Africa's Lost Souls
Rootless, desperate and dying: What can be done for millions of Angolans?
April 9, 2001
By Peter Hawthorne

There is hell on earth. It is just north of Angola's capital, below the sprawl of the teeming informal market of Roque Santeiro--one of Africa's biggest--where years of refuse dumping have formed a scarred ridge of eroded ground and spewed garbage. More than 1,000 people live here. They are born here, they breed, bleed and die here. Only the devil could have come up with the name for this place: Boa Vista, which means beautiful outlook.

The outlook for the garbage-dump people of Boa Vista is a fly-blown, post-apocalyptic scene of desolation at the edge of the world. Their shacks are built of cardboard, driftwood, old iron and fraying plastic. Near-naked children play tag among the filthy debris. Only one in three will survive beyond the age of five. Most of the Boa Vista squatters have no formal identity papers. They have to beg, steal or barter for food and clothing. Motorists who drive along the potholed road below the cliff-dwellers look the other way. "Yes, we know about Boa Vista," said a U.N. aid official, "but it's regarded as a no-go security risk. You get out of your car and they'll be over you like piranhas."

There are lost people known as dislocados--officially, internally displaced persons (IDPS)--in other hell-holes in Luanda, a city of around 1 million people in 1988 that is now trying to accommodate 3.8 million. After almost three decades of intermittent civil strife and guerrilla war, the Angolan government estimates that close to a quarter of the country's 13 million citizens have been internally displaced. This year the U.N. is appealing for $202 million in aid, mostly to ensure the survival of the wandering victims of a never-ending war.

Dennis McNamara, U.N. special coordinator on internal displacement, came to Angola as part of a report-back mission on the crisis in countries where IDPS don't have the benefit of international refugee status. "In this kind of situation civilians, usually women and children, are the ones used and abused," he says. "It's a case of poor people living on top of poor people." Part of McNamara's task is to persuade potential aid donors that in countries like Angola the local displacement problem is even worse than that of cross-border refugees. "It's a long-standing humanitarian crisis" he says, "and it puts the majority of the entire population at risk."

As many as 250,000 IDPS could live in the capital city, but only 17,300 are housed in camps run by the by the Angolan government, the U.N. and other humanitarian agencies. Most of these unfortunates live within residential communities. Aid workers report that there are thousands of families who have come into the city to escape the war now living in disused and condemned buildings. "We call them the povo cinzento--the grey people," said a U.N. aid official.

Outside Luanda and other cities, mainly in the east and central provinces, Angola is still paralyzed by the bush war waged for nearly 25 years by rebel leader Jonas Savimbi. His 10,000-strong UNITA army has a series of Ho Chi Minh trails that thread throughout the interior, leaving most of the population paralyzed like flies in a spider's web. Only 25% of the country is regarded as safely accessible. More than 70% of all humanitarian aid has to be transported by air. The government claims there are still 6 to 7 million mines and other unexploded ordnance scattered throughout the country. Children who are lucky enough to attend school in upcountry areas are taught mine awareness.

Most Angolans believe the only chance for peace is for both Savimbi and President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos to step down. "Dos Santos is out of touch with reality," says Father Joao Domingos, an outspoken Roman Catholic parish priest in Luanda. "Savimbi knows only how to make a war of vengeance. And neither cares how much the people suffer." The two are "at a level of irreversible incompatibility," says Abel Chivukuvuku, once Savimbi's bodyguard and intelligence chief and now head of a breakaway UNITA political faction in the Angolan parliament. "Something has to give."

As long as the Angola regime continues to receive huge revenues from its offshore Atlantic oil fields--around 850,000 barrels a day and rising--there is little incentive for the government to make any concessions toward peace with Savimbi. Dos Santos, however, dipped into oil royalties last year for $20 million to add to a $70 million national emergency program. It includes plans to improve agricultural production, health and nutrition, as well as for de-mining operations and idp resettlement. The deal contains some bold promises, but they can't hide the reality that Angola is a country of two worlds. One is the exclusive, coastal Malibu-style state complex at Futungu, south of Luanda, where Dos Santos and his ministers live. The other is Boa Vista.