. In the public areas, some foreign guests conferred in whispers — all businessmen (briefcases, cell phones, brisk mannerisms, handshakes). The restaurant was good, the rooms were expensive, and I was eager to leave after one night. I moved to the rundown, seedy Grand Hotel da Huíla, in the center of town, which was less than half the price of the new hotel.

Only its name was grand. The food was terrible and the hotel was practically empty, even a bit ghostly, but the Grand was friendly and clean, and I could sit on the veranda by the big cracked waterless swimming pool and write undisturbed.

Nothing had been written about travel in the interior of Angola, nothing I had read that described what I had seen on the back roads. The Angola story that reached the world was a condemnation of Portuguese colonial abuses, or a history of the long civil war, or amazement at the phenomenal oil profits. This alone made me glad I was here. The business visitors to Angola were efficient, tactful, and noncommittal, and many of them were rather tight-faced and (so they intimated to me) anxious to leave. They did not describe the country except to their companies back home. Angola had no other travelers, no backpackers, no birdwatchers, no anthropologists or political scientists, no casual visitors, no idle wanderers like me — none that I could see.

Books about Angola were typically accounts of warfare and crisis, most of them outdated. The best-known one in English, Ryszard Kapusciśski’s Another Day of Life, is a breathless narrative of the capital, Luanda, and some desperate excursions into the bush, during the war in the mid-1970s. It is harrowing, very short, partisan, and vague on details. Bay of Tigers by Pedro Rosa Mendes recounts a 1997 trans-Angola (and trans-Africa) trip; it is eloquent, impressionistic, surreal in places, but even vaguer on details than Kapusciśski. Most books about Angola are relentlessly political, because its history is a chronicle of violent crises, interspersed with long periods of colonial torpor or brutality. The lengthy civil war was extensively reported by journalists at the time. But I found that it was seldom discussed now. Most Angolans are too young to have experienced the worst of the war and too distracted by their poverty to care. The subject on the minds of most Angolans I met was money — how to get it, where to spend it, and please could they have some of mine?

In this country without foreign travelers, without foreign tourists, I had penetrated to the small city of Lubango and was sitting on the veranda of its old hotel, becalmed by the Day of the Defunct. What now?

I’m beginning to think that this sort of travel experience is mainly fantasy, I wrote in my notebook that day. Many travelers are essentially fantasists. Tourists are timid fantasists, the others — risk takers — are bolder fantasists. The tourists at Etosha conjure up a fantastic Africa after their nightly dinner by walking to the fence at the hotel-managed waterhole to stare at the rhinos and lions and eland coming to drink: a glimpse of wild nature with overhead floodlights. They have been bused to the hotel to see it, and it is very beautiful, but it is no effort.

My only boast in travel is my effort …

It was such a slog, such a lot of trouble to have gotten here, a kind of stumbling and uncertainty, begun at the border, where I was the only distinguishable foreigner — a magnet for the pesterers and touts. I’m conspicuous and solitary, and after two bone-shaking days I make it to the provincial city — a sort of victory if you value that kind of trudging through misery, realizing the fantasy of having seemed to blaze a trail all by myself.

I was lucky, I made it, I saw the initiated girls, I perversely enjoyed the three-pieces-of-chicken metaphor that to me was like a short story. I was fascinated by the rusted tanks and war wreckage along the road, by the ruined huts of vanished colonials, by the nonexistent road and the washerwomen at the river and the still serviceable dugout canoes. But what did all this add up to except a traveler’s tale, something to report, the I-did-it boast, newsworthy to those who don’t travel? And it’s expensive, uncertain, physically difficult, and lonely.

I have always felt that the value of a travel narrative, especially one that detours down back roads, is that it becomes a record of details of how people lived at a particular time and place: how they spoke, what they said, what they ate, how they behaved. The Soviet Union I saw and wrote about in the 1960s doesn’t exist anymore, nor does the South America I saw in the 1970s, nor the China I traveled through in the 1980s. The way of life on many Pacific islands has changed since I paddled around them in 1990, and as I was witnessing on this trip, the Africa of 2001 had undergone significant alterations — a few improvements, many degradations. To console myself, I think: Maybe the incidental details in these narratives will someday be useful for historians. Preserving the texture of life in a chronicle of travel could help inform the future, just as the diaries of foreign travelers like Smollett or Montaigne helped us understand old Europe.

The French historian Fernand Braudel frequently cites humble diarists and bold travelers in The Structures of Everyday Life, his encyclopedic account of how we have come to live the way we do on earth. On November 2, 1492, in Cuba, Christopher Columbus saw an Arawak man puffing on rolled tobacco leaves, a European’s first glimpse of smoking. Tea arrived in England from Holland in about 1657, and Samuel Pepys drank his first cup of tea on September 25, 1660, so he wrote in his diary. The use of the individual fork at a meal dates from the mid-sixteenth century. Until then, all Europeans ate with their hands from a common trencher. Of his manner of eating, Montaigne wrote, “I sometimes bite my fingers in my haste.” Around 1609, an English traveler — one Thomas Coryate, who ate with his hands — saw diners in Italy using forks and ridiculed them. The villagers I saw in January 1964 in southern Malawi, scooping stew into their mouths from a common bowl using hand-shaped lumps of steamed nsima dough, now employ spoons and forks.

This argument for the importance of trivial observation is obviously self-justifying, but if you’re alone on the road, you need to be bucked up somehow, and even if the observations are illusions, they are illusions necessary to your existence. And if you aren’t vitalized by fantasies — here I am in this old car speeding through the bush, here I am among tribal people engrossed in a ritual — the experience would be demoralizing. But the implied vanity bothered me, because being a fantasist in travel is simply self-regarding, and much is lost in translation.

I am looking for something to write about, because that’s the nature of this travel, and perhaps of most travel: to see something new — a stimulus; to satisfy curiosity — a pleasure; to follow an itinerary — a narrative. But behind it all, and especially fueling the fantasy, is the need for the traveler to be at large in an exotic setting, to be far away, to act out a narrative of discovery and risk, to mimic the modes of the old travelers, to find similarities and differences.

My ideal traveler is the person who goes the old, laborious way into the unknown, and it is this belief that lies behind my travel, and drives me. I want to see things as they are, to see myself as I am. And look: I am a seventy-year-old man traveling like a backpacker in the middle of Angola, and the only other foreigners I see — six or eight of them — are businessmen hustling to make a profit off the country’s resources. Maybe that’s me too, another sort of businessman, another sort of huckster, someone hoping to make a living by being here and noting down what I see.

I need to be realistic, I wrote as the veranda lights came on, so dim that I could hardly see the page of my notebook, because I have never been more keenly aware of the sadness in wasted time. Angola is perhaps a lesson in wasted time.

When the fierce immigration official at the Angola border post had bared his teeth, scowled at me, and said, “Você é professor?” and I had replied, “Yes. Sou professor,” I was not lying. My letter of invitation stated that I would be traveling in Angola to teach in various schools. Since tourists were not welcome — and what would they do if they did visit? — I needed a reason to be here, and lecturing to English-language students was a persuasive one. It was not a ploy.

I was in Lubango to teach a few classes at the Instituto Superior de Ciências da Educação, a set of buildings and a campus within walking distance of the Grand Hotel. My contact and nominal host was an American woman, Akisha Pearman, whom I met soon after I arrived.

Akisha had lived alone in Lubango, teaching as a senior English language fellow at the institute, for almost two years. She lived in a few small rooms in the center of town. She was one of the people who had told me of the frosty July days (“I had to order winter clothes from the States”), and that nearly every day in the city the electricity went out for three to five hours, that there was a shortage of running water or a similar nuisance. Akisha laughed these off as minor annoyances. Uncomplaining, patient, dedicated, and hard-working, she had been prepared for this life by her two years as a Peace Corps teacher in Mozambique and by her ten years of teaching in the United States, Spain, Korea, and Madagascar. Her Angolan students and colleagues told me they loved her. Akisha had earned that love.

In my what-am-I-doing-here? mood, Akisha was a timely lesson. She made a point of staying positive, didn’t grumble, never gossiped, and she expected the best from her students. She was also a passionate photographer, and though her talk was always upbeat, her photographs were a record of all she had seen. She did not judge or talk idly, but her photographs showed that she noticed everything — the disparities in wealth, the vandalized buildings, the contradictions, the humor, the goodwill, the scheming, and the violence in Angola as well as the joy.

When I said that I needed to adapt my cell phone to Angola and buy minutes, Akisha said, “We’ll go to the mall — we actually do have a mall in Lubango!”

The Millennium, as the mall was called, had been plunked down next to a desolate parking lot in Plaça João Paulo II (named for the pope), a large yellow-painted structure with a high vaulted ceiling that mimicked a night sky picked out in dimly lit stars, the whole interior kept in deliberate semidarkness. In dazzling sunlit Angola such darkness was a novelty. The shadowy stores were built to resemble old Portuguese shops and cafés, with bow windows, antique lamps, and Euro-kitsch fittings, and at the mall’s center was a rudimentary fountain and a pool — no water. A single-screen theater occupied one corner, and the shops sold phones, pizza, shoes, clothes. In another zone of the ridiculous place, a nail salon, three banks, and two boutiques selling hair extensions and wigs, which were desired by many women but (as my friend Kalunga Lima was to tell me later) mocked by Angolan men, who euphemistically laughed them off as tetos falsos — fake roofs.

“Let me show you how expensive these things are,” Akisha said. She took me to a men’s clothing shop. A simple polo shirt that would have cost $20 in the States was priced in Lubango at $120. Men’s suits had price tags in the many hundreds of dollars, and pointy-toed shoes were $500 or more. All the merchandise was imported from China.

Business was good, the stylishly dressed (tight black jeans, stiletto heels, frilly blouse, false roof) clerk claimed when I asked. But the store was empty, there were no more than thirty people in the mall itself, and no one was buying a ticket to the movie. The mall had not yet become a hangout, and the only shop that was busy was the one selling cell phones.

For a few dollars, the woman in the cell phone shop got my cheap phone working. The Internet was unreliable in Angola, it was not much use in Namibia either, nor had it been available where I found myself in the Okavango. Perhaps Africa was going to bypass the email and Internet generation, and communication would be, as in Japan and some other countries, based on smart phone technology — texting, social networking, and not much else.

As we walked around the Lubango Millennium — which was an eyesore, already falling apart — Akisha told me a bit about herself. She was the eldest of five children. Her father, a former professional football player, was a successful coach in North Carolina, and both of her brothers were standout college players — one of them a former NFL running back. Akisha was an athletic presence too, radiating health and strength along with her good sense and optimism. Most of all she was independent. She had liberated herself by joining the Peace Corps a year after graduation from college, and as a teacher in Mozambique had become fluent in Portuguese.

Akisha’s example reminded me of how much I admired people who worked humbly in Africa. Like the best of them, Akisha saw herself as more a student than a teacher, looking to be enriched by the experience. And though she never alluded to it, she could not have found it easy to be the only American in Lubango, a young single woman living on her own in this remote and, from what I could see, inhospitable place.

But she had lived and worked for two years in Inhambane, a sleepy seaside town — long ago an important port — in southern Mozambique, so she had come to Lubango with an understanding of isolation and a knowledge of the damaging absurdities of Portuguese colonialism.

Probably more nonsense has been talked about, and more myths have been created around, Portugal’s imperial adventures than any other nation’s. The most ludicrous was “Lusotropicalism,” a cock-amamie theory and mystique of racial harmony proposed in the 1930s, which posited that because of their unique temperament and culture the Portuguese were the Europeans best suited to adapting to other lands and dealing with equatorial natives — finding (so it was argued) common ground in sympathy and like-mindedness. “We understand the natives better than you do” was the Portuguese boast. This implies not only that Portuguese imperialism had been a triumph, but also that Angolans had colluded in their own enslavement and willingly offered up their diamonds and gold.

But the reality is that Angola’s history has been a colonial tragedy, and sometimes a farce, rife with racism, resistance, rebellion, and death. And the briefest glimpse of any Portuguese overseas territory is proof of the mess they made of their colonies. A dramatic fact, pointed out by a historian of Angola, Douglas Wheeler, is that in the four hundred years from 1579 until 1974 there had never been a five-year period in the colony without at least one punitive Portuguese military campaign. The glory of the Portuguese was their great navigators and discoverers, but they were incompetent administrators, ruthless bosses, and greedy exploiters. The crooked aristocrats and desperate peasants who planted themselves far from home, and finally fled, left nothing behind but derelict slave quarters, empty vinho verde bottles, and gloomy churches.

In Malawi in the 1960s, I met middle-aged Portuguese men across the border, in Vila Cabral, in Mozambique (then a sleepy, underfunded colony popularly known as “Portuguese East”), who had emigrated from poverty-stricken villages in rural Portugal to become carpenters, stonemasons, and barbers in the African bush. Their wives were idle and cranky, screaming at the first servants they’d ever had in their lives. Few of the colonos were able to speak the local language, and it was no surprise when revolutionary movements began to harry them, to hasten their departure. Because of the character of the colonizers, this process was inevitable, as Douglas Wheeler also described, noting that the settler from “an archaic rural society, semi-feudal in some provinces, often tries to cheat the African because he is weaker, and because he himself is used to being humiliated in his poverty back home and has come here to get rich.” The settlers got along well enough with the Africans in villages sustained by their traditional ways. The somewhat Westernized Africans were another story: the new settlers resented the ones who could read, who had ambitions and political ideas. Those Africans were despised and belittled as calcinhas — wearers of trousers.

When I mentioned that the bumbling and often cruel nature of the colonial Portuguese became clearer only after one had actually traveled through a former Portuguese colony, Akisha said, “I have a great story.”

While working in Inhambane, Mozambique, she had become acquainted with a Portuguese husband and wife who, like the ones I had met as a Peace Corps volunteer long ago in Vila Cabral (Niassa province), had immigrated to Mozambique in the 1960s. This was a period when the Portuguese government, under the tenacious, long-ruling dictator Antonio Salazar, created incentives for its poorest citizens to seek their fortunes in the colonies. They were given free passage on ships, lessons in husbandry, and seed money to begin new lives. And of course one of the great incentives was the promise of cheap workers, under the forced labor regime then in place that browbeat village Africans into plowing the fields and serving white farmers.

Akisha, during her first stint in Africa, was impressed that forty years earlier these Europeans had left their modern, native land to start a life in humble, distant Mozambique.

“It must have been a great adjustment to travel all that way from Portugal to Africa,” Akisha had said.

“Yes, in a way” was the response of a Portuguese man.

“So different!” Akisha said. “How did you manage?”

“It was easy, really,” the man said.

“How so?” Akisha asked.

“We came from a poor village in Portugal,” the man said. “In Mozambique we had electricity and running water for the first time in our lives.”

Over the following days I became a part-time teacher at the Instituto Superior de Ciências da Educação in Lubango. My students were Akisha’s English-language group, all of them teachers themselves, improving their skills, many of them intending to return to their own schools, or to use their proficiency in English to study abroad for a further degree — two of them wanted to study law elsewhere.

Nothing is more satisfying in travel than to land in a place and assume an occupation, even a temporary one, as a teacher; to cease being a voyeur and have a purpose and a routine, especially one that involved interacting with intelligent students. I had once been a contented teacher in Africa, so I happily slipped into the role and was comforted with a sense of belonging.

“Many of them want to write stories and poems,” Akisha told me.

Without frankly discouraging them from imaginative writing, I extolled the importance of being an eyewitness, of dealing with verifiable facts and the recent visitable past. I mentioned that foreign journalists seldom came to Angola (but did not mention the reason: the Angolan government hated foreign journalists). A number of the students were older — in their thirties. Some of them had seen war. The town of Lubango had changed hands several times during the civil war, so they had experienced occupation and divided loyalties and the hardships of sieges — shelling, shortages, survival, death, the intrusion of soldiers into their lives. And as a result they had known suspense and uncertainty and fear. This was something to write about.

I suggested structures, I told them stories, and I encouraged them to tell me stories, all of them related to the theme of the eyewitness: something they had seen and experienced, perhaps a vivid childhood memory. And so we talked about early memories, to practice English and to rehearse the stories.

“My mother wanted me to go to school,” Miguel said. “She talked about it all the time, and after a while I was eager to go to school. I had no idea what was in store for me.” He described his apprehension — his mother’s urging, his father’s passivity, his utter ignorance of what school entailed. And then came the day for school, which was a long walk from his village in a remote part of Huíla province. “I sat there in the classroom,” he said, the memory of it making him falter a bit, “and I realized I was trapped. I couldn’t go home. I was afraid. I was captive there.”

“I was with my friends some distance outside my village, walking along a path,” Gomes said, standing and gesturing with his expressive hands. “We were about ten or eleven. We saw a woman approaching us. She rushed to us and said, ‘A house is burning in the village. You must do something!’ ”

The small boys asked what they should do. “First, take off your shoes,” she said. “And please accept this money.” She gave them each a few kwanzas. They were dazzled to have the money, even though it was a pittance. “Now go to the village and help put out the fire.” Taking her for a witch with special powers, they hurried to the village, but found there was no fire. When they returned to look for the woman, they discovered she’d made off with their shoes.

“My earliest memory goes back a long way,” a woman, Dinorah, said in a solemn voice. “I was two years old and lying in my mother’s arms. She held me tight, and I knew she was upset about something, but I didn’t know what. She whispered to me, ‘Kiss your father.’ But I didn’t know where he was. She led me to him and I saw his face. I thought he was sleeping. I kissed him.” She paused for dramatic effect. “He was dead, lying in a coffin.”

In another class I described the use of dialogue. One of the students, Delcio Tweuhanda, had an idea for a novel. Jumas Chipondo had written a series of essays about his life; he was a Lunda-Chokwe, one of Angola’s most artistic people, and had lived as a refugee in Zambia and Botswana for a decade during the war years. Several others wanted to form a group and write a book together, perhaps an oral history. They asked questions and spoke about their plans, and whenever I was with them I was hopeful, for them and for myself.

I made a point of asking them where in the world they wanted to go. Not Portugal, they said. Not Cuba. Not any of their bordering countries, the easiest ones to get to — not Namibia, not the Republic of the Congo, not Zambia. South Africa, perhaps. And, with unanimity, America.

Now the Grand Hotel no longer seemed seedy or abandoned or a place of funereal gloom, as it had when I first moved in; it was my refuge, a peaceful place. Akisha had stayed there for months on her arrival. “It’s like that hotel in The Shining!” I saw her point: a large empty hotel with sinister echoes and ambiguous odors. But I could write there, and so it suited me.

Every morning at breakfast, I sat before a large painting that covered one wall of the Grand’s dining room like a mural. At first glance, it was a European landscape, rich in picturesque details, showing a village of stucco houses with russet tiled roofs, a white steepled church at the center, and a cluster of dignified municipal offices — all these buildings looking solid and indestructible. A ridge of magnificent mountains rose in the distance, and a sky of fluffy clouds, and in the foreground two peaceful cows grazed in a lush meadow.

The only human I saw in the picture was a Portuguese man in a frock coat strolling on a path near the cows. The whole painting, with its soft contours, spoke of peace, serenity, abundance, fertility, permanence, even holiness — the shafts of sunlight like a blessing from above.

The Algarve? No, it was of course a painting of Lubango in its previous incarnation as the colonial town of Sá da Bandeira. Though in style and substance it was a nineteenth-century panorama of a European pastoral, it had been painted (very small date and name in the right corner) by Rolla Tze (perhaps Chinese from Macau?) in 1945, the year of the Grand Hotel’s opening. Nothing of it smacked of Africa — no Africans, no thatched huts, no exotic animals or flowers. At least none was apparent. But standing very close to it one morning — it loomed over me — I found a small black man sitting in tall grass in the deep left-hand corner.

This was how Portugal idealized Sá da Bandeira, hoping that colonials might see it that way too, as Portugal-across-the-sea, awaiting the settler’s ax and plow, beckoning to a pious congregation for the church, which was the present-day Cathedral de São José. Sá da Bandeira was advertised as the sort of market town that existed in rural Portugal.

Although it had never found prosperity, Sá da Bandeira lasted as a colonial fantasy right up to the year of independence. Here is the experience of an American traveler, Mrs. Alzada Carlisle Kistner, arriving with her entomologist husband, David, at the Grand Hotel on their beetle-collecting trip through Angola in 1972 (as she recalled it in An Affair with Africa, published in 1998): “A liveried doorman bowed a welcome; the receptionist, dressed in a cutaway coat, was coolly efficient; servants carried our bags. The flower-filled tiled courtyard had a gorgeous swimming pool and a hedgehog curled up like a ball on the lawn. Our suite had parquet floors and a marble bathroom, where we bathed and dressed for an elegant dinner. Surrounded by hovering waiters, we ate as a trio played ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco.’ ”

Two years after that, all hell broke loose, and the city was today still suffering the effects of the war. It had grown, it sprawled, it was now a city of a million and a half. Nearly all those people lived in hovels — some in a dense shantytown in the heart of the city, which anyone on foot — it was my usual route — had to traverse in order to get to the Millennium Mall, and that meant passing among the shacks, the raucous boys, the beer joints, the mud puddles, and the latrines — and stepping over a dead dog, which was not moved the entire time I was in Lubango.

Looking for ways to spend the time when I was not teaching or writing, I found the ethnographic museum, housed in a small whitewashed villa on a side street. I visited twice, and on both occasions I was the only person in the place. I hoped to find slit-eyed Chokwe pwo masks used in boys’ initiations or a Chokwe body suit of woven fiber. But what I found were objects that I had seen along the way from the border: wooden staffs that the Kwanyama elders had used in the Efundula village; baskets and wooden bowls like trenchers I’d seen; and finger harps, marimbas, fetishes, and carvings that were still being used in the Angolan bush. The centerpiece at the ethnographic museum was exactly the sort of dugout canoe I’d seen a man paddling and fishing from on the Techiua River south of Cahama a week before — revered here in Lubango as an ancient artifact. So both ways of life persisted in parallel, and it seemed that the old way was, if not the more reliable, then the more common, because it was a necessity.

I asked Akisha about the Chinese who’d come to Lubango. She said there were many — hundreds here, thousands on the coast, but they kept to themselves. Like their counterparts in Namibia, they had all arrived within the last few years from the People’s Republic. They ran small businesses, they were engaged in construction, some were farmers, and three of them owned a restaurant in a corner of Lubango.

For our farewell meal, Akisha took me to a Chinese restaurant, which was on a sloping potholed dead-end road. Like many of the other shops, it had a red-painted façade and a wooden porch. But inside, it was China, with sticky plastic tablecloths, a pinkish calendar showing a colorful pagoda, porcelain animal figures, and a small shrine of a gilded, potbellied immortal flanked by a dish of burning joss sticks.

Eight chain-smoking Chinese men sat at one of the round tables, shouting and drinking beer. They were the sort of tough manual laborers I’d once seen in China lashing bamboo scaffolds or digging ditches — hard-eyed and suspicious, and these were wheezy and red-faced from the alcohol. They yelled for food, they yelled at each other, they yelled for the bill. Outside, in Angola, they had to be deferential or circumspect, but inside, in this version of China, they could howl. “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away.”

Like us, they were served by a young woman, Mei, from Tsingtao, and the food was cooked by Zhou, a middle-aged man in an apron. The manager was a woman I took to be about thirty-five, Wang Lin, from Yantai, who called herself Irma; but she told me she had a nineteen-year-old son, so she must have been more like forty-five. Akisha and I had spicy mapo dofu with rice and got acquainted with the owners.

Mei, in her mid-twenties, was a recent arrival. Wang Lin had been in Lubango for a year; she said it was okay — not bad, a little quiet perhaps. But she didn’t miss home.

“I might go back to China for a visit,” Wang Lin said in Portuguese to Akisha, “but not to stay. I am staying here.”

Mei said, “I want to go to Spain for a holiday.”

Zhou said, “This is where I live now.”

Angolans never came to the restaurant, they said, but that was all right. There were enough Chinese and Europeans and Cubans in Lubango to keep the place busy.

Every time I encountered Chinese in the hinterland I felt I was seeing the future of Africa — not a happy future, and not a distant one, but the foreseeable future. They were a new breed of settler, practical, unsentimental, mainly construction workers and do-it-yourselfers and small businessmen, hard to please but willing to put up with tougher conditions than any Portuguese.

Some Africa watchers and Western economists have observed that the Chinese presence in Africa — a sudden intrusion — is salutary and will result in greater development and more opportunities for Africans. Seeing Chinese digging into Africa, isolated in their enterprises, offhand with Africans to the point of rudeness, and deaf to any suggestion that they moderate their self-serving ways, I tend to regard this positive view as a crock. My own feeling is that like the other adventurers in Africa, the Chinese are exploiters. They have no compact or agreement or involvement with the African people; theirs is an alliance with the dictators and bureaucrats whom they pay off and allow to govern abusively — a conspiracy. Theirs is a racket like those of all the previous colonizers, and it will end badly — maybe worse, because the Chinese are tenacious, richer, and heavily invested, and for them there is no going back and no surrender. As they walked into Tibet and took over (with not a voice of protest raised by anyone in the West), they are walking into the continent and, outspending any other adventurer, subverting Africans, with a mission to plunder.

Over the Chinese meal, I mentioned this to Akisha, but she simply said, “We’ll see.”

When I asked her for horror stories about Lubango, she just smiled her kindly schoolteacher smile and gave nothing away. She missed her family, she said, but she was committed to her students and to being self-sufficient. She was a marvel of serenity and dedication, much stronger perhaps than she realized. But that is the way of the teacher in Africa: you get stronger or you go home. She’d become interested in the Portuguese language and wanted to study it more deeply, perhaps in Brazil. Her contract was soon coming to an end, but with friends in Namibia and some in Cape Town she had no immediate plans to return to the United States.

She made me feel small and superfluous, and though that was the nature of the sort of traveler I was, I had begun to accommodate myself to Lubango. After all, I had something useful to do here, so for a time I was not merely a voyeur — or at least, with this effort, I could justify my voyeurism.

I returned each day to the Grand, as if home from a job, and during this time I rejoiced in having gainful employment, both a distraction and a relief, which gave me a greater understanding of the country. If there was any hope here, it lay in these students and teachers, but it was clear that they were underpaid. Some teachers in rural schools, as I read in their essays, were not paid their salaries for months, and had to be supported by donations from the parents of their students. The teachers in Angola, as in much of Africa, were ignored and used badly by their government, which earned billions from its oil and gold exports. Probably many of these teachers would look elsewhere for a future. And this is why foreign teachers are always welcome in Africa — someone else foots the bill.

The routine of teaching in Lubango suited me, and surprised me too, because I had come to like the predictable day. I had spent my life on the road, waking in a pleasant or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning after breakfast hoping to discover something new and repeatable, something worth writing about. I think other serious travelers do the same, looking for a story, facing the world, tramping out a book with their feet. The traveler physically enacts the narrative, chases the story, often becomes part of the story. This is the way most travel narratives happen.

I had for a happy period suspended my travel. That made uprooting myself from Lubango all the harder. The best of travel involves short, intense periods of residence. I had enjoyed the routine of being a teacher. But there is no routine in travel, only early starts and insults, and if there is a rhythm, it is a rhythm of disruptions and shocks and uncertainty — and in Africa the godawfulness of dark, early morning starts and filthy buses.