Five wet, wild weeks in the Angolan highlands
Thalefang Charles | Friday April 8, 2016 15:06
Just after my grand arrival (dropped off by a convoy of two helicopters) at the Cuito River source lake, still excited at being at the source of one of Africa’s iconic rivers, the rain came down hard.
There is a time-tested Setswana belief that rain falling down after one arrives is a good omen. I don’t know if this applies when arriving in foreign countries, but nevertheless, the rainy reception caught me unprepared and quickly smacked the arrival excitement off my face.
My first night at the Cuito source lake basecamp at the Angolan highlands began with rain-soaked clothes and a waterlogged laptop computer and camera. But that was just the initial pleasantries of the Angolan rain forest saying, ‘congratulations, nice to meet you’. I had to dry myself and come to grips with staying in a rain forest during the rainy season. Cameras and computer were dipped in rice to suck out the moisture and in the meantime I had to explore the area. A team of National Geographic (Nat Geo) researchers was busy sampling at the place and they were already used to being soaked on everyday. They were even bragging of double digit numbers of beestings. There were swarms of bees everywhere. The only time we got a break from bees was when it was raining.
Gabonamong ‘GB’ Kgetho, a poler from Seronga who was part of the river team that travelled by mekoro through the Cuanavale River to its confluence with the Cuito River, shared a bush survival guide to avoid bees. GB said I should avoid using scented body-lotions and deodorants because they would attract the bees. So for my time there, I never used body lotion until I returned home and only suffered two stings from bees that just panicked and stung me – I believe. One was trapped between my backside and seat, while the other was trying to free itself from between my middle and ring finger, hence resorted to stinging me.
In the evenings, as the busy bees knocked off to their hives, even more devilishly troublesome creatures emerged – mosquitoes in particular. They gleefully sucked our blood to an extent of infecting some of the researchers with malaria. These bloodsuckers were deadlier than bees because of all the other diseases they were able to transmit such as Zika and Yellow Fever. Despite the anti-malaria medications supplied by the Nat Geo Health Department and insect repellants, the mozzies managed to cause a few cases of malaria among our team of researchers. Hidden within the remote highlands with impenetrable thick forests, are small villages that we frequently visited for group research interviews.
The people there survive from their small cassava plantations, fishing, honey and occasional bush meat. Most of these villages shared with us their invaluable knowledge of their environment as well as how they survived the Angolan war. Every village hoisted the ruling MPLA party’s flag - red, black with a yellow star in the middle - while others had the UNITA flags too. The villages have a soba (chief) whom we used to meet with a group of men inside their meeting grass and mud hut around a bonfire (women were not allowed here). Most of the people in these areas have not had much contact with the outside world in the last 30 years because of the remoteness of the villages and the effects of wars. Since the end of the Portuguese colonial administration, they have been cut off from the outside world because of blown up bridges and destroyed roads and access to key services like health and education has been hard. They live without modern medicine and children do not attend school.
After the liberation war and civil war, the only Portuguese legacy that these locals have held onto is the language and Christianity. It was enlightening to find Christian churches at these deep forest villages with humble people that had no material wealth, but were still staunch Christians. One Sunday, we arrived at Samununga village which is headed by Soba Andre who invited our research team into a church session. It was ironic watching this humble community now preaching to mostly white scientists about the God they received from the imperialists.
The villagers also narrated the troubles they went through during the wars. Angola is still reeling from a devastating past of a 14-year war of independence against its former colonial ruler, Portugal, and another 30 years of civil war fuelled by Cold War rivalry. The Cuito Cuanavale Rivers are located on the southeastern side of Angola in the Cuando Cubango and Moxico provinces that were mainly the stronghold of UNITA led by Jonas Savimbi against Dos Santos’ MPLA during the Civil War.
These remote highlands were the surrogate battleground during the Cold War. Wreckages of buildings with bullet holes, rusted tanks, trucks, and even helicopters still litter the forests and minefields remain menacing underground. I followed the Halo Trust, one of the agencies that are doing the important job of de-mining in Angola, on their mapping surveys in a village called Tempue. The villagers recently identified two minefields at the entrance of their village with live landmines. What I found surprising in Tempue is that, although there are landmines around their village, the people do not seem to worry much about it. As a visitor I was careful where to walk, (even answering my regular nature calls I made sure that I do not veer much off the roads). It is after being around landmines that one understands the feeling of freedom in the wilderness. Angolan forests did not allow me the complete freedom of being in the wilderness that I usually get when I am in the bush in my country. In Angola there is a constant remainder of bombs waiting to explode, and every footstep could be one’s very last. We have heard that Angola contained “approximately 10 million landmines and it could take four decades to remove all of them”. At the moment the de-mining agencies say about 60 percent of mines remain undetonated. But despite this lurking death, when we met the locals, with their happy and welcoming eagerness as well as their seemingly carefree strolls through their land, we forgot, albeit temporarily that we were in a land with over 89,000 landmine survivors and millions of bombs still out there.
*Thalefang Charles was on a National Geographic/Okavango Wilderness Project Research Expedition on the upper Okavango catchment area in Angola dubbed #Cuito2016.