Mozambique Mysteries

by Lisa St Aubin De Teran

  My being here and conceivably hailing from here would seem even more serendipitous were it not for my having fallen in love with so many other places in the past and also felt that I belonged there, wherever that particular ‘there’ happened to be. My memory is full of places where on arrival I felt the urge and even the need to stay. They were always beautiful; and being there made me feel good. Sometimes I have upped stakes and moved somewhere new for six months or a couple of years; sometimes circumstances have detained me longer. When I travel, I carry a mental notebook in which I jot down the desire to spend a month, six months or a year in any given place. If, as when I moved to Umbria, for example, I decide to drop anchor and make a base, it is with the certain knowledge that I will keep travelling away and coming back to it. The difference between everywhere else I have seen or known and Mossuril District is that when I first set foot on Varanda and looked out to Ilha and along the coast to the Cabaceiras, I felt that I never wanted to leave: not then and not ever.

  It is a paradox that in the Western world we have much more knowledge of slavery than most people do here where the drama was enacted. The lack of access to books, newspapers, TV, cinema, the internet and even basic education has blocked out great chunks of history. So Lolly, my teenage daughter who was born in Italy, knows more about the East African slave trade than the descendants of its victims and perpetrators here. Wherever there have been slave markets, there must also be the descendants of Arab and local native Africans alike who whipped the ‘black gold’ across the land and onto the ships. Popular myth would have all Africans be direct victims. To some extent, all Africans are, because the devastation slavery caused within the continent is such that all suffered from its aftermath. What many descendants of slaves in the diaspora find unthinkable is the part some black Africans played in the sale of their brothers and sisters.

  Within the chapter of history entitled ‘The Slave Trade’, the buyers and sellers will always be tarnished by their inhumanity. What is often forgotten is that a black skin does not in itself make any African brother to another. What used to be called ‘tribes’ and are now called ‘ethnic groups’ are what define who gets allegiance, help, respect and even the right to live from whom.

  The word ‘slave’ is known: escravo is the Portuguese term, but what the slave trade was and what it did is yet another mystery here. Visitors arrive and talk about slaves and slavery. They say that hundreds of thousands of men and women were brought to Ilha. If asked about it, most locals will smile and nod because it is an Akunha asking, or at best a city man distanced from them by wealth. So locals smile and nod and agree to something they cannot believe. Some extra delving brings up such arguments against it as: ‘Epa! Think about it, not a single person lands on Ilha without many others knowing about it. So how could tens of thousands of strangers have landed and none of us have seen them?’

  This is followed by a grin and a slight grimace of regret for the outsider, who must inevitably feel foolish in the face of such a truth. Losing face is almost the worst thing that can happen socially. It is almost as bad as shame. Shame cements the villages together. Shame is the local police force and judiciary rolled into one. Shame nurtures honesty and kindness. Avoiding shame is essential in a place where your village is not just the home you come from, but also the home you aspire to stay in till the day you die, and the home your spirit will rest in after you die. Someone’s community is his or her way of life and religion; it is the recipient of their love and loyalty, their law, and the only resting place of their ancestors without whom none can thrive.

  To try and explain that the slave trade happened long ago doesn’t usually help.

  ‘Long ago when?’ People ask and then shake their heads before there is a chance to reply. Older brothers or parents, aunts or uncles would certainly have mentioned such an event if it had taken place.

  ‘Tens of thousands of men and women, you say? Eeh! Nada! ’

  And that is the end of the discussion. The notion of tens of thousands is graspable in a country where, until the currency changed in January 2007, a bread roll costs a thousand meticals and a day’s unskilled labour was worth between 15,000 and 30,000 meticals.

  ‘During the war, more than ten thousand people came but there is a misunderstanding because most of them walked over the bridge from Lumbo and no more than fifty landed on the fortress steps as you say. We don’t call them slaves though: they were refugiados [refugees].’

  To try and define slavery doesn’t help clarify the concept either. There were people under Portuguese rule only thirty years ago whose condition was little different from that of a slave, except that the colonial subject didn’t have to be purchased in the first place so their life was cheaper.

  There are still people here in almost the same boat. There are estimated to be over two million actual slaves worldwide as of 2007; among the many countries accused of harbouring slaves are Britain, the Netherlands and the USA. Here in Mozambique, drudgery has replaced slavery, but there are still many workers who work for their food only and receive no wage. They sleep on the bare ground and eat fish heads and manioc flour. Their ‘masters’ assure me that ‘this is what they like’. Out of hunger, most people will eat scraps, but not out of preference. It is true that fish heads are always eaten by choice, but given the chance, most workers would also like to eat the rest of the fish.

  In theory, there is a minimum wage; in practice, with over half the population unemployed, and less than 10 per cent of Mozambicans having a regular salary, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children are reduced to serfdom.

  When Lolly arrived in the summer of 2005, she taught the students to sing Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song’. It caught on and the lyrics finally provoked some emotion and the emotion provoked discussion. An idea of what slavery might have been like began to grow. The idea that there are millions of people beyond Mossuril descended from slaves began to sink in. Vakháni vakháni, the concept of what goes on ‘out there’ is starting to take shape.

  Unlike, say, in the Caribbean where many men still aspire to ‘marry light’ as a way of climbing up the strictly colour-regulated class system imposed by the British, the light skin of a mestizo has no intrinsic cachet in Mozambique. There have been centuries of racial mixing, particularly with the former Arab rulers. The deep colour prejudice of, say, the Ashanti, where a mixed race child is virtually outcast, does not exist here. But the Macua seem proud and happy to be who they are. None of the skin whiteners so popular in the West Indies are in the shops. When a local woman whitens her face it is with a mussiro bark mask. This is Mozambique (pronounced ‘Mossambeaky’ by all and sundry), and almost no one knows or really cares what goes on elsewhere.

  Morripa is very good at talking in local metaphors. For people who don’t really grasp what Mozambique is, or Africa, or that there are other continents such as Europe and America, everything has to be brought down to simple descriptions and then enlarged gradually. Many of the students and workers are very bright, a few exceptionally so, but their isolation has been almost complete. Morripa is a mine of local history, which he is gathering for a book of his own. When the Portuguese arrived on Ilha in 1498, the sultan was Musa Malik, or some say Musa Mbiki. The name ‘Moçambique’ is believed to be derived from his name. This is one of the few things I can corroborate from a book.

  There seem to be only two English language guidebooks on Mozambique: the Lonely Planet for East Africa and the Bradt guides. Even though both have minimal coverage of this part of the north, they are all there is and tourists on Ilha travel armed with one or the other. Morripa quickly surpassed both guidebooks. We barter information: tales from my country in return for tales from his. It is too confusing to explain that I don’t have a country as such, that I have many and none. The idea of having no village to call home is so disturbing a concept here that having once ventured down the road of trying to explain it, I now keep it as a shameful secret. It stays in the small bag of shameful secrets tha
t are my legacy. If Bob Dylan was right when he sang ‘there is no success like failure’ then I could be cooking with gas.

  One thing that failure does bring is a better understanding of others who, for whatever reason, have also failed. By the same token, anyone who has been broke can sympathize more easily with the vast majority of the world’s population who still are. Comfort can become a cocoon and wealth a blindfold. Any past other than the ancestral past of this area is irrelevant here. In one way or another, everyone is starting from scratch. In a curious way, I, too, am starting my life again, building from zero with the guidance of my own ancestors both known and unknown.

  On Ilha, where many of the grand palaces were built from slavery (as indeed were many of the grand country houses of England, France, Portugal, Spain and the United States), there was to be a museum of slavery in what used to be the police barracks. It is a fine derelict mansion. When restoration began, though, in early 2005, all mention of the museum of slavery vanished. Instead, it seems, there will be a conference facility, and a fancy restaurant.

  Slavery and the notorious Middle Passage may have little place as points of interest in the popular culture, but Hollywood has. So when Danny Glover declared he would make a movie about slavery on Ilha with Halle Berry as the star, there was much excitement here. (Had it been a Bollywood movie, there would have been even more excitement.) As a result of the movie news, at the end of 2005 the island was a hive of gossip and speculation, if not activity.

  Visits were made from LA and black Americans were sighted. A black American arriving on the island is as foreign to the local people as an Englishman. It is not skin colour that divides people here: it is ethnicity and wealth. The latter is the real divider. All foreigners are wealthy by comparison to a local person and our habits are as mysterious to local residents as theirs are to us. Just as the movie speculation peaked, Ilha was cancelled as a location and gossip shifted from stars and dates to the reasons why the deal slipped through Ilha’s net. On such a small island, even non-events provide months of table talk.

  XXI

  Ilha

  THIS PARTICULAR ISLAND IN the sun is somewhere to either love or hate. It is a place where all passion has been spent, languishing in the aftermath of an exciting and violent history. You cannot take a step here without being confronted by elements of the past, yet nor can you take a step without being struck by its extraordinary, somnolent calm.

  By night, approaching it by sea, it has a fairytale quality. Parts of the island are beautiful almost beyond description, parts are magnificent, parts are gracefully decayed, and half the island is a very large African village under what looks from above like one enormous undulating macuti roof.

  Coral stone to build the palaces on the north end of the island was dug by slaves from the south end of the island. As a result, there is a difference in height of about two metres. Inside this pit, for hundreds of years, Ilha’s native population have built their huts. Roof touches roof for shade, creating a rabbit-warren effect underneath the gigantic palm-leaf canopy of what is called the Macuti City.

  Beyond the Stone City where intrepid tourists stay and the local grandees and officials have their rambling offices, there is virtually no indoor plumbing and there are no sewers. It would take a Mahatma Gandhi to sort out the sewage here. It is a problem many have studied and all have abandoned. Meanwhile, thousands of Omuhipitians use the biggest self-cleaning toilet in the world and life goes on regardless.

  Uninvited or unescorted visitors are not really welcome in the Macuti City where people spill into the narrow lanes to wash, cook and chat. Tourists who wander in are invading the little privacy there is there. Elsewhere, few tourists would barge into someone’s house uninvited and observe or photograph strangers in their bedrooms and bathrooms. Because Ilha is seriously overcrowded and hundreds of people sleep in the lanes and conduct their lives on their doorsteps, to wander through it lacks respect. Several visitors of mine who spent a few days on Ilha before joining us at the college have told me they felt unwelcome when they strolled through the macuti warren and took against the island as a result. We are visitors, our money is needed and our presence is desired, but not to observe the sanctuary of the Macuti City, which belongs to the Omuhipitians and not to us. It is home to 14,000 people, not a zoo. The Stone City is and always was the domain of foreigners.

  If Ilha were the heroine of a fairytale, a Sleeping Beauty, then one could say that she pricked her finger in 1898 when the Powers-that-be decided that Mozambique should have a capital nearer to its South African neighbour’s. At that time, hundreds of thousands of Mozambicans were crossing the border to work in the South African gold and diamond mines. Although Portugal failed to provide sufficient funds to develop the new capital, the city grew. By the 1940s, with a boom in the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of white South Africans were using the beach city of Lourenço Marques as their playground and trading post. Access by air and overland was relatively easy there, whereas access to Ilha de Moçambique, the former capital city far to the north, was difficult and costly.

  Mozambique Island had made sense as a capital city in the days when trade was by sea. With railways and roads taking over as the main means of transport, the absence of any rail link from north to south or of a proper road from South Africa, plus territorial threats from the British in Natal, doomed the island to be demoted. The stroke of a pen had decreed that the new capital would be Lourenço Marques, but as with other new capitals designated by politicians in other countries, it takes more than a piece of paper to make one.

  In the case of Ilha, the seat of government moved, but the island’s social supremacy continued for several decades. From 1507 when the first Portuguese settlement was established there to the turn of the twentieth century, wealthy and important families had lived and traded there. The politicians might move south, but the happy few did not follow them. While the beach resorts along the southern coast grew up, Ilha’s own resort – Lumbo, known as the St Tropez of East Africa – continued to flourish.

  With the 1930s rail link to Nampula, Cuamba and Entre Lagos on the Malawian frontier en route to Blantyre, and the 1940s rail link to the Port of Nacala, Ilha held its own and continued to thrive. However, the lack of government money began to take its toll and the Stone City began imperceptibly to deteriorate. Fewer new businesses came, fewer contracts arrived, fewer kickbacks trickled down, and there was less new blood. Those who would enter government and attain power no longer needed to lobby on the island or network the glamorous bars at Lumbo. Thus Ilha stopped luring the intelligentsia and that sector of society full of energy and ambition.

  For the fairytale princess, a potent sedative was beginning to course through her veins. Across the channel, Lumbo continued as a favourite beach haven for wealthy Nampulese and as a hideaway for nostalgic international tourists. Lumbo was the chosen holiday resort for many of the colonizers and hosted a steady stream of other Portuguese visitors. In the 1930s it was at the Hotel do Lumbo that the Aga Khan had his famous love affair with Hollywood’s Ava Gardner. The Hotel do Lumbo is now no more than a ruin in a ruined town cradled by a ruined railway terminal beside a disused airport. But enough villas remain on the former esplanade and enough jacaranda trees and sculpted pillars for the imagination to see how lovely it must once have been.

  Between them, Lumbo and Ilha limped along as the abandoned dowager and her attractive daughter. Lumbo Airport was the second to open in Mozambique and had regular weekend traffic of light planes ferrying in the rich and famous. LAM, the national airline, also ran a passenger service there.

  The passenger terminal remains intact and is one of the prettiest airport buildings I have ever flown to. For a few heady months in 2004, LAM reopened a service from Nampula to Lumbo, but there were not enough passengers to keep it open. However, in the future, Lumbo will open again. Its runway is big enough to take a 747 jet. Mees landed there with the Presidential Jet when he first toured the country. When Lumbo Airport does ev
entually open, presumably in time for Coral Lodge’s guests, the Cabaceiras will benefit enormously.

  In June 1975, when the first president of the still ruling Frelimo Party issued the 48/5 decree (whereby all of the Portuguese colonizers had forty-eight hours to leave the country and each could take only five pieces of luggage with them), panic reigned and the Portuguese fled.

  Mees told me that he first knew of this exodus from the other side. A Dutch TV network sent him to Portugal to film extensively the fleeing refugees, or ritornados as they came to be called. Tens of thousands of distressed refugees were taken in by their fellow countrymen. Mees interviewed dozens of them for the documentary he filmed. Their stories were of grief and loss: they had been cruelly thrown out of the country they loved and had helped to build; they had lost everything from houses to businesses, farms to shops, books to children’s toys. Their distress was genuine and heart-wrenching. Many were penniless and unemployable. Many were just old and homeless. Some had been born in Mozambique, some had merely lived there. Some families had been there for many generations. Mees told me, ‘It was a shocking sight. There were so many of them. I remember wondering at the time what sort of people would be so cruel.’

  It was the people whose liberation leader, Eduardo Mondlane (who had studied in the USA and worked at the UN with Kofi Annan), had been killed by a Portuguese letter bomb while in exile in Dar es Salaam. People who had fought a long slow war of independence and had had to reclaim their land by fighting for every inch of it. It was the millions of people who were sick of being marginalized and punished by a minority of foreigners.

  In the wake of centuries of harsh and unjust treatment: of slavery followed by virtual serfdom, of extreme physical abuse, imprisonment and torture, disappearances, theft and rape, sending the perpetrators out of the country with forty-eight hours’ notice doesn’t seem so cruel any more. In fact, it shows a degree of tolerance. In many other countries, thousands of the former oppressors would have been shot.