David Beresford in Luanda
Sitting on a hotel balcony, the ambassador recounted with gleaming eyes how a diamond prospector had invited him to grab a random handful of gravel from a river bed, and had then picked three precious gemstones from the palm of his hand.
Below, in Luanda’s stinking, garbage-strewn streets, a street-urchin kicked his legs in the air for balance as he rooted through a roadside bin, and some men scavenged through rubbish with absent-minded indifference.
In a country where inflation stands at more than 3 000%, money has little more than a notional value, at least to the mass of its inhabitants. But that is not to say there is no wealth. This is a get-rich-quick country and the carpet-baggers are in town —many easily identifiable by their thick forearms and pot bellies which testify to a lifetime’s love affair with Boer cooking, boerewors and beer.
For all their girth they are fit men, ex- soldiers and naval frogmen who have abandoned South Africa and the vicissitudes of affirmative action in pursuit of dazzling fortune. Diamonds — alluvial and maritime — are the lure and the stories about them are legion. They speak of the fabled Cuango Valley, financing Unita’s war to the tune of a estimated R108-million a month, and of Catoca, reputed to be the biggest diamond-bearing kimberlite pipe in the world, bigger even than Kimberley itself.
It was the lesson of Kimberley that the dealer, not the digger, is king. In recognition of this, De Beers and rival buyers are taking uncut pebbles off the street at top prices with no questions asked.
Testament to the riches in this country of the poor, a giant rig squats massively in Luanda Bay, under-going maintenance. The black gold pumped out of Angola at the rate of some 635 000 barrels a day has financed the governing MPLA during 20 years of civil war, as well as generating sufficient profit to have the world’s oil corporations jostling at the troughs.
There is yellow gold as well, waiting to be discovered, and a host of other minerals which have never been tapped. Angola’s reserves are impossible to quantify, as is the potential of other sectors of the economy. But, before war blighted it, this was Africa’s second-largest food producer and the world’s fourth-largest coffee exporter.
The economic potential offered by peace is obvious. But the chances of peace being established are far more uncertain, resting superficially on the round shoulders of Alioune Blondin Beye, the United Nations special representative.
The temptation is to characterise the base for the UN mandate for peacekeeping in Angola — Univem III, inconveniently and inexplicably situated some 35 minutes’ drive away from the city centre along narrow and pot-holed roads — as a Tower of Babel. But “Vila Espa” is a flat, sprawling complex of container boxes, humming to the buzz of air-conditioning units under a baking African sun.
Beye seems to carry Univem by sheer force of enthusiasm. But the impracticability of the whole operation is reflected in the fact that Beye, who hails from Mali, is French-speaking in a Portuguese-speaking country, heading an operation which is administered in English. He even uses a translator to speak to his chief spokesman.
The contribution of mediation to the resolution of conflict is always debatable: more often than not, peace is the product of a convergence of circumstances over which the UN presides as a master of ceremonies.
Ten days ago the diplomatic corps was talking excitedly about such a convergence. There was apparently a new spirit of co-operation between Unita and the MPLA in supervising the ceasefire and moving towards military integration. The South African mercenaries working as military advisers had been given their marching orders by the government. The notorious “ninjas”, the police rapid reaction force, were being restricted to base and political prisoners were being released.
But, by the weekend the endless cycle of optimism and pessimism that has accompanied 20 years of civil war was turning once more.
Jonas Savimbi had again called off a summit with President Jose Eduardo dos Santos. Unita’s troops were failing to turn up at UN assembly points. Diplomats were sounding grave warnings of a pull-out by Univem. And amid the garbage of Luanda the talk was of diamonds.