Another Day of Life Read Online Free PDF

noise, communicating to the enemy how much strength is approaching. This is a form of warning, a way of evoking a fear in the opponent that will be greater than ours. And there is a sort of rationale to it. Because the other side is also unfamiliar with war, unfamiliar with gunfire; surprised by volley, they withdraw and flee.
    The skirmishes in the first days of the war were limited to just such actions of firepower. They rarely came to direct combat. Once, says Ndozi, I lived through such an adventure: My people shot off all their ammunition at the beginning and later they couldn’t attack because there was nothing to attack with. I sent scouts into the town that we were supposed to attack. They returned and said that there wasn’t a soul there, the enemy had fled. When we walked into our objective, nobody in my unit had a single cartridge in his clip.
    We didn’t want this war, Ndozi insists. But Holden Roberto struck from the north and Jonas Savimbi from the south. This country has been at war for five hundred years, ever since the Portuguese came. They needed slaves for trade, for export to Brazil and the Caribbean and across the ocean generally. Of all Africa, Angola supplied the greatest number of slaves to those countries. That’s why they call our country the Black Mother of the New World. Half the Brazilian, Cuban, and Dominican peasants are descended from Angolans. This was once a populous, settled country and then it was emptied, as if there’d been a plague. Angola is empty to this day. Hundreds of kilometers and not a single person, like in the Sahara. The slave wars went on for three hundred years or more. It was good business for our chiefs. The strong tribes attacked the weak, took prisoners, and put them on the market. Sometimes they had to do it, to pay the Portuguese taxes. The price of a slave was fixed according to the quality of his teeth. People pulled out their teeth or ground them away with stones in order to have a lower market value. So much suffering to be free. From generation to generation, tribes lived in fear of each other, they lived in hatred. The military campaigns took place in the dry season, because it was easier to move then. When the rains ended, everyone knew that the times of misfortune and of hunting for people had begun. In the rainy season, when the country was drowning in water and mud, hostilities stopped. But the chiefs were thinking up new campaigns, marshaling new forces. This is remembered by everyone even today because, in our thinking, the past takes up more space than the future.
    I began fighting ten years ago, says Ndozi, in Comandante Batalho’s unit. That was eastern Angola. We had to learn the languages of the local tribes and act in accordance with their customs. This was a condition of survival—otherwise, they would have treated us as foreigners trespassing on their land. And yet, we were all Angolans. But they don’t know that this country is called Angola. For them, the land ends at the last village where the people speak a language they understand. That’s the border of their world. But, we asked, what lies beyond that border? Beyond that border lies another planet inhabited by the Nganguela, which means nonhumans. You have to keep an eye on those Nganguelas, because there are a lot of them and they use an incomprehensible language that conceals their evil designs.
    All our enemies feed on the backwardness of the people, he says, and pay handsomely to keep the tribal wars going without end. They bought Holden Roberto so he’d create the FNLA from the Bakonga. They bought Savimbi to create UNITA from the Ovimbundi. We have a hundred tribes and must build one nation out of them. How long will it take? Nobody knows. We have to wean the people from hatred. We have to introduce the custom of shaking hands.
    This is an unlucky country, he continues, just as there are unlucky people whose lives just don’t want to work out. The Portuguese were constantly