Mozambique Mysteries

by Lisa St Aubin De Teran

  Two days later, Adamji returned the Petromax lamp and resumed his duties as college guard. He was so tired that he kept breaking out into a cold sweat and keeling over at his post by the gate. He was sent home to sleep for a night and returned the following evening full of himself and sporting an enormous red and gold cap, which he had bought in Nampula the year before in a moment of weakness. Whenever he wore this cap, it was a sign that all was well chez Adamji’s wives.

  For several weeks after the healing ceremony, he mused over the various aspects of the event, checking details with me to highlight the enormous extravagance of such a visit to the village. By the end of the month, though, when his ex-wife relapsed back into a precarious state of health and took to her bed again, whenever he ran over the list of food and the costs of transport, it was with a hint of regret that he had footed so much of the bill on a micro credit against his future salary, thereby making the distance between him and his longed-for ‘rooky tooky’ much further away.

  The latest assurance is that the college will have electricity by the end of 2007. There are 10-metre-long eucalyptus poles marching along the edge of the dunes en route to Varanda and new tri-phase wires have been installed between Chocas and Mossuril. From such movement, I can deduce that there will indeed be electricity from the national grid here in the near future. What I cannot say, and nor apparently can anyone else (including the installers), is how near that future is.

  Meanwhile, big and small generators of varying capacity are ferried into the college to throb and vibrate in the narrow generator room until the inevitable day when they either stall or explode, hurling bits of Taiwanese steel into the coral-rock walls and plunging the college complex back into darkness. It is hard not to take the delinquent behaviour of the various generators personally because, almost out of spite, each time one dies it takes with it whatever it can. So with monotonous regularity, CD players and mobile phones, computers, regulators, DVD players, transformers and charges burn out with the offending engine.

  There is no such thing as a buyer’s warranty in Mozambique. What you see is what you get and what you buy is always at your own risk. Things look nice: they are bright and shiny and proudly bear brand names of worldwide renown, but alas they are almost all made in China and Taiwan and even the brand names are fake. The recycled iron and steel is the bane of every Mozambican who tries to rise up the economic ladder. Save up and buy whatever machine you can think of and the one thing you can be sure of is that it will break down. And once it is broken, it will prove impossible to buy 90 per cent of the spare parts you need. Add to this the fact that all machines cost more here than they do elsewhere and the mystery of why backyards and front rooms have house shrines of metal junk is solved. So much money goes into each purchase that even after the piece in question has irreversibly broken down, no one can bear to throw it away. We are now on our sixth generator and we too have a generator graveyard. It is a room of modern sculpture filling up with old engines, ghetto-blasters and the like. Covered with the blood, sweat and tears of Tigo and every mechanic within a radius of 100 kilometres, each derelict piece seems too precious to throw away despite the certain knowledge that it will never again be of any use to us or anyone else.

  XIX

  Mossuril and Fabulous Chocas-Mar

  AS OF A FEW YEARS AGO, passenger planes can land in Nampula. Before that, it took five days of driving day and night on pitted roads from Maputo to reach the capital of the north. Because Africa was colonized as a commodity, goods were supposed to travel to the ports to be shipped back to Europe. So railways and roads run from east to west across the continent, but rarely from north to south. Mozambique is no exception.

  When I first arrived in Nampula, there was a tarmac road to the coast for 200 kilometres with craters in it so large Mees’s Land Rover could have fallen right in one and we would not have been able to see over the edge. Our first several trips were accordingly nerve-racking and we both arrived half-broken from the bone-shaking we took en route. Two years ago, this road to Ilha was both widened and resurfaced. It is now a very reasonable highway.

  Before reaching the road bridge to Ilha, there is a turnoff on the right to a red-dust road at a place called Naguema. A small signpost provides this information. Here I might pause, beckoned to the house of the regulo (the hereditary chief and heir to the title of ‘King of Naguema’). Everyone else in Naguema lives in a simple mud hut, but there are three houses in the regulo’s compound, as befitting a king. All three wings of his mud-hut palace are stacked from floor to corrugated-iron ceiling with an eclectic array of products ranging from boxes of condoms to teacups, crates of insecticide to crates of Coca-Cola, engine oil and washing-up liquid, and sacks of seed corn. Like a conjuror, he pulls out rolls of animal skins from the dark recesses of his stores, and instructs me to give them to Mestre Canira (master carpenter of the Cabaceiras, drum-maker and a village leader).

  Forty minutes of driving along the dust road from Naguema will bring you to Mossuril. Despite (with a fair wind) it being only thirty-five minutes by sailing dhow from Ilha, Mossuril is the start of another world: a lost world. It runs parallel to ‘out there’.

  Mossuril town is an ancient place and a sleepy testament to the grandeur of the Portuguese colonization. The town is known locally as a sede: the ‘seat’ of power and administration. Once it was a town, now it is a ruined village with an enclave of partially restored buildings around a square overlooking a spectacular bay. Beyond this square, most of the buildings are derelict or semi-derelict and many are piles of historic rubble.

  The police station functions with great formality and the chief of police comes to work each morning with an immaculately laundered uniform to sit in an office so dilapidated it looks more like a carefully arranged film set than a scene from real life. Doors and windows, door frames and part of the roof are all missing and the walls themselves are coming away in chunks. Across the road, some of the villas that flaunt memories of better times are even worse off than the police station. Where once the Portuguese lived and worked in grandeur, there are now gutted shells, fallen pillars and roofless ruins, being slowly but surely reclaimed by tropical vegetation.

  But Mossuril has electricity (when there isn’t a power cut) and fixed landlines for telephones (when the line is working) and internet service (theoretically, but we have never managed to log on to it). And it has a public notary and a courthouse. It boasts a proper primary school, and a secondary school is finally being built there. In Mossuril Sede there are government officials from various sectors ranging from agriculture to health, education and culture. Work in such local offices is an uphill struggle to get any money to trickle down from the national and provincial budgets.

  Thanks to vast amounts of foreign aid, there is money available to Mozambique, but very little of it reaches outposts like Mossuril. There are also hundreds of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in the country, but most of their lines of operation stop short of Mossuril. The NGOs or charities that do include this once important town tend to go no further. A couple of years ago, UNICEF gave every child in Mossuril District a school bag, but they didn’t keep going to help provide schools.

  On the edge of the sea, beyond the neatly laid-out central square, is a fortified church with an outside cellar in which the Portuguese conquistadores used to hide when under attack. It was here that they landed and dug in during the early to mid-sixteenth century. It was from here that they rode out and conquered the coast, seizing Macua village after village from their African and/or Arab overlords.

  Having ‘settled’ the coast and built their palaces and villas, the Portuguese centred their attention on raw commerce, with Ilha at its hub. So, gradually, places like Mossuril and the Cabaceiras were left to their own devices and the tenuous hold of their colonizers disappeared, leaving little trace beyond their abandoned buildings. In a game of cat and mouse, sporadic efforts were made to tame and reclaim the wayward coastal villages and towns. Puni
tive missions were sent to collect taxes and subdue the coastal population. The Mediterranean overlords could kill the local population, enslave, forcibly convert and punish all the ones they could catch, but as soon as the overlords’ backs were turned, the local Macua population escaped their control again.

  This was a pattern often repeated across the entire country, not least because the Portuguese government was so overtly interested in financial gain from its colonies that it hardly even pretended to govern them. So long as the ivory, gold and slaves kept arriving on Ilha, what happened in the rest of the country was of little interest. Within this policy of laissez-faire, many inland areas had an easier time of it than the coast. Mossuril and Lumbo, Naguema and the Cabaceiras, on the other hand, were right under the Portuguese noses and thereby suffered more interference in their tribal affairs. For centuries, there were frequent native rebellions. In fact, it wasn’t until 7 May 1897 that the last armed resistance to Portuguese rule was quashed. At the beginning, history brought Vasco da Gama to Mossuril District, and at the end it was also here that Mossuril’s own King Mucutu-Munu made a last heroic stand against the Portuguese. With an army of Macua warriors, the native African defenders braved a battalion of the occupying army and were beaten under a rain of gunfire. King Mucutu-Munu was captured and held as a prisoner on Ilha. He died nailed to the wall of one of the grand palaces of Ilha.

  Since Mossuril is so imbued with history, maybe it is not entirely by chance that it also played an important role during the ‘civil war’ that tore Mozambique apart for seventeen years after its hard-won independence from the Portuguese. One of the ‘Twelve Men of Mozambique’, who swore to fight to the death to protect their country from the ravages of neighbouring South Africa, was from Mossuril.

  Having finally forced the Portuguese colonizers out in 1975, Mozambicans embraced their fledgling independence by turning their country from a place of brutal injustice to a welfare state, and from a place of native despair to a place full of hope. It was, for many, a time of euphoria, a golden age. But it was a golden age run by a professed communist (Samora Machel), and although most of his fellow countrymen were not communists, with the ‘Reds under the Bed’ phobia of Big Brother in Washington, there was no way such a government (freely elected or not) was going to be allowed to stay in place without a fight. So, with America’s blessing, together with sore losers from the former Portuguese colonizers, elements of the reactionary South African Police Force invaded Mozambique to terrorize its citizens and destabilize its socialist government.

  Under the charismatic leadership of Samora Machel, Mozambique struggled to ward off these illegal incursions. Long before 9/11 and the focus of Western attention on ending terrorism, the civilian population of this huge, backward country in East Africa was under almost constant terrorist attack. While the rest of the world either pretended not to notice or refused to help, twelve patriots gathered and swore to protect Mozambique’s freedom with their lives. As they solemnly swore this oath, each of the twelve men cut off a joint of one of his own fingers. Since each would go on to fight, I have often wondered why they mutilated themselves; but they did, and the gesture had a tremendous rallying effect on the new nation. Maybe, in a country where kings can get nailed to walls, and terrorists were running amok, and where, for years, the Portuguese secret police, the dreaded PIDE, had been chopping off people’s fingers as blithely as trimming flower stalks, you had to do something dramatic to grab people’s attention back then.

  I was in a bar once in Chocas-Mar splashing out on fizzy orange Fantas with Morripa when one of these Twelve Men of Mozambique came in with an entourage. Everyone present stopped talking and stared in awe. Afterwards, Morripa explained to me that this man from Mossuril was a national hero.

  One of the most powerful and richest Mozambicans of all time, the industrialist and entrepreneur João Ferreira dos Santos was also a Mossurilian. His company’s logo JFS can be seen all over Mozambique. As an old man he used to return regularly to the place of his birth and be carried to the beach between Chocas and Varanda to bathe. That too is in the grand old past now because João Ferreira dos Santos has been dead for years. Mossuril’s glory days are over and it is far away from any action. The only excitement it seems to have had in the last year is the occasional sighting of a big cobra in the undergrowth by the church. Big cobras are unusual in the area but Mees and Ramon had (unintentionally) been so close to it they almost tripped over its back. Mees took me back to the exact spot where he had seen it to ask if it was poisonous.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ a local boy informed me.

  ‘Are you sure? How do you know?’

  Since it was the first big snake any of us had seen in ‘our’ area, it seemed important to know. The boy shrugged and signalled towards an old man resting by a half sack of manioc under an African almond tree.

  ‘Ask him if you don’t believe me.’

  I went up to the old man and greeted him, ‘Mascamolo, babu.’ Then, having exhausted my Macua, I slipped into Portuguese to ask whether the cobra was poisonous.

  ‘Without a doubt,’ he assured me. ‘You see, there is a khapulu [a lizard with giant scales] living in that pile of rubble and the khapulu is amai-a-inowa [the mother of all cobras]. It has poisonous saliva,’ he told me, touching his mouth to convey the idea of dribble. ‘They all go to the khapulu to get their venom. So the cobra must have been poisonous.’

  I could not argue with such impeccable logic. When I checked the story of these khapulu with some of the workers, they confirmed that this lizard was indeed ‘amai-a-inowa’. Later on, I also asked some of the older students about it: ‘I have heard that the Khapulu is the mother of all snakes. Does that mean that the two-headed blind snake also gets its poison from there?’

  It was unanimously agreed to be the case. We never saw the giant poisonous cobra again, nor have we ever seen the dribbling khapulu, but others have, and in these parts, knowing someone who knows someone who has seen something turns that something into a fact.

  Beyond the town/village, the ghostly and still graceful ruins of a pillared building perch on a hill overlooking a wide swathe of ivory sand and stunted marram grass, which is both a beach and a lagoon depending on how much of the sea has seeped over the mangroves. The pitted, dusty road up to this ruin is like a local Calvary because this war-damaged shell is what remains of Mossuril’s former hospital. Like so many other medical facilities and schools, it was singled out for destruction. Now, in a newer wing behind, a cottage hospital does its humble best to operate as such despite having no doctor at all. It is run entirely by veteran nurses. The same war that wrecked it, crash-trained these nurses on its battlefields.

  Headed by Said, a squat and unflappable male nurse, with a gentle smile and a grip like a vice, the medical team treats all ailments from major to minor. With insufficient medicines and almost non-existent equipment, theirs is often a thankless task. But the steady flow of dead and dying who are carried away downhill are the victims of a wider neglect beyond the skeleton nursing team’s control. No one locally has a bad word to say about Said or his colleagues, who try to make up in compassion what they lack in materials.

  Front and back, the hospital grounds look like a refugee camp. Here women squat and wait, squat and cook. One piece of equipment this hospital does have is a malaria-testing kit. So it is to here that people flock to discover how many crosses of malaria they have. From the Cabaceiras, as from many other villages, there is no transport; so a sick person has to walk to Chocas and then hope for a communal taxi (chapas). The fare to Mossuril from Chocas is one dollar. For those who don’t have that money (and most people do not) it is a nine-kilometre walk each way to get malaria tested. Weakened by fever, this walk in the burning sun is often the killing factor. But Mossuril has more and better medicines than the local health posts, and malaria is a killer. Unless a patient is unconscious, they will tend not to be hospitalized for malaria. There aren’t enough beds for the hundreds of cases. Yet blood test
s are taken one day and the results delivered the next, so the journey has to be made twice before treatment is given. This gap is too much for many malaria victims. When the treatment is prescribed, the hospital pharmacy does not always have the necessary medicine. The nearest pharmacies are on Ilha or in Monapo. Both are far away. And when the treatment is taken, it is often only to find that the malaria is a drug-resistant strain.

  As a result, no matter what family you pick in this area, at least one, if not many, members of it will have died from this checkable but still unchecked disease. At any given time, in any local village, there will be malaria victims fighting their fevers on the floor of a mud hut. Sometimes we see such victims wrapped completely in a capulana, so that it covers their heads from the further ravages of mosquitoes, lying in the dust outside their huts.

  After the darkness of all the local roads, the way to the hospital shines like a beacon across the salt flats. A line of street lamps brighter than any other lamps in the district light up the road from the hospital to the town it serves.

  After Mossuril Sede, the dust road gets bumpier on its way to the former seaside playground town of Chocas-Mar. Halfway between the two small towns an enterprising family sells paraffin, petrol and diesel in beer bottles. This is the only refuelling place after Naguema. Mossuril Sede has a derelict petrol station which now sells cold drinks and crisps, thereby providing the only local bar facility. Chocas-Mar also has an abandoned filling station, but it doesn’t sell drinks, hot or cold.