Historic City Series: Huambo

With its public parks, open-fronted villas and pavement cafés, Huambo has been said to feel more European than African. Add the Mediterranean climate and the tree-lined streets and you can see why the Portuguese called the city Nova Lisboa (New Lisbon) after their own capital.

Located in the country’s lush central highlands, among hundreds of thousands of hectares of rich agricultural land and connected to the coast by the Benguela railway, Huambo was once a wealthy and successful city and was even planned to replace Luanda as the country’s capital.

 

Huambo receives its name from Wambu, one of the 14 old Ovimbundu kingdoms of the central Angolan plateau. The Ovimbundus, an old tribe originally arrived from Eastern Africa, had founded their central kingdom of Bailundu early as the 15th century. Wambu was one of the smaller kingdoms and was hierarchically under the king of Bailundu and came of interest through the advent of the construction of the Benguela Railway by the Portuguese. Though the kings of Bailundu and Wambu (particularly Ekuikui II and Katiavala I) opposed the penetration of the railway by ambushing workers and settlers, they were eventually subdued by the Portuguese Army and Huambo was officially founded on 8 August 1912 by Portuguese General José Mendes Norton de Matos.

Huambo was found to be a strategic place for many reasons. A benign climate (greatly due to its high altitude, 1,700m) and the presence of abundant water resources in and around made of it an ideal spot to have a hub on the railway.  A rail system was devised by the British entrepreneur Sir Robert Williams as the easiest and cheapest way to link the rich copper mines of Katanga (Shaba) in Belgian Congo to the Angolan port of Lobito on the coast from which the mineral could be exported; the Lobito bay was admittedly the best natural seaport in the whole continent.

By the 1920s Huambo already was one of the main economic engines of Portuguese Angola. It had some important food processing plants, served as the main exporting point for the Province's considerable agricultural wealth and was also known by its numerous educational facilities, especially the Agricultural Research Institute (currently part of the Faculty of Agricultural Science).

Decades of war, however, stunted Huambo’s ambitions of greatness. The city was a major flashpoint between the ruling MPLA and the rebel group UNITA and it saw some of the worst fighting in the country. Its beautiful buildings were devastated, the countryside peppered with landmines, and hundreds of thousands of people were driven from their homes. 

In Huambo’s heyday during the 1960s, it was known asthe “granary” of Angola and a major exporter of products such as beans and maize. The legacy of war and landmines still looms large in the province, however, and the majority of farming is subsistence and small scale. Analysts predict that it will take time to relaunch Huambo as a major agriculture exporter, but in the meantime the city is marketing itself as an eco-city.  Home to the country’s Institute of Agricultural Research and Faculty of Agricultural Science, Huambo is the national leader in environmental matters.

It also has the Casa Ecologia, an environmental study and education venue, and the park in the city center with its Estufa Fria (greenhouse), which is to be redeveloped and expanded to become a base for researching and preserving indigenous plants.

In another reinforcement of its ecological importance, the province has been chosen by the government to
pilot a project aimed at reducing land degradation. The scheme, in partnership with the Global Environment Facility and with input from the United Nations, aims to reduce unsustainable agriculture, stop deforestation, prevent overgrazing and promote better environmental practices, particularly among subsistence farmers.  (Wikipedia,  Sonangol Universo Magazine)

Angolan Food: Kizaka Peanut Stew

Kizaka is a traditional Angolan dish widely consumed in urban and rural zones of Angola.  Kizaka, sometimes spelled as Quizaca, is basically made of cassava leaves stewed in finely ground peanuts (peanut butter). The full recipe of this popular dish of Angolan traditional cuisine is as follows:

Ingredients:

1 kg shredded cassava leaves, 250ml smooth peanut butter, salt and olive oil to taste. Optionally, you can add some hot chili, 250g of smoked catfish or dry prawns. Meanwhile, the fish have to be well cleaned and broken into pieces, removing as many bones as possible.

Preparation Method:

Add the leaves to a pan, cover with water and boil half-covered for about 60 minutes. When ready, drain. Mix the peanut butter with 250ml water then transfer to a pan with the greens and bring to a boil. Season to taste then add enough water to cover.  Bring to a boil, reduce and simmer and cook, partially covered, until the water has reduced and the dish is almost dry. It can be served over plain rice, with funje, plantains, or boiled cassava. (Recipe from AngolaMarket.com)

Tackling Angola's Teacher Shortage

(The Guardian, Oct 13) The dusty playground around Primary School 200 is filled with children. It could be breaktime, except that everyone is sitting in attentive groups. Some pupils are gathered beneath trees; others bake in the heat under a long, shiny sheet of corrugated metal that looks like a bike shelter.

In her job as a teacher-training co-ordinator in Huíla province, 43-year-old nun, Sister Cecília Kuyela witnesses school overcrowding every day. Primary School 200, which serves the poor area of João de Almeida, has 7,348 pupils for 138 teachers and eight permanent classrooms. At peak periods, classes are held in the street. But that is the least of Sister Cecília's worries.

Amid the hum of singing and recitation, 33-year-old teacher Rosa Florinda is drawing on a blackboard. "She is teaching her second-graders to tell the time,'' says Sister Cecília. "She has drawn clock faces on the board but that is not going to work. These children do not have watches. Neither, probably, do their parents. She needs to do things differently,'' she says.

Outdated teaching methods are only a fragment of Angola's education challenges. When the country's 27-year civil war ended nine years ago, its education system faced a standing start. Millions of people had moved into cities and provincial towns. The schools that were still functioning in 2002 had been built before independence in 1975 to cater essentially for the children of Portuguese settlers. The curriculum had scarcely evolved beyond some Soviet-influenced tinkering. Teacher training had stopped.

Angola signed contracts with China, trading oil for infrastructure projects such as roads, railways, hospitals and schools. Angolan cities became, and still are, building sites. But the realization loomed that without teachers, schools are just empty shells.

In his office in the provincial capital, Lubango, director of education Américo Chicote, 48, describes a "crisis'' that seems without end. "Our biggest challenge is to get children into school but then we have to find people to teach them. In Huíla province we have about 700,000 children of school age and 19,000 people teaching them. At the end of the war we had 200 schools. We now have 1,714 schools but we are still teaching 40% of our pupils under trees, and the school-age population is growing at a rate of 3% per year. Results are suffering. There are 171 days in the school year but there are not 171 days of good weather. We just have to do our best.''

According to Unicef, less than 10% of five-year-olds have access to preschool. Only 76% of children between six and 11 are in primary school. Overall, more than 1 million six- to 17-year-olds are out of school. In poor, rural areas only 38% of children are enrolled, according to Unicef. Chicote says the problem comes back to the lack of teachers. "The shortage is so great," he says, "that those who do come into the system choose where they will work. We do not have the resources to pay incentives to place them where they are most needed.''

During the war, people with only a grade 3 or 4 education became teachers. Since 2002, the pressure to meet MDG2 and to reduce Angola's 27% teenage illiteracy rate has seen the country recruit thousands of untrained school-leavers into teaching. Currently, anyone with a grade 10 education can sit the exam to become a teacher. Recruitment is on a massive scale aimed at people from all walks of life, including demobilised soldiers. Angola has 18 provinces. In Huíla Province alone, 1,900 people were hired to teach last year.

In a bid to tackle the country's education demands while at the same time attempting to accommodate the constant influx of children, Angola has turned to on-the-job training. Sister Cecília is among 350 trainers – all of them experienced teachers and some of them nuns - operating in seven provinces under a £4.4m scheme funded by the European Union and Unicef.

"Most teachers do not have up-to-date skills,'' says Sister Cecília, who has been teaching for 22 years. "They may have attended a few seminars but they do not know how to bring their subjects to life. My role is to travel to schools and show the teachers modern methods. They in turn must train at least five colleagues,'' she says.

The three-year-old EU-funded Unicef scheme covers two subjects – maths and Portuguese – and aims to bring 9,000 teachers up to grade 9 level. However, the project's organisers say they are aware that more than 12,000 Angolan teachers fall short of the minimum level.

Chicote says the programme had been a resounding success. "We estimate that around 40% of our teachers are not properly qualified. So far, training initiatives have reached about 3,000 teachers in the province. The scheme needs to be expanded to reach more teachers across more subjects,'' he says.

Breaktime erupts at Primary School 200. The dusty compound is suddenly transformed into the lively playground it was always intended to be. Sister Cecília has a quiet word with Rosa Florinda, the teacher who struggled to explain how to tell the time. "I am doing my best,'' says Florinda, who has a grade 10 education and eight years' experience as a teacher. She hopes in due course to be given on-the-job training. "I would love to learn some methods for animating my teaching. But to tell you the truth, in all this dust and heat, if I can just keep their attention for a whole lesson I feel I have done well.''  (Alex Duval Smith, guardian.co.uk)

Tips on How to be a Responsible Tourist (in West Africa ) by Sandy Asuming

Sandy Asuming, a student from the Gambia, shares with us her passion for the development of the responsible tourism concept in West Africa by explaining how the tourists themselves can help implement very simple changes in behaviour which can have major impacts on the sustainability of destinations and the local communities living there.

Responsible tourism is about tourists making environmentally friendly, sustainable, ethical and respectful choices when travelling and minimising the negative impact of tourism. Being responsible is something all tourists needs to take into consideration when making a decision on travelling to a destination.

Responsible travel can be considered as the most enjoyable way to travel because it brings you closer to local people and culture, it gives you the chance to experience the authenticity of the destination. It shares some of the benefits of tourism more widely with local communities, and helps minimised some of the negative impacts tourism might often have. No matter the type of travel you’re involved in, tourism brings both positive and negative impacts to a destination but responsible travel and tourism maximises the benefits of tourism and reduces some of the negatives.

The majority of us travel to experience new cultures, take on new challenges, experience new activities, or even to discover ourselves. Travelling gives us the opportunity to take a break from our typical daily routines and to reflect on the importance of life. But yet almost all travellers show an abject ignorance of anything other than a westernised world view. Being a responsible tourist can make a big difference by supporting the type of tourism that is not harmful to the environment and is supportive of local communities who lead the effort to gain or maintain sustainable livelihoods.

Contact between tourists and local people may result in mutual appreciation, therefore tourists need to be aware of local customs, traditions and to show respect to the host community in question. Residents will then be open minded and will be more willing to be educated about the outside world without leaving their homes, while their visitors significantly learn about a distinctive culture. Local communities are benefited through contribution by tourism to the improvement of the social infrastructure like schools, libraries, health care institutions, internet cafes, and so on. If local culture is the basis for attracting tourists to the region, it is important to preserve the local traditions and handicrafts.

If tourists’ attitudes change and they allow themselves to become responsible travellers, the host communities will benefit from this by protecting endangered wildlife, as the importance of preserving and conserving this resource will become more apparent. Many of West Africa’s countries depend on their wildlife as tourist attractions and if it’s not protected, there will be a decline of tourist numbers and as a result will have a bad effect on the economy. For example every year around 23000 tourists visit the Bijilo forest park in the Gambia and because the park is close to Banjul which is the capital city, it is easy for tourists to commute from the park to the town. However, the number of incoming visitors tends to be high which causes overcrowding. This causes damage to local wildlife especially the green monkeys which no longer find the need to look for food but instead sit beside nearby road sides and wait for tourists to feed them. In addition, tourists purchase bags of peanuts for the animals and litter the grounds with the empty bags. This is a danger for the monkeys who attempt to ingest them. Also, by over feeding these monkeys, they become over-friendly and become susceptible to theft by poachers.

Bearing this in mind, it is advisable for tourists to be educated on the effect of their ignorance. In doing so, tourists will become responsible for their actions while enjoying the experience.

At the end of the day by protecting and enhancing favourite destinations, future enjoyment for visitors and local resident will be sustained.

Another point is that tourists need to recognise that water and energy are precious resources which need to be used carefully. It’s important to buy from the local stores, use local taxis, local tour guides etc. All these little transactions help the local community. In the Gambia, for example, there is an excellent selection of good quality restaurants, therefore by eating in local restaurants you are ensuring that your visit benefits the wider community.

Applying the WCED’s definition of sustainability¹ to tourism, as coined in Bruntland’ Commission, the reason for responsible travel to be practised is “to meet the needs and aspirations of the present without compromising the ability to meet the need and aspiration of future generations.” The core issue is conserving resources. There is a need to balance social, economic and environmental impacts for both tourists and host communities.

To learn more about projects that work towards implementing responsible tourism principles in the Gambia, you can view out selection here.

You can also learn more about travelling in and around West Africa by joining our growing community of 1000+ people passionate about West Africa and its beautiful local heritage.

¹ World Commission on Environment and Development (1987). Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Angola's Diverse Vegetation

It has been said that Angola has the most diverse vegetation of any country in Africa.  The country has vegetation commonplace to highlands, lowlands, desert, savannah and rainforest. 

Rainforest
The Maiombe forest,  which spreads from the DRC through Cabinda, Congo and Gabon, contains rare tropical woods such as blackwood, ebony and sandalwood. There are other areas of tropical forest in the northern third of the country. 

Afromontane forest
A particular type of forest that occurs only above 2000m in isolated spots. The dominant tree here is the yellowwood. 

Miombo woodlands 

Covers central Angola and contains tropical woods like Angolan mahogany which makes excellent timber.

Mopane woodlands
A dry area of woodlands and savannah containing mopane, a single-stemmed tree with distinctive, butterfly-shaped leaves. 

Coastal plain
The lowest-lying part of Angola. Along the coast you can often see the famous baobab tree.

Desert
The land of the Welwitschia Mirabilis, an astonishing desert plant that resembles a giant octopus. It produces only two leaves, spans six to nine fee and can live as long as 2,000 years.  The plant is unique to this province and neighboring Namibia.  (From: Sonangol Universo Magazine)