‘Excuse me, does anyone speak English?’ I ask. I guess not, going by the blank stares.
‘I do, but it’s just a little,’ the man on the bench across from me says. Mr Samson is a retired pilot, trained in Russia, and a staunch Jehovah’s Witness. He’s also going to Zalala beach.
Every day around 3pm, fishermen come back to shore with boats tilting with the weight of their catch. Most of it arrives already packed into fifty kilogram sacks. Bidding starts before the catch reaches the beach, when Mr Samson and other buyers walk to the boats. Fish that’s not in sacks is put on the ground for people who want to shop for dinner. There are many different kinds of fish I’ve never seen before, as well as lobster, prawns, crab and squid. I buy three lobsters and a kilo of prawns. Boats are turned upside down, some to get repaired.
As always on a beach in Africa, a soccer game starts. People who aren’t swimming or playing soccer repaint their boats. On the way back to Quilemane, the long road that goes through all the village we passed on the way to Zalala turns into a market of sorts, with tables piled with raw and fried fish. When we reach my stop, Mr Samson asks where I’m going to cook my seafood. I was hoping his house before finding out he lives out of town. He writes a note in my journal and tells me to go to the restaurant at the back of the bus station. His friend owns it. It reads: ‘Ao senhor Quinbane. Ou Paulo, ajudára preparare comida. She is a South African journalist. Henrique A. Samson. Nicoadala.’ Mr Samson puts two handfuls of squid in my bag before I jump out of the chapa.
Senhor Quinbane’s restaurant is hidden behind buses parked for overnight trips that start at 5am. He’s not at the restaurant when I arrive and, considering that this is a place where people buy their food, the manager cannot let me cook in their kitchen. He suggests getting a bicycle to his employer’s house. I look for a person who speaks English at the ticketing office next to the entrance, who tells the cyclist where to drop me off.
It’s a slow, bumpy trip to a three-storey building where we find two women chatting outside. One of them is Senhora Quinbane. Her husband isn’t home. Her English is only as good as my Portuguese – which is limited to pao, bom dia and obrigado; bread, good morning and thank you.
Senhora walks up two flights of stairs to their place. Her three children watch DStv in a lounge where most of the space is taken over by a lounge suite and a lazy-boy chair, a room divider with several collections of dinner sets, family pictures, certificates, vases, jugs and glass sets. She leaves me in the kitchen. The family cat walks around the plastic bag with my seafood. Senhora returns with her son, car keys and a note that never makes it to my hands, telling the manager that it’s okay to let me use the kitchen.
‘Now, tell me, what is it that you need?’ the manager asks me.
‘I want to cook rice and seafood stew,’ I declare, showing him my plastic bag.
He waves me to a plastic chair in the yard. He returns from the kitchen with Angelina. She takes the black plastic bag and motions me to sit down. She gets two knives and two basins, which she fills with cold water. Angelina doesn’t speak English. She shows me her ring finger. She’s married with two kids – I already know she’s a cook. My empty ring finger says I’m single. I type on an air keyboard to say I’m a journalist. We stand next to each other, knives in hand. She works slowly so I can mimic her cleaning of the fish.
She puts the squid on the table, slicing it open to remove its eyes and membrane. My turn, but the squid keeps slipping and Angelina takes over. By now there are six people hanging out with us. I may not know how to devein prawns or open a lobster, but I do know how to get a brazier going. I let my coals settle, with room for the flame to move after I start it with just a bit of paraffin and fan it until every coal is orange. Then the cooking can start.
Angelina boils the seafood for about ten minutes. She goes inside to get another pot, which goes on the fire. She adds oil, thin onion slices, one diced green pepper and two cloves of garlic pounded in a wooden mortar and pestle. She adds very finely chopped tomatoes into the pot that I keep stirring as she commands me to – by rotating her fist.
We speak in oohs and aahs and nods, using phrases and hand gestures. When the tomato sauce is cooked, Angelina adds the seafood to the pot, followed by a pinch of salt, a cube of stock, a touch of black pepper and some Rajah curry powder. She stirs the stew for the last time, taps the spoon on her hand, licks it and gives it two thumbs up. She disappears inside to get containers.
‘Angelina, the food is for all of us,’ I tell her, my hands pointing at all of the group now assembled.
After we finish eating, two of the men help Angelina clean up, then we hug goodbye.
They go home, and I’m off to get my bags from the hotel. I must be on the bus to Nampula at 4.30am; I might as well sleep in it.
I’m not the only passenger. While some sleep on the seats, I sleep on the pavement. It’s better than spending the night on a soft surface that comes with snores and endless farts.
I’m going to Nampula to honour two favours Mr Samson asked of me – that I take the time to listen to a Jehovah’s Witness, and go further north to Ilha de Mozambique.
We arrive at night when the island is mostly dark, with only a few lights switched on. I don’t have a place to stay, but the driver knows about a hostel. He drives up a street with weeping willows, dropping me off where rows of houses start and cars can’t drive through. The hostel is on the second or third street up the alley.
When the front door opens, a sleepy woman in a worn-out cotton nightdress with long, silky hair appears. She takes me to the kitchen through a lounge that reminds me of apartheid-style four-room houses for its close space.
In the kitchen, she gives me a seat at the table with her two children and feeds me a lightly spiced potato soup with pao that’s crispy on the outside and dense on the inside. It’s not buried under flour, like they bake Portuguese rolls in Johannesburg.
‘Please forgive me. We were not expecting anyone, so I made a simple meal,’ she says. Honestly, the only thing she needs to apologise for is giving me a normal portion. Were this my mother’s kitchen, I’d join my thumb and index finger and wipe the dish clean.
It’s low season for travellers and I have the dormitory to myself. My itinerary on the island: Check out markets, shops and a museum, then go to Pemba. A few people who I reveal this plan to agree that it will work. There are minibuses throughout the day from the island to Nampula, where getting a bus to Pemba is as easy as standing on the side of the road.
In the morning, I walk to the beach for sunrise.
This side of the island smells like a pit toilet, so I don’t stick around. The beach has pieces of driftwood and brown plants spewed out by the ocean. At three kilometres long and five hundred metres wide, the island is made for wandering by foot, even with the bicycles carrying two people and mopeds parked on some corners. When the Portuguese built the island as their capital they wanted to evoke Europe, with square limestone houses that have small, square windows made with wood. The colour palette features corals, peach, yellow and the bright, dark red of the island’s museum, where a display of various types of boats is the main feature of the collection. The historic buildings have long lost the sparkle on their white walls to water and black, mouldy stains. I feel transported to an older, more romantic era, when signs were carved in wood and hung on buildings. Here, even the traffic signs hang off houses, and even though the Farmacia sign of the pharmacy is written on white glass, stepping inside still feels like walking into a postcard from an old world – where pills and potions are stored in glasses and their labels handwritten.
There is a park lined with trees that are painted white around the base of the trunk, like others around the island; and pockets of green spaces with grass patches in geometric patterns. Perhaps as a nod to the weather, and to the practicality of walking being how most people get around, there are green benches around town so you can sit and watch life go by: Young girls in bright hijabs that have rhin
estones, fishermen with their catch, people cruising on mopeds, and school children running back home or going to the mosque in groups.
Most of the town’s people are Bantu. Some, like my landlady, look like more diverse versions of Ilha’s heritage, which includes Arabic sultans who counted the island among their conquests along the Swahili coast – from the island through Tanzania and Kenya, to Somalia. The island is still Muslim.
I’m in an unlikely tropical paradise. Even if it’s one that smells like crap, with grandiose houses that time has turned into crumbling ruins; it’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve been to.
The houses in Macuti Town are built with mud and palm roofs. There are kiosks that pack groceries, baby clothes, toys, drinks, plumbing pipes and more into little dim rooms, and street corners where people sell bread. I take my place in the line for bread.
A man sits outside a house with coral pink walls that have brown dirt stains at the foundation. He sells hot rolls from a bamboo basket with a wide mouth. While we wait our turn in line, a woman in a white doek and yellow wrap stands next to him to put her bread in a sack. By now, the town is fully awake. The market is in full swing. Piles of second-hand clothing have been laid on the ground. People who sell vegetables, mostly shiny tomatoes and okra, sit across from them, their produce arranged in pyramids. Some people sell fish and rice. I’m minding my business along the waterfront when I notice a girl undoing her braids in the middle of the road.
‘Excuse me. Shouldn’t you sit on the pavement?’ She’s younger than me, so I can play big sister.
‘It’s not like a car is going to drive by,’ she laughs.
I help her undo her hair for a while and then, after promising to meet outside the hospital for lunch before I leave for Nampula, I continue my walking tour.
In Nampula, I stand at a T-junction unbothered that the sun is setting on the horizon with no sign of any bus. I sit and eat fried prawn kebabs. Later, after the area starts to empty out, Alberto from the house across the street comes over to ask me about my plans. He says there are no buses for long distances other than at 5am. He offers me a place to sleep.
For most of the night, we sit outside, under the skies, with his grandmother and cousins, listening to Marrabenta songs. At dinner, we eat rice and a watery fish stew from one large enamel dish. When bedtime comes, and the cousins roll out their sleeping mats on the porch to escape the hot bedrooms, I lay my kanga on the floor and fold a pair of jeans into a pillow.
Alberto wakes me up 4am and offers me a glass of water, toothpaste and a bowl of water to wash my body. I’d rather miss the bus and spend another day in Nampula than wake up.
He wakes me up again at 6.30am. His friend Mohammed is thirty minutes away. He’s a truck driver on his way from Maputo to pick up goods on a route that passes through Nampula and Pemba. The truck is empty and Alberto needs to transport industrial plastic drums and copper wires. Our lift is called Phoenix – a big, sleek chrome machine fitted with a three-quarter bed behind the front seat. There’s a side table and a small basin. I sleep most of the way to Pemba, getting up when Mohammed and Alberto stop for breakfast. Mine is tea and hot bread.
It only occurs to me when I’m fully awake that I’m in a truck with strange men, in a place I don’t know. It’s too late to think this plan through. I lie back on the bed and read while the guys converse in Portuguese.
The trip features what are becoming usual snapshots of tropical villages – people running after cars when they slow down, selling baskets full of mangoes, bananas and cashews. In Pemba, Alberto walks me to the minibuses parked along the road to find one to the beach front. He refuses payment for the lift and gives the driver money for my trip.
A brief hug, and we become a memory.
The driver drops me off at a junction with a casino, telling me that there are no chapas to Russel’s campsite, less than a kilometre from here.
Walking through thick sand with a head that’s becoming dizzy from the sun, and people who drive past when I flag their empty bakkies, I feel like I’m trekking across the Sahara. The result is a heat rash that covers my whole face and body, making me look like a rough-cast wall.
Pemba has three faces. The city centre with three ATMs, one each for First National Bank, Barclay’s and Standard Bank, an internet café, one big supermarket and streets lined by hawkers; there’s the village of mud huts, and the shoreline that’s not made for play, where fishermen and villagers hang out.
Tourists and expats live it up at Wimbi beach; the playground of my favourite side of Pemba, with waterfront mansions, five-star hotels and less expensive ones across the road from the beach. The sea is clear and light blue close to the beach, with light turquoise pools, and gets darker as it stretches on. Kids bathe and play in the water. Seagulls swoop, a topless sunbather lies on his stomach. He is wearing a black fedora and reading a book. A beach boy with jet-black dreadlocks and strings of beads on his wrists sells necklaces with cowrie-shell pendants and bracelets made with red, blue and green plastic beads. Kayaks are drying on poles suspended across palm trees.
Further up the beach, where the surface juts with sharp, jagged rocks, groups of women pick shells they put in plastic basins. Some of them work in pairs to pull green nets across the water. All feet are in flip flops, and pagnes are gathered and tied at the knees so they don’t get wet. A man is waist deep in the water with his net. Kids pick at a bed of rocks. Towards sunset, Wimbi beach is no longer the exclusive turf of swimmers, sunbathers and beach boys – a group of boys take off their T-shirts and plant sticks in the sand to mark out a makeshift soccer pitch. A long game of soccer ensues, where goals are celebrated with back flips and dips in the sea.
Couples stroll hand in hand, the water fills up with black bodies, and girls walk around selling peanuts and other snacks.
Walking around the beach, I see a growing crowd at the parking lot. I follow it to find a circle surrounding a guitarist who scrunches his face as he plays and sings. While everyone in the crowd of tourists and locals smile, a young boy watches with folded arms, looking bored.
I start feeling restless after a few days in Pemba, and find my next adventure by putting my pencil on the map and going where it lands.
The tougher the trip, the greater the satisfaction of being at my destination. Take Ibo, in the Quirimbas Islands. My trip starts at 5am in Pemba at the back of an open chapa that drives around town several times until there isn’t any room left for more people and the bags and the sacks of rice, bananas and peanuts they jump in with. One man has five live chickens.
When we finally get going, it’s mostly on roads that leave us covered in thick layers of dust.
The eight-hour trip ends at the village of Tandanhangue, where we wait until 4pm when one of two boats that connect Ibo and the mainland arrives. The only restaurant sells cold tea, hard homemade biscuits and hot Fanta Orange. The only drinking water is muddy, with bits floating in it. I hang out with Joia, who I meet in the chapa. The male nurse breaks my heart when he reveals that there are no ATMs in Ibo, and that the only budget hotel, Miti Miwiri – after the two trees in the yard – only works with cash. He mends it by offering me a room at his house.
When the boat arrives, we wade in the water to get to it. There are four other people with us. An old man in a newsboy cap grins at me the entire journey.
There’s a woman caught between her crying toddler and restless chicken, and the boat’s captain. We’re surrounded by swamps of mangrove forests that you can walk to from Ibo when the tide is low.
We dock at a pier that’s really just a small concrete slab, with plastic tables and five chairs, and an extension cord connected to an unseen source of electricity.
The path to Joia’s house is overrun with weeds. Ibo has whitewashed coral-themed five-star beachfront hotels with walls that are covered in bright pink bougainvillea, where you can drink US$15 cocktails while looking out at the sea.
Ibo is stuck in an exotic time warp of buildings that
crumble, some with tree trunks in the walls. The beachfront hotels are the only places that have power round the clock. The rest of the island is powered by generators that start running at 4.30pm.
Home is a commune Joia shares with two teachers. Meals are rice and crab curry or fish stew. Entertainment is hanging out at Miti Miwiri at night to charge our phones and dance with aid workers who are here for a conference.
Kids take turns to go to school in the mornings and afternoons. When they’re not in class, their heads are buried in their books on their patios at home.
The younger ones run after me asking to pose for pictures. I relent. Their friends ask for pictures as well – rinse and repeat, replete with kung fu poses. Ibo, for the monied, offers nature walks, dolphin safaris, birding, scuba diving and island hopping; I can only afford to walk and visit the Fort of São João Baptista, which housed slaves, the Cowrie house which is named after the beads that cover it and the Igreja de Nossa Senhora do Rosário Catholic church.
The island feels small after two days.
Joia asks his Maputo-bound boss to give me a lift to Pemba. We leave on a speed boat and drive to Pemba in a Land Cruiser.
My twenty-first and last day in Moz starts in a daze. I stumble out of Brazuca bar at 5am after a wild night with a South African whose parents are turning a barren island into a paradise getaway. I walk to the ATM to get cash, and quit my place in the line when a policeman offers me a lift on his moped. The bus has already passed my stop. It has my bags; spending another day in Pemba is not an option. He makes several calls before finding the driver’s number. When we catch up with the bus, my seat is already taken. An old woman offers me a seat on her sack in the aisle. I move to a free seat when it becomes available and sleep my way to Mocimboa da Praia. The driver doesn’t understand a word of English. He leaves me at a drinking hole where he finds someone who speaks enough English to tell me how to reach the Tanzanian border.
The fellows take a break from their beers to take me to the junction where I catch the chapa to Namoto border. My ass, dressed in granny panties, sticks out in the air when I hop in. There’s no place to sit in the chairs and the floor. I squat over some legs and hold on to parcels for support. Rami offers me his seat. Another passenger gives me her kanga, which I use as a cover when the dust starts rising.
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