Cláudio Silva reflects on moving from Angola to the United States as a child, founding Angola’s largest food and travel platform, and what the country’s current flourishing means not just for Angolans but for the world.
I was born in Luanda, Angola. My father moved myself and my siblings to the Washington DC suburbs when I was five years old for political reasons, and I immediately understood that this place is not like the other place. There’s a huge difference in development, in wealth, in the way people live—I’ve never forgotten that feeling.
There was also profound ignorance about where I’m from. My earliest memories in life are from Angola, where I was surrounded by extended family. Then I moved to this other country that was extremely cold, where everything felt far apart. Children didn’t play in the streets, there was no beach, and I couldn’t speak the language.
I attended first grade in Angola, where I learned cursive, multiplication, and division. When I came to the United States, I was surprised that kids hadn’t yet learned any of that. Angola has a Soviet background, and education is a really big deal. By age seven, I knew what the map of the world looked like. I knew that there were seven continents and there’s this place called Europe, this place called the United States. Meanwhile, my classmates in the States had no idea. I’d say, “I’m from Angola,” and they’d be like, “Mongolia?”
To this day, I have this mild obsession that people should know where I’m from. It’s fueled everything I do in life. My first real love was music, so when I got to Boston University, I started a music blog about music in Portuguese: music from Cape Verde, Portugal. I wrote about Bossa Nova in Brazil, Kizomba and Kuduro from Angola. Something went off in my mind at that time: if people have no idea about music in Portuguese, and have no access to it, then maybe I should give them access myself.
After music, it was food. When I was in sixth grade, I lived in Portugal with my mother for a year. She bought me my first cookbook, and we would cook together in her kitchen. Over the years I became more and more obsessed with cooking. My dad used to take me to restaurants from a really young age—to this day, he teases me, saying “you’re such a posh guy, always wanting to go to restaurants.”
In 2013, I finally decided to move back to Angola. Every visit had such a profound impact on me — during my two-month vacations, I always wanted to stay longer. The moment the plane lands in Luanda, with no walkway to the terminal, the experience is always the same: the door opens, hot air hits your face, you descend the stairs, and there’s that unmistakable feeling of home. I was tired of not having that regularly, and I was tired of not having my family around me.
But even after moving back, I still felt the urge to explain where I’m from, to showcase my own city. To be a host. To make people aware of what kinds of food you can eat in Luanda, and where you should go out. At the time, Luanda was a very weird place. It was in the midst of an economic boom and had a lot of expats: French, Portuguese, Brazilians, Chinese, Lebanese, and more. A lot of these expats were involved in the oil industry, and the oil industry makes everything more expensive: the price of housing, the price of food, the prices that you pay in restaurants.
At the time, Luanda was known as the most expensive city in the world, and Westerners were fascinated by this fact. How could a city in Africa be the most expensive city in the world? Countless articles explored this phenomenon—I admit I wrote a couple myself. But I’ve always wanted to make people understand that it was the most expensive for expats. When I returned to Luanda, I realized there wasn’t a single online resource written in Portuguese for Angolans about where to dine. Everything was written in English for expats, serving an incredibly narrow audience.
I decided that I wanted to take on the challenge: to write about my own country for Angolans. Of course what I’d write would also serve anyone else living in Angola, including expats, but my focus would be on Angolans. I’m from a generation where many people are returning home to live and start their own businesses. I’m part of a network of creatives, restaurateurs, artists, and even some politicians, who want to create change. That’s why I started my company, Luanda Nightlife, in 2013. I now call it LNL because it’s grown beyond just nightlife and just Luanda—it covers the entire country, focusing primarily on food and travel throughout Angola.
A few years after founding LNL I started writing articles for Roads & Kingdoms. Eventually the League of Travelers launched, and Nathan [Thornburgh, co-founder of Roads & Kingdoms] and I had a conversation, and he was like, “We’re trying to get out to Angola. Do you think it’s ready?” I was like, “Fuck no! This place is not ready!”
And now finally, it’s ready.
But first, some additional context. Angola gained independence in 1975, before which it was a Portuguese colony. I’m 36, born in 1988. My parents, born in the 1950s, literally lived under colonial rule. Though technically Portuguese citizens, they were subjugated in their own land.
My grandparents on both my mother’s side and my father’s side were born in this colony that was very, very different from what we have today. And their life was completely different from what my parents’ life was like. My grandmother was illiterate, and she married a literate man, my granddad, who became a doctor under colonialism. He was one of the first Black people to own a car. This is 1960-something, this is not far away.
And the same thing can be said with slavery, because Angola—obviously it wasn’t Angola at the time, but the Kongo Kingdom and Ndongo Kingdom of my ancestors were two of the main purveyors of slaves to the western world. We’re talking about millions of people that were forcibly taken from Angola to the Americas, especially Brazil and the Caribbean.
The slave trade was abolished in 1869. It sounds like it’s a long time ago, but if you walk through Luanda, there are places you can go to that have the infrastructure to hold human beings. There’s an old police station that still has the metal shackles that held people’s arms and necks in bondage. It reminds you that this is not long ago, and I think that’s such a powerful thing for people to understand.
Because without slavery, you don’t have cash crops like sugar. Without sugar, you don’t have the British Empire becoming so incredibly rich enough to start the industrial evolution. Without the industrial evolution, you don’t have capitalism. So this painful history is also a vital cog in the machine that governs our lives and our worlds today.
Most of my life I have dealt with this profound ignorance of one of the places in the world that is most impactful for the development of the current world.
It’s because we’re a new country and because we were under colonialism and because we had a long civil war up until 2002 that was fueled by countries like Russia and the United States, that Angola looks like what it does today. It is a developing country, a country of contrasts. You have very rich people, and you have abject poverty in the same street. When you walk down the street in Luanda you’ll see the latest model of a Porsche Cayenne, but then you’ll see somebody whose leg has been blown off in a mine begging at your car.
This is the world outside of the Western countries. This is also a result of the industrialization of Western countries. Capitalism and wealth don’t happen in a vacuum. There are people who have to be exploited—or had to be exploited in the past—and they exist, and they have a voice. And part of this Angola trip is giving people this voice and saying, “look, we’re doing this.” It’s important that people have an idea of where this is and on whose back the modern world was built.
But this is not a pity party. It’s like, look at us now. Africans are very proud. We know that we have been pawns in world conflicts, that we have not always had a voice. We feel these years of slavery, the years of colonialism, which are for us very recent, or the civil war, which happened in part because America was so against the spread of communism that they were willing to do anything in any country to crush those movements.
During Angola’s post-war economic boom, Luanda’s restaurants prided themselves on importing almost everything they served. Plating fish flown in from Lisbon on the daily TAP flights was all the rage. Now, the inverse is true. Tasting menus made with local ingredients are surging throughout the city. Local chefs, many of them trained abroad in places like France and South Africa, have a newfound respect for local, indigenous ingredients.
Some, like Helt Araújo, are going even a step further: he is running a foundation to find out what the hell we ate before the Portuguese got here. He’s going to be our culinary guide on the trip this June and will lead introduce us to some of the ingredients he has unearthed.
Angolans aren’t the only ones recognizing the country’s gastronomic potential. Two Dutch entrepreneurs are leading a new initiative—the Angola Food Movement—that builds a dynamic network connecting public and private stakeholders, chefs, farmers, and entrepreneurs to create new opportunities in Angola’s food system.
Second-generation Swiss immigrants to Angola are producing local dairy and charcuterie products in their quasi-urban farm in the southern city of Lubango; we’ll be eating locally-made brie cheese during our trip. And on the arid southern coast of Moçamedes, Angolans are producing the country’s very first commercial wine, a blend of Portuguese grape varieties invigorated by Namibe’s particular terroir.
Most of my life I have dealt with this profound ignorance of one of the places in the world that is most impactful for the development of the current world, the current way of life. And that stops with trips like this. It’s a drop in the ocean, but it gets people speaking about these countries. It gets people going to these countries.
And I think that’s one of the most powerful things we can do. We are going to eat amazing food and meet fascinating people and have a tremendously good time. But this trip is more than that. Shining a light on Angola at this turning point in our history is incredibly important for me personally. It’s important for the region, and it’s important for the world.
All images by Clay Williams. For more information on our June journey, visit our League of Travelers trip page: Eternal Angola