The long road back for one Angolan town

Portuguese coffee farmers hewed this town from the rainforest nearly a century ago, in the days when Angola was the gem of Portugal's colonial empire. By all accounts, it was a sleepy little place. Giant houses lined the wide, cobblestone main street and overlooked the lush, mist-covered valley below.

That was before the war. Twenty-seven years of fighting have scattered Quibaxe's residents and reduced the town to rubble.

The story of Quixabe (pronounced kee-BAHSH) is typical of Angola's civil war. Although it held little strategic importance, the town became a battleground, changing hands between government and National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) rebel forces more times than anyone here can remember.

Now, with a cease-fire reached in March, rebuilding it shows just how long the road back to normalcy is.

Father Domingos Salgueiro Mota, the pale, white-haired priest of Quibaxe's one remaining Catholic Church, is the village's living memory.

Mr. Mota came here as a young man in 1965, and stayed when other white Portuguese left at the country's independence in 1975. He stayed when UNITA took over in 1992; and when they fled in 1997, taking with them everything that could be moved. He stayed even when his parishioners began to abandon Quibaxe for larger, safer cities near the coast.

"These last four years were a disaster," says Father Mota sadly, sitting in the neat but faded sitting room of his rectory on a lime green chair that must have been the height of 1960s style. Behind him, two large bookshelves hold volumes of well-thumbed classics, the only link to the outside world this town has had since the war began again in earnest in 1997.

Isolated since that time, the people of Quibaxe survived on what they could grow and make. They lived almost exclusively on a diet of cassava – a root with little nutritional value that is pounded and turned into a sticky gruel – and the few fish they could catch in a nearby river.

Today, there is still no running water or electricity anywhere. The plumbing and clean toilets that were installed in the primary school by nongovernmental organizations five years ago were quickly destroyed. The provincial administrator, Antonio Domingos Joao, says UNITA specifically attacked anything rebuilt by the government or aid groups.

At the hospital – which, miraculously, is till standing – there are no mattresses, blankets, or medicines. UNITA stripped the hospital bare when they abandoned Quibaxe, taking everything but a surgical chair that was bolted to the floor. The handful of remaining staff – which includes no doctor or nurses – can do little for the ill but offer sympathy and occasionally some food.

A few lonely signs still hanging from battered and bullet-ridden buildings are reminders of better days. Once there were restaurants, bars, a pharmacy, and even a small movie theater. Mr. Joao looks at the signs and sees the future he would like to rebuild.

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