Luanda’s market grew from a rubbish tip to an open-air shopper’s mecca that offers a glimmer of hope for Angola, writes Phillip van Niekerk
LUANDA’S market began on the edge of the city’s rubbish tip, in the shade of a baobab tree, in the late Seventies, as a blackmarket for United States dollars and scarce food.
It has grown into a 3km-long strip of stalls on a rise above Luanda Bay, a magnet for more than a million people daily and one of the largest open-air shopping meccas in the world.
The hardy baobab lasted until last year. The strain of hundreds of thousands of people pissing on it daily eventually proved too much, and the venerable old giant collapsed from woodrot.
This is not the Yeoville fleamarket. The outlaw flavour of Luanda’s market is captured by its name: Roque Santeiro, after the Robin Hood-type hero of a Brazilian soap opera popular on Angolan television.
It is a place to drag the propagandists of minimal state interference to show them that a real free market is nothing like the fantasies of Milton Friedman and the Financial Mail, where the entrepreneurs are people with middle-class values who might have played in the same cricket team as them at school.
What rules do you abide by when the state, big business, and foreigners leave you nothing? The only code you need to know, to buy a revolver or an Uzi for $100 or an AK-47 for $50, is the secret code. You can commission killings for a few hundred dollars. Even human beings are on sale. In June, a Zairean man was apprehended at the airport with two babies he had bought at one of the Luanda markets for $300. This prompted a police crackdown on the traffic in human organs and babies.
But the bulk of the market is the legitimate produce of the Angolan people, and the majority of the vendors are hard-working women supplementing the meagre wages of their husbands.
Maria de Lourdes Bartolomeu (23) sits in the same place every day, a shawl over her head, a basket on her knees, selling beer from France and coke from the United Arab Emirates. She has been working the market for five years, since she fled the diamond- rich Cafunfo region to escape the war.
She buys cases of beverages from wholesalers deep in the market, who buy directly from the port. They have negligible overheads and easily undercut the prices in Luanda, attracting even affluent shoppers from the city.
This is the market of the poor, but what suburban mall offers in such close proximity sun glasses, beef cutlets, sheep’s brains, personal computers (with Windows ’95), fabric from Dubai, canned fish from Finland and red wine from South Africa?
There are stalls with bottles bubbling with bark and strange concoctions for kidney stones and sexual impotence. The sick of Luanda come to Roque Santeiro to buy cheap antibiotics, surgical spirits and ampules of morphine, all – it is clear from their labels – pillaged from local hospitals.
There are stalls of grease, spark plugs, hubcaps and strange rusty engine shapes – and re-sprayed stolen cars. Aid agencies, must intercept their stolen vehicles before they enter Roque Santeiro because once the vehicle is inside the market, it has passed out of their hands forever.
A feature of the market is the stench and the flies. The French non-governmental organisation, Medicins Sans Frontiers, built latrines but they have been commandeered by racketeers who charge the equivalent of 30 US cents for a shit. Most people go in the open-air, near the road, and visitors have to tread carefully and hold their noses to get into the market.
Once you are in, there is a throbbing background noise emanating from the narrow makeshift alleys where speakers crackle and blast out CDs of Michael Jackson and the Afro-Latin rhythm of local stars such as Celia Sambo and Gaby Moy.
Women sit for hours in the sun beading and braiding each others’ hair. Everything that has a value is on sale. You can get a haircut, or an abortion ($50) or visit a prostitute in a shack covered by an old parachute.
Roque Santeiro is the largest, but not the only, open-air market in Luanda. South of the city is Marque de Futengo, the tourist market, where, among the Zairean masks, ivory crucifixes and leopard pelts, you can buy grey parrots from the jungles of Cabinda in cardboard boxes.
Angolans were into selling long before Encyclopaedia Britannica salespeople went door to door in the US. One MPLA soldier, who drove a tank home as his retrenchment pay after the war ended in 1992, was able to flog it to the new army when the war restarted in 1993.
But, for all its Fellini-esque celebration of the improbable, Roque Santeiro is the market of the people. And it is dominated by women.
Maria Bartolomeu operates on the meanest of margins – less than $1 profit if she sells a case of cooldrink or beer. On a good day she takes home almost $4. Her husband, a policeman, earns $7 a month, but she surpasses his salary in two days. The basic wage of a teacher in Luanda is the equivalent of $10 a month. Men earn negligible salaries in a formal economy that has been gutted by civil war.
Roque Santeiro is increasingly the centre of import-export trade, the node of contact between foreign countries and the Angolan hinterland. Situated next to the harbour, bulk imports are unloaded straight into the market. Its networks bypass the city of Luanda, the boardrooms of the ruling MPLA party, the World Bank and the oil and diamond multinationals.
Even the rich put up with the dangers to buy their food, medicine and spare parts. There is a police station opposite the main road, but the security forces, corrupt and demanding protection money, are often part of the problem. Coming across a policeman at the market is as frightening as running into the young toughs who loiter about waiting for whiteys to rob.
No doubt, the free marketeers, if they could be coaxed out of their airconditioned hotels, would see a vision of Dante’s Inferno at Roque Santeiro, and would hold their noses and run for their lives.
But, this is really a good news story. Without institutional assistance, the women vendors of Luanda have started to regulate their market into sectors, and to make deals with police, and gangsters to trade in peace. But more, they have survived colonialism, war, famine, greedy elites, foreign invasions and structural adjustment programmes, and still make a tidy profit at the end of the day. In their resilience and independence and energy, they represent a glimmer of hope for Angola.