Fish and quince

As you know by now, the diet in Luanda after 75 was varied: fried fish...or fried fish...or still fried fish which was always served with rice! However, depending on what trading goods you had – money was worthless – and whether you knew the right people, sometimes you could get other stuff. People who worked in the cigarette factory, for example, could swap their cigarette packs for beer with someone who worked at the beer factory. Bottles of beer could then be swapped for a chicken, or a turkey. The supreme merchandise was whisky, the real stuff, not the one everybody made at the garden shed or the one you could buy by the litre in plastic bottles! A bottle of whisky, together with something a bit more trivial, like sugar or potatoes, would be worth a whole pig! Unfortunately, the pigs, eating the same as we did had a disgusting fish taste! It was even worse than eating fried swordfish everyday! Anyway, that didn’t last as the few pigs still around in Luanda were quickly eaten and became extinct! When I started working for Schlum, I either went home or to the beach at lunchtime, but the foreign staff who had no reason or time to go home got a takeaway from the Petrangol canteen. Lunch was always fried fish heads with tomato rice and quince jelly (???) – don’t ask! One of my friends, a French engineer, only liked the jelly so he would swap his fish heads for more quince. The mystery of the fish heads puzzled the engineers, so they decided to find out why the fish only had heads and where on earth did the rest go. They went undercover to the kitchens and discovered that the cooks ate them before serving the heads to the staff!

Teaching and learning

In 76 all uni students in Luanda had to teach in secondary schools due to the lack of qualified teachers. I was assigned to 2 schools. Obviously, I was really bad – I was not properly qualified or trained and there was no curriculum. However, one problem I did not have to face was lack of discipline from the kids. I was 18, hardly older than some of my pupils, but they were lovely and they all respected me. At the time, I drove a used BMW my dad had bought me and they absolutely loved my car. They would follow me out of the school and say: “Miss, you drive so well! Can you give me a lift, miss? Just a ride to the beach, miss!” The father of one of my pupils owned a shop and everyday he would bring me a lollypop, a rare delicacy in those days. It became a joke among my sister’s friends. Whenever someone asked if they knew Sacha’s sister the answer was “She is the one in the BMW with a lollipop?” I quickly learned never to tell them to write about a free theme. I spent many evenings laughing aloud like crazy while I read their compositions! Out of everything my pupils wrote, my favourite sentence was: “Comrade President Neto is considered immortal because even though he is dead he appears on telly every night!”
And please don’t ask me how I had time to work, study, teach and still lead a very busy social life....I think the days then had a lot more hours than nowadays! At least 36!

Baobabs

When Mike was working in Luanda, he was very sad because there was nowhere he could go to climb. He wanted to go to Pedras Negras, but it was too far away from the capital and the roads were too dangerous. One day he decided that if he could not climb on mountains, he could climb….the baobab trees! So we went looking for baobabs right for climbing. We looked, and looked, trying to find the ideal baobab tree. Some had big biting ants, others were not steep enough…… We were nearly giving up when he saw the perfect climbing baobab. An old man was sitting on the shade. As soon as he saw us, immediately tried to sell his baobab fruit. I wasn’t too keen, the fruit is very, very sharp and I really didn’t fancy it that morning. However, to help the old man and to give Mike the chance to try that fruit he did not know and was very curious about, I bought it. Mike tasted it and I asked him what he thought. His answer was: “You know what? When I want to feel like my teeth are growing a beard, I’m sure I’ll find a more pleasant way to do it, without having to eat THIS!”

My first real job was with TAAG – before that I was a teacher but that job doesn’t count and anyway it’s part of another story I’ll tell later. As you may know (or not) TAAG stands for Angolan Airlines, or “Take Another Goat” as the english expats loved to refer to the company, a joke about the company logo which looked like a goat. My work was not very glamorous. I wasn’t a crew member, my feet were firmly on the ground. I belonged in the company’s headquarters, on the fifth floor of the TAAG building, next to Hotel Tropico. I worked for the Finance Department, in the Interline office and it was there that I met my best friend, one of those friends one makes for life; one of those friends we may not see for over 20 years but when we meet again it’s like we saw each other the previous day. Our job was to accept (or refuse) invoices from other airlines for TAAG tickets flown by them. How many rows we had with some companies who thought they could trick us! Whenever I visit a travel agency today I realize what an easy life the staff enjoys. They put into the computer the start of the trip, the destination, the dates and….Hocus Pocus! They’ve got the price! We had to know how to calculate the price of a trip. We had some HUGE green manuals, which gave us the distance in miles between A and B and sometimes C, D etc and with the help of a troglodyte calculator, (huge too) we had to work out the cost! (when my daughters heard this story, they wanted to know if I was born while dinosaurs still roamed the earth!) The IT department (TAAG was very ahead of its time) took the whole tenth floor and used some monsters they called computers, which worked with perforated cards. Working for TAAG was sometimes fun, albeit for a very low salary. Sometimes we would go in groups to have breakfast at the hotel next door – it was always eggs and ham, but in those difficult times of food shortages it tasted delicious! At 5PM everybody went home – very quickly and all at the same time! The lifts were always so full they wouldn't stop on the ground floor, they would go straight to the basement. The problem was that the only way to get out of the basement was….in the lift........ and sometimes it was already 6PM when we finally managed to get out of the building. It’s interesting to note that I was always much more afraid of those lifts than the curfews, the prisons, snipers, assaults, robberies, …… There were a lot of jokes about the safety of TAAG’s flights which was unfair, as the maintenance and pilots were provided by TAP, the Portuguese airline. There may have been some scary moments, but nothing special, really..... and there was a story about how in an emergency in a flight from Sal to Havana the crew discovered that the oxygen mask boxes were kept closed by superglue, but I’m sure that was just a rumour spread by the enemies of the revolution!..... However, the two things everybody agreed upon was that God was Angolan and supported TAAG football club!

A blog about Angola would not be complete nor would it make any sense if I didn’t mention my childhood or teenage years, if I didn’t say anything about the time prior to the independence.
Geographically speaking, Luanda was a paradise. It was a paradise with problems, due to the big social differences. I’m proud to say that my parents always tried to help people who were victims of those differences and thanks to their attitude, they made friends for life – friends who welcomed them in Luanda with open arms, when they went there on holiday in 2006.

What can I say about those special and unforgettable years? Where to start?
I have wonderful memories of the first 17 years of my life. Precious souvenirs I keep under lock and key in my mind......just in case one day senility decides to creep in and do a monkey in a china shop! I had a more carefree childhood and adolescence than my daughters. And even though they find it very hard to believe, I was happy without TV, mobile phones, computers and internet. Without designer clothes and ipods.
I played in the streets with my friends, cycled and roller skated in the street too. These memories are precious as I am and always have been totally hopeless in sport: I played basketball but I was never good at it; my coordination – or lack of it – between my eye and my hand (left) is appalling, so I was never any good at tennis or badminton; I can swim, but not in a competitive way and my daughters think that watching me skiing is one of the funniest things in this world….well, I’m sure you get the gist! However, I was very good at roller skating, better than most! And I loved it! Unfortunately, roller skating was not in my mother’s list of appropriate sports for a girl, so she enrolled me in ballet, where I always felt like a hippo out of the water! We were 3: I was the middle one, my little sister was 3 ½ years younger than me, and my big sister, 7 years older. To tell the truth, she was not really my sister, but my cousin, but I cannot remember myself without her and she always felt like a big sister to me. My mother was very strict and a disciplinarian and she did not let us enjoy any freedom. We had to go to bed at 6PM and she would make sure we got up at 3 or 4AM to study. My mother had a theory that we would learn better that way, after a good long night sleep. It might have been true if I had gone to sleep at 6, but as I couldn’t, I would read in the dark until much, much later. We weren’t allowed to invite friends over or go to their houses, which never stopped me, really, I would go anyway, I just made sure she didn’t find out. Parties were a definitive no, no. There were boys (OH!) there! In my mother’s handbook “How to bring up my daughters” boys were to be avoided like the plague! Thanks to that I grew up feeling quite inadequate and terribly shy around them....and unable to understand them, although I have a feeling I cannot really blame my mother for that.
We were rebels but quiet ones! I still laugh whenever I think about how my big sister would go out at night and my mother would not give her a key to check what time she would return. Except that my mother would fall asleep and when my sister came back she knocked on my window and I would go and open the door.
Despite the lack of freedom, I had a happy time. I remember and I miss the endless summers, my friends, my high school colleagues, the Sundays spent on the beach….
I remember the first time I fell in love, at first sight (of course!), a “coup de foudre” when I was 10 and I remember being sure it would be forever! And it was!………Almost!

Kalandula

In the period following the independence Luanda was a real oasis. Of course we had a curfew, which, truth be told, we conveniently “forgot” everytime we wanted to go to night clubs or parties, and I don’t know anyone who regrets not to comply. To venture out of the capital was quite a bit more dangerous. My friends and I went every Sunday to Santiago beach – a few kms North of Luanda. Unfortunately today it’s a ship graveyard. It was a beautiful beach and completely deserted – like having our own private beach (some of the images in the slideshow are from Santiago). Sometimes we went to Palmeirinhas, South of Luanda and we went a couple of times to Cabo Ledo to have some barbequed lobsters – it was possible to get them if we went at the right time and knew the fishermen. I was working for Schlumberger at the time. The Angolan staff talked a lot about Kalandula and all the foreigners wanted to go there, but the situation was terribly dangerous and the fact that we would have to go by car made the trip impossible! The road to Malange was partially destroyed (as much as we knew, as no one dared to go there by car) and there was the real danger of ambushes and even worse, land mines. However, the engineers pestered us so much, doubting the beauty of the waterfall, in fact we were probably afraid they would start comparing it unfavourably to more beautiful waterfalls in Africa and the rest of the world, with the result that we, IDIOTS, decided to prove them wrong. And we went! We left Luanda at 4 AM on a lovely day in 83 and we went to Kalandula. There were 2 cars, full of petrol cans as there was absolutely no gas station in the way, 2 british, 1 Nigerian, 1 Portuguese, 1 French and 2 dumb Angolans! I remember clearly the way there: the French guy smoking calmly in the back seat saying that it was perhaps a bad idea to smoke inside a car full of petrol cans, but………. Otherwise, without a problem. Once there, we took plenty of photos – as we had to prove we had been there! - and as quickly as possible we got on the road again. By then we knew for sure the roads were barely passable and the trip would be long. Thanks to 2 flat tires and the fact that the return trip was mostly done at night time, it took even longer to get back. We arrived at 3AM the next day, nearly 24 hours after we had left. My parents were in a panic - although I had not told them where I was going, they had heard it from a “friend” of mine. Even my father who is normally a very calm person was frantic, as a friend of his had been murdered just outside of Luanda for his car. I have daughters today and can understand my parents’ worry, but at the time it was just a great adventure! The only problem resulting from that trip is the fact that Mike (my husband) wanted to go there too, but he was on holiday at the time – he has not yet forgiven me that we didn’t wait for his return.

It's not possible "to pass through" Angola

I’ve “passed through” and even “stayed” in many countries, many towns. Today I live in England, a place my husband and daughters consider “home”. What about me? For 17 years I’ve been trying to convince myself that I’ll get used to it - and I have, no doubt. However, I can’t really call it “home”.
I love going to Portugal to visit my parents. I prefer the milder climate of Lisbon to the cold weather I get here. However, I can’t call Portugal “home” either – no surprises there, I never really lived in the country.
Sometimes I wonder whether I would feel “at home” if I went back to Luanda. The town has changed a lot since I left in 84 and it will go on changing thanks to the amazing economical growth it’s going through. If I went back, would Luanda be a stranger to me? Or would my heart recognize it as one would recognize a first love after many years despite the age and the wrinkles? After all, it was not the political regime I loved, or the buildings and monuments, but the land, the people. The land is terribly scarred by all the spilt blood but it’s still the same land. What about the people? Has all the suffering changed them?
I didn’t “pass through” Angola. And when I had to leave, a piece of me remained behind, and I brought a piece of her in my heart. It’s not enough, but it helps to keep me sane.

There was a general lack of doctors, specialists and surgeons in Luanda for a couple of years after the independence. At least, until the Cuban doctors turned up……but that is another story.
I’ve always been very healthy (fingers crossed, touch wood) so my problem was just trying to find a dentist. My ex-mother in law suggested someone who had taken over the dental surgery where she used to go before 75. My sister and I booked an appointment.
The “doctor” gave me a local anesthetic before starting the treatment – I think it was very strong, as I felt totally numb not only in my teeth, but also in my whole face and neck. In order to allow you to understand what followed, I have to explain that the “dentist” had a handicap in one eye, he had a glass eye. So as I’m sure you can understand, it was very uncomfortable, embarrassing and even scary to keep looking at him – so I closed my eyes. However, after a while feeling absolutely nothing, I decided to check what he was doing. He was definitely NOT treating my tooth, the *@#&* was kissing my nose!!!! Today I laugh, but at the time I was furious! Needless to say, I never went back. I discovered later, to my horror, that before 75 he was only a helper at the dentist, and I suppose I should consider myself a very lucky person as he did not kill me with that anesthetic.

I never thought I would say this one day, but I miss the queues, and “what are they selling?” Some people would prefer “What are they giving today?” but in reality, no one “gave” anything there. When they had sugar, they had no rice, when there was rice there was no oil,………..I never really understood why they only ever sold a product at a time! I suppose because the containers arriving in the ships only had loads of the same product, duplicated many times! I was always amazed at how everybody respected the stones. People would leave a stone to mark their place and then go home to sleep or eat or go to the loo…….. I never heard anyone trying to claim a stone that didn’t belong to them, even if it was closer to the supermarket door! Nobody took anybody else’s place. There was a lot of respect for each other, something I sometimes don’t see in Europe!
The beer was served in the bars in Bulgarian jam containers – there were no glasses on sale, so once we ate the jam, we would use the containers! Recycling is not at all a “modern thing”. We recycled everything in Luanda, after 75.
Food was very important at that time – there wasn’t much around! We enjoyed the tinned Spam and had great pleasure tasting the tinned chicken – it was so soft, you could eat everything, even the bones! We would put the tin in the oven 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 hours and the result was always the same! I personally, never had a problem to eat them: a few cuba libres to wash them down and everything would go: skin, chicken and bones! Especially after a few weeks eating fried sword fish everyday!
No running water or electricity was another problem we had to face on a daily basis. We quickly got used to block the plugholes in the sinks, washing basins and baths as soon as we saw a trickle of dirty brown liquid coming out of the taps, allowing them to fill up slowly. Some people would leave their taps open all the time and the plugholes blocked, in case the water started to run suddenly – so it was common to see floods in a town where usually there was no water at all! We soon learnt to have “cup baths or showers” – something which required lots of expertise, trying to get clean with a minimum of water! And I cannot count the number of times the water stopped running while I was washing my hair and I had to go to the beach to get rid of the rest of the shampoo with sea water! Today I see the English women paying lots of money to get that “beach babe look” which we achieved with no problem whatsoever, for free!

I was born in the most fantastic continent, in a truly magical place, Africa! In the most beautiful city in the world, Luanda.
Better than my memory, my senses do not forget Angola. What I remember best are the smells. The perfume of ripe mangoes, maboques and palm fruit. The smell of low tide, of wet soil after the rains. The coffee and the dried fish in the Praia do Bispo.
Next come the colours. The blood red of the acacias in full bloom, the golden red of the sunset, the bright red of the soil, the perfect blue in the sky with no clouds, the silver green in the sea, the multicoloured cloths of the kitandeiras, the women selling foodstuffs from door to door.
In this never ending trip happening only in my memory, I can still hear the noises. The calemas in the sea during bad weather, the rain falling on a tin roof, the deafening thunderstorms. The cries in the market, the merengues, batucadas and kizombas in the night.
Then come the tastes. The sour and tangy cashew fruit, the velvety sweetness of the mangoes and pawpaws, the sharpness of the mucuas. The hot spicy chilies and the sweet lightness of kifufutila.
Last, but not least, I can still feel the fine sand in the beach escaping through my fingers, my feet running at the edge of the sea, licked by the waves, the lovely breeze of a warm evening in the ilha, the light kiss of the sun on my skin.
I miss Luanda loads. I miss the serene calm life I never found anywhere else. I miss all the friends I lost when they left in 75 and the ones I lost again when it was my turn to leave in 84. I miss Bairro Pop, Vila Alice, Ingombotas, Mutamba and especially, Mussulo. I miss the palm and coconut trees, the beach, the Avis, Miramar and Imperio. I miss the barrocas and marginal, Palmeirinhas, Santiago and Cabo Ledo. I miss the rains which left me completely soaking wet in a couple of minutes but never lasted longer that a couple of hours. I miss mainly a place I can call home and I can identify with. I didn’t just lose the place I lived in; I lost my roots, my cultural background, my sense of belonging.
I miss Africa. Terribly. And just like Alda Lara, I want one day to say: “I’ve come back”.

L'amitie

Ca fleurit comme une herbe sauvage
N'importe où, en prison, à l'école,
Tu la prends comme on prend la rougeole
Tu la prends comme on prend un virage
C'est plus fort que les liens de famille
Et c'est moins complique que l'amour
Et c'est là quand t'es rond comme une bille
Et c'est là quand tu cries au secours
C'est le seul carburant qu'on connaisse
Qui augmente à mesure qu'on l'emploie
Le vieillard y retrouve sa jeunesse
Et les jeunes en ont fait une loi.
C'est la banque de toutes les tendresses
C'est une arme pour tous les combats
Ca réchauffe et ca donne du courage
Et ça n'a qu'un slogan " on partage"
Au clair de l'amitiéLe ciel est si beau
Viens boire à l'amitié
Mon ami Pierrot
L'amitié c'est un autre langage
Un regard et tu as tout compris
Et c'est comme S.O.S. dépannage
Tu peux téléphoner jour et nuit.
L'amtitié c'est le faux témoignage
Qui te sauve dans un tribunal
C'est le gars qui te tourne les pages
Quand tu es seul dans un lit d'hopital
C'est la banque de toutes les tendresses
C'est une arme pour tous les combats
Ca rechauffe et ca donne du courage
Et ca n'a qu'un slogan : "on partage"

Herbert Pagani

I remember as if it was today – mid November 75, I was in the queue to enroll in the FAPLA (the glorious Angolan Army). I still keep the piece of paper that proves it, and my husband loves to show it to everyone!
Afterwards, I went straight to the queue at the university. The classes were starting soon at the Faculty of Economics and no way was I going to miss my place!
In the beginning we did some revision as the 74-75 school year had finished early and the teachers didn’t have the chance to cram everything in.
The 2 years I was at uni were memorable. I made loads of friends, they all were “tyre sandals” (made of car tyres, as there were no shoes to be found in the shops). We had great teachers but that didn’t last long! On red Saturdays we went to cut sugar cane to help the national economy and rebuilding the country. And you know what? We loved it! We used to go in groups, all with our own cutlass and it was fun!!! And what’s even more surprising, nobody ever got hurt! Nowadays, the safety rules would never allow it!With all its difficulties, Luanda was a real oasis! And the best of all is that everybody who decided to stay knew each other……….or if they didn’t, they knew the friend of a pal of a friend……….It was a tiny community!!!!!!!!!!!