who goes where

1 Every time I come back to Britain I realise exactly why I left.

2 Within 24 hours of landing in Luanda, Lara, I wanted to leave.

1 I have lovely friends, and there are lots of things I like about London in particular, but within seconds of touching down I am cringing.

2 Even among my family and friends, I felt they’d been lying to me. They said it was better, that things were improving, but as soon as I arrived I could see it wasn’t true.

1 So I’ll carry on living here in Luanda. I don’t know for how much longer, but I prefer it here.

2 I’m starting to sort my life out here in London. I’ve got work, I’m buying a small flat, and my children have an education. I want to visit Luanda – Angola is my home – but I have to look after my family. It’s my life. I need to protect my own life, don’t I.

3 Look, I came back to Luanda because I couldn’t take the UK any more. I was lonely. I don’t belong there. But it’s so difficult back here. I’ve been ill already. I can’t find work. People said it was getting better, but it’s not. They were lying. I don’t know how I’m going to get out now. They make it very difficult to leave the country once they know you’ve lived abroad. I’m stuck.

4 I can’t live in London any more. It’s my home, I know, but I just don’t like the way of the English. So unfriendly. It’s much better in Luanda. People here are more open, there are better parties, the weather is wonderful, we’ve got the beach. Why would I want to go back to England? That said, I’ve bought a place there just to be sure. At least then I’ve got a base. It’s important to have your own base. But I’m not going to live there. You must be joking! I don’t even know what I’d do. I can earn much more money here. As long as you can get out every few months, it’s much better in Luanda.

3 I’m stuck. I found it so hard in England. I couldn’t find work. I wasn’t being accepted. I tried. But the English, they made it so hard. There’s an attitude there if you’re African: don’t come here to live off us. But I’ve got friends who made it. They worked hard, kept their heads down, and they’re making it. They’ve got citizenship now. I didn’t get it. So now I’m stuck. I came back to Luanda thinking it would be better, thinking I would get work, thinking I would be back with my friends. But it’s changed. They aren’t my friends in the way they were. They said it was better. They said they’d get me work, that they’d help me. But I’ve been back months now, and I have no work. They all disappeared when I got home, vanished, and the promises vanished too. And I’ve been ill.

2 I’d prefer to live in my own country, of course I would. But I’ve got children now. I have to protect them. There’s nothing there for me. It’s terrible there. No one chooses to leave their homeland unless they have to. I had to. I couldn’t survive there. Now I have a home. I have my own home. I own it. I have a job. I can fly to America and visit friends there and it will cost me a few hundred dollars, the same it costs to fly from Luanda to Luena. I’d rather live at home. But this is my life, and we only have one life don’t we. Don’t we. Are you listening?

3 So are you going to come back? Or have you abandoned us again? Run back home to London? Come back. Do your work here. It’s important. London isn’t going to run away you know. You can always go back there. But come here now. It’s important. Bring your family. Things are better here. It’s ok. Bring your children. It’s easy for you foreigners. Please come back.

5 You were never really integrated were you? That’s the problem. You’ve got to integrate yourself, you know. Don’t be so English. You’ve got to be more like them. Forget about work and worries and just have fun. That’s what Angolans prefer.

3 They wouldn’t accept me. I tried. But they wouldn’t accept me. But now I’m home, I’m not sure I feel the same any more.

1 Every time I come back to Britain I realise exactly why I left. Within seconds of touching down I am cringing.

a matter of perspective

A reader of this blog suggested I add some pictures of new buildings in Luanda to balance out those of Sambizanga, and show people the ‘other side’ of this (partially) changing city. So I have. But before you look at these pictures, think about this a little. I would love to take lots of pictures of the new buildings in Luanda. Some, I think, are incredibly impressive. Some are even verging on stunning. Some are plain ugly. But that is neither here nor there if the only aim is to record their existence and record change. Taking pictures here is very difficult. The other day a friend of mine, an Angolan woman, was stopped by police for taking pictures of some older buildings in downtown Luanda. In the end, the only way she managed to keep her camera and the photos was when her aunt turned up and paid the coppers $50. Another friend of mine – a while back – was taken to the police station for taking snaps in Luanda. He wasn’t snapping the palace, or the police, or the presidential guard – just a hotel (a rather ugly one at that). In contrast to this, if you go into places like Sambizanga, people leave you to click away. You won’t be arrested or bribed. OK, you might be mugged, but this might happen in any city when you’re carrying a camera so it’s hardy peculiar to Luanda. If the authorities here really want people to see the good side of things here, they should allow us to examine them in our own way, and snap them too. Unfortunately, and particularly if you are foreign (like me), you are much more likely to be accused of spying. Flattering, maybe, but incorrect.

Anyway, enough of that. Here are some pictures. This building is very close to where I live. It was built by Angolans and Chinese. Unlike the employees of Casais (the brutal Portuguese company who tried to destroy our house), the men who built this building were provided with hard hats and boots.

That blue and white vehicle below is known as a kandongueiro and is what most Angolans rely on for transport. It costs 50 kwanzas a hop, more or less. That’s about 70 cents. They can be a wee bit hairy but on the whole – inside the city – they are pretty reliable (a lot more so than your average London bus). But you need bendy legs and a hard arse if you’re going a long way. Always guaranteed good conversation (again, a lot more so than your average London bus).

Just to come back to Casais again: they are destroying another building on the Marginale. Just like the exploited employees they have doing work next door to us, their men on the Marginale do not wear boots and protective helmets. They work in dangerous conditions with no protection. Does anyone think Casais would be allowed to get away with this in Portugal?

Cranes are everywhere. From my bedroom window, I can see four huge cranes. Building building building. This is one of the cranes I can see. It’s helping to build a(nother) hotel. When I lived here before in 1999/2000, street kids used to sniff petrol on this very same spot. Not any more they don’t. Now they go around the corner, just up the road from the Hugo Boss shop. ‘Men here spend more money on clothes because they are more vain than women and they have all the money.’ That’s what I was told. Who knows if it’s true.

Finally, look at this. Can you see?

Yup. That’s Nike. Nike goes artisan goes global. I couldn’t resist buying it. It cost about $3. It’s brilliant. ‘My uncle makes them,’ said the young man who sold it to me. I’m not sure I believe him. But whoever is making them is very clever. How did Nike come up with that horrible tick? And why do people love it so much?

Originally posted from Luanda 16 April 2007

Sambizanga lakes

Beyond the inner tarmac circle, this is what the roads of Luanda look like almost everywhere. As we left Sambizanga, a lady caught me taking this picture, and she roared with laughter and shouted to the man I was with: ‘Don’t let those tourists take shots of our lakes of Sambizanga!’ And then she laughed even more. They are lakes, and I feel deeply ashamed that when I first got here I said that people don’t need four by fours. They do. But the truth is, the people who have them – the rich and the foreign – don’t actually enter these areas that much. The people who need them are the poor and the local who live here and must cross the lakes every day.

This is a good business: giving piggy-backs across the lakes.

We sat in a bar around the corner from here and drank bottled Coke for 60 kwanza, a quarter the price of Belas Shopping. An old man muttered sweet somethings to himself and other men stared. Then we all got talking. I won’t tell you about what. That’s a secret and if you’re interested, wait for my book. I will tell you one thing though: the people who live in places like this are a whole lot more open and chatty than the wealthy. ‘What do we have to lose? We have nothing! What do we have to lose talking to you? Of course you can use my name. Say what you like. It’s time they were told the truth.’ I am feeling very humbled.

Originally posted 14 April 2007 from Luanda

admiring

Third day without electricity. The garage is on its seventh. Privilege provides a generator. It rumbles, but brings us wireless internet, a shower and toast. It also stops the food going off. You forget that if you always have electricity, but if you don’t, the first thing is food. What will we do with the food?

If you have a fridge.

Reading Caras which is exactly the same as Hello, Ola and all those other magazines that love to love the rich who love themselves. Famous people (or not so famous), pretty women (and not so pretty), and powerful men (and some simply desperate to be powerful) all feature. Caras never hides what its interested in. It does what it does extremely well. It worships privilege. So much so that on the exceptionally rare occasions that it features the non-privileged it insists on emphasising its editorial line: we are not interested in anyone who isn’t ‘someone’. Gazing at a photograph in the middle pages of issue no 112 from January this year, I got stuck on a particular photograph. A good-looking man, Lázaro, has his arms around ‘two admirers’. Nameless admirers. They are the only people in the all of the photographs (other than the ads) who are not named. Even children are named in Caras. But these two ladies didn’t cut the mustard. They are the masses, they are the public, they don’t have names. They are just there to admire the names. They each had a pile of sarongs and towels on their heads. I wonder if Lázaro or the Caras team bought one.

Eating Cadury’s Fruit & Nut. Nice. Listening to a very good Angolan rapper, MCK, who I’m going to meet soon. His music is excellent. When I bought the CD, the man selling it to me said: ‘Cool, MC K, he speaks the truth’. He definitely doesn’t mince his words. He says what he thinks. And he’s very astute. MCK, pronounced M-C-Kappa. The album is called Nutrição Espiritual. It’s got a great mix with some Salif Keita music. A few years ago, a boy was killed (allegedly) for singing MC K’s music while washing someone’s car. Witness fear meant the case was never resolved in court. Imagine that. Singing a song. A song. Here’s some words from a track, Silence also speaks:

We’ve got more weapons than dolls
We’ve got fewer universities than nightclubs
More canteens than libraries
The people know the truth…

Originally posted from Luanda, 11 April 2007

hand over ya’ ID

Angola’s first shopping mall opened three days ago. It’s a good hour’s drive from the city centre, taking into account traffic jams, lakes and dissolving tarmac. You can buy beautiful chocolates, very good wine, healthy oat bars, natural shampoo, baby clothes, cakes, watches, handbags, Diesel jeans, and cinema tickets. There are eight cinema screens. I was given a sneak preview and a very nice man gave me six free tickets to the cinema which I promptly gave away to another very nice man. It’s not that I don’t want to go to the cinema – I do – but I have to use the tickets before Wednesday and I know that’s not going to happen. I was also given a large and probably expensive Belgian chocolate by another very nice man who still hadn’t decided what price he was going to charge. I drank a good coffee, ate a chocolate cake and then drank an orange juice. Foolishly, and bizarrely, I didn’t test the loos.

I gazed at this for a long time.

Belas Shopping is all about freedom – the freedom to shop every day. I felt free to interview people, until a burly security guard arrived and began interrogating me. What was I doing? What did I think I was doing? What was I asking people? Did I have authority? Did I have identity? Who was I? These were all good questions: I had spent the previous two hours, sliding around the shiny floors, gazing through polished windows, asking myself very similar things. But security man didn’t want an exchange of ideas. He asked me to hand over my identity. I became confused and he got very cross, and the two young men I was interviewing grew rather anxious and disappeared. We were left waving microphone at walkie-talkie and walkie-talkie at microphone until he got bored and walked away too.

Originally posted from Luanda, on 30th March 2007

plus Something on the Weaker Sex

This is one of those posts that you write with your hand hovering over the delete button. Is this really necessary? Or is it an act of self-destruction, a masochistic moment that could lead to a few tears (with luck), or an end to all male relations forever on this particular terra? Of course these questions form a subconscious – or perhaps very conscious (I haven’t a clue) – caveat, a begging apology, before I continue, a plea for understanding. But this needs to be said.

For every Angolan man, there are seven women. In fact, the true statistic could be higher – it might be ten to one – but even if it’s only three to one, the fact of the matter is that if you are an Angolan woman there is a lot you have to put up with when it comes to your man. Whether you like it or not, he has the upper hand. Supply and demand. The Angolan male – when it comes to choosing a lover – is living in fortunate times: he has one for each day of the week. I didn’t pluck this figure out of the air, I was told by the head of the women’s parliamentary group, Maria Lourdes Veiga – an extremely impressive figure. She admits that women here have little choice but to share their man. I can’t even begin to imagine this. I am not known for my capacity to share my husband, sometimes even on the level of conversation… so the idea that I would knowingly share his body is beyond my imagination. With one, two, three, four, five…

Out of the question.

But given how lucky the Angolan male is, it is even harder for me to imagine why any man here would need to exaggerate the number of love affairs he has had. If he can already – by statistical virtue – have seven women, why would he need to pretend he has had even more? And yet, he does. It’s the devil and the deep blue sea. If a man makes a pass at you and you turn him down, the rumour mill – mujimbeira – dictates that you will have slept with him anyway. I learned yesterday that when I last lived in this country – between 1998 to December 2000 – I had eight love affairs. Eight! Ah, if only it were true.

It’s amazing what unspent testosterone can come up with. If the men of this land could put their sexual fantasies into writing short novels, Angola could have a thriving Mills & Boon pumping out fiction for the local market. They could make a fortune – which would probably increase their real chances of seduction.

A female friend sat and listened to me moaning about much of the above. I felt sure it was to do with a cultural misunderstanding – perhaps I am leading men on without knowing it? – but she assured me this was not the case.
‘It is the same for us. I have been in the same situation. A man made a pass at me, I turned him down and he was so humiliated, he spread a rumour that we had made love.’
‘So is it possible to have male friends without them getting the wrong end of the stick?’
‘Sometimes. But it’s not easy. If you go out with a man here, his wife will know that he’ll try… He will always try. That’s why you have to be very careful about who you are seen with in public.’
‘What?’
‘People will assume, when they see a man and a woman out together, that they are having some sort of thing.’

I should probably know better. I am no spring chicken. I’ve lived here before. But I refuse to accept this straight-jacket around relationships. There are many wonderful men here – men I like to talk with, to share ideas with, to discuss politics (national and international), journalism and so on – and I don’t see why I should not be able to have those conversations without discovering the following week that, in fact, I was in the throes of passionate love-making. Is a woman not allowed to think, to discuss, to exercise her intellect with a man – shock, horror – as she might also do with another woman? Or must we always be confined to our bodies, identified as sexual objects who were dropped on the planet simply to titillate the weaker sex?

I have no answers. I am totally bemused. Perhaps the best thing, instead of trying to raise the male, is for us to go down, to lower our standards and behave like them. Isn’t that what they call equality?

P.S. I have struggled with this. It is clumsily written. Nerves and doubt got the better of me. But my heart tells me to press publish, so here goes.

originally posted on 1 April 2007, from luanda

she just collapsed

‘I tried to go to England but eventually I gave up. The visa process was humiliating. They wanted so much information – what I earn, what my daughter was earning… They even asked me if my daughter was earning enough to support me. Imagine! Maybe in England that is how things work, but an Angolan man would never expect his daughter to pay for him. So in the end we didn’t go. The process was entirely insulting. And the idea that I’d want to go and live in that place which has no sun, and where people don’t have enough time to sit down and talk at lunch… Why would I want to stay there? But that’s what they thought. That’s what the embassy staff were thinking: that I wanted to go and live in their country. Honestly. My passport is full of visa stamps. I’ve been all over the world. But I have no intention of living anywhere apart from Angola…’

‘She just collapsed. She’d been waiting for her passport to be sorted out. I’d seen her the day before when she was queueing like the rest of us; when it came to her name being called out, they said she should come back tomorrow because her passport would be ready then. So she was there again today. I saw her in the queue again. We were all waiting together. We’d been there since six this morning. You have to put your name on the list and wait to be called out. And when they call out your name they either give you your passport or they tell you that your process isn’t ready yet. And eventually it came to her turn. The man with the list called out her name. She put her hand up and walked over to him. I saw him shaking his head – ‘your passport isn’t ready yet madam, come back tomorrow’ – and she fell to the floor. She was about 42 years old. People rushed to help her. They picked her up and took her to a bench to lie her down. It was the stress. She couldn’t take it any more. All the bureaucracy. All the waiting. The uncertainty.’
‘So did they fast-track her passport, to help her, to make her better?’
‘No! Of course not. She’ll have to go back tomorrow. But you see, the point is that you mustn’t get angry. You must stay calm. Your whole family is depending on you – your mother, your father, your children, your wife. If you get really angry, look what happens. Your heart can’t cope and you collapse. That doesn’t help anyone.’

Orignally posted from Luanda, 28th March 2007

corrugating

A huge signpost bowed down into the middle of the road – a hand in front, a hand behind – as I drove home in a grey car. Its waist had melted. Large metal structures, overnight, let loose on Luanda. Now they are kneeling into pot-holes and leaning precariously on one leg, or an exhausted arm. The nose of a smart yacht is still struggling for a last gasp of air at the Boating Club. Leaves and branches and whole trees were beaten so hard, they fell to the floor in bits and pieces, broken and in some cases crippled for life. A large man was sitting on a roof, banging at corrugated strips, realigning, readjusting and repairing.

‘How much overlap should there be with those corrugated roofs? The man who did mine just pushed them together so the rain comes in all the time. I have to be at home when it rains to place the buckets in the right place.’

She was terribly worried. She wasn’t at home. The rain would be flooding the floor already. The thunder was so strong, whole buildings were trembling. She needed to get her three children to bed, in the rain and the floods and the water.

Driving to the beach. Should I even be going? This is a story. Floods. People will have lost their homes. ‘Five cars were destroyed in the rain!’ a boy told me. ‘Five cars!’ The remains of the day were in the sea – plastic, wood, bottles, Coke cans, plants – tossing about by the bay.

‘There’ll only be white people on the beach today. You’ll see. Only white people go to the beach when it’s cloudy. Angolans never go to the beach if there isn’t any sun.’

Not quite true but a fair generalisation. The beach was covered in white and pinky wales, hairy ones with breasts, wandering up and down the sands, gazing frustrated at the unusually polluted seas, trying to figure out how to get beyond the rubbish into cleaner waters. A skinny man gave a large woman a piggy-back out into the deeper waters and then tossed her clumsily from his shoulders. She flapped her arms and splashed out to sea. I didn’t notice if she came back, but there was a distinct lack of hysteria.

A very wobbly man, undressed in rags, talked to himself and rolled in the sand in front of three plump girls lying in a row, their round bottoms shaped and defined by bikini bottoms designed for flossing teeth. They let him stare and fiddle for over an hour, and then he was moved on by two men dressed in berets, dark glasses and guns. They stood and stared as he struggled to lift his broken body, half a hairy face covered in handfuls of sand, and stayed to watch him limping– up down, up down – away from the teenage trio, and weaving precariously between tanning foreigners who are here to do business.

Yesterday, a team of election inspectors from Southern Africa – who’d expressed some alarm about the number of men in suits who’d followed them about their business – asked me with a wink and a nod and a chuckle if I’d ever read Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Originally posted from Luanda, on 25th March 2007

going up in smoke

I went to get my nails done – my feet – at a smart and sterile ‘international’ hotel which has wireless internet in the bar, but thankfully not in the ladies’ beauty room (do we have to work everywhere?). Beauty parlours link women the world over. Stylists stop, a hunk of hair in one hand, curlers and hair-dryer in the other, to discuss how many portions of chicken they want the receptionist to buy, or their lover’s latest errors. I feel guilty about paying to get my nails done, but it is the most enjoyable luxury I know. And I love listening to and participating in universal subjects with complete strangers. We are linked forever by our men and our stomachs. G – who did my feet today – was an absolute expert. She hacked off all that dead skin, plucked at layers of ancient nail, snipped at overgrown cuticles and then filed and toned not just the nails but my entire foot. And then, she painted them red. I had suggested gold.
‘Isn’t gold all the rage now?’
‘It is popular, yes, but you’d be better off with a deeper colour to hide your fungi toenail here,’ she said, pointing to my left big toe. So now they are a plum-red.

G used to be a teacher. But she didn’t get paid for two years, so now she does nails.

The woman next to me was having an all-over transformation: feet, hands and hair. She was left sitting under a lamp – the sort that cacoon old women’s heads in local salons in southern France – reading a magazine.
Then all of a sudden, she was on fire. Smoke rushing out of the lamp, reminding me of a 6th form play I did at school in which our chemistry teacher, Dr Hustler, provided dry ice and fans to create fog.
‘Fogo! Fogo!’
But G didn’t bat an eye. Digging her thumbnail into my large fungal nail to which she was adding the finishing touches, she muttered something about evaporation under her breath.

Later I went for dinner with an academic and a priest. A local joint. Two parrots – one caged, one chained to a bar – flapped and squawked. A rather nice young dog kept turning in circles, then lying down, then getting up and turning in more circles before lying down in exactly the same position on the same spot. The academic ordered something sensational which he described unconvincingly as ‘cabbage’. Chunks of ginger, prawn head, banana pau, okra and cabbage. Utterly delicious. And then the rains came. Heavy heavy rains. We moved tables to the centre of the room but the winds pushed up a gear and the rains followed us to the centre of the room. A pool of water spread across the room, blue buckets were placed strategically under particularly heavy leaks. Then a small explosion and a controlled shriek. Smoke and sparks in the kitchen. All the lights went out. The parrot on the bar was particularly irritated: garbled messages and bubbled groans streamed from his corner. Neither the academic nor the priest even blinked. We carried on talking about the history of this country – me, swinging like a pendulum, on their every word, desperate to remember the detail. It struck me that maybe I should hire a parrot to help me. Forget bird brains, parrots are said to have excellent memories.

Our main dish was a sort of soup of fish, more banana and mandioc. It was equally excellent and you would never have known that it was cooked without electricity for about 45 minutes.

We drove home through lakes.

Originally published from Luanda, 18th March 2007.

breathing life into Adam

I was sitting in the car, another traffic jam, reading Chocolate, a glossy full of elegant women who appear to have only time to dress, undress and paint their faces and bodies. Glossies are the same the world over. Chocolate is a cross between Red and Vogue and Hello. It’s full of Angolan people – mainly women – who are making it.
Making what?
It. Don’t be difficult.

I was gazing at a woman’s legs. She was wearing leopard shoes and a very short dress. Her legs were beautiful. I was thinking about my legs. They used to be extremely beautiful, but they aren’t any more. I don’t mind as much as I used to – there’s more to life than legs – but it’s taken me a long time to get there. So I was gazing at her legs and marvelling at their length, and wondering how long and thin they really were and how much was down to photographic trickery. Not much, I suspect. My friend, who was driving, peered over every now and then, to gaze at the legs too. Then he bought me a bag of cashews for 500 kwanzas (about five US dollars) and we began slowly chewing and chipping away on the nuts waiting to reach the front of the jam.

Eventually I got bored of Chocolate. We’d read all of it, even the recipe for a hot chocolate mousse sponge, so I started gazing out the window.
Cars.
Block buildings.
Old Cuban structures. Faded grey. And pink. And peeling pale yellow. And peeling nursery blue.
Hawkers. Why are they called hawkers? There is nothing hawk-like about the people who weave around 4X4s inhaling petrol, whilst trying to sell their wares. I must have missed the point somewhere.
More cars.
Motorbikes. We talked a bit about them.
‘I’m going to buy one.’
‘You’re stupid. You’ll get killed.’
‘But look at the traffic – we haven’t been moving for the past 20 minutes.’
‘Yes, it’s the only way to get about. Buy a helmet.’

I gazed to the side. And saw an apparently very normal site.

A long, dark, soft body wrapped in filthy charcoal cloth sleeping on the pavement under the narrow shade of a young malnourished tree. Such a deep sleep. So much going on around him, but he slept solidly. Occasionally, a hawker approached to share in the shade of the tree – but at a distance. Just in case. Such a peaceful place, such a tired body, it seemed a little cruel to express any fear. He was sleeping happily. I watched, willing him never to wake up again to the world of begging and pissing. There was something extraordinary about this body. Some charisma. Something enchanting. I think it was his arm, his right arm stretching out away from his body, stretching towards the thin trunk of the tree, providing his head with a small pillow of support. Not just his arm, but his hand, and fingers. Large, strong but also soft, composed and sensitive. His fingers almost reaching out but too tired to stretch.

‘He looks like something out of a painting, that painting.’

‘Ah, look, we’re moving now.’

We drove away, skipping over the lights as they fell back to red, lurching into Kinaxixi.

I’m not mad, you know. That was Adam.

Originally published from Luanda, 15th March 2007

poor connections

The Bishop told me I should telephone God.

‘No matter if I haven’t got a strong connection, he likes bad phone lines.’

The Archbishop told me today that I was only interested in homosexuality, and some of his aides became very cross. I wonder if an angry Archbishop might cut the connection altogether.

So far, I haven’t tried calling. I’m thinking about it though. The Bishop said it might help resolve all of my visa problems.

Originally published from Luanda, 13 March 2007