I was being as unobtrusive as the flies until I drew my camera. People either got disgruntled and ignored me with their peripheral vision, or pretended not to see me, or grinned as I grimaced at the inevitable clumsiness of taking people's pictures. Two waist-high kids came over to look at the bicycle. One spoke French for both of them, and told me about his father's bike that had a "pa-pa-put" motor on it so he never had to pedal except to get started. He asked me about the name engraved on the frame of the bike, and laughed when I said the American r's in "Sears, Roebuck."

Matadi, Zaire Republic--It was a six-hour trip up the Congo River. The first half was delta swamp with dense jungle and occasional mudflats where huge flocks of birds congregated. The second half was hills, cliifs, ravines, small huts wherever there was greenery, and lone fishermen paddling along the backwaters.

Matadi is Zaire's outlet to the ocean, paved and built up by the Belgians before they left in the violent early 1960's. There haven't been any new buildings for a long time, and marks of civilization, like the concrete slabs covering the sewer ditches, are falling apart. Like center cities everywhere, Matadi is giving way to the suburbs: the villages which crowd the circle of hills around the city now use shale-and-cement and concrete blocks for building materials instead of woven cane and occasional tin-and-plywood.

The concrete walls are usually covered with Zaire's new flag, Black-Hand-Holding-Golden-Torch-in-a-Green-Circle, and pictures of Zaire's president Mobutu Sete Seko. Mobutu has changed the county's name from the Congo to Zaire, instituted the new flag, and changed his own image in an effort to foster nationalism among his people. Mobutu's face appears on every Zaire stamp, and on all currency except for the very smallest coin. On coins minted in 1967, right after he came to power, he's depcited in an army uniform with rows of medals on his chest and a mean look on his face under his black glasses. Coins from 1969 show him in a business suit. In 1972 an African fur hat is added to the suit. The latest 1974 coins have him wearing a daishiki and fur hat--the only still recognizable feature is the black glasses, as thick as ever.

Luanda Angois--One week before the ship anchored in Luanda harbor, the city had convulsed in its second summer riot which left over a hundred people dead. From the ship you could see the black smudge in Luanda's tin-and-plywood suburban shack jungle that used to be four blocks of homes. Everywhere you went in Luanda there were jeeps, carrying soldiers, carrying guns. Portugal had been fighting a guerilla war since 1961 in Angola, a Portuguese colony since the 1500's. That war had one good result: the young Portuguese soldiers sent to Angola came back disgusted at the mud and sand and at Portugal's semi-feudal dictatorship which was wasting them there in a futile holding action. They overthrew that government in 1974. But although the new government was willing and even anxious to give Angola up, the three factions of the Angolan guerilla movement still hadn't formed a coalition which could take the government of Angola from Portugal.

The Portuguese Angolans were just as fragmented: many were staying because they had no place to go and owned only their homes; others were panic-stricken at the prospect of independence and left. Two passenger ships which called at Luanda almost empty August 24 and September 2 each left carrying 800 passengers over capacity. During those ten days, trucks and vans crammed with luggage and household goods formed a line which snaked over a mile back into the city from the docks.

The black market reflected this mass exodus. Since the Angolan escudo is worth nothing outside Angola (one of Portugal's many exploitations), foreign currency was in great demand by those trying to leave and by the black marketeers who got to the foreigner first. On the day after we arrived, August 24 the highest dollar exchange was 32 escudos--the official rate is 25 to the dollar. But on September 16, the day before we left, the white counter-coup had failed to prevent the independence of Portugal's colony on the east coast of Africa, Mozambique, and one dollar was worth 50 or more black market escudos.

The reason the ship stayed in Luanda so long was a dockworkers' strike and slowdown, a final revolt against the coerced labor Angola has exploited for hundreds of years. When slavery was finally abolsished in the 1870's, it was replaced with a labor code which allowed the government to force anyone who did not have a steady job--always Africans--to sign a six-month contract with employers who had asked the government for workers. Village life was destroyed since men weren't there for six months out of the year and were often shipped to other parts of Angola. In response to the world's disapproval over the past two decades, the Portuguese revised their "native policy." But the attitude remains, as do the long hours and low pay. So the dockworkers slowed down and sat down.

Like every other country I saw in Africa, the problems of underdevelopment are rampant in Angola. There is hardly any industry and most manufactured goods are imported; Luanda for instance, a city of a half-million, has no bottling or canning facility. There is one doctor for every 10,000 people in Angola; there are 3000 college students in a population of five and a half million; the per-capita income is less than $500 a year.

And the multinational corporations are moving in, too. Oil-rich Cabinda, Angola's enclave north of the Congo River, is controlled by Cabinda Gulf Oil Company, which is rumored to be financing a separatist guerilla movement there. American Oil Company has just opened a field south of Luanda with cooperation from Shell. On the rooftop patio of a downtown Luanda hotel, I met an American tractor demonstrator and salesman from the Ford Motor Company whose job was to town-hop in the interior and set up Ford's market. He was very proud of Luanda's Ford dealership, Robert Hudson Ford, and their $20 million parts warehouse. His impression of the countryside was that "parts of it are very scenic, but most only reminds you that there are tons of bauxite and iron ore under it."

There is a distinct possibility that under the present unsettled conditions, the Angolan government may be unable to exercise control over multinational operations as they attempt to extract the oil, bauxite and iron ore. That is a worry common to many African governments because of their chronic instability, limited authority, and minimal revenues.

The reason I was on the rooftop was the sunset. Because of Luanda's location on a point of land, with an island sheltering the bay, you see sunrises over the bay and sunsets over the ocean. And they're always beautiful. At sunrise on the ship's last morning in Luanda, the water in the bay shimmered like smooth aluminum foil watercolored pink and orange. But the source of the shimmer was soon painfully evident: an oil film, produced by the anchored ships, spread over the entire bay.

And development dawns over Angola. Oil slicks are only the precursors of ice-skating.