Mozambique Mysteries

by Lisa St Aubin De Teran

  The village elders and drummers here know of all these drums, but Cabaceirians are too poor to own them. Mestre Canira is both village carpenter and the drum-maker. Bit by bit, the right woods and skins are gathered and tucked away, and one by one, as though by magic, new drums emerge to replace the simple wood frames covered with goatskin with which the village used to make do. With or without the right drums, the rhythms get played and handed down. In the absence of a big khupura, drummers beat crates, pots, jerry cans and old oil drums.

  In May 2006, when a theatre group from distant Pemba came to play in our Culture House, I think almost as many people came to marvel at the visitors’ collection of drums as came to see the performance. Since then, the drum-making here has increased.

  There are key huts where the ceremonies take place. One of these is the macuti roof-maker’s, between the college and the shore. I lie awake at night and try to decipher the tom-tom messages, but as with so many other things here, I can only guess what they mean. Some of these nocturnal sessions are so wild and insistent that I ask around next day what they were about. The answers always downplay: someone was sick, someone came of age.

  ‘It is nothing. It is our tradição.’

  It is our tradition. The message is clearer than the tom toms: it is nothing for you to worry or know about and everything to us.

  I may be lost culturally, but I know what I am doing and why I am here and I also know where I am. The latter is reassuring and not usually the case for me with my impaired sense of direction. I know that the latitude is 15°, and the longitude is 41°. I know this because it is in the name of the lodge that the local builders will erect around the lagoon of Varanda in 2006/2007. So few people seemed to know where Mozambique was, let alone Cabaceira Pequena, that 15.41, its map coordinates, were added by its developer to the name Coral Lodge.

  So I can be as precise as a cartographer or as vague as the local villagers who know that Angoche is down the coast and Mossuril and Nacala are up the coast. Naguema, Monapo and Nampula are inland via the one and only car-worthy dust road. Nampula is sixteen days’ walk away from the village for an old man and twelve days for a young one. The spice island of Zanzibar, though farther away, is somehow more familiar. A handful of fishermen have been there in their dhows. It is seven to ten days’ sailing up the coast and far away. The relatively frail dhows pull into shore each night and passengers and crew sleep in makeshift foreign moorings. The return voyage is against the wind and takes anything from fourteen to twenty-eight days to complete. Unaided by maps, a compass, any kind of engine, and with the most basic steering and a single sail, several dozen Ilhians and an intrepid handful of Cabaceirians have braved the voyage to see the one bit of the world they can see for free.

  Paradoxically, once they arrive on Zanzibar (admittedly without the necessary documents to be there), many of them are so amazed by the sheer size of its port, cruisers, dhows, warehouses, container stacks and streets, that they stay hiding by their boat for their entire stay. The general opinion seems to be that there is too much ‘confusão’ (confusion) over there. Once back home, since their attempts to describe what they have glimpsed ‘over there’ add a great deal more ‘confusão’, and since many sailors also drown, such voyages are few and far between.

  The rest of the world lies at unspecified and unimaginable distances from the comforting embrace of the shared ancestors. So, when pressed about it, Madagascar will be confirmed as being ‘out there somewhere’. Madagascar is ‘nearer than America or China’ but none can say by how much. Bicycles and batteries, spades and big knives come from China, while America is very rich and Americans have red shiny faces and wear shorts.

  When my son, Alex, first visited Mossuril in 2004, he explored the neighbourhood on the back of Morripa’s motorbike. Assuming that Morripa had always lived in his compound, and impressed by his insight into human nature, Alex wondered how someone so wise would react to ideas from beyond the confines of his village. Tentatively, and tactfully, he began to probe what Morripa might know of the world beyond by inviting him one day to explore further afield, say to the province of Zambezia or the capital city, Maputo. Morripa removed his blue knitted golf cap, shook his shaven head and announced, ‘My travelling days are over. What interests me now is to help my village travel into the twenty-first century without suffering too much on the way.’

  There was a long pause and then Alex asked, ‘But aren’t you curious about what goes on beyond this village? I am going to China next year – you could visit me, you know, just to see.’

  ‘Well, I’m curious to know what is happening in Africa, but not to travel any more.’

  Alex told me that while he was trying to find the words to lure Morripa out, the other astounded him by adding, ‘You see, I spent several years in Beira and travelled across almost the whole of Mozambique; and believe me, during the war, we got to see a lot of our fatherland close up because we had to crawl across it on our bellies. And when I first went to Russia and China, I was very excited but Russia is unspeakably cold and the Chinese are brutal. I can’t recommend your going to China. They’ll have you: get you into the army and that is where the brutality comes in.’

  Alex covered his surprise and reassured him. ‘I’m going to Beijing as a student.’

  ‘That’s what you think: it makes no difference. They’ll get you marching before you have the chance to unpack your suitcase.’

  Without giving him time to reply, Morripa mused on. ‘Cuba was nice, though. Cuba was great. I lived there for a couple of years as a military trainer and had some good times; but it took me seventeen years to get home and now that I’m here, I’m staying.’’

  In the ensuing conversation, Morripa described his life as a hostage negotiator and artillery trainer, and his escapades during the war, his tours of neighbouring African countries and his long and perilous trek home once the armed struggle finally ended in 1990.

  After that, Alex and I were both curious as to who else, sitting on the stoops of their mud huts in the sleepy village, might have hidden knowledge of the world beyond. We steered talk towards foreign parts but found no more globetrotters. However, whereas most foreign countries other than China and Taiwan rang no bells with the general Cabaceirian public, Malawi was perceived by some as the place where cars are smuggled from and where spare parts can be bought for a song. Between the seven thousand local people, there are half a dozen motorbikes (of which four are connected to the college) and approximately thirty bicycles. With no public or private transport in or out of here, over half of the population has never left the confines of Mossuril District. For the majority of these, Mossuril town (eight kilometres away) with its tree-lined streets, electricity and government offices, is the farthest from home they have ever been.

  Morripa’s brother has a pick-up truck, another villager owns a lorry, Sr Falcão from Chocas has another, which chugs past the college a couple of times a week, and Mees has a Land Rover. This is just enough cars for everyone to know what cars are. Debates about the scarcity of spare parts tend to be heated and popular. And it was what generated most response to Alex’s and my enquiries about what happens ‘out there’. Some people knew people who had been to Malawi on the convolho (railway train) to Cuamba and then over the hills by road.

  Conversation about Europe was more limited, but it was rumoured to be somewhere near Maputo. And Maputo, the capital far to the south, is a name, a place, and some people know someone who has been there or lived there. A few, like Adamji and the ferry captain, have family there. They do not aspire to visit Maputo because it is far away and they don’t know exactly where it is. They would like to be able to telephone, and, eventually, for their family to come home. Most new students at the college know the name but don’t know where it is other than that it is farther away than Nampula.

  Maputo has been the capital since the end of the nineteenth century. Before that, since time immemorial, for at least a thousand years, the capital of Mozambique was M
ozambique Island, or Ilha de Moçambique, as it is called in Portuguese; Omuhipiti in Macua. Ilha is only four kilometres away across the Mozambique Channel from the Cabaceiras, but the overland route takes well over an hour, driving along the bumpy dust road in a 4x4.

  The overland way from the Cabaceiras to Ilha is via Chocas-Mar and Mossuril, Naguema and Lumbo. Door to door, it is 37 kilometres to Naguema and then back on to the tarmac road to Lumbo, a further 18 kilometres and finally just under 4 kilometres of the single-track road bridge. This has passing places where workmen are constantly repairing the precarious 1960s structure. I have met several engineers who assure me that if I could see under this bridge and see how it is falling apart, I would never cross it again. But I can’t see under it, so I continue to cross it along with a few other cars from time to time. For well over a year now, a team of workmen have been laboriously restoring the rusting bridge. But from above, I cannot see what it is the workmen are shoring up.

  On either side of the bridge road, clusters of local workmen in overalls nurse generators and winch sacks of cement and soldering equipment over the sides. The most noticeable part of the restoration is the oil drums that have been strategically placed on either side of the already narrow bridge to slow down traffic. They work the way dodgem cars do, and get about the same amount of beating. Meanwhile, no heavy vehicles are allowed on the bridge. This includes coaches. South African and Tanzanian tours have taken to bringing groups of travellers to visit the island. I don’t think they put it in their brochures that all passengers have to get out and walk the four kilometres of road bridge under burning sun, dodging cars like the locals.

  Far as it is by road, straight ahead from Cabaceiras’ beaches Ilha is visible day and night. When the tide is out, it is almost possible to walk the four kilometres to the island’s nearest shore: almost but not quite because of the channel thirty metres deep full of sunken ships and lost souls. When the tide is low, we walk up to three of the four kilometres across the wet white sand to climb into the marooned boats and sail up to a small beach in front of the vast burgundy façade of the municipal museum. For local people there seems to be only one real capital, one real city, and it is the one on their own skyline. No government decree can detract from its grandeur or its history or reduce its popular status. Although via transistor radios, rare newspapers and rarer visitors there is sometimes talk of ‘Maputo this’ and ‘in Maputo that’, nothing that ever happens in Maputo is half as interesting to a Cabaceirian as the minutiae of what goes on in Ilha.

  ‘Maputo,’ Morripa tells me, ‘isn’t even its name. It was Lourenço Marques right up until 1976 when our then president, Samora Machel, changed its name to change its image.’

  There is scorn in his voice for rival Maputo and a visible softening as he pronounces the former president’s name, lingering fondly over consonants.

  In the Cabaceiras, life does not revolve around Maputo’s or any other name: it revolves around the tide, and around its own fishing fleet of a thousand dugout canoes and battered sailing dhows. It revolves around the market with its baskets of bread and manioc, mangoes (when they are in season) and little fist-size mounds of dried fish, onions or beans. Life revolves around the dilapidated mosques and the al’mo, the curandeiro and his or her magic powers, the leader or regulo, the feticeiro, the imam and the muezzin (who calls the faithful to prayer).

  And then on high days and holidays and when needs must, there is the metropolis of Ilha, ‘Omuhipiti’, with its Stone City of restored and ruined palaces and its Macuti City of palm huts packed together in such an unsanitary jumble that it makes the randomly scattered Cabaceiras seem like models of hygiene and planning. Seventeen thousand people live in the Macuti and Stone Cities. Approximately 80 per cent of them are packed into the Macuti City, which teems with activity. Between the mud huts there are mud mosques, market stalls, carpenters, metalworkers, mechanics and shops. Despite its shambling decay, and perhaps in part because of it, it is an exciting city for tourists.

  Like Zanzibar, its Tanzanian counterpart, Ilha is in some ways in a time warp. Unlike Zanzibar, though, Ilha is very small, and it is not just an island city but also a city island devoid of any hinterland. And unlike Zanzibar, 99 per cent of Ilha has been untouched by the addition of any modern architecture. Ironically, Ilha’s historic buildings and ruins have been preserved by neglect, thereby making the place a must for anyone who loves old buildings. On the other hand, anyone unimpressed by grandiose architecture should give it a miss. Ilha is a living museum with UNESCO World Heritage status and a dire shortage of indoor plumbing and sanitation.

  Within that mud-hut maze of Omuhipiti, every Cabaceirian can find a friendly face, a cousin or a former neighbour. But Omuhipiti is another world living at another pace. It is hectic and stressful compared to the peaceful mangroves on its opposite shore. The city has electricity and ice, cars and stereos, squares and streets, shops, televisions, policemen, and even a steady trickle of Akunha tourists. People wear shoes and have bank accounts and ATM cards; people have jobs and secondary education. The markets have proper stalls and different prices.

  The social and economic distance is too great for most Cabaceirians to bridge on a regular basis. It costs thirty dollar-cents each way to take the packed ferry to Omuhipiti. That is more than most of the villagers can afford, so they content themselves with the very occasional visit and long nostalgic memories of past trips and boat adventures with wind and waves, whales and dolphins, storms and leaks. For me too, trips to Ilha are few and far between. Most of my time is spent in the Cabaceiras, squeezed between the bush and the sea. The villages are held together as though by laboriously mended fishing nets, their inhabitants living by the ancient lore and practices of the Macua.

  VI

  The Lure of Mozambique

  THE MOON RISES TO A mysterious timetable in the mangrove. Some days, a silvery lunar ghost hovers in the afternoon sky. On other days there is no hint of a moon until nearly midnight. So the nights are either pitch dark or hooded by a sparkling canopy of charcoal taffeta flecked with gold. Over the endlessly sea-flooded land, over the mud huts, over the church and the mosque, over the bush and the beach and over the sea itself, moonbeams floodlight the speckled, glowing sky, highlighting falling stars.

  Drums beat in the background muffled by ancient trees. A random natural firework of jagged lightning flashes up from the west, silhouetting a baobab, a kapok and a palm grove. It is a dry electric storm and it is the nearest most people in the village will come to Mr Edison’s invention.

  This land is a net through which stories are sifted from the drama and magic that wash through it day by day. Poetry is as unconscious and as natural as breathing. The mysterious vein it comes from is almost untapped. A great West-African bard said, ‘When an old man dies (in Africa), a library is burnt down.’* That is how it is. Things are not written here: they (laws, stories, traditions) are remembered and handed on. As society changes, the generational chain of handing down is breaking. Although the rest of the country and the rest of the world have forgotten this African backwater, through isolation, it celebrates and remembers itself. For decades, the ancient local culture has been barely touched by outside influence. Modern Western values are virtually unknown, even modern medicine rarely encroaches on the traditional cures.

  Every day, everyone here sets out with the same dual mission: to eat and to survive. Neither is easy to fulfil. Death lives in the village as an unknown man with no face who steals the hearts of the sick and dying. Some people sleep with a knife by their head when they are sick so that if the Grim Reaper comes for them in the night, they can fight him off.

  Others say it is pointless to fight death: it is a predestined event and the shaman (the al’mo) knows to the minute and the day when each of us will die. The ceremony of burial and formal mourning lasts for forty days and ends with a celebration. Drums beat for the sick to chase evil spirits away. And drums beat for the dying and the dead and to remember the newly d
eceased. Hardly a day goes by when the drums are not beaten. The almost continual tom tom strikes me as remarkable but it passes for normal here. Ironically, the word ‘normal’ is the local Portuguese for ‘good’ when referring to a state of well-being or health. Every day, dozens of greetings follow the pattern of mutual enquiries into health with the almost statutory answer that I and everyone else are ‘normal’. Only when someone is gravely ill or has actually died does this term change.

  The landscape is lush thanks to the twice-yearly rains. From Naguema to Mossuril, most of the bush land is virgin (if a virgin, like a reformed criminal, can regain her former status after a given period of time). The land has not been used for over fifty years and trees, lianas, ferns, lilies and bamboo form a wild tangle beloved of brightly coloured birds.

  Around Mossuril, then Chocas-Mar, and then Cabaceira Grande, mud huts speckle the landscape. They are dotted randomly in small mud clearings. The finished product is invariably a two-, three-, or four-roomed hut with a palm roof, two small front windows and a door. In some clearings, a new hut will be under construction, with an intricate double framework of bamboo holding coral stones in place prior to being faced inside and out with the local red mud. In other clearings, older properties sit in a state of collapse as the mud walls return to the earth they were dug from. The huts are unnumbered and unnamed and there are no streets as such. It takes a feat of memory to remember where this or that person lives.

  Several times a week, washing is strung out to dry on a sisal line or draped over bushes. Even the laundry is decorative, consisting almost entirely of capulanas in bright clashing rectangles of bold patterns. While many of these are Swahili kanga inscribed with Kiswahili proverbs, such as ‘Jipe moyo utashinda/If you give your heart you will succeed’, few locals could tell you what the writing means. A capulana is used as a skirt, dress, towel, sheet, shawl, cover, headdress, coat and almost everything else a piece of cloth can be used for. Even the babies’ nappies are cut from worn-out capulanas. Women measure their status by the number of capulanas they have. Despite the heat, the local women wear two or three of these cloths over each other.