Mozambique Mysteries

by Lisa St Aubin De Teran

  Evidence of the former Portuguese oppression is abundant. Even the beautiful groves of cashew trees that are spread across Nampula Province and beyond have a history of cruelty behind them. Martin Mason, an agricultural consultant working with the US government, told me that under Portuguese rule, every time a worker had a new child, twenty-five cashew or mango trees had to be planted by him and his family. If any of these twenty-five trees died, the worker in question was flogged as an example to his colleagues.

  The countryside is full of cashew trees, huge, wonderful oases of shade. I had often wondered how they got there: who had planted, watered and nursed them in this arid climate? Because this is not a place where a man can just plant a tree; after planting, that tree needs coaxing and tending like a sick child. Cashew trees grow to be enormously top heavy and then they tend to topple over. Unlike most other trees, this partial uprooting does not signal their demise. The roots run very deep into the ground. Once a cashew tree collapses sideways, it continues to grow, making new roots to join its forefathers and often sprouting a second head. In every village there are these fallen but still growing trees. In some villages, they have become the communal meeting place, providing ample sitting space for an entire committee.

  After her crown and sceptre were rudely snatched away by the southern rival, Ilha was never going to regain her former glory, but economically she had a chance. That is, until 1975 when the 48/5 decree rid Mozambique of its former Portuguese masters. Arguably, no other city took such a body blow as Ilha. Elsewhere, houses were vacated and businesses abandoned, and then, over the years, the same buildings were swallowed up by Indian merchants and shopkeepers and by government offices and by the few local people who made good. But Ilha didn’t have houses as such: it had hundreds of palaces, enormous, stately, costly, ghostly buildings far too big for an average family of shopkeepers to slip into and convert to a holiday home.

  Elsewhere, the Portuguese colonizers’ houses and warehouses were mostly left empty for years. ‘What if they came back?’ the local black Mozambicans asked themselves. ‘What if the white masters came back and found their guards and servants living in their houses and sleeping in their beds?’ It didn’t bear thinking about. The Portuguese had beaten and abused their local staff when they had done nothing wrong; they would probably kill them if they took over their houses. It was one thing for a liberated Mozambican to step into his or her former master’s shoes: but step into his bed? No way. As the years passed, though, ways were found; people started living in a bit of a house and then edging in a bit further. When it became clear that the Portuguese masters were not coming back, door and windows, tiles and furniture, buckets and tools began to disappear discreetly.

  On Ilha, there was nothing discreet about the magnificent abandoned palaces, nothing discreet about the monumental doors. The last violence Ilha saw was after the country’s liberation and immediately after the Portuguese fled. In Perugia, Italy, the local Umbrians tore down the vast Rocca Paolina, symbol of papal rule in that former Vatican State after the papal forces were beaten and Perugia regained its freedom. So on Ilha, after the Portuguese exodus the Omuhipitians attacked and vandalized some of the palaces that most symbolized their vanquished masters. The islanders had borne their oppression patiently, but as soon as they were free, groups of them took to the streets, forced open some houses and smashed up what they could.

  Like the fortress, houses on Ilha are built of huge coral rocks. They were built to last. Their beams are made of almost indestructible ironwood, their doors are six inches thick, their stairs are massive and their arches structural. The ‘tearing down’ of the Stone City was more a gesture than a fact. It would have taken dozens of bulldozers, wrecking balls and cranes or a great quantity of explosives to raze the Stone City. Undoubtedly some damage was done, but how much, thirty years on, it is hard to tell.

  Ilha is a small island: 350 metres wide, 2.5 kilometres long. The Macuti City has always been overcrowded; the Stone City was always serviced by hundreds of servants from the Macuti City. There cannot have been many secrets kept there. During the final, brutal years of Portuguese rule, when opposition was rampant, Ilha was a seat of oppression. It may be forgotten now, but it was not forgotten then. In Lourenço Marques, police and army chiefs remembered the great fortress of São Sebastião. Far in the north, away from the prying eyes of foreigners, journalists and relatives, prisoners could be kept and tortured there and their bodies could be disposed of without any fuss or publicity. Some of the worst atrocities of the outbound government are said to have taken place on Ilha in the thousand-year-old dungeons of São Sebastião.

  The muezzin calling to prayer from the seaweed-green mosque that towers over the northern shore can be heard all over the island. A cry in the night from any of the stone or mud buildings echoes through the streets. Only from within the massive walls of the lonely fortress of São Sebastião could the cries of the prisoners being interrogated be hidden from the rest of the island. But colonies, by their nature, use and abuse the native people. And being waited on hand and foot becomes so addictive that not even a state of national emergency could make Portuguese soldiers and officers and their civilian counterparts clean out their own latrines or wash the bloodstains off their office walls. The secrets leaked out via the local servants, who whispered them on.

  In Maputo, as Lourenço Marques is now called, people remember with a shudder family members being sent to Ilha. Someone whose family suffered during the final years of Portuguese rule told me, ‘For a prisoner to be sent to Ilha was a death sentence: too far away for anyone to visit or help. And even if anyone did manage to get there, no visitors were allowed into the fortress.’

  Over the years, in the Macuti City, local islanders must have heard sad and shocking tales from prisoners’ relatives. Through them, and the things they themselves saw, heard and overheard, they must have pieced together a grim picture.

  Wandering through the island now, seeing beautiful buildings choked by their own rubble where the annual rains have eventually brought down a floor or a wall, it seems like wanton vandalism when one first hears how the islanders tried to destroy their own city. But vandalism is a phenomenon of the Western world. This is an ordered society where people do things for a reason. We come to admire the city and gaze at the architecture and find it a shame that it is so decayed without considering the shame of past atrocities. The beauty that remains is impregnated with passion and violence. It has stayed in the stones. In most cities, elements of such violence are at large in the streets. But Ilha is a soporific place where tranquil domesticity spills into its unpaved streets and grandiose civic buildings are the camping grounds of hundreds of families.

  From the dhows being hand-carved on the seashore by a chapel to nets being mended on a green-slimed beach, from fruit and bread being sold on an esplanade to fishing dhows sailing into port by the collapsed jetty in front of the vermilion museum, there is no hurry, no rush and no aggression. Even the market seems to have been sprinkled with sleepy dust. With few cars passing between the tree lined streets, the noise is that of children playing, women chatting and the few pedestrians in the Stone City greeting each other with the formal effusive greeting of the Macua.

  The Macuti City is the part of Ilha that is full of life. In the Stone City, day and night, silence reigns despite the many squatters in among the ruins and the wealthy residents of the restored stately villas and the handful of relatively new hotels. Its name is apt because the stones overshadow the people who inhabit them.

  Each year, more ruins are restored. The difference is noticeable and entire streets are beginning to look quite smart as more and more people discover this architectural treasure. It will take many years, probably decades before Ilha is fully restored. Maybe it never will be; maybe there will always be ruins and rubble between the pristine walls of this or that palace.

  Whatever the future is for many of her derelict buildings, the Sleeping Beauty of Ilha has woken up. Unlike
the fairytale princess, she was not woken by the kiss of a lovelorn prince. Ilha was woken by the various kisses of intrepid foreign tourists who found their way here and discovered the sleeping dowager of the Indian Ocean. Despite the efforts of UNICEF and its declaration that the entire island be a World Heritage site, and despite the efforts of aid organizations – predominantly from Scandinavia – it is the arrival of tourism that is breathing life into Ilha’s economy. It is tourists in ever-increasing numbers who are generating the restoration of the Stone City and providing income to the Macuti City dwellers.

  After the waking kiss, the Sleeping Beauty proved not to be immune to age. The passing centuries had left warps and wrinkles and her once immaculate stone gown had decayed in places. But hers is still a real and ancient beauty. As work progresses on her coral vestments, it is not the superficial work of cosmetic surgery. Description and photographs can never capture all the pleats and folds, her marine hems or her concealed charms.

  Now that Ilha has been discovered and made its mark on the tourist map, foreign visitors will continue to come. New accommodation is under way to receive them. The pioneer hotel, the four-star Omuhipiti, stands out as the only modern building on the island. It used also to stand out as the one and only hotel, but now it has competition from the likes of Hotel Escondidinho, and Pensão Casa Branca. An Italian architect, Gabriele, has a delightful pensão opposite the mosque. Open the door and you are confronted by a courtyard shaded by a large palm, follow through and climb the stairs to the typical flat rain-catching roof and look out across the whole island or watch the stars. More can be learned of the goings-on of Ilha from an afternoon spent on Gabriele’s roof terrace overlooking the main mosque and its fishing beach than on several days of extensive touring. And given the heat on Ilha and its magnified glare from acres of white and pastel walls, chilled drinks and real Italian cappuccino sipped in shade are an added bonus.

  Another long-term resident, Jorge, has built the simulacrum of a Portuguese village by the sea. Leading straight onto a small beach, Jorge’s pensão (which is beside the BIM Bank’s palace, which is on a corner of the square by the market square) has rows of cottage-type rooms overlooking a long garden with a wall of blue at the end that merges visually with the sea beyond. The back part of his pensão is a traditional Ilhan palace housing restaurant, bar and rooms galore. Though, like much of the island, this pensão still has work in progress. Many of the rooms are finished and the garden is a delight. When the need to get away and write somewhere with the luxury of hot showers, electric light and a fan arises, I sail to Ilha and stay in one of Jorge’s pretty cottages, undisturbed by any sound except the wind rustling palm leaves and the sea lapping at the private dock.

  Slowly but surely a number of local householders are also doing up and opening rooms for tourists. In the long run, this will help solve the inevitable accommodation congestion that Ilha will have. Even though it is not necessarily a holiday destination where tourists will stay for weeks at a time, it will get more tourists than it can cater for and I think it will get them very soon.

  Once Ilha is up and running with more tourist infrastructure, she has one rival in the Indian Ocean: Zanzibar. Where Ilha can beat this rival is if the island manages to remain a safe haven for tourists. Being able to wander around the streets, being able to admire the city, the luxury of being truly welcome are great attractions. This is a predominantly Muslim stronghold without any religious tension. The local people are far from any undertow of fundamentalism. Ilha is not lobbying for independence and it is not lobbying for Shiite rule; in fact, it is not lobbying for anything other than a good wind for its fishermen, a good meal at night and a good feeling for all and sundry, be they visitors or natives. Maintaining this easy-going feeling as waves of foreigners invade its shores and unintentionally upset the status quo will not be easy, but I think it is and always will be a priority for tourists.

  Ilha is a bazaar of bright sun glittering on splintered blue and peeling pastels against the horizon. It is a job lot of sand roads and fragmented pavements, avenues of fat trees bulging into the roads, fragments of old stone, rusty cannon balls, pieces of anchors and massive beams chewed by time. Ilha is a kaleidoscope of shreds of beige and ochre sprinkled with astonishingly bright colours. Women in vivid yellow, green, red, pink and orange capulanas stroll through the streets or sit in doorways.

  PART FOUR

  XXII

  Morripa, the Local Hero

  ABDALA MORRIPA IS THE hardest of all the local people to describe because he is an enigma. His knowledge is deep rooted in the mangroves but has been fed by the twelve years he has spent abroad. To see him in his compound (known affectionately not as Morripa’s house but as Morripa’s village because of its size and the size of his immediate family), is to see a powerful, authoritarian 47-year-old man who has made good despite almost impossible odds. Part of the great esteem he is held in is because he has visibly ‘made it’. He lives at a markedly different economic level from his immediate peers. One possible exception is his brother, who is a step ahead with a 4x4 truck to Morripa’s Honda motorbike. Discussion of Morripa’s well-being is a favourite topic. His staunchest fans maintain that Morripa could have a 4x4 if he so desired and that he doesn’t have one because he doesn’t want one.

  This could be true. I remember him explaining to me on one of our many walks that he was bound by an oath to his father never to drive. ‘My father was a driver, a chauffeur by profession. I was still a boy when he made me take the oath never to drive. My father has been dead for years but I made him a promise and I cannot break it.’

  Much of Morripa’s life is governed by promises. He is the most dedicated motivator of the twin Cabaceiras and determined to set them on the path of economic development within his own lifetime. To this end, long before I, or Mees, or the former Dutch owners ever came here, he has been educating himself the better to help his people and organizing them into self-help groups.

  Another, equally important promise is to his family. He has vowed to put food on their plates every day and to send all his children to school. This is no easy task for any father in the Cabaceiras, but for one like Morripa who has twenty-eight children, only the quartermaster skills he gleaned from his long military service have enabled him to honour it.

  Morripa is an entrepreneur: he builds holiday homes for the Indian community in Chocas-Mar. He keeps sheep and grows mulberry trees in his garden. He is always building. Behind the split-bamboo fence of his compound he does actually own a small village. Every time I go away for more than a few months, another traditionally built bamboo-frame mud hut springs up among his fruit trees like an adobe mushroom.

  Replete with mobile phone, generator, refrigerator, TV, video player and stately furniture, it is his home that supplies the chairs carried to the college whenever special guests are coming.

  When the first fourteen staff members were camping and squatting in his houses and grounds, I was not surprised that they were reluctant to leave. Compared to the college, Morripa has all mod cons. Daily the order to strike camp and move into the palaceu was skilfully ignored until it was pointed out that while seven of the fourteen had beds and rooms there, where did they think Morripa’s enormous family was sleeping? Generous to a fault, Morripa hosted all the first staff for ten days without once drawing their attention to the fact that their occupation had rendered his children homeless.

  As a result of his hospitality, there was no excitement about moving into the college by anyone except Ellie and Ramon. Most of the others saw it as an enforced downgrade and failed to see any potential for rendering the numerous bare rooms more comfortable or turning any of the intrinsically beautiful building into a semblance of home.

  I remember the first time I visited Morripa in his compound. In those days, he had a pergola in his garden with tables and chairs where we sat and talked. Thanks to the many years he spent living in Cuba as a military instructor, his Spanish is fluent. But for this, we would not h
ave been able to communicate beyond the boundaries of my then very limited Portuguese.

  When he is relaxed, Morripa describes his world and the way he sees its future in the most lyrical terms. He is a natural poet who speaks in metaphors. Sometimes, to this day, I have to ask him to say things again because he loses me in his leaps of imagination. On the first day I visited him, he decreed that I accept and eat a boiled egg. It was an incredibly hot mid-afternoon and a boiled egg was the last thing I wanted. I demurred politely but he would have none of it.

  ‘You have to eat it, it is from Peru,’ he told me, and went out to give instructions to one of his numerous daughters.

  A boiled egg in the tropics is a dodgy thing. Once in a while a little cooked embryo lurks inside the shell. I am a squeamish eater and not fond of finding surprises in my food. Only a few days before when making an omelette at Varanda, I had cracked open a blob of putrid green slime with a glutinous lump inside it. The smell was strong enough to linger in the little storeroom kitchen for several days. As a result, I was off eggs.

  The thought of an egg imported from Peru was scary. It still took five days by road to get to Maputo. I didn’t imagine eggs were being airlifted into Mozambique from South America along with essential medical supplies and tractor parts. Ellie came from Peru originally and I had travelled there: an egg had not much chance of being fresh even before it started its descent from the Andes.

  I looked around the pergola for somewhere to hide the egg when it came and began to think of ways to distract my host while I disposed of the Peruvian offering. As luck would have it, I had no handbag and my thin dress had no pockets. Through the still skimpy bougainvillea I could see two teenage girls laying and then lighting a small charcoal fire. A battered aluminium pan was filled with water and a very large egg was put to boil.