For decades, ‘Miss Katia’ was the first port-of-call for war reporters in Angola. John Grobler met her in Cape Town, where she is retired
Sometime in 1977, the government in Luanda had “a little coup trouble” and imposed a midnight-to-6am curfew – which remained in place for the next 15 years or so. “I think the government just forgot about the curfew,” says Katia Airola, smiling grimly to herself.
Just what the little coup trouble was, “Miss Katia”, as she is known to the 2 000-odd journalists who visited Angola over the last decade-and-a-half, is not interested in expanding upon. Such is the enigma of Airola, a transplanted Finn who adopted Angola’s cause as her own. She has held many foreign journalists’ hands (or the scruffs of their necks) as deputy director of Angola’s national press centre as they tried to decipher the chaos that was post-liberation Angola.
Oddly enough for a hard-bitten realist, her relationship with Africa started at the age of 13 when she read her first Tarzan books. Born in Helsinki as one of three sisters, she had decided then already that she wanted to live in Africa. It took her 33 years to get there.
The association has always been political. In 1957, she married a Portuguese “caf revolutionary” and moved to fascist dictator Antnio Salazar’s Portugal. The condition was that if he wanted to be involved in politics, they would not get married or have children. “Of course we got married, of course we had children – and, of course, he had his politics.” The marriage did not last, but by the early 1960s, she had met another Portuguese who invited her to come along to Angola – her first chance to set foot in Africa.
With her three children, they arrived in Luanda harbour in November 1964. The sky was grey. The city, sweltering in the equatorial heat, was grey with the vivid, red-tiled roofs oddly juxtaposed against the oily bay of Luanda.
With her English, she soon found a job in a local bank’s forex department, where she remained for the next 19 years. When the notorious April Fool’s Day of 1974 arrived – disenchanted soldiers seized control of Lisbon and threw the Portuguese colonial empire into disarray – she was one of two forex experts left in Angola who decided to stay. Why?
She wanted to live in Africa, and to see if socialism could work. “Finns do not run away from trouble.” The fleeing Portuguese colonials were packing everything into homemade crates and the former “pearl of the Atlantic” (Luanda) withered away by the boatload. “It’s hard to say how many people left, because they left so many times,” she says.
The repatriation arrangements allowed for three types of exodus: first the civil servants, then the general refugee population, and then anyone who could get on to a boat . Her neighbour, she said, “left three times, every time taking advantage of his position as civil servant”.
Luanda was incredibly quiet at night – the new arrivals from the countryside “went to bed with the chickens”. With the curfew, people would start their parties at 11pm to 6am, and no one ventured into empty streets, now devoid of cars as well – the fleeing colonials had sabotaged whatever they could not take with them.
South Africa invaded Angola as Cuban troops started arriving to reinforce the revolution. This caused confusion in Luanda as the new government tried to meet the threat, she said, but it was also surreal as no-one knew exactly where the invading forces were.
Who came first, the South Africans or the Cubans? “That’s something we will argue about until the year 3000,” she said. But she recalls that when Che Guevara visited Africa in the middle 1960s, former president Agostinho Neto had asked the Cubans for help.
By 1984, Angola with its huge oil and mineral resources had become the hot end of the Cold War, and coverage of Angola in the world’s media reflected this divide. Attempts by an inexperienced government to prevent visiting journalists from seeing anything embarrassing proved to be even more embarrassing. Everything not expressly sanctioned by the government was forbidden, leading to very negative reporting.
In 1984, she daringly suggested that Angola’s bad international press was the country’s own fault – and the next day, she received a call from the Secretary of Ideology for Propaganda, Roberto D’Almeida, “an angry-faced” individual, offering her a position with the Centro do Imprensa de Anibel De Melo (CIAM), the press centre in downtown Luanda. Since then, she has, in five or six shoeboxes, collected the details of some 2 000 journalists who visited Angola, “some of them nice, some of them not so nice and some, like most Americans, unbelievably innocent”.
For most journalists, a single visit was all they needed – Luanda, with its chaos, aggressive cops and exorbitant prices, is a bit like Lagos – except no one understands you unless you speak Portuguese. But some, like war photographer John Liebenberg and the London Independent’s reporter, Victoria Brittan (“Queen Victoria,” Miss Katia mischievously calls her), kept on coming back, their cards in the shoeboxes regularly updated.
Part generous grandmother, part fierce apologist for the Luanda regime, a political discussion with Miss Katia can be both enlightening and perplexing. When I visited her in late 1993, when Jonas Savimbi’s Unita had seized 70% of Angola, she argued the only solution was to kill Savimbi, but later passed on church reports on the countrywide 1992 massacres on mostly Unita people.
She only voted once, in 1992: “It was one of the greatest moments … people were so polite, standing for hours in the queues. And when reporters asked them who they were going to vote for, they all said: ‘the vote is secret’.” Today, although 90% of correspondence at the Angolan press centre is still addressed to her, Miss Katia lives in Cape Town where she takes care of her grandchildren.
Her apartment at 27 Rue de Soa Tome has been taken over by the Voice of America. It’s an ironic twist, as she always considered it an extension of the American intelligence services. But the rent allows her to live comfortably on her otherwise meagre, inflation-shrunk Angolan state pension, and allows for little luxuries like a satellite TV.
“I get the BBC, which I like, and sometimes even watch CNN, which I don’t like,” she said in her still Finnish-accented English. “And I see the people I used to know — that’s nice, you know, I still like to meet them on my TV screen.”