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Outside Magazine September 2002

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This is the situation. This is the confusion. This is Angola.
It was once a crown jewel of African beauty—a place blessed with so many rivers, so much pristine coastline, and such teeming, verdant savannas that it made God jealous. But after 27 years of brutal civil war, Angola is slowly rising out of the graveyard of its sad history. A tale of diamonds, ghost elephants, despair, and that rarest of Angolan treasures: HOPE.

By Mark Jacobson


	Farm workers watch as fields burn outside Saurimo (Antonin Kratochvil)

THE DRUNKEN soldier in the airstrip waiting room put down the AK-47 he'd been pointing at my head and picked up a pair of bricks. This was progress. Bricks don't go off by themselves; their clips are not emptied out of fear, or habit. Bricks take willpower, aim. Besides, despite demands for beer money and much raving about my motives for being in Saurimo, a backwoods diamond-mining town in the far east of the country, it had become clear that the soldier was not 100 percent serious about killing me. He simply wanted to make a point about his life here, in Angola.

"Kuito!" the soldier exclaimed, shouting the name of the devastated city on the central Bié highlands, scene of some of the fiercest fighting in the longest civil war in African history. "Kuito!" he repeated, pointing to the swatch of blistered skin on his left forearm. The UNITA rebels had put fire on him in Kuito. "Huambo!" he announced, displaying a six-inch gash on his rail-thin lower thigh. He'd been shot in the leg in Huambo.

"Moxico!" he said. One of the fingers on his right hand was missing. It had been blown off in Moxico (pronounced "mos-SHE-co"), the giant eastern province.

"Moxico, Angola! Kuito, Angola! Huambo, Angola!" the soldier reprised, waving the bricks in the air, as if his body was a wound-by-wound primer of his beleaguered nation's geography.

Then he dropped the bricks. They were nothing but props anyway, and he had something much better. Removing his khaki cap, the soldier rammed his head into my chest.

"Olha ai!" he shouted in Portuguese. Look here!

His head had a hole in it, a dark well descending into his cranium. About a half-inch in diameter, deep enough to store a small marble, the depression was located where one might find the centering whorl on a young boy's scalp.

It couldn't have been a bullet hole. How could he have lived through that? No, he must have gotten hit with a pickax, a rake, the point of a machete. Either that, or someone—his mother? God?—had pressed a thumb into his yet unformed skull.

"Olha!" the soldier yelled once more. But the menace was gone, replaced by plaintive desperation. He couldn't have been more than 20, but he looked incalculably older.

Well, I'd come to see the lingering nightmare, hadn't I? And here it was, presented on a platter, right down in the black hole in this poor dude's noggin. What lurked in there, what bad videos? The legacy of the slave-master Portuguese who during their 500-year reign had shipped roughly four million Angolans off to the plantations of Brazil and Hispaniola? Jump cuts of a thousand malarial nights sleeping in the bush waiting for UNITA's rebel M-16s? Angola was a land full of grievous memories, unhappy ghosts. Perhaps the poor guy had punched that hole in his head himself, in a vain attempt to release the demons.

But now there were other soldiers in the waiting room, a dozen men in camouflage from the Forças Armadas de Angola (FAA) carrying AK-47s, ready to be shipped out to some new venue of potential doom—all of them young like him, all looking just as haunted. In Angola, there are always more guys with AK-47s.

Get up, they told their drunken comrade, no more Castle beer, no more shouting at the tourists, time to move on. The soldier grunted, clamped his cap down over his broken head, and picked up his gun once more.

"Olha...Angola," he said, one more time, and walked out.

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Mark Jacobson is a contributing editor at New York. His next book, about taking his kids around the world, will be published by Grove/Atlantic in 2003.

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