Mozambique Mysteries

by Lisa St Aubin De Teran

  On the upside, whereas anywhere else in Africa I would be doomed to be a perpetual outsider, the Macua are a vast ethnic group with no qualms about welcoming outsiders and foreigners of every race and colour into their midst. Why this should be so was explained to me in Maputo by a scholar called Dr Couto, who grew up in Nampula and knows a great deal about the heartland of the Macua. He told me:

  Most African ethnic groups are relatively small and have had to be protective of their bloodlines to preserve their culture. This made all outsiders, no matter what their intentions, a threat. The Macua, on the other hand, are nine million strong. Six million of these are in Mozambique, predominantly in the north, the other three million are scattered across South Africa, Tanzania, Malawi and Botswana.

  With a group that size, it would take a lot of foreigners to water down the race or encroach on its culture. Thus, traditionally the Macua have never feared extinction by outsiders. They are not threatened by foreigners, who can marry freely into their villages. If you are not born an Ashanti or Zulu, Yao, Massai, Ngoni, Chewa or Makonde, you cannot become one. But a woman born in London like yourself can become a Macua if a chief initiates you into his village.

  Traditionally, there was no higher authority than the village, so each village was like a small kingdom ruled by its regulo. Before our independence, Mozambique was never truly united. In places, you can still feel a society trying to find itself. Up north, the social customs are very strongly ingrained. There is no identity crisis among the Macua.

  You feel the difference when you are up north. Foreigners are welcome. It isn’t put on, it is genuine. Traditionally, foreigners brought news and goods to trade.

  I do feel the difference. I felt it immediately I arrived. People stare at me and my family, at Mees and our occasional visitors, with wonder but not suspicion. There is intense curiosity but no feeling of aggression. I would not walk around at night anywhere else in the world as I do here in the Cabaceiras.

  For those who fight against hunger, win or lose, there is no shame attached. These are villages that have retained those old-fashioned concepts of honour and dignity. Malice has found no place to take root. Particularly in rural communities all over the world, travellers discover ‘the salt of the earth’, which just goes to show that even in this corrupt and corrupted planet on which we live, integrity can prevail everywhere. Like a fragment of beautiful old Chinese porcelain washed up by the sea after centuries of lying on its bed, I have found a lovely tessera: a piece of life’s mosaic. It is a small remnant from the past, a memory of simpler times. It is my floor, the level at which I want to get out of the lift and stay. I am trying to rise to it. And despite being ‘topographically challenged’ (as my best friend, Otto, would say), I know where I am going.

  The place isn’t Shangri-La by any means, but the bad things people did to each other in the so-called civil war didn’t happen here. And the bad things done to the native people by their Portuguese overlords in the ten years’ war of independence that preceded it didn’t happen here either. Bad things happened nearby: they happened less than fifteen kilometres away, but here there is little difference between fifteen kilometres and fifteen hundred, because both are ‘out there’, out of bounds and happening in the parallel world to which Cabaceirians tend to have no access.

  Without a foothold in the economy ‘out there’ and with such limited access to the outside world, life is an endless barter. Money rarely enters the villages and thus cannot keep changing hands. Fish is bartered for coconuts, salt and palm leaves, favours are bartered for favours, time is bartered for basic materials, as everyone competes to complete the loop, to shore up the protective circle. Help is taken and given freely, compassion is an essential component of daily life, solidarity and generosity are innate. Without them, the community could not survive here in such poverty and isolation. Each and every Cabaceirian must have a passion for life in order to survive. And the quality of all these things is undiluted and unstrained.

  VIII

  Pioneering in Mossuril

  THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT OF Mossuril is unspoiled. It can boast over 3,000 square kilometres of virgin coast, wild inland woods and seemingly endless semi-abandoned cashew and palm plantations. Devoid of any industry, it is peppered sporadically with mud huts which, from time to time, fold back gracefully into the red earth that made them. The inland vegetation is lush, the climate is good, the native population is unusually friendly, crime is minimal and the vast majority of the population is unemployed.

  Part of Mees’s long-running dream to build a chain of barefoot luxury lodges in Africa is to exclude all his own complaints from thirty-one years of living almost continually in hotels and eating almost continually in restaurants. He is, without a doubt, the fussiest person I have ever met regarding what a hotel room or a restaurant needs to be just right. He is also passionate about ecology and eco-building and traditional building methods.

  As a child and then as a teenage bride, I fantasized about running away to Norway and I daydreamed of pine forests and fjords, thereby gleaning an enormous amount of pleasure from a place I have still never been to. After Norway, no one place ever monopolized my daydreams again until I began to focus on Mozambique. I love travelling, and I love to flirt with places. To the intense annoyance of some of my partners, I enjoy ‘armchair travelling’ almost as much as the real thing. So I plan endless trips I will never take and then make other trips on impulse without much caring where I am going so long as I am going somewhere. My love affair with Africa had shifted from armchair to aeroplane and encompassed much of West Africa long before I met Mees, and yet I was obsessed by the idea of Mossuril for many months before I actually went there. I became infatuated with the place. As with any new love, I found ways to bring its name into conversation and to talk about it (from a standpoint of extreme ignorance) at every opportunity. When Mees went back there in 2003 to complete his purchase of the Varanda Nature Reserve, I was more than ready to join him, although my overt reason was to do a location scout for the documentary/travel project I had been developing sight unseen.

  Because of such intense anticipation, I was not surprised when my own reaction to Mossuril was as immediate and overwhelming as Mees’s had been: I didn’t want to leave it, and I knew that I would return soon and begin to shape my life to incorporate living somewhere on its calm lackadaisical coast. For all that, my first visit wasn’t particularly calm because it was packed with things to do and people to see. Gathering information for my Mozambican documentary, I interviewed several local dignitaries, including Sr David Joel, the then District Administrator. Word travels fast in a small world and he had heard that I was a writer. As such, he begged me to help bring schools to his area. I told him, as gently as I could, that I wrote books and developed films but I didn’t do schools. One day, far in the future, I might be able to help with a library, but schools were another matter. He laughed in obvious disbelief and asked me to think about it. His parting shot was to tell me: ‘There are over seven thousand people there and not a job between them. I am afraid what will happen to this nice area when all the children you see now grow up and have nothing to do. That is a dangerous scenario. I think you could do something about it.’

  Back in Holland, his request weighed on me. I was already working fifteen hours a day seven days a week on my other pursuits and I knew nothing about schools. In fact, the very word ‘school’ still gave me the shudders. Having to attend parents’ meetings at my children’s schools had always felt like torture. I had hated school for 90 per cent of the time when I was obliged to attend one, and I had gone to great lengths to escape the daily classroom ordeal. Yet the District Administrator’s plea continued to prey on my mind.

  I did some nocturnal research into existing charities and aid developers and compiled a vast list of aid organizations working in East Africa. Then I wrote a tremendous number of letters, bringing the plight of the Cabaceiras to their attention. Only five of the fifteen hundred letter
s I wrote got a reply and only one (from the then CEO of the Millennium Challenge) gave any concrete assistance (in the form of advice) by introducing me to the head of Planning and Finance in Maputo (Dr Couto, the erudite Macuist). It seemed that no one wanted to or would help. Yet by writing all the letters (hundreds of which were actually just copies of the same), I had found a cause I could not let go of.

  Describing to potential donors what could be done to help, a plan had emerged which didn’t actually look too hard to execute. There were three ruined buildings that could house three separate schools: primary, secondary and a tourism college. All they needed was some pretty simple restoration and each would be ready for use. It wouldn’t even be particularly expensive since the buildings were massively built and still structurally sound (give or take the odd corner). If no one else would do something, Morripa, Mees, and I decided that we would do it ourselves.

  Trying to sell the idea of helping Mossuril to the experts, I learnt as much about Mozambique as I could, the better to state its case. I confess that when Mees first broached it, I knew very little about the country except that it was opposite Madagascar and once had a guerrilla leader called Samora Machel, who grinned out of the bush in his camouflage fatigues with an incredibly alluring gap-toothed smile. I knew that this very short, vivacious leader became the president of liberated Mozambique and was subsequently assassinated in a plane crash.

  Somewhere, in an archive, I knew there was documentary footage of Samora Machel’s military campaign, fought by men and women, many of whose leaders were poets, short-story writers and essayists. Jean-Luc Godard had worked in Mozambique on a documentary project. Machel was one of the most filmed fighters in history. His was a literary government and after a long armed struggle, the writers and freedom fighters had beaten the CIA-backed South African Police Force. Other than that, I knew next to nothing about it, except that it was dirt poor and had suffered a calamitous flood.

  On closer analysis, courtesy of the internet’s limitless gush of statistics and reports, I saw how desperately poor Mozambique had become and what crippling damage its so-called civil war had caused. The invading opposition forces had systematically destroyed the infrastructure: schools, health centres, hospitals, roads, rail tracks and bridges, factories and warehouses. One and a half million Mozambicans died in that war, which is still called a ‘civil war’, but which was a country fighting outsiders to maintain its hard-won independence. The South African and Zimbabwean invaders left chaos and landmines in their wake.

  Despite the enormous damage, and the military and civilian casualties, Mozambique was clawing its way back into economic growth. Seventy per cent dependent on foreign aid, it had a track record of good governance and a longstanding president, Joaquim Chissano, who had been one of the literary fighters and also the first prime minister to Samora Machel’s presidency after the war. (In 2006, the 70 per cent dependence on foreign aid finally dropped to 50 per cent thanks in no small part to tourism booming in the south. The country is finally on the road to recovery.)

  With a few rather notable exceptions, such as the murder of the journalist Carlos Cardoso, the country also seemed to be actively fighting corruption. Having travelled widely in West Africa where high-ranking government hands seem to be dipping into almost every public kitty, I thought this in itself was tantamount to a miracle, if true.

  I gathered great mounds of information and sifted through them in my spare time. As usual, much of what I downloaded was contradictory, but a general picture of drastic underdevelopment emerged and I was able to devise a development project for the Cabaceiras that would try and address some of the contributory factors to its poverty. Morripa and the village committees had given me lists as long as my arm of all the things they and their children needed, which ranged from water to schools, jobs to food, a road to a football pitch. A couple of the projects, such as a sports field, were not essential to other elements of the list working, but most were so inter-related that it began to seem pointless to develop one without the other. The more I looked at what other development organizations were doing, the more I saw how each seemed to focus exclusively on one area without either cooperating or collaborating with another.

  The most important goal was to make our plan work and to make its positive results lasting. We were a bit like pirates on the high seas or bandits in the woods. We were unorthodox and out of order (the latter according to many working in the field that stopped abruptly at Naguema and rarely ventured down the dirt road to Mossuril, thereby not touching the Cabaceiras). Some observers pronounced that we were rank amateurs and doomed to fail. One expert, who did take the trouble to visit, but with the sole purpose of sneering, announced, ‘Your project will be a piss in the ocean. You have nothing except ideas.’

  Putting aside his overt hostility and gratuitous rudeness during the remainder of his visit, his verdict was correct, albeit not how he had intended it. We are not trying to change the world; what we want is to show a tiny part of it how their world can change from within. To do so, what we most need are ideas.

  Meanwhile, onlookers from Ilha and Nampula jeered that it would not be sustainable. The word ‘sustainable’ is not one used in normal daily conversation. Yet it has become the key word in the field of development endeavours. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on ‘sustainable’ projects. Hundreds of millions of dollars are lost and wasted as most of the projects, in the sub-Sahara at least, fail and are reclaimed by bush, dust or desert.

  Between us, the villagers, Mees, Morripa and me, we came up with a strategy which reflected the needs of numerous different sectors of the villages plus the overall needs of the villages as a whole. Our plan is a bit like a novel: it has a beginning, a middle and an end; it has a cast of thousands. It is divided into self-contained chapters all of which link into a central story. It is a fairly cinematic novel with a classic Hollywood ending. It has been said that the essence of any film story is the following: ‘Somebody wants something badly and is having trouble getting it.’ We have so much of that essence here we could bottle and market it. We had our ‘goodies’ (the villagers) and ‘baddies’. The underdogs unite and rise up to beat their cruel overlord. In this case, that overlord (the arch-baddie) is Poverty.

  Because the plan grew from inside the village and is designed by the villagers themselves and their hereditary and elected leaders to give the local people what they need and want, it will not be rejected by them as foreign or alien intervention. There are actually some extra bits, like a nursery school, a public library and ornamental gardens, which are ones that I want, but the rest of the project comes from the grassroots, from listening to people like the Varanda workers, the village committees, fishermen and local students, as well as the local government officials in various sectors.

  I used all of Mees’s contacts, thereby speeding up my access to the corridors of power in Mozambique. And I was able to leapfrog a couple of years of hard slog by using all his research and plans to bring infrastructure to Coral Lodge. Where possible, I have milked my own network of eminent advisors and friends of friends to bring professionally informed advice to bear on each part of our plan. I have been very lucky in meeting experts from all over the world, and they have been very patient and generous in letting me pick their brains.

  Morripa has had the benefit of many years abroad and thereby acts differently from, say, many other Mozambicans on the up. Having had to go through the transition himself, he is very aware of how gently his peers must be treated in order to guide them towards having confidence ‘out there’ in the world beyond the village, and also taking responsibility and initiative for and in the future. To find guides with both the patience and compassion to do this, he suggested bringing in new blood because ‘with it could come compassion, a luxury not many Mozambicans found the time for’.

  In an ideal world, we need experts here. The entire district is crying out for a medical doctor. There are nearly 200,000 people scattered over nearly 3,500
square kilometres without one. And we need tropical farmers, and people who can teach management skills. And we need English and nursery-school teachers, waiters, cooks, barmen and a football coach. We need a micro finance expert, a librarian, an herbalist, a computer wizard and many other specialists. But the world is far from ideal and we had none of the above as we prepared to start the college. However, we knew that we also needed international volunteers, and they, at least, would prove easier to find.

  In the spring of 2004, I began to look for an existing organization with dedicated volunteers to join forces with the community college-to-be. The idea was to bring in groups of a dozen at a time with bursts of energy and enthusiasm to work side by side with Morripa and his team to groom small groups of local men and women for the jobs that Mees and his colleagues, and any other local hotel and restaurants-to-be, would later make available.

  Meanwhile, Mees was busy daily with his hotel development, both in Holland and also in Mozambique. Any problems we encountered out in the bush proved minimal besides the endless bickering and nit-picking that went on between the development consortiums behind the scenes back in Holland. The battleground shifted several times as sordid corporate coups sometimes undermined both of our efforts. But we grew closer together by sharing the goal of making things happen in the Cabaceiras. Each time his business partners threatened to abandon the project, thereby breaking all the promises they had made to the village, we found ways to keep it going.