By Kalaf Epalanga

‘What is the purpose of your visit?’

‘Vacation.’

‘Where are you going to be staying?’

‘At my father’s house.’

‘How much money have you brought with you?’

‘It’s enough for the cab, I think. Around fifty thousand escudos.’

It was 1995 and I’d just arrived in Lisbon. The border officer stopped leafing through the pages of my passport and looked up, fixing his eyes on mine. I gave him a smile. He looked back down at my visa, set my passport to one side and asked me, while he had a word with the inspector, to wait for him next to a wall, where there were already some other passengers from my flight, along with two Eastern European women and a Brazilian lad, maybe in his twenties. At that moment it didn’t occur to me that I was running any risk of being denied entry and sent back to Luanda. I didn’t even think that, in the eyes of those border police, a seventeen-year-old guy who’d just landed in Lisbon with a tourist visa almost certainly would not be going back to his country – he’d have to be crazy. News of the civil war in Angola must have been making headlines in all the papers. I was not a refugee, I had not come to claim political asylum, but right there in my tourist visa, those must have been the words that shouted the loudest. That was the moment I realised that there’s nothing scarier than an African crossing European borders. ‘Hide your money, hide your daughters, the blacks are invading our backyard!’ When they see us approaching the window, I can hear their thoughts as we hand the border police our third-world passports. Those were my first hours in Portugal. I lost count of how long I waited before I was taken to a windowless room where I found a police officer behind a desk, leafing through the empty pages of my passport with the impatience of someone who’d seen hundreds that morning alone. When he finally turned his eyes on me, I was already sitting down. He repeated the same questions the border officer had put to me. He asked my father’s profession.

‘Doctor.’

‘Is he coming to meet you?’

I nodded and he, looking at the page with my tourist visa, made a sound, a long hmmmm, as if he already knew what my answers to his next questions were going to be. That sound was a way for him to find his balance, perhaps courage, to make me one more number in the growing stats of African immigrants who were arriving every day at the borders of the European Union. If they had some way of locking the borders, they’d do it, I have no doubt. From my perspective, at that moment, they could go ahead and lock them. I would have given anything not to have had to leave Angola. It would even have been a relief to get sent back. I knew I wasn’t welcome. It would have been a relief for everyone, even my father. I’m sure he would have preferred me not to be in Portugal. We barely knew each other. Ever since he left Benguela for Coimbra, the news I received from him was in letters and occasional phone calls. The letters were always addressed to my mother, who, after reading in silence through the things that related only to the two of them, would then read the few paragraphs addressed to me. I don’t remember when I received or sent the last letter; I must have lost interest, and he stopped bothering.

The inspector picked up one of the stamps, paused for a second and then hammered the page. I was free to enter Europe.

I walked briskly through the Arrivals terminal and spotted my father near the automatic glass doors, where I could see the ‘Exit’ sign. I was taking broad strides but it felt as though I were running, not into my father’s arms, but out of that place. I had just arrived in Europe and already all I wanted was to run away.

But I kept on going towards my father, towards the faint picture I retained of him. I had always wondered if I’d know how to react at that reunion. I even wondered, during the journey, if we would recognise each other. Maybe it would be easier for him to recognise the features of mine that were, or had once been, his own. I would have to make a much greater effort, since the only image I had of his face was from my parents’ black-and-white wedding photographs, from 1975, a time and country that no longer exists. The access I had to these few photographs was limited too. Only occasionally, in the most acute phase of my childhood curiosity – a phase in which I inundated my mother with questions about ‘When is he coming back?’ – my father – and ‘What did he look like?’ – did she, in an attempt to calm me down, go to fetch the photographs. She used to do this when she no longer had the patience to explain my father’s absence. Off she’d go to fetch the album of their wedding photos and tell the story of the family and of the characters who appeared in those pictures.

Thirteen years had gone by since I had seen him. I felt doubly foreign, not only because I’d just landed in a foreign land but because between me and my parent there was a gulf like the Strait of Gibraltar, where you could only hope to glimpse the opposite bank on an occasional cloudless day. I smiled when he saw me. He then lifted his hand and pointed to the end of the Arrivals corridor, away from the crowd holding signs and flowers and the folks waving gleefully to their relatives coming out through the door behind me. We both dashed, trying our best not to stumble on the pieces of luggage crossing our path. Then he paused, opened his arms, and I threw myself at him. My heart was drumming fast. He grabbed my shoulders and held me away. I wished it could have been longer. Thirteen seconds more, at least, for the number of years we had stayed apart. He touched my head, and I noticed we were the same height. His lips stretched slightly, but not enough to expose his teeth to me. He then wrinkled his forehead, took a parking ticket out of a pocket and grabbed my trolley. As we sprinted to the exit, he kept rambling about what he would have to pay for the car park and that he could have filled the tank several times over with that small fortune. ‘This is not Angola, where a litre of gasoline is cheaper than a bottle of water,’ he said, and I wondered which Angola he was referring to, because the country I had just left was far from affordable.

Just outside the airport, apropos of something I no longer remember, my father said, his two hands firmly on the wheel and eyes on the road, with the banal expression of somebody describing the state of the weather to break the silence in a group: ‘My days in Lisbon are just home-work-home. I don’t have friends.’ I wondered how a man could live without friends. What sort of relationship could he and I hope to build? Bearing in mind that, in my almost eighteen years of life, I had no memory of having lived under the same roof with him at any time, this admission made me shudder. I felt sorry for us, for the chasm there was between us, which neither one of us had had the patience, or the courage, to cross.

Excerpt from “Whites Can Dance Too” copyright © 2023 by Kalaf Epalanga. Published by Faber Books.

About the book: Hours before performing at one of Europe’s most iconic music festivals, Kalaf Epalanga is detained at the border on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant. Trapped, his thoughts soon thrum to the beat of kuduro, the blistering, techno-infused Angolan music which has taken him from Luanda to Kristiansund, Beirut to Rio de Janeiro, Paris to Lisbon.

Shifting between his reflections while incarcerated, and the stories of Sofia – Kalaf’s friend at the heart of the Lisbon dance scene – and the ‘Viking’, the immigration official holding Kalaf’s fate in his hands, Whites Can Dance Too is a celebration of the music of Epalanga’s homeland, and a hypnotic paean to cultural roots, to freedom and love.

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Kalaf Epalanga is an Angolan musician and writer. Best known internationally for fronting the Lisbon-based dance collective Buraka Som Sistema, he is a celebrated columnist in Angola and Portugal. Whites Can Dance Too is his acclaimed debut novel; it was first published in Portugal by Editorial Caminho (2017). Epalanga is currently based in Berlin.

You can read our interview with Kalaf Epalanga here