There are two points on Varanda where giant sea turtles lay their eggs. I have yet to witness this, but everyone else has seen them. They come at night and leave several-metre-wide tracks in the sand. Part of the guards’ job is to protect the eggs and, when necessary, to help the baby turtles reach the sea. Tortoiseshell is forbidden here, but it is still sold as bracelets and hair combs. It is fairly easy to persuade people not to kill the turtles and not to traffic in their shells, but it is much harder to persuade hungry people not to eat the turtles’ eggs. For hundreds of years, turtles’ eggs have been part of their diet. Once a year, local children glut on them. In a land of severe sub-nutrition, telling people not to eat a protein-rich food because it is unecological to do so isn’t enough to change a lifetime’s habit. Meanwhile, Varanda guards protect two of the nesting places. Each turtle lays her eggs in various spots. If predators come and raid a nest, another will survive. This works for some predators, but knee-high local children know the ploy and dig indiscriminately all over the beaches in search of hidden stashes.
There is nothing sacred about turtles, big or small, in the local culture. Fortunately for dolphins, to catch one is taboo. No fisherman will kill one, and if a dolphin accidentally gets into their fragile nets, a fisherman will go to great pains to extract the entangled dolphin and let it go.
Ramon and I were once sitting in one of the two beach bars on Ilha looking out to sea when a young man in a dugout canoe caught a dolphin. One minute he was paddling slowly along the coastline, and the next minute like a cartoon character he was whizzing across the sea. His dugout was raced to the end of the derelict pier and then back towards the fortress. The fisherman had to struggle to stay upright and yelled to a neighbouring canoe for help. For several minutes, the first man was yanked this way and that with the trapped dolphin leaping out of the sea from time to time before being dragged under again by its nylon harness. The second canoe managed to pull up alongside and the two grappled together. More slowly, but still at an unnatural speed, both canoes raced up and down parallel to the beach until their living engine tired and they were able to extract the dolphin and let it go.
Opposite Varanda 7 and Varanda 8, by the desert island of Sete Pãos, dolphins come regularly to play with the local fishermen. Children from the village go out and swim with them in the still, transparent waters of the western beach. The island got its name because it has seven windswept trees (pãos) clinging to its beaches. The remainder of the eleven-hectare island is bare beaches, moorland or sea-smoothed coral rocks scattered with millions of coral stones and fossils. From a distance the southern tip of Sete Pãos looks like a moonscape. At certain mysterious times of the year, when the tide is fully out, it is just possible to walk and then wade to Sete Pãos from Varanda, but it is not possible to walk back without being cut off and probably drowned. I have not yet been able to find out when exactly it is safe to walk there, so a plan to do so and then camp overnight sits on a back-boiler. On the days when I visit the island, it is by sailing dhow, safely steered into port by one of the fishermen and his sons.
Mees is an experienced sailor and takes to the sea without any qualms, guiding the dhows into this and that wind as we tack across to Ilha or the other islands. If a dhow captain insists that we be dumped miles away from our designated destination, Mees tells the sailors how to land us where we want to go. When I am alone here, I am never more than a passenger at the whim of the captain. I cannot tell the difference between having to land in the wrong village or on the wrong island because the wind or the waves really don’t allow us to do otherwise and being dumped arbitrarily because the captain wants to go home or to go fishing or for a hundred and one other reasons.
Morripa and Ibraimo are the arrangers of our boats, most of which come from Cabaceira Pequena. Despite there being hundreds of available dhows, most of which would be happy to take passengers and get a fare, only one particular boat was ever contracted. Many hours were spent contemplating the fortress wall on Ilha, waiting on the coral rock carved into sea steps, for ‘our’ boat to arrive. No matter what time we arranged to be met, we always seemed to end up waiting in the burning sun.
The gigantic fortress of São Sebastião is on the tip of the island. It took the Portuguese sixty years to build it and innumerable slaves lost their lives dragging its coral rocks. It has never been successfully stormed or besieged. Inside, there are the remains of a small autonomous city and two massive rainwater tanks, which were built a thousand years ago by Arab conquerors. As though to belie its military nature, the fortress has an ornamental doorway. Despite watching it from across the channel for month after month, the true scale of it only really became clear from the inside. It is almost alarmingly huge and empty. Given its violent history, I had expected it to exude some of the sadness and despair of some of the thousands of slaves and hundreds of prisoners held there through the centuries, but the place has a surprisingly peaceful air, as though all the sighs of the lost souls have been swallowed up and dispersed by the sea breeze.
Week after week, the diminutive and wizened sea captain rocked me into the small harbour by the fortress steps. During each crossing, as his son attended to the sails and tiller, the captain sat doubled into the bowed wood by the mast, knitting a new fishing net in lurid orange nylon. This activity gave him an old-womanish look, denied only by his sinewy forearms. Intuitively, every time the boat needed his expert attention, he uncurled like a hermit crab and tightened or loosened a rope while ticking off his son in a stern whisper.
The captain seems so at ease with the water that he gives the impression he could sit and knit on the ocean’s surface without the intermediary of a boat if need be. I cannot say that I have found myself to be completely at one with the water yet, but then I came here late in my life and was not initiated into its mysteries as new-born babies are here. Every time a wave made our old dhow lurch, or the leaking, curved side planks dribbled more than the usual amount of water onto the floor, I wondered whether we were near enough to either shore for me to swim to safety if our boat capsized. When there are more passengers on the boat I feel less nervous because they treat every crossing like a works’ outing or school trip and fill the dhow with animated chatter.
One day, while sitting on the regular ferry dhow waiting to set sail together with a dozen villagers, I witnessed a traditional ceremony without having been first guided to it by Morripa. Among the passengers was a young couple with what had to be their first child: a new-born baby they were cosseting as only new parents can. The father was holding the baby girl in his lap while the mother angled a blue and green striped umbrella against the morning sun. After the muezzin had called to tip the captain off that it was time to get under way, the captain asked the baby’s parents something in Macua and then told them off. Both mother and father apologized sheepishly. At which point the usually calm captain leapt across the dhow and seized the baby. For a moment, it looked as though he was going to throw the infant overboard, but he merely took possession and marched round the rim of his dhow, balancing on the worn planks as he held the baby out to sea to all four compass points, lowering her towards the water as he mumbled an incantation. Then he stepped into the middle of the boat and knelt over the slimy bilge that always seeps through the raw cotton caulk and very delicately wet his fingers and then wet the baby’s lips with sea water as he whispered ‘mother’s milk, mother’s milk’ in Macua. Whereupon he gave the baby back, everyone smiled and the boat was poled out of the mangrove with an infant on board on its maiden voyage.
When I returned, I learnt that all children are thus presented to the sea god in the hopes that he will spare them. It seems that the sea god is like a dragon that preys on young flesh. As though to prove this, on the next weekend two local children were stolen by the sea, trapped by the massive tide and drowned. Girls don’t learn to swim here because girls don’t go out to fish. The women and children only gather crabs, clams and cone shells. It is impossible to learn to navigate all the se
a paths through the mangroves because the tide redesigns the landscape on an almost daily basis. One week the water can be shallow in one point and the next it can be three metres deep. The sailors and fishermen feel their way through the water, trusting their instinct to guide them.
I hope by the time the baby on the boat is old enough to gather shellfish, there will be a proper school in the village and swimming lessons for all the children. With a double death, all the drums in the village beat out their ghostly tattoos. But all the drums in the village were not loud enough to drown out the mothers’ wailing. I could hear their grieving cries from dusk till dawn from Saturday to Sunday when the sun came up and life moved on with the daily trudge to the well.
That weekend when the children were stolen by the sea god has frozen as a moment in time. It will stick in the time-frame of the village. Time hangs like clothes on a line of events. Last weekend, next weekend, today, yesterday and the various weeks and months are timeless. Only events are remembered, and life is measured from one to another.
Some people come to Africa and they adore it. It excites them more than anywhere else in the world. They don’t see the squalor so much as the riotous colours and the bursting energy of street markets and the buzz. When I first came to Africa, many years ago now, it kidnapped my heart. I know that when Mees first visited as a young cameraman of seventeen, he promised himself that one day he would come back and live in Africa. Wherever one travels, there are people like that who came to visit and could not tear themselves away. There are those who came and went home as though infected in their blood with a need to return, who sold up all they had in Europe or the States and headed back never to leave again.
Africa is full of mysteries. Mozambique is full of mysteries. I unravel one, understand another and decode a third only to discover more and more layers, more and more depths. I live here and I know it quite well now, but it never ceases to surprise me. There is no room for monotony; it will always continue to surprise, to disturb and delight. It is unpredictable, the people are unpredictable, the weather is unpredictable – except that here in the north of Mozambique there are always varying degrees of heat.
Every day is a voyage of discovery. Every day is an adventure. Sometimes that discovery is no more than finding the place where the mongooses stand each morning on their hind legs worshipping the sun. They gather in a half circle in attitudes of prayer and look up to the early morning rays as though giving thanks. They stay like that for nearly an hour. They go to the same place every day. They are not disturbed by human presence so long as one remains a couple of metres away. They just stand with their gingery coats and their thin bodies greeting the day.
Some days the discovery is in the sea. Sometimes it is on land. Sometimes it is to see the star-shaped siri siri flower making a puce carpet on the mangrove floor where before it was only succulent leaves. Some days, a new Macua mystery unfolds. I know that at least four of the workers at the college are powerful and form part of the group of shamans. One, I think, is the head of heads, the shaman of shamans for our area. Once, there was a secret sect meeting into which I was inducted. It was very strange and rather spooky. I felt honoured to have been drawn in and I know that I was included because I was trusted to keep secrets. Without fully understanding what many of those secrets are about, I see that within the tight hierarchy of the village and its sects, it is not my place to describe everything I see.
The Varanda workers have a hierarchy and swear an oath of allegiance to their fellow members to enter the Varanda team. Even the college workers and students are forced by the community to swear an oath of allegiance. It matters to the community that the projects we have will work. It is the projects that will provide the jobs so needed in the village. It matters to the villages that the forthcoming lodges work. To ensure future enterprise, it matters that in this infant stage no equipment be stolen and no visitors upset.
The Cabaceirians are proud of Varanda and proud of the lodge that will be built there. The community’s share of the profit will transform their economy. And there will be eighty jobs. Eighty jobs are enough to feed 2,400 people. Each time Mees returns from Holland, hundreds of villagers come out to greet him, chanting and Tufu dancing and banging their drums to say thank you for the chance of a better life. Mees is very uncomfortable with all that. In fact, he hates it. He says, ‘Let them say thank you after Coral Lodge is up and running. I don’t want to be thanked for what I haven’t done yet. It makes me feel like an impostor.’
I have translated this into Portuguese for Morripa who has translated it into Macua and relayed it to the village, but the chanting and the dancing processions continue because, they say, what Mees has given them is hope and they never had that before.
PART THREE
XV
The Tradição
AMONG THE VILLAGERS IS A tiny Catholic congregation of thirty-nine souls, which exists without any regular priest. The last incumbent, Padre Cirillo, ‘went native’ many decades ago and abandoned his duties. The Catholics, headed by Victorino, foregather in the dilapidated but grandiose church of Nossa Senhora de Remedios: ‘Our Lady of the Cures’. Ironic, because there are numerous maladies here and virtually no patent medicines. Most of the cures are from medicinal plants; much of the hardship here is from a lack of cures. Long ago, this area was famed for its herbal remedies. It lured trading ships from around the world to trade with the local curandeiros. Nowadays, although the mangrove and surrounding bush are still full of herbal remedies, they are for domestic use only.
Victorino, the church’s key-keeper, is also one of the foundation students at the college. Aged thirty-nine, he has found a late vocation as a chef. He is meticulous, proud and often silent and he takes life and loyalty very seriously. Highly regarded within the community, he is one of the few locals to have ever had a job before: for many years he served at the District Administrator’s table in Mossuril town; and the sense of protocol he gleaned there has remained indelibly. Despite being an ardent Catholic, Victorino follows the pagan tradição closely and sees no contradiction in so doing.
During his training shifts as joint head of kitchen he runs the storeroom and cooking areas with ruthless precision and takes personal offence at any slackness. Having been taught to chop and slice by a visiting five-star chef, he has sublimated both into an art form. His often stern features relax into an expression of such bliss while in the act of chopping that no one (myself included) dares interrupt this ecstatic communion. His manner is very grand and almost as condescending as an old-fashioned English butler. The similarity does not stop there, because like Bertie Wooster’s Jeeves, Victorino can be counted on to come up with a simple and sensible solution when problems escalate.
Be it for the Catholic minority or the Muslim majority, statistics about religion here are semi-redundant because while closely following either creed, everyone simultaneously follows another. Yet adherence to both Islam and Christianity is truly felt, it just isn’t the Christianity or the Islam that others know: it is a local, more tolerant version of both. Apart from the small number of Christians, everyone else is a Muslim. Islam here dates back hundreds of years to before the Portuguese arrived in the wake of Vasco da Gama (who first landed on Ilha and then at Cabaceira Pequena in 1498). Along this northerly coast, most of the population is nominally Muslim. Inland, Catholicism predominates, neck and neck in places with Jehovah’s Witnesses and a handful of other evangelistic sects. But the coast, with its mixture of Macua, Indian and Arab, is dotted with numerous tiny mosques.
Throughout the day, the muezzin climb the steps outside what look like small white farmhouses and face Mecca to call the faithful to prayer. At 7am the muezzin from the mosque next to the college gives an extra yodel out to sea to alert the ferryman that it is time to punt out of the mangroves and set sail to Omuhipiti with the last boat of the day. But at 5 and 6am, when the first ferries leave, there is no yodel from the mosque.
When the sea is calm and there is no
wind to fill the patchwork sails, the captain and his sons will row the whole way. When the sea is rough, though, or the wind is contrary, no ferries or fishing boats can leave at all. There seem to be many such days.
Apart from the muezzin and the occasional crescent moon carved into a gravestone or stick marker, and the handful of mosques with minarets, it is hard to see that this is a Muslim community because the outward signs of other Muslim areas are absent. Cabaceirians are socially relaxed and easy-going. Local men sometimes wear Arabic skull caps (kufia), yet the women usually show no hint of Islam in their garb. They wear their traditional capulanas. These exotic-coloured fabrics wrap around the waist, strap babies to backs, transform into fantastic headdresses (lenzo) and also act as windcheaters, and as both shawls and blankets. Women tie their housekeeping into a knot of capulana, which they tuck into their waist; they make a great performance of secretly tying and untying as though each had discovered a unique hiding place. As a skirt, the capulana has a tendency to work loose. Unlike in other Muslim settlements, where the women cover up, Cabaceirians and Mozambicans in general have no compunction about rearranging their clothes in public, wrapping and unwrapping capulanas to hitch them back into place.
I have never seen anyone wear a veil here or a headscarf other than in the flamboyant traditional style, but Momade, the tomato-grower, says there is a woman outside Mossuril who ‘wears the hooded sack’. Women and girls wander freely around the village and on the ferry to Ilha. The girls tend to be loud and giggly. Men and women openly tease each other and flirt. Many men have more than one wife, but many women also have more than one husband. Officially, a man can have several wives at the same time; officially, women cannot have more than one husband. But marriages are both easily made and easily broken.
Mozambique Mysteries Page 16