Go Tell the Crocodiles

by Rowan Moore Gerety

  When he returns home, Bento says he wants to try to attend eighth grade in Vilanculos, about fifteen miles from his house. When he was younger, the prospect of coming up with the money or the means of transport to get to school there intimidated him. Now, he says, if he had a bicycle, the school fees wouldn’t be a problem. He’d sell firewood, or anything at all, he said, to pay for school; any decent job requires a high school diploma.

  On that note, Bento led me out into the dirt courtyard, through the narrow concrete alley that bounded the house, and back into the street. It was nearing five o’clock, and he needed to collect from his delinquent customers before they went home for the night.

  The following week, I asked Bento if I could come along on part of his sales route to see how the business worked. He agreed to call me when he reached Baixa (pronounced BYE-sha), Maputo’s central shopping district. Each day, he traces a grand rectangle that runs from Mafalala down to Maputo’s port, through Baixa, and back out to Mafalala along a different route. It seemed like an awful lot of ground to cover to sell fifty muffins over the course of an entire day, somewhere in the neighborhood of eight or ten miles. I wondered why Bento didn’t sell something else as well. Throughout the city, the sidewalks teemed with itinerant men and women selling a single item—cigarettes, phone credit, shoelaces, sunglasses, peanuts, ice pops, bananas, pens. It seemed like a lost opportunity. How could you “upsell” your customers, or attract new ones? Not everyone wanted a muffin; why not sell cigarettes?

  Every economy has its riddles: a Mozambican in the United States would surely gape at the working televisions that line the sidewalk on trash day, or drinks that cost the price of dinner. Bento said he had sold phone credit in the past but that it had created problems with his senhora; he didn’t want to be accused of taking care of his “own business,” and risk ending up on the street again.

  The informal economy in Maputo is long on labor, short on trust, and short on capital. Risk aversion—be it fear of unemployment or fear of loss—is a powerful force in the milieu that Bento inhabits. Those like him who spend their days working for someone else must constantly guard against giving off the impression of disloyalty lest they end up without a place to sleep. Even those who use their own capital for sidewalk vending generally live hand-to-mouth. Most vendors in Maputo participate in informal credit groups called xtik (pronounced shteek) to put aside whatever savings they can. Bento contributes 10 meticais every day to receive 300 in a lump sum at the end of the month. It is a challenge to keep enough money around to accumulate any kind of a diversified inventory: today’s profits must always go to tonight’s dinner and tomorrow’s supply. Everyone stands to lose by theft, getting duped out of four dozen eggs, having phone credit snatched out of your hand, or seeing the police confiscate your goods altogether.

  All of which converges on a bizarre sort of efficiency in sidewalk commerce, akin to the uniformity of gas stations or fast-food chains at the other end of the spectrum. When competition is tight, change and innovation are often too costly to consider. Instead, everyone ends up with a business that looks much the same as their competitors’. On the sidewalks of Baixa, it’s often the simplest rig you could imagine for the task at hand: the hardboiled-egg vendors carry eggs, plastic bags, and small reused gin bottles of salt, chili powder, and vinegar, all arranged on a square of egg carton; peanut vendors have flat, circular baskets piled with peanuts, a stack of newspaper wrappers, and different-sized plastic caps to measure out their sales; muffin vendors carry muffins. In the little portion of Baixa where I lived, shoes and clothes dominated the sidewalk, and you could often chart the time elapsed since the last passage of the municipal police by looking at the shoes for sale on the pavement. If it had been more than an hour since the cops came by and told the men to clean up, ladies’ heels were lined up in rows, sorted by size and style. If the cops had come more recently, the shoes were piled high and haphazardly. Every time the police came, the vendors hightailed it around the corner, carrying their merchandise on their backs, only to return a few minutes later.

  Bento beeped me with a missed call at ten thirty the next morning. By the time I went out to meet him a half hour later, I was surprised to see that he had already sold every last muffin. Before him on the sidewalk stood a shiny see-through octagonal bucket. “Amigo!” he said warmly, offering me a firm grip. What’s with the bucket? “My senhora got it for me. I kept telling her that the customers couldn’t see what I’m selling.” Bento had noticed the buckets months earlier, swinging in the hands of some of his peers. In the few days since he’d had it, his muffins had been selling more than twice as fast, and he sometimes finished before ten a.m. Innovation had paid off.

  Around this time, I decided to buy Bento a bicycle. Only part of me believed that it would help him go back to school. It just seemed like he could use a break. We met up on a Saturday, and I walked with him on the last part of his route, which had been seriously curtailed since he began selling from a clear bucket. He introduced me to two of his regulars, young women working at a cosmetics store, and turned bright red when they began to tell me what a good boy he was. Two blocks later, Bento tried to collect from a man washing cars on the side of the road who had eaten a muffin early in the morning. “I told you to come at noon,” he bellowed, rag in hand. “There’s no work! How am I supposed to pay you when there’s no work?” Bento reasoned with him.

  “Ya, it’s not that, John. . . . It’s just—I’m finishing early.” The man reluctantly dug up a coin, which Bento secured inside his second pair of pants.

  At the store, Bento fell immediately in love with a BMX bike, which, he said, was like those of the “filhos de ma-John-John,” the sons of ma-John-John. He gripped the handlebars approvingly. Ma-John-John are the Mozambican miners who work across the border in South Africa. Historically, miners’ repatriated wages have been of huge importance to the Mozambican economy, and they are (rightly) seen as rich men in the poor rural areas where their families live. There’s a chain retailer called Kangela (it has an outlet in Vilanculos, near Bento’s home) that caters specifically to miners and their families. The men make orders and pay at kiosks set up at the mines in South Africa and pick up the goods when they come home on leave, using a green slip of paper redeemable at warehouses throughout the southern half of Mozambique. As if the status conferred upon the miners by their purchases were not enough, they often visit the warehouse to make the pickups with the whole family decked out in their Sunday best.

  The storekeeper did not want to sell us the BMX bike. “It’s too small,” he insisted. “Tomorrow, you’ll come back and say, ‘The bike broke, the bike broke.’ No good. He needs a bigger bike.” I worried about finding spare parts, and for a moment, I tried to nudge Bento toward a more conventional choice. A single model of bicycle prevails on the roads outside Maputo—a full-size Indian-made gentleman’s bike with a spring-loaded baggage rack and longhorn-like handlebars. Hero was the brand. I knew, from observation, that they could be made to last nearly forever. At a national park, I’d seen a cache of fifty or sixty Heros confiscated from poachers who rode them through the woods to go after warthog and antelope. Elsewhere, in the countryside, you can commonly see three people teetering over gravel on a single bicycle. Heros haul sacks of charcoal and goats to market. They continue to roll long after the plastic pedals have begun to disintegrate and the seats have worn through. If Bento managed to keep from getting his bicycle stolen, it seemed like Hero might be a good choice in the long term.

  The storekeeper was a tall, grizzled Pakistani man in his sixties. His wife, standing by him peering out from behind a head scarf and a pair of soda-bottle spectacles, reached the middle of his chest. Impassively, the two of them watched us deliberate with their hands folded on the glass counter. Bento wasn’t interested in the Hero. Again, the man refused to sell the BMX. He shook his head adamantly and shuffled papers by the register.

  In the end, money prevailed, and the storekeeper relented. “You
promise you won’t come back?” he asked as he filled out my receipt.

  “Today, I am happy,” Bento said. We rode back to Mafalala, and he vowed, unprompted, not to take the bike out of his house. He would wash the wheels and take the air out of the tires and leave it in the closet, he promised, so that it didn’t get picked up by any molwenes before he got it back to Pambara.

  Bento poses with a cell phone and his new bicycle in the courtyard of his senhora’s, or madam’s, home in Mafalala, a neighborhood on the periphery of Maputo.

  The month before I met Bento, UNICEF released a major report on the state of child welfare in Mozambique, based on a “deprivations” approach, which considers the various “deprivations” that can interfere with a child’s healthy development. The overall picture was better, the report said, than it had been several years before, but on the whole, the findings were dismal. Half of Mozambican children suffer from chronic malnutrition, and more than two-thirds of schoolgirls said that some teachers require sex in order to pass their classes. Only a small portion of the report deals with child labor, which is prohibited outright in Mozambique. It found that 15 percent of urban children and 25 percent of rural children worked, and that most working children also attended school.

  From the perspective of a casual observer, these figures were optimistic. It seemed to me that far more children worked and far fewer attended school than the report let on. But interestingly, the report showed similar levels of school attendance among children who work and the population at large. I wondered whether this would be true if the same children didn’t work: Would they still be able to go to school? Who would pay for their books and uniforms? While I hung out with Bento, I returned again and again to the assumption underlying the report’s discussion of child labor: would he be better off if he hadn’t been able to sell muffins? Certainly, Bento would be better off in a world where his best option wasn’t selling muffins, but that world seems a long way off. I wondered whether he’d ever considered it. It was obvious that Bento’s stint in Maputo had included moments of trauma. He’d lost a good chunk of his childhood and been through experiences that would be best avoided by adults and children alike. By the time I met him, he was a veteran of difficult circumstances. But with his pluck and determination, it seemed that he might turn out all right.

  In the last week of September, I left Maputo by train and took a roundabout route to Tete, in the western reaches of the country, where there is a multibillion-dollar coal-mining industry taking root. Bento and I stayed in touch sporadically by phone. In the Mozambican way, our calls never lasted more than thirty seconds or a minute, out of tacit concern for running out of credit. In November, he said he would be in Pambara for Christmas and that I should call if I passed by on my way back south. I did, but I got a robotic recording instead, known, colloquially, as a liga-mais-tarde, or “call back later.” Call-back-laters are not very specific. The same message may mean that someone’s phone is off, that it’s in an area without service, that the line has been disconnected, or simply that the network is having technical problems, which it often does. I continued getting call-back-laters every time I tried him for the next month, when I left Mozambique, and each time I’ve tried him since.

  The last time I saw him was in the afternoon, a few days after we got his bike. Once I met Bento, I seemed to run into him everywhere, and on this day, he got my attention from the other side of a highway that cuts into the center of Maputo on a long, steady incline, its two sides separated by a wide drainage canal. “Aaaamiiiigo!” Bento shouted from the opposite embankment. I looked over and he waved with his whole body. We stopped to chat on either side of the canal, crouched halfway down the sloping concrete banks. Bento was running some errands. Sales were good; his senhora was impressed with the bike. He assured me he hadn’t taken it out of the house. “Ya, okay,” he said. “We’ll talk.”

  I didn’t find out whether Bento made it back to Pambara for Christmas until years later. I’d held on to a phone number for his senhora’s daughter, Bemvinda, though, and she was one of the first people I called when I was back in Maputo at the start of 2016. One morning, I made my way from meeting a friend in Sommerschield, a leafy neighborhood of ambassadors’ residences and tall cement walls, to the house she shared with her mother in Mafalala, along a narrow sand street by the airport. You can chart the wealth of each neighborhood in Maputo by the produce on offer in the street, from Sommerschield’s welded steel carts heaped high with butternut squash, pineapple, and imported grapes, to Mafalala’s meager displays of green peppers and pale cabbage laid on crude tables made of pallet wood.

  Bemvinda was waiting outside, cell phone in hand. The home was just as I remembered it. Midday sun poured in through a window onto pink walls stained with soot. Bento’s senhora, Essina João Chambe, sat on an overstuffed armchair patched with bits of woven plastic rice sacks. The television sat on a tall mahogany shelf next to a carved wooden cat; a refrigerator stood on a pallet in the corner. Chambe is a slight woman with a proud bearing and a soft smile. She had come to Maputo in 1989 after her husband died, leaving her with three small children to raise and feed in the midst of the war. A few brothers and sisters had already followed fortune into the capital, so Chambe came too. She quickly found work as a maid, first with a Portuguese family, then for Swiss, and then for Italians. For a time, in the early 1990s, she’d left her kids with relatives and followed her employers back to Italy. They wanted her to stay, but she couldn’t stand being apart from her children, and she returned within months.

  When I asked how she’d gotten started hiring boys like Bento, Chambe replied, “Life.” By the late nineties, bills for groceries, books, and school clothes gradually outstripped her maid’s salary, and she began to bake muffins at night after she returned from work. Bento—the family called him Dino—was among the last of ten or fifteen boys who have stayed with her since 2000, selling her muffins by day. “I tried to treat them like my own kids, because I already knew what suffering is.” By Bento’s account, at least, she did cook good meals for them. The kids spent their evenings watching TV or playing soccer in the street, as her own children would have done, and yet, they also slept outside on a small mat.

  Bento had come to the house for the first time with another boy who was already living there. He said he’d been mistreated with a previous madam, Chambe recalled, so he moved in, and the two of them sold together for a time. In Chambe’s memory, he’d stayed for only two years. By my count, he was there for more than three. He left for South Africa at the end of 2014, after going home to Pambara for the holidays, to live with an older brother near Johannesburg. Bento, I thought, was finally old enough to become a ma-John-John. When he left, I was glad to hear, he still had his bicycle. “He tied it up so neatly!” she said, a glint in her eye. “That boy has judgment!” Bento had earned less than $40 a month for his work. And yet, Chambe said, with the pride of someone all too familiar with the juggling such a tight salary required, “With the little I gave him, he managed to buy things.”

  Bento had fallen out of touch with the family since he left the country, but he’d stopped by the house just a few weeks before I did, Chambe said. He was on his way home for Christmas. “He’s already grown!” She beamed: a broad-shouldered nineteen-year-old with a deep voice striding through the doorway a boy had left less than two years before. He called her Vóvó, or Grandma. He seemed happy, energized, she said. “I said, ‘You, here?’” Chambe recalled, giddy. “‘E pa! You remember me?’ He said, ‘How could I forget, Vovó?’”

  Acknowledgments

  This book owes a great deal to the generosity and goodwill of the Mozambicans whose lives are recorded in its pages. They gave freely of their time, their insight, and their convictions, a debt that no amount of writing could repay.

  I hope my endnotes, too, serve as acknowledgments unto themselves, of the scholars, journalists, and others whose work has shaped my understanding of Mozambique’s place in the world. I am gratef
ul to the Fulbright Program for making my travel possible, and to Jermaine Jones, at the Institute of International Education, for graciously allowing me to veer off course without reproach.

  In Mozambique, I relied on the companionship, guidance, and hospitality of countless friends and strangers alike. In particular, I wish to thank Paulo, Julio Khonamumba, Beto Vasco Vares, and the other Woodcarvers of the June 16th Collective; Casimiro, Muanhua, and Fernanda, in Quarterão 16; Ahmed and Ali, in Bombeiros; and Father Marcelo Anggo in Liupo, each of whom helped me begin to understand a different piece of Nampula. Many thanks to Osório, whose warm welcome, creativity, and book recommendations enriched my time in Tete immeasurably; to Silvia Cheia, for her help in navigating MDM; and to Lídia Lópes, whose good cheer brightened many a day in Maputo.

  Emiliano and Lúcia da Silva let me into their family and shared their lust for life (and love of kizomba) over the course of many feasts on the terrace behind their apartment in Baixa. Conversations in their living room jolted my curiosity and offered a taste of Maputo I will not soon forget.

  My fellow students and researchers at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane all made the Centro de Estudos Africanos a truly welcoming and inspiring environment for a newcomer; most of all, Elisio Jossias, who humored me through constant tweaks to the focus of my research and helped me make valuable connections to scholars throughout the university. Roberta Pegoraro, David Morton, João Feijó, and Nadia Esteves each sharpened my Portuguese and curiosity for Mozambique with valuable feedback and encouragement early on. Kory Russell, Emily van Houweling, and Wouter Rhebergen became fast friends and opened their doors on my arrival in Nampula. Thanks also to John Haas, for picking up the first story I filed there.