Mozambique Mysteries

by Lisa St Aubin De Teran

  Chocas has a different sort of derelict building: its ruins are more 1930s domestic and less historic and monumental. It was and still is a seaside destination. It used to be a thriving resort, whereas now it is more of a ghost village overlooking a beautiful beach. Once the rich and powerful came here from Nampula city to take the waters, but seventeen years of war put an end to such frivolity and Chocas-Mar decayed into three streets of abandoned seaside cottages and small holiday villas with the odd tenacious local householder, and a handful of Indian businessmen holding on in the face of neglect.

  Vakháni vakháni, Chocas is clawing its way back onto the tourist map as stragglers from Ilha drift across the channel to lunch in what used to be the only restaurant in Mossuril District but is now one of three. Each month sees new holiday homes being built on the shore, and gutted shells that had stood empty for nearly twenty years are gradually being restored. There is even talk of a hotel to come and a pizzeria, and there is also talk of a South African jam factory and a bio-diesel plant. In small towns there is always a lot of talk, but now it seems that something is really about to happen in Chocas. There are even piles of building sand and gravel being moved to the abandoned shell of a former restaurant overlooking the bay where word would have it there is to be a hotel.

  Even Dona Ancha, who is virtually the unofficial queen of Chocas, says there is a hotel coming soon. Dona Ancha and her Portuguese husband, Senhor Falcão, run the local shop which extends into a bar tended mostly by their children. It is here that people come from far and wide to buy cold drinks, ice, coffee, candles, razors, tomato paste, sardines and a good twenty other products, none of which are available elsewhere for a wide radius.

  Meanwhile, every day, under a spreading ficus tree, a gaggle of fifty women with jerry cans queue for water, while local boys wander up and down the main street selling lemons, mangoes, fish, squid, lobster and crabs.

  For travellers arriving from Nampula, Chocas-Mar might look like a one-horse town, but coming from the Cabaceiras it is almost a metropolis. It has cars and TVs, ice and electricity. People have motorbikes and dune quads, shoes and proper clothes. Houses have floors and running water. Just four kilometres away by dirt road from Cabaceira Grande and eight from Cabaceira Pequena, a time warp occurs. As the dunes and bush unfold away from Chocas, the houses stop abruptly. There is an expanse of bush and then the mud huts begin with their palm-thatch roofs.

  For volunteer staff at the college and for me and Mees, and for Lolly and Jason, it became known as ‘Fabulous Chocas-Mar’. It is fabulous, if only for its ice. In the heat, hour after hour one begins to fantasize about cold drinks. With no electricity, fantasize is about all one can do unless by walking, cycling or driving one can get to Chocas. A bar doesn’t have to give you much in the tropics if it can supply an iced drink.

  This was actually a problem for a while because Chocas’s one and only restaurant (o Compleixo) used to peak early: it reached that heady cold-drink point and then stopped. So you could get an iced coke or a cold beer but little else besides. The simplest meals were taking several hours to materialize. Such is the movement being whipped into the area that the Compleixo is now under new management, which serves fresh butter with the bread and proper meals on clean cloths, the food arrives within the hour and the kitchen even rises to puddings. Whatever next?

  The physical distance isn’t far, but the economic and mental leap is enormous between Chocas and Cabaceira Grande. Hundreds of older people in the Cabaceiras have never been to Chocas, let alone to Mossuril or beyond. There is no proper road and no transport. It is a long hot walk. In a village so poor it merely subsists, there is nothing to sell. With nothing to sell and no money to spend, and with every ounce of energy needed to keep up at home, there is no point in wasting that energy on alien soil. From time to time, someone takes the leap and travels out to Mossuril for documents or to Monapo or Nampula to buy nails or wire, a bicycle or cotton. For the very poor, there is little joy in travelling with up to fifty people in the back of a truck or squeezed into a minibus with thirty fellow passengers.

  Travelling beyond the village means venturing into the unknown. With the rapid changes of our digital, technological world, a Cabaceirian elder is at a huge disadvantage ‘out there’. The position of power and respect he or she holds within his or her own community and the back-up of the tradição are all lost once the invisible frontier from the bush to Chocas is crossed. The rest of the world moved on without them. Even the super-cool young men who hang around the market baskets in the Cabaceiras are mere country bumpkins outside their community. They are all targets to be duped and dumped. They are figures of fun in Nampula, to be treated with disdain in shops and ignored by even the lowest shop assistants. Even someone like Morripa, who has travelled the communist world from Cuba to Russia to China and who is a project manager, will get neither service nor respect in the cities, where the shops and emporiums are mostly owned by Indian merchants, most of whom have no time for local citizens who make good.

  Twice a day, while the relentless tides cut off the Cabaceiras and the mangroves are claimed back by the sea, the educational, cultural and social divide deepens, cutting off the villagers from the country’s stride into the twenty-first century. After centuries of mistreatment by slavers and colonizers, not many rural Mozambicans will stand up for their rights. After centuries of isolation, not many rural Mozambicans know what those rights are; and if they do, they have a sneaking suspicion that such rights are for everyone else but somehow not for them.

  The pride of the Macua, so evident within the villages, is lost once they leave that magic circle round their home. As things stand, to make good, a local person has to leave home. Cabaceirians can subsist unless disaster strikes. But disaster does strike all too often, be it in the form of an illness or a death in the family, a fine, a capsized boat, or just the need for a new macuti roof. Emigration to Ilha, Nampula, Nacala or beyond is the only way to get past fourth-year primary school or to get a job. And Ilha is already overcrowded, its schools are overcrowded, and it has massive unemployment problems of its own.

  Less than one per cent of the Cabaceirians have a job with a salary. Approximately four hundred men (out of a total of twelve hundred fishermen) go out to fish each day, unless the wind or the tide is wrong for them, in which case none of the fishermen can go out to fish. There are many hungry days. When there is no fish, there is no food that day.

  Some of the local men and women earn twenty dollar-cents a shift carrying salt in the salt flats. Each family plants approximately fifty square metres of manioc. When the manioc fails, as it often does through exhaustion of the soil and manioc diseases, villagers starve. For eight months of the year there is no fresh fruit or vegetables; for four months of the year, people can buy tomatoes, onions, potatoes and mangoes. With most families (of five people) managing on under forty dollar-cents a day per family, there is no money for such purchases.

  So the Cabaceirians make do with what they have and some of them dream of better times. Most men and women dream of better times for their children. Most parents have to see some, at least, of their children die before them. The tide steals children, as do malaria, chest infections and diarrhoea. Women die in childbirth, men die at sea. On land, men tend to die from ruptured hernias, which they get from lifting weights far beyond their strength. And throughout the year, men, women and children die of malaria. On the whole, no one comes to help, so no help is expected. The people help each other. In twin villages of seven thousand souls, there are no visible orphans and no glaring signs of poverty. Almost everyone suffers from sub-nutrition but there are no starving people lying in the gutter.

  Calamity comes time and again and takes its toll, but the villagers absorb the shock and lend each other a hand. When a mud hut burns down, friends and neighbours help rebuild it. When someone is sick, small rations of food get smaller. When someone dies, a winding sheet will always be provided to wrap the body in before laying a dead person in a
box in the ground. The few chickens and goats wander freely between the huts. There are no locks on doors: sometimes there are no doors. It is not only the police who rarely come as far as here, the villages sit at the end of a dead-end track and no one comes. Actually, no one came until 2006, but now there is a trickle of visitors who know we have ice in the bush. But the villagers continue to take care of and to police themselves with their tradição. And the fear of shame and banishment continue to be stronger than any written law. And the traces of what the Portuguese did and what they left must make the wandering spirit of King Mucutu-Munu proud because, despite 450 years of Portugal trying to suppress the Macua, history has proven how dismally it failed.

  As I write, Mees has been travelling backwards and forwards to Amsterdam for fifteen months now, juggling between keeping his investors happy and getting on with things here. Every time he goes away, it feels as though a neap tide has drained me. And every time he comes back my life leaps to new heights. Trying to be together has proven harder than trying to lift this little bit of the world to face the future from a better angle.

  In terms of separation, 2006 has been our worst year yet. Spending five months apart didn’t damage our relationship, but it made a tough time tougher. We didn’t plan it that way, it just happened, and it made us both sad enough to not ever let it happen again.

  Being without him after years of round-the-clock contact has given me many hundreds more hours on my hands than I would have chosen to have. Sifting through them I found time to study again. Or, to be precise, I found the desire to study plus the time to go with it. As a result, I can now write in Portuguese (something the college really needed because my former illiterate notes to very formal officials were a little too funky for a hierarchical society like this). And I am making enough headway with Macua to see that if I keep it up for several more years I may be able to write the history of its culture that I feel is missing. And last, but not least, I have been able to learn a lot more about medicinal plants. Mees will be back soon and here to stay; but the system of study that I dredged out of my loneliness in his absence is also here to stay.

  When I was a child, I wanted to traipse around the tropics finding and drawing plants like Marianne Evans. I have often wondered what I would do in my old age and now I know. I will go full circle and gather the medicinal plants of the mangrove; and I will draw and chart them and gradually compile a botanical reference book.

  The past year has also been a year of mourning for the death (from cancer) first of my sister Lali, followed by that of my older sister, Gillie. Grief, loss and missing someone are very different emotions, but they are related and overlap.

  I moved here to be with Mees and although we have ended up so often with an ocean between us, I feel that in spirit he is here in this spiritual place. Everything and everywhere is imbued with his touch; so much so, that if I discover new wonders, I wait to savour them with him because to do so alone feels almost like treachery. I hoard troves of new beaches, new paths, ‘new’ ruins, new books and new projects for his return.

  Because Lolly and I are living on the edge of the earth, some friends assume that we are in a place full of danger. They imagine our staying here to be a brave stance. But there is no daring involved. This is one of the safest places I have ever known. At night, as we walk through the bush returning from Chocas or the mangrove, along footpaths so narrow they have to be known, past mud huts nestling beside cashew and mango trees, past salt flats and ruined palaces, our only fear is ‘Will we know the way home?’ I have never felt afraid of man or beast here. On the one hand, the local people are friendly, helpful, polite and amazingly tolerant. On the other hand, there are practically no beasts left bigger than a dog, or wilder than one.

  Most days, vervet monkeys lope through the mangroves and sometimes whole families of them run along the sands. There are some small gazelles (fewer than there might be if the people of Naguema would stop spearing them to cover drums) and some giant iguanas. Some people say they have seen a panther on the dunes, but I find this unlikely. In the days of famine, some twenty years ago, the Mozambicans ate just about every wild animal in the country. Where the Big Five used to roam, hungry huntsmen rounded them up, down to the last lion casserole.

  Further inland, where the Big Five migrate from the Niassa Game Reserve on the Tanzanian frontier, many of the animals have returned. In Mossuril District, this has not been the case. Last year Morripa’s dogs and goats were attacked by hyenas. Nocturnal genets will kill any chicken not protected by a basket with a stone on top, but short of these, there are no predators by day or night, except for the Grim Reaper, who seems to work overtime here.

  XX

  The Remains of Slavery

  MY ORIGINAL PLAN FOR THIS book was to write a diary to describe my time in north Mozambique in daily units. But time as I know it doesn’t exist. The sensual cocoon which changes shape occasionally as things happen flows in an unpredictable pattern. There are currents, and whirlpools, and waves. The result on the page is more random than I intended, but it keeps pace with the place.

  The coast of northern Mozambique has had a chequered history. For over a thousand years, ships came to find fresh water, to repair and renew their masts, and to trade. The forests of Lunga and Matibane were and are still a rich source of timber. Matibane is one of the few forests left of iron wood. It is no longer legal to export this dense timber, although I have heard that it trades on a black market. The forest is reserved for the restoration of monuments. In the past, ships were lured by Ilha’s water reservoirs and the valuable iron wood it could muster. They also came to buy other timbers, spices, herbal remedies, gold, ivory and the seemingly endless supply of black gold: slaves.

  Not far away, on Zanzibar, a similar history unfolded. But Ilha is further south on the circumnavigation from Europe. Ilha has ingenious and vast water deposits and most of the houses still have flat roofs criss-crossed with rain-catching gullies to supply this otherwise arid island. For ships sailing up from the Horn of Africa, Ilha was a must. It took advantage of its strategic location and grew into one of the richest prizes in the Indian Ocean.

  The Chinese were the first to discover its worth, then Indians, then Arabs, then the Portuguese. Twice the Dutch tried to seize it and twice they failed miserably. The second Dutch attempt to seize Ilha’s fortress was made with the British Royal Navy. Their joint failure is entombed under sand banks on the seabed. Enterprising boys dive down and haul up fragments of treasure. Even more enterprising and controversial salvage teams, notably from Britain and the US, are salvaging the treasure on a more industrial scale. It is fairly hush-hush because the sunken ships lie well within Mozambique’s territorial waters. But it is only fairly hush-hush because Ilha is a small island and the professional divers and their advisors tend to discuss their secrets in stage whispers that echo from pillar to post in the island’s very few bars and restaurants. Also a website showing part of the treasure trove of the American millionaire who has backed some of the ‘secret’ missions advertises its origins to the four corners of the world.

  In the centre of this Fortress of São Sebastião are two ancient Arabic cisterns. In 1558, the Portuguese conquerors started to construct the fort. It was finished sixty-two years later. From its parapets I can see across the channel to the Cabaceiras and its ruined palaces. From the Cabaceiras, the chunky grey fort is clearly visible weighing down one entire end of the island. In the two rainy seasons, the flat roofs become a rumpled green carpet with a lush pile, then a meadow of wild flowers, then an impenetrable tangle of overgrown grass, saplings and vetch. Reflecting the season, this yellows and dies, becomes a fire-hazard of dry straw and eventually blows into the sea leaving nothing but a mat of future mulch for the next rains.

  In the olden days, these roofs would have been spick and span, gathering every available drop of rain for the waterless island. But the fortress has suffered the same fate as everything else and fallen prey to decay. Only nesting seabird
s and occasional tourists disturb its long hibernation until the rare times when a dance festival or a concert jerks it awake. As a setting, it is magnificent. As a piece of architecture, it is astonishing; and as a place to wander around it has in its atmosphere a curious mix of the fine and the foul through which a paradoxically peaceful feeling pervades. The paradox lies in the horror of the tens of thousands of lost souls who have passed through its gates.

  For many centuries this island was a hub of slavery. It is full of former slave warehouses, slave docks, and great and small slave markets. Incalculable numbers of slaves passed through this place landing on the stone steps by the fortress in blinding sunlight on their way to a life of darkness. Records show 90,000 slaves in one year, 58,000 in another, waning to 27,000 as the slave trade died elsewhere. There are steps worn down by the tread of slaves being taken out to waiting ships.

  Being an inveterate fantasist, I like to imagine that my own slave ancestors also passed through here, or even came from here originally. The chances of this being the case are small, but having built my life on small chances, I like to persist in this fantasy and justify my new affinity and latest love as answering a call from my blood. I can never prove this to be the case, but nor can anyone else prove the contrary. My great-great-grandmother, Belle, was a slave from Benin sold in Belem, northern Brazil to my great-great-grandfather, a Sr Mendonça, who saw her in the slave market of Belem and fell in love with her. Belle was six feet tall and had royal blood (or so the story goes) and she fetched a high price as my ancestor bid for the woman he saw as his wife. To avoid the gossip, the couple moved across the frontier to British Guiana where they bought land and lived a grande passion, producing many children whom they largely neglected, so enraptured were the parents in each other.