Ibraimo and the guides were chattering as they walked. Some of the time it was clear that they were joking but their laughter sounded hollow in the night air.
After a while, I couldn’t help asking myself what exactly I was doing there. My only answer was that, despite vowing not to, I had, unashamedly, come seeking adventure. It was exciting, because like Mary Kingsley in West Africa and Dr Livingstone in Malawi, I was aware of being somewhere where other travellers had not been. Unlike the intrepid European pioneer travellers from the past, we were not venturing into an unknown continent, nor would achieving our goals add anything significant to the world’s existing stock of knowledge, but at a personal level on our mini-voyage of discovery, it was exhilarating.
Who can say to what degree life influences art or vice versa? Aged fifty, I certainly still don’t know the answer. All that is clear is that for me the two forces are inextricably entwined and regardless of what initiatives I take to lead a more ‘normal’ existence, it seems that adventure and I will continue to walk hand in hand. Like a Vaudeville player who has retired from the stage, I am now making yet another ‘last comeback’.
Quite suddenly, Ibraimo stopped and pointed to the other two guides, who were shorter than the rest of us. When he pointed out (in Macua and sign language) that the tide had risen over their chins and was still rising, the exhilaration turned to rank fear. We had been wading for well over an hour. We could not turn back and we could not go on. We clambered onto a sharp coral rock shaped like a field mushroom and crouched on its cap while the current swept in.
The water level rose swiftly and steadily. For the first fifteen minutes or so as we squatted on our rock, Ibraimo and the two guides seemed to find this hilarious. Their laughter and banter was reassuring. As time went by, the tide kept rising and more and more of our perch was submerged by fast swirling water, and the three Macua men grew increasingly sombre. At the point when they fell stoically silent I began to see that it was really in the lap of the gods whether we made it to dry land that night or whether we drowned. There is a Macua proverb that says, ‘God is truly the judge of all things,’ but if we drowned, we (the akunha) had dragged the guides with us, which was a sorry thought. Having just been sitting in Ibraimo’s house with some of his eight children, the idea of turning them all into orphans on a whim made our night jaunt look like a terrible mistake. While I sat on that rock, I am glad that I didn’t know then, as I do now, how many local people drown every year in the tide. Nor did I know that one false step can be deadly because it is riddled with whirlpools and sink holes.
Because the locals were afraid of their wilder ancestors and marauding foreigners whose malign ghosts supposedly lurked in the mangroves, I kept trying to persuade myself that our guides were really more afraid of spirits than the incoming tide. The minutes of waiting expanded into smothering tension too fraught to deal with. I opted out by imagining myself to be a mere observer of other people’s plight.
As the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuściński observed, time moves very slowly in Africa, because it doesn’t really exist in the same way as it does in the Western world. Days drift by in a continuum altered only by natural daylight and dark. Occasionally, something happens, and time clusters round that event. It becomes a momentary excitement, it gets inordinate attention, and then it slides into the collective memory as a landmark: a point in time.
In general terms, once you accept the concept that things are neither fast nor slow, that they just are, it is incredibly relaxing. It is as though a straitjacket has been removed and hitherto unknown dimensions reveal themselves. Alas, I had not yet slid into that rhythm; it was still only two days since I had taken the long-haul flight from Amsterdam to Johannesburg. The consumer bonanza of South Africa’s number-one airport was still fresh in my mind and I was still fully into measuring time according to my Western medium. In the eerie moonlight, on our two square metres of coral island, it seemed clear that we would all be there for quite a while. So I used the interlude to observe and think.
For reasons I could not explain at the time, my thoughts were unusually clear and I felt exhilarated. This is a known effect of being in a mangrove. The plants have air roots which generate so much oxygen that it has the combined effect of making you high and intermittently knocking you out into the deepest and most peaceful of sleeps. As I had walked through the water, I had several times had to fight the urge to slip under and sleep, as one might in a warm bath. On the rock, I got the other side, the zinging, extra-alert effect.
Once my own fear factor subsided, I realized that I had sloughed off years of tiredness in less than an hour and I began to enjoy my predicament. My mood stopped on its road to euphoria every time I remembered that the villagers had watched us trudge past their mud and macuti (palm-thatch) huts that night with expressions which had struck me at the time as more like dread than ‘Cheerio!’ The ecstatic greeting we had received from several hundred jubilant villagers when our dhow was pulled to the shore had turned to something else entirely when we proposed wading through the mangrove. As we set off, my ability to partially read other people’s thoughts either let me down, or the thoughts got lost in translation. I had thought: We are breaking a taboo and they are trying to scare me, rather than seeing that we were breaking a safety rule and the villagers were scared for our lives.
The memory of those looks, combined with the stoic but obviously growing gloom of our guides and my guilt towards them, began to unnerve me. When I mentioned this to Mees, he was very sanguine about it all, but he had spent thirty-one years as a news cameraman amid war, earthquakes, floods and riots. He suggested that, since we would probably have to stay on our safe haven for at least another hour, we crack open the box of patisserie I had bought that morning in Nampula. At which point, I remembered that I not only had my laptop and a box of cakes in the carpet bag I had been carrying on my head as we waded along the underwater path following the guides step by step like lobsters on a migratory path, I also had a thermos of coffee.
So we unpacked our little picnic and the five of us ate in the moonlight. Our guides had probably never seen a thermos, coffee, a confectionery box or a chocolate cream sponge before in their lives. I thought they were shy when they refused second helpings of both the cake and the pre-sweetened espresso. With hindsight, people who have lived almost exclusively on fish, corn and manioc must have found my delicacies quite disgusting. Had I looked more closely, I would probably have seen them discreetly dropping the slices of chocolate sponge into the raging sea.
Despite having travelled widely in search of a home, I have lived more as an experienced somnambulist than an active member of any society. Years of training have allowed me to get by while half my senses are asleep. That night, in a moment of truth, I found there was something so completely incongruous about drinking espresso while perched like a gannet mid-sea, in an environment in which I was to all intents and purposes nothing, that I woke up to life as though to a revelation. Far away somewhere, a screech owl staked its claim to the silent night and packaged the moment, so to speak. Above, the sky glittered with more stars than I had ever seen before.
The tide eventually turned and instead of surging on towards the village, it began to move decisively back towards the sea, summoning all its slipstreams and rivulets. As the Macua say, ‘The sea has emptied again.’ Everywhere, nature adapted to its rule. Millions of crabs scuttled across thousands of rocks. Perched on our jagged outcrop, we were like giant crabs: dependent on and irrelevant to the majestic tide. The sensation of physical harmony with the surrounding was like another kind of wave. When the water finally ebbed enough for us to go on our way, slipping back into the tepid water was a sensation I cannot describe without the inevitable Californian overtones, because it was like a rebirth, a new baptism. I was a minuscule and insignificant part, but every part of me recognized a visceral, cerebral and spiritual affinity with that watery domain. So I knew, even then, before I had seen the stillness and beauty of where I w
as to go, that this wild and wonderful place was the place for me.
Three hours later, standing on the edge of a lagoon cradled by white sand – with nothing but the murmuring ocean and whispering casuarina trees, swathed in warm air – I felt a huge relief knowing that all my days of running and seeking were over. This was what I had been looking for; and one day I would return to live and (hopefully) eventually to die there in that ancient, silent, magical place.
II
Dream Catching
I JOKE SOMETIMES THAT I don’t drive a car because I am driven. In fact, I don’t drive and I am an obsessive seeker of goals. I was always looking for something and I didn’t know what that something was. I just knew, intuitively, that I’d recognize it when I found it. Find it I did in a place called the Quirinthe Peninsula just beyond Cabaceira Pequena on the northern coast of Mozambique. It is a place so remote that few have visited it since the time of Vasco da Gama.
Local legend has it (with some corroboration from history books and some embroidery, no doubt, by the local community) that Vasco da Gama stopped on Mozambique Island (Ilha) and asked for water from the massive Arabian reservoirs there. The islanders pretended that they had none to spare and sent the Portuguese captain to neighbouring Cabaceira Pequena. He sailed the four kilometres of the Mozambique Channel and demanded water from the thriving Afro-Arabian trading village on the coast. Supposedly, a fight broke out between two of his unruly sailors and the local Cabaceirians, who refused to give their precious water away without due payment.
So a thirsty Vasco da Gama sailed away again, to return the following year for vengeance. Together with a small fleet, he bombarded the hapless Macua-Arabic village, razing its coral-stone warehouses and buildings to a pile of rubble. To this day, the bleached coral ruins remain.
Since then, few foreigners have been back. Across the mangrove, only three kilometres away, the Portuguese colonists built several palaces and both lived and traded in Cabaceira Grande for over two hundred years until their show town slipped back into the bush. At the turn of the twentieth century, having beaten the rebellious native population back into submission, they tightened the yoke and took up where they had left off, asset-stripping Mossuril for the greater glory of the King of Portugal. It was not until 1975 that Mozambique managed to free itself of the ensuing Portuguese colonial rule. After the colonists were unceremoniously expelled once and for all, the people left the Portuguese legacy virtually untouched. The villas and palaces of the former masters stand abandoned, the soap and palm-oil factories are derelict, cashew plantations grow untended, and former farmland has reverted to bush.
However, in the first wave of colonization, back in 1569, the Portuguese built a stately church in Cabaceira Grande, which stands intact to this day, wedged between the seashore and a palm grove. This church of Nossa Senhora de Remedios has a garden of giant lilies beside it, around the tomb of an unknown conquistador. After the Portuguese left Mozambique over thirty years ago, the jungle crept quietly back over the village and pushed it back to a level of mere subsistence around the abandoned palaces and the church, which are the only testimonies on its mass of mud huts to it ever having been a town.
Meanwhile, its sister village, which had been the victim of Vasco da Gama’s revenge, never recovered and sank further and further into obscurity. With its stocks and stores destroyed, it had nothing to sell. There was nothing to give and nothing to take.
Out to sea, the lighthouse of Ilha de Goa beams its intermittent guidance to passing ships. The lighthouse is zebra-striped. There are no real zebras left here in the hinterland. Along with all the other game, they were outrun by hungry villagers in the years of famine when the rest of the country was at war after independence. It looks as though what is left is a half-memory: the zebra stripes are maroon and white and the only hint of black is where the annual rains have mildewed lime. The lighthouse itself is a relic from the past. After dark, the four-kilometre-wide Mozambique Channel is the exclusive domain of submarine creatures. On this once famed trade route, ships used to find their way to Mozambique Island and then Zanzibar and Goa, guided by the Table Mountain visible on the horizon. By day, fishing dhows and hundreds of dugout canoes bob on the normally tranquil surface. Long ago, by night, the sole light of Ilha de Goa steered ships away from the perilous coral reef. Now the lighthouse continues its slow blink and the treacherous coral rocks are still underwater in the narrow Mozambique Channel, but no ships pass by day or night.
Around the full moon, a colour spectrum bleeds, seeping red, yellow and violet bands into the sky, tinting passing clouds a watery magenta. Around a full moon there is no need for a torch or lanterns, no need for candles or oil lamps because the moonlight is bright enough to read by. But for over a week around each new moon, no invisible hand throws the cloth of stars and it is so dark that on night walks one stumbles into trees and mud walls.
I am wandering in the dark, feeling my way, getting hopelessly lost until Morripa, my friend and guide, leads me back once again to mysterious tracks known only to him and a few hundred closely related and mostly forgotten Cabaceirians. Morripa is the most mysterious of all the inhabitants here. His call has anchored me among the mangroves. By association, he has washed a veneer of acceptance over my otherwise outlandish status of Akunha. His guidance steers me through all of this unknown territory. It is he who has assembled a team here and who finds most of its new members. From Adamji to guard, Fatima to cook the beans and Mestre Canira to make doors and windows, shelves and chairs, Morripa is the recruiter. Like a conjurer, he can find most things. Unlike a conjurer (and given the dire isolation of this spot), he needs a few days for each request. But with that time (and by paying up-front plus transport), and by using his enormous network gleaned in his other lives, he can come up with anything from a bull to a helicopter, a tractor, a rabbit, a dinner service, tarpaulin, computer cable or anything else one can think of.
Without knowing it when I first met him and pledged my support to his cause, Morripa is also a fellow dreamer and a fellow writer, workaholic, insomniac. While appearing to be the gentlest of men when, for instance, talking tête-à-tête with one of his twenty-seven children, there is also a fierce side to him which rarely shows. I know from his war record that he has been trained to strike deadly blows. I have seen his face set and his eyes narrow a few times and thereby seen why it is that no one messes with him. Mostly, though, in situations designed to provoke a saint, he stays incredibly calm and conceals all emotion, becoming as near invisible as flesh and blood can be. Lurking under the surface of all his diplomacy there is defensive violence, an iron will, a lot of poetry and a pureness of heart that often imbues mere proximity to him with spiritual feeling. If he were Jewish, he might be considered a Just Man, carrying the burden of other people’s woes. But he is Macua through, and through, and he lives as a dream-catcher devising plans and schemes for himself and his people and making them happen.
Together, we are learning to pace ideas and actions. There are three of us, Mees (my partner), Morripa and me, sharing a vision too unlikely for many of our peers to see. By trial and error we take two steps forward and one step back in a dance whose steps we are partly copying and partly inventing. Sometimes Morripa or I shoot out in a false direction in what we call ‘Bridge over the river Kwai syndrome’. Then a simple action mushrooms into a feat of engineering, labour and sacrificed energy only to collapse shortly afterwards. Mostly, though, we have found a good rhythm and a balance between talking about things, planning them and actually getting them done.
I am on the edge of the known world, surrounded by seawater yet not on an island. Twice a day the tide floods the mangroves enclosing villages. The Indian Ocean is so pristine here it is clear enough mid-channel to see thirty metres down to the seabed. Starfish, occasional sea urchins, corals, lobsters and sea creatures ranging from grey blobs to marlin, dolphins and whales inhabit the channel. To sail over them seems like watching an endless Discovery Channel documentary cl
ose up on a wide screen. Only at sea are we truly equal: if the leaking dhow capsizes, we will all drown. The sea is no respecter of persons. Although high winds bring the same gloomy fears to all the passengers, the crossings are usually relatively safe. So long as the bailer keeps bailing and the crew and passengers keep shifting their combined weight from side to side, laughter echoes across the waves from the various boats. Fair winds trigger hilarity and foment excited debates.
After my first dozen crossings, the women perched at one end of the dhow ceased to stare at me with anxious wonder and their emaciated menfolk ceased to resent my presence on their boat. Akunha are supposed to charter their own vessels. The four battered local ferries are the domain of native Cabaceirians. A couple of times, in the early days, I was challenged by the captain of the early ferry as to why I was trespassing. When I explained that I had come to live among them and therefore was not, technically, an outsider, the captain pointed out that I could never be one of them because I was rich and they were poor. One early morning he told me, ‘This ferry is for local people only. The price [ten MTS = forty USD cents*] is for us. You have more money so you should pay more.’
One of the other passengers, an old man from the village with bloodshot eyes and a scar on the side of his neck where something nasty had obviously been surgically removed, stood up for me. The captain listened to him attentively and even half-smiled at me to encourage my continued efforts on behalf of his village, but he stood firm on his first point: ‘The Akunha can afford to pay more, so she should.’
Several other passengers agreed with this, while a few others joined my scarred and aged defender. In the typically democratic manner of village meetings, with a dhow acting as a forum, the captain then turned back to me and invited me to share my thoughts on the state of our relative wealth. By this time, we were quite far out to sea, so stepping out and running to Morripa for his usual protective mantle was not an option. He takes Draconian measures against anyone who attempts to rip off me or the college we are creating. I supposed I could stubborn it out and refuse to pay more money but a mixture of feelings surged up and all of them pointed to the captain actually having a good point. Alone on that ferry, wedged between a flock of skinny people in rags, I could afford to pay more to sail to Ilha. The captain and crew worked hard for their pittance. Whenever a boat was becalmed, the crew would row, if need be, from shore to shore. And lastly, the charter fare for tourists sailing from Ilha was 400 meticals, which was forty times more than I was proffering and the wizened captain was rejecting. I capitulated and doubled my fare, thereby pleasing all but my champion who grumbled about my lack of spirit the rest of the way. However, the captain was delighted and took it upon himself to teach me Macua in return for my largesse. This he did, and still does, imparting words very slowly and with firm condescension as though my failure to speak his language is the proof of my mental inadequacy. He nods encouragement to me as to a dog with a stick.
Mozambique Mysteries Page 2