Tomás' Angola remains lost

In Cape Town, at a beachfront restaurant, one of the waiters smiled when he heard us speak. He later confessed that, as soon as he realized we were Portuguese, he asked the colleague at our table to switch places with him. He missed speaking to someone in his native language too much to waste the opportunity. During dinner, and because we ended up talking a lot, we learned that his name was Tomás, that he was 25 years old, and that he was Angolan. He had been in South Africa for three years, but only in Cape Town for a couple of months. Before that, he had been in Pretoria, where he worked in a hotel. When we asked him if he wanted to return to Angola, his eyes filled with tears. "There's nothing more I want," he replied, "but I'll only consider returning when there's respect for the people." Naively, we asked, "But things are better, aren't they?" He responded with an ironic smile and a statement that disarmed me: “For the new elite, yes, but for the people even flies are the same.”