Angola’s Lost City

Tempos Sem Véu (Unveiled Times)
By Roderick Nehone
246 pages, Luanda: Editorial Nzila, 2003 (in Portuguese)

In a now famous poem from the late 1950s, "Canção Para Luanda" by Luandino Vieira, several inhabitants of Angola’s capital city pose the question, "Luanda, onde está?" Literally translated as "Where is Luanda?" a more poetic rendition might read, "Luanda, where are you?" Vieira’s poem, written on the eve of Angola’s 1961 armed rebellion against Portuguese colonialism, searches for an African city that has been paved with asphalt and turned into a European metropolis often referred to as "the Paris of Africa."

On November 11, 1975, the day of Angolan independence, Luanda’s population had grown to some 700,000 inhabitants, primarily due to the influx of people from the interior who were fleeing intense combat zones. Ironically, the emotional euphoria of an independent Angola was short lived, as fighting among the principal independence movements quickly turned into a proxy battle between Cold War superpowers. Cuban troops withdrew in 1988, but independence groups did not reach a final settlement until 2002.

Despite fierce urban battles often fought house to house, Luanda managed to survive the post-independence conflict. Yet, Angola’s literary community still finds itself asking "Where is Luanda?" as it seeks answers in a chaotic city where many residents, or Luandenses, survive in a thriving informal economy. Recent literature — including the 2001 novel Jaime Bunda, Agente Secreto (Jaime Bunda, Secret Agent), a pastiche of detective fiction by Angola’s most prolific novelist, Pepetela — has decried the lack of administrative infrastructure in Luanda while celebrating the resilience of its population.

The latest novel by Roderick Nehone, Tempos Sem Véu (Unveiled Times), continues this literary focus on Luanda as a touchstone for the nation. Roderick Nehone is the pseudonym of Frederico Manuel dos Santos e Silva Cardoso. Two of his previous works both won the Prémio Sonangol de Literatura, the now semiannual national prize for literature. Nehone is part of a group of writers who emerged in the 1980s that includes Cikakata Mbalundu, Sousa Jamba, and Jacinto Lemos. As children of the Angolan liberation struggles, their writings reflect the contradictions of a nation seeking to coalesce around a new identity.

Like Pepetela and Vieira, Nehone portrays Luanda as a divided city. The novel’s main characters — Fernando (Nando) Belamor; his wife, Catí; his mistress, Sandra Bontempo; and Sandra’s husband, Jorge — are upper-middle class Luandenses brought together by the two women’s desire to have children. Nando is the head of Belamor Limitada, an import-export company that embodies Angola’s growing participation in the globalized economy.

As reflected in Nehone’s narrative, Angola is dependent upon imports, humanitarian food assistance, and subsistence farming to feed most of its population, despite possessing more than adequate natural resources. Once a primary food exporter, war and postwar conditions have now forced the nation to import most of its food. Nando cuts a business deal with U.S. partners, namely a Miami-based concern eager to exploit Angolan coffee for untold profits. Symbolically, others in Luanda do not reap the benefits of such deals; Nando and his class compatriots drive daily by thousands of refugees, many of them war veterans or victims of the millions of landmines that remain scattered throughout the nation. Those battling the congested roadways of the war-damaged city close their car windows and look straight ahead rather than acknowledge the faces of "the displaced who had to immediately face the tough laws of the streets."

And, as Angola becomes integrated into the globalized economy, women’s bodies remain valuable commodities. Late colonial ideology had emphasized racial miscegenation as a positive effect of Portuguese domination, although mestiços (people of mixed races) did not represent a significant percentage of the Angolan population outside of the large urban centers. Nehone’s novel offers a new twist on the concept of hybridity. Catí is diagnosed with uterine tumors and forced to undergo a hysterectomy, while Sandra’s desire for a child is suppressed following a car accident in which her husband Jorge becomes a quadriplegic.

Catí discovers that artificial insemination and maternal surrogacy make her dream of motherhood possible. Without the concept of "surrogate mother" in Angolan Portuguese, the Brazilian expression, "barriga de aluguer" (rented belly) serves to clarify the commodified relationship of surrogacy. For her part, Sandra agrees to become the surrogate mother for Catí’s child, an action that complicates her own amorous relationship with Nando, whom she met while translating between him and his U.S. partner. The women travel to Rio de Janeiro for the procedure, much to the shock of their families and Luandense society. Catí is criticized by her elders for not seeking traditional remedies before resorting to the invasion of modern medicine. "To rent the belly of another woman to make your baby?" they moan. "This tears down our culture, our way of life. It means bringing strange customs to our land."

Catí’s decision is all the more scandalous in light of Angola’s long and complex relationship with Brazil. As the economic mainstay of the Portuguese metropolis and later as a post-independence empire, Brazil was built on the labor of enslaved Africans. For hundreds of years, African and African-Brazilian women, many of whom came from Angola, participated in forced surrogacy, whether bearing the children of the Brazilian elite or serving as wet nurses to their mistresses’ babies.

The real criticism of Unveiled Times, of course, is directed toward Nando, who, at first, is horrified that his mistress will bear a child for his wife, but who ultimately partakes in all types of selling — mistress, nation, future. When Catí discovers the real relationship between Nando and the surrogate mother, she gives her the baby, which, as we discover, was Sandra’s real intent from the beginning. Moral and ethical ambiguities abound as Luanda — once one of Angola’s primary port cities of enslaved Africans — carries its market history to new grounds.

In "Canção Para Luanda," the lost city is found in the memories of the marginalized women who traverse its roadways to sell their wares and themselves. Nehone’s novel reveals a divided and commodified society where the memory of liberation struggles and the formation of nation is present in the street names, monuments, and, perhaps, in the collective hearts of those displaced in the global community of Luanda.