The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari

16. “This Is What the World Will Look Like When It Ends”

THE INTENSITY OF A TRIP — bad food, hard travel, slow buses, hot weather, jeering locals — can induce a mood of isolation, provoking episodes of alienation that resemble out-of-body experiences. I think: Am I imagining this? And I have no answer, because no one hears the question. But then I found someone to ask.

Dazed with Luanda and dispirited by my trip, I was fortunate around this time to have met the clear-sighted Angolan Kalunga Lima, who had told me many things I needed to know — and most of all that my sense of Angola, and Luanda in particular, was not the consequence of travel fatigue. I was first introduced to Kalunga at a photographic exhibition one evening in Luanda. He assured me that I was not overdramatizing the situation. He was impressive, intelligent, and straight-talking, and his gift for satire was a relief to me.

I said, “A man in Namibia told me, ‘Angola’s a nightmare!’ ”

Kalunga said, “Namibians have a gift for understatement.”

Perhaps a clue to his speaking his mind was his unusual history. The son of a politically passionate Angolan father and an adoring Portuguese mother, he had been born in Algeria, where his father, a committed revolutionary, was a soldier in exile. Kalunga had been educated in Canada and the United States, and later, on a whim, he taught on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. He had traveled widely in Africa and Europe, was well read, responsive, funny, and hip. Seeing a Hummer stalled in traffic on a Luanda street, the African driver wearing thick gold chains around his neck, Kalunga said, “He got bling!” He was a maker of documentary films, and his latest project was chronicling the discovery of the “Angola Titan,” a dinosaur whose fossil remains had been discovered in the southern desert near Namibe. He had also made a documentary about Angola’s elusive and little-known giant sable antelope (palanca negra gigante), apparently its last living wild game.

I instantly took to Kalunga, for his warmth, his candor, his enthusiasm, and soon after we met, we made plans to travel in the Angolan bush, a safari on which he would be the photographer and I the writer. He wanted to show me the habitat of the endangered antelope.

“We’ll collaborate! It’ll be a major magazine piece!”

A major magazine piece was less of an incentive for me than delving deeper into rural areas. What convinced me that we’d be a good team was that we seemed to share certain crucial ideas, as aid skeptics and as disbelievers in the current political process, with a curiosity about traditional tribal culture and a general feeling that any salvation, or simple hope, in Angola was likely to be found not in Luanda but in the landscapes of the distant countryside.

The sable antelope was an animal unique to Angola, and because of that was an icon in the country — the symbol of the national airline, the name of Angola’s national football team. It had the longest horns of any antelope in the world, and existed nowhere else in the world except a place called Cangandala.

“I thought there were no wild animals left in Angola,” I said.

“Just this one, and it’s doomed,” Kalunga said. “You have to see it soon, before it becomes extinct.”

“Where is Cangandala?”

“East of here. Near Malanje.”

“That’s where I want to go. On the train.”

“Zona verde,” he said.

“I love that expression. I heard a guy use it when we got stuck on the way to Lubango. The green zone.”

“The bush.”

“Why is it I always feel hopeful in the bush?”

Thoreau had written in his essay “Walking”: “I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.” I too believed in those verities.

“Because they haven’t made a mess of it,” he said. And being Kalunga, and gray-eyed, he smiled and added, “Yet.”

It was true, he said, that Luanda was a city of idle millions. Three quarters of the country’s population was under the age of twenty-five, and very few had jobs. A quarter of Angolans lived in Luanda. Unemployment he estimated at about 90 percent. But these were wild guesses, since statistics were nonexistent. No one knew the size of the population. The last general census had been taken almost forty years ago, in 1974.

“The people from the countryside flock to Luanda — and what for?” he said. “There’s no work. It’s just one slum after another. They don’t go to school, they don’t have jobs. They have no idea of the war that ended just nine years ago.”

It so happened that I was in Luanda on Angola’s Independence Day. It was a national holiday, but for an unemployed and cynical populace, whom the government regarded as “the mutable and rank-scented many,” this was meaningless. There was no celebration, no music, no flags flying; there were no parades. It was just a day off, an empty day.

Kalunga mentioned a great battle, the siege in 1994 of Cuito Cuanavale in the south, a town held by Angolan and Cuban soldiers that was attacked by armored columns of the South African army. In forty days of shelling, Soviet tanks against Mirage fighter planes, the result was the deaths of more than fifty thousand people and defeat on both sides, the whole bloody business fought to a stalemate. I had heard it called “Angola’s Gettysburg” and “Angola’s Stalingrad.”

“It was the biggest conventional battle fought anywhere on earth since World War Two,” Kalunga said, “and these Angolan kids you see have no idea that it happened. There are land mines in Caxito” — sixty miles north of Luanda — “that are still blowing up farmers, but no one seems to care. People just sit around. Other people clean them up — foreign agencies.”

“But if there’s work for the Chinese, why isn’t there work for Angolans?” I asked. The day before, I had spoken with a man in the know who said that an accurate figure for the number of Chinese expatriates, businessmen, and settlers in Angola was about seventy thousand, and slowly growing.

“The Chinese are a separate workforce,” Kalunga said. “They keep to themselves. We first began to see them in 2006. They were living on ships anchored in Luanda harbor. You know why?”

“I was told they were criminals, working off their sentences.”

“Right. Slave labor. They worked on the buildings that are now starting to fall apart — there are cracks all over the Chinese buildings. They’re still here. The first generation of Chinese-Angolan babies is starting to appear. You see them in the shantytowns of Luanda, these little half-Asian mestiços.”

Some of these Chinese former prisoners had served out their sentences, gone into business, and become wealthy, or at least well-off. They ran factories making plastic goods and cinderblocks. Some had resumed their old criminal professions. Kalunga gave the example of a large counterfeiting ring that had made fake 2,000-kwanza notes. This was a shrewd move; though Angolans could easily spot counterfeit hundred-dollar bills, no one recognized fake kwanzas because no one had seen the point of faking them. These dud bills were used in the markets and shops, and many had been exchanged for real U.S. dollars, the most desirable currency in the country. But the Chinese had their adjustment problems. For one thing, they were ethnically, visibly alien, and Kalunga and others I had met in Luanda told me that the Chinese were targeted for harassment, disliked, jostled, picked on, seen as easy prey, and robbed. The week before I arrived in the city, two Chinese men were stabbed to death in a casual mugging.

“More recently, Chinese women and children have begun to arrive and settle,” Kalunga said. “And I see rich Chinese in the restaurants and gambling casinos. They’re part of the life here.”

“So if it’s as awful as you say, how do you manage to live in Luanda?”

“I don’t live in Luanda!” he said. “And I travel a lot.”

It was then that he’d described his film on the iconic symbol of Angola, the giant sable antelope. When I mentioned that I knew the sable antelope from its picture on the 10-kwanza note, Kalunga laughed. No, he said, that was yet another example of Angolans getting it wrong: the animal depicted on the money was not a sable antelope but another creature entirely, called a bush donkey. Angolans didn’t know the difference, but in any case, there were only about forty of the animals left in the wild, because of the erosion of their habitat and their being poached for their meat and their splendid horns. They were doomed.

“And we’re probably doomed,” Kalunga said. “That’s why I don’t live in Luanda. I moved my family to Lubango so we can get out of the country if there’s trouble. It’s possible from there to get to Namibia by road. In a crisis we’d never get out of Luanda by road or air. We’d be stuck here, and that, my friend, would not be good.”

His wife, Maria Manuela, whom he called Nela, was a medical doctor in the Angolan army, and they had three young children: Carlos, sixteen; Rafael, nine; and Luena, seven. But his wife was barely getting by; doctors in Angola had no status, he said. Most doctors earned “about three thousand dollars a month — and a clerk in a bank earns about eight hundred.” The government hospital in Lubango was so poorly run his wife could not perform necessary operations — Nela was a plastic surgeon specializing in correcting disfigurements and war injuries — so she had joined the staff of a hospital funded by a Canadian charity.

“Imagine, a private hospital! Because this government, rolling in money, can’t run a hospital itself — that’s how desperate things are,” Kalunga said. “And Angolans don’t make anything. Everything is imported. There’s a lot from Brazil. Food from South Africa. Everything you see in this country — every single thing — has been made somewhere else.”

Meeting Kalunga Lima energized me, because he himself was energetic. He spoke his mind and I could speak mine, and I was free to ask him ignorant questions. He revealed a side of Luanda that had been hidden from me. He introduced me to his friends; some of them were as intense as he was, others were smooth operators — money men, importers of luxury cars, oil executives. Instead of going to the gourmet restaurants — the crowded, expensive places — we went to hole-in-the-wall places that from the outside did not look like restaurants at all — simple shop fronts that were mom-and-pop diners.

This was another aspect of the secret, improvisational city. One of these eateries — no name, no sign — served home-cooked Portuguese food, and a large-screen TV showed a live feed of the Portuguese parliament debating the meltdown of Portugal’s economy. Kalunga said that — given the food, the checkered tablecloths, and the genial hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Coelho — we might be in Lisbon or Oporto. And by the way, he said, the Portuguese prime minister would be arriving in Luanda within the next few days, hoping to borrow money from the Angolans to save Portugal from declaring bankruptcy. (This happened, just as he’d predicted.)

Kalunga explained to me the origins of the independence struggle. His father, Manuel dos Santos Lima, had been the first MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) military commander, based in Algeria in the 1960s, and had helped found the military wing of the party. Kalunga said with a rueful smile that of all the foreign soldiers, only the Cubans had been idealistic, but in time they too became disenchanted with the corruption and selfishness that had followed the revolution. He detailed the atrocities, the beheadings, the mass killings committed on both sides, and the competition among independence fighters, and described the funding of the war, the slaughter of elephants for their ivory, the sale of blood diamonds.

But corruption was nothing new in Angola, he said. In the late nineteenth century a megalomaniacal chief in Ovamboland, in the south, had impoverished his people, stolen their cows, and built himself a castle in the bush. Other chiefs mimicked the Portuguese and dressed in frock coats. Certain chiefs of the Kwanyama bought imported clothes, drank champagne, studied etiquette, and stuffed themselves with food at a time when their own people were dying in a famine. These extravagances were a distant echo of what was happening in Angola right now.

Speaking of distant echoes, it was Kalunga who had used the word jinguba, meaning “peanut,” which reminded me of “goober.” He said the Kimbundu word mbanza, a musical instrument, probably became “banjo.” His name, Kalunga, bestowed on him by his proud father, meant “God,” “supreme being,” or “highly intelligent being,” and he laughed when telling me this. He explained that in this dispirited place many evangelical preachers from Brazil had become successful, turning movie theaters into churches. God-bothering was one of the growth industries of Angola — churches run by flamboyant Brazilian preachers. They were shysters, sweet-talkers, and because they demanded money from new believers and brandished fake diplomas, they were known as sellers of banha da cobra — snake oil.

“You’ve heard the word assimilado?” Kalunga asked over coffee one day. I had heard the term and thought it indicated a mulatto with an education. But he said no. “They were indigenous people who held the status of citizen. There were three requirements. One, you had to speak Portuguese fluently. Two, you had to sleep in a bed, not on the floor. Three, you had to eat with utensils. What do you think?”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“But what about reading and writing?” He laughed softly. “Literacy wasn’t a requirement! And you know why? Because the Portuguese officials who checked them — many of them could not read or write. Ha!”

A habitual blogger, Kalunga often left posts on a documentary makers’ website, Creative Cow. One had been a message to a young filmmaker: “So much of life happens in ways that we can not entirely predict, so having a variety of experiences opens up possibilities you may not have predicted. For example, taking a course in a formal environment will give you a chance to meet individuals with similar goals you would not meet on your own.

“Last piece of advice, set yourself up for the long haul. What ever you do, make sure it is sustainable, it invariably takes longer than you think to get anywhere in life.”

Kalunga put me in touch with a well-traveled friend of his whom I asked about the Angolan president’s personal history, and he said, “I have seen favelas in Brazil and slums in Latin America and Africa. The slum where Dos Santos was born, Sambizanga, is by far the worst of them all. I have never seen anything to compare with it in squalor and poverty.”

We talked about paying a visit there. Kalunga said, “What’s the point?” And the friend agreed: “When Mandela became president, he made a point of fixing up the township where he’d been born, improving the housing and providing water and electricity. But Dos Santos, a multibillionaire and powerful, has done nothing. He has no wish to improve his town or do anything. He has no sentiment, no pity.”

The country was ripe for satire. In 2012, the New York Times Magazine ran a multipage advertorial, paid for by the Angolan government (a government that until then had refused to allow any New York Times journalist to enter the country), that referred to the “maturity of [Angola’s] young democracy.” “Young democracy” is a curious way to describe a country with a president who appointed himself in 1980 and has been in power ever since. Dos Santos’s portrait is on the money. When a politician’s face is on all the banknotes, you can be sure he is planning to stay in office for life. Young democracy!

I was invited to give a talk at the Viking Club to the Angola Field Group, its membership composed of some Angolans and many expatriates, teachers, oil industry functionaries, aid workers, hangers-on, and hospitable beer drinkers. Though he was not present that evening, Kalunga was a member and had shown his documentary films there.

My talk was preceded by the singing of three diminutive Bakongo men in snap-brim hats, from Uige province in the distant north. They called themselves the Disciples and harmonized to “Go Down, Moses” and “When the Saints Go Marching In,” which they had learned at the mission station in the remote town of Bungo.

Instead of giving a formal talk to the boozy group, I merely described my trip from the border — only 2 of the 250 members of the club, I learned, had been near the border. I said, “There is nothing I can tell you about Angola that you don’t already know, but I’m sure there are many things you can tell me” — and I invited comments.

One of the men in the audience elaborated on the various euphemisms the officials used to ask for bribes. Another said, “Do you know about Dia do Homem? It’s Men’s Day all over Angola — every Friday is Men’s Day. Men meet, get drunk, go out and prowl and chase women. There is no Women’s Day.”

“The motorcycle taxi has a funny name,” a young man said. “It’s called a cumpapata — literally, a ‘grab-ass,’ because that’s how the person behind the driver holds on.”

A woman said, “Cuca beer — I will tell you what Cuca stands for. Com um coração Angolano — with an Angolan heart.”

It was a pleasant evening of congenial foreigners and Angolans who lived in Luanda as if besieged. Afterward they regaled me with stories of how expensive it was to live in the capital. Yet none complained. Simple survival in the city represented a sort of victory.

I met Kalunga the next day, at another restaurant.

“That’s a river fish,” he said, explicating the ingredients of my meal. “It’s called cachuso — they catch it in the Dande River north of here. We can go there. We can go so many places! Angola has land and water. All the fresh food is imported from South Africa, yet Angola could feed Africa. This country has not been written about at all!”

So we made plans: to look for more giant sable antelopes; to visit the site of the recently discovered dinosaur the Angola Titan, which he had documented; to go north to Zaire province to see the Bakongo people and the trackless forests of Uige; and to take the train to Malanje. And we would travel by boat along the western limit of Angola, down the Kwango River, which David Livingstone had written about.

“To zona verde!” he said, toasting, and as we pored over the map, he said that it was all doable.

We drank to our proposed trip, our venture, as Kalunga put it, to as terras do fim do mundo — to the lands at the end of the earth.

I had never envisioned traveling with someone else. I had always extolled the virtues of going alone, putting up with the hassles, taking the risks; that was how I had arrived in Luanda. But I realized I could not go farther on my own — at least not in this country — and I was flattered that Kalunga saw me in the way I saw him, as a good traveling companion, someone fit to take into the bush.

On the day the Portuguese prime minister arrived from Lisbon to ask Angola for money to bail out his failed and bankrupt economy, Kalunga took me on his motorcycle to the Luanda train station at a place called Viana. We made inquiries — the times of the trains to Malanje, the cost. Two trains a week, cheap tickets, an easy trip.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked teasingly.

“No. I want to think about it.”

“Maybe the last train to zona verde.” He was still teasing. Teasing is often a sign of trust, of friendship, of a bond.

We were still in sight of the city, with its buildings under construction, its many tall cranes, and the sound of bulldozers and jackhammers. It looked plausible enough as a city on the rise. But it was an illusion. Luanda was a city in decay. We rode out of Bairro Viana to the edge of a dense and ramshackle musseque. Better not go in too deeply, Kalunga said; his Kawasaki was new and powerful, just the sort of machine a gang of boys would love to steal. The idle watchful boys were like the idle watchful boys I had seen all over Angola; they had been my first glimpse of the country, the rappers and pesterers on the border at Santa Clara. Pretty girls sidled up to us and admired the motorcycle and flirted with Kalunga. Some girls were dancing with each other in front of a makeshift stall selling Angolan music. This Luanda slum was dense and labyrinthine, so we stayed with the bike, on the perimeter. Still, I could see it was a lively place — loud music, lots of chatter, hurrying crowds, and shrill, shrieking, giddy laughter.

Foreigners I had met mentioned the laughter. “They are a joyful people” was a frequent remark. One Englishman told me, “You sometimes see them jumping and doing handstands on the sidewalks.” The leaping and the laughter did not seem mirthful to me, but rather frantic, like the overstimulation I’d seen in African cities. It was closer to hysteria or that sorry chattering you hear from someone on the verge of panic. It was at times like frenzy. I thought: This is the laughter in the shadow of the gallows, the sound of people who know they are doomed; this is the look of a place that is going to hell. This same hysteria is found in Thucydides’s description of the plague in Athens: “Oppressed with the violence of the calamity, and not knowing what to do, men grew careless … and the great licentiousness … began.”

Like the Athenians, the Angolans of the musseque acted as if doomsday was upon them: a shrieking, chaotic, reckless society on the brink of extinction. Not people in despair, but people dancing — doing the kiduru and the kizomba, as Kalunga explained of the pirouetting girls at the shantytown, and sometimes breaking into a jig as they walked. The city was thick with prostitutes, many of them refugees from the Congo, snatching at men at the Pub Royal and the Zanzibar. Most people were giggling crazily because they knew their number was up. That was how Angolan laughter sounded to me — insane and chattering and agonic, like an amplified death rattle. With disaster or death hanging over them, like the Athenians, “they thought to enjoy some little part of their lives.”

Kalunga climbed on his motorcycle, but he didn’t start it. He sat and stared at the city and said, “This is what the world will look like when it ends.”

Two weeks later, Kalunga Lima died of a heart attack at his home in Lubango.

He had been scuba diving off Angola’s southern coast a few days before his death, and that may have caused it, an embolism produced by a hyperbaric event. He had been working on a documentary about the coastal waters for Angola’s national exhibit at Expo 2012 in Korea.

By then I had withdrawn from overpriced Luanda, and, procrastinating, I began to reconsider my onward journey.