Later in the day, I returned to Chaimite and found Mr. Vicente and his colleagues doing a brisk business in declarations for school registration and bank accounts, with a line of people standing by the desk holding open passports, bilhetes de identificação, and ragged pieces of paper bearing names and addresses.
Periodically, Vicente reached into the lone drawer remaining in either desk and fished change out of a small plastic bag. The all-important carimbo, a wooden stamp marked “Conselho Municipal de Beira,” sat on the desk as he worked, the thump of ink against paper punctuating each transaction.
When the office closed at three thirty, I sat beside Vicente, who leaned back in a cream-colored guayabera and black loafers, a pen clasped between long, slender fingers. The Mapiko, resplendent pink in bright sun, loomed over his right shoulder. “As long as Frelimo was in power, the neighborhoods had no problems finding offices,” Vicente complained. There were lots of houses that had no plaque saying “Patrimonio do Estado.” “How is it that this idea came up just now?”
At three forty-five, two young men approached in tank tops and shorts, hoping to get declarations. Mr. Vicente grabbed at his own embroidered collared shirt and gave the men a disappointed, quizzical look. “Come back tomorrow with shirts!” he scolded them. “Assim?” he asked, gesturing at their outfits, incredulous. Like this?
The people of Chaimite, Vicente explained, continue to complain about the lack of an actual, physical sede de bairro. “When it’s raining,” he said, “they come here and find no one. ‘Where are the civil servants who work here?’ They come to a public agency expecting to be served. But when it’s raining, no one stays here getting wet just to give out information!
“Some ask, ‘When will you get offices?’ ‘What do you do when it rains?’ ‘Why are you working like this?’” Vicente said. “Our answer is always the same: ‘The day will come when we will get offices.’”
Vicente is a veteran of the colonial civil service. After the civil war, in the 1990s, he rose to the top of the city administration, becoming chief of staff under a Frelimo mayor. When it changed to Renamo, he said, “I got kicked out.” Vicente struck me as a consummate bureaucrat in the best sense of the word. He saw his post as a civil servant, however humble it might be, as a vocation, a calling. By sheer will and respect for the office, after all, Vicente managed to enforce a dress code in the midst of Chaimite’s outdoor market, even if the only perimeter he could erect around the sede de bairro was a psychological one.
“Frelimo is in the minority now,” Vicente said. “They don’t take a liking to anything MDM does. I’ll try to explain,” he said, a glint in his eye. “Here in Mozambique, in any part of the public administration, the bosses are from Frelimo: those are what you call lugares de confiança”—positions of trust. “When I’m in public administration, I put political parties to the side,” he said resolutely. “To the point that people have doubts—‘Is he from Frelimo? Is he from MDM? PDD?’ That’s what all civil servants should do.”
“These complaints [about the sede being outside],” Vicente went on, “it doesn’t just hurt the city; it hurts us, because when it rains, we suffer. When it’s hot and there’s lots of dust, we suffer! And we write it in our reports: please, accelerate the construction of . . .” He trailed off. “If we had a house, we could have chairs. As it is, three, four, five people show up, and they all have to stand. It doesn’t work.”
Vicente packed up the stamp along with the plastic bag holding the day’s receipts, slung his chair over his shoulder and carried it to the soda distributor to store overnight, and headed home.
9
The Selling Life
MAPUTO
I met Bento because he wanted to buy my bicycle. I was wrestling with my bike lock on a corner of Avenida 24 de Julho, in Maputo, when Bento appeared, sauntering down the sidewalk, oblivious to the heat. Bento was on the younger, charming end of fourteen. He wore flip-flops and a gray T-shirt that came nearly to his knees and carried several dozen corn muffins in the bottom of a clear plastic sack, which he swung about with abandon as though it were full of dead leaves. Reaching the corner, he stopped to greet a boy a couple of years his senior who sold phone credit. Bento nodded at me with his chin, grinning.
“Amigo, I like your bike,” he said. “Why don’t you sell me your bicycle and buy a car?” Bento said amigo with unsettling authority—pleadingly, as the best vendors and minibus touts do—as if to win me over with willful camaraderie.
“I’m not selling it.”
“How much will you sell me that bicycle for?” he repeated.
“How many muffins have you got?”
“Fifty.” I made what I thought was an obvious joke and told Bento I would only sell my bicycle for at least seventy corn muffins. He was unfazed: “I’ll give you money to top it off.”
“I only accept muffins,” I said.
“Then give it to me. Your race should have cars, anyway.”
“You know, not all white people have enough money to buy cars as they please.”
“Yeah, I know that not every branco can just buy cars, but it’s the right of your race to have a car. Only we negros go around on foot. It’s our right to suffer.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“It’s the law of our race.”
I was speechless. Bento gave me his phone number, asked me to “beep” him with a missed call so that he’d have mine, and continued on his daily route. “We’ll talk,” he assured me. He saved my phone number as “Branco”—“White.” I rode away in wonder. He was like a fourteen-year-old prophet, frankly laying out a worldview that had been imposed upon him by a childhood on the streets of Maputo. There was plenty of truth in it, too. Other than the occasional backpacker, you rarely saw brancos outside of their cars unless it was on the terrace of a sidewalk café or on the brief walk from a parking spot to an apartment building.
Mozambique’s postwar prosperity has paid for renovations at Maputo’s most famous colonial hotel and erected a state-of-the-art office tower for the cell phone provider Vodacom. Chauffeurs in Mercedes SUVs and luxury sedans cruise downtown displaying an aggression toward pedestrians that borders on the pathological. Real estate prices in neighborhoods like Sommerschield approach those in Brooklyn and San Francisco, with houses selling for upward of $1 million. Yet Bento didn’t seem to dwell on any of this. He was just stating the facts.
Two days later I ran into Bento early in the morning on Avenida Eduardo Mondlane, his sack twice as full as it had been when we met. We stood chatting by the tailgate of a parked jeep, and I invited him across the street to have an egg sandwich. “Deixa lá,” he said. Let it be. “Now is the time to sell.” He gestured bashfully at his clothes—another ragged T-shirt and shorts—as if to say, “I can’t be seen in this.” “I don’t work Sundays,” he said. “One Sunday we’ll get together, when I have a long, free afternoon. We can go passear.”
Shoppers and vendors cross the street near the Mercado Central in Baixa, Maputo’s bustling downtown shopping district.
Bento was born in 1997, in the bush outside Pambara, a crossroads about ten hours north of Maputo, in Inhambane Province. He was raised by his father’s mother. His older brother, charged with looking after him while his grandmother farmed during the day, simply brought him along to class beginning at age three; before he turned ten, Bento had already gone as far as he could go in the primary school closest to home. After sixth grade, a few of his brothers’ peers went on to work as porters and haulers for Chinese logging operations. Most started families young and farmed dry patches of cassava and beans. Bento wasn’t old enough to haul logs, and he didn’t feel like farming, so he decided to come to Maputo.
According to the national census, along with Gaza, to the west, Inhambane supplies more migrants to Maputo than anywhere else in the country. On the whole, the southern half of Mozambique, which includes both provinces, is vastly more developed than the north: taking a bus from one end of the country
to the other, you can track the growth of corrugated steel roofs, stereos, and shops for motorcycle parts as you move closer to the capital. But most of Inhambane is still remote and underdeveloped. As recently as 2012, there were whole distritos, or counties, without a doctor. Until you reach Inchope, more than six hundred miles from Maputo, a single paved road cuts a path through the countryside. Gray scrub and coconut plantations are interspersed here and there with houses made of reeds and gnarled cashew trees, plumes of smoke rising from barely tended fires. Sacks of charcoal and stacks of cut firewood line the roadside. It is a form of commerce that requires no signs and no immediate oversight. If a car stops, a child or a woman will come running from the nearest house to make a sale. Gathering firewood, sold in bales of 5 or 10 meticais (15 to 30 cents) over the better part of a year, is how Bento saved enough money to come to Maputo. He had a total of 800 mets ($30) when he started his trip.
Half Bento’s savings went immediately to bus fare. While the bus idled in Pambara, the other passengers reached out the windows to buy sodas and cookies and cashews from teenagers holding their merchandise over their heads. Bento peeled off another 100 mets to treat himself. “In the spirit of going along with other people,” he explained. “You won’t manage to make the whole trip sitting like that”—he crossed his arms—“while everybody else is eating. You just won’t.” Bento bought bread, Coca-Cola, and cashews.
The bus from Pambara stopped at the Junta, a swarming openair depot on the northern edge of the capital. Bento stepped down into a parking lot filled with tractor trailers hauling produce from South Africa, fifty-pound sacks of potatoes and onions testament to the difficulty Mozambican farmers face in competing with agribusiness from their neighbor to the south. Bento had already spent more than half his savings, which left him just under $15. He wandered back to the main road and watched minibuses heading into the city. Touts leaned out and rapped on the sliding doors, shouting their destinations impatiently. Crowds of people pushed past him to board. “They were saying ‘Xikelene, Xikelene’—I didn’t know what Xikelene was,” Bento said, laughing at his younger self. He got on one bound for Xipamanine, then walked around the neighborhood’s endless market asking for work. Before long, a boy selling bean fritters from a bucket brought him to the house of a surly fat woman—minha senhora, he called her—who agreed to take him in. The job interview went something like this:
“Where are you from?”
“Pambara.”
“I only want someone who doesn’t rob or steal.”
“I don’t steal.”
In this way, Bento joined the ranks of Maputo’s ubiquitous hard-boiled-egg vendors, nearly all of whom are school-age boys. In the mornings, he went and bought charcoal and four dozen eggs at the market and rounded up some cardboard to start a fire. He sold each egg for 6 meticais, so that the last dozen was sold for profit. If he managed to sell quickly, he repeated the exercise in the afternoons. In the best-case scenario, Bento could make 44 meticais, about $1.50, after selling eight dozen eggs and turning over the first 100 mets in profit to his madam. But he often finished the day out with a dozen or eighteen eggs left over and went home with not even 100 mets for minha senhora. There were nonpaying customers and other occupational hazards.
Mashangaan, or people from Gaza Province, Bento says, think that Manhambane—people from Inhambane—are stupid. Though they aren’t from the capital themselves, the Mashangaan have become a sort of elite among migrants to Maputo. They have a longer history in the city, dating back to its colonial days, and their language, Tsonga, has displaced the local Ronga as Maputo’s lingua franca. “In Xipamanine, I suffered, because I’d just gotten here: a guy might eat your egg and get short with you if you ask for your money before he’s finished. He’ll say, ‘Hey, do you work for the government or something?’” In Maputo, Bento quickly fell victim to his own naïveté.
On one occasion, early in the morning when the eggs were fresh, Bento was making his rounds downtown in Maputo’s Central Market, a cavernous colonial pavilion with a rusty corrugated roof and mounds of produce displayed on tables fashioned from shipping pallets. Near the entrance, Bento stood by and watched as two older boys ate four eggs each in quick succession. They were fifteen or sixteen, Bento figured, in retrospect. “Hey! These eggs are big!” one gushed. “They’re hot too,” his friend added. “Ya! How much have we eaten?” Twenty-four meticais each, Bento told them. They wanted to eat more eggs, they said, but they wanted bread to go with them. Could Bento go get them bread? It’s not uncommon for a stranger to ask a small boy to run an errand, even in the city, or for customers to make this sort of above-and-beyond demand of vendors in the informal sector—often, it’s the price of doing business.
One of the boys produced a purple 20 meticais note and gave it to Bento. “I took two steps, and then one of them said, ‘Hey, wait—how do we know you’re going to get the bread? We’re giving you our money and you’re not giving us anything in return. Either you need to give us your eggs or give us your money.’” Incredulous at his former self, Bento said he’d given them the eggs—three dozen of them—though they hadn’t yet paid for those they’d eaten. “I didn’t know!” He laughed raucously. “I didn’t know!” When he came back with the bread, of course, the boys were nowhere to be found, and Bento sat down and cried, realizing he’d been had. Several matronly produce vendors came and asked him what happened, and Bento told his story. “Here in Maputo,” one of the women said, “you need to open your eyes.”
Besides his daily pay, the terms of Bento’s employment allowed him room and board and 500 mets, or $16, at the end of each month. The problem was that his madam and he didn’t see these conditions in quite the same way. Room meant cardboard on the floor of his madam’s kitchen, and board meant dinner. If Bento failed to produce 100 mets at the end of each day, which he invariably did at least once a week, his madam considered that he’d been “looking after his own business,” which meant that she didn’t pay him his monthly wage.
Bento is one of an army of thousands of boys selling goods on the streets of Maputo and most other Mozambican towns. Here, two teenagers from Gaza Province sell used clothing, called calamidades, or “calamities,” shorthand for the government office—the Department for the Prevention and Combat of Natural Calamities—that distributed them, along with food aid, during the civil war.1
In the end, his senhora’s miserly suspicion amounted to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because he couldn’t expect to eat before the end of the day, or to receive his pay at the end of the month, Bento ended up doing as much of his “own business” as he could. With one batch of eggs safely behind him at noon, he began to hang out at the Central Market, where he could earn enough for lunch by toting around shoppers’ parcels. Whatever clothes and possessions he accumulated, he hid with peers whose madams were a bit more lenient.
Telling all this with four years’ hindsight, Bento was remarkably even-keeled. He possessed something like the opposite of entitlement, a fatalism that ran far deeper than the portraits of teenage nihilists we see on television. His was the only path Bento knew for boys in a similar situation, and he didn’t seem to preoccupy himself with its injustice. Contentment was clearly his survival mechanism, yet somehow, I still wanted him to feel the outrage that came so easily to me, the indignation of the rich on behalf of the poor.
Most of the circumstances that defined Bento’s life on arrival in Maputo were actually illegal: he was too young to work, and he was paid less than half the minimum wage. His whole industry of sidewalk vending was outlawed, and he had a “right,” as a minor, to a battery of things he did not, in fact, have. The norms were so far outside the law that it made you wonder whether the law did any good at all. Didn’t such a state of affairs simply undermine the government’s credibility on the issues where it did have some traction?
Traffic safety offers a good example of the problem. Thorough enforcement of the rules would require police to issue violations to almost ever
y passing vehicle. The law calls for all sorts of things that you do not commonly find on the road in Mozambique: seat belts, no more than three people per row in back seats, emissions control, functional headlights. In 2011, a law was passed requiring safety vests and triangles for every vehicle. Strangely, given that so much was wrong with the average car on the road, the law on safety vests was strictly and immediately enforced. Many people saw this simply as a ploy used by traffic cops to collect more bribes. In Mocuba, a small town in the north, I remember seeing something similar occur with motorcycle helmets. Overnight and without explanation, helmets were in great demand: clusters of three and four taxistas—motorcycle taxi drivers—would share a single one, trading off between fares. They did this, they said, to avoid a fine that had suddenly become the police’s top priority. Still, not a single passenger wore one, so that you might see a helmeted taxista ferrying a helmetless mother and her two children on the back of his bike, the hair of all three passengers blowing in the wind. To enforce that requirement uniformly would have brought Mocuba to a halt. No one would have been able to do their errands, to get a ride when they were late for work. Corruption served as a sort of compromise between reality and the law.
More broadly, you might say that the same was true of other forms of opportunism like the ones that weighed on Bento in Xipamanine. With so much reality in supply, the force of the law’s demand was next to nil. “The problem here is that no one respects the minimum wages,” I heard my landlord in Maputo say one Saturday afternoon, looking up from a newspaper. “In the informal sector, no one makes that.”
“Ah—yes,” his wife answered knowingly. “But who will pay it?”
Bento continued to sell eggs for seven months, until he couldn’t tolerate his senhora’s stinginess any longer. Then he found another house, in the neighborhood of Mafalala, where he sold bajia, or bean fritters, typically served on a long white roll, as the filling in a greasy, dry sandwich. Selling bajias, things were not nearly as bad as they had been in the egg house, but Bento often had to stay out until eleven or midnight to sell out, and his unconventional education continued apace. “At that hour, there’s no one in the streets. Only police and molwenes”—thugs.
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