Meandering Memory Flight over Luanda

Tomes of theses have been penned – and in the past few decades hammered away at typewriters or touch-typed on fancy laptops – all purporting to shed light on how the human brain functions. I am, however, more inclined to a more romantic approach over exact sciences and settle for a simple parallel conclusion that what goes on deep inside the labyrinthine memory lanes of our grey matter is still in the realm of the unknown.

How else would I explain that our powerlessness at the impending lack of ice cold beers and the thought of all that sushi spoiling, should make me think of Luanda? How else does one explain that rather than rushing out to buy a generator, I’d rather reminisce about nights sleeping away to the sound of we called generator music, sometimes a welcome relief to drown out the clanking sound of the air conditioner that pumped in sea air laced with the ever-present smell of the sewage that often transposed the maze of cavernous innards of the city’s bowels.

These are fond memories briskly being overtaken by progress hammering away at scaffolding, wielding paintbrushes and trowels and eager to produce a dazzling vision of a glorious woman. The city has come a long way from its war look as a post-war teenage girl, wrestling with the agony of finding a fitting personality, identity, attitude and look. Today’s Luanda is a bustling city, awash in adrenaline – with the presence of affluence and ostentation palpable in the air. Dreams fight the demons of the nightmarish past decades that saw a whole generation born while cannons were exacting death elsewhere in the country.

Yes, the grey is slowly making way for garish colours and the flame-grilled peri-peri chicken now competes with fancier fare, including – yes – sushi! The teenage girl is turning into a beautiful modern woman with good taste – and attitude. Private schools and colleges are popping up like mushrooms, ready to fill the voids in the eager minds of a generation bereft of proper education. Restaurants and nightclubs need not even be mentioned – they are usually the first ones on the scene. Perhaps those more concerned with the exact sciences use them in calibrating their barometers. More telling tough, is the astounding growth of the banking sector, with banks opening up where before the quinguilas sat, patiently waiting for patrons with their 100-dollar notes looking for local currency. Like many other informal activities, this was referred to as the ‘parallel market’, which, in this case had the clout to establish its own ‘parallel exchange rate’. Tragically, these barefoot street money exchangers redolent of city smells will not become the tellers in the new banks, which will no doubt take in the modern young women, fresh out of one of the private colleges, with good taste, wafting in expensive perfumes on their high heels.

But, plunging back into fading memories … The ice-cold beer was never a problem – even at the height of the war, you could drive 30 to 40 kilometres from the city centre and you would find someone selling such blessing out of a cooler box packed with dry ice – for five million kwanza a piece, standard price in the parallel market (20 million in an exclusive bar with running water and a flushing toilet in the Cidade Alta, probably the noblest of suburbs! Naturally, here they have generators to power their fridges and a private cistern to supply water). Needless to say, the parallel market was the city’s life support system.

Just the other day, peering into the west, trying to track down a hint of the elusive Comet McNaught as it crept across South African skies, again I was pulled to Luanda with its beer-in-hand salmon-coloured sunsets. It is amazing how beer seems to be the substitute – or perhaps antidote – for the lack of something to do. All the pleasant memories I have of Luanda seem to be intrinsically linked to a cold beer. Why else would I on revisiting the city of my birth, Lubango, again be faced with ‘beer realities’? Our plot of land with our old house on the fringes of the city was in my day hemmed in by a brewing plant and a juice factory. Today these two are operated by – respectively – the makers of South Africa’s favourite holiday companions and the world’s largest soft drink company … the once recently struck by blackouts of another nature. Between the two of them, they have pumped in millions, doing much to unclog the pipes of a rusty economy that appears to be untapped from the billions the country generates from its diamonds and oil, mysteriously siphoned away in murky pipelines to the unknown in a parallel world.

Angola is a country of parallels, mysteries and hope. While memories and nostalgia evoked by greying photographs must serve a higher purpose to which we remain alien, exact sciences are at work, impatiently pushing Angola, frantically playing catch-up and filling in the colour. Luanda, described by poets and writers as ‘Menina do Atlântico’ (Girl of the Atlantic), has become a lady and is waiting for us to come courting and discover her charms. But beware! There is an old adage that says that once you have tasted the waters of the meandering Bengo River (which supplies Luanda), you will never want to go away again. Many a foreigner has fallen prey to this enchantment and accepts it as something from the realm of the unknown where exact sciences do not enter. So, perhaps it is safer to settle for a beer … if you want to come back, that is!