One week into the building process, I panicked and began to realize that I had grossly underestimated the work it would need. But when I saw how much the builders could achieve in just three weeks, I was amazed and reassured. It would take time, but it could be done and they could do it. The carpenters and plasterers, builders and craftsmen were surprisingly skilled. They told me that since there was virtually no work in the Cabaceiras, they had all been obliged to move to Nampula and Ilha and they had honed their skills there. Many of them had returned specially to work on the palace – o palaceu – and they were very pleased to be back with their families and helping to give pride to their village by restoring a monument.
The atmosphere was exciting. A works kitchen provided vats of beans and rice, and trays of lurid Jolly Jus and bread were carried up and down ladders to combat the heat. During break-times, workers flopped on mats all over the rubble heaps chatting and laughing in Macua. Snakes and scorpions, bats and bees were the cause of hilarity. In the absence of proper tools, the craftsmen made ingenious copies out of scraps. Every morning at 7am sharp, the workers assembled and Morripa made a speech, fanning the sparks of a collective dream into a glowing fire. There is no Macua word for a college, so ‘o colégio’ jumped out of every conversation. Some of the builders themselves enrolled as future students and many of their children were shoved through the gateway to have their names added to Morripa’s list.
Most of the workers are barefoot. Since much can be learned from observing other people’s feet, it was via patterns of scars and minor mutilations, calluses and damaged nails that I got to know about some of the workers. Another nice aspect of mangroves is that everyone’s feet are scrupulously clean. The local ladders are made of tall saplings with round rungs nailed across with 5-inch nails. It takes three men to move the tallest ladder. Workmen climb up and down its 15-metre height carrying buckets of cement on their heads while the ladder wobbles alarmingly. Together with dozens of small striped squirrels, they run across the rafters and hot roof tiles, shouting to each other in streams of ‘Eeee’ and ‘Eye-oh’ and ‘Epa! ’ The mestres (master craftsmen) keep inviting me to join them on the roof but I have no head for heights and cannot bring myself to tackle the trembling ladders. At lunch break, they try to tempt me with tales of how ingeniously the roofs are made.
‘They are works of art,’ Mestre Canira tells me. ‘There are rainwater channels built over all the ceilings in a system so intricate it is hard to believe.’
I cannot be tempted: I get dizzy standing on a chair, so I explain that roof climbing is not for me. Morripa tries another tack.
‘The view from the roof is unbelievable: you can see all the islands and all the ruined palaces for miles around.’
I wouldn’t go up if the Taj Mahal were visible from the roof. But the invitation to ascend becomes a daily taunt. The dozen or so workmen on the roof all call down to the grounded sissy while their once broken toes curl round tile ridges. When work begins on it, there is more of a garden growing through the remains of the roof than in any of the courtyards. Wild flowers and grasses billow in the sea breeze around clumps of wide-leaved ficus. Between the portico and the veranda, clusters of acacia saplings make a skyline of what, from a distance, look like television aerials.
Several times a week, like migrating starlings, we gather in the grounds and meet to discuss our future path. Many of the workers want to enrol in the college-to-be but they don’t know what a college is or what it is to be. Morripa and I try to explain that it will prepare people for paid jobs. This has to be followed by explaining what a ‘job’ is and the concept of a salary. The best way to do this is to refer to the Varanda workers because they are the only local people with steady work and a monthly wage.
Anyone over the age of fifteen can enrol regardless of their current level of formal education. Almost all the recruits are worried by the thought of going back to school. All are aware of their severe lack of education and are nervous at the thought of being shown up in a classroom. This is a country where management by fear reigns. Requests are commanded, instructions are shouted and results are consistently derided and sneered at by the ruling class. Some of the workforce has travelled to Ilha, Nampula or Nacala for work and know how the system works. Their fear of authority ‘out there’ is ingrained: they were shouted at and beaten at school, shouted at and humiliated at work, shouted at and humiliated by most of the people they come into contact with from beyond the Cabaceiras. Some, like Sumaila, who was in the army, join the college expecting it to be like a boot camp; others, like Victorino and Marufo, join with no idea at all of what it will be, while a few join with a rough idea of what it can do and a longing to be able to do it. The oldest candidate was Muanema, a lady of fifty who didn’t understand a word of Portuguese.
The sun beat down. Sacks of cement were relayed from Nampula and Monapo in trucks that charged as much to transport it as the cement itself cost. Giant bamboo canes arrived from Monapo and massive beams from Matibane. Boatloads of smaller timber arrived from Ilha. Morripa took delivery and wrote down each load, running the building site like a military operation. Day by day, he became more and more obsessed with o colégio, from the national flag that would have to fly in its front garden to the uniforms the students should wear.
In Johannesburg, a very nice girl called Pipi was gathering a group of volunteers together, vetting and selecting, briefing and equipping them to come out and start the college. In Zimbabwe, Ellie and Ramon had arrived; on standby to reach the college in September. In Kenya, Sieka was drawing up a curriculum and starting planning some of the other school projects. Sieka, the former director in Africa of AIESEC (an international work-exchange organization), would be the project director.
Everything was going well until in July something happened which to this day is a bit of a mystery. Some officials in Nampula (who had been helpful and supportive of the venture) got wind of a visit-to-be of the Minister of Tourism. For the first time ever, he would be visiting Mossuril District and, they said, ‘It would be a wonderful thing for the village and the college if His Excellency the Minister were to open the college.’ They explained that it would be a publicity coup and would give the college the official stamp of approval such a maverick venture needed to be well regarded in Mozambique.
By the time this came up, I was back in Holland but Mees was in Mozambique. He asked me what I thought and we asked the workers what they thought. The big question was: would it be possible to restore enough of the building in the five weeks left before the minister’s visit? Morripa and the workers decided it would.
Morripa explained: ‘There has never been such a visit to the Cabaceiras. We want it to take place. It is not only an honour: it is a reward for all our hard work. You are proud of the palaceu, but so are we. And it will be the excuse for an even bigger feast and there is nothing the workers like more than a party.’
Twenty-three more builders were hired and we decided to partially restore one wing and the façade.
From then on, everything began to be funnelled into preparation for the minister’s visit. Our gentle start-up was becoming a bandwagon and several elements of the razzamatazz were slowly but surely slipping out of my and Morripa’s grasp. With hindsight, we should have stuck to our own plan, invited the minister to see work in progress and gone for the down-scaled start-up we had first envisaged. On the learning curve, we will try not to be roller-coastered again.
Good or bad, we did sort of get ready in time. The effort was much too great and sixty-three workers worked flat out day and night (by choice and with overtime). When anyone complains that the local people are lazy, I know for a fact it is not true. I have never seen anyone anywhere work harder than these builders did. As a result, there are sixty-three people who feel viscerally attached to the college. It is their handiwork and they are immensely proud of it. When their family members come to visit, they are given the tour, and the ups and downs, the bee and scorpion stories are retold with re
lish. Having seen the miracle of conversion from ruin and rubble to the palace as it is now, each of the builders believes in the rest of the dream and are very good rural campaigners converting doubtful neighbours to unite and join the leap forward.
Morripa planted a hybrid palm in the circular flowerbed opposite the pillared portico; Mees and I put two rows of flags on bamboo poles on either side of the path. The villages cooked up enough food for six hundred people; the volunteers whitewashed the college walls and blew up a thousand white and gold balloons, and the workers put as many finishing touches as they could to the palace right up until five minutes before the Minister of Tourism arrived with a convoy of officials. We weren’t ready by a long chalk. Ninety per cent of us had been up all night for three nights in a row and the workmen were all high on exhaustion. The chef from Nampula who was supposed to orchestrate the kitchen from the night before and present the banquet on the dot of noon, turned up drunk twenty minutes before it was all due to be served. Since he was also the purveyor of all the salads, fruit and vegetables, there was a lot of improvisation on the various recipes. Everyone, myself included, was covered in lime dust and paint so when the walkie-talkie message from the chief of police informed us that the visiting convoy had just left Chocas-Mar, there was an unseemly scramble to change into our party clothes. From the film taken on that day, I see that in the rush I forgot to shake the dust out of my hair, and I greeted the minister and guided him around with what looks like a powdered wig towering over my head. Fortunately, I was so relieved that we had managed to dismantle the scaffolding and get hold of four kilos of ice in time that I was unaware of my hair.
The party, which had been beset by logistical problems, was further tested by extensive protocol regulations (e.g. a visiting minister has to have ice tongs, and, of course, ice, whisky glasses, champagne glasses, and all sorts of things then unobtainable in the Province of Nampula). We could ‘open’ the college, but we could not ‘inaugurate’ it, so the red ribbon that had been tied round the pillars to be cut had to be hastily withdrawn. Little things like the brand new generator breaking down on the day and the third replacement water-pump seizing up didn’t help. And when dozens of the gold balloons started bursting in the midday sun, each one sounding like a convincing gunshot, the minister’s bodyguard and police escort became alarmed.
We had the required ice tongs and the ice bucket, the correct glasses and even a costly German dinner service for forty people. And in the open kitchen, the local cooks had performed miracles on half-a-dozen hapless goats and a pen of ducks and hens. On either side of the steps, Tufu dancers were singing the visiting minister’s praises as he walked up the steps to the main entrance to claim the iced water that was his governmental right. The looks of tension on the faces of the college staff in the video taken that day reflect their knowledge that as the Big Man approached, behind them, three separate cars and a motorbike had headed off into the bush in four different directions in search of ice and not one of them had returned yet. Our joint mission was to delay the visitors for as long as possible on those steps to allow any of the four ice-searchers time to return. Hot-foot from Mossuril, the ice arrived at the moment the minister sat down and asked for a glass of iced water. The remainder of the official visit was easy from then on. Even the drunken chef staggering into the banqueting/assembly hall with a platter of three bananas as dessert for forty people didn’t really matter. Everyone was so full of goat and fish, chicken and duck, coconut rice and manioc-leaf matapa, sweet potatoes and prawns that no one wanted the dessert anyway.
The college opened on 27 September 2004, and I left it three days later, basking in its recent glory. Mees stayed on for five weeks and shoehorned it into existence. The really tough half-term was what came after he left. In February 2005, Mees returned to Mossuril for five weeks. Although he was not there to sort out the college, he stepped in and helped out a lot with the organizational work, setting up systems for all the staff and students to follow. Almost as importantly, he also got a team of gardeners going and the first vegetables were sown.
By the time I returned in the first week of May 2005, between them, Mees, Morripa and the pioneers had created something that worked and was there to stay. Having received horror stories of the monotonous diet from Mees and the staff alike, Lolly and I joined the college braced to suffer culinary torture. We took the precaution of bringing out several kilos of spices and dried herbs and two kilos of espresso coffee. Instead of the anticipated mono-diet of beans and rice, though, we were greeted by the miraculous presence of Sofia, the chef, and the equally miraculous growth of a vegetable garden with over fifteen varieties of crops.
Sofia’s son, Tigo, arrived from Maputo as a volunteer teacher and stood out from his first moment by being nearly two metres tall and as thin as a stick painting of a Masai warrior. Despite being almost as much of an outsider in the eyes of the villagers as Ellie and Ramon, Tigo tunnelled into the heart of the village by making friends with his students and striding through the bush to visit them in their mud huts so often that he turned the wary stares of their neighbours into friendly greetings. On communal quests for cold drinks, on the six-kilometre walk each way, Tigo takes one step to everyone else’s two. On moonless nights, when it is too dark to see where anyone else is on the path, I can always locate him far ahead by his intermittent ‘Epa!’, which he says as much to himself as anyone else.
At the college, he spends many hours a day practising playing his guitar on the front porch. This area has fitted stone seats that stay cool even during the hottest evenings, and it has wide stone steps down to the medicinal garden overlooking Morripa’s hybrid palm. With its view both of the ruined governor’s palace and a seashore clogged with mangroves as green and as rounded as a tree plantation, this is Tigo’s domain.
Tigo is a ‘city boy’, as at home in Maputo as Johannesburg. The countryside is a new concept for him. Yet while he transforms fishermen into cooks and waiters and laundrymen, Nature has grabbed Tigo by the throat. Together with Ramon and two of the students he discovered the joy of growing things. Baskets of fresh produce were taken to the kitchen daily, to the delight of the staff and the consternation of the students and workers, who kept getting (to them, unknown and inedible) things like beetroots and carrots, parsley and celery in their staple beans. When I tried to replace the lunchtime menu with a vegetable soup there was a hunger strike, but by gradual introduction, most of the other vegetables got eaten and even became popular. Students began to accuse the cooks of favouritism for dishing out more carrots to one than another and a handful of students began to ask for vegetables to take home.
We started the College of Tourism and Agriculture somewhat blithely based on the assumption that tourism was arriving in the area (which it was) and vegetables could grow there (which I, for one, did not know, but Morripa and his older colleagues assured me to be the case thanks to the Portuguese market gardens remembered from their childhoods). The success of our back-garden crops was a crucial step in taking everything forward to the stage when a commercial farm could pay for the upkeep of the college.
The founding fathers were all local builders and craftsmen and it was they who led the team of sixty-three peers who worked on the initial restoration of the college building. Having achieved almost the impossible and made the ruin habitable in a matter of only two months, they were intensely proud of their work. More than a job, it was a labour of love. They had all received a salary, but no money can induce a workman to work almost round the clock as they had in the last weeks before the opening. From then on, each one of the builders felt proprietorial towards not just the building but the project and every aspect of its running.
Scratching the surface of these villages unearths something akin to caved-in Etruscan catacombs in which entire pockets have been miraculously preserved. Despite the predominant illiteracy and the profound geographical ignorance of most of the villagers, some, like the mestres and a few of the market stall-keepers, and a han
dful of the older college students, know about some more general Mozambican issues from political meetings and seminars. And some of the villagers have family who have gone south and who return occasionally with fancy phones and proper shoes, wallets, shades and transistor radios. What is gleaned does not always fit together, but enough seeds of knowledge about ‘out there’ have germinated to convince a small group of local men and women that, contrary to the local popular belief, they can look beyond the here and now to the future. And by wanting it enough, that future can be better than the way things are today.
Fortunately for the college, it was people such as these, such as the Mestres Selimane, Aldi, Tauacal and Canira, Ancha Abacar, Marufo Ussene, and of course Morripa, who have inspired their friends and families to take up the challenge of ‘bringing movement to the Cabaceiras’. Without the vision of that hard core of believers, there would be no college, and its building would still be a monumental sprawling ruin smothered on either side of the pillared portico on its façade by purple bougainvillea.
The future, in general terms, is a treacherous concept. The future is a thief. It will steal sons and daughters, parents and siblings. It is the enemy of longevity. When I was a child, because I went around looking very serious and miserable, complete strangers used to come up to me in the street and say, ‘Cheer up. It may never happen.’ Here, it is as though the same people had gone round canvassing before I arrived. Be it from near or far, strains of laughter abound, together with a profound belief that the future is something that only rich people have entry tickets for.
Mozambique Mysteries Page 11