Global Policy Forum

By Justin Pearce

"Mais ou menos" is the Portuguese for "more or less". It's what you say when you don't want to commit yourself to an answer - like "so-so" in English, or "comme ci, comme í§a" in French. In Angola, though, the Portuguese phrase has resonances all of its own.

You're living in the ruins of a bombed out building, the nearest water source is a river a kilometre away, food is expensive, and you've seen half your family killed as battles raged through your town. How's life then? Mais ou menos.

I heard that phrase over and over again as I walked along the main street in the Angolan town of Kuito - a street which in 1993 was the front-line in a stand-off between government forces and the rebel movement Unita. The woman who used the term most emphatically stood outside a precarious pile of tilted concrete slabs and beams. Once it had been the state security headquarters, until someone decided to dynamite it. Now it was her home.

Journalists thrive on pathos, and there seemed to be plenty of it here. But no one in Kuito is in the business of exaggerating their woes. "It's better now there's no shooting," the woman said. So I tried another track. "I've heard food here is very expensive," I said. "Expensive yes, but not very expensive," she replied.

I asked if she had enough to eat? "Enough," she said, adding as if it were an afterthought, "I have to make sacrifices so my children don't go hungry." Here, that all adds up to "mais ou menos".

Ruined buildings

Two types of building dominate central Kuito. Firstly, there are the concrete construction-kits of the 1960s, which the Portuguese were fond of decorating with tiles, or painting in pastel pink and blue. Some of these have whole sections of the exterior walls blown away, so that from the street you look straight into someone's home, six storeys up in the air.

The other style of architecture features grand 19th century faí§ades, designed to give this small country town a central square worthy of a capital city. Those faí§ades are all that are left now, showing sky through their windows and rafters like a crumbling movie set.

Some buildings have been repaired - the ones that house the aid agencies which fly flags as if they were embassies. The aid agency cars, big comfortable four-wheel-drive vehicles that account for most of the traffic on the streets, also fly flags, like a presidential motorcade.

Maybe it's only natural that aid agencies around here should start taking on the external trappings of little states - after all, they do perform most of the functions of government. The million people of Bie, the province of which Kuito is the capital, enjoy the services of a single Angolan doctor. Humanitarian organisations do the rest - the government just tells them where they can and can't go.

And recently, after years when foreigners were forbidden from straying much beyond Kuito, the authorities opened up access to the town of Camacupa, about 80km (50 miles) away.

Camacupa

The first thing I noticed when I arrived in Camacupa were the children shrieking with delight. A man was grunting and chanting as he stumbled around the main street with a broad blade in his hand and the skeleton of an automatic rife slung over his shoulder - he was a man for whom the war had just got too much.

Beside him, a civil servant rode a new bicycle and smiled that life was good. As in Kuito, half of Camacupa's buildings are ruined. But the ruins are on a less grand scale than Kuito, and the first thing you notice here is the trees - neatly-spaced avenues with the branches pruned back for the winter, so as to make a nice shape when they come into leaf. And the trunks had all recently been whitewashed.

Twenty thousand people, uprooted by the war, live in displaced people's camps outside Camacupa. But there's still time to paint the trees in the town. I rode back from Camacupa in a car with three Angolan aid workers who had seen the worst.

Landmarks became an illustrated history as my travelling companions compared notes. That bomb-shattered school? 1998. That burnt-out tank? 1993.

Kuito

As we approached Kuito, the conversation became more animated - Unita was on this hill in '98 - the government was on the other one over there. I started asking them about the siege - How did they get by? They said they stayed indoors during the day, only going out after the roadblocks had gone to bed. What did you eat? Cats, rats. They laughed and joked as they recalled.

We were now on the outskirts of the city. My companions compared notes - "Unita got as far as this bridge in 1998", "No, not to this one," "Yes they did, and they made a lot of confusion in front of the police station."

In Angola, confusion is usually a code word for extreme violence. Understatement once more - like mais ou menos, it's a way of coping. It doesn't do to dwell too much on the past here. So you laugh as best you can. Or else you end up like the mad man of Camacupa, with the kids laughing at you.

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