mike in angola

We are told in the early hours of the morning that our flight to Luena is cancelled for no obvious reason.  On the way to breakfast we take a step outside the hotel and put two and two together – the roads are flooded, a big storm has hit overnight. This doesn’t stop cars from attempting to get around though. Potholes can be massive in Luanda so you’re chancing your arm (and car) with every pool of water you attempt to cross.

We’ve got a day to kill but no idea of how to do this. The hotel hasn’t got a great deal going on around it so we’re a bit stranded, still with the feeling of imminent danger if we venture off down the wrong street. Charlie spends an hour and half calling local tour operators - each one has 4 numbers but they rarely work. It’s a Sunday though so when he does get through it’s too short notice for anyone to pick us up for a days excursion. We decide to call Titus who puts us in touch with Erna, the OGB Humanitarian Officer for Angola. Erna seems oddly quite pleased about giving up her Sunday and showing us around the ‘real’ Luanda and laugh’s at our suggestion of maybe seeing some touristy things like the fort.

Erna has built up strong community and governmental connections in Angola and appears to know a lot of people after spending 8 years here. She takes us on a broad loop of the city in her Oxfam pick up, suitably equipped to deal with the lakes that have now replaced the main roads throughout the city. The trick seems to be watch the cars in front of you and see what happens to them. In the outskirts I spot my first Baobab tree, I’m very excited but everyone else misses it. The suburbs are a sprawl of shanty towns with open sewage canals in between – now overflowing with from the heavy rain. We spot a few Chinese workers pumping water from someone’s house on to the street. Erna points out that the owner must be pretty wealthy as this service is out of reach for the vast majority of residents.

We offer to buy Erna some lunch in exchange for her generous hospitality and putting up with our relentless questions. She agrees and takes us down to the ‘baracas’ down by the sea front. A baracas is essentially a tarpaulin market area with stalls serving locally sourced food. They’re very basic and not particularly inviting but Erna previously lived in this neighbourhood and so knows exactly where to head. It’s pretty difficult to work out one persons patch (I’m tempted to say restaurant, but they’re not) from the next but Erna points out that each bar with TV and HiFi on denotes the perimeter of one stall and start of another. There’s a power outage so the stalls are pretty quiet.

The beach behind the stalls is sadly used as a toilet and dumping ground which doesn’t wet the appetite. There are no other options for the locals though as there’s no sewage or waste disposal. Erna is clearly well respected here and chats to the chef and waitress like they’re old pals, explaining our weird English vegetarian requests in perfect Portuguese. Me and Antje opt for the local fish as it comes highly recommended. We choose well – the grilled red snapper (with fangs) is incredible and a far cry from the ready meal fish we had yesterday on Ilha. It comes with cassava, carrots salsa, cassava grain (odd gritty stuff that you sprinkle on top), washed down with Angolan beer ‘Eka’.

We are joined by three of Erna’s friends. One a charity worker, one a banker and another a Brazillian guy who normally lives in a condiminium and appears way out of his comfort zone in this baracas. He’s been lured out though by the promise of good fish which lives up to his expectations.

After food we put the left over fish in a bag for Erna’s dogs and drive back to our hotel. That night the four of us venture outside the sterile complex for some action, and a beer. Most of the restaurants are busy due to it being valentines day but we eventually find a small bar / restaurant which is all themed up for romance.  The icing on the cake being the over dramatic Italian opera piped through the house speakers. Nice touch. Our romantic evening for four gets cut short though as Titus calls to mention we might be on for a flight to Luena tonight.

False alarm though.

There’s one Lamborghini in Luanda. Everybody knows the driver – he’s a bank clerk. They also know there’s no way he could have paid for a Lamborghini legally, on a bank clerk salary at least. The funny thing is that he can only drive it up and down ‘the marginal’, the coastal road at the heart of the city that stretches all of ¼ mile. All other roads here are littered with potholes that would wreck the low underside of his car in 5 minutes.

For me the 8 hour long haul from Heathrow on Friday is filled with anticipation. A chance to mull over the winter in oxford and well-wishers I’d left behind and guess at what might await us in Angola. We’d read all the government sites, Oxfam literature and newly published guide book and on paper this country didn’t sound too inviting. Landmines, corruption, poor infrastructure, gun crime, poverty and serious health problems being the most common terms used. But if you look at the crime statistics of any major city in the UK you could just as easily be put off, so I’m keen to find out how much of this is a daily reality and how much accounts for organisations trying to cover their backs.

I chat to a burly scouser on the plane and ask him what brought him to Luanda. ‘Working in Cabinda for 3 months’ he says, ‘offshore’. Expats, mostly from the UK, Brazil, Portugal and Russia live in guarded condominiums and provide labour for the 4 main industries here: oil, diamonds, telecommunications and construction. They are kept in isolation from the real Angola, and few have any interest in seeing the country and it’s people whilst out here. Cabinda is the infamous separate northern territory that hit international news last month with the terrorist shootings of the Togo national team traveling to the African nations cup in Angola. We’re heading East and South over the next 2 weeks so safe from this threat at least.

The country with the biggest stake in Angola is China. The statistics will blow your mind. The population of Angola is guesstimated at 17 million, there’s not been an accurate census for many years. Since the war ceased in 2002, China have shipped 3 million prisoners (yes, all prisoners) to Angola to reconstruct the roads, railways and buildings obliterated in the 27 years of fighting. Surprisingly there’s no tension between the Chinese and locals but many questions are being asked about the deal that was struck which involved a $7 billion loan from China (the largest ever loan of it’s kind) in exchange for Angola’s oil.

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There’s no easy way to describe the smell that hits you as you walk off the plane in Luanda. Even at 4 in the morning you know instantly you’re in the tropics. It’s kind of a warm, musty, humid smell and brings a smile to my face. I put my jumper in my bag, won’t be needing that.

Gonsalvez our driver meets us on arrival and takes us to Hotel Forum, no room available till 10am so we crash in the lobby. There’s a surprising amount of life on the streets on the drive over. Lots of 4 x 4’s driving around and people chatting on the road side waiting for the sun to come up.

Gabriel our guide arrives at 10 and takes us out to see a bit of Luanda and change some dollars in to Kwanza. The safest way to do this is in a grocery store but you can get a better deal with anyone on the street making a ‘shhee’ sound with their mouth and rubbing their fingers together. Highly illegal in other countries I’ve been too but seems to be pretty normal here.

Gabriel is a warm, gentle man originally from Mozambique. He speaks good English and is able to answer our barrage of questions about Angola and the tour.

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A snapshot of what you see driving around Luanda, Angola’s capital

Traffic jams, abundance of brand new jeeps, landrovers, hummers, pickups. Street vendors carrying huge great weights of produce on their heads mainly fruit, plastic spades and kitchen utensils. They also sell locks, CD’s, t-shirts, bread, electrical equipment, sim cards and combs from under sun umbrellas to the gridlocked commuters. Other things new to my western eyes are potholes, collapsed tarmac roads, African nations cup statues, murals of soldiers, Che Guevera stickers and a piece of graffiti saying ‘P.Diddy badboy’.

There are many billboards dotted around, amongst other things promoting the MPLA (ruling party), Cuca and Eca beer and cheesey phone and bank ‘lifestyle’ adverts set against the contrasting backdrop of shanty towns, cranes and construction work.

Most Luandans pay a lot of attention to their appearance, girls with colourful dresses and perfect braided hair and guys with shirts and trousers. On Sunday it’s not uncommon to see a man dressed in a pristine white suit and matching shirt and tie leave a derelict looking shanty town and cross a flooded muddy street for church with not a mark on him.

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We head to the Oxfam office, a modest building with 4 desks, a kitchen, toilet and large map of Luanda on the wall. There are also campaign posters highlighting HIV/AIDS work, child labour, domestic violence and land mine do’s and dont’s.

Gabriel takes care of our Namibian money and arranges to meet us for the final 3^rd of our trip in Benguela. He hands over to Zetoy, the IT technician who takes us down to the Ilha peninsula for lunch. Ilha is a 5 mile strip that connects with ‘the marginal’ and juts out to sea. On the left is a long beach with locals playing football, volleyball and swimming in the sea. On the right we pass private yacht moorings where the expats and elite tend to hang out. On the horizon are oil tankers and cargo ships. Two more mad stats for you – Angola currently imports 80% of all it’s food. Due to this massive demand the average time taken for a cargo ship to dock is 45 days. Needless to say sea merchants shudder at the thought of having to drop off at Luanda. A new larger port has been promised we’re told.

We stop at one of the many restaurants and order some fish and chips, and rice and beans for the veggie’s. Zetoy spends a few minutes trying to explain the concept of vegetarianism to the waitress which he doesn’t quite grasp himself. ‘So no meat?’ he repeats back to us several times, ‘how about chicken?’ The food is fine but we later realise well expensive even for UK standards – about £20 a head. Due to the normal foreign clientele you can expect to pay double on Ilha and you’re unlikely to get the freshest, tastiest food the city has to offer.

On the way back to the Oxfam office we pass the 16^th century San Miguel fort surrounded by palm and cactus trees, also the presidents building, grand unitel building (mobile phone headquarters)interspersed with acres of tin roof shanty towns. At the office we are met by a kind Tanzanian gentleman, Titus. It seems that one qualification for working out here is to have an impressive name. Titus spends an hour talking through our detailed itinerary whilst pointing out the main areas we’ll be visiting over the next 2 weeks.

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Oxfam have been operating in Angola since 1985. In 2005 there were 200 Oxfam staff working in the country but are now down to 20 since the focus has shifted away from emergency response and humanitarian work. The current projects here consist of water and sanitation work and HIV/AIDS awareness which Oxfam implement in partnership with numerous other organisations and government bodies.