An established hierarchy is strictly observed here. A carpenter’s apprentice will never touch his master’s tools other than to hand them to him on request. A builder’s apprentice will never get to lay a brick or use a spatula: his job is to carry and watch. In all village disputes including personal domestic ones, the word of the regulo is law, together with the joint decision of the community committee. If the latter decides a man must walk 50 kilometres to get something for the village, then that man will walk. Each village is ruled by the fear of the shame of failing it. The pecking order is very complex and the rules of precedence so intricate that I have yet to master the half of them.
The hierarchy of those who toil at sea is easier to discern. Among the local fishermen, at the top are the lucky ones, the captains who have made (or more often, inherited) a sailing dhow. With stitched rice-bag sails and raw cotton caulking, and a coral rock tied to a rope as an anchor, they sail out farthest and catch the most fish in their endlessly mended nets. Someone has to bail out seawater every ten minutes or so with a baobab seed scoop or a severed jerry can, but even though their dhows are rudimentary and small (between ten and fourteen feet long), they are the sea lords of the Mozambique Channel.
Dhows have been built locally since before the Portuguese first came. Many captains today still, vakháni vakháni, build boats with the help of their sons. Sometimes a half-finished boat will sit for years outside a mud hut like a beached whale’s ribcage, waiting for the cash that will enable it to be clothed in wood, or to buy a handful of precious nails. Though cash is scarce, the fish is abundant and extraordinarily varied, but to get to the bigger fish, fishermen have to get out to sea. The shallows are a nursery and the multicoloured swarms are babies hiding in the mangroves. Most of the fish consumed locally are no bigger than goldfish.
I have yet to learn their names beyond the basic swordfish, tuna, marlin, red snapper, stonefish, diminutive sardines, huge and hideous garopa, and the delicious and obliging parrotfish. The latter has big blue bones so bright even a child can fillet one on the plate. In fact, the rainbow-skinned parrot fish would be perfect if it didn’t go off faster than any other. Mixed loops of small fishes beaded onto slivers of grass are the ones that get taken home, fried and eaten. Head, bones and all, the usual ration is one per person (as and when available). Given the tiny morsels of flesh on each, it is not surprising that it is always fried rather than grilled. Without these few drops of oil, people would suffer from severe muscle wastage, and the fish itself would shrink and dry on a grill.
Next in the fishermen’s hierarchy come the dhow captains’ close families, who can join in the daily fishing excursions. Next are the owners of dugout canoes. There are over a thousand of them on this bit of coast. In each one, a single fisherman paddles across the waves. They fish in groups with a shared net, or singly with a simple hook on a stretch of nylon, or a spear or a bow and arrow. What they fish with depends more on what they have than choice. When the shoals are far out (as is often the case), intrepid paddlers can be seen bobbing and bouncing on the waves by the coral reef. Since the majority of fishermen have no boats at all, hundreds of them wade out from the shore and dive with a mask and spear or a mask and pointed stick. Some of these divers are said to transform into sea creatures, which magical power gives them a social cachet.
Dozens more fishermen work in groups, swimming out with a net which they spread and then close between them. Lower down the scale are the waders. Some of these own the same killing tools as their neighbours higher up the scale but can neither swim nor dive and are thus forced to stay in the shallows. Among this lowly group are some men who have irretrievably lost their boats. Having climbed up the economic ladder, the loss of a boat inevitably plunges the owner and crew back to the bottom rung. Women are permanently placed on the lowest rung because it is taboo for women to go out to sea. They are skilled at gathering shellfish. There are numerous varieties, but they specialize in collecting translucent pointed cones and scooping out their inhabitants. Behind the women are trails of discarded cone shells. Up-ended, the sharp points of these stick out of the mangrove bed like waiting daggers and account for many a wounded foot. Grubbing around among these cones, at the very bottom of the scale, are flocks of half-naked children who paddle over the beaches collecting what everyone else has left.
On most of the days when the villagers eat well, it is a sad day for their economy because it means a catch has not found a buyer on Ilha and the fisherman is consuming his stock. A lack of boats and sails, nets and lines, hooks and masks forces most of the fishermen to take it in turns to fish. A hook costs only a few dollar-cents, but it has to be bought on Ilha on a good day, or in Nampula, 230 kilometres away. Either way, hooks cost money and the cost of the trip makes even a fishing hook yet another luxury item.
It is difficult to describe just how hard it is to get around here; how bad the roads are, and how few roads there are in the first place. Chocas-Mar is a mere six-kilometre walk away from the Cabaceiras, but that relatively short distance is like an uncrossable bridge. On one side, Chocas-Mar is firmly rooted in the twentieth century (and creeping towards the twenty-first), while on the other side, the Cabaceiras are many decades (and in some aspects, centuries) behind in their economic development. Here at the college, everyone knows that six-kilometre divide too well. We have all walked it so many times, stumbling back at night, bumping into trees and falling into holes. It is hard not to be out at night, when darkness falls before six o’clock each day.
Thousands of African villages still subsist in poverty as they have done for centuries. This is not the case in Mossuril District, where much of the real poverty has set in over the past fifty years. Before that, for centuries, this was a place where industrious villagers could thrive. The now mostly barren land was farmed, the abandoned cashew and palm plantations were in full production, markets were full, shops and boarding houses abounded and local industry included a soap and several palm-oil factories. There were schools and hospitals, and substantial wealth in circulation.
With a national average life expectancy of little over forty, there are not many survivors who can remember how it used to be when Cabaceira Grande was a grand little town overlooking the country’s former capital on Mozambique island. More local people can remember the last years of the harsh rule of their Portuguese colonizers and the confusing war years that followed.
Some can remember when a lion walked past the gates of what is now the college every day at sunset. Some can remember that the Cabaceiras were full of donkeys until, over the years, the beasts were eaten and their burdens transferred. Everyone knows fragments of their community’s past and none knows why the current tide of poverty has seeped into their village, encircled every mud hut and then failed to ebb away.
The baobab tree (Adansonia digitata, or mlapa in Macua), which is sacred all over East Africa, is said to grow for up to 3,000 years. It is taboo to cut or damage a baobab. The most important village meetings take place under its shade. All there is to know about this place must have been discussed beside a baobab. Beloved by elephants, perhaps, like the elephant, a baobab never forgets. But despite playing an integral part in the tradição, harbouring ancestral spirits and advising the village chiefs, baobabs don’t talk to foreigners.
PART TWO
VII
How I Found Mees or How He Found Me
ONE OF THE ASPECTS OF African society that I most admire is the intense support, both moral and physical, that family members extend to each other. My own family has been fragmented for three generations. It has enough steps in it to build a staircase. We are a host of stepbrothers and stepsisters, stepmothers and stepfathers, step-aunts and step-grandparents, and there is little love lost between so many of the various branches as to render reunions well nigh impossible. Since my mother died in 1980, I have sometimes felt like a tropical bud-graft that didn’t take on a northern tree. I only really feel I belong when I am with my children.
Despite
this, I have always yearned for a relationship in which I could be myself and not have to pretend to fit into a society that is, in many ways, alien to my nature. And I have longed not to be the eternal support, but instead to find a partner who is equally supportive. Ironically, I only encountered such a helpmeet when I finally gave up searching for one. And also ironically (since I had previously scoured the globe’s most exotic places in search of my Mr Right), I met him in Rotterdam. We first met while I was giving a TV interview about my debut into the world of film development, with Amsterdam as my unlikely base.
I discovered later that Mr Right’s being there that evening was sheer luck. The interviewer was a friend of his who had asked him to step in and film at short notice. Mees had more or less given up filming and had turned his hand to eco-tourism instead. After the interview, he gave me his card and asked if we could meet up some time in Amsterdam to discuss a number of documentary projects he had in mind. It was months before that happened, but eventually it did and Mees van Deth and I became friends and colleagues.
Long before any romance entered our equation, we worked together (when our busy respective timetables allowed) to develop a documentary film about the northern coast of Mozambique. We named it Out of the Woods in Mossuril, and it was to be the pilot for a series of films on places that came into being through their connection with plants and trees. A second project was to be set in Peru and based on the quinine industry; a third and fourth would have followed the course of sugar to the Caribbean and then back to Europe, and would chart how the sugar boom tangentially caused the African slave trade.
We were both based in Holland. He is Dutch and was born and brought up in the TV city of Hilversum: the place where the Philips factory made the revolutionary original television sets. It is where Mr Philips placed the first ever TV reception tower, giving Hilversum the dubious honour of having unleashed TV on to the market, thereby changing the world for ever.
While I was developing movies and documentaries, Mees was making documentaries and developing tourism in the Cabaceiras. In 2002, he asked me to go out with him and help conduct a location scout there for our pilot documentary. But the time was not right, I could not justify the cost, and I let that chance go. Some months later, when he returned and we met for a coffee, he showed me hundreds of photos taken on his trip. I remember feeling quite sick with regret at the sight of them.
I could have gone and visited that idyllic place. I could have had a safe adventure, travelling in the company of a guide who had travelled so much and seen so much in his previous thirty years as a behind-the-news cameraman that my own life looks tame by comparison. Instead of searching for likely subjects and footage from an office in Amsterdam, I could have gone and found all the material I could possibly desire out there on the edge of the Indian Ocean.
Mees was pressed for time that day and had to move on to another appointment. He gathered back his photos and I made him promise to invite me again on his next trip. I also asked him to give me a photo of Varanda: the peninsula with its mangroves and lagoon that he was buying on the northern coast of Mozambique. Back in my office, fired by all the new images of Mossuril, which arrived digitally the next day, our documentary began to take shape, and Mees also began to occupy my thoughts, independently of his camera.
Over the following year, I extracted the following about him. And ‘extracted’ is the operative word, because it was like pulling teeth. After three decades of filming all the most horrible things that one man can do to another and that the elements can do to man, Mees was on horror overload. He had taken a decision some years before to give up filming wars and earthquakes and civil strife in favour of doing something gentle and positive. He wanted to live in harmony with nature in a place where people were kind to each other. He wanted to build and run a lodge that would also benefit local people and give them the chance of a better life. He had been developing an eco-project in the north of Holland but couldn’t quite abandon his own lifelong dream of settling in Africa.
His yearning for Africa was a non-specific nostalgia and his wanting to build a barefoot luxury lodge somewhere in the southern part of that continent was a fantasy without any location. What made that vague wish a reality was finding Cabaceira Pequena. Finding it at all, regardless of any ulterior motive, was, if not a miracle, at least a chain of lucky coincidences because foreign investors can’t exactly stumble on the Cabaceiras and no film-maker had ever been that way before.
Part of his long experience as a cameraman was filming the Dutch government’s official tours. It was thanks to such a tour that he first travelled in Mozambique. The Netherlands is one of the biggest foreign-aid donors here and in 1999, the then Dutch Minister of Foreign Development, Eveline Herfkens, made the first official Dutch visit to Mozambique to see how all the money was being spent and to assess where future funds should go. She and her entourage toured the country in the presidential plane. Mees was the official cameraman for the entire tour. Thus he got to see a great deal of Mozambique in a short time and he realized that he liked it more than any of the many other African countries he had visited before.
When they visited the northern beaches, he was so struck by both their beauty and potential that he decided then and there to up sticks and move. I know very little about the three decades he spent filming, but in a rare expansive mood, he once told me this story.
We were travelling around Angoche in the minister’s convoy, and then we stopped for a few minutes to observe the view. When it was time to pile back into the cars, I didn’t want to leave, not then and not ever. I didn’t want to have to move from that coast to finish filming the tour or for anything else. I was really tempted just to give up everything else and stay on.
I’ve been filming since I was sixteen and I have never let any network down, never been late or absent when called to rush out to this or that disaster. Nor have I ever left an assignment midway, no matter how difficult, inane or untenable it turned out to be.
‘We need someone to go to Liberia and interview Charles Taylor. What is he really like? It seems no one can get to him.’
‘We need someone to go to Peru and film the Shining Path’s army in action for a couple of weeks. There are a lot of reports of arbitrary atrocities and they are not letting the press in.’
‘We need someone in Lebanon tonight.’
‘We need someone to get into the heart of the earthquake/flood/fire/war/epidemic/zone.’
For thirty-one years, I was that someone. I was lucky day after day and week after week. It seemed that the last several journalists who had tried to interview Charles Taylor hadn’t been able to get to him because they were shot in the lift on their way up to his palatial chamber. A trigger-happy guard explained this to me as he waited for authorization to send me up in the same lift.
‘You can go up, no problem,’ the soldier explained. ‘That is not the question. The question is: To which floor? Our Glorious Leader is on one floor; if you go there maybe you will also come back down again. But if my instruction is to send you to the third floor, for example, like that other journalist person last week, then open the door and: Bingo! They shoot you. Right there in the lift.’
Further conversation was halted while the candid soldier worked off, and then stifled, his laughter. Although he obviously found the mere thought of the third floor hilarious, I didn’t and nor did my crew. As a result, I found myself alone in the sinister lift. Maybe I only imagined it smelled of blood and spilled brains. It was a slow lift and, to add to the fun, the guard had not said which floor I was assigned to. As I ascended towards the mad dictator, braced for a hail of bullets as soon as the door opened, I questioned not just the validity of my quest but also of my being. No one needed to risk their life to tell the public that Charles Taylor is insane. I knew it when I went out to Liberia, I knew it when I made the appointment, and I knew it when I went up in that lift.
As a personal experience it wasn’t a waste, though, because it made me stop an
d think. The Liberian guard understood something about life which I hadn’t: we can all go up but the question is to which floor? That was the point and I wanted my life to have a point. I wanted to know which floor in advance, get there myself and pull a few hundred other people up there to safety. I made myself a promise not to take pointless risks again, but instead to do something worthwhile that could bring pleasure and not pain into the world.
Making things happen out here in the north of Mozambique is a dream that Mees embraced long before I could even pinpoint the place on a map. I am a groupie here, delighting in the achievements and findings of others. And because in so many ways I am following other people’s plans, the things I do and the way I spend my time are a leap away from the way I lived before.
As a perpetual traveller who has spent my entire adult life avoiding tourists and pretending not to be one, it is ironic that I have become not only a tourism consultant, but also the idea person behind a college of tourism. Anyone who travels in another country in their own time or in search of their own pleasure is, technically, a tourist. For three decades of world travelling, whether I like the label or not, I was also a tourist.
The list of things I don’t like about places I visit is enormous and comprises dozens of petty details as well as broader issues. A place that has no tourism, which had no tourism in the past, and which not only wanted but needed tourism in the future, is a tempting blank piece of paper on which to write a new page excluding all the small horrors and errors of other destinations. When I think of all the places I have visited where I have thought how wonderful or more wonderful they would have been ten or twenty or fifty years before, and how I yearned to have known them then, I realize that the pioneer aspect of Mozambique is one that I find endlessly pleasing. It is a great luxury to walk along paths – be they submarine or in the bush – and to know that no tourist walked this way before. No Akunha knows this or that place and this or that beach. Even my own confusion about which race I belong to has been unanimously settled here: I am an Akunha. My mixed-race status that stands me in good stead elsewhere in the Third World, and which elicits unspoken suspicion and occasional disdain in Europe, counts for nothing here. Foreigners start at Chocas-Mar.
Mozambique Mysteries Page 8