‘When we first went to Tchova,’ Tsetse, the leader of Timbila Muzimba, had told me a couple of days earlier, ‘we were really just looking for somewhere to practise. Back then we were basically a traditional timbila ensemble, like any other group from Inhambane Province. But at the Big Jam we found ourselves playing with Cuban drummers, and in a few months we had an electric bass, a jazz drummer, a saxophonist, even a rapper!’
Looking at the musicians waiting their turns at the Associação Moçambicana de Músicos, it was not hard to imagine how such a transformation might have taken place. There were teenaged hip-hoppers and ageing marrabenta guitarists, pianists with beards like Thelonious Monk and bassists with waist-long dreadlocks – although, as I had seen on an excursion to Zimbabwe, the alchemy that would allow them to bring their talents together was not to be taken for granted. In Harare, I had encountered musicians of all these different types, but such was the economic despair and political intimidation that there was just no energy, no appetite for fusion. In Mozambique, on the other hand, a new generation was growing up in a climate of peace and optimism – a parallel, perhaps, to Britain in the 1960s – and the one thing that everybody wanted was change.
As ‘Georgia On My Mind’ came shuddering to an end, the musicians on-stage set down their instruments and returned to the audience – with the exception of a skinny little boy in a red T-shirt and oversized leather shoes who appeared to have been playing the drums. He was clinging to the drum sticks, arguing with the sound engineer, glaring at him, furious, and when the man tried to lift him from the drum stool he darted suddenly beneath his arm and secured the bass guitar before anyone else could reach it – tightening the strap as far as it would go.
‘The kid is playing bass!’ remarked Selemane approvingly, as the boy launched into the bassline to ‘Smokestack Lightning’ – throwing in trills and fragments of the melody.
I stared at him in amazement.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ I said. ‘How old is he?’
‘Sufixo…’ Selemane pulled down the corners of his mouth. ‘Sufixo eight years old.’
The boy was playing with absolute absorption, grimacing, rolling his head. He seemed barely to notice that his shoulders were crumpling, his legs collapsing with the weight of the instrument, and finally the sound engineer went to fetch a small amplifier, which he pushed beneath him so that he could sit down.
‘Who the hell is he?’ I persisted.
‘Sufixo, he is a street kid,’ Selemane shrugged. ‘He come here four years ago. We used to send him to buy weed for us… Oh, but he never smoked it! People here, they are looking after him. They are paying his school also.’
‘Has he got no family?’
‘He has one grandmother, but you see this boy! Nobody can stop him from making noise! The womens here they are saying, “Oh Sufixo, it is time you go to sleep,” or “Oh Sufixo, it is time you must wash.” But Sufixo, he is playing drums. He is playing bass, piano, guitar, timbila… Sufixo is making noise! That’s what we do here in Maputo. We make noise!’
THE SMALL, BEACH-FRONTED town of Catembe lay on the southern side of Maputo Bay, where it was visited every forty-five minutes or so by a fat old ferry with a jungle of weeds below the waterline. The ferry carried commuters, traffic for Ponta d’Ouro on the South African border and tourists on day trips to the various bars and restaurants on the beach, and one day it also carried me and Selemane. Jumping from the jetty, we set out along the rubbish-strewn sand, handing a bottle of vodka between us and talking, as usual, about music. From here, you could look back towards Maputo and almost see the city as a whole. A mile distant, the arms of cranes stretched above high-floating freighters, loading goods from the factories of Johannesburg. Beyond them, grid-faced tower blocks stood over their reflections, waist-deep in churches and tenements, while out to the east there were parks and gardens, embassies and hotels, the ocean empty all the way to Madagascar.
Jangada was an open-air restaurant where Chico Antonío, King of Maputo Fusion, held court every Saturday afternoon. As Selemane and I climbed the steps to the verandah, we arrived among waitresses, tourists eating seafood and Chico fans waiting for the next set – although the larger crowd was at the back, where a group of the capital’s foremost musicians were sitting among ashtrays, wine glasses, beer bottles and coffee cups, the floorboards around them having something in common with a moat. There was Carlitos, founding member of Ghorwane, the biggest group in the country. There was Jorge Domingos, who had been playing with Gito Baloi when he was shot dead in Johannesburg. There was Roberto Isaias from Kapa Dêch, and Dino, mercurial bassist of the Pazedi Jazz Band. And there, at the head, was Chico – his short grey dreadlocks spilling round his ears, his eyes black and mesmerising, his teak-coloured face consumed in moments by a grin of perfect white teeth.
Selemane and I pulled up a couple of chairs.
Like Sufixo, Chico had once been a street kid and had learnt his various instruments at the São José de Lhanguene mission school in the ghetto. He had gone on to play trumpet with the Orchestra Marrabenta Star de Moçambique, and to become head of the local Alliance Française, but even today he had the look of a vagrant – his trainers worn bald, his clothes eclectic enough to have come from an aid agency. As Selemane would often observe, music in Maputo was all about freedom, and Chico was like the music personified. Just to get here, he had walked five miles along the shoreline, his guitar on his back, his trousers rolled up to stop them from dragging on the ground.
‘In the past it was colonial time,’ Chico told me, when we were sitting together later that afternoon. ‘The colonials didn’t give us space to play. They banned marrabenta, and they closed down the venues because they realised that the culture was bringing people together, fuelling the revolution. That was a hard, bad time. It’s been more than thirty years now since we won our freedom. That is a long time, of course, but you must think of it within the context of Mozambican history. Right now, culturally, it’s a transition time…
‘We know who we are. We are African people. But we are African people who are mixing with Europeans, Americans, Chinese… So, to express who we are we must bring our traditional music together with the music of all these other places. We must be Africans, but Africans open to the world!’
As the clouds turned fiery, Chico sat on-stage with his acoustic guitar, singing in his rich, haunted voice, throwing jagged chords into the blend of jazz, heavy metal and traditional rhythms that his band was generating behind him. He stared beyond the city, turned in moments to usher in a drum fill or to conduct a spiralling guitar solo, smiled his magnificent smile – although a handful of people were bouncing up and down in their seats, yelling ‘Bravo!’, and those few tourists who had remained for the evening were nodding politely if they were listening at all.
‘You must be wise, cool, kind… but the devil too!’ Chico continued, as we were walking back towards the ferry that night, the rest of the musicians stumbling drunkenly behind us. ‘Life, you see, is like a zoo. A bar-zoo! You see chickens, lions… And some of us must escape!’
‘And what are you?’ I asked.
‘I myself am a bull!’ Chico’s grin flashed in the darkness. ‘A red bull! I see the zoo from the outside!’
The crossing to Maputo took only twenty minutes, but there was a bar on-board, and it was here that we gravitated, clambering round the lovers canoodling on the staircase, emerging on the top deck as, with a groan from the engine, the nose of the ferry turned into the bay and the city appeared from the rolling superstructure: a line of light the breadth of the horizon, punctuated by a floodlit cathedral the shape of a rocket, by red-tipped radio masts, advertisements for soft drinks and the brilliant strata of the tower blocks.
‘Okay, maybe you have a wife and kids,’ said Chico softly, a beer in his hand, a hat on his head on which he had crossed out the word ‘Safari’ and written the word ‘CHICO’. ‘Wife, kids, money… These things aren’t important. There is only the music! You
have to see the zoo from the outside!’
Meetings with
Remarkable Poets
SARAH MAGUIRE (born London, 1957) is a poet and translator, and director of the Poetry Translation Centre. Her interest in Arabic literature led to visits to Palestine and Yemen, and to her co-translating the Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Zaqtan; the Sudanese poet Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi and the Afghan poet Partaw Naderi. She set up the Poetry Translation Centre in 2004 – and it is through their tours, bringing poets to the UK, that she has her most remarkable meetings. www.poetrytranslation.org
Meetings with Remarkable Poets
SARAH MAGUIRE
If you scroll through the photos of the Poetry Translation Centre’s first World Poets’ Tour in 2005, you’ll notice that the photographer suddenly rotates his camera from landscape to portrait mode – at the moment when Maxamed Hashi Dhamac ‘Gaarriye’, the astonishingly famous Somali poet, invites ‘the tallest man in the world’, fellow Somali Hussein Bissad (8’ 1”), to join him on stage. The capacity audience at London’s Brunei Gallery – half of them Somalis – exploded, while the British poet, David Harsent, who’d co-translated Gaarriye, looked on wryly from the sidelines. ‘I had a suspicion,’ David told the audience when he came to read his translations, ‘that sharing a stage with Gaarriye might be a tall order …’
When Sir Richard Burton visited Somalia in 1854, he was immediately struck by the Somalis’ devotion to poetry. ‘The country teems with poets,’ he wrote, ‘the fine ear of this people causes them to take the greatest pleasure in harmonious sounds and poetical expressions, whereas a false quantity or a prosaic phrase excites their violent indignation.’ Nothing since then has changed – other than the fact that Somali became a written language in 1972 – and poetry is still the supreme achievement of Somali society, wielding a power and fascination that’s difficult for us Westerners to grasp.
I’d never before been in such close proximity to someone as famous as Gaarriye. The experience, I imagine, is something akin to being on tour with Michael Jackson: the instant he’s spotted, he disappears into a scrum of delighted Somalis of all ages, who crowd around him, chattering, eager to shake his hand, touch him, be photographed next to him. In his late fifties, small, balding, wearing oversized glasses and sporting a Daallo Airways T-shirt, Gaarriye is a man most non-Somalis would walk past in the street without a second glance. Look more closely and you’ll see that he’s never at rest: his expressive face is electric with animation; his eyes dance; he fidgets constantly, gesticulating, grimacing, grinning, scowling – and that’s when he’s ‘at rest’. On stage, he is a consummate performer, carving his poetry into the air with startling gestures that so powerfully articulate the meaning of his verse you almost begin to think you can speak Somali. Gaarriye is nothing short of a showman: hence his co-option of Hussein Bissad. Had a performing bear been available, there’s no doubt it would have ended up sharing his stage.
The UK is home to the largest Somali community in Europe: an estimated 100,000 Somalis were thought to be living here in 2010. They routinely feature at the very bottom of all those indicators of well-being: health, housing, employment and educational opportunities. I yearn for the day when – instead of Somalia being a byword for instability, ceaseless war and piracy – the country’s exceptional poetic tradition brings it universal renown.
I founded the Poetry Translation Centre in 2004 (thanks to the Arts Council’s generosity) with two aims: to ginger up poetry in English through translating contemporary poetry from Africa, Asia and Latin America; and to engage with the countless thousands of people now settled here for whom poetry is the highest art form, as it is for anyone from an Islamic background. The zeal for poetry is far from confined to Somalis: the many Sudanese, Afghans, Pakistanis, Kurds and Iraqis living here are equally fervent in their devotion to poets and poetry. So what better way to make them feel welcome than to translate their most highly esteemed poets into English, using the skills of talented linguists working closely with leading British poets (such as Jo Shapcott, Sean O’Brien, Lavinia Greenlaw and W.N. Herbert), with the additional hope that brilliant translations might engage English-speaking audiences too? And that meetings between these remarkable international and local poets might change their writing and, perhaps, their lives?
The tours are the thing: there is nothing like having the opportunity to witness a poet such as Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi from Sudan (arguably, our ‘star poet’) bewitch an audience with the precise music of his intensely lyrical Arabic. The polar opposite of Gaarriye, Saddiq on stage is preternaturally still, focused, heartbreaking. And yet his hugely complex, gorgeous poetry is equally popular with the Sudanese community here, and the poor man can’t get from one end of Queensway to the other without being set upon by admirers.
Just as famous with the Persian-speaking communities of Afghanistan, Iran and her own native Tajikistan (and to many Russian-speakers in the former Soviet Union, where her work is widely translated), is Farzaneh Khojandi, who is generally acknowledged as the best woman poet writing in Persian today. Performing, she stands with her hands clasped together and, looking upwards, recites her playful, haunting poetry in a voice verging on a whisper, as though praying to someone whose attention she is certain she can claim.
The night I met Farzaneh, for our second World Poets’ Tour in 2008, she was white-faced from the exhaustion of her interminable journey from the remote Khojand province – and from the shock of finding herself in such an alien place. Her translator, Narguess Farzad, had found Farzaneh and her husband (a renowned Tajik musician whose stage name is ‘Mr Lightning’) sitting in their hotel room in the dark. At first Narguess thought they’d not yet grasped how to use those slot-in cards to activate the electricity in their room. But, in fact, supplies of electricity being so random in their part of Tajikistan, and light bulbs (when they light) so weak, they preferred the familiar comforts of darkness to the glare of their hotel.
At the dinner we held that evening to welcome all our poets, Farzaneh was seated next to the Somali journalist and translator, Maxamed Xasan ‘Alto’ – the first African she had ever met. Alto, like seemingly all Somalis, a supremely gifted linguist, began speaking to her in Russian: the one time in my life I actually saw someone’s jaw physically drop. And then Farzaneh broke into a luminous smile: looking round the restaurant for the first time, she made it clear she knew she was with friends.
Letting Greene Go
TIM BUTCHER (born Rugby, 1967) is a journalist, broadcaster and author. His first book, Blood River (2007), is an account of an epic journey through the Congo to unravel the region’s turbulent history. For his second book, Chasing the Devil (2010), he trekked 350 miles through Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. On the staff of the Daily Telegraph from 1990 to 2009, he specialised in awkward places at awkward times, reporting on conflict in the Balkans, the Middle East and Africa. He lives in Cape Town with his girlfriend and their two children.
Letting Greene Go
TIM BUTCHER
IT WAS not just mist that hung over the Freetown peninsula when my ferry approached the coast of West Africa back in the dry season of 2009. The aura of the great English author, Graham Greene, was also strongly there, framing my hazy view of the mountain skyline and timeworn foreshore of Sierra Leone’s capital city.
Always before a journey I read up on a place and when it comes to this part of Africa Greene dominates, after writing so authoritatively about his numerous visits. His first trip was back in 1935 when Freetown was the launching point for an overland trek he immortalised in his first published venture into non-fiction, the travel classic Journey Without Maps. He came back for a calendar year as an MI6 spy in the Second World War, an experience he famously used as the backdrop for what I regard as his best novel, The Heart of the Matter. And so strong was his association with Freetown that at the height of his literary fame a British newspaper flew him back to write a post-independence piece on the city in the late 1960s.
A SETTLEMENT FIRST founded by mariners in the 1500s is still best approached by water. Those early sailors from Europe had crept south from the Straits of Gibraltar in their tiny ships, picking their way down an African coastline that offered inhospitably arid desert at first and then, as they ventured into the tropics, nothing but low-lying, disease-ridden mangrove swamps.
What a miracle it must have been to round the northern headland into the Sierra Leone river estuary, Africa’s greatest natural harbour, a freak combination of powerful tidal currents that prevent silting in a deep channel tucked behind a long mountainous peninsula that curves up into the Atlantic, acting as a bulwark against the motion of the ocean. Better still, freshwater streamed all year round down the flanks of the peninsula, water so sweet it was used to fill the casks of seventeenth-century pirates, eighteenth-century slavers and nineteenth-century humanitarians.
The twenty-first century ship that delivered me to Freetown was a superannuated Greek ferry that had been pensioned off after decades of service in the Ionian Sea to work the daily crossing of the Sierra Leone river estuary. I had taken the dawn service and as we set off from the northern shore the blast from the ferry’s horn bounced back from thick sea fog making my chest shudder. The other passengers barely noticed, carrying on chatter that sounded like tuning a short-wave radio, a babble of foreign sounds every so often crystallising into a familiar word. They were speaking Krio, the broken form of English with roots reaching back to those early mariners and which is still the main language of Sierra Leone. I heard tok for talk, aks for ask and pekin for child – derived from piccaninny.
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