Word: luanda
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Portuguese Angolans were just as fragmented: many were staying because they had no place to go and owned only their homes; others were panic-stricken at the prospect of independence and left. Two passenger ships which called at Luanda almost empty August 24 and September 2 each left carrying 800 passengers over capacity. During those ten days, trucks and vans crammed with luggage and household goods formed a line which snaked over a mile back into the city from the docks...
...reason the ship stayed in Luanda so long was a dockworkers' strike and slowdown, a final revolt against the coerced labor Angola has exploited for hundreds of years. When slavery was finally abolsished in the 1870's, it was replaced with a labor code which allowed the government to force anyone who did not have a steady job--always Africans--to sign a six-month contract with employers who had asked the government for workers. Village life was destroyed since men weren't there for six months out of the year and were often shipped to other parts of Angola...
Like every other country I saw in Africa, the problems of underdevelopment are rampant in Angola. There is hardly any industry and most manufactured goods are imported; Luanda for instance, a city of a half-million, has no bottling or canning facility. There is one doctor for every 10,000 people in Angola; there are 3000 college students in a population of five and a half million; the per-capita income is less than $500 a year...
...multinational corporations are moving in, too. Oil-rich Cabinda, Angola's enclave north of the Congo River, is controlled by Cabinda Gulf Oil Company, which is rumored to be financing a separatist guerilla movement there. American Oil Company has just opened a field south of Luanda with cooperation from Shell. On the rooftop patio of a downtown Luanda hotel, I met an American tractor demonstrator and salesman from the Ford Motor Company whose job was to town-hop in the interior and set up Ford's market. He was very proud of Luanda's Ford dealership, Robert Hudson Ford...
...reason I was on the rooftop was the sunset. Because of Luanda's location on a point of land, with an island sheltering the bay, you see sunrises over the bay and sunsets over the ocean. And they're always beautiful. At sunrise on the ship's last morning in Luanda, the water in the bay shimmered like smooth aluminum foil watercolored pink and orange. But the source of the shimmer was soon painfully evident: an oil film, produced by the anchored ships, spread over the entire...