Blue Dahlia, Black Gold: A Journey Into Angola by Daniel Metcalfe (2014)

Having read quite a lot about Rwanda and Congo, I felt I needed to read up on their neighbours, finding out about other African nations radiating out from the central core of the Congo. Trouble is that books about them are hard to find, for example, there don’t seem to be any books about Burundi’s civil war, 1993 to 2005. Either that, or the existing books are heavy academic works, often collections of essays, which weigh in at £30 or £40 and can’t be found second hand. Reading between the lines, no-one in Britain cares enough about these countries to write, publish or read books about them.

Daniel Metcalfe’s travelogue was one of the few paperbacks I could find about Angola and seemed like an affordable way of finding out about the recent history and current shape of Angola, Congo’s large nation to the south, and one of the participants in the Great War of Africa. I didn’t really take to the personality created in the text and found it a grim read whose occasional attempts at humour didn’t come off. Nonetheless, I’d recommend it as giving a very good overview of Angolan history, along with first hand accounts of the tremendous disparity between the oil super-rich and the majority of the population which remains dirt poor, and for the vivid descriptions of his excursions into the (generally very unattractive) interior. The net effect of the book is to make Angola sound like an awful place.

Angola historical overview

Angola is the seventh largest country in Africa (Wikipedia). It was first reached by Portuguese sailors in 1484 and the current capital city, São Paulo de Loanda (Luanda), was founded in 1575. (It was conquered by the Dutch in 1640 and briefly ruled by them till 1648, when the Portuguese resumed control.)

The Portuguese didn’t penetrate far inland, instead creating a series of coastal ports and trading entrepots. The main commodity was Africans as Angola became one of the main locations of the transatlantic slave trade, which was well established by 1600, with around 10,000 slaves a year transported. Most of them went to Portugal’s other vast colony, Brazil, a thousand miles across the stormy Atlantic.

Throughout the 18th century Portugal slowly conquered various tribes and kingdoms in the territory they claimed, and pulled natives into the global economy, forcing them to produce raw materials such foodstuffs and rubber. Brazil won its independence in 1822 and Portugal abolished the slave trade in 1836, illicit trading being policed by the anti-slavery Royal Navy. But generally Portugal still only had a very thin, coastal presence.

It was only at the time of the Berlin Congress of 1885 and the late nineteenth century Scramble for Africa that the Portuguese made sustained attempts to penetrate further inland, to explore, conquer and claim the territory of what was to become the modern territory of Angola.

Part and parcel of this late 19th century conquest was the widespread imposition of forced labour on the hapless natives, hard forced labour under the compulsion of the whip, to turn out agricultural goods to be shipped back to the motherland. (It was a Brit, Henry Woodd Nevinson, who exposed the extent of the exploitation in his book A Modern Slavery, published in 1908, the year King Leopold was forced to hand over his barbaric rule in the Congo over to the Belgium state.)

Soon afterwards Portugal entered a period of political turmoil triggered by a coup in 1910 which overthrew the Portuguese monarchy (the same year, as it happens, as the Mexican Revolution) to establish what became known as the First Republic. One of the republic’s many liberal reforms was ending forced labour in the colonies.

However, the First Republic suffered from chronic instability and was overthrown in 1926 with the advent of António de Oliveira Salazar, who established the so-called Estado Novo in the 1930s. This new regime came to be known as the Second Republic as Salazar established an authoritarian corporatist state in Portugal. As part of the ‘return to order’ the New Order reimposed brutal forced labour in its colonies.

Portugal stayed neutral throughout the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War while millions of Angolan natives slaved to produce agricultural products for Portuguese consumers and profits for Portuguese companies. Appalling conditions led to a high death rate among workers and a scandalously high infant mortality rate of 60%. Critics wrote reports calling for change in the 1940s and 50s but were ignored or imprisoned.

A workers’ protest starting in a cotton company in 1961 led to widespread rebellion across Angola which was suppressed with much bloodshed (p.114). This and the uprising of Bakongo in northern Angola are now seen as marking the start of the Portuguese Colonial War, which lasted from 1961 to 1974 and involved not just Angola but Portugal’s other colonies in Africa, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau.

The wars were as ruinous and futile as the Vietnam War and ended in the full independence of the three African countries involved, after elements in Portugal’s own army overthrew the authoritarian civilian government on 25 April 1974 in what came to be known as the Carnation Revolution (pages 71 and 135).

There was a year delay while the new regime established itself and while peace talks to end the colonial wars dragged on. The Alvor Agreement of January 1975 called for general elections and set the country’s independence date for 11 November 1975. Hooray!

Except that the country was almost immediately plunged into a civil war between the three main anti-colonial guerrilla movements: the communist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), and the anti-communist National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).

The FNLA were eliminated in the first year but the conflict between the other two refused to be settled and dragged on for decades, becoming one of the leading proxy wars between the Cold War adversaries, the USA and the Soviet Union, with the Soviets and Cuba backing the communist MPLA government and the Americans funding and supplying the anti-communist UNITA.

UNITA developed some bases inside Zaire, to Angola’s north, with the support of Joseph Mobutu, Zaire’s western-backed dictator, but were mostly based in the south, enjoying support from the apartheid South African regime which was funneled through the state immediately south of Angola, Namibia, itself a colony of South Africa which was experiencing its own war of independence. (Namibia won independence from South Africa in March 1990.)

This being Africa there was also a strong tribal element in the civil war. The MPLA was primarily an urban-based movement in Luanda and its surrounding area and was largely composed of Mbundu people. UNITA was a predominantly rural movement mainly composed of Ovimbundu people from the Central highlands who make up about a third of the population (pages 123 and 133). Obviously there was overlap and complexities. There are many more tribal groupings in the country and allegiances and membership shifted and complexified over time.

The Angolan civil war raged from 1975 to 2002, 27 years of massacre and destruction which not only left an estimated 800,000 dead, but displaced over 4 million people and devastated the country’s infrastructure, leaving it one of the poorest in the world. In 2003 the UN estimated that 80% of Angolans lacked access to basic medical care, 60% lacked access to water, and 30% of Angolan children would die before the age of five, with an overall national life expectancy of less than 40 years of age. 70% of the population lives below the poverty line (p.70).

Whole families sat and begged on the rubbish-strewn streets [of Luanda] that stank of animal and human excrement. (p.49)

Metcalfe writes that the population of Luanda is 4 million, but a recent Guardian profile (see below) gives it as 7.8 million and that this number is set to double by 2030.

So from the start of the independence struggle in 1961 to the end of the civil war in 2002, Angola suffered 41 years of hurt and wasted lives.

Daniel Metcalfe

Daniel Metcalfe studied classics at Oxford then went to work in Iran and travelled around central Asia, material which he used for his first book, Out of Steppe: The Lost Peoples of Central Asia (2009). This is his second book, and is actually not so much one journey as an account of three journeys across Angola undertaken in (I think) 2010, with follow-up visits.

Right from the start Metcalfe describes himself as a financial journalist and his bio says he’s written for the Economist, Guardian, Financial Times, Foreign Policy and the Literary Review. In other words, he initially appears just the kind of pukka chap that has formed the backbone of English travel writing for the last hundred years, all of whom went to top private schools (Evelyn Waugh [Sherborne], Wilfred Thesiger [Eton], Eric Newby [St Paul’s], Colin Thubron [Eton], Bruce Chatwin [Marlborough], Jan Morris [Lancing]). So I was expecting references to tiffin and cricket, or a trip to the little known Luanda polo club or some such. Posh boy eccentricity.

I was wrong. Metcalfe doesn’t have the de haut en bas tone of the classic English chap abroad; quite the opposite, he’s keen to rub in what a man of the people he is, travelling with only a grubby backpack in the cheap and chaotic minivans ordinary Angolans use, cadging a night’s kip on the sofas or packed beds of all sorts of random acquaintances, and having at least two severe bouts of food poisoning.

But with the thought of the Great Tradition of English Travel Writing in mind I couldn’t help being struck by a sense of the text’s belatedness. What I mean is that earlier travel writers described to their readers distant and exotic lands a) which none of the readers had travelled to or knew much if anything about and b) which were largely ‘unspoilt’.

Metcalfe’s book arrives in the internet age when:

a) there is no ‘distance’ or ‘remoteness’ any more – any of us can Google articles about Angola and its history, geography, tourist features, festivals, national costume and so on and find out more or less everything contained in this book; and

b) Angola is definitely ‘spoilt’, ruined in fact, but in two senses of the word: i) the cities, towns and landscape are still recovering from 40 years of destruction, for example tourists are advised not to wander anywhere off the beaten track because the country is still covered in millions of unexploded mines; and ii) every conceivable tourist attraction has been photographed, thoroughly documented, posted on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and all the rest.

Metcalfe is therefore labouring in a genre which is almost obsolete. These days a travel writer has to work very hard to find anywhere that millions of Western tourists haven’t already trampled and photographed to death, and then has to work up in their prose a sense of enthusiasm for sights or experiences which bored locals experience every day and post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and so on.

The book’s structure

São Tomé and Príncipe then mainland Angola

In a bid to be quirky and original Metcalfe starts his journey by flying in to the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe, two archipelagos based round the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, which are themselves about 87 miles apart and about 150 miles off the northwestern coast of Gabon. This far from the mainland, they were uninhabited till the Portuguese discovered them and populated them with Africans. The islands became an important entrepot for the slave trade as well as slave plantations producing coffee and cocoa. The islands became independent alongside Portugal’s other colonies in 1975 and form the second-smallest African state after the Seychelles.

Metcalfe visits the capital cities of each island and is shown round a rotting old plantation house. He learns about the semi-fictional slave king who led a Spartacus-style slave rebellion, ‘Rei Amador. He tells us it has the smallest economy in Africa, 80% of which is contributed by foreign donors ie it’s not really a viable state at all.

But the main story is that oil has been located near the islands, which are therefore teetering on the brink of becoming very wealthy, but there is general anxiety that, as with every other ‘petrostate’ (like in nearby Nigeria), the money will end up funneled into the hands of a tiny super-rich elite while the rest of the islanders continue living in poverty.

Then he flies to mainland Angola where he makes three journeys, carefully indicated on the book’s one and only map. A throwaway remark reveals he seems to have made at least two trips to the country: he tells us he first visited Angola in 2010, then two years later, in 2012 (p.83).

Anyway, it’s not really a journey into Angola but maybe five distinct journeys:

  • down the coast from Luanda to Benguela
  • from Benguela inland to Huambo and then to the remote town of Cuito Cuanavale
  • then, after returning to Luanda, from Luanda directly inland to Malange and then Saurimo
  • then north up the coast into Zaire province, to the heartland of the old Kongo kingdom, M’banza-Kongo, to the oil town of Soto
  • then flying into the enclave of Cabinda which is part of Angola but separated by the mouth of the river Congo which is inside the Democratic Republic of Congo

A well-ruined country

The bottom line about Angola seems to be that it has been ruined at least three times over. First by the brutality of Portuguese rule which enforced harsh forced labour on most of the population well into the 1960s, doing little to create a decent infrastructure such as roads and schools, or to foster an educated middle class. Second, by the 40 years of warfare, first for independence, then the terrible, futile and ruinous civil war.

But what really strikes Metcalfe is the ruin brought since the civil war ended by the arrival of OIL. The Angola he flies into is now a ‘petrostate’ with a huge gulf between the overclass of politicians and businessmen who have made themselves fabulously rich on the proceeds of oil, drive huge four by fours, live in gated mansions, stay in gleaming hotels – and the great majority of the population (of 33 million) who scrape a living off the land (periodically stepping on one of the millions of abandoned landmines) or make a living by working the utterly corrupt life of the cities. Thus despite the billions of dollars pouring into the treasury from oil revenue, Angolan life expectancy is among the lowest in the world, while infant mortality is among the highest. A third of the population can’t read or write.

José Eduardo dos Santos, the leader of the MPLA, once, back in the olden days, a ‘Marxist’ party, was Angola’s president for almost four decades. During the oil boom his daughter, Isabel dos Santos, was ‘awarded’ numerous lucrative contracts, thus becoming Africa’s richest woman. She is nicknamed ‘the Princess’ and at the time this book was written, was said to be a billionaire. So much for Marxism. Interestingly, she attended the elite fee-paying St Paul’s School for Girls in London before going on to become a billionaire.

London, where you can launder your drug or organised crime money through any number of willing banks, invest in shiny new riverfront developments, pick up some multi-million dollar artworks for your portfolio, and drop in to see your son or daughter being educated at one of its elite private schools. Convenient for oligarchs and kleptocrats from all nations.

Angola is a country divided between a small, super-rich, oil-rich elite, and the rest which helps to explain why everything is diabolically expensive, even the most basic food and drink. Luanda is routinely voted the most expensive capital city in the world (p.45). This is apparently because the agricultural sector is in such a state that almost everything has to be expensively imported. Even the most basic hotels and restaurants are beyond his budget. This isn’t a tropical paradise where you lounge in cheap cafes enjoying the streetlife. Luanda is a city where he trudges along busy with his backpack while shiny four by fours roar past on their way to hotels, cocktail bars and restaurants which are wildly beyond his reach.

Author’s persona

I felt vulnerable, exposed and ill equipped. (p.44)

Right from the start Metcalfe presents himself as a down-at-heel traveller with a backpack, ‘an unaffiliated writer’ (p.68), himself slightly confused about his motives for going, blessed with some contacts but relying on wit to busk a lot of the journey.

This pose would have been cool in the 1960s or 70s but in the age of the internet and modern, luxury, all-expenses-paid travel journalism, it comes over as a bit forced and contrived. I did the backpacking thing back in the day. In the 1970s I hitch-hiked round Europe and then round America because I was 18 and genuinely didn’t have any money or ‘contacts.

But it seems to me that worldview, that cultural possibility, has gone. A few short years later friends with their first jobs in the City were flying Club Class to New York or Sydney. In the 1990s the barely employed could afford to fly to Ibiza or Phuket. Hitching with a backpack was no longer at the cutting edge of anything. As airplane tickets and travel costs, generally, plummeted in the 1980s and 90s, ‘roughing it’ became a quaint throwback to a simpler age.

And as the internet has given access to every hotel and every restaurant and almost every person anywhere in the world, there’s no excuse not to have rung ahead, booked and organised everything.

I arrived at Saurimo at midnight, with not a clue where to stay. (p.225)

For a journalist who’s written for the Financial Times and the Economist, who mentions elsewhere that he looked up contacts and had names and addresses of businesspeople, NGOs, charities and various other contacts before he left London, to reduce himself to this impoverished state seemed a bit contrived.

It’s a running gag that Metcalfe’s backpack gets put on the wrong plane and flown to the other side of the world by mistake and it takes a week or so for it to be returned to Luanda airport for him to collect. In another age, and in another writer’s hands, this might be funny, but here it comes over as pathetic.

On not one but two occasions he manages to get food poisoning – once from eating the in-flight sandwich on the plane from Sao Tome to Luanda, once from eating prawns at an all-day party in Luanda – and we are treated to descriptions of him lying on a sofa moaning for days on end punctuated by sudden dashes to the shared toilet. Possibly this is meant to be comic but it comes over as squalid.

Because he can’t afford to stay in the ruinously expensive hotels, he cadges beds for the night on the sofas of strangers. As I say, in another age and in the hands of a more stylish writer, this might come over as cool or funny, but in this account it comes over as shabby, and wilful, a choice to do things the most difficult, dirty and sordid way. The impatient reader thinks, ‘Enough with the backpacker chic, already. You should have just negotiated a better advance from your publishers or with the FT Travel section or with any number of upmarket travel mags. Then you could have stayed in all those gleaming hotels and we wouldn’t have had to read about you roughing it on the sofas of hospitable Luandans who barely know you.’

When Metcalfe sticks to the fact he is very interesting indeed. He gives solidly researched, thorough and authoritative accounts of a wide range of historical issues from the first founding of the country, the slave trade, the ups and downs of 20th century Portugal. He is especially good on the history of the long bloody civil war, which he cuts up into passages which are deployed throughout the book at appropriate moments or in the relevant towns where key battles occurred.

A good example is his trip to the remote town of Cuito Canavale in the south-east of the country, where a 6 month long ‘battle‘ brought together all the combatants in the war for a confrontation whose ending can now, in retrospect, be seen as a turning point not only in the Angolan war but for the wider region (leading Cuba to withdraw its forces and South Africa to grant Namibia its independence).

His encounters with numerous people like businessmen and entrepreneurs, staff at NGOs like the HALO mine-clearing charity or Save The Children, passengers on numerous coaches, cafe owners and academics, geologists and ‘oilies’, street rappers and hawkers, manic minibus drivers and drunk taxi drivers, miserable bar owners and fierce museum keepers, Congo kings and holy men, each shed factual information on Angola’s past and present and are uniformly interesting.

But when he tells anecdotes about the travelling itself, they come over as strangely limp and dead. This is a really good factual primer for Angola (albeit ten years out of date) but when he writes about himself and his ‘adventures’, Metcalfe is a peculiarly charmless writer. Maybe part of this is because so many of the people he meets are depressed, defeated and downbeat and their negative mood affects the author and, thus, the reader, too. Angola does sound like a grim place.

  • We sat down, exhausted and somehow a bit sad. (p.211)
  • Living in Luanda seemed to drive him to despair. (p.215)
  • The king was playing his part but I couldn’t help feeling it was all a bit sad. (p.238)
  • I sat, by now stained and a bit depressed, pondering my destination, unaware of how bad the next eighteen hours would be. (p.286)

I wasn’t surprised when the tough son of the household where Metcalfe dosses in Luanda, Roque, reveals that he tried to commit suicide a few years previously (p.258). Somehow it’s that kind of book. There are flickering attempts at humour, but for the most part it’s pretty downbeat.

One of the saddest things about Angola is the decimation of the wildlife. Most of the wild mammals have been exterminated. He has a passage about the last few remnants of the once flourishing giant sable or palanca negra gigante and meets a worn-down conservationist who is trying to save it from extinction (pages 214 to 219). Despair and sadness. Metcalfe even travels through a region where there are no birds. The skies are empty. Everything is dead.

Anti-tourism

The book amply demonstrates why Angola is on no-one’s tourist trail.

There is really no tourism here. There is nothing to visit in Luanda, except for one or two clapped-out museums that are invariably closed. Walking is pretty much out, due to the threat of muggings, not to mention the polluted and pungent streets. There are no taxis… Excursions into the country are generally a no-go. The few eccentric tour leaders who do venture into the empty national parks explain that most of the game has been shot and eaten and numbers haven’t recovered yet. Hiking or bush-walking is definitely not an option, due to the millions of landmines and unexploded ordnance, most of them unmapped. And there are diseases, lots of them: yellow fever, dengue fever, sleeping sickness, typhoid, rabies and rampant falciparum malaria (that’s the worst kind)…

In short, Angola is an anti-tourist destination, and certainly no place for a backpacker. The only sane kind of visit is brief and on business, with someone to meet you, lodge you and cover your laughable expenses, before you are gratefully shuttled out on a non-Angolan liner. (p.46)

Then there are the police, ‘feared for their erratic behaviour and drunken extortion of passersby’ (p.47). And the absurd expense of everything. And the street crime. And the dedicated stonewalling obstructive Soviet-style bureaucracy you face every step of every process designed to wear down and crush any applicant for anything, as he finds out when he tries to get his visa extended or goes the labyrinthine process required to apply for an audience with king Muatchissengue Watembo of the Chokwe people (pages 232 to 239).

Eastern bloc-style obstructionism which is reflected in the hyper-suspicions of the police who stop him and demand to see his papers countless times, with or without then bullying him into giving them a bribe to let him go on his way (the Angolan police being ‘renowned for’ their demands for gasosa, p.230). Far from being relaxed and casual like Congo, Angola has overtones of being a police state. ‘Basic education, sanitation and health care are all awful’ (p.45).

Basically, Don’t go.

Highlights

Marxist capitalism

Metcalfe is good at explaining the hypocrisy of the so-called ‘Marxist’ MPLA government. Even as it bought communist textbooks printed in Moscow and Havana to indoctrinate generations of schoolchildren against the capitalist enemy, it set up a massive corporation, Sonangol, which functioned on purely capitalist lines. When the first oil was found in the 1970s the franchise and money was handled by Sonangol who, over the following decades, developed into a huge corporation with interests in every aspect of the economy, almost a parallel economy in its own right.

At its heart was MPLA leader and president José Eduardo dos Santos, known as ‘the magician’ for his skill at keeping all political factions onside by the skilful doling out of contracts and backhanders. The elite surrounding him were known as ‘the Futunguistas’ after one of the many presidential palaces. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the MPLA made a smooth transition to capitalism because they had, in fact, for years, already been practising it (pages 72 to 75). These former Marxists now have their noses ‘deep in the trough’ of the purest capitalism. Mobutu only with oil. Transparency International ranks the country as almost bottom of the league table of corruption.

The ruling class of Angola has misplaced, disappeared, embezzled and creamed off tens of billions of dollars for themselves, leaving most of their compatriots in abject poverty. Why on earth should Western governments give them loans and Western aid agencies step in to treat the poor and ill when more than enough money exists in the government system but Angola’s leadership refuses to use it for good, preferring to loot their own country?

Slavery and degredados

He gives a good brief history of the slave trade, pages 100 to 106. The academic he interviews, Fernando Gamboa, makes the familiar point that slavery was already a well-established practice among African tribes before the Europeans arrived, but they massively increased its scale and ‘efficiency’ as a business (p.198).

I was more intrigued to learn that a) Angola’s second city, Benguela, was founded in 1615 in totally unsuitable location near a swamp which resulted in the earliest settlers dying like flies (very like the early English settlements in Virginia at the same period); and b) that, like Australia, it was forcibly settled by transported convicts or degredados. Unlike the convicts Britain sent to Australia, who were often guilty of relatively minor offences such as stealing a loaf of bread, these degredados were hard core villains, mostly murderers. Being hard core urban villains they were unsuited to agriculture but took to the slave trade like ducks to water, and also ensured the city had a ‘hellish reputation well into the nineteenth century’ (p.100).

The Salazar regime (1932 to 1968)

What comes over about Salazar’s Estado Novo regime is its dusty, down-at-heel backwardness, its narrow-minded closedness, its petty bureaucracy and inefficiency. Visiting diplomats, especially Americans, thought he lived in a parallel universe. This helps to explain his response to the rebellions of 1961 which was total refusal to accept reality, negotiate or relinquish the colonies, and instead his insistence on fighting on to the bitter end which meant that, long after Europe’s other imperial nations had bitten the bullet and given their colonies independence, Portugal continued fighting its bitter wars to retain them (pages 114 to 118).

White flight

As the scale of the civil war became clear, between 1975 and 1976 pretty much the entire white population of about 300,000 left, flying back to Portugal in what Metcalfe refers to as ‘the great airlift’ (p.124). That included all the administrators, civil servants, the police, engineers, designers, builders, architects, managers of the education and health systems, doctors and teachers, everyone who ran everything left the relatively unskilled, untrained Angolans to figure out how to run a modern country in the middle of a brutal civil war. The result: services ceased to function, education and health ceased, ministries shut down, the rubbish piled up in the streets, no-one knew what to do (pages 72 and 136).

The irony is that once the civil war had ended and the oil boom began in the Noughties, lots of Portuguese flocked back to the country for its boomtown opportunities and, by a spooky coincidence, there are, once again, about 300,000 expatriate Portuguese in Angola.

Sex trade

Oxfam’s regional director Gabriel de Barros explains how girls as young as 12 are traded by families to rich men in return for financial support, the resulting rise in teen pregnancies, STDs and AIDS (pages 108 to 111).

Huambo

Originally named Nova Lisboa, Huambo is the capital of the fertile highlands and was beautifully laid out by Portuguese planners to become the new centre of their empire in the 1920s and 30s. Unfortunately, it then became an epicentre of the civil war, the landscape around ravaged by war, littered with mines, and the town fought over again and again, climaxing in a 55-day-long siege in 1993 which eviscerated it. The government enforced a press blackout and in 1993 international journalists were busy in Somalia and Yugoslavia so the world never got to hear about it.

Landmines

The countryside is littered with millions of mines, anywhere between 6 and 20 million, no-one knows. Never stray off the path, don’t climb rocks or walk round a bridge. Any prominent or beautiful natural feature was targeted. For the foreseeable future they must all remain off limits (p.124).

Queen Njinga

An extended passage giving the life of the remarkable Nzingha Mbande (1583 to 1663) who rose to be Queen of the Ambundu Kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba in present-day northern Angola. She fought for 30 years to maintain the independence of her kingdoms against the encroaching Portuguese and to later generations became a symbol of resistance. The most notable things to emerge from the account are that she supported the slave trade, but insisted it be carried out according to the old customs; and the stories that she dressed as a man, insisted on being called a man, dressed her guard of women as men, and made her many male lovers dress as women if, that is, these later stories are true (pages 198 to 206).

Chockwe art

Metcalfe visits Chockwe country and even manages a (bizarre) audience with the old but still revered Chockwe king. The Chokwe people once ran an empire which covered parts of modern-day Angola, southwestern Congo and northwestern parts of Zambia. There are about 1.3 million people living across that territory. The Chockwe are famous for their sculpture art, which fetches high prices in the West.

Wooden statuette of a Chockwe princess

The role of Cuba in the civil war 1975 to 2000

Castro’s communist Cuba saved the Marxist MPLA government. In 1975 as Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA took more and more territory and advanced on the capital, Cuba flew in thousands of soldiers who stabilised the situation then reversed UNITA’s advance. Cuba’s involvement in Angola was deep and long. Between 1975 and 1988 over 300,000 Cubans served in Angola (p.212). Rejected in most of South America, snubbed by the North Vietnamese, unable to get a purchase in Mobutu’s Congo, Angola provided an opportunity for Castro to dream of spreading his revolution around the developing world. Now all that sacrifice seems utterly pointless. You could say that the 300,000 Cubans who fought to keep the MPLA in power ended up helping Isabel dos Santos to become the richest woman in Africa. Thus, as Shakespeare put it, does the whirligig of Time bring in his revenges.

The last phase

The last phase of the civil war from 1999 to 2002 was the most brutal. Metcalfe dwells on the character of the larger-than-life, brutal, charming, paranoid UNITA leader, Jonas Savimbi. Like president Habyarimana of Rwanda, like Mobutu and Kabila of Zaire and the Congo, Savimbi genuinely believed in black magic, spirits and witches.

By the 1990s there were frequent burnings of dissidents and accusations of witchcraft in UNITA areas. In one case, Savimbi himself ‘discovered’ a woman spying on him by flying over his house at night. Suspected women and children would be dragged to a stadium and set alight. Anyone who dared to speak against o mais velho risked execution, including any woman who refused his advances. (p.246)

Lovely to see the old traditions being kept alive. Jeane Kirkpatrick, America’s representative to the United Nations, called Savimbi ‘one of the authentic heroes of our time.’ Hundreds of thousands of rural inhabitants were terrorised by UNITA, press-ganged into working as porters, cooks or prostitutes. The MPLA government rounded up entire regions and confined them in camps. In the final months of the war as many as 4 million people were displaced, a third of the entire population.

M’banza Kongo

On his third journey, Metcalfe cadges a lift north in a battered Land Rover with the staff from a Save The Children refuge in the town of M’banza Kongo in the north-west of Angola. Back in the 1480s when the Portuguese discovered the river, the Kongo empire stretched for hundreds of miles north and south of the river mouth and far inland. Metcalfe retells the sorry saga of how initial optimism on both sides of the cultural contact quickly deteriorated as the Portuguese realised the potential of the Kongo people as slaves. In Metcalfe’s account it was the discovery of Brazil in 1500 and the quick realisation that it had great potential for sugar plantations but lacked manpower, which transformed the situation.

500 years later Metcalfe visits the homes and refuges in M’banza Kongo which house the large number of children who are thrown out of their families every year for being evil spirits. Belief in witchcraft, spirits, kindoki (a kind of witchcraft or possession by evil spirits) and the power of fetishes is universal and when any ill luck befalls a family its most vulnerable members – children and to a lesser extent the elderly – are blamed.

Update

Metcalf’s book was published in 2013. Apparently, since then, some of the gloss has gone off the oil boom so that the planes and top hotels are no longer as busy as they were. But the structural divide between super-rich elite and everyone else remains, as evidenced in this photo essay published in the Guardian.

MCK

Protest song by anti-government rapper MCK who Metcalfe interviews (pages 83 to 88).

Portuguese terms

Recurring words and ideas include:

  • assimiliado = African who, according to the Portuguese colonial system, had reached an approved level of civilisation; comparable to the évolués in francophone colonies
  • bom dia = good morning
  • candongueiro = mini bus
  • confusão = a metaphysical state of chaos and confusion before which mere humans are helpless
  • contratado = Portuguese form of forced labour
  • empregada = home help /servant
  • feitiço = fetish or the spell is controls
  • garimpeiro = unofficial diamond miner
  • mestiço = mixed race
  • musseques = shanty town
  • pula = slang for white person
  • roça = plantation-type farm run on forced labour
  • soba = official

Fluffs

The book is generally well proof-read and typeset, but I did spot a couple of errors which humorously point towards a new use of language:

  • As she flocked cigarette ash out of the window… (p.27)
  • I felt huge a sense of excitement. (p.54)
  • There are railroads totally some ten thousand miles. (p.124)
  • They grew rich on commerce between the Zanzibar and the Atlantic… (p.229)
  • A strange period ensued when neither war nor peace reined… (p.243)

The title of the book is explained on page 144.

Credit

Blue Dahlia, Black Gold: A Journey Into Angola by Daniel Metcalfe was published by Hutchinson books in 2013. All references are to the 2014 Arrow Books paperback edition.

Related links

Africa-related reviews

History

Fictions and memoirs set wholly or partly in Africa

Exhibitions about Africa

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by Simon on November 15, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on November 15, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/11/15/blue-dahlia-black-gold-angola-daniel-metcalfe/

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