Some of the patterns, like the lurid green tulips on a yellow and brown background (‘Let words be brief and actions great’), do not reflect any sub-Saharan shapes, but many of the others are copies of the patterns found on shells and animals and the intricate weave of leaves in the jungle. The overall effect is always astonishingly bright. Every group of wayside stragglers, every market, every gathering or group of passengers swaying precariously on the back of a chapas (a truck or pickup offering communal transport) presents a striking picture. The use of colour is so unrestrained it pushes all concepts of compatibility of shade and tone into oblivion. A painter might strive for years to achieve such an effect and yet a child of five here knows intuitively and effortlessly how to pick out wild and wonderful colours and wrap herself in them. Alas, I have yet to acquire that knack. My attempts to dress in the local style result in my looking like a mad parrot. It is not something I do often, but for funerals and traditional ceremonies, for instance, I try to make the effort. If nothing else, it lifts the spirits of the workers here, particularly the women, who laugh till they double up each time I try to copy their grace and style.
A rose may be a rose, but to a gardener nowadays there are so many roses that the generic term is a poor description. Nor will ‘a rose by any other name’ necessarily smell as sweet. In fact, there are relatively few roses from among the numerous modern varieties that smell at all. So too the term ‘mud hut’ identifies a type of dwelling yet fails to take into account the seemingly endless permutations available within such an apparently tight parameter. There are different qualities of mud (matope in Portuguese and mattophe in Macua) and many different kinds of frame used to support it. Thatched roofs also vary not just from region to region but also from village to village. The various qualities of palm, straw and reeds, the thickness, arrangement, pattern, overall shape, binding and finishing are surprisingly complex. The mud huts of Mossuril that seem to have been thrown together are actually carefully crafted using traditional building methods handed down from mother to daughter. It is the women who build the mud huts here and the women who own them.
Almost every aspect of human behaviour is dealt with autonomously in the local villages. Universities and government departments, Western culture, thought and might, from Plato to Christianity, from Nelson Mandela to President Bush, seem scarcely to have touched anything but the surface of the way of life here. A few of the older men and women, and a few more of the children, can understand and speak Portuguese. Some villagers can also read and write in Portuguese, but it is not the lingua franca along this coast.
For as long as the oldest villagers can remember, the staple diet has been manioc and maize (both originally imported from South America) instead of the indigenous millet. Local markets also sell little sachets of flavouring: Jolly Jus for soft drinks, and Benny, chicken stock in a yellow sachet with a red hen on it; both are imported from or via the Arab Emirates. A typical kitchen is a small outside area of compacted mud where grain is pounded in a giant wooden pestle. Every household has such a pestle and a portable water container (or two or three), one or two saucepans, a knife and a plastic bowl. Food is cooked over a simple wood fire and eaten on the same rush mat that will later be used as a bed. All food is eaten with the fingers of the right hand only. (Woe betide he or she who blunders into the communal pot or plate with the left. Although no physical violence would follow, or even any verbal condemnation, anyone who eats with his or her left hand is deemed irrevocably disgusting.)
Sport-wise, the notion of football has arrived. Young men who migrate to Nampula or Nacala cities in search of work bring home tales of football heroes. Football T-shirts are highly prized from among the charity bundles of clothes that flap for resale in Chocas-Mar’s mini-market. The names of players and teams are bandied around the village by boys who have never seen a football game (be it on a pitch or a TV) outside of Mossuril District. Wherever they can, bored boys form clubs and challenge each other on bush-clearings and beaches. And whenever they can, barefoot younger boys kick home-made footballs around in the red dust with passionate flair.
Long before the Arabs arrived to trade and later colonize Mozambique Island, the Chinese were there bartering Chinese goods for gold and ivory. Through the centuries, a few Chinese families stayed, quietly trading. After Mozambique’s independence from its Portuguese rulers in 1975, the People’s Republic of China stepped into the breach. Ever since, the city markets have been flooded with cheap Chinese goods, some of which trickle down to rural areas. When he or she can afford it, a villager will buy a plastic Chinese torch with fat red and white Chinese batteries. In this land of foreshortened lifespans, the ridiculously short lifespan of such batteries is accepted with resignation. Batteries that die in under an hour are the only available ones. Such things are luxuries; light comes from other sources. It comes from the moon and the stars and from tiny oil lamps recycled from tin cans. Paraffin oil is sold from beer bottles in most markets. It is ladled out and the price is per ladleful. Although no one can recall when it happened, at some point this imported paraffin must have replaced the once locally obtainable whale blubber. The ingenious tin lamps are fashioned locally and yet, despite costing less than five dollar-cents each, few families own more than two of them, and most treasure a one and only miniature lamp. These paraffin lights burn and flicker like fireflies in the mud huts and the night markets.
Yet even imported goods such as paraffin and rubber (which filters into the village as thin strips, called corda pneu, cut from a used car tyre and prized by those who can afford it as ties for palm thatch) bring only a general sense of ‘out there’. When pressed, a villager will explain that the rubber strips come from Jambeze, Namialo and sometimes Nampula, and paraffin comes from Mossuril, Ilha and Monapo.
‘How does it get there?’
‘By lorry from Nampula like everything else.’
Only Arabia really has a place in the local psyche. Arabia, where Arabs come from, where money first came from, where rich people live, where Islamic edicts (such as when Ramadan will end) are issued by radio, where there are endless fields of sand and whence dates are sent annually to the market on Ilha to sustain the faithful.
‘Alham lililá.’*
The Arab colonization of the north-eastern coast of Mozambique, which started approximately a thousand years ago, has left indelible marks. Every village has a mosque; every graveyard has some crescent moons and sickles carved into its headstones; every village has an ethnic (Arab-Macua) mix. On the executive committee of each village, besides the African witchdoctor and chief, there will also be a local Koranic scholar. And up and down the coast, in mud huts, there are Koranic schools. In the absence of other schools beyond fourth-year elementary education, the latter are often the only place where children can truly become literate. And in a place devoid of libraries or bookshops, or newspapers, the Koran is often the only available book to study and read. Local men – be they dressed in flowing Arab-style robes and embroidered skull caps (kufia) or second-hand T-shirts, jeans and faded baseball caps bought from the charity bundles that find their way into every street market – always greet each other in Arabic.
‘Salaam alaikum.’
‘Alaikum salaam.’
Although Arab colonization has left its mark, the changes wrought by contact with the West and by Portuguese colonization seem to have had much less impact. It almost looks as though the Portuguese influence was limited to building palaces, churches and villas and planting trees. The landscape is full of semi-tended or abandoned cashew plantations sprinkled with giant mango trees and studded with ruined Portuguese buildings. Buildings and trees alike merely form a backdrop to the rural African life that takes place in and around them. So the Portuguese ruins have become like grandiose termite nests: they are not demolished, nor are they used for anything, although sometimes a mud hut will be built up against one. Mostly, they will be left to the elements as ficus and mango, neem and cactus grow over each ruin and cover
it up.
There is a central government in Mozambique, and there are strong provincial and district governments, but for the everyday running of the village, not much trickles down from Maputo or Nampula or Mossuril to hold the fabric of these rural communities together. There is, on paper, a Portuguese legacy of laws, rules and regulations. Theoretically, every step of every day requires written and stamped approval. But in a place without enough schools or health posts, housing, water or transport even for government employees, the local (often illiterate) Macua-speaking population lie beyond the system and the system is too antiquated and cumbersome to adapt and bring its lost members into its fold. Numerous local people do not know what the laws of the country they live in are, nor do they speak or understand the official language of their own country, and some still do not have documents that officially make them members of that country.
It is not the constitution that provides certainties for many, particularly northern, Mozambicans. Certainties are provided by nature and by custom. The sea will fill and empty, the sun will rise and set, the muezzin will call to prayer five times a day, getting through the day will be hard, and if any help is needed, that help will only ever come from family and friends and the guidance of ancestors. And if the going really gets tough, the village chief, the regulo, will sort things out, with or without a little help from the feticeiro.
The Cabaceiras are small coastal villages ruled from within. The seat of power here, untouched by thousands of years of strife towards democracy elsewhere, is strikingly democratic. As in many other parts of rural Africa, democracy has been achieved by an alternative route which did not start its journey in Greece, nor pass through Rome, London, Paris or Washington, and owes nothing to Rousseau or Locke. Not only have African villages like the Cabaceiras evolved their own democracy (which is so integral to everyday life that it is taken for granted and seems to have no special name, nor to be the rallying point other nations make of their democracies), these same so-called ‘backward’ villages have a form of democracy that works, that truly represents its people, that gives the chance of equality to all members of the community, and pre-empted the notion of a welfare state by several centuries. Without all the razzmatazz of hustings and election campaigns, and the political fanaticism that has devastated the rest of the world for generations, the villagers here sit under a tree, discuss whatever problems they or the villages have and sort them out.
But for the blight of poverty, this could be a political utopia. As ‘buts’ go, it is a big one. It is a battering ram of a ‘but’. It makes a mockery of the culture here, of the people, of their leaders, of their children and of so many of their hopes and dreams. Out of sheer greed, the West, in all its glory, imposed this poverty on these and thousands of villages like them. In a place where words were bonds and land was used but not owned, it was easy for Europeans to steal every piece of land in sight. Desmond Tutu summed it up when he said, ‘When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.’ When the Cabaceirians opened their eyes, their land had been tied up via contracts written in Portuguese legalese.
It is impossible to visit any town in north Mozambique without noticing the presence of merchant Indians. Behind the till in almost every shop, the face you will see is Indian. In many African countries this is the case, but here in Mozambique the Indian diaspora dates back to the ninth century when Mozambique Island was, albeit briefly, under Indian rule. In the days when travel and trade were predominantly by sea, Ilha’s strategic position on the main trade route to Goa and India lured numerous Indians not only to trade but to settle on the island. Although the overall power of the Indian settlers was later usurped by the more warlike Arabs, the Indian legacy remains to this day. The majority of not only shops but also businesses are owned by Indians. Only a handful of these are actually the descendants of the early settlers; their ranks have been swelled both by Indians from India and also by immigrants from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, to the point where the Mozambican-Indian population is a powerful social and economic force.
Particularly in the north, black Mozambicans tend to be poor and Indian Mozambicans tend to be wealthy. When the Portuguese rulers were expelled, they had forty-eight hours to leave and were allowed a maximum of five suitcases a piece. Thus they left behind them enormous quantities of goods and stock, selling what they could en masse in that brief time-frame. The only Mozambicans in a position to buy up such stock were the Indians, who stepped right into the breach, thereby enormously increasing the economic disparity between themselves and their black compatriots.
At a more general level, the Indian cultural legacy is widespread. Rajah curry powder is the most commonly used spice; Indian fabrics and patterns are sold on every market, together with the Tanzanian kanga. Local craftsmen carve Indian patterns into their Macua sculptures and local silversmiths along the entire northern coast craft Indian designs (which they believe to be Macua) in the filigree pendants and earrings, belts and necklaces they make. Although the extended Indian families tend to stick together and intermarry from within their group, over the centuries there has been enough Indian-African miscegenation to leave a noticeable ethnic mix. This is evident even in the Cabaceiras. Our mangrove guide, Ibraimo’s wife, Sara, is a light-skinned, green-eyed Indian, whose wealthy Ilhan/Nampulese family renounced her for marrying him.
In this dramatic continent, the Cabaceiras are a dramatic setting in which the real world includes a world of spirits, and the mundane and the miraculous constantly interact. Evil spirits, diavos, hover in the mangrove and randomly possess passers-by. Once a diavo has installed itself in a host body, anything from visiting a hospital to eating a four-legged creature can activate it. Whenever an apparently insane person comes crashing and screaming through the palm groves, bystanders scarcely look up from whatever they are doing, despite the victim’s screams and eventual convulsions. Each time I witness such an attack, I ask in alarm, ‘What is it?’
Someone will shrug and say nonchalantly, ‘Diavos,’ as though no further explanation could possibly be needed.
I am always left wondering if the victim is actually possessed, or if he or she just thinks so. With every muscle in spasm, is there a difference? No matter where in the world we are, we all seek certain truths, sift fact from fantasy, and attempt to define our lives.
When Antonio, the newest of the college guards, asked for an advance on his salary to pay the local witchdoctor to remove the giant stone that he claimed was weighing him down and racking his gut with pain, who could say if such an inner weight existed or not? Antonio had been to the hospital and taken a conventional treatment to no avail. As he insisted it would, the traditional ceremony cured him. How or why it worked remains a mystery. But Antonio is back at his job. He is one of the happiest of all the workers because the leap he has taken has been the biggest.
At the age of nine, as the son of poor parents on Ilha, he was sick and received an injection at the hospital. That injection accidentally paralysed both his legs. For the next eleven years, he hauled himself around on the ground, dragging his chest through the dust as he propelled his torso and withered legs with his hands. Despite his disability, he attended school and is fully literate, conversant in Portuguese and good at maths. In 1995, after the so-called civil war, the government gave him a wheelchair. When both his parents died, he was reduced to begging on the streets of Ilha. He spent most of every day in the bald square opposite the bank, catching people as they emerged from the palatial bank building with a little fresh cash in their pockets. Unlike most other beggars on Ilha, Antonio was always extremely polite and not in the least pushy. Attracted by his gentle charm, I would sometimes get into a conversation with him, which, one day, developed into a plan. Shortly afterwards, he and his wheelchair were carried onto a dhow to sail to Cabaceira Grande.
Working here at the college is his first ever job
. I think, as much as the work and the sense of community, he is happy to have his own room, three meals a day, a place to wash, and to have left behind him the humiliation of having to beg to stay alive. He is a devout Muslim and quickly joined the faithful at the mosque that borders the college grounds. As a fully literate storeroom guard, he is extremely useful here and, because of his enforced immobility, he is also learning to help prepare capsules of medicinal herbs for the college pharmacy. His is a Cinderella story: it isn’t so easy to make such a huge and immediate improvement in most of the local people’s lives.
Socially, he has livened up the local chatting sessions. As a storyteller, he takes some beating. He had to perfect the art to captivate his audience and win them over from a distinct disadvantage. He already has a little circle of younger listeners (Antonio is thirty), who regard him with awe for being here at all. It is as though he had the power to fly, as though some powerful magic has stuck to him because overnight he has joined the privileged ranks of the live-in staff. From being a homeless beggar he has jumped to having sheets and blankets, a clothes basket, a lantern, a bristle toothbrush, his own towel and soap, and a chair. Few of the students have such things at home; their mud huts are bare. In their eyes, Antonio might be crippled but he has got what it takes; so they hover around him and listen to what he has to tell because maybe that way some of his luck will rub off on them.
Mozambique Mysteries Page 7