Luanda

It smells of gas, sewers and homemade food. The traffic is hallucinating, even by African standards. Everybody owns a SUV-like vehicle (offered by the regime to regime friends, whispers my very dear Angolan friend on the picture above). People on the streets want to sell you everything: from room deodorisers to fancy suits (of the striped kind).

And there are so many of these vendors. You’re either unemployed or a street vendor. Nobody produces anything in this country that was once a top exporter of coffee, cotton and sisal. I travelled the road to the Kilamba Kiaxi slum (7km in more than one hour) and they were everywhere. Weting their feet in the dirty water that flooded the road after a pipe was damaged during construction work. How much weight can women carry on their heads?

We meet a happy group of MPLA partisans on scooters. They propably came from one of those popular meetings with half-price beer and free DVDs:

Cars everywhere. In the slum, their carcasses decorate the streets are provide accommodation for hens. I speak to two thirty-something women whose life changed after they received a 250 dollar loan from a microcredit agency. It allowed them to become… vendors. Now they want to expand their businesses and aim at a 1,000 dollar loan from the same Canadian-funded project, Kixicrédito. And so they come here:

The national oil company, Sonangol, has slightly better quarters:

They keep the light on all night. I suppose the idea is to attract all the mosquitoes that carry malaria and other evil diseases. If they stay away from the slums maybe life expectation at birth will rise above 42 years.

Fortunately, I have only one mosquito to fight in my room before I go to sleep, after all these strenuous and happy hours.

Kingdom of Kongo

I just love the name “Congo”. Somehow, my little occidental brain came to associate it with drums, big animals standing in the savannah, thick dark water humming with mosquitoes, some sort of danger or threat at nightfall. Joseph Conrad’s book “The Heart of Darkness” certainly helped develop this mystique. Congo would be the perfect name for “heartbeat”. I’m walking in the jungle, branches crack behind and above me, my heart is beating at 160 congos per minute.

The Congo river was (and is) one of Africa’s hearts, and the Portuguese explorers who sailed it in 1482 and found the many villages of the Kingdom of Kongo on its banks most certainly realized that. This was a prosperous region, densely populated, with the capital Mbanza Congo (in today’s northern Angola) registering around 100,000 inhabitants at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Natural resources, manufacturing activities and a functional trading network accounted for this prosperity. The painting above, by missionary Giovanni Cavazzi (sixteenth century) depicts that commercial buzz.

The Portuguese and the Kongo rulers soon established a successful partnership. Nzinga a Nkuwu was the first king to convert to Christianity. He adopted the Christian name João, and his offspring was named after Portuguese kings and VIPs: Afonso, Henrique, Diogo… The Portuguese provided military power and education through the church. The Congolese provided… slaves. The trade existed prior to the Portuguese arrival, but exploded as the colonization of Brazil – its sugarcane plantations, its goldmines – demanded an ever-growing workforce.

Anyway, this happy friendship didn’t last forever and as other colonial powers entered the game (the French and the Belgian) the Kingdom of Kongo (along with its puppet ruler) was abolished in 1914. Previously, the region’s new boarders had been drawn at the Berlin Conference (1885). Because the Belgian wanted a land exit to the Atlantic for their Zaire, the Portuguese Congo was detached from main Angola and the Cabinda enclave was born.

Cabinda. What a headache for the Angolan government. Why can’t they slurp its immense reserves of oil (more that 60 % of the country’s production) without being bothered by separatists and voices claiming the end of human rights violations and a fairer distribution of revenues?
Although a Peace Agreement was signed in 2006, Cabinda remains Angola’s most unstable region. The many riches of the Kingdom of Kongo prompted greed and war. Cabinda carries this history and is somehow still living it.

Miss Landmine

A norwegian artist named Morten Traavik had this crazy idea after travelling to Angola in 2003, only one year after the end of the war. Landmines were shaping the body of angolans (the country is one of the most heavily mined places in the world) and creating this one-legged angolan we see on TV (and on the videos below), often with a homemade wooden leg to replace the prosthetic limb denied by an incipient health system. Morten Traavik says it was a spontaneous beauty contest being held by teenagers on the streets of Luanda that gave him the idea of Miss Landmine. Combining sweet innocence and harsh reality. Subverting the sexism of this kind of pageants by exposing mutilated bodies. This artistic and humanitarian project (supported by the angolan National Demining Comission) got wide attention from the international media. Last April, Augusta Urica from Luanda and Maria Restino Manuel from Cuanza Sul were the first crowned Miss Landmine (the creators plan to redo the stunt in Cambodja soon). But my personal favorite is Maria de Fátima Conceição, Miss Moxico:

International estimates say there are about 10 million landmines in Angola. The country is slowly but steadily reducing this figure. With precious help from the chinese entrepreneurs, who don't mind sacrifying a few bulldozers (and the occasional worker) in order to satisfy the government's frenzy for reconstruction and thus collect its abundant petrodollars.

Kuduro: vibrant as the country it comes from

I'm travelling to Luanda, Angola, on August 27th, as most of you readers know. As I read, surf and chat in order to prepare for this reporting journey, I repeatedly come across this recent musical phenomenon some of you may not have heard of yet: Kuduro. This ragga/zouk/techno sound mixed with angolan kizomba is soaring in Luanda and successfully being exported abroad, partly because of a portuguese band named Buraka Som Sistema (the portuguese-speaking readers among you will enjoy the wordplay). These children of angolan parents and their friends from the Lisbon suburbs created something called progressive kuduro. London fell in love with it. Buraka grabbed the money unexpectedly earned with the album sales ("From Buraka to the World", 2006) and went to Luanda to shoot a video, taking M.I.A. along. Watch:

Here's a pure angolan example, Dog Murras. The Luanda slums (or musseques) were the cradle and are now the theme of many a kuduro song. Phonetically, in Portuguese, kuduro means "stiff ass". Dancing it demands a powerful hip and a certain inclination for sexual display.

In a few days, I shall see for myself the endless musseques that surround Luanda, this schizophrenic capital where luxurious SUVs splash mud on inexistant sidewalks and families with no electricity or running water listen to the distant buzz of fashionable nightclubs. Oil lubrifies the lives of very few Angolans in this country of 15 million. Reserves are supposed to end in 20 years. Will that be a curse or a blessing?