Seven years after the end of the civil war, and one year since the first elections to be held in Angola in 16 years, there is a new sense of stability and optimism. But in the city of Kuito, people are only now starting to deal with the trauma of the war
For 15 years, the residents of the Gabiconta building in the centre of Kuito town lived in apartments with the front façade missing. Where there should have been walls, windows and balconies, there were holes and rubble, sometimes with a clothesline hung across, signalling survival in a building that seemed condemned.
The building dominated Kuito, towering above the crossroads at the town’s centre, across from a ruined sports pavilion and a roofless church. It dominated the town’s iconography, rivalled only by the images of amputees that became a leitmotif for Angola’s civil war.
Since the nine-month siege that lacerated the town in 1993, Kuito had been, literally, a cemetery. The main street was lined with buildings suspended, perhaps permanently, in states of near collapse. Families fed, washed and slept under sunken roofs, without the privacy of external walls. Those walls that stood were laced with bullet holes and shrapnel marks. Below, the yards and gardens were home to the war’s dead. With the town cut off from its hinterland during the siege, and its residents unable to walk openly in the streets for fear of snipers, graves were dug, by night, in people’s yards, often yards from where they cooked or improvised latrines.
Today, the Gabiconta building retains its iconic status in Kuito, but for a different reason. As the town lurches towards normality, six years after the end of the Angolan war, the Gabiconta building is a beacon of reconstruction rather than a black hole of despair. The yellow, pink and blue hues of its new cladding cast a more gentle light over the crossroads, and testify to the dividend of peace. A new cine-theatre complex and sports pavilion stand across from it; where the Catholic church was, a new church is being built.
Kuito is in the throes of a hectic, haphazard rebuilding, the product of a combination of long-overdue governmental sponsorship, Chinese investment, and the resolute entrepreneurialism of the town’s people, honed over a decade and more of survival in a war economy. It has a frontier-town energy, underscored by the constant roar of the motorbikes that are now the favoured transport for people and goods, as well as an opportunity for young people to show off a bit of bling and bravado.
For anyone who knew Kuito during the war, these mark an extraordinary change in the town’s landscape. But more striking still is the impact of peace on its people’s internal landscape. Even as the town’s architecture is transformed, an emotional archaeology is uncovering stories and memories buried since the war years.
With the success of last year’s legislative elections, the first since 1992, and only the second in the country’s history, fears of yet another return to war have gradually been shaken off. People now talk politics, and recall the war, with unprecedented frankness. Not only are people rebuilding, they are remembering. And this makes it possible to tell the story of the siege, and survival, of Kuito, in newly intimate detail.
The Angolan war was a classic proxy for the cold war through the late 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet bloc and Cuba supporting the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) government, and the US and South Africa backing Jonas Savimbi’s Unita. By 1992, the conflict seemed to be exhausted, and the UN supervised elections and — supposedly — demobilisation. But Savimbi returned to war in spectacular fashion, launching an all-out bid for the key cities of the central highlands, Huambo and Kuito. Huambo fell, but Kuito held out.
This is the heartland of the Ovimbundu, Savimbi’s own people, from whom Unita drew its strength. Kuito voted Unita in the 1992 elections, and should have been sympathetic and susceptible to takeover. But the brutality of Unita’s attack and, when Huambo fell, of its treatment of those inside the city, helped inspire a fierce resistance – a resistance that finally culminated just last year, when Unita suffered a humiliating defeat in the elections.
Proxy war
By January 1993 Unita had surrounded Kuito, advancing as far as the main street. Snipers occupied key buildings at intersections. From a hill outside, the town was bombarded daily by mortars. The town’s people sought refuge in the small cluster of colonial-era multi-storey buildings that marked Kuito’s centre.
In one of these, an elegant art-deco building known as Casa Ford, Olegário Cardoso ran an auto-parts business, and some other retail enterprises. The son of a first-generation Portuguese father, whose own parents had emigrated to Angola in the 1890s, and an Angolan mother, Cardoso had remained in Kuito throughout the war, his elderly father insisting on staying when other Portuguese had left, in 1975.
As the bombardment started, Cardoso started to take in refugees, until there were 478 people living on the ground floor of Casa Ford. In nine months of shelling, just eight died. Three of these were children. A government plane had flown overhead, dropping supplies by parachute, and the children had run to the window to see it. Cardoso knew that Unita often shelled the town in response to a parachute drop, and warned them to stay away from the windows. But a young man, the uncle of one of the children, accused Cardoso of being too anxious, and went himself to the window. The children followed him, and a mortar shell fell directly outside, exploding shrapnel through the shopfront. The children were killed; the uncle escaped.
Albertina Manuela Cassoma initially took refuge in another of Kuito’s iconic war buildings, the Prédio Comercio (Commerce Building). There, on 21 August 1993, a mortar shell landed in the yard while Cassoma was preparing food; it killed her six-year-old niece, her cousin and her mother-in-law, but left Cassoma unharmed. She and her surviving family moved to Casa Ford. Then, in the early afternoon of 15 September, her father was shot by a sniper. He lay in the street all afternoon, until night fell, when they were able to safely retrieve him. He needed an operation, but the hospital had no petrol for the generator, or anaesthetic. They set about trying to procure these, but before they could, he died. It took Cassoma and her brother 24 hours to dig a grave in the yard, during breaks in the shelling. They wrapped their father in a cloth and placed him in a rough coffin that Cassoma’s brother had prepared from scavenged wood.
Survival by any means
Casa Ford had key advantages over other refuges in Kuito. It had two storeys of reinforced concrete, so was unlikely to collapse, even if shelled directly. Cardoso had stocks of dried goods in his warehouse, and was able to trade these for fresh food at the town’s improvised wartime markets. There was a well in the yard, providing fresh water. And Cardoso had a mill, which he ran as a business, milling people’s wheat and corn in exchange for a share of the resulting flour.
Yet the besieged Kuito had long run out of foods like wheat and corn: so how was it that Cardoso was able to run a mill? As the town’s people grew desperate, they developed a strategy for procuring food. Nightly, groups would gather to stage mass “break-outs”: under the protection of small numbers of soldiers or civil defence, or through sheer force of numbers, they would attempt to break through the Unita lines in order to forage for food in the hinterland. These were known as the batidas and became a rite of passage for Kuito’s people. A batida group could number anything from 10 to a few hundred people; sometimes they sneaked through the Unita lines, on other occasions, they would have to fight. Those that made it through would split up to search for food in the fields and villages outside Kuito, for up to a 50-mile radius. At every step, they risked landmines and discovery by Unita patrols, and on their return, they would have to try to break back through the siege lines again.
A resting place
On 18 August 1993, Pastor Armando joined a large batida group. Unusually, he brought with him his whole family. His wife was heavily pregnant, already overdue by one week, and had pleaded with him to bring her to the small town of Kunje, just outside Kuito, which was reputed to be safer. (Kunje, unlike everywhere else in the hinterland, was in government hands.) With their six children, they intended to join the batida in order to break out of Kuito, and then proceed to Kunje, just four miles away. But their group fell into an ambush. Armando’s wife was killed, as was their two-year-old daughter, whom she had been holding by the hand. With his five other children, Armando succeeded in escaping the ambush. They hid overnight in the bush, and eventually made it back into Kuito the following day. Nobody else from the original batida group returned. The bodies of his wife and daughter were never retrieved.
In 2003 the government led an exhumation process, to disinter all the bodies buried in the town and re-inter them in a new cemetery on the outskirts. When Albertina Manuela Cassoma’s father was exhumed, they found little more than the cloth in which he had been wrapped. Nonetheless, the remains were re-interred in the new cemetery, granting him finally “a dignified resting place. It’s difficult to forget”, she said.“But at least, now, I am not reminded constantly. When he is in the yard, you remember all the time. It brings peace to you, and the sense of recrimination is less.”
One morning in August, I visited the cemetery, in the company of Agusto Alegre, another survivor of Kuito’s war. A large sign outside dedicates it to the memory of the “martyrs” of Kuito. Inside, 7,000 graves are identified simply by numbers on small iron plates. The cemetery overlooks the town from a hillside, adjacent to the point from where Unita used to launch mortar attacks. Just beyond the cemetery is a new township, Bairro Zambia, built to accommodate those who returned from exile in Zambia after the end of the war in 2002 – which identifies them, to the people of Kuito, as Unita’s people.
Alegre, a mestico whose Portuguese father fled Angola at the outbreak of the war in 1975, leaving Alegre with his Angolan mother, served in the civil defence in Kuito during the siege. He had six children, and all survived the siege, only to die of various illnesses subsequently – though he and his wife have had six more children since, all of whom are healthy.
“It’s not worth thinking still about the war”, he said. “During the war, nobody thought about anything — they just waited for their hour to come. All we did every day was look for food. ‘What am I going to eat?’ ‘When will I die?’
“The war is in the past now. We’re thinking of other things, of rebuilding our country. We’re thinking of another life. If we dwell on the past, we will be overcome by hatred. There are many Unita now living here, within the town. He who killed my brother – if I think about the war, I will need to kill him also. So to avoid this, it’s better to forget the past. And build a new life. What’s past remains in the past.”
A time of peace
Back in the town, Pastor Armando showed me the new house he was building, a home for his seven children: he has remarried and has two further children by his second wife. He had bought the materials incrementally, and it was taking three years to build, on the site of his original house, destroyed during the war.
“Angola has changed a lot”, he said. “The houses that were destroyed by the war are being rebuilt, roads and bridges are being repaired. Projects that had been placed on hold are now being developed. And one of those was the rebuilding of my house.”
Armando spoke in simple, prosaic terms about his vision for the future. “I hope my children will continue their education. Our dream is that the country will produce the young people qualified to run it well, and that it will be well organised and allow its people a good quality of life.” He harboured no resentment. “There is no justification for ongoing hatred”, he said. “We are in a different time: one of peace, not war.”
Albertina Cassoma, too, looked optimistically towards the future, despite qualms about some aspects of Angola’s reconstruction. For her, the exhumation project was a success, but was left incomplete. Restricted to the town, it did not include those killed outside, on the batidas, such as Armando’s wife. “There are still many remains in the fields and along the roads, lying there without dignity.” She called for a renewed, expanded exhumation project, to bring those to the cemetery. She was also more circumspect about the quality of governance in Angola, an issue that has provoked widespread international criticism.
“We have to change the type of governance. The country has many riches, but only two or three people benefit.” She warned of serious inter-generational and class tensions if the country’s young people were not given the opportunity to participate meaningfully in the economy. Yet there was great potential in this generation, she said. “During the war, we just lived for the moment; nobody thought of the future. Today the young people are worried about their education.”
Kuito, and Angola with it, has succeeded in leaving the war behind, she said. “The trauma and the intolerance are passing. There is forgiveness, and that forgiveness is the basis for life. The country is changing. People are working; the government is helping. If we maintain this momentum, Angola will be another country, a better country, where people can smile and forget the bad things of the past. There is much to do, but that which has already been done is great.”
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