The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari

14. The Slave Yards of Benguela

ONCE, LONG AGO, when Lubango was a country town named Sá da Bandeira, a railway regularly served it, clattering around steep valleys and rolling hundreds of miles from the high plateau to the arid coastal settlement of Moçâmedes, now named Namibe. No longer. The train fell into disuse, and the tracks were sabotaged in the post-independence war. Buses have replaced the train, Namibe is off the map, and Benguela is the main destination on the coast now, retaining its old notorious name.

Benguela was once among the grimmest slave ports on earth. This swampy, low-lying little town helped populate the Americas with its exports of humans sentenced for life to captivity and hard labor. Consider the description of Benguela in The South African Year Book and Guide for 1923: “Straggling town … formerly a busy place … Many of the old houses are substantially built and provided with large encircled compounds, formerly used for slaves awaiting shipment.” It is estimated that as many as four million slaves were shipped out of Angola or died in raids, on marches to the coast, or at sea. Slaves captured from the interior were kept in Luanda’s and Benguela’s holding pens, where they were fattened for the Middle Passage.

Does any aspect of the Angola slave trade resonate today? Yes, and sometimes in peculiar ways. I was at a café with an Angolan man who said, “Let’s have some peanuts,” and then to the waiter, “Queremos alguns jinguba,” and I caught the word jinguba.

The Kimbundu word had been brought by Angolan slaves to America, where it persists as “goober.” (“Goodness how delicious / Eating goober peas.”) I was later to learn a Kikongo word from the north of Angola that is even nearer, the word nguba, as in the Kikongo proverb urging discretion: Ku kuni nguba va meso ma nkewa ko, “Don’t plant peanuts while the monkeys are watching.”

I was headed to Benguela, but it was not a simple matter. In Africa and around the world, trains leave from the city center, and the bus station is generally on the outskirts, in the poorest and dirtiest part of town. The passenger bus business needs an expanse of cheap space — for parking the oversized vehicles, for maneuvering them and turning them around, and especially for providing them leeway for the mobs that mill about and wait with their bundles so they can board these notoriously unpunctual things. You find that kind of space adjacent to the slums. A bus station in sub-Saharan Africa is not really a station; it is a glorified parking lot, and it is one of the unpleasant inevitabilities of overland travel, not just unpredictable but offensive and rowdy, and haunted by stray dogs snarling over the scraps of garbage discarded by the passengers waiting to board.

It was not yet six in the morning, and a fight was in progress at the Lubango bus station, a bus having just drawn in, rocking in the wide potholes like a ship in a gale: a number of drunks trying to board a bus were resisting their being thrown off by two of the toughs hired to control the crowd.

The noise had woken the dozing passengers, who, with red eyes and wild hair and creased, sleepy faces gaped from the windows, and then, aroused by the brawl, they began screaming abuse. They had come from another town, south of Lubango. Their mockery was not aimed at the rabble or at the struggling drunks but instead at the heavies who were dragging them to the ground, the easier to kick them senseless.

A man yelled from a window in Portuguese, “So Lubango is a place where a drunk can’t get on a bus!”

That owlish observation caused cackling laughter, more abuse, and more of this unrhyming dirty poetry of early morning, but the rest of it was lost in the louder rap music that blared from an amplifier at the ticket office.

I had risen in the darkness of the hotel. I waited in the darkness and stink of the bus station parking lot. A feeble rubious hint of morning light bled sideways into the sky, each puddling bit of brightness making the place look uglier with sharpened details of its decrepitude, and the shouting made it worse. What am I doing here?

Broken signs, slumping power cables, burst-open boxes of garbage, a tidemark of muddy litter, a muttonish smell in the air as of goat breath and decayed meat. Added to that were the overburdened women with swollen cloth bundles bound in string and two or three small well-behaved children, the usual Angolan rapper crowd of oafish boys with baseball caps and earphones, and pretty girls standing daintily in the morning-moistened dust. The sight of these girls made me think that a whole study could be made of hairstyles in Angola — not just the extravagant hair extensions and fluffy wigs, but hair strung with beads or woven into cornrows or twisted into snaky locks, and some women’s heads were beautifully shaved to a shining baldness like polished mahogany finials on Victorian staircases.

The Benguela bus arrived as the sun rose over the low tin rooftops, the noise and the heat rising at the same time. So the urgency to board was combined with the sweat of pushing, and I was part of that same pushing — odd and obnoxious for me, elbows out, to be part of the scrimmage, but necessary or I wouldn’t get a seat.

And when we set off I saw that the habitable part of Lubango, the orbit of my teaching duties, was really very small, that the city was a set of small Portuguese plazas surrounded by shanty settlements, just like every other town of any size in Angola. And if you didn’t know any better, you’d never think it was a country floating on a sea of oil. You’d think, as some sentimental people do: Poor little beat-up place — we should do something to help. We should send money, maybe lots of money; Angola (with annual revenues in the billions) seems to need money.

Outside of town we passed the now familiar roadside rusted and burned-out tanks and military trucks near the fallen-down Olde Worlde Portuguese farmhouses, their tile roofs shattered. This was at a place called Viamba, as we approached the edge of the Serra de Quilengues escarpment. Whose tanks, whose trucks, whose houses? Impossible to tell. Time moves on, no one cares, the scrap yard grows; no one mourns the dead in these rural tableaus of abandonment.

An hour into the trip, at Cacula, we stopped at a small market where hawkers — pleading women and dusty, spaniel-eyed children mostly — offered food on trays, fat tomatoes, stacks of small bananas, discs of sliced pineapple, loaves of bread, piles of bread rolls, and plastic bags with squished and greasy potato fries. Several women balanced bunches of onions on their heads, and one with a basin of chicken pieces spotted with flies approached me and asked, “Qual?”

Again the existential question: Which of these old, dark, flyblown, and inedible chicken legs do you desire, senhor?

After that, everyone was eating on the bus and arguing in a jeering and companionable way. We traveled under jacaranda trees that were shedding their violet blossoms, the blooms bursting and crackling under our wheels, and we slowed for the cows that crowded the road.

At greater intervals a general cry was raised from the back of the bus, and then the driver shouted what sounded like an order and bumped to a stop. Fifteen or so people got out to piss. They did not go far. All pissed in full view of the bus and its seated passengers. There was no indecency in this, no urgency either. Perhaps their staying close to the roadside was not laziness but a result of the land mines that, everyone knew, had been laid — and never deactivated — just off Angolan roads, especially here in the southern provinces. The men stood, feet apart, and hosed the tall grass. The women lowered their tracksuit bottoms, squatted, and spattered; some used a shawl, shrouding themselves a few feet from the bus and dripping like leaky tents. As on the trip with Camillo, it was more like a pissing contest than a call of nature, and it was accompanied by continual chatter — the pissers cheerfully calling out to one another, holding conversations as they casually whizzed, laughing and teasing.

The paved road was too good to last. It gave way to gravel and sent us sideways. And then, two hours into the journey, we left the gravel road for a detour through woods and bush and clusters of hot, exposed mud huts of poor villages. In some places the road was under construction, in others it had washed out in the recent rains. The delay didn’t matter much. We had left the escarpment and were tipped downhill into the heat. Bumping over bony tree roots, near a ramshackle hut on one of these bush tracks, a small, misshapen, paralytic boy struggled forward, hanging on to his stick, stabbing it into the dust and hobbling. The bus driver slowed down — as Camillo had done a week before. He handed over a package of bread, thrusting it through the window, and the skinny boy touched his heart in thanks.

Whatever inconvenience it was to be riding this way, slowly and uncomfortably, at least I was privileged to witness this impulsive act of human kindness toward a crippled and abandoned soul, propped up on a stick in the middle of the bush.

Traveling overland, as I had from the border, I saw that Portuguese Angola had been a colony not of towns but of outposts, most of them failures. And independent Angola was not much better — still a country of isolated outposts, but bigger ones, and just as hungry. Around noon, five hours into the trip and not even halfway to the coast, we came to Quilengues, which was a haunted little town, frozen in its period, perhaps the assisted-immigrant 1950s. Quilengues had a church, colonial houses, and shops beside the road. It seemed a whole intact place, but two of the student teachers I’d known in Lubango had taught in a school here, and told me they often were not paid for months — eleven months in one year — and when finally some money did come in, it was apportioned in small installments. So the teachers were held hostage: they could either stay and wait or leave and forfeit everything they were owed. A pretty place, Quilengues, but the inner story was of cheated teachers, underfunded schools, and severe water shortages. Again, this in a country immensely rich in oil revenue.

In most African travel along bush tracks of this sort you’d expect to see animals. As I had noticed earlier, not in Angola. Not a gazelle, not a monkey. It was as though, from the conspicuous absence of game, its soul had been stolen. There was plenty of room for animals to range, enough habitat and fodder, and many waterholes. On the way to the coast we rode through distinct landscapes and climates, descending from the cool highlands to great sloping bush to grassy plains. But they were landscapes without any animals except a cow or a goat, only the occasional village of thatch and mud.

The day growing hotter, we entered a belt of bush areas that had seen violent fighting, based on the evidence of half-buried, rusted, and blown-up tanks. Many represented old battles, but one at Chongoroi, which we rolled through, had taken place only a dozen years before. In March 1998, a hundred armed men from Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA forces descended on Chongoroi, burning the vehicles of UN monitors and the vans of the World Food Program, killed two people and injured three, before making their escape. Instead of a memorial marking the dead and wounded, there were overturned trucks with shell holes in their sides.

Nearer the coast, the villages were larger, and one town, Catengue, a former Portuguese settlement, had been rebuilt — the first rural town I’d seen that looked habitable, with old, smooth-sided buildings and mended roofs. One reason for this might have been that it had become a railway town again, the train from Benguela passing through twice a week, but not today.

More food stops, piss stops, fuel stops, roadside markets with chickens, oranges, bananas, and greasy fries, with more angry yelling from the back of the bus, the driver responding by yelling back and laughing. The man next to me shrugged at the shouts, and explained, “Muito lento,” which, like a tempo indication on a musical score, was easy enough to understand. The bus was going too slowly for the impatient passengers.

At one of the food stops, as I searched for a cup of coffee, a man from the bus asked me in English, “Senhor, can I help you?” I was the only branco on the bus, and perhaps also the oldest. When I told him I was looking to buy coffee, he said, giggling a little, “No coffee here.”

“But Angola grows coffee.”

“Yes, but,” and he laughed again, shrugging, “this is …” His gesture meant: We are nowhere, we are in the bush, there is nothing here. Then, “What is your country?”

I told him what he wanted to know.

“What you think about Angola?”

I said, “Angola very nice.”

And at that moment I waved away a woman who held out a basin holding some sticky, shapeless mess, as if showing me a sample of stagnant pond life.

The man translated my compliment for his friend beside him, who practically gagged on the banana he was eating — two Angolans by the roadside, sharing the Americano’s hilarious joke. He said Angola very nice!

They were Miguel and Delfino — Miguel was the English-speaker. They had been at a wedding in Lubango and were headed to Benguela to catch another bus to Lobito, where they lived. They too complained that our bus was slow. We should have been in Benguela by now, Miguel said. And he shrugged.

“In Angola we have bad situation,” he said. “Nothing is right. Nothing is justice. You see the road? Bad. You see the food? It’s …” He made a sour face. “Lobito is good. My home is good. But we have slow business. Everyone want” — he fidgeted his fingers, making the money sign.

I said, “Angola has oil. Angola has gold and diamonds. Angola has money.”

“Big people has money,” Miguel said. “Big people has too much of money. But not” — he nodded at the market activity, the women with trays on their heads and infants on their backs, the children with buckets of plastic water bottles or baskets of oranges, pleading for customers, the girls swinging bags of fries, the basins brimming with shapeless, sticky pond creatures, everyone jostling to sell their wares, smilingly destitute, competing and elbowing forward before the bus left and a great sunlit silence descended on their market once more — “not leetle people.”

“But you’re a big person, Miguel,” I said. And he was — physically imposing, fat-faced, with a potbelly, perspiring in a blue-striped sweater-vest that he’d probably put on that morning in chilly Lubango and hadn’t yet taken off. Delfino was smaller, dapper in a black leather waistcoat and pointy-toed shoes, listening attentively, watching me with close-set eyes.

“Me, I am big” — and Miguel clapped a hand to his belly — “but I has no money.” He leaned toward me and said, “Government people has money — and their friend, and their family. Politician people has money.” He was whispering now. “They keep. They don’t geeve.”

I made a sympathetic noise in my sinuses.

“Is bad,” Miguel said, and after explaining in Portuguese to his friend, Delfino muttered something Miguel agreed with: “Is trouble.”

“Big trouble?”

He nodded and, sticking out his lower lip for emphasis, said, “Big trouble. Leetle people not happy.”

I wasn’t that happy myself. I was thinking: I have heard this before. I have seen this before. The unending echo of underdevelopment, but with a difference — more people, more squalor, a greater disconnect between the governing rich and their parasitic friends, and the poor who live without hope.

We came to a weird plain of bush, with maybe a thousand baobab trees, more than I had ever seen in one place, no other trees near them to diminish the power of their swollen bagginess, their fat bulgy trunks and stubby, wrinkled, rootlike branches. Because baobabs are a favorite of elephants, for the water stored in the pith of their trunks and branches, they are often stripped, splintered, and gored by the great beasts’ powerful tusks. But in the absence of elephants this baobab forest remained intact.

The long straight road down sandy slopes to the coast, the last twenty miles of this ten-hour trip, offered a panorama of the scoops of shoreline bristling with palm trees, the Bay of Benguela, and the South Atlantic Ocean, an expanse of shimmering blue silk on this sunny day. And then we were in honking, screeching traffic on narrow tropical streets.

Hot, flat, coastal Benguela was the opposite of cool, hilly, high Lubango. But both were ramshackle and disorderly, praised by people who lived in them by saying, “You should have seen this place ten years ago!” — the sort of backhanded compliment you hear in Calcutta. But they had reason to say so. The American journalist Karl Maier, in Angola: Promises and Lies, described how in 1992 pro-government forces shelled the Benguela headquarters of the occupying UNITA army, which had dynamited the central market. “Both sides carried out summary executions,” Maier wrote. “Bulldozers were brought in to scoop up hundreds of bodies that had been left rotting in the streets.”

The bloodshed in Benguela had been horrific and relatively recent. But I had come for a reason. I had agreed to teach English classes here, too.

“Benguela of the slave yards,” the Angolan novelist Pepetela writes in his family saga, Yaka. Pepetela, which means “eyelash” in Kimbundu, is his nom de plume; his real name is Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos. This novel is a good introduction to the town, an account of the immigrant Semedo family over four generations, beginning in the nineteenth century, the family growing as Benguela grows, first with the slave trade, then in commerce and shopkeeping and farming, but always exploiting African labor. Yaka opens with two vivid memories of young Alexandre Semedo: the first, his fear of the slave yards, “monotonous songs and mysterious drumming mingled with the sound of chains,” and the second, the sound of lions roaring at night. “Lions never frightened me, they were my first lullaby.”

Fiction gives life to places in expressive ways that no history book can begin to suggest. Characters in novels admit us to intimacies — not true of scholarly chronicles, no matter how detailed. We know the people in novels better than we know our friends. Without underlining the racial complexity of colonial Angola, Pepetela takes for granted the various strata of white society; in Yaka, Alexandre’s mother refers to herself as belonging to “the lowest class of whites” because she has no servants or slaves, and says, “I’m a second-class white because I was born here.” This sort of coloration gives Angolan fiction an odd texture and emphasis — neither Zimbabwean nor South African fiction, which is often full of white settler families, strays into such racial classifications, or describes whites as so poor they work as menials and don’t have servants.

In the Benguela of Yaka, Alexandre reflects on how “his mother died with a complex about being a second-class white; she had wanted a first-class white [to marry] her son.” Status is everything in the remote colony — exiled criminals looking for respectability are “offended when their rotten past is recalled.” But no one plays by the rules, only thieves win, and physical passion dominates characters’ lives: Father Costa, a rural priest, has defiantly fathered fifteen mulatto children.

Since Angola is so seldom written about, and fiction is always so revealing, I made a point of boning up on Angolan authors. The Angolan novel is unusual; it is unlike the typical African novel of tribal life, of the yearning for freedom and an awakening political identity and the coming of independence. The Angolan novel is an anarchic and multicultural hodgepodge, as self-referential, incestuous, and homegrown an artifact as everything else in isolated and xenophobic Angola. Its theme is often disappointed expectations.

Such novels are not for the literary critic or the connoisseur of fiction. They aren’t much fun, and it’s tedious work to finish them. But I wasn’t interested in whether these books were well or poorly written. I only wanted to know if they gave any clue to the inner life of the country, and even badly written or clumsily translated books often manage that. The Angola of Angolan fiction (of Pepetela, of José Luandino Vieira, of Arnaldo Santos and Sousa Jamba) encompasses the lives of black Africans, usually Kimbundu-speaking people, but also of white peasants and white slum dwellers, many of whom speak a shantytown slang of mixed Kimbundu and Portuguese words.

Yaka portrays a Benguela of rednecks, rich landowners, racism, family secrets, impartial cruelty, casualties of war, family strife, litigious yokels, brutal sex, hard drinking, and the long shadow of the past hanging over all of this fictional hothouse. It sounds like Faulkner, down to the Southern Gothic sweep and scope, but it is not so felicitous as Faulkner, and like many African novels it is sententious and lacking in humor. Yet the book gives access to Benguela. Yaka is a chronicle of the country seen through the eyes of a large multigenerational family whose first ancestor, Oscar, is a convict sent to Angola in 1880 for killing his wife — ten years in Angola is his punishment, as well as banishment to the colony for life.

The strict chronology of the novel is helpful, like a flesh-and-blood history book: the early settlement, the slavery and forced labor, the growing family, the fierce wars, the tribal battles, the uprising of 1961 that led to clandestine networks of rebels, the departure in 1975 of the Portuguese from Lobito, the port “cluttered up with crates of every possible size … All of Angola is going in those crates, the lieutenant said. Dismantled machinery, diamonds in the petrol tanks of cars, textiles, appliances of every kind, the most incredible things … even things not thought to be valuable, wooden statues and masks, everything sells in Europe, leopard skins and mats, ivory and baskets, it’s a case of plunder.”

The last section of Yaka concerns the shaky independence and the subsequent war, when Alexandre Semedo’s great-grandson (adopted by some Cuvale people from southwest Angola) fights in the guerrilla war “that will be famous, behind the enemy troops, and the occupation of Benguela will only last a hundred days, one hundred dark days.”

The reference is not to occupation by the Portuguese, but after independence by the South Africans, whose soldiers commandeered the city, intimidated its people, and handed it over to the government opposition after a major battle in 1975, which took place in the area I traveled through, from Lubango to Benguela. Most of Pepetela’s fictional locations (among them Dombe Grande, and Capangombo on the plateau, near Humpata) can be found on a map — where the characters moved, where they farmed and owned shops, where they looked for wives, where (near the coast road and the Caporolo River, which I had crossed late in the day) the Portuguese in the 1940s set off in hunting parties to provoke Africans and massacre them after they’d managed to engage them.

The first place I saw in Benguela, because I had rushed to the sea-front for relief and a breeze, was the central slave quarters. It’s one of the city’s landmarks, an old, low prisonlike fortress, a stockade in stone, facing the ocean. Because it is so near the water, the slave quarters is a popular place for youths to gather, and though some of them were selling ice cream and candy and chewing gum, all of them looked hungry.

Benguela was not a natural place for the Portuguese to settle, yet it was identified as a prime site for development in 1615 by Manuel Cerveira Pereira, who named it São Filipe de Benguela after his patron, King Philip II of Spain and Portugal. But it was swampy, unhealthy, and inhospitable. As the novel Yaka dramatizes, it was for centuries a town of petty shopkeepers and slave traders, nearly all of them, of course, exiled convicts.

From its beginnings as a small slave port in the late 1600s, Benguela would a hundred years later rival Luanda in importance. It never had an extensive settler population. Even into the twentieth century the number of whites in Benguela and Lobito was still tiny (the “native town” of the 1920s guidebooks). But then the white population of Angola was relatively modest. Until 1940 ethnic Portuguese constituted less than 1 percent of Angola’s inhabitants, and it was not until 1950 that their proportion approached 2 percent.

The government of Portugal, attempting to stabilize the white population, tried to create an agricultural colony near Benguela in 1885. It failed because it was run by ex-convicts who hated farming and were tyrannical toward their workers. The failed farmers were pressed into the army, but they failed at soldiery too, because of their mindless brutality or their simple desertion. The historian of Angola Gerald Bender noted that by 1907 the majority of crimes in Benguela were committed by these ex-convicts.

All eyewitness accounts of Benguela through the years describe a small miserable town supported by the slave trade. After slavery ended, forced labor was instituted. The practice was the same; it was just a change of name, from slave (esclava) to servant (serviçal). Like the slaves, the servants were bartered for guns and cloth, marched to Benguela and Lobito, and sent to other Portuguese colonies that needed labor, among them São Tomé and Principe. An average of three thousand people a year were shipped out in the 1920s. Some Portuguese observers objected, and in the 1940s one of the harshest critics, Captain Henrique Galvão, a long-serving government official, compiled a report of abuses committed against the Africans who had been forced into servitude. The Salazar government responded by arresting Galvão for treason and banning his report. Despite the introduction of some labor reforms in the late 1940s through the late 1950s, as I learned in Lubango, forced labor continued into the 1960s. So you could say that until just the other day, Benguela had been no more than a depot for human trafficking.

Wandering the city one day, I happened upon a church built in 1748 and dedicated to the city’s patron saint, São Filipe de Benguela. It was a weekday, but even so, a dozen people were earnestly praying inside, a group of women near the altar loudly declaiming a service together as a sort of chorus. The church was cool, shadowy, a refuge from the heat and noise and dust, and the eight praying women — black, white, brown — seemed to assert a continuity of belief that had survived the centuries, because in addition to their search for rubber and copper and gold and slaves, the Portuguese had also wanted to find souls to convert. Along with fattening them, the colonizers ritually baptized every slave and forced laborer in kneeling groups before being chained and rowed out to the ships.

Another place I saw soon after I got to Benguela was an area in the southern part of town where Chinese developers and laborers were putting up six big, ugly multistory buildings, some of them pale pink, others canary yellow, still others pastel blue. Chinese industry, Chinese people, Chinese effort, Chinese paint, and Chinese investment are evident everywhere in the port cities of Benguela and Lobito.

The first Chinese workers to arrive in Angola were criminals, prisoners of the Chinese justice system — thieves, rapists, dissidents, deserters, and worse, an echo of the earliest immigration from Portugal. Characters in Yaka speak of being exiled to Angola to work off ten-year sentences. The first workers the Chinese sent were convicts shipped in chains, to work off their sentences in forced labor. Angola, having begun as a penal colony of the Portuguese, became just recently a penal colony for the Chinese. These Chinese convicts were the labor force for China-Angola development projects — the ugly oversized pastel buildings, the coastal roads, the dredging of the deep-water port of Lobito — and after they had served their sentences, the agreement was that they would remain in Angola. Presumably, like the Portuguese degredados, they would elevate themselves to the bourgeoisie or a higher class of parvenu.

Possibly, again like the Portuguese convicts, the Chinese would become the loudest racists, and for the same reason. “The inferiority complex of the uneducated criminal settler population contributed to a virulent form of white racism among the Portuguese, which affected all classes from top to bottom,” the political historian Lawrence Henderson wrote of the early settlers. The Portuguese convicts became the most brutal employers and the laziest farmers, and a sizable number turned furiously respectable, in the way atoning whores become sermonizing and pitiless nuns.

After the first wave of Chinese convicts (“We started seeing them around 2006,” a man in Luanda was later to tell me), more shiploads of semiskilled Chinese workers arrived. As with the early Portuguese convicts, they were all men. Then, a few years later, women were allowed to work in Angola, like Wang Lin and Mei, whom I had met in Lubango. Now there were Chinese marriages, Chinese children with Angolan nationality, Chinese shopkeepers, and Chinese stonemasons, plumbers, carpenters, and heavy-machinery operators up and down the country.

How many Chinese were there in Benguela and Lobito? Everyone I spoke to had a different figure, but always a high one. One estimate — wrong, it turned out — was a quarter of a million. I put these high figures down to fear. As in Namibia, Chinese businessmen were at the low end of the construction industry — for example, manufacturing cinderblocks to sell to Africans to make slum houses.

One of the newest buildings I saw in Benguela was the railway station, a fenced-off, flat-roofed, one-story building; it had been designed and put up by the Chinese in 2011 to replace the old bombed-out one. The Benguela Railway, Caminho de Ferro de Benguela, had been formed over a century ago to create an 835-mile link to the town of Luau, at the eastern edge of Angola, near the Congo border and the copper mines in Congolese Katanga. An Englishman, Robert Williams (after whom a rural station is named), had been the moving force behind the railway, a concession granted by the Portuguese. Work on the tracks began in 1903, at a time when there were fewer than 10,000 whites in the whole of Angola, most of them degredados — convicts, deserters, dissidents. But the railway was not in full operation until 1928, when the Portuguese boasted that it was a money-earning transcontinental line, taking Congolese minerals to the Atlantic coast and part of the overland route to Mozambique, on the other side of Africa.

Over the years, the Benguela Railway became a target for saboteurs, until it was totally destroyed during the long civil war. One challenge to rebuilding was that land mines had been laid up and down the line. Over a recent ten-year period, 2,000 mines had been found in the rail corridor and removed by a British charity called the HALO Trust. (In all, 68,000 mines in Angola have been cleared by this gallant organization, which is still uncovering land mines in the country.) The Chinese, loaning $300 million to the Angolan government and providing both skilled and convict labor, helped with some of the mine removal, relaid the track, put up new stations, and rebuilt the infrastructure as far inland as Huambo, with the intention of reaching the Congo border.

The word was that the line was working. But the new, glass-fronted Benguela station was shut, and no one knew when it would open. No schedule was posted, nor did anyone know when the next train to Huambo would be leaving.

“What’s Huambo like?” I asked.

“It’s like Lubango, but not as nice.”

I have been known for saying that I never saw a train without wishing to board it. I could have tried harder to find information about the Benguela line, and I might have managed to buy a ticket to Huambo. But having just arrived from the central plateau, where some of the same towns were linked by the line, I had an intimation of the trip. I already knew the railway towns of Catengue and Binga, and I had a pretty good idea of what Huambo would be like. So — almost unknown in my experience — I shocked myself by saying, “I don’t think I’ll take that train.”

“I thought you’d jump at it,” the American woman who’d brought me there said.

“I’m not jumping.”

“I’ve heard you love trains.”

Yes — what happened? Why was this trip going flat? Was it because I always had to fight for a seat, and kept seeing the same dreary sights, the same bad roads, the same sorry market women, the same slums? In Africa every rural village is different, but every city is the same, and a perfect fright.

The American woman was Nancy Gottlieb. She had lived in Angola, mostly in Benguela, off and on for seventeen years, and she swore that the city was improving. One of her several projects was running an English-language school. I taught a few classes for her and also gave classes at the Instituto Superior de Ciências da Educação in the center of town.

The institute’s name was grand, and the students and teachers were attentive. They spoke English fairly well — English was their subject, and half of them were employed as teachers in schools in and around Benguela. They were fond of books, they said, but when I pressed them, none could tell me the difference between fiction and nonfiction; a novel, a history book, a memoir of family life, a short story about an atrocity, an animal fable — they were all pretty much the same (“stories”). This slender grasp of definition and form seemed something of a handicap in teachers of literature, like a chef having no sense of smell.

“Books are so expensive,” Sylvia volunteered when I urged them to read a bit more. Sylvia was stylishly dressed and a college teacher. True, everything was expensive in Angola except bananas, but the people were scholars. The rest of the class agreed: books were unaffordable.

“What do you read?” I asked.

They named some decades-old Nigerian paperbacks they’d been given. They were unfamiliar with the Angolan novelists I’d been reading.

Domingo said, “Can you give us some of the books you wrote?”

“I didn’t bring any with me,” I said. “Why don’t you ask the Ministry of Education, or one of your billionaires!”

My lessons were mainly an effort to encourage them to write about events they had witnessed, economic changes, the progress of a wedding or a funeral, the novelty of Chinese settlers, even (I delicately suggested) political repression and intimidation — because the government reacted violently to any rallies, demonstrations, or protests, beating and arresting people, deploying dog squads and water cannons.

The great irony, if not outright farce, of human rights in Angola was that one of the first prisoners of conscience selected by Amnesty International, at its founding in 1961, was Dr. Agostinho Neto, who was named “political prisoner of the year” because he’d been locked up by the Portuguese. After he was released from prison, Neto went on to become the first president of Angola, and soon he began jailing his opponents, who themselves became prisoners of conscience. So Amnesty was in the paradoxical position of appealing for justice for the victims of the very man they had successfully championed. I mentioned this to the students at the institute, who weren’t impressed, responding blandly and probably with some truth that worse things happened in Angola.

After I got to know them better, I asked them where they had been in their country. Apart from visits to Luanda and Lubango, they had not traveled much, and none had been south of Lubango. They had no desire to see Angola’s rural areas, nor any African country. Where in the world did they wish to go, I asked. Like the students in Lubango, they were unanimous in choosing the United States. They were specific about places — New York, Chicago, Florida, California. On the rare days when the Internet worked in Benguela, these students trawled it for images of America. They were certain about what they’d find there.

“And Texas,” Francisco said.

“Why Texas?”

“Because everything is bigger in Texas.” This caused laughter, but after class, when I asked him if he was serious, Francisco said confidentially, as though giving me a travel tip, “Austin, Texas, is the best place for parties. Lots of bars, lots of music and women. You can have fun there.”

“Can’t you have fun in Benguela?”

“Not that kind of fun.”

Money was on their minds. Money was on mine, too, because only cash, preferably U.S. dollars, was acceptable in Angola. No hotel or restaurant would accept a credit card. Not having enough cash was not an excuse — an ATM machine would be pointed out. “Use that.” And it was in Benguela that I used my card with the highest credit limit and found that it was repeatedly turned down. This was the card that had been hacked in Namibia, my identity stolen. The card was unusable, so I depended on the dwindling stock of dollars in my bag. I had not known about the credit card fraud; I assumed that there was something wrong with the Angolan ATM machines, since there was so much wrong with everything else in Angola.

My money worry added to the melancholy of Benguela, the complacencies and longueurs of hot afternoons, stifling even next to the ocean, the turbid greeny-brown sea and the yellowish froth from its short breaking chop, the ruined pier to which the fattened and baptized slaves had been marched before being taken out to the slave ships.

Added to this was news of unrest in the Congo and the continuing Boko Haram massacres in Nigeria — the killings by fanatical Muslims of anyone who looked Christian or Westernized or foreign. I had thought I might head that way. But hundreds of Nigerians had been killed in the north of their country, and every week brought another bloody attack.

I was restless, and that made me curious about Nancy Gottlieb, who had stayed in Benguela and ran the English school. I asked her bluntly how it was that she had landed here. She said she had a degree in business, but had become disenchanted with the companies she’d worked for in the States. She had learned of a Danish charitable organization with a “people-to-people” philosophy. She joined it and was sent to Benguela in 1994 to help run a school. In the following years she had lived through a rough period; for instance, in 2001 the school was attacked and some of the students were kidnapped by anti-government soldiers. The uncertainty, deprivation, and occasional violence lasted until the end of the war.

I asked what kept her — a slight, single woman — for so long in a provincial town in Angola. She said that after spending time in India doing Vipassana meditation, she’d had an insight. “I sort of said to myself, ‘If I don’t find the man qualified to be the father of my children, I think I would rather spend my time helping children in Africa.’ You know, a kind of thought that you just have and keep to yourself, but you know that you had it.”

And after seventeen years she still found her life here rewarding, and felt safer than in many cities she’d known in the States.

“Everyone I meet has problems that are so much bigger than mine,” she said. “And yet for the most part they’re almost always happy, laughing, energetic, smiling.”

I was told there was a man in Lobito whom I should meet. Lobito was only sixteen miles up the coast, and on the way I stopped at a ruined fort on a high mound outside the town of Catumbela, just above its namesake river. Nearby, but at a greater height, on a hilltop, the luxury Riomar Hotel was being finished by Chinese laborers — one of the many projects of the president’s billionaire daughter, Isabel. The mansion of the governor of Benguela — it, too, looked like a hotel — was also a feature of the hilltop.

The old fort, on the flat-topped Catumbela mound of yellow clay, had dense stone walls, with interior cells and apartments, square and squat, commanding a view of the surrounding countryside. The mansion and the hotel were exceptional. All the other dwellings along the river were slum huts or shanties.

A notice on the fort gave its name as Reducto de São Pedro, reducto indicating a redoubt or a stronghold. The text in Portuguese ran as follows: “This [fort] was made at the cost of the inhabitants of Benguela, in honor of the municipal administration [because of] the continual insults made to the white people by the indigenous people of the district” — os continuous insultos feitos aos brancos pelos indigenas deste districto. “First stone placed on 5 October 1846.”

It was quite an indictment. Because of your threats and insults, we had to build and pay for this fort. Look what you made us do!

I discovered afterward that in 1836 a settlement of free whites had been founded nearby on the river, but it had failed. Still, a handful of Portuguese remained, and punished the upstart locals. Later in the 1800s, a trader named António da Silva Porto lived on the river near here. He was a sertanejo, or backwoodsman, a trader who circulated from the coast to the interior. Polygamous, with a number of African wives and many mestiço children, and with an uncertain business, Silva Porto was a Portuguese Mr. Kurtz, but jollier, less successful, and, judging from one of his diary entries, realistic about his residence in Angola. Porto wrote, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed are king. As poor as I am now, if I retired to Portugal today, I would amount to nothing; on the other hand, I am who I am around here as long as I possess one piece of trade cloth.”

That neatly sums up the entire Portuguese adventure in Angola — hopeless, shiftless, horny Europeans exploiting Africans who they believed to be more hopeless and more shiftless. And it was a legacy, the corrupt Angolan president, Eduardo dos Santos, still in power after thirty-two years, continuing to exploit the people and accusing his critics of spreading confusão — chaos.

Lobito, just across the Catumbela River and up the road, was the brightest place I had seen so far in Angola — a deep-water port that was being improved by the Chinese, a large oil depot, a town center that was only mildly vandalized, and an older restored hotel, the Terminus, which had once been connected to the Benguela Railway.

The hotel and this somewhat salubrious part of Lobito was on a narrow spit of land called the Restinga, a Portuguese word for sandbar, which it much resembled. This finger-shaped peninsula protruding from Lobito was an upscale ghetto, with beaches on both sides, lined with palm trees and grand villas, modest bungalows and two-story apartment houses. A few of these buildings dated from the 1920s, but most of them had been put up in the 1950s, the time when Portuguese immigration to the colony had been encouraged with generous subsidies. And you could see that on this piece of land a colono might feel safe, since it gave the impression of being an offshore island.

The person I’d come to see was a tall, handsome man of about sixty with the sonorous name of Rui da Câmara e Sousa. It turned out that he had read some of my books and was happy to sit and tell me about his distinguished family. He was a descendant of a well-known governor of Benguela, and was himself a college professor and a real estate entrepreneur. His villa, built in 1954, was a pretty place, but as with all the homes on the Restinga, there was a continual clamor of shouts and music from boom boxes of the people picnicking on the beach just across the narrow road, some of them swimming, others eating or dancing under the palms and ironwood trees, many of them screaming at each other. Rui said he was used to it. He’d been born in Angola.

His earliest ancestors, having sailed from Madeira to Moçâmedes, down the coast, had been pioneers on the Huíla Plateau — in Sá da Bandeira, still fresh in my mind as Lubango — and Humpata. When I had hiked around Humpata one day, and seen the Boer graves from the 1920s, I had been struck by how hilly, cool, and fertile the land had been, how like a farming community in Portugal, the very qualities that had attracted the Boers and the Portuguese. Madeira at the time was poverty-stricken, like many of the places (the province of Bragança in Portugal, the Azores) from which Portuguese peasants emigrated. In Angola these people were largely subsistence farmers, most of whom cultivated sweet potatoes.

“It took about two months to travel from the coast to Humpata,” Rui said, meaning a journey by ox cart. “But it was a good place to settle — the Portuguese there called themselves ‘the white tribe of Angola.’ ”

Rui ran through the rest of his pedigree, not boastfully but rounding out the family portrait. His great-grandfather Captain António Barrada de Câmara had been military governor in 1900, and he died in a hunting accident. Rui’s grandfather Hortensio de Sousa, governor of the province, had not been forgotten; a bridge and a park in Benguela had been named for him. Hortensio had been very poor in Portugal, a law student, and then a lowly employee in a Lisbon bank in 1914. When the First World War started he became involved with a dubious man in Luanda.

“The crooked man was Alves do Reyes,” Rui said. “He wanted to be like Cecil Rhodes but was more like Bernie Madoff in his scheme to make counterfeit notes. His business was good, of course. When Reyes was arrested for fraud, my grandfather became prosperous.”

Though the province was in constant turmoil in the 1920s, Hortensio flourished in Benguela. He was one of the few men in the small white population who was not a criminal exile and who did not become a shopkeeper or a trader. As an administrator, he rose to be governor and had lived in that huge mansion I had seen on the heights of Catumbela.

“It took a long time for the Portuguese to have continuity here,” Rui said. “It is a recorded fact that it was not until 1906 that the first Portuguese person was born in Angola, and survived. All the other babies died.”

I said, “But very few women came to Angola.”

“No women came!” Rui said. “That’s why I say that the greatest contribution Portugal made to Angola were the pombeiros.”

The word was new to me.

“They were the indigenous people who wore shoes,” Rui explained — agents, free men of color, all of them mulattos. “Pombeiros made the country. They were the ones who contacted the Europeans and facilitated the commerce. They supplied the slave traders with captives. They traveled into the interior. In some cases they traveled deep into Africa. Long before Livingstone made his famous trip to Angola, the Portuguese traveled on foot to Mozambique.”

David Livingstone not only traversed the continent, walking 1,500 miles in six months, arriving in Luanda in 1854, but he also refused to abandon his men, the Makololos who’d been his porters and guides. His unstated reason was that he still needed the men as guides and porters, and so instead of accepting passage on a ship, he turned around and walked back, eastward, to the coast of Mozambique, describing and mapping and naming Victoria Falls on the way.

Rui was hospitable, and as a builder, speculator, and Angolan citizen he was optimistic about the country’s future. Nonetheless, it was baffling to hear him extol the influence of the pombeiros. In his eagerness to explain one of the permanent institutions that the Portuguese had created in Angola, he settled on these mestiços, these pombeiros, who’d made their living as slave traders, commission agents, and middlemen, swapping cloth and beads, copper wire and rifles, for humans, who were rounded up, handed over to the slave master, then shipped out in chains.

We talked a little about the word pombeiro. I wondered if it came from the Swahili word pombe, for alcoholic liquor; someone who sold pombe might be called a pombeiro. The Portuguese adopted many Swahili words, and there are Portuguese words in Swahili: meza for table, sapatu for slipper, and the word gereza — prison — is derived from igreja, church. Later in my trip, an Angolan of my acquaintance said that pombe meant “pigeon roost” — a euphemism for slave quarters. But Fernand Braudel writes, “The word pombeiro may come from pumbo, the busy market in what is now Stanley Pool” — today called Malebo Pool, on the Congo River. Whatever the origin of the name, Braudel added, pombeiros “exploited their African brothers even more cruelly than the whites had.”

My black Angolan friend didn’t agree with Rui, and said that the mestiços were disliked by blacks and regarded as collaborators.

Still, it was a novelty to be sitting in a pleasant house on a sunny day in Lobito, hearing the family history of a man whose ancestors had settled the country. Arrayed on tables and on shelves were African artifacts — household objects, masks, stools, fetishes, and baskets — created by the masters of Angolan carving, the Lunda-Chokwe and the Yaka people. Even the most mundane wooden implement, such as a stirring spoon or a headrest or a pestle, was finely made, chip-carved and ornamented, and Rui handled them with a connoisseurship that suggested inner knowledge. There was no pretense to this Angolan-born white man, who considered himself a member of the white tribe. He was full of plans, too, for business deals and local opportunities. He was an optimist, he said. The country had a great future and he saw himself sharing in the coming prosperity.

The conversation came to a sudden halt, though, when Rui’s cell phone rang, and he raised his hand to me and showed his palm in a wait-just-a-minute gesture.

Then he began speaking efficiently and rapidly, and the voice on the other end was a near-hysterical weeping, easily audible, though I was six feet from the phone.

“Filipa,” Rui said, trying to interrupt. “Filipa … Filipa … Calma, por favor, ouça, Filipa …”

He soothed the disturbed voice, spoke a little more, and hung up. Then he said, “That was my daughter. She has just had a bad automobile accident on the road from Luanda. I think she’s all right, but she is very upset and her car is destroyed. They happen very frequently on that road — terrible car crashes. I must go to her now. You will excuse me?”

On the Restinga in Lobito, at an outdoor seaside café, I was given a celebratory meal, because I would be leaving in a few days for Luanda. The others at the table were American expatriates, with whom I had spent the day.

It was a beautiful evening, festive with strolling lovers holding hands, diners, Angolan families, youths on cell phones or tapping out text messages, all well dressed, their big cars and SUVs parked nearby.

At our table we were talking about a man we’d met, Jim, a Texan, who worked for Exxon Mobil in the design and manufacture of steel platform legs for offshore oil rigs.

“There’s more oil in Cabinda than in Nigeria,” he’d said.

Jim did nothing but work — ninety days straight was normal, and on his few days off he drank beer. His wife and six children were in Houston. For safety reasons, his company did not allow him to travel after dark even the short distance to Benguela, and he was accompanied by bodyguards whenever he went out in the evening in Lobito. An odd working life, but he’d seen odd places before — “oil countries are always the weirdest” — Algeria, Pakistan, the Persian Gulf states. Jim didn’t complain. This was one of the wealthiest countries he’d ever been in, though not many Angolans did the work; his employees were British, Filipino, and Bangladeshi. He’d be leaving Angola soon. Jim said without much interest that he had never traveled the sixteen miles from Lobito to its sister city of Benguela.

“The oil people are subjected to strict travel rules,” one of my expatriate friends said. “They can’t cross the Catumbela Bridge after dark.”

We had pizza, drank beer, and talked about how pleasant this meal was, how like a café on the Mediterranean, a light breeze from the ocean, the laughter, the fragrance of the food, the lovers, the drinkers.

And that was when I saw the children sidling near. At first I thought they were polishing the luxury cars — one was flicking a rag at a new Mercedes parked five feet away. But it was a ruse: the boy with the rag seemed to be busying himself so that he could have a plausible reason to approach us.

He was about nine or ten, extremely thin, barefoot, in a torn T-shirt and ragged trousers. He had the large bright eyes of someone either very sick or very hungry. The boy inched forward as we finished the meal, a third of a pizza still remaining on one plate, an unfinished crêpe on another.

The boy remained watching, the others behind him, all of them looking hopeful. Then the boy dared the question in a whisper, a word that sounded like termina, easily translated, and the woman who spoke Portuguese said we were indeed finished, and pushed the plates of scraps nearer to him.

He took the food from the plates into his skinny fingers and walked a few feet, and there, in the happiest and wealthiest enclave I had seen so far in Angola — the stylish Restinga — I saw the boy wolf down the food and then stumble away, and in this desperate expression of hunger, gasping from the effort of it.

Rui’s daughter Filipa survived the crash. Rui was not so lucky. Nine months later, alone in his house — his wife and children were on vacation in Portugal — he was found by his maid, murdered in his bed, “his head smashed to pieces,” it was reported in Correio da Manhã. “A trail of blood.” There was no sign of forced entry, “which leads police to believe that the entrepreneur had opened the door to acquaintances.” The police also speculated that the motive might have been robbery. “It was a house with many valuables but all that could be said for sure to be missing were a television, a computer, and a mobile phone.”

“My father had no enemies,” his son Ricardo told the newspaper Sol. “He will be buried here in Lobito. He was born here, like his father and grandfather. This is his land and where he wanted to be.”

The person who had introduced me to Rui told me one gruesome detail that resonated. “He was bludgeoned to death by a big stick, the kind used to pound corn to flour — it was in his house.” The stick was one of the finely made, heavy village pestles he had shown me in his collection of African artifacts, which he had held lovingly, as though they were family heirlooms.