The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari

15. Luanda: The Improvised City

ROLLING NORTH ALONG the coast, past the twisted wrecks of car crashes (I stopped counting at forty), and churning through towns clogged with yellow sludge washed from the sand cliffs by the rains, the roadside itself a tidemark brimming with litter, I seemed to be traveling into greater misery. Not my misery — as a flitting bird of passage, I had nothing to complain about — but the misery of Africa, the awful, poisoned, populous Africa; the Africa of cheated, despised, unaccommodated people; of seemingly unfixable blight: so hideous, really, it is unrecognizable as Africa at all. But it is, of course — the new Africa.

Angolans lived among garbage heaps — plastic bottles, soda cans, torn bags, broken chairs, dead dogs, rotting food, indefinable slop, their own scattered twists of excrement — and in one town a stack of dead cows, bloated from putrefaction, looking like a forgotten freightload of discarded Victorian furniture, with the sort of straight stiffened legs you see fixed to old uncomfortable chairs. This blight was not “darkness,” the demeaning African epithet, but a gleaming vacancy, the hollow of abandonment lit by the pitiless tropical sun, appalling in its naked detail. Nothing is sadder than squalor in daylight.

Never mind, there is more squalor down the road in the next town, looking exactly the same, yet in spite of its familiarity just as frightening. The point beyond which you cannot find any more words for the squalor is the point at which you think: Why go any farther? It is like the futile feeling of describing a vastation, the ultimate ruination, a bomb crater, an earthquake, a war, or a massacre: your sigh echoes the despair you’ve just witnessed. Some of the South African townships I’d seen inspired this feeling and perhaps could have prepared me for what I was seeing now. But a nightmare does not prepare you for the next one. Each new nightmare is singular in its own ghastly way. And so it is with African cities.

For some weeks now I had been thinking that, in the overcrowded cities of Africa, I learned nothing except that people who had come to those places endured the dirt and discomfort because they were buoyed by their hopes of leaving and felt safer in the dense anonymity of a slum. A sense of temporariness made the squalor bearable. It was the same rationale that travelers had in the bus stations, which were merely filthy, oil-soaked parking lots: “Yes, dreadful. But, senhor, a bus will come to take us away!” No one conceived of living for any length of time in an African slum — without light or water it wasn’t possible — only of going away, and the ultimate wish was to be delivered to another, less pestilential country.

“Where do you want to go?” I always asked the students.

“Away from here” was the inevitable answer.

An Angolan was not someone working, but someone waiting. You couldn’t blame them for wishing to flee, though some were remarkably conceited in one respect. When Angolan students were awarded a scholarship to study in the United States, or were offered a three-month, get-acquainted, five-city tour there, they often insisted on flying first class — so I was assured by the officials who processed these travel grants. And when the demand for a first-class ticket was turned down (for even the American ambassador flew economy), the student applied to the Angolan government for an upgrade, which was routinely approved. After all, the Angolans in power traveled first class.

When I confided to the few foreigners I met on the road that I found all this dreary and unpromising, they either disagreed with me or were noncommittal. Some said they had hopes. I felt they couldn’t bear to look hard, or perhaps were more idealistic than me. Or maybe they saw something I had missed. Some argued convincingly that Angolans had been brutalized by their past, or had seen much worse in their colonial history and in their wars — this part of the coast had been a chain of battlefields in the fight for Luanda. My own hopes were dwindling, and I thought the slow, wearisome trip might be making me delusional. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I expected too much.

In that inquiring mood I met Kalunga Lima, an Angolan, younger than me, whose sentiments echoed my own — but he knew much more about the country than I did. In my relief, and in this spirit of agreement, he became my friend. He articulated what I felt.

“Something is coming here, something I fear,” Kalunga said. “This is a country of young people, and very few of them have jobs. All were born after Dos Santos took power. They don’t know any other government. They don’t know their history. They have no idea of what happened in the war.”

He glanced down at me writing this in my notebook. I said, “Can I quote you?”

“Someone has to say it.” He went on talking. “These young people will show their anger — at prices, at corruption, at injustices. This is an intensely corrupt country. Everyone in power gets a commission.”

I asked him for examples.

“You can’t get a diploma or a certificate at any school without bribing or paying off the teachers. Everyone in the government takes bribes. The whole country is based on bribery. It will end badly.”

He was talking fast. I was still writing, and looked up for more.

“I think the tide will turn,” he said. “Look at all these idle youths. They sit around in the slums, but they see what’s happening. The government lets the Chinese put up their buildings. They let the foreign oil workers earn their income and pay their bills. These youths are not involved. All they do is watch from the musseques” — the slums. “They are getting angrier.”

“Yes?”

“Paul, listen. The infant mortality rate here is among the highest in Africa.^* The roads are terrible, the housing is awful, the schools are useless. People don’t have water. And it’s a government of multimillionaires. Profits from oil alone are forty billion dollars a year!”

Kalunga said everything that was on my mind, and was thoughtful and eloquent. In his indignation he had the authority that came of living and working in the country. He shrugged when I pointed out a nearby group of tough-looking policemen, and said that maybe they’d arrest him for sedition, or spreading alarm and despondency.

“Those cops?” We were at a sidewalk café. It was nine at night and the traffic was heavy; the street, Rua da Missão, was one of the city’s busiest. “They’re waiting to stop a car so they can get a bribe. They call it a gaseosa. ‘Give me a soda.’ ”

Within five minutes they had pulled over a van and were huddled with the driver, demanding the payoff Kalunga had predicted.

An Angolan in his mid-forties, Kalunga was heavyset, balding, and physically powerful. He had an intense gaze and the sort of face that seemed lit from within, suggesting high intelligence. He was a scuba diver, a professional photographer, and a filmmaker. He usually rode a big Kawasaki motorcycle. One of the first things he told me was that he often traveled on this bike from Luanda to Lubango, stopping only for food and fuel — almost six hundred miles on bad roads and bush tracks. He was unlike anyone I had met in Angola, and I could not remember having encountered an African of his insight and objectivity, who spoke so freely and with such candor.

That was in Luanda, a few days after I had arrived from the road. The trip north from Benguela had started at five on a dark morning, at the bus station, as usual a bleak oily field. As we swung north toward Lobito, I noticed things I’d missed before: a huge new (Chinese-built) soccer stadium, a vanity project for a Pan-African tournament and a reminder of how many schools could have been built or improved with the money; a new (Chinese-built) airport, not yet opened; a new (Chinese-built) bridge over the Catumbela River; and the deepening of Lobito’s port, Chinese workers doing the dredging.

Farther on, the garbage and the sight of wrecked lives, people existing like castaways at Xilip, Cangulo, Sumbe, and Porto Amboim: the slum dwellers crowded and immobile like their own trash heaps. Why did they fling away all this garbage, fouling the very places they lived? Between the towns, the river valleys were green, still wooded, and most of the beaches empty, glittering scoops of looping bays and headlands, no fishing boats onshore, no boats at all, just the running carpet of yellow sand next to the glare of water.

The main road was narrow but straight and paved, and this symmetry created a greater danger than rutted, potholed gravel because it emboldened drivers to speed. The consequences littered the roadside — burned-out trucks, minivans, and crashed cars the whole way to Luanda. One of the most recent wrecks, I now knew, belonged to Rui’s daughter, Filipa.

Nine hours of this, with cows, goats, and dogs to steer around, and with stops. But a stop would be fifteen minutes in a muddy courtyard of a coastal town, yellow sludge up to my ankles as I sloshed to the shack selling — what? Greasy bags of poxy fries and piles of flyspecked frango (“Which one, senhor?”) and no bananas. And a chat with Agostinho.

“What your country?” was a question I could answer, but “You tourist?” was a hard one.

I said, “I don’t know.”

“You business?”

“No business.”

“You teacher?”

“Sometimes.”

He poked me in the chest with a big blunt finger and laughed, saying, “Why you come here?”

“To see this,” I said. I pointed to the heaps of garbage, the market women squatting against their baskets of bruised fruit and fanning away flies, the children whining for food, the rapper boys, the beaten dogs, the bullet-scarred shop fronts, the stacks of pirated DVDs, the strangely overdressed girls in tight slacks and curly gleaming hair extensions, eyeing me with disapproving pouty faces.

And Agostinho welcomed me in the national language.

I was surprised to see the wide empty beaches. Perhaps close-up they would look as befouled as the towns, but at this distance, seen from the higher coast road, they appeared wave-washed and clean and desolate. In Luanda I was to meet a young, athletic Portuguese diplomat who told me that on most weekends he drove down the coast to surf the waves here at Cabo Ledo and Cabo de São Bráz. He surfed alone, he never saw other surfers.

From the coast, some inland stretches were green, villages showing through the trees, some of them clusters of small thatched huts, others tracts of one-room cinderblock houses with tin roofs. Areas of the landscape had been burned out or deeply eroded, and looked blasted by time and the elements (and artillery shells), but no matter what lay inland, the seashore beneath the sloping hills was lovely — remained lovely, probably, because it was uninhabitable. No one could live on or near the beach. Nothing would grow in the sand. The water was undrinkable. The traditional knack for small-scale sea fishing had apparently been lost.

In the afternoon we crossed the Kwanza, a wide river for which the Angolan unit of currency is named (kwanza, a Kimbundu word, should not be confused with the Swahili word kwanzaa, meaning “first”). The bridge over the Kwanza had been blown up many times and was being improved again — Chinese design, Chinese laborers, Chinese money.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, this was a significant boundary, the river somewhat mystical for Angolans, a setting of myths and folktales and many battles. The land surrounding the Kwanza seemed almost idyllic. But not long after we passed it — thirty miles from the capital — the Luanda blight began. Soon there were no trees, only shacks and people and bare soil. The blight was not simply the small shacks, cement-block houses, roadside dumps, and stricken villages sitting in a sea of mud; blight was also evident in the new, larger cement structures, unfinished or abandoned or vandalized and sitting in seas of mud.

What appeared to be a modest building boom was in reality cutthroat opportunism, random and shoddily put-together real estate ventures — ugly houses and grotesque skeletal structures projected to be hotels. Why would anyone stay in these hideous buildings surrounded by slum huts? The building boom had been outstripped by the growth of squatter camps, hillsides of shacks. Buildings were rising, but slums were also growing — the buildings vertically, the slums horizontally. Like the South African pattern of migration, people from rural areas kept coming — the burgeoning shantytowns outstripping any slum improvements, the low mean city of new arrivals visibly sprawling.

In a bus that stopped in traffic for twenty minutes at a time, and with the continual dropping off of passengers, I thought I must be near the center of Luanda, so I got off with some other riders. The place was called Benfica, a district of heavy traffic and ugly buildings, stinking of dust and diesel fumes. Africa, yes, but it was also a version of Chechnya and North Korea and coastal derelict Brazil, places without a single redeeming feature, places to escape from.

As I stood at the roadside, tasting the grit, a small car intending to avoid the clogged traffic sped past, banged into a road divider, flew sideways, and, deformed by the crash, swerved off the road. A man with a bloody face and hands pushed the driver’s side door open and, seeing him, bystanders laughed. The bloody-faced man staggered, his arms limp, his mouth agape, like a zombie released from a coffin. He was barefoot. No one went to his aid. He dropped to his knees and howled.

“Idiota,” a man next to me said, and spat in the dust.

I became conscious of entering a zone of irrationality. Going deeper into Luanda meant traveling into madness. Everything looked crooked or improvisational, with a vibration of doomsday looming. I would have been happy to get on a bus going in the opposite direction, but I had a dutiful sense of needing to follow through on my plans, continuing north into the insanity.

Many places I’d been in the bush — Tsumkwe or Grootfontein or Springbok — had been described as “nowhere.” Yet that was not how I saw them. They were distinctly themselves, isolated though they might be, settlements with a peculiar look — the look of home. But this Benfica was the very embodiment of nowhere, and on the way to nowhere, the twitching decrepitude of urban Africa. Standing next to the sheet-metal shop, the blowing dust, the big trucks and fumes, the noise and the heat, I thought how this was in microcosm the whole of the city experience in most of Africa, though up to now I had avoided facing the fact. And at that point I hadn’t yet seen the full extent of Luanda’s awfulness.

From the immensity of the slums, the disrepair of the roads, and the randomness of the building, I could tell that the government was corrupt, predatory, tyrannical, unjust, and utterly uninterested in its people — fearing them for what they saw, hating them for what they said or wrote. Though the regime was guilty of numerous human rights violations, it was not outwardly a politically oppressive place. The police were corrupt, but casually so — Angola was too busy with its commercial extortions to be a police state. It was a government of greed and thievery, determined to exclude anyone else from sharing, and Angolan officialdom had an obsession with controlling information.

I knew of many instances when investigative journalists were arrested for doing their jobs — two of them around the time I was in Luanda. In one case, a print journalist, Koqui Mukuta, was beaten and locked up for reporting on a peaceful demonstration, and twenty of the activists were also arrested. In another example, a radio journalist, Adão Tiago, was jailed for reporting episodes of “mass fainting,” possibly caused by the release of toxic industrial fumes. But the Angolan government does not actively persecute the majority of its people; it is a bureaucracy that impoverishes them by ignoring them, and is indifferent to their destitution and inhuman living conditions.

A society of shakedowns and opportunism is inevitably a society of improvisation. That came across vividly in Luanda: the improvised bridge or road, the improvised hut or shelter, the improvised government, the improvised excuse. Angola was a country without a plan, a free-for-all driven by greed. It was hard to travel through the country and not feel that the place was cursed — not cursed by its history, as observers often said, but cursed by its immense wealth.

A sense of hopelessness had weighed me down like a fever since I’d stepped across the border weeks before. And with this fever came a vision that had sharpened, coming into greater focus, as if inviting me to look closer. My first reaction was a laugh of disgust at the ugliness around me, like the reek of a latrine that makes you howl or the sight of a dirty bucket of chicken pieces covered with flies. After the moment of helpless hilarity passed, what remained was the vow that I never wanted to see another place like this.

The xenophobia that characterizes Angolan officialdom in the remote provinces, small towns, and coastal cities is the prevailing mood in the capital, where hatred of outsiders seemed intense. Individually Luandans were friendly enough, sometimes crazily so, screeching their meaningless hellos. Nancy Gottlieb, in Benguela, saw this as “happy, laughing, energetic, smiling,” but it seemed to me nearer to frenzy. In crowds they pushed and jostled with the mercilessness of a mob, and anyone with a uniform or a badge or any scrap of authority was unambiguously rude or downright menacing.

Friendliness is helpful to a stranger, yet I could manage without it. Being frowned upon or belittled is unpleasant, but not a serious inconvenience — no writer or traveler is a stranger to hostile or unwarranted criticism. But xenophobia of the sort I found in Luanda, and on an official scale, institutionalized alien-hating, was something new to me. It seemed odd to be disliked for being a stranger, and while the foreigners I met in the capital had their own explanations for this behavior (slavery, colonialism, civil war, the class system, tribalism, poverty, the cold-hearted oil companies) and had ways to cope with it, I found it inconvenient to be so conspicuous and developed a general aversion to being despised.

Luanda was a surprise because it had been to me, like much of Angola, a foreign land without a face. The reason for this silence or absence of description was that the Angolan government severely restricts the entry of foreign journalists, pretending to be contemptuous, accusing them, in their favorite buzzword of paranoia, of spreading confusão; outsiders disrupting the smooth back-and-forth of bureaucratic thievery. But contempt was the wrong word — contempt is inspired by superiority. A truer word was fear; politicians and businessmen alike were terrified of being found out, of anyone telling the truth about this corrupt country.

When Luanda does get into the news, it is usually a hooting headline to the effect that the city is practically unaffordable to foreigners: “The most expensive city in Africa!” The Economist, the BBC, and other media outlets have run such stories, with grotesquely colorful details, about the unreasonable sums you had to pay to get very little, which caused expatriates to complain. The people who suffered most from Luanda’s high cost of living were not the expatriates but, of course, the urban poor, the people huddled in the musseques. They were mainly a silent class. Not a sullen class, though; Luanda’s slums were characterized by blaring music and high spirits bordering on hysteria.

And when I heard of the foreign expatriate couple who paid many thousands of dollars for a tiny room in which the electricity often failed, or hundreds of dollars for a modest restaurant meal, I suspected that they were obliquely boasting, because what kept them in Luanda were their huge salaries. “My rent is seven thousand dollars a month,” an expatriate in the oil industry told me. “And there are people who pay eight thousand a month who don’t have water half the time.” The only reason foreigners came to the city was to make money, and they stayed because their salaries kept growing as oil profits increased. Oil production figures had just been revised upward, output approaching two million barrels a day, at $100 a barrel: a billion dollars of gross revenue every five days, an almost unimaginable cash flow.

Luanda was a hardship post — it had been that way throughout its history — but it had become a boomtown based on oil. No traveler had ever praised Luanda in its poor days of the past, but it was much the worse more recently for its wealth: the bad restaurants where it was impossible to get a table, the stinking bars where it was hard to order a drink, the expensive neighborhoods with potholed streets, the traffic jams in which people sat for hours in their unmoving BMWs, Mercedes, or Hummers — I saw more bulky, overpriced Hummers in an average day in Luanda than I saw in a month in the States. Or the bad hotels where locals said I’d be lucky to get a room.

I found my way to the city center, and at the reception desk of a newish but already seedy hotel I was told they might be able to fit me in for three nights. I thanked the clerk for her hospitality.

Unsmiling, being busy, looking away from me, she said, “Pay in advance. Three nights. That will be eleven hundred dollars. Cash please. No credit cards.”

“And you might not have hot water,” came a teasing voice behind me.

I had no alternative. The whole of Luanda was a convergence of oil and mining interests, vying for the city’s few hotels and restaurants (and prostitutes). The guests at my hotel were foreign workers in the national industries — some rough types in old clothes, especially rowdy in the evening, and the slicker, nastier-looking operators of all nationalities in their new suits, making deals in oil, diamonds, and gold. The words “oil, diamonds, and gold” have such allure, and suggest glitter and wealth in a fabled city fattening on its profits. But this was not the case. The city was joyless, as improvisational as its slums — hot and chaotic, inhospitable and expensive, grotesque and poor.

It had always been a city of desperation and exile. No one went to Luanda for pleasure. Criminal exiles were succeeded by slavers, and later by traders in rubber and ivory, like King Leopold’s Belgians next door in the Congo. When the rubber and ivory trades declined, Angola returned to slavery and then forced labor. But these cruel roles were never mentioned. Ask any Portuguese to explain his country’s relationship to Angola and you’ll be given a version of Lusotropicalism, how the Portuguese had a natural affinity for the dusky people in these warm, sun-kissed lands. But the reality was that Portugal, having imposed itself on the land, was completely out of touch, socially and culturally, with Angola. One small example: Angolan music was not allowed to be played on the national radio station — the only radio station in the country — until 1968.

The city had never elicited any praise. A traveler in Luanda in 1860, quoted by the historian Gerald Bender, reported a town “ankle-deep in sand … Oxen are stalled in the college of Jesuits.” You might say, “But it was 1860!” That’s true, but it was the premier city in the colony, and the colony had existed for more than two centuries. Later in the nineteenth century another traveler reported Luanda as “a burning furnace [with a] cohort of mosquitoes, spiders, lizards, and cockroaches — an infernal scourge.” In the mid-1920s, “Luanda was described by a Portuguese commentator as cidade porca — ‘pig city’ ” (Douglas Wheeler and René Pélissier, Angola). At that time, only two places in Angola, Luanda and Benguela, could claim a skilled, working populace of “trousered blacks” — caminhos, as they were known in Angola. No Africans wore trousers elsewhere. Not that it really mattered, but the Portuguese boast — largely a self-flattering fiction — was that, as inspired imperialists, they had created a whole class of assimilados — indoctrinated, educated, assimilated Angolans.

Even in the 1940s Luanda was small, with a mere 61,000 inhabitants. The population increased rapidly in the 1950s and ’60s. Most Portuguese were happy to get away from the mother country then, a time when only 30 percent of households in Portugal had electricity and less than half had running water. Migration was a step up, and continued into the mid-seventies, when whites numbered well over 300,000. We know that figure because just before independence there was a frantic scramble of Portuguese to flee Angola, and that was the number that left — virtually all of them. One vivid urban myth still making the rounds of Luanda describes the fate of a young Portuguese girl abandoned by her parents in their urgency to escape the country. The girl was raised by the family’s former maid in a musseque, the solitary white waif in a black slum.

In 1974, the year of freedom and bolting colonos, the serious fighting began, bitter warfare that had never been seen in the history of this embattled country, as two main factions and their foreign supporters (Cuba on one side, South Africa on the other) skirmished to possess the land. The nearly thirty-year war finally ended in 2002 with the killing of the opposition commander, Jonas Savimbi, with an Israeli-made rocket (Israelis were said to be complicit in the assassination). Angola was the embodiment of Rebecca West’s dictum in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: “It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of a skunk.”

A country that has been so besieged, battle weary, and burned out, subjected to decades of fighting and uncertainty, can perhaps be forgiven for being half mad and dysfunctional. The Luanda of 1991 and ’92, which seems to me like only yesterday, is described in Karl Maier’s Angola: Promises and Lies as a city under attack, a ghost town of artillery damage and corpse-strewn streets, its population of refugees supported by food drops from the UN’s World Food Program. Without calling attention to his own bravery, Maier reports intimidation, persecution, massacres, and limpeza (murder under the name of “cleansing”). In Luanda, Maier finds evidence of mass executions and hidden graves: “I detect movement, a scurrying among the graves we pass. Closer inspection reveals small tunnels the width of a beer can. There are tiny passageways everywhere among the tombs — rats are burrowing into the graves.”

This, then, was the heritage of Luanda. Without oil wealth, it would have remained just another rotting African city by the sea, like Freetown or Monrovia or Abidjan, the horror capitals of West Africa. But it was floating, bobbing, buoyant on a lake of oil, and so it was busy. More than busy: it was out of its mind.

Don’t listen to me. Listen to José, a man of thirty-five or so, a middle-level functionary in the oil industry, born in the province of Cabinda — site of the oil wells, most of them offshore. A serious, slightly flustered, and candid soul, José confided his doubts to me. He didn’t know me, I didn’t know him; we had met casually in a Luanda bar over a Cuca beer, and my direct questions provoked him.

“There is something wrong with this country,” he said. “I have been to the U.S. on oil business. I was in Texas. I could see how different it was from this.”

“Weren’t you tempted to stay in Texas?”

“Yes. Because it was so nice. But how could I stay? It’s not home.

Your country is not my country.”

“Where exactly do you live?”

“You wouldn’t know the name. My town is in Cabinda — I love this town. But it’s hard to get to. For one thing, I can’t go by road to Cabinda, because that means passing through the Congo, and that is not possible.”

One of the geographical anomalies of Angola is that oil-rich Cabinda is a separate, isolated province surrounded by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a weird result of Portuguese colonial expansion. But it has proven valuable only recently. When John Gunther traveled in Angola for his Inside Africa (1955), he was unimpressed by anything in the country, and he dismissed Cabinda entirely, as a remote area without any resources. “One geographical curiosity is Cabinda,” Gunther wrote, “an enclave of Portuguese territory separated from the rest of Angola by the mouth of the Congo. Not much is known — or is worth knowing — about Cabinda.” Cabinda is the source of virtually all (95 percent of the national revenue in 2011) of Angola’s immense wealth. Being prosperous and cut off, with some educated people, the province even has its own secessionist movement, which now and then sets off a bomb or sabotages a building.

José didn’t want to talk about that, and I couldn’t blame him — after all, I was a foreigner with perhaps too many questions. And I was a noncommittal American. The CIA had a long history of meddling, its covert operations designed to further Angola’s instability, as I knew from reading In Search of Enemies by a former CIA operative in Angola, John Stockwell. Yet José seemed eager to unburden himself.

“Angola,” he said, shaking his head. “There’s something wrong. You can’t treat people like this!” He sighed in exasperation and looked at me closely.

“You have traveled here?”

“A bit.”

“You see how poor are the people? But others are so rich. Some people in big cars, just sitting, expensive watch, jewels, suits from Lisbon. And outside the car, the women on the street, no shoes. You see them, they carry things on their head.”

“And they live in the musseques.”

“Yes. This city is so dirty! I am here for a business meeting, but if my company asks me to come here and live, I will have to pay three or four thousand dollars a month for a little room. It’s a problem for me. I can’t do it. I would go anywhere but here.”

“So what do you think is the problem, José?”

“The government is the problem,” he said without hesitating. “They don’t care. They are just stealing money from the oil business.”

“Like Nigeria.”

“Worse! Much worse — and Nigeria is terrible,” he said. “We need a change — the whole government should just go away. We should get a new one that will use the money better.”

A bit breathless from having spoken his mind, he seemed to have surprised himself with his own candor. He asked me what I was doing in the country.

I said, “I’m just visiting.”

He said, “I’m sorry it looks like this.”

No foreign newspaper reported the weirdness of Luanda, though the writer Pepetela had published a hallucinatory novel about the city. Perhaps to avoid censorship, his 1995 book The Return of the Water Spirit is oblique, depending for its effect on the strange collapse, week by week, of tall modern buildings in Luanda, as if from the effects of a curse. The manner of destruction is a mystery, seemingly bound up with the violation of the serene habitat of a resident spirit — possibly the disturbance of “the old African identity.” But the curse is simple enough to understand: it is the blight of incomplete and misdirected modernity. Urbanization has so upset the natural order of things that the land itself has become seismic and unstable.

This fanciful fiction is penetrated by occasional glimpses of reality, as when Pepetela describes daily life in wartime Luanda: “ ‘How much lower can we sink?’ people asked while standing in the queue, either for the bus, or in front of the store with goods that few of them could afford to buy, or at the hospitals that had neither medicine, cotton nor gauze, or in the schools that had no books and no desks. Luanda was filling up with people fleeing from the war and hunger — at a rate that was as fast as it was suicidal. Thousands of homeless children loitered in the streets, thousands of youths sold and resold things to those that drove past in their cars, countless numbers of war amputees begged for alms at the market. At the same time, important people had luxury cars with smoked glass. No one saw their faces. They drove past us and perhaps they didn’t even look so as not to have their consciences made uneasy by the spectacle of all that misery.”

This description of Luanda in the early 1990s can easily stand for the Luanda I saw almost twenty years later. So, for all its obliqueness, the novel is prescient. And two characters who make cameo appearances in the narrative are other living Angolan writers, Arnaldo Santos and José Luandino Vieira. Vieira, who was born in Sambizanga, the same slum where the current president, Dos Santos, first saw the light of day, celebrates the slum as a vortex of energy. Santos is a minimalist poet, Vieira one of the first novelists of the revolution and himself an early political prisoner.

All three writers — Pepetela, Santos, Vieira — are white, but identify themselves as fully Angolan. White writers in South Africa also identify themselves as South African, and they are, but they come from a privileged, or at least an educated, class, whereas these Angolans are from the poorest level of society, slum born and bred. Another important Angolan writer, but much younger, is Sousa Jamba, born in a rural village near Huambo in 1966. Jamba spent much of his youth as a war refugee in Zambia, then shuttled between Britain and the United States, where he was educated. After publishing three novels, Jamba returned to his home village in 2004 and reported to the BBC that the place was in much worse shape than it had been when he left it decades before, during the war years: “The school has fallen apart … [The students] have to bring their own chairs, the windows are completely broken. They have no pens or pencils. I find it very sad that one of the wealthiest countries in Africa can have kids who don’t have pencils.”

I’d previously met Jamba in London, and Vieira in Portugal, where he had rusticated himself to a small village. Both men were likable and intelligent but had the stunned and rather solitary air of exiles: a look of lostness. Born in a slum in Luanda in 1935 and raised in poverty, José Vieira was an early target of the Portuguese, arrested by the colonial authorities as a dissident when he was twenty-four. Two of his novels, The Real Life of Domingos Xavier and The Loves of João Vêncio, and his short story collection Luuanda, are expressive, written in an almost untranslatable patois (so the translators attest; I read them in English), a combination of Kimbundu and Portuguese peculiar to the Luanda shantytowns, the ghetto idiom Vieira had learned, a “literary eloquence founded on slang, patois, and pimp terminology.”

Over coffee in the Portuguese town of Matosinhos, Vieira told me that he was still routinely turned down for a U.S. visa because of his old political beliefs, his imprisonment by the Portuguese, and his former militancy. Since Pepetela and Santos still lived and wrote in Luanda, I made an attempt, through an intermediary, to meet them. And I said that if they were interested, I would be happy to speak at the Angola Writers’ Union or meet them there for a cup of coffee.

This quaintly named organization, a bureaucratic collection of like-minded (that is, approved) writers, was a cultural throwback to the Soviet Union’s adoption in the 1960s of Angola’s liberation struggle. The Agostinho Neto Mausoleum in central Luanda was another Soviet throwback, inspired by the mummification in Lenin’s tomb. Because of the avowed Marxism of one faction, many Angolans in the sixties and seventies were more inclined to study in the Soviet Union than anywhere else, and were offered Soviet scholarships. President Dos Santos was a Russian-speaker who had been educated as an engineer in Baku, Azerbaijan, and whose first wife had been Russian. (It was their daughter, Isabel, who had become a billionaire investor in Angola, and was touted as one of Africa’s five richest women.)

“They don’t want to meet you,” my intermediary said of my proposal of a cup of coffee with the Angolan writers at the writers’ union.

“What about my giving a talk? Did you mention it?”

“They had a problem with that.”

“What sort of problem?”

“They don’t see the point of it.”

“Of my speaking to them?”

“Of listening to other writers. They’re funny that way.”

“Writers like me?”

“Any foreign writers.”

“So what did they say?”

“That they didn’t think there was anything you could tell them that they didn’t already know.”

“Probably true! But maybe they could tell me something,” I said. “And what about literary curiosity — or any curiosity?”

“I guess they don’t have it.”

What they had — their chief trait, the affliction of Angolan officialdom — was xenophobia, a bit awkward in any writer and rather a burden. It made much of their writing humorless, self-righteous, and provincial, which was another reason their writers’ union was necessary to them, because it legitimized them as writers. They had an engraved certificate they could frame and hang on the wall, the way dentists and massage therapists did. And, precious in that politically protected way, they could go on writing their fantasies, and be rewarded by the dictatorship, while the whole country was falling to pieces before their eyes.

Yes, they probably would not have wanted to hear me say this sort of thing to them.

In the meantime, I rattled around the city. The traffic was unmoving, the gridlock incessant. “It takes hours to go a few miles!”

people said. “I have a two-hour commute!” The sidewalks were broken and obstructive. Blue-and-white jitneys called candongueiros, which followed no fixed route, roamed from street to street picking up fares. Some streets were named in the solemn way of political dogmatists — Rua Friedrich Engels, Boulevard Comandante Che Guevara, and even Rua Eça de Queiroz — honoring the author of, among other novels, Cousin Basilio, for which he is sometimes referred to as the Portuguese Flaubert.

One Luanda street I happened upon in the course of an evening walk was Rua de Almeida Garrett (off Avenida Ho Chi Minh). It was named for João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida Garrett, a nineteenth-century Portuguese writer and politician, little known in the United States and perhaps even lesser known in Angola. I knew of him only from an epigraph quoted in a novel by José Saramago, an assertion that resonated in Luanda: “I ask the political economists and the moralists if they have ever calculated the number of individuals who must be condemned to misery, overwork, demoralization, childhood, rank ignorance, overwhelming misfortune and utter penury in order to produce one rich man.”

Many streets in the city had no name, a topic of satire among people from whom I solicited directions, a sort of you-can’t-get-there-from-here paradox. But Luandans — the working ones, the foreigners, the businessmen — lived with all this inconvenience, and laughed about it, because enduring it meant they could make money. The weak went home, the poor died, the strong stayed and got rich.

Billions of dollars were routinely embezzled by Angolan politicians and oil executives. Martin Meredith devotes an enlightening chapter in The Fate of Africa (2006) to the gross cheating by Angolan officials, which is an extensive catalogue of klepto schemes. Some businessmen engaged in a mechanism known as “trade mispricing.” This funny-money ploy was explained by Ed Stoddard in a 2011 Reuters report on corruption in Angola. “In this case, the way it typically works is that Angolan importers pretend to pay foreigners more for imports than they actually spend. The difference provides cash that can be discreetly put into banks or other assets abroad.” It worked best with oil, but also with simple import transactions. “An Angolan importer overpays the exporter, say in the United States, and asks the exporter to deposit the excess payment in the importer’s offshore account or a Swiss bank,” said Dev Kar, a senior economist at the International Monetary Fund. Through this trade mispricing many billions vanished in an average year.

You’d expect such a place to be moribund, yet Luanda was abuzz. A current throbbed through it like a rapid pulse — a blare of car horns, zungeiros (street vendors), hawkers selling lottery tickets, shouting women with baskets of fruit on their heads, children and amputees loudly calling out — more demanding than beseeching. The days were also very hot — low-lying Luanda is noted for its enervating humidity. There was not enough space in the city for all the cars and impromptu markets, and the constant spillover of people, crowding the streets and sidewalks, made it a jammed and harassed place.

Because only cash was accepted, banks were besieged by people withdrawing money, and most high-end shops or businesses of any size had an ATM machine on the premises — my hotel had two in the lobby, and they were in constant use. The fact that so many people walked around with stacks of kwanza notes made it a city of muggers and thieves. An American woman told me that in order to make arrangements for her family of four to fly back to the States, she’d had to bring a bag filled with $4,000 in cash to the airline office to buy the tickets.

Because Luanda was dysfunctional and subject to sudden power cuts and water shortages, people with money — Angolans and foreigners alike — created small hermetic settlements, walled compounds, where they had their own generators, water sources, and amenities: tennis courts, swimming pools, golf and social clubs, and of course armed sentries and guard dogs.

The International School of Luanda was one of these salubrious compounds, an oasis behind a wall, catering to the children of expatriates, diplomats, oil people, and wealthy Angolans. Unwelcome at the state schools and rejected by the writers’ union, I visited the school out of curiosity, to observe a sealed community in action. In return for their hospitality, I gave a talk to the students.

After a long and far-from-simple drive to the south of the city, through the improvised neighborhoods, the grim precincts of poverty, the International School was something of a surprise: orderly, well planned, spacious, clean, and surrounded by flower gardens. Healthy children of all races were gathered in congenial groups — 630 students, 91 teachers — and what was singular about the school was the presence of books. Apart from Akisha Pearman’s department in the Instituto Superior in Lubango, books had not figured much in any of the schools I’d visited. Please send us books from America, I was implored, and my routine reply was to refer them to the billionaires in their government.

The newly built library at the International School was worthy of a small college. And the students were bright sparks, with the confident air that comes of being well taught, taken seriously, and — it must be said — wealthy, sheltered from the hideosities of Luanda. I gave my talk and answered questions and was shown around the school by the teachers, who were earnest and upbeat. It all seemed marvelous and almost unbelievable that such a place could exist amid the encircling gloom.

“So,” I asked casually, “what’s the tuition here?”

“Forty-seven thousand dollars a year,” I was told by a teacher, who gulped as she managed to utter the words.

At the time, this was roughly the cost of tuition at Harvard University. Because many of the students were the children of oil industry employees, the existence of such a good school was an incentive for foreign workers to stay with their families in Luanda. An oil executive was later to tell me that Angolans simply did no work, and he added, “Forty thousand workers in the oil industry support twenty-three million Angolans.”

The residential compounds and other amenities were the foreigners’ way of turning their backs on the reality of the place, of shutting out the chaos, of being secure. In many respects this pattern was no different from the urban planning in Palm Springs or the gated communities around Phoenix and elsewhere, but in Luanda what lay outside the compounds were slums of extreme danger and pure horror.

* And in the world: 215th out of 224 countries, according to the CIA World Factbook for 2012. There are 84 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in Angola.