Mercedes Sayagues
Unita’s artillery rumbled 5km away. Malanje was surrounded. Panic ensued. The airport was swept by people desperate to get on a relief plane bound for Luanda.
The Antonov had little safe time for take- off. Manuel’s mother lifted him over her head. A hand pulled him up on board. While his mother scrambled for Manuel’s sister, the door closed. That was the last time Manuel Domingos saw his family.
The year was 1994. The Domingos lived just outside Malanje. When shelling began, they fled to the derelict railway station in town. One day, the word spread that planes were ferrying people to Luanda. Terrified crowds thronged the airport.
An hour later, Manuel disembarked in Angola’s filthy capital. The plane taxied to a hangar. Everybody got out and walked away. So did Manuel. He went downhill towards the glittering bay. For the first time he saw the sea.
“I walked. I looked at the tall buildings. I missed my mother and father, and I cried softly to myself,” recalls Manuel. He was seven years old.
It was the cars that grabbed my attention as I climbed the stairs to a newsroom in the Luandan suburb of Alvalade. Four cars in the backyard of a high-rise, one block down from the sleek corporate headquarters of oil giant Elf Aquitaine. They were covered with straw, cardboard and rags, made into homes by Manuel and a dozen young friends.
This is Luanda, 1999. The city is swollen with a second wave of people displaced by recent fighting. Just as in 1993/1994, when these children arrived. At night, an army of homeless people invades doorsteps and shopping arcades. Thousands are children.
The kids show me their home. Inside, the seats have been removed to make room for two or three children to sleep. In spite of the filth outside, the interior is quite clean, decorated with magazine pictures of beautiful women, lots of Naomi Campbell and Princess Diana, and expensive cars. Worn blankets, rags and cardboard, that’s all. Two older kids sleep nearby in a tent fashioned out of an olive green parachute.
They cook over an open fire in one corner and relieve themselves in another. When it rains, neighbours give them plastic bags, old blankets and clothes. They take turns washing cars for $1, helping customers carry their shopping from the Martal supermarket across the street or carrying the rubbish from their apartments at 50 cents a trip.
The pattern of their short lives is similar: war, flight, abuse and survival. “Bullets and landmines killed my family,” says Claudio. During a lull in the fight for N’dalatando in 1993, he caught a lift in a Red Cross car. Brothers Jos and Miguel escaped on a cargo plane from Uige, possibly in 1994. Simeao Silva lost contact with his family while fleeing a Unita attack on Uige in 1994.
Paulino Dias’s mother sent him to warn his cousins of an attack on Malange. Shelling began before he could go home, so he and an older cousin joined a convoy of cars fleeing the city. The cousin died of malaria in Luanda.
Somehow, the children survived, begging, stealing and doing odd jobs. A few spent time at a shelter and returned to the streets. There is a sweetness in them, a longing for affection – one clings to an armless doll, another to a puppy – yet violent reactions are just below the surface. Fights erupt over trifles.
“Most of the time I don’t think about my family very much, but sometimes, if I hear a music I knew then, I start crying. Nobody controls me here. I would like to study. To be a locksmith,” says 13-year-old Paulino.
Orlando, also 13, fans the fire for a meal of beans and rice. He likes to cook. Orlando was born in the village of Cambuluca, in Bie province, in Angola’s central highlands. In 1992, the family fled to Huambo province. Orlando was sent to stay with an uncle in Luanda.
The uncle drank and abused him. Orlando hit the streets. A priest placed him in a home for street kids on the Ilha. He stayed 10 months, until older kids dripped melted plastic on him while he slept. Orlando hit the streets again.
For a year he slept in a hole dug on the beach at the Ilha. During the day, he begged from expats and shared meals with fishermen. He befriended the kids in Alvalade and joined them last September. Orlando would like to learn to read and write.
None of the kids has heard of the Red Cross and Save The Children family reunification programme. I give them the address. They chatter about it.
Orlando remains quiet, withdrawn. I ask him if he would like to return to Cambuluca. He shakes his head. “I am not sure I can remember where my home was. The house, the river, they are fading,” he whispers.
I tell him of family reunions of child soldiers I witnessed in Mozambique. How a boy arrived as a shy stranger, and a villager cried out his name, and the family members who clasped him to them.
“I can’t promise that your mother is alive or that she is still in the village,” I say. “But I can promise that, if she sees you, she will recognise you. Or somebody in the village will.”
He looks at me diffidently. One part of him wants to believe me; another says, “What the hell, why dream?” He sketches a brave little smile. I think he is trying to make me happy; if I tell him a fairy tale, he will say, “Yes, fairies exist.”
Three blocks down lives another group of kids. No love is lost between the two. They are enemies, battling for turf and jobs. This group sleeps in the sewers, which they enter through a manhole and where they keep blankets, rags and cardboard. In the rainy season, they have had to flee rising water. Their stories are similar to the car kids.
These are resourceful children. They survived, alone, in Africa’s most violent and rundown city. They found a home, work and friends. This is no mean achievement.
But how many will live to see 21? Aids will kill many; also crime. The police will kill a few others. Police killings of street children in Brazil are well known. Luanda does not lag far behind in police brutality.
“Is it not strange that we count and proclaim only military casualties? These homeless children should be listed as wounded; and wounded forever,” wrote Martha Gellhorn of Vietnamese orphans.
Can the wound heal? What happens to you when you grow up without a nightly kiss, with no one to tuck you into bed? What kind of adults will these children be? Will they be able to fall in love, have a family, hold a job?
A psychologist who has worked with older children in war says a lot depends on the life you had before war destroyed it.
But what memories survive when you are six? What happens if your warm home and your loving family fade away and you are left with the tall buildings, the filth and the squalor, the violence of Luanda’s mean streets?