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Eating My Words
Of Pão and Piri-Piri Sardines: Angola Road Food
I made a wrong turn in Europe in my youth and, after a week or so at sea, I landed in Angola at Luanda on the south west coast of Africa. I was headed for Ghana and Nigeria, which was way north of Angola, to be sure, but seemed connected up by roads well enough. At least that's how it looked on a big, folded Michelin map of West Africa. How long could it take hitch hiking north? A couple of weeks? A month? Earlier in the year I had hitch hiked from India to Europe. It seemed possible, and it was bound to be warmer. Winter was descending on Europe and even Lisbon, from where the cheapest boats sailed south, hunched its shoulders against the wind.
It didn't occur to me that the army troops on the ship were headed to Angola for a reason. The officers were quartered in second and first class, the troops in third. I traveled on a third class ticket. The common rooms in third class were bleak and smoky and smelled of spilled beer, stale vomit, and unwashed clothes and bodies. There was nothing to sit on but benches, and these occupied by entire families of woebegone peasants from grandmothers wrapped in black to grandbabies starting to swelter in bright wool sweaters, all headed to new lives in the colony. Not that they wanted to go, mind you. These were people who had been forced off their land, people being shown the door, people subject to a government policy that would put them in a war zone to somehow make it just that the colonizers remain in power after hundreds of years. Did I mention there was a war going on in Angola? It was news to me. This was 1971. Portugal wouldn't last another five years. I didn't know any of this on the boat, only after I arrived. A war like the one raging in Viet Nam, and I had never heard of it; a war that had been going on for God knows how long, and I had no idea, no clue, had no idea Cuban soldiers were fighting on the other side.
There were prostitutes in third class, guests of the government. They had been picked up in Portuguese cities and they were being shipped out. Some of the young officers came down from second class to pay their respects and spend their money. The troops in third class had no money to spend on pleasure.
I first encountered pão, a small, round, tough, crusty bread in Lisbon. It was served with every meal. With jam, butter, and giant cups of café au lait in the morning. With caldo verde, the ubiquitous green soup, and grilled fish at lunch. With whatever I could find for dinner that fit my vegetarian definition of myself back then. It was served aboard ship, too, in the giant dining room where we all sat in the same seats at the same tables for the entire voyage. Once the chef got it clear that I was a vegetarian who would eat fish but not meat, I was shown the full range of frozen and canned vegetables at his disposal. Pale white florettes of cauliflower that gave up any hint of shape at the merest prodding with a fork tine. Peas mixed with tiny cubes of carrot. Caldo verde was served at lunch, and I overlooked the nature of the broth. And, of course, pão was served with every meal.
Jean Anderson in The Food of Portugal calls pão the frugal, favorite bread of every province of Portugal. "It contains four ingredients only," Anderson writes, "and owes its chewiness to hard-wheat flour, vigorous kneading, and brick oven baking at intense heat amid swirls of steam."
I mention pão, because once I got out on the road in Angola there was no food to speak of. No truck stops serving mint tea and boiled eggs, no rice with mystery meats or soupy mystery grains, pulses, lentils, or beans. There were crude shops that sold pão, soft drinks, beer, and tinned goods. Sardines, for example. I quickly settled on piri-piri sardines, a product of such a ferociously spicy nature that I never once had intestinal troubles. And that's what I remember most of Angola. Pão and piri-piri sardines.
That and the fact that I couldn't leave the country in any direction but south, to South West Africa and eventually South Africa. I tried otherwise, hitching south through half the country to Huambo to catch the Buenguela rail road east to Luan on the frontier with Zaire. A small, pyramid-shaped armored car preceded the train's engine as a hedge against land mines. Troops and officers filled second and first class. I had purchased a third class ticket, an open car with a wooden bench. But it somehow so offended the conductor that I would sit back there with the native population, he moved me up to second class. I bought citrus fruit and giant avocados through the windows of the train when it stopped. And I made it into Zaire, to Dilolo, albeit only for a couple of hours in an afternoon.
The Angolan police took me to the bridge on the frontier in a jeep with an open box of hand grenades rattling about on the floorboards. I was crazy, they told me. I would be back, they told me. And they were right. I was hoping to get a transit visa to take the train from Dilolo across a corner of Zaire to Zambia where I could link up with the Great North Road and get the hell off the entire subcontinent. A Zairian policeman picked me up and drove me to the station where I was questioned in mellifluous French by a tall, thin man wearing a spotless, crisp tropical suit and a white shirt and tie that set off the most exquisitely deep black skin I have ever encountered. He made several phone calls and sent me packing back to Angola. Those few hours in Zaire were the only ones I ever felt as though I was in Africa. By the time I reached Kenya, months later, I didn't care.
I was picked up by truck drivers with sten guns on the front seat. I was picked up by a farmer and rode through the night with his African workers in the back of an open Toyota Land Cruiser until he had to turn off the highway. I was picked up in the middle of nowhere by a car filled with Gypsies, and when they turned down a dirt track, they dropped me off in the middle of nowhere. One guy in the front seat did his best to bridge the cultural gap. He had long, oily black hair and all of his front teeth were outlined in gold. He wore a bright blue polyester shirt with big white polka dots and a giant collar. "Hey, " he would say, turning around and fixing me with bright, wild eyes, "Elvis, eh?" Or, "Hey, Bobby Dylan, eh?" Or, "Hey, Tom Jones, eh? This man too much nice. Tom Jones." At which point he launched himself into a rendition of "Delilah", pounding the rhythm on the dashboard. We shared my pão and piri-piri sardines, and drank warm beer, and by the time the Gypsies dropped me off the man in the front seat was saying, "Hollyvood," while mimicking with his index fingers a quickdraw cowboy pulling out his gun. "Hollyvood."
I turned 21 in Mozambique in a seaport on the Indian Ocean then called Beira and now called Sofala. There was a war going on there as well. I found fresh apples imported from New Zealand, the first Granny Smith apples I had ever encountered. And there was white cheddar from New Zealand, too. Waiting for a bus to the Zambian frontier, I ate my pão and I ate my piri-piri sardines, and then I let crisp apples and hard, sharp cheese speed me home behind closed eyes.
Schuyler Ingle ...
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