By George, a "New" Angola

His upper lip was beaded with perspiration, his shirt was soaked with sweat. "Eight countries in three weeks," sighed Senator George McGovern. "Almost a dozen heads of state and over a hundred people of substance. I've really learned a lot. But I'm exhausted."

The South Dakota Democrat was standing amid a jostling airport crowd in Libreville, Gabon, where he was catching a plane home after a tour of southern Africa that had taken him to the Sudan, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique, South Africa, Rhodesia, Angola and Ethiopia. The swing was no breezy Baedeker tour. As a result of Iowa Senator Dick Clark's upset defeat in last month's elections, McGovern is in line to chair the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on African Affairs, assuming incoming Foreign Relations Chairman Frank Church continues the custom of having such geographical subcommittees. McGovern's trip was partly intended to show that he not only wanted the job, but also was thoroughly prepped for it.

In his meetings with the region's leaders and opinion makers, McGovern mostly listened. But when Rhodesia's Prime Minister, Ian Smith, asked McGovern what he would do to solve Rhodesia's problems, McGovern had a succinct answer: "Resign." Yet at a dinner party in Johannesburg, he startled his South African hosts by indicating that Smith's government in Rhodesia, if it continues to move toward an "all parties" conference of local leaders and carries through with a promised one-man, one-vote national election next spring with "credible" international observers, could expect the U.S. Senate to repeal the economic embargo imposed on the country in 1966.

The most significant stop on McGovern's safari probably was Angola. That troubled, former Portuguese province has until recently strongly opposed U.S. African policy. In turn, Washington has long objected to the large force of Cuban soldiers and civilian workers (about 20,000) in President Agostinho Neto's socialist republic. Neto, reports TIME Correspondent David Wood, who accompanied McGovern to Luanda, hinted to McGovern that the Cubans will leave Angola eventually -but only when South Africa stops raiding the country's bases along the Namibian border.

Nonetheless, Neto says he is anxious to expand diplomatic relations. Angola is looking for Western financial and technological help, both for economic reasons and to offset its dependence on East bloc aid. In his talks with McGovern, Neto stressed his desire to improve relations with Washington. Why, he asked the Senator, does the U.S. continue to maintain diplomatic relations with Ethiopia, which has a large Cuban cadre, while refusing recognition to Angola because of the Cuban force on its territory? McGovern told newsmen, "I didn't have an answer for that."

The McGovern trip was also an opportunity for American newsmen to visit Angola, from which they had been barred since 1976. Correspondent Wood found that the country's teeming capital (pop. 490,000) fully reflected the serious economic problems facing Angola. His report:

In most African cities the central marketplace is a carnival, where women mass in daylong congregation, squat amid bundles and babies, haggle over prices, cluck over misfortunes and paw over food for sale. Not in Luanda. Its central market, a dank, echoing, three-story concrete structure, is virtually empty of food. Long, bare counters stretch away into the urine-scented gloom. Weighing scales swing empty in the hot breeze, and the women sit quietly, waiting.

A sudden clash of gears and a loudly laboring engine stir the place into action. Seconds later, as a flatbed lurches into the market, a hoarse cheer goes up and women pour down stairs and out of doorways. The truck is loaded with sacks of potatoes.

Few people in the Angolan capital appear to be living on the edge of starvation. But many children's bellies are swollen with malnutrition, and the garbage heaps are well picked. The outdoor cafes and surfside sea food restaurants that once gave Luanda a festive air are empty and shuttered. Most of the storefronts in the city are empty too, and long lines form daily at the few shops still open.

That food should be scarce in a city whose harbor waters literally jump with fish and where grain and corn bend in nearby fields is a contradiction. But it is not an uncommon one in young Third World countries where economic pragmatism has been pushed aside by ideology.

Serious and chronic food shortages are only the most visible failing of the avowedly Marxist regime that wrested control of Angola from the confusion of independence and civil war two years ago. A dogmatic and strongly centralized government was imposed by the MPLA in an attempt to construct a multiracial egalitarian society out of the rubble of four centuries of Portuguese rule. Now, after 37 months of trial and error in which almost every sector of the economy showed alarming declines, Neto is steering Angola toward a more practical course. But it is not easy.

In a major speech this fall Neto declared, "We are not going to be so radical ... We are not going to attempt, as some comrades do, to get rid of the private sector ... The private enterprise of farmers, small businessmen, masons and carpenters is an important facet of production which we need in the country."

That speech is remembered well by the kintandeiras, the hard-nosed Angolan businesswomen who have traditionally bought food wholesale and sold retail at the marketplace. In recent weeks they have been on strike, protesting against the low retail prices set by the government. Swordfish, for example, is listed at about 200 a pound at the market, and is unavailable. But a few lucky consumers get swordfish from fishermen friends, who peddle their catch out on the "island," the curving sand peninsula that protects Luanda harbor from the sea. There, a pound of swordfish goes for about 45-c- or 55-c-.

But clumsy government attempts to lower food prices are not the sole reason for the shortages. When the Portuguese left en masse three years ago, they took with them, among other things, 28,000 of Angola's 30,000 trucks, thus crippling the food distribution system. Much of the richest agricultural land in Angola is under the sporadic control of UNITA, the South Africa-backed guerrilla force of Jonas Savimbi, who contested and lost control of the capital in 1976. Much of Angola's produce rots before it can reach Luanda.

Angola has been steamrollered in some business deals. Cuba was granted fishing rights off the coast, and the relatively efficient Cuban trawlers have put the local fleet virtually out of business. Much of the Cuban catch is shipped to Cuba for freezing and packaging, and then shipped back to Angola as costly "imported" fish.

Having declared that ideology should be no barrier to economic improvement, Neto is now moving to ensure that the government bureaucracy does not stand in the way either. In the past few days the Prime Minister's job as well as the two posts of deputy prime minister have been abolished as excessive, and two officials of the inept ministry of internal commerce were replaced.

Perhaps most indicative of the change in Angola is Neto's open bid for more Western investment. The few Western companies operating in Angola, Neto said, "are doing their work well, have good relations with us, and pay their taxes promptly. We have no reason to complain." Conspicuous by its absence was any reference to capitalist exploitation, neocolonialism and bourgeois imperialism, common catchwords in the socialist Third World--and until recently in Agostinho Neto's troubled capital.

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