Mozambique Mysteries

by Lisa St Aubin De Teran

  When the local girls are courting, they roam hand in hand with their boyfriends, kiss and cuddle, dance and date as they would in London or Amsterdam. Make-up is local style and consists mainly of a rather unnerving white mealy facemask made from a pounded tree bark (mussiro). Although not the most attractive cosmetic at first glance, it works, because the local women have beautiful skin in varying shades from ebony to beige, reflecting a thousand years of interracial mix in the times when Cabaceira Grande and Cabaceira Pequena were important trading posts and Ilha was the empress of the Indian Ocean.

  There are other cosmetic products squeezed or concocted from local plants. Atija, who was one of the first class of students in September 2004 and is now employed by the college as deputy head of kitchen, knows every local recipe there is for beauty products. Despite having five children, Atija is still disarmingly youthful and pretty. She is also one of the few local women with a high energy level. A lifetime of sub-nutrition has slowed many of the local women down to the point where speech is a whispered drawl and even walking is a slow shuffle. The only time when all the women and girls seem to be injected with adrenalin is when it is time to dance. Girls who find it hard to stand up for more than an hour at a time will dance in the traditional ceremonies for six or seven hours at a stretch without showing any signs of fatigue.

  Atija and a small team of local woman form a tireless team of work and social commentary. This is probably enhanced by having had nearly a year of cooks’ perks and thereby beating the almost endemic anaemia and poor diet of her peers, but the team in question also stood out before the extra food graced their palates.

  While unflagging in their pursuit and performance of the tradição, none of the local women, be they lethargic or energetic, seems to devote much time to the pursuit of Islam. They fast during Ramadan and always wash after going to the loo, but other than that, they hold on tenaciously to their pre-eminence in this matrilineal society and take full advantage of the liberties this entails. Very few of our students have all their children with the same man or stay with one husband for more than a few years. If a man goes away, such as to seek work, his wife or wives feel at liberty to switch husbands. With one notable exception, all the women I know in the villages have few problems with being one of two or even three wives.

  It seems that the problem of survival is so universal and paramount that little else can distract from it. Most families live in harmony with their neighbours; about half of the families share a two-room mud hut between two wives, four or five children and one husband/father with a lot less bickering than an average Western family. Even in the cemeteries, visible from afar by a halo of frangipani blooms, Christians and Muslims lie side by side and have done so for centuries. Perhaps one of the reasons why there is no religious tension here is because underlying everything else, the people are of one faith. For one and all uphold the tradiçµão, and the pagan beliefs go hand-in-hand with whatever other religion is upheld. Overall, it is the tradição that rules. Where the customs of the ancient ancestor worship contradict either Catholicism or the Muslim faith, then the latter are adapted.

  These villages are microcosms of the old Macua way of life. For instance, Macua women are traditionally powerful. But further inland, customs have changed, swinging towards women being more like active chattels than depositories of power. Yet within this matrilineal society, women can do very much what they like, restrained only by the strict parameters of poverty. So women continue to own much of the property, to have both control and the custody of their children, and they also have almost complete sexual freedom. Women sit on the village committees, and hold office in the local and district government. This tendency is reflected nationwide: at regional and national level, there are many women in the government. It is hard to know how much of this is due to the innate matriarchy of the predominant Macua, and how much is thanks to the late President Samora Machel’s championing of women’s rights.

  Many of the curandeiros in Mossuril District are women, as are some of the al’mos. Each category is immensely powerful within a given village. The Cabaceiras do not have their own curandeiros at the moment, although there are women training now with a female master curandeiro in Lumbo, fifty kilometres away. When their services are needed, a troupe of twelve ladies arrives by boat dressed in white robes with red sashes and carrying mysterious luggage. Each time they come, preparations begin weeks before their arrival and a buzz of excitement circulates from hut to hut and through Atija’s kitchen. Since the traditional healing and exorcism ceremonies take several days and nights to perform, I will reserve describing one to another chapter. Suffice it to say that enormous homage is paid publicly to these women, and their elevated position within the tradição overrules any stipulations on the lowly place of females in society decreed by the Koran.

  Another contradiction is the local attitude to alcohol. Most people don’t drink any, but that is more because they cannot afford to than on religious grounds. A few of the village elders abstain on religious grounds if it is offered to them, but most men and women will drink a beer when they can and see no reason not to, despite the Holy Koran specifically forbidding it. And yet, with a few notable exceptions in Chocas and Mossuril, a general sense of the Muslim disapproval inherent in the religious ban does seem to curtail the consumption of alcohol. The shabeens and hooch distilleries to be found in almost every other African village are not a part of life in the Cabaceiras. As with many Western ‘home brews’, it is not so much the alcohol per se as the toxic substances which adhere to it in the slapdash home brewing that corrode livers and brains. In East Africa, proffered home brews are best politely avoided since battery acid is added to give it that extra zing, with deadly side-effects.

  The combination of public drunkenness being socially frowned on and the local poverty which prohibits most people from buying alcohol at all has resulted in much happier homes than in other equivalently poor communities. Beyond the village, there are a handful of notable and noted drunks with the salary and the inclination to sit morosely nursing quarter litres of gin. They alternately stare at their trophy and drink from it until they fall comatose across the table and have to be carried home. The most popular brand is called Travel Gin. As some of the villagers learn English, when the irony of the name dawns, there is much joking about the ‘travellers’ and conjecture about where they are travelling to as they stare red-eyed into their yellow cartons; and how, if they keep travelling in the same way, they will end up nowhere.

  Despite such upstanding remarks, I noticed when we opened our own training restaurant and bar that our first stock of Travel sold out with indecent speed and some peripheral tipplers seemed to be losing their sense of reality a little more regularly than could be any good for either them or their families. From our first stock-taking it was clear that the amount of ‘travelling’ in July 2006 was threatening to get out of hand. Since all supplies have to be brought in from over one hundred kilometres away, it was possible to curb this tendency by simply not bringing back the beloved gin (a quarter litre of which is cheaper than a beer). Before we opened the first bar in the Cabaceiras as a training vehicle for the college students, there had never been a bar, café or restaurant here.

  There is a local mad woman who rants in the early evening, weaving between the mud huts and shouting whenever she can run away from her anxious family, but there were no drunks sprawled in the dust, no fighting, nor beating up of their wives and children. To be fair, nor were there such scenarios when we opened our bar, but with our entire stock of Travel (for what we had assumed would be six months) consumed in three weeks, we didn’t want to turn this spiritual village into a gin shop. So, if only for the sake of the livers of the four customers who, virtually unaided, accounted for our gin sales, it seemed better to teach the trainee barmen how to stand firm when asked, ‘Tem Travel?’

  One of the hardest lessons for the student barmen (who as hitherto jobless villagers are lower in the hierarchy than the rela
tively wealthy customers whom they know and respect) is to admit that our new and lovely bar, once again, is gin-less. We have had many meetings about it because all the students would like the gin to flow in unlimited quantities so that their bar, 2 Coqueiros, which is their pride, and which is stocked with so many other exotic drinks, sweets, appetizers and bottles of mysterious beverages, never has to announce the humiliating phrase, ‘Não, Travel não temos.’

  In the first month their community bar opened, I noticed a lot of salaries and subsidies from our project spiralling into its kitty. By the second month, ninety sobered staff and students were beginning to get over the marvel of ice and cold drinks and home-made cookies. For most of our team, the presence of a freezer at the college was much more alluring than the stocks of alcohol it chilled. The luxury of a cold drink is hard to convey to anyone who has not lived without refrigeration for a prolonged period of time in a tropical climate. In the summer of 2006, I was also bloated with Coca-Cola and joining the local craze of savouring the many flavours offered at 2 Coqueiros by way of fizzy drinks, from the lurid crimson Sparletta to the E-colorant bonanza of Fanta (a local favourite now replaced by the gentler blends), and the sophisticated Ananas, Lemon Twist and just plain Limão.

  In this 99 per cent Muslim community, the two most popular national beers are the lagers that are served all over Mozambique. They are called 2M (pronounced ‘doys emmy’) and Manica. The two brands engage in a constant marketing war which includes giving away posters, mats and all sorts of propaganda. Even a devout Muslim will use a metal 2M sign to repair his roof, or to cut up into a pot or bucket, funnel or watering can. Apart from the occasional ‘traveller’ though, bars here are more places to meet and talk over a cold drink than places specifically designed for the consumption of alcohol. Beers are what rich people drink. And the students are amazed at the capacity of an Akunha to consume alcohol.

  One group of South African visitors downed six bottles of 2M each, provoking a local debate as to how such a feat could be possible without any ensuing vomiting or passing out.

  ‘How do they do it?’ Morripa asked me. ‘I mean, I have travelled and tried it, but I can’t get past a bottle and half without virtually falling off my chair. Six bottles each. We counted them, and then they stood up and left without so much as a stumble. I always thought that colour was just about your skin and a certain hardness of heart, a lack of compassion, but now I am wondering if it isn’t a lot more than that. Six bottles in just over an hour! I fought for my country for seventeen years and I’ve lost count of how many battles I survived, but I couldn’t survive that, none of us could. So we must be made differently.’

  I think I find the paradox of religion and drinking more intriguing than the local people do. Alcohol isn’t really an issue here: it is a luxury, and luxury is a phenomenon that occurs ‘out there’ beyond the frayed edges of these twin outposts.

  No one can say for how long harmony will continue to reign here, but while it does, there is an almost tangible gentleness about the village. Occasionally there is a petty theft, but it is rare. There is a lot of gossip but it is mostly devoid of malice; rejoicing in the misfortune of others is also rare with so much misfortune to share. Criticizing the rise of others is a trickier subject, but such is the way in many post-colonial societies. The students find it hard to take orders from leaders chosen from among themselves. As a result, getting chosen for the management courses is a mixed blessing. Students who complete such courses will not only get much better jobs, but they could, theoretically, set up their own small businesses in the future. The downside is an instant loss of popularity and solidarity among their peers. Success is a lonely journey. A few of the men and women who have started on its road have managed to regain their place in the social hierarchy at a higher level. This has been easier to achieve in the kitchen than anywhere else. Atija is accepted by all as deputy head of the kitchen. Her successful transition from student to staff acts as a good example to the many student cooks. They get a student subsidy, she gets a wage.

  Having joined ‘the other side’, the teaching staff, Atija can also see more clearly the very long road we need to take not only to train cooks and chefs but to introduce and maintain essential standards of hygiene in the kitchen. Part of every day is consumed in the battle with dirt. In our sanitized, pre-packaged world in the West, we tend to take hygiene for granted. In Africa, in a place with very limited water, devoid of storerooms, refrigeration or even furniture, the level of ignorance on hygiene – apart from that which pertains to each scrupulously clean person – is high. Instilling hygiene is a slow and laborious process. Everything has to be repeated and shown not once, but a hundred times. And everything has to be checked and checked again. Hand-in-hand with fighting sub-nutrition, it is our daily diet. Out of the battle I have gleaned that common sense varies from culture to culture, and what may be obvious to me is a complete mystery to people here.

  More than providing skills and training, more than providing jobs, getting the local people to truly understand the importance of home hygiene and better nutrition are two simple things that can save their lives and the lives of their families.

  Village life is a hand-to-mouth affair: days are about surviving, nights are about discussing the daily miracle of being there and staying alive when almost everything conspires for this not to be the case. After the talk and the laughter, the tears and even the drumming either ceases or pauses; there is sometimes a profound silence interrupted only by screech owls, nightjars, the plangent wails of bushbabies and the occasional furtive movements of genets.

  XVI

  Natural and Supernatural

  IN THIS PLACE OF BASICS, where everything has to be conjured out of what is available, and where so little of what we think of as basic materials in the Western world are available, even the trappings of traditional ceremonies are about as simple as such things can be. At the beginning and at the end of life, the voice of these rites is that of beaten rhythms and whispered prayers, beaten rhythms and whispered spells, beaten rhythms and cabalistic signs written on scraps of paper. Until the Mestre Canira began his clandestine drum upgrades, all the local drums were four pieces of wood stuck together with resin glue with a piece of brittle goat hide stretched across them. An unskilled drummer will split this hide within a few minutes; a skilled drummer will wear it out with his fingertips and the palms of his hands. When someone is sick, or when someone dies, the drums are beaten all night. One drummer sustains the rhythm in a thinner solo while the others tighten the skins over hot charcoals. There is shame in a slack skin, shame in a badly kept drum. Caring for the drums (batoke or nlapa) is an honoured position within society.

  When a child is initiated or a baby is born, when someone reaches puberty, marries, sickens, dies, leaves or returns, then drummers pound out their quick rhythms for hour after frenzied hour. Since there is hardly a day one or other of the above events does not occur, the drumming becomes part of the night. Only during the month of Ramadan, when drumming and dancing are not allowed, or when goatskin breaks putting a drum out of action, is there really any silence in the village at night.

  There is no easy way to learn about the traditional Macua ceremonies, not least because all questions regarding them are answered identically: it is the tradição. The word is like coming up against a brick wall without any apparent fissure, let alone a window, through which to glimpse a little further. As a spoken language with an oral culture, learning has to be from people and not from books. The Portuguese colonists came to Mozambique to make money from ivory, gold and slaves, they did not come to observe or record the local customs. Few Christian missionaries came and most of those who did were more intent on stamping out the local culture than preserving it. Some of the more recent Italian Catholic missions have gathered valuable information on various aspects of Macua culture, but it remains largely unpublished and unavailable (such as to me, a novice Macua scholar).

  If I trespass into the more secret re
alms of the tradição, it is with the knowledge that TV and Western values will, inevitably, change this area, and when they do, the rich cultural treasure currently stored in the elders’ heads should be preserved for future generations to come back to when the joys of soap operas and advertising eventually pall. By chance, courtesy of its long isolation, the Cabaceirians have an undiluted version of the tradição. For all that, it is not my place, nor do I have the right to intrude. But since I have been invited to observe the traditional rites, I hope to repay that privilege by recording what I see and learn.

  However, my invitation comes from village elders and not from the rank and file of their disciples. The latter guard their secrets jealously. Only with the elders (several of whom are the local mestres) can I dig deeper into the culture. Gradually, though, bits and pieces of the old religion are unfolding thanks to the patience and erudition of my guides. Morripa, who is virtually the key to the Cabaceiras, is foremost among these. Without him, I don’t think I would be living here. He is my guide and interpreter, colleague and friend. Just as in real life, wherever I go, Morripa either is there or just was there or is about to arrive, so too, in these pages, Morripa is never far away.

  Magic is practised daily by the Macua, but there is no longer anyone to keep its more powerful and darker side going in Cabaceira Pequena since the old feticeiro, Alpino, died a few years ago. The septuagenarian hereditary chief, Sheik Namana, is said to know all there is to know about Macua magic but he has not handed his knowledge down. Some of the village elders do not see this as such a bad thing. Whereas a curandeiro and the other village leaders work for the good of all, a feticeiro can work for both the powers of Good and Evil. The late Mr Alpino, apparently, was ‘a bad man who hurt a lot of people, making them sick so that he could cure them for money’.