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.
17. What Am I Doing Here?
ALL ITS LAMPS BLAZING, its windows alight, its larval contours illuminated, the last train to Malanje had a glowworm’s gleam, trembling in the dusty half-dark and heat of Luanda’s Viana station, when Kalunga Lima had gestured to it and said, “Are you sure you want to do this?”
He was teasing, because since I’d met him he had pegged me as a procrastinator. Normally I am anything but: a leap in the dark is my usual mode of travel, and by the time I met him I had been on the road for many weeks. He was the procrastinator, in my opinion, an Angolan and longtime resident of Luanda who’d moved with his family to the provinces. Angola was doomed, he said, because of the few cheating the many. Kalunga had relocated to distant Lubango, the easier to escape the country by the simpler southern route when the chaos he expected arrived. And it occurred to me that many people shared his fears, that the slums of Luanda, like many in African cities I’d seen, were no more than transit camps for people wishing to flee.
My hesitation was much more of a reversal than he knew. I was the man bewitched by the Chattanooga Choo Choo and the Patagonian Express and the Trans-Siberian, who had written, “Ever since childhood, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it” — yet here was the brand-new Chinese-made train, lit up, on a recently restored line that could bear me in relative comfort east on a safari for 265 miles into zona verde — the green zone of Angola’s bush, the site of the last few wild animals in the country and of the sort of village life that always seemed a consolation. My lifelong idea of supreme happiness was being a passenger on a train rattling through the night to a distant place unknown to me.
But I thought, Not this time. I had no desire to board the train. And, thinking it, I was joyous — a great relief to conclude that this was the end of my trip. No more. The same joy I had always felt on setting off on a long trip now visited me on this decision not to go any farther. Not here, not now.
It was then that Kalunga had taken me to the desperate musseque beyond Viana and, frowning at the loud music and squinting at the scuffling crowds and the shacks — the poverty, the twitching excitement bordering on frenzy, the hopelessness of it — had uttered the devastating pronouncement that stayed with me: “This is what the world will look like when it ends.”
Struck by this doomsday vision, and saddened by his own doom so soon after that, I was left to ponder my next move. I knew that Malanje, the last stop on the railway line, was a dead end: no road led north from there. I’d have to return to hateful Luanda and take the coast road to a place called N’zeto. From the map I could not discern any onward road. I probably could not travel north at all except by air, and even if I spent weeks struggling by back roads to the border, my prize would be the Congolese river town of Matadi, a well-known hellhole. Then I would board a bus to Kinshasa, a rotting city much like Luanda — and rotting for the same reasons: a corrupt government rich on diamonds, gold, and mineral wealth, and on rarefied techniques of embezzlement and trade mispricing.
Rigged elections at this time had provoked rioting in Kinshasa’s streets and a fierce police presence. After that, Brazzaville, Pointe-Noire, and a transit of the squalid cities of the coast, because the Congolese interior was largely made up of no-go areas. Of course, I could put my head down and travel farther, but I knew what I would find: decaying cities, hungry crowds, predatory youths, and people abandoned by their governments, people who saw every foreigner as someone they could hit up for money, since it was apparent that only foreigners seemed to care about the welfare of Africans.
Because I was traveling overland, what lay before me was a grubby and unrewarding itinerary of West African cities — that is, West African shantytowns. No poverty on earth could match the poverty in an African shantytown, and no other place was so bereft of hope. In an African village, poverty was a relative term. I knew that from the humble villages I’d seen in Botswana and Namibia and the Angolan interior, places where people survived, as they always had, in a subsistence economy, growing what they needed, bartering extra food for what they couldn’t grow or buy, living in mud huts, using a slit-trench latrine, practicing slash-and-burn agriculture. It was a life of fetching and carrying and making do: walking an hour for water, washing in the river, scavenging for firewood, killing the occasional chicken, living hand to mouth — not flourishing but eking out an existence in meagerly productive routines.