Mozambique Mysteries

by Lisa St Aubin De Teran

  The reluctance that Anglo-Saxons have to gloat does not exist here. When someone is right about something they underline it, frame it and tell it to the four winds. So I got a lot of ‘I told you so but you wouldn’t listen’ lectures over the next week.

  That was the worst thief we have had. The temptation here is enormous: very poor people have daily contact with hundreds of items, any one of which could alleviate their own dire straits. I see it more as a triumph that relatively so little has been stolen. To date, not counting the one in prison, two students have been expelled for repeated petty theft. One kept stealing food from the storeroom and the other stole clothes from the laundry and sold them. The latter was another opportunity for Morripa to tell me that I had been warned. The young man in question is a very bright, sweet person who looks much younger than his twenty-one years. He is popular with the other students and had done everything he could to attract my favourable attention by bringing plants for the gardens and helping to tend them in his spare time. He learnt English quicker than most of his peers and showed every sign that he would make a star pupil. That is until he was arrested and thrown into jail for stealing three coconuts.

  It turned out that the theft had occurred before he joined the college but his case had been complicated by a gang from Matibane, who carried out a jail break on the day our student-to-be was due to leave the jail. He had walked out with the escapees and was subsequently re-arrested. At the point I became aware of his problem, he was stuck in Mossuril jail and facing an eight-month sentence.

  Every day his mother trudged the sixteen kilometres to Mossuril and back to take her son some manioc porridge. And every day she came to the college in tears to beg me to help her boy. I hated the thought of him in the dark smother of a cell with nothing to do but pine and weep. From the little I have seen and heard of prisons here, they are not the sort of place where a nice young boy should be. I also knew that poor people ended up in jail for very petty thefts, such as stealing a chicken or falling foul of a wealthier neighbour. And I felt sure that, given the chance, he could turn out well and be a credit to the community. So I paid two hundred dollars to bail him out and allowed him to join a team of trainee waiters. But in the intervals between serving drinks, he slipped in and out of the walled garden and stole clothes from the washing lines. I was actually very sorry to see him go. The village committee expelled him, though, and despite his and his mother’s tears, this time there was nothing I could do.

  If this were somewhere else, and if there were not thousands of people who don’t steal and who need help, and if there was enough money to invest a little in bringing someone back from the edge, I would still like to help him. Every child I have ever known, myself included, used to be a petty thief. It is part of our growing-up process to leave theft behind us. This particular student hasn’t done that and instead he has thrown the chance of a decent future away. I wonder how it would have felt if, for instance, on one of the (many) times my sisters and I took a knife to slide sixpences out of our mother’s piggy bank, or when we stole stationery from school, we had been caught and thrown into jail and ostracized as thieves. Would or could we have gone on to contribute something positive to society?

  But this is a poor underdeveloped country where chances are few and far between. And his two-hundred-dollar bail could have bought two families a new house each, or sent several children to school, or bought fifty mosquito nets and saved hundreds of lives. The fear that the former District Administrator had, when he begged me to bring schools to the area, was precisely this sort of story: a good boy goes to the dogs, turns to petty crime and then spirals into never-ending trouble. Meanwhile, I cannot appear to condone his crime and neither can I go against the wishes of the community. But nor can I forget how dazed and broken he looked when he was in jail. Without the college, his is a hopeless case.

  We don’t have any programmes for helping to bring lost sheep back into the fold but, since Don Mattera in South Africa can turn the most hardened criminals into ministering angels, maybe we should. Meanwhile, the Cabaceiras continue to police themselves and provide their own Macua welfare state, feeding the five thousand with their little fishes. There are no beggars here, and despite severe sub-nutrition, no one actually starves. Nor is there a single homeless man, woman or child. Not many places can say the same.

  The villagers rarely come into contact with the police or the courts, but if they do, their innate submission and lack of education keep them at a constant disadvantage. By law, they are entitled to a duly qualified counsel for their defence, an advisor who can explain what their rights are and how they should plead. In practice, there is none of that. With so few local people being able to understand, let alone speak, Portuguese, and with the florid legalese of the courts, they are doomed. The only way they can avoid the brutal prisons is to pay a fine and the fines are far beyond their means. Despite never having been much of a rider, I find myself leaping onto my high horse all the time now, deflecting sneers aimed at my new neighbours and sticking up for the rights they don’t even know exist.

  Morripa has a way of shrinking back into himself like a sea creature retreating into its shell whenever the college falls under verbal attack. I should probably do the same but have not yet mastered the technique. As he quite rightly points out to me when a verbal skirmish is over, within Mozambique we don’t have to defend ourselves. Anyone can come and see, and the success of what the village is doing can speak for itself.

  Vakháni vakháni, I am trying to reserve my weaponry for outsiders who occasionally visit under the false banner of pretending to help while actually adding to the woes of the local people (who need such cruelty like they need a hurricane). Three times now, outsiders who are no strangers to spite have actively undermined the project. Each time my paternal grandmother’s Carib blood and its legacy of non-forgiveness rises in my veins. Since it is I who have guided these outsiders in, I would joust for the villagers’ success if need be.

  Before Mees came here, back in 1999, there was no health centre at all in Cabaceira Pequena. Since the village regularly becomes an unreachable island, some kind of autonomous medical post was a priority. Even when not cut off from the tides, there is no qualified doctor in the whole of Mossuril District, with its 189,000 souls. But in Cabaceira Pequena, when no one could get in or out, people died of gangrene from infected cuts. And people died of malaria and gastroenteritis for want of treatment that was readily available elsewhere.

  To this day, people die and are wrapped in their winding cloths and buried and no one really knows what they died of. The cause of death on their certificate will give some cause or another, but sickness/disease (doença) is a general term. It would be more honest to write ‘neglect’ as the cause of most deaths here.

  In a tropical village with a population of over three thousand people, a simple health post is only a first step towards dealing with the serious local medical problems, but it is a big step in the right direction. With a health post, wounds can at least be disinfected and covered, malaria can be treated, fevers can be lowered and diarrhoeas and vomiting curbed. Eye infections can be cured, and so can numerous skin diseases. Even though all the above treatments are administered by a nurse and not a doctor, that nurse can, at least, recognize the most common and recurring complaints and treat them. In the absence of any other health facility of any kind, under the previous owners the Varanda Project paid for a health centre, which the villagers then built.

  In 2003 (in fact during my first ever visit), this was officially handed over to the Mozambican Government. There was an enormous amount of Tufu dancing. This local dance is typical of Ilha, Mossuril and Angoche. It is performed by women only, in troupes. Each troupe dresses in identical capulanas and is thus easily identifiable by colour. The groups then compete with each other. Tufu is about song and dance. The songs are African ballads. And as a commentary on recent and past events, they can both protest and praise. In the Tufu lyrics, women can air any grievance
including ones it might be taboo to bring up in a more formal meeting. The dance troupes are rigidly organized by the local women and each group has a chief, a secretary and a treasurer.

  The first time I saw this Tufu dancing, I thought it was wonderful and exotic and exciting. Now, innumerable Tufu spectacles later, I still find it all the above but it wanes in direct proportion to its duration and the amount of available shade to watch it in. The dances I attend usually take place outside in the midday or afternoon sun, so one stands in 30, 32, or even 34 degrees Celsius nearly passing out from the fierce rays. Far from admiring the dancing, after about twenty minutes one is just dying for it to stop, for there to be shade. Fantasies about ice, cool coconut water, chilled mango juice, lemonade, a cold Coke, take over from any kind of aesthetic appreciation.

  The Philistine in me goes into ascendance and the cultural aspect is lost in the mirage of shade and refreshment. Feeling like a complete freak on the day of the health centre celebration, I noticed that all the government officials were sweating profusely and every visitor was standing in a dripping shirt. Centre stage had been given to the Director of Health and the District Administrator and their entourage, and they were getting the real brunt of the sun. The slight overhang of the tin roof of the health centre provided a very thin line of shade. There was quite an unseemly scuffle to get into this, which I am afraid I joined. It wasn’t much help but it just prevented the alternative of fainting into the magic circle.

  And then the dancing stopped and thoughts of diving for cover and dashing into fabulous Chocas-Mar – as we like to call the place – for a cold drink began to seem like a possibility, when out of nowhere a different-coloured troupe stepped in and began the whole performance again with variations. It may be a modern addition to the dance, but plastic football referees’ whistles play an important part in latter-day Tufu. The District Administrator wasn’t looking good and the Mayor was swaying as though prior to passing out. I saw later that they had years of experience in similar events but took the precaution whenever possible of having a few palm leaves arranged over their heads to get through the dancing and speeches. With the handing over of the health centre being a first official occasion for Cabaceira, no one knew that this was the expected protocol.

  Sheik Namana (whose name can be and is spelled at least five different ways) is the traditional hereditary leader of Cabaceira Pequena. He is old and frail and wears thick bottle-end glasses. His light skin, straight hair and beaked nose are his Arab legacy. He is a fine, wise man with a tough job. His village has no money and its chance to compete in any way was cut off and thrown away at birth. The ruins of Arab warehouses along the shore are thought to be over eight hundred years old (and are said to have been destroyed in a punitive raid by Vasco da Gama). The rest of the dusty village is a straggle of mud huts littered with shells. Sheik Namana himself, though the owner of a flock of goats and a dozen chickens, lives in a simple mud hut furnished with four chairs and a couple of rush mats.

  For years he too has been dreaming of a better future for his people. He has had the forethought to get all the official documentation to build a jetty and he has hardwood stored for it. With a jetty, the fishermen could get in and out at will. They could fish every day. They could sell their catches on Ilha. As he describes such future opportunities, decades fall from him and he smiles ruefully. He is a man who has suffered with his teeth, most of which have given up the struggle and fallen from his troubled gums.

  Sheik Namana has been hovering under a tree, reflecting odd flashes of light from his enormous, green glasses. When he sees that his guests can bear the heat no longer, he instructs the village committee to serve coconut water from a stash he has been keeping out of sight.

  The effect of that cool coconut water was instant and miraculous. The District Administrator gave a rousing speech on the strength of it; the former Dutch owner of Varanda gave a speech, Mees, as the new owner of Varanda, gave a speech. And then just about everyone present gave a speech and there were enthusiastic cheers for all of them. At a certain point the cheers became so enthusiastic that entire speeches were lost, but no one seemed to care. A good thing had happened and it was the herald of more good things to follow. Varanda had paid for a community meal and the food was being stirred in pans the size of washing cauldrons. Everyone would eat. The longer I spend here, the more I see that speeches are great but they are only words and Portuguese and Macua are both florid languages. Meanwhile, food is food. The success of all events big and small is measured by what there is to eat.

  There is a saying here that in the West people have money but the Macua have time. Everyone here is incredibly patient. They are patient with each other, with the government, with the elements, with hardship, and with me. Sheik Namana has been patient all his life but now that his great age shows how close he must be to death, he has become impatient. He is quite blunt about it.

  ‘Look at me,’ he says. ‘My time has almost come. I have waited my whole life to see a jetty and I want to see it with my living eyes, so please don’t wait too long.’

  In this ancient trading place we are exchanging speeds. While I help to make some of the things they want happen quickly, at another level, I am also learning to slow down, to harmonize with the mangroves and the sea. When I walk through the bush, I try to feel the grasses and the trees, the stones and heat in the way that the locals do, letting it all flow through them so that they can walk for twenty, thirty or forty kilometres effortlessly. The word ‘esikula’ means ‘the inclination grass makes when stepped on by someone’. The phrase ‘othikila isikula’ is Macua for ‘what goes around comes around’, or more literally: ‘to thank someone for a gift or good deed by repaying it with another’, and more literally, to repay a gift or deed by bending towards the giver like grass that has been stepped on.

  The give and take of life here allows me to blend. Even though I will always stand out as an Akunha, this is where I belong. I do not aspire to be able to transform myself into a lion like the old man at Naguema is said to do, or even to carry a jerry can of water on my head the way local women can, but I have come to know the feeling of being an extension of the red matope earth, and to find my own way sometimes through the mangroves, although not yet across the inland seas.

  XIV

  Beachcombing

  I KNOW EVERY STEP OF the beaches on Varanda 8, and Varanda 9. When I think about the numbers, it seems like a strange way to refer to a beach, but since that is how all the locals call them, it has come to be a habit. Varanda 1 has a long classic sandy beach, Varanda 8 has labyrinthine rock pools and Varanda 9 has the lagoon, pristine white sands and a little cluster of rock pools as well.

  I walk up and down all their tide lines gathering shells. While scanning the sands for cowries and conches and dozens of beautiful speckled and spotted shells whose names I don’t know but whose forms and settling places I have become familiar with, I see the constant changes along the beach. There are stretches of the finest white sand and stretches of coarser grain. There are slabs of coral rock ground smooth by years of passing waves and there are clusters of sharp grey coral where the sea has played architect and left rock pools and towers, bridges and caves. From week to week the sands shift, alternately hiding and revealing the coral beneath them.

  Sometimes there are footprints in the sand. These are mostly the barefoot prints of fishermen walking to and from their dugout canoes. Five of these battered dugouts are moored to an old casuarina tree on Varanda 8. Beside them is a mound of hundreds of giant clam shells. When I first visited Varanda, I spent hours searching for single giant clam shells and over a week I gathered a dozen, which I stored with the guards by the water tank. They seemed very unimpressed when I showed them my find but they smiled politely and asked if I wanted more. I tried to explain in my Hispanic Portuguese that the pleasure lay in finding the shells myself. Only later, when I discovered the remains of the fishermen’s lunches dotted along the entire coastline did I understand th
e patronizing nods the nature guards had given me when I started hoarding my shell treasures.

  For the villagers, everything that the sea has to offer is interesting if you can eat it. Even some of the really beautiful shells that wash up only rarely on the beaches here are varieties the local people eat. The first time I walked through Cabaceira Pequena in daylight, I saw that the narrow sand streets were littered ankle-deep in places with the same shells I had laboriously collected one by one. Now that I have been here longer, I have become more selective and try to find only the prettiest examples, along with fragments of old Chinese and Portuguese porcelain that sank to the seabed when the ships they were ballasting went down.

  Over the years, I have collected innumerable basketfuls of shells. I have collected so many I am running out of places to put them. The worn and chipped specimens I gather do not appeal to others in the same way that they do to me. The rare and perfect specimens sold by the fishermen are the shells that others can most readily admire, but the fishermen dive for their shells and I am no diver, so I hoard my flotsam, curbing the desire to bob down every few seconds to scoop up yet another battered fragment as it signals to me from the sand.

  Most days, though, when I walk on the beach now, I gather nothing but impressions of the sand and the sea, adding my footprints to those of the sandpipers and egrets, gulls and pelicans, flamingos and storks, and the intricate maze of crab tracks. Deep in the mangrove beyond Varanda there are giant black crabs. They are bigger than my feet and can look quite sinister, especially at night. Out on the more open beaches and in the lagoon, there are innumerable species of designer crabs flaunting as many colours as the local capulanas. At night, thousands of them dance on the sands, chasing the waves.