Perhaps I have entered this new world with such gratitude and energy because I was catapulted into its reality and its pure dreams directly from a world full of greedy schemes. Such is its spell that I, the perpetual traveller, have stopped travelling by will and now only travel through need. If I need to renew my visa, I leave the area. I go reluctantly and can’t wait to get back. By so doing, I hardly know myself: I have been a compulsive traveller since the age of eight when I started travelling to the seaside five days a week instead of going to my London school. That urge to be on the move had never stopped until I came to Mossuril.
Life in the bush for someone like me who chooses to come here is relatively easy. Even in Nampula, the provincial capital some 230 kilometres away, friends imagine my days as being filled with unspeakable hardship and want. Some are appalled by the mere idea of our not having electricity or running water. Living without modern conveniences is a challenge and can sometimes be a problem, but mostly (with ingenious and time-honoured substitutes) daily life is reasonably comfortable and the conditions improve month by month.
Now things are happening here that are a force for good; being around them is exciting. While I am growing I am helping to make some of those things happen. And my greatest luxury is that all my masks are set aside. The lack of domestic luxury is more than compensated for by spending part of every week at a beach which is a terrestrial paradise. Being here is a privilege; the hardship and want is the exclusive domain of the local people.
This is easily said because I did not live through the first months of trial and error when the systems that substitute lanterns and oil lamps for electricity began or when the various water needs were established. I was in Holland when the interim chaos was tamed. The really hard slog at the start-up was not achieved by me at all. I was just an occasional fly-on-the-wall in the ongoing soap opera of life in a palace in the middle of nowhere with a team of local villagers and a team of international volunteers. The latter was led by my niece, Ellie, who left her job as a personnel manager at a youth programme under the British Home Office to go out and administer the College for Tourism and Agriculture in the languorous backwater of Cabaceira Grande.
With her boyfriend Ramon, Morripa, and the first twenty-one students,* it was Ramon and Ellie who fought the daily battles and breathed life into the college. They and Morripa discovered the tenuous supply lines that enable it to survive. Two sacks of charcoal are now brought in every Thursday, wobbling on the back of the charcoal burner’s bike from 35 kilometres away on a bumpy dirt road. Now it is the coalman who arrives hot and exhausted from pedalling in through the heat, but in the early days it was Ramon who staggered into the courtyard after marathon charcoal runs. The mysteries of where to buy washing-up liquid (Ilha), loo paper (Nampula), salt (at the salt pans), a bicycle (Monapo), string (from the two old sisters who live by the mosque in the village), bleach (Nampula), peanuts (Nacavallo), a torch (Nampula), petrol (Naguema) and cold drinks (Chocas) are easy patterns to follow. Yet each pattern had to be discovered. There was no point asking any of the villagers where one could buy washing-up liquid or shampoo or any of the other things because decades of isolation and poverty had turned all but a handful of basic goods into unheard-of luxuries. Neither the needed items nor their names were known.
With a lone motorbike as the sole means of transport, Ramon and Ellie battled to keep the college supplied. Every day, over fifty people needed feeding in a place almost devoid of food or shops, and without a gas station. There was land, seeds and willing hands but not one gardener in the first group of volunteers. Six months went by before so much as a lettuce leaf or a blade of spinach, a tomato or sprig of parsley was sown. The students knew how to cook manioc porridge and cornmeal porridge, rice and beans. And they could grill fish. None of the early helpers were cooks, so none could show the students any new recipes. Only salt and chilli are available locally by way of herbs or spices. Only later did the few women in the village who know how to cook other things (like cakes baked in saucepans with hot stones on their lids, and duck stew, chicken in coconut, and a variety of dishes with pounded manioc leaves, peanuts and garlic) come forward to share their knowledge. Even the fishermen stayed away in the first months, unaware that a cash-paying client had finally arrived on their doorstep.
In the early days, a regimen of rice and beans was begun and for four months it was adhered to like a religious ceremony: twice a day, mountains of rice and beans were ladled out of cooking pots the size of baby baths. When Sofia, a professional cook from Maputo, arrived in January 2005 to take charge of the kitchen, she was welcomed like a returning hero. In the same village that had seemed completely devoid of ingredients, she rustled up shellfish, crabs, prawns and many types of fish. And refusing to be deterred by local lack, she located enough foodstuffs in the neighbouring towns to transform everyone’s diet. Not surprisingly, she was an instant hit.
V
Meaning and Distance
THE PEOPLE HERE ARE MACUA: Mozambique’s largest ethnic group. The name ‘Macua’ (also written as ‘Makua’) was externally applied and does not take into account many distinct subgroups. Their ancestors migrated from West Africa via the Congo basin and began reaching the southern continent soon after the first century BC. Even apparently separate ethnic groups such as the Lómuès and Chirimas are actually subgroups of Macua. Theirs is a melting pot whose past is a blur wrapped in myth. Theirs is a matrilineal society influenced by centuries of Arab occupation. Theirs is a language full of questions, emphasis, excitement and laughter.
At first, not a hint of meaning reached me from their rapidly repeated syllables. Then, gradually, words jumped out and lit the way through otherwise dark and unintelligible dialogues full of elongated ‘eeeees’ and resigned ‘ayos’ and a lot of ‘nya, ya nyas’. Spoken Macua is a branch of Kiswahili, so it is peppered with Portuguese and Arabic words. Before I came I tried to find a Macua dictionary but was told many times that it is an oral and not a written language. Despite this, I see it written down on signs and notebooks, lists and memos. It is full of ‘Ns’ and ‘Ks’. It took me some years to discover that it isn’t true about it being unwritten, it is just that most people, including hosts of its natural speakers, can’t read or write it, and it has no written literature. Rather like Old English, the spelling is still unstable: if I ask five people to spell any given word for me, they will tend to spell it (if at all) in five different ways.
One or two words can convey very specific ideas that it would take at least five times as many words to communicate in another language. For example, there is a star that comes out in the early hours of the morning, between 2 and 3am. It is called Nttharara, which means ‘star that gives to souls the perception that they must retreat to their hiding places because dawn is approaching’. Then there is a tree with a white shiny trunk called a Muthrenha-kholé, which means ‘tree that does not permit monkeys to climb its branches because its trunk is slippery’. One of my favourite words is okhwahurya: to defoliate a palm tree by removing the leaves one by one. In a village where every mud hat has a palm-thatch (macuti) roof, okhwahurya is in everyday use.
The first words of Macua I learnt to use were ‘vakháni vakháni’ (slowly slowly, or ‘bit by bit’). My saying it makes the local people laugh, it breaks the ice, it allows for a giant learning curve. And, vakháni vakháni, it helps move things forward. These two words helped to shoehorn me into the heart of this Macua homeland.
Much as I would love to become fluent in this poetic language one day, I despair of ever being so. The above is more than 50 per cent of the sum total of my written Macua. I hope that a better and younger linguist than me will come and broaden the existing lexicons and thereby help increase the written potential of Macua.
*
Through a mixture of observation and initiation, I am learning the things the local people know. It is a slow process full of mysteries. Initiation into this watery place is more by osmosis than anything else. Knowledge se
eps in, soaks in and is absorbed as by the local limestone. Then it dries out slowly and some remains. By nightfall each day, I know a little more, but I cannot isolate what I have learned: it is just there, wedging me a little further into this seemingly simple but incredibly complex culture.
Information seems to be coded. This is not done in an overtly secret way or even with covert concealment. There are numerous clues and hints, mysteries and riddles; to learn more is to follow each and every one along dead-end tracks until the Right Path is found. This Right Path is an important concept grasped by great and small. Life is about aspiring to find it, fulfilment is in the finding. There is not one Right Path for everyone, there are many and each must find the one best suited to him or her. The easiest way is rarely the right one but neither is the hardest one necessarily the way to enlightenment. In the soft-spoken way of Mozambique, in which almost every conversation is reduced to whispers, I probe local knowledge for extra clues to add to my existing hoard. Attempted shortcuts tend to result in new waves of confusion. The necessary shortcut is the one that goes from learning to feeling. Knowledge without understanding is as friable as the sea urchins’ shells that wash up on the beach.
I watch a white flurry of egrets circling the college, swooping and rising with the currents of hot air. And I watch the lone fish eagle gliding above the palm trees in search of prey in the limpid shallows, and I watch the pair of kingfishers on their daily visit to the arthritic branches of an old frangipani tree. Every bird and beast seems to know where it is going. Every man and child moves with a slow and measured determination as though edging towards a communal goal. I envy their sense of direction, both topographically and spiritually. They all seem to move without questioning their movement while my own feet are fettered by the need to know not only where I am going but why I am trying to get there. I have yet to learn to take African steps and walk by instinct.
It is an old cliché to comment on the natural rhythm of Africans and to marvel at their ability to dance. But the rhythm of life is less obvious yet equally present in their every movement, of which walking is one of the best examples of the inherent harmony between man and nature. Following in local footsteps brings home the extraordinary precision, the subconscious mathematics of movement. With tree trunks or baskets, sacks of manioc roots or sacks of coral rocks balanced on their heads, pedestrians move with unstinted grace.
As far as possible, I have stopped asking questions. I learn more by waiting and watching. Most of the villagers do not know why things are, just that they are. Asking questions disturbs the serenity of such things. Elsewhere, waiting in friendly silence has triggered verbal confidence more quickly than here. Silence is a comforting capulana (wrap) known to everyone. Although the villagers often break into chatter and laughter, none is unnerved by silence. So it has taken many months of quiet companionship to break through its barrier. People communicate on different levels and speech is only one of many. Despite my (admittedly rather scant) Western education, it is sometimes unnerving and often humbling to be surrounded by people who all know so much more than I do about the essentials of nature, life and survival. The irony of having been appointed as the helmsman to so many thousands of souls is not lost on me. Luckily, as I struggle to guide them to a place of safety from marauding poverty, none of them know that I have so little sense of direction I can get lost in my own house. If our economic odyssey were to require even the shortest of actual journeys, ours would be a lost cause were I to lead them. As it is, my guidance is merely the application of common sense and the benefit of hindsight.
The Italian comic actors Massimo Troisi and Roberto Benigni made a film together (Non Ci Resta Che Piangere) in which they play two latter-day losers who get hurtled back to the Renaissance. When they meet Leonardo da Vinci, they are able to astonish him with their ideas. And day by day they impress their fifteenth-century neighbours with their erudition, as much to their own surprise as anyone else’s. In many ways, this is the story of my life here, because most of what I can add are the things that most of us take for granted. It is easy to shine with a bag of gadgets, a digital camera, a laptop and access to the internet. When someone has never seen the modern world in action, either in real life or on TV, some of the credit for the invention of every labour-saving device tends to rub off on the person who first shows each ingenious miracle. To date, the most popular import has been a tin-opener. Some of the students bring family members to see it in action, and the admiring ‘Oohs!’ and ‘Aiis!’ must bring pleasure to whoever actually invented it, lying in his or her grave.
Only a few of the local people can read or write and only a few can speak Portuguese, the official language. Macua is spoken at home and Portuguese is learned at school. There are only two primary schools here for this population of approximately seven thousand souls. Primary school is supposed to go to grade seven, but in the Cabaceiras it stops at grade four. This elementary education is taught to classes with over a hundred children in each, with virtually no books or teaching materials beyond a blackboard and (sometimes) a piece of chalk, no furniture and no proper school building. At the end of 2006, there were over eight hundred children sharing five heroic teachers.
After four years of primary school, there is nowhere to go. There is no local school to carry children on through later grades. There is no secondary school and nor are there any jobs. Hundreds of Cabaceirian children do not attend school at all. Thanks to the unity of this forgotten society and its own internal efforts, instead of creating a cultural desert, the extreme isolation of the Cabaceiras has magnified Macua culture. Despite the almost universal lack of formal education, everyone is steeped in the oral culture of the area.
Their ancestors, known as Makholo (big people from long ago), settled here over a thousand years ago. The spirits of their ancestors live with them, guiding the people via the mukhulukana (curandeiros or healers/witchdoctors), malio (al’mos or benign magicians), and namirrette (feticeiros or shamans), recule or mwene (regulos or chiefs) and imams, the religious leaders.
The ancestors are revered, recalled, consulted and sometimes feared. Every time someone dies, they join the army of older spirits to watch over and assist, punish and advise the survivors in their community. There are good and bad spirits, just as there are good and bad people; at night, uneasy spirits roam the mangroves and catch stragglers unawares.
The sun rolls into the horizon here rather than gradually setting as it does in other places. Its disappearance is almost as fast as a fireball. Night descends so suddenly it feels as though someone had switched off the light. Miniature oil lamps are lit in bright sunlight in readiness for the daily blackout, which invariably occurs at 5.50pm.
Every day, year round, it is hot, and body movement is hampered by this heat. People pace themselves to balance what the body can bear without dehydrating. The long evenings are also hot by European standards, but the edge is off the melting sensation and an almost constant breeze rolls in from the sea. Out of direct sunlight, the villages come alive. Night markets gather round myriad flickering oil lamps in home-made tins. It is in the evenings that the bakers bring out their best bread from their clay ovens and the day’s catch is sold, bartered, shared and fried.
In the cities, people say that in rural Africa people go to bed at sundown and rise at dawn. That is a mere myth here: they do rise at dawn, but night-time is for drumming and traditional ceremonies, for gossip and courting, night markets, dancing and visiting. When eventually the chatter dies down, the drumming keeps going, with dozens of different beats and tempos. Some are accompanied by singing and chanting, while others are sombre or frenzied percussion solos.
The Macua language has dozens of words for drums. Four years after my first visit to Mossuril, I am still very much a novice in the field of identifying them. Nlapa is the generic term for a drum, but it can also be a small drum covered in lizardskin to be played by hand and never with a stick. Having taken my first step into drum identification, the rest be
came, and remains, endlessly confusing. So far, I have sifted out the following. A soro is a little drum. An ettahura is the biggest of all: it stands chest-high and has a diameter of approximately seventy centimetres. A shapumpa is a drum in a band. An ekushasha is one I have heard of but have yet to track down. A kokhorona is a big drum. An ekhavette is a big drum kept at the traditional leader’s house and used only for boys’ initiation ceremonies and the investiture of village leaders. A mkwelo is a bigger drum than an ekhavette but smaller than an ettahura.
What the rhythms and use of most of them are is still a mystery to me. The khupura, on the other hand, is barrel-shaped and covered with antelope-skin (ntthapwe) at either end and it is used for Tufu dancing all along the northern coast. The mukhunha has to be beaten by hand on one side and with a stick on the other. The evijiya is both a drum and a dance for wedding ceremonies. The mirusi is a drum and a dance. During the mirusi, the dancers become frenetic and shriek like banshees. The funereal marilo is more sedate. The erika is both a big drum beaten by women and a dance. It is used at girls’ initiation ceremonies. Like the reverberating drum beats themselves, the list goes on and on and it will take me many more years to decipher. Their rhythms underline almost every moment of every day, and although each beat conveys meaning and triggers emotion, it does so in a language impenetrable to outsiders.
Mozambique Mysteries Page 5