Angola Mon Amour!

They say Luanda was, under Portuguese rule, a beautiful city of over a million people. It was, by all accounts, just like Portugal, with lovely cafes along the “Coronado”, fancy shops and restaurants. Then hundreds of thousands of Portuguese suddenly left when independence was declared in 1975, and the place fell apart. They took everything with them; nothing was left. Moreover, they had not trained anyone to take their place. There were only something like three black medical doctors in the whole country. So, just as if there had been a bomb scare, all the bakers and barbers, technicians and professionals fled the country virtually overnight. Angola rapidly descended into anarchy. A communist government under Dr. Agostinho Nieto, himself an MD, came to power, but a western-backed right wing movement sprang up under Jonas Savimbi. For the better part of the next two decades, civil war reigned. The government side was aided for a time by the presence of thousands of Cuban troops sent by Fidel Castro as a proxy for Russian soldiers. Meanwhile, white-controlled South Africa tried desperately to destabilise the country; at one point RSA troops were reportedly within twenty-miles or so of the capital, when a decision was made not to storm it.

A UN-brokered peace accord was hammered out in 1992, but not before half a million people had died. Countless others were injured or left with amputated limbs, the result of land mines. The government in Luanda had been under enormous pressure to reach an agreement with the rebels, who controlled two-thirds of the country and therefore much of its vast ( though largely untapped ) mineral and other wealth, including offshore oil supplies. Ironically, it was only in the latter stages of the war, by around 1991, that Luanda itself came under attack. It did not receive the kind of devastation of Beirut or Sarajevo, but by the time I arrived there in August, 1997, it was still a city without a soul. Most of the buildings were still standing, but virtually no shops were open, and garbage lay rotting in the streets. The stench of raw sewage was everywhere: the public sewage system had broken down.

A Frenchman once told me that the problem with black African countries was that none of them had any tradition of ‘l’état’. Angola epitomised this malaise: I have never seen a place where there seemed to be so little community spirit or sense of public service. Everybody seemed to be in it for themselves. Here was a country that by rights could have been one of the richest in Africa. It is the seventh largest country in Africa, and covers an area greater than Spain and France combined. It was teeming with wealth. But it seemed that all the wealth was being siphoned off, with very little of it trickling down to the common man. Diamonds, for instance, were largely controlled by UNITA, Savimbi’s renegade group. Concessions were given to foreign conglomerates such as De Beers or other firms. Mercenaries from companies like Executive Outcomes were hired to protect these assets. Either that, or UNITA would operate the mines themselves, using the proceeds to build up their arsenal or stash their wealth abroad. Similarly, foreign multinationals controlled the enormous offshore oil wealth; there was absolutely no evidence that any state royalties from these fields was being invested for the public good, or filtering down to the man on the street. On the contrary, one suspected that government ministers and others on the take were lining their pockets, with western governments doing little more than hold their noses. The local currency, the ?, was so dirty and so devalued that after a few days we all started paying for things in US dollars; otherwise one’s pockets would be bulging with the rotten local bills. Meanwhile, a World Food Programme executive jet had been sitting on the tarmac at the airport when I arrived; tellingly, ten days later it was still there. This was obviously a country that was seriously out of whack: the Seven Sisters were laughing all the way to the bank while the world community was left holding the bag for a half-starved population. It just didn’t make sense.

Before leaving for southern Africa I had been worried for my safety, especially in places like Angola. Okay, this was not going to be Bosnia, but the Canadian government did in fact have a travel advisory notice out, warning people not to travel there unless they had to. Did I have to? I don’t know, really. I guess I figured that the European Union would not finance this mission unless it felt it was a safe enough place. When I asked my client in Belgium if any special measures were being taken to provide for our safety, the answer came back in the negative. Chances are I would not have ventured into Angola were it not for the fact that we were conducting our mission for the Southern Africa Development Community ( SADC ); not only that, but I was told that someone working in the SADC office in Namibia would be accompanying us on our mission. I still had misgivings about going in there, but I sort of rationalised my fears away. For instance, I managed to convince myself that the SADC man would not go in unless it were safe. Moreover, in the back of my mind I had it that when we arrived in the country we would find that an EU vehicle such as a Land Rover would be there to shepherd us around. In this, I was sorely mistaken.

In fairness, it is not as if I had not been warned what Angola would be like. In fact, if anything the dangers and deprivations of the country had been oversold. Everywhere we went in Namibia and South Africa, people would take pity on me when they heard I was going to Angola for ten days. Not that I hadn’t been to some pretty icky places in Africa already; Conakry, after all, is a long way from St. Germain des Pres. I had been advised to bring my own food and other provisions into the country, on the grounds that there would be shortages of virtually everything. Thus, one of the things I did in my spare time in Cape Town was go around to all the shops and buy up all my favourite foods. I managed to fill a small cardboard box full of things like chocolate digestives, cheese and crackers, peanut butter, tea bags and the like. And because I had read somewhere that the great spy thriller writer Ian Fleming never travelled anywhere without salmon paste, I brought a small jar of that along, too. Actually, Fleming himself reportedly took along a bottle of vodka, apparently working on the theory that between that and the paste he could break out and have a party with virtually anyone, anywhere, at any time of day.

There is a saying in personal development circles that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Well, the same goes for countries. In Africa, if you are to like most of the countries you visit, then you have to get over those first impressions, because they are invariably bad: long lineups at customs; hot, humid waiting rooms with no air conditioning; chaos at the baggage carousels, and too many seedy-looking people trying to be helpful. Angola was no exception to this, but for the fact that we had a dear Angolan lady to clear the way for us. Her name was something like Alicia, and she certainly meant well. She had a booming voice and a perpetual smile, as if someone was constantly tickling her. After about half an hour of waiting in line with the other deplaning passengers, a customs officer seemed to take pity on us and let us through as a group. So, off we went to beautiful downtown Luanda. I travelled with one or two colleagues in an old Renault driven by Sr. Ingles, the official SADC representative in Angola.

None of the other members of my party could stand Sr. Frances, a man of medium height who was somewhere in his fifties. But he and I got along just fine. I took an immediate liking to him. For one thing, he spoke very good English, having studied at an Ohio university back in the fifties or sixties. Apparently, he had reached quite a high level within the Ministry of Fisheries, basically running the whole department. But apparently he got demoted, for whatever reason, replaced by younger men or maybe by someone who was sharper or had better connections. As a sinecure, he had been given a position as SADC representative, which perhaps had a degree of prestige attached to it, and maybe even gave him a stipend. But in reality the job was an empty one, and Angola was one of the less active ones within the SADC fishing community. Given the horrific war the country had been through, one could hardly blame them. Communications with the outside world were notoriously poor, and the fisheries ministry operated on a shoestring budget, or so we were told.

We had been warned that Luanda would be expensive, and indeed it was. In fact, it was so expensive that the hotel cost more ( $150 US per night ) than my total daily allowance for hotel, meals and incidentals. We were told there was no choice. So, we had to put up with this ghastly place, where jackhammers sounded like they were in the neighboring room, the lighting in the room was atrocious, and the manager had all the charm of a prison warden. The restaurant was one of these lavish, darkly lit establishments that are Africa’s idea of what a European or North American businessman on an expense account expected on his travels. Everything was white linen tablecloths, sterling silver setting, pink napkins stuffed into crystal wine glasses, and a menu that looked like the magna carta. All this was designed to make you feel that the $27.50 US that they charged for a standard meal was worth it. What they did not give two hoots to know was that noone on these kinds of trips wants any of this stuff. What most people want is fast service, simple, wholesome but tasty food, and reasonable prices. Instead, what you get is slovenly waiters, intolerable delays, mixed-up bills, and a feeling of suffocation.

Half of my travellers cheques were stolen in this clip joint; someone told me that professional thieves always leave half, to give them more time to flee before the victim notices. I had stupidly left my briefcase, where the cheques were stashed away, open on the bedspread while I went for a jog along the stinking coronado, or boardwalk. I figure the surly front desk clerk, who asked when I registered how I would be paying, tipped off the chambermaid that I had left my room. When I noticed the cheques missing the next morning, it took long efforts at persuasion for the functionally illiterate policeman to even file a report, which American Express required before they would reimburse me. The fuzz accused me of being involved in a scam to defraud Amex of $1500 US, the amount of cheques missing! For their part, American Express were very understanding, although I did have to wait another three weeks before having replacement cheques hand-delivered to me at a Jo’burg airport hotel.

I continued to run along the coronado whenever I got a chance, until one day when a shot rang out beneath my hotel room. It happened while I was on the phone with a colleague upstairs. I heard a loud bang, followed by another and then a third. It’s funny, this was the first time I had ever heard a gun go off in real life, and although it did not sound like the sound of gunfire you hear on TV, there was no doubt in my mind what it was. I immediately put the receiver down and ran to the window to see what was going on. It was dark outside, and in any case there was a ledge outside my window, so I could not see much of anything. But I could tell that it was something important by the yells from the crowd of people that had quickly gathered. Quickly, I turned off all the lights in the room, hung up the phone and hit the floor between my bed and the wall, as far away from the window as possible.

All I could think of was that there had been a holdup in the lobby. And for all I knew, the gunmen were still in the hotel. I was scared stiff that one or more of them had been trapped inside the hotel. My mind was racing. I had this image of one of them racing through the hallways of the first floor, where my room was located, looking for hostages. Luckily, my fears turned out to be unfounded. After twenty minutes or so I struck up the courage to grab for the phone in my room. I called the hotel desk and asked what was going on. The clerk at the other end acted as if nothing had ever happened. I had to pry it out of him that there had indeed been a shooting, but that it was now safe enough to come down. I waited a while. When I eventually went down to the lobby I determined that a fellow guest of the hotel had been shot in the leg by thieves who ran off with his briefcase. Apparently, the hapless man had been returning to the hotel around 6:30 PM when two black man confronted him at the entrance. What transpired then I am not certain of; either they demanded he hand over the briefcase and shot him when he hesitated or refused, or they shot him and then grabbed for the case. In any case, they got the briefcase, and two of three bullets they used entered his leg.

The thieves quickly got away, and their Portuguese victim, I am told, lay bleeding on the hotel steps before anyone came to his aid. When management finally reacted, he was whisked off to somewhere, presumably a hospital, never to be heard from again. I felt tremendous sympathy for this poor man, who I never met. I don’t know his name, I don’t have a clue what he looked like, whether he had a family, or anything like that. But my heart went out to him: one minute he is walking up the hotel steps, no doubt relishing the thought of taking off his suit and lying down on his bed before having a relaxing drink, and the next minute he is lying in a pool of his own blood. And what about the thieves? How desperate and how callous could they be to shoot a man for no more than the contents of his briefcase? By the time I made it downstairs to the lobby, a hotel employee was mopping up the blood and replacing the blood-stained, inlaid mat with “HOTEL CONTINENTAL” written on it. Everything was business as usual. it was as if nothing had ever happened. The desk manager was as expressionless and unfriendly as ever. But for my colleagues and I, there was a qualitative difference: we were scared. From now on, we decided to travel everywhere together; no one would go out on his or her own. What this meant was that we were driven almost everywhere, so I never did get another run in along the coronado, or indeed anywhere else in stinking Luanda. Days later, when we were scheduled to travel in a minibus to a fishing centre along the coast, I refused to go, on the grounds that no special security measures had been taken. One of the other team members refused to go as well. The trip went ahead largely because it was felt that not to get out of the capital, which is inland, and visit a coastal fishing centre, would destroy any credibility our mission had. Thus, I waved goodbye to my erstwhile colleagues early one morning ( early in this part of the world means anytime after 10 AM! ), wondering whether I would ever see them again. Thankfully, they returned in one piece late that same night, tired and shaken. Over a late meal in the hotel they told a tale of incompetence and danger that could only really happen in Africa.

It seems that with a Namibian at the wheel they travelled by van to the coast at breakneck speed. Our Luanda-based Namibian hosts followed in a car. However, when the party of two vehicles arrived at what they thought was their destination, nothing was set up for them. Instead, they were whisked off to another locale 100 kms away, to meet the governor of the local province. This hastily arranged meeting turned to be purely ceremonial. This is vintage Africa! When it was over, they were driven back to the original coastal city. Alas, it was so late in the day that all they had time to do was talk to one or two artisinal fishermen on the beach.

To make matters worse, it seems that the only thing their Namibian escorts were interested in was buying as much freshly caught fish as they could for their families. These stinking fish they proceeded to dump in the van for the ride back to the capital, rather than smell up the car they themselves were driving in. My colleagues regarded this as a real slap in the face, which of course it was, since the fish could just as easily gone in the trunk of the car, I am told.

To make matters worse, the driver of the van is said to have been driving at breakneck speed, to the point where my colleagues feared for their lives. We had all thought that the danger on this trip was going to come from Jonas Savimbi’s rebel forces, who still controlled large parts of the country, including some coastal areas. Instead, it turned out that the chief threat was from this maniac government driver, probably desperate to impress his foreign passengers of his high speed driving skills. At one point along the potholed-road home, a tire blew, resulting in the van swaying left and right and very nearly ending up in the ditch. After this episode, the driver was ordered to slow down; and in typical African style he reacted to this order by slowing down to a trickle. Thus, the journey back, with the smelly old fish making everyone virtually sick to their stomachs, took double the time of the outgoing leg.

I learned all this from my colleagues as they gorged themselves in the hotel dining room late that night. Their collective philosophy towards eating while on mission in Africa was neatly summed up by one of them: when food is plentiful, eat as much as you can, because you never know where your next meal is going to come from. So, I sat there listening to their tales of woe, comparing their day to my own, which was a curious mixture of buffoonery and ostentatiousness. Not having any particular plans for the day, I was greatly relieved when another colleague, the one who also refused to go along on the sidetrip, invited me along to a barbecue aboard a research vessel. She assured me that everything had been cleared with her friend, an Italian fisheries biologist aboard the vessel, who was said to be looking forward to meeting me. The vessel in question was the Nansen, a Norwegian government-owned ship that seemed to be exclusively dedicated to African fisheries research. The vessel was making a brief stop in Luanda while on a cruise in the southeast Atlantic. But what I thought was going to be a nice quiet barbecue turned out to be an adventure I could have done without.

First of all, I was refused entrance to the port area because I did not have my passport with me. I had deliberately left it behind so that it would not be stolen, thinking that although it was by no means safe in my hotel room, it was even less safe on my person. Thus, if I wanted to board the vessel, I had to go back to the hotel and get it. After much rancorous debate, this is what I eventually did. The result of all this was that I was somewhat late for the barbecue on board. My colleague went ahead without me. When I finally got on board I was introduced to Sylvia, my colleague’s friend. Sylvia was incredibly glamorous: with her halter top, blond hair and dark tan she looked more like a Hollwood starlet or high class hooker than a fisheries scientist.

My colleague and Sylvia had apparently been talking to each other for quite some time before I arrived; they obviously had a lot of catching up to do since they had last seen each other. Gabriele was initially polite with me, but then she proceeded to do something that absolutely mortified me. She steered my colleague over towards a cluster of people eating their hamburgers and downing their beers. Speaking flawless English, she started introducing my colleague to the Captain and his wife, who, like the rest of the people on board, was Norwegian. Then to my shock horror, she started moving towards the next officer, in order to introduce my colleague to him, without ever having introduced me to the Captain. It was as if I did not even exist. Sensing my discomfort, she turned to me and said that she did not have time to introduce me to anyone, and that I would have to fend for myself. I have never been treated so downright rudely in my life!

What surprised me even more was how the Captain and all the others in his entourage, plus my colleague, went along with this slap in the face. For my part, I reacted instinctively: there was no way I was going to be treated like garbage and humiliated in front of all these people. I therefore decided to ignore her. As the introductions continued, I went right up to the Captain, pumped his hand vigorously, introduced myself, briefly explained my mission, and told him what a tight ship he ran. She sure was a beauty! In fact, unless one were told, one would never have guessed that this was a fisheries research vessel; rather, it had all the trappings of a small luxury cruise ship. Everything was spanking clean and appeared to be brand new. It all seemed so incongruous against the backdrop of squalor and human misery that is Luanda. The very route to where the Nansen was docked took us by sewage- infested waters where some people defecated while squatters from nearby lean-tos gathered stinking water in pails for household usage. But hear was the gleaming, multi-million dollar Nansen, with its well-scrubbed, well-dressed Norwegian officers and crew, totally cut off from the people they were supposed to be serving.

This was not my first experience with Scandinavian ‘aid arrogance’ in southern Africa; I had already seen it in Namibia, where the Icelanders had ‘donated’ a tremendous white elephant of an oceanographic and fisheries research institute located in the posh coastal resort of Swapokmund. These Nordic invaders reminded me of what author Graham Hancock calls ‘lords of poverty’: people who thrive on the misery of third world peoples. The Scandinavians are notorious for their ill-advised aid projects in Africa; they still operate under the assumption that they know what is best for Africa and Africans. They suffer from the delusion that they represent a superior culture, and they make no apologies for trying to educate poor, uneducated Africans so that they can follow the Scandinavian model. In the process, they make no attempt to listen to Africans, to meet them halfway, or to introduce and adapt appropriate technology. Instead, they simply transpose Scandinavian values, goods and services lock stock and barrel into an African milieu. Operating with their Calvinistic ethic, expensive aid projects are a way of assuaging their guilt. In fact, the more expensive the better. So, instead of buying a cheap vessel locally, converting it into a research vessel and paying a local crew under Scandinavian supervision, absolutely everything aboard the ship is Norwegian! It is outrageous, and it made me sick.

Meanwhile, back at the barbecue, it was an uphill battle to engage in social intercourse with the ship’s compliment. For, while they all spoke English, they were very cliquish. They stood around in groups of three or four, and it was not an easy thing to break in on their Norwegian conversation. Unfortunately, therefore, I spent much of the time on board standing around looking at my shoes. When the agony seemed about to end, I screwed up the courage to ask the captain for a tour of the ship. This was, after all, a fisheries research vessel, I was working on a fisheries project, and I knew that after tonight there would be no other opportunity to look
around, as the vessel was due to take to sea again the following morning. Actually, I could not for the life of me understand why Sylvia had not offered to give my colleague and I a tour, but there was no way I was going to ask her for one, after being treated so badly by her. I was half expecting him either to say that this would not be possible, or to delegate one of his officers to show me around. Instead, to my amazement he offered to give me a personal tour.

I could, of course, have gone on my own, but I thought this would have been a bit churlish. Instead, I invited my colleague along. She, no doubt because of her Prussian, orderly, subservient mind, could not get over the fact that I had asked the captain for such a tour. Still, she put all her principles aside and tagged along. It turned out to be a nice little tour. But best of all was the fact that I had gone over Sylvia’s head and developed my own relationship with the captain.

If Luanda used to be a lovely city, then it’s women still are. After only a few days there, one cannot but come to the conclusion that they are the most beautiful women in the world. They may not have money for fancy clothes or expensive makeup, but their natural beauty shines through. When I remarked on the exceptional beauty of the women to the Portuguese chap on my team, who happened to have been born in Luanda, he quickly nodded his head in agreement, adding that “Coffee makes for a very nice colour in women”. For a moment I thought he was being facetious, but after thinking about it a bit I concluded he was right; there is something about the mulatto, café au lait complexion of the people here that is very special and appealing. I can only guess that it came from years of inbreeding with the Portuguese.

Towards the end of my ten day stay in ‘beautiful downtown Luanda’, I was dying to get on a plane out of there. This trip was starting to become an ordeal. For one thing, our meetings were not going very well; the Angolans were not really cooperating. All they seemed to want to do was complain about SADC, and talk in generalities. As for our side, we were performing reasonably well as a team. We had difficulty getting our act together in meetings with our hosts. There was also a tendency for everyone to shoot off in his own direction. Personality clashes were also starting to emerge in the group, and the jokes were starting to wear a bit thin. Because we had the Icelandic SADC representative travelling with us, we had to maintain a united front; nevertheless, there were loud rumblings below the surface which threatened to spill over at any moment. This was to happen on our next stop, Mozambique.