Adventures in Angola
Recently I have been digitizing 35mm slides from my field work in Portuguese Angola in 1958-59. I ran across a slide that I thought might interest plant lovers at Cascade Manor.
The first picture is of Welwitschia mirabilis. It is the single existing species in a single family of the five families of cone-bearing plants (gymnosperms). Its closest relatives are fossilized species from the Lower Cretaceous of northeast Brazil. The breakup of Gondwanaland, 160 million years ago, isolated Welwitschia from its South American relatives. Leathery leaves up to 4 or 5 feet long, grow continuously from a trunk at ground level. Some individual plants may be as old as a couple of thousand years. Welwitschias are found only in the Namib Desert of coastal Angola and Namibia. This desert is so dry that most of the moisture that supports the Welwitschia comes from fog created by the temperature inversions caused by the off-shore Benguela ocean current. (See dissipating fog clouds in picture 2.) The discoverer of the plant, Friedrich Welwitsch, a nineteenth century Austrian plant explorer, fell to his knees in absolute awe, writing that he “could do nothing but kneel down […] and gaze at it, half in fear lest a touch should prove it a figment of the imagination.” I did not fall to my knees; but I did drive a couple of days to get to the Namib Desert to see this wonder of the plant world. In mid-nineteenth century Angola, Freidrich Welwitsch also discovered the only cactus species that occurs naturally outside the New World.
To put my travels in Angola in perspective, my new bride and I landed at Luanda on the day after Christmas, 1958, and drove in a decrepit Jeep to the southwestern part of the country, where my field research was centered. (Shown in orange on Map 1.) We camped out most of several months, returning to what is now called Lubango, primarily to enjoy the luxury of a bed, soak in a bathtub, wash our clothes, and get meals served to us. In 1959, with the exception of within five small cities, only 16 miles of paved road existed in all of Angola, which is the size of Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, and a bit of Idaho combined. (See Map2.)
Map 1
Map 2 
I include pictures of the cities of Luanda and Lubango (underlined in red on Map 1) in 1958 and today. Luanda’s population has grown from 200,000 to 8,600,000. Lubango’s population has grown from 10,000 to 600,000. Oil and diamonds support this growth.
Luanda, Angola, The Capital City 1958
2020 
You can see the orange tiled roofs of the government buildings in both pictures
Aerial views of Sa da Bandeira (now, Lubango) 1958
Lubango 2006 [Now Angola’s second largest city] 
Ah! The adventures one takes when one is only 26!