From The Last Train to Zona Verde (Paul Theroux, 2013) pp318-9
Because only cash was accepted, banks were besieged by people withdrawing money, and most high-end shops or businesses of any size had an ATM machine on the premises my hotel had two in the lobby, and they were in constant use. The fact that so many people walked around with stacks of kwanza notes made it a city of muggers and thieves. An American woman told me that in order to make arrangements for her family of four to fly back to the States, shed had to bring a bag filled with $4,000 in cash to the airline office to buy the tickets.
Because Luanda was dysfunctional and subject to sudden power cuts and water shortages, people with money – Angolans and foreigners alike – created small hermetic settlements, walled compounds, where they had their own generators, water sources, and amenities: tennis courts, swimming pools, golf and social clubs, and of course armed sentries and guard dogs.
The International School of Luanda was one of these salubrious compounds, an oasis behind a wall, catering to the children of expatriates, diplomats, oil people, and wealthy Angolans. Unwelcome at the state schools and rejected by the writers’ union, I visited the school out of curiosity, to observe a sealed community in action. In return for their hospitality, I gave a talk to the students.
After a long and far-from-simple drive to the south of the city, through the improvised neighborhoods, the grim precincts of poverty, the International School was something of a surprise: orderly, well planned, spacious, clean, and surrounded by flower gardens. Healthy children of all races were gathered in congenial groups 630 students, 91 teachers and what was singular about the school was the presence of books. Apart from Akisha Pearman’s department in the Instituto Superior in Lubango, books had not figured much in any of the schools I’d visited. Please send us books from America, I was implored, and my routine reply was to refer them to the billionaires in their government.
The newly built library at the International School was worthy of a small college. And the students were bright sparks, with the confident air that comes of being well taught, taken seriously, and it must be said wealthy, sheltered from the hideosities of Luanda. I gave my talk and answered questions and was shown around the school by the teachers, who were earnest and upbeat. It all seemed marvelous and almost unbelievable that such a place could exist amid the encircling gloom.
“So, I asked casually, “what’s the tuition here?”
“Forty-seven thousand dollars a year,’ I was told by a teacher, who gulped as she managed to utter the words.
At the time, this was roughly the cost of tuition at Harvard University. Because many of the students were the children of oil industry employees, the existence of such a good school was an incentive for foreign workers to stay with their families in Luanda. An oil executive was later to tell me that Angolans simply did no work, and he added, “Forty thousand workers in the oil industry support twenty-three million Angolans.”
The residential compounds and other amenities were the foreigners’ way of turning their backs on the reality of the place, of shutting out the chaos, of being secure. In many respects this pattern was no different from the urban planning in Palm Springs or the gated communities around Phoenix and elsewhere, but in Luanda what lay outside the compounds were slums of extreme danger and pure horror.
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