Last Day in Angola

Why would I want to leave behind a view like this?




Even Pandora knows what it’s worth…



And its price is too high.

I can’t exactly remember why we are leaving. All that decision-making seems like a long time ago now. I know it has to do with not fitting, and not being able to claim this as home: it is not our home.

Once it was the home of a large colony of Portuguese people: spreading out, threading through this land, rooting saplings that sprouted trees – born here, raised here – but their branches had trouble sharing the air: instead of twining and combining, they clashed like antlers. New trees can be uprooted. Old trees can be sawn down. The houses are either empty, blown apart by civil war, or re-inhabited by the people with deeper roots: although civil war proved that even these are not beyond ripping up and tearing apart. The pavements are heavily cracked. Angolan mud disturbs the order of Portuguese tree-lined streets. Ghosts of every colour roam the streets and visit the houses they built, lived in once, but never possessed.






We don’t even have roots. We stood on the boulders and built a house… that began sliding as soon as it rained.



Our first home in Wako-Kungo was crisp and clean and hopeful. It was only warm when the sun melted through the windows. But it became overcrowded and packed with various tensions.



Our second (and final) home chattered with stories we couldn’t hear. I was furious when the construction workers were told to paint over the mural in the large dining room. The salon area upstairs had a spectacular view over the Kwanza-Sul valley: winds blew the blue curtains into the hallway; blowing the view – touches of trees and water – through the hotel and out the other side. We were no obstacle.




Our third home – on the edge of the woods – was haunted. There had been fighting in the woods: there are still some landmines, like a deadly matrix, matted into the soil: a forest of trees so thin and tall, the place where the branches began could only be seen by tipping your head right back. At night the only sound was the creak of tree-trunks pressured by winds, and the sporadic crash of falling leaves and branches onto the tin roof. When the strange smells crept out of the fireplace as night fell, and the worms crawled up from the tiled floors; when the big, wide-eyed, black-and-white dog from the opposite house appeared silently at our open front-door and stared at me; when Hal became sullen and silently hostile; I knew something was going to happen. The spirits of the tall trees grew flesh and visited our home with knives and guns, robbed us of our confidence, and killed themselves when they tried to escape the woods. We left the same night.



All the goodbyes were painful, but it was Bany’s who’s was the most shocking. He took my breath away. I’m still wondering if I’ll ever to get it back.





wako-kungo
santa comba
angola
ghost stories
tall trees
on boulder mountain
Turbo Tagger

Arriving at Night: Wako-Kungo: Early May 2004

We arrive in darkness. A twelve hour journey across the barren coastal strip, punctuated by the baobab with their swinging mice, up until Sumbe, when greys and beiges slide into palm-lined beaches, but without any smooth blues: instead the ocean, a deep black, oily void, drops dramatically down from the beach: consuming, inhospitable, disturbing waters.



The road takes a sharp inland route from Sumbe, through dense, humid jungle-forests, patterned with lightening-white tree-trunks and thickly woven canopies. At once, through a fracture in the green, a crashing waterfall opens a wider window upon an island settled in the thick currents of a gluey river, upon which people are living on floating grass. We stop here, by the cascades, for the first time – and stop there on all proceeding trips that follow, to listen to violent water and filter gold through our fingers.





After the waterfalls, the frost-edged bushes of coffee-plantations line the road for a mile or so, fringing the driveways of old Portuguese coffee fanzendas: a promising symbol of Che Guevara’s failure to destroy all of Angola’s plantations.



Over a tumultuous curve in what was once a road – now obliterated, and filled with ferocious mud waves – the car tips into the Kwanza-Sul valley: jurassic, volcanic, expansive and breathtaking: I can see pterodactyls cut through clouds and dive into nests tucked into crevices of the almighty boulders that pepper the wrinkled green landscape.



A journey that began at seven in the morning in Luanda, is over by nine in Wako-Kungo, our new home. My first sights of Wako are in darkness: a high street lit only recently – for the first time in thirty years – by mains electricity: although it’s only ever sporadically lit from then on. We drive through the town and up to the top of it – where the road ends and the park before the white church begins, marking the foot of the mountain, where another, smaller, church overlooks the town: an abandoned guard-post of spirits.



We take a sharp right before the park and drive over the holey, gravel and mud road, and before the road meets a fork that either continues, or doubles back on itself, we pull into the driveway on the right of a white house, and are met on the doorstep by Harel, shining a torch into the Landrover, so I can’t really see him yet, and who was to be one of only four other people about to become our strange surrogate family.



In that first month there was only five of us: Harel, who was the entire Logistics Department, Yosi, who was the entire Construction Department (ABH), Danny, the entire Bullshit Department, Eran, the entire Social Department, and me, the entire Female Department! I became too accustomed to the small numbers – I adapted and took for granted too quickly, and grew too used to, feeling familiar and at home, with these people, in each of our spaces. With the exception of Danny, I felt like it was home – our home – but I was wrong, and it was very quickly taken away, very quickly filled with more people; people who were not part of my idea of what this new home was for us, and too quickly the people who had made up that ideal were pushed out. And I don’t think, in all the proceeding three years, I ever really got over this – this usurpation – and the indifference and invisibility that followed.

angola
africa
wako-kungo
sumbe
che guevara
waterfall
Turbo Tagger

Keep Your Friends Close, But Keep Your... Family (!) Closer:

While I was attending the women’s washing course in Aldeia 1 (I’ll write about that soon…), over the field in Aldeia 3, Sapalo – one of the twenty Angolan Social Co-ordinators, and Aldeia 3’s Social Representative – was being attacked with a knife… by his cousin!!



Recently the family in Casa 11 of Aldeia 3 had to be evicted (and that’s a whoooole other story… which I’ll tell at some point…) and apparently this caused some insecurity amongst some of the other villagers, including Sapalo’s cousin! So, as a measure to prevent his family’s eviction from his house in Aldeia 3, Sapalo’s cousin attempted to stab the Social Co-ordinator - his cousin! Fortunately Sapalo, who has a great deal of army experience, was able to overcome him, and escaped with a few cuts to his hands. As a result of this murder attempt, Sapalo’s cousin (aside from being arrested of course!) and his family is… guess what??... being evicted from the village!! Nice plan Sapalo’s cousin!



Apparently, the moment before he launched his attack, Sapalo’s cousin exclaimed:

“Sapalo, you are my cousin. But today I am going to kill you!”

...I think he’d been watching a few too many dodgy Brazilian B-movies over in the market!!

attempted murder
family
wako-kungo
angola
Turbo Tagger