Mozambique Mysteries

by Lisa St Aubin De Teran

  It was a slow process and the longer it took, the more I determined, in this place of no doctors, not to eat the imported egg no matter how prized a possession it might be. I broached the subject as tactfully as I could.

  ‘How does a Peruvian egg get transported?’

  Morripa looked at me quizzically and smiled.

  ‘I mean, how can you get an egg from Peru here in this isolated village?’

  Morripa looked at me, clearly proudly aware that it was indeed no small feat. I was not to be daunted and kept going.

  ‘Don’t eggs have to be fresh? Do you just have the one or has anyone here eaten one?’

  I didn’t add, ‘and lived’, but I was thinking it. Morripa looked worried. Up at Varanda we had talked a lot and he had high hopes of what a future alliance might bring. We had already solemnly pledged to join forces on some matters. I could see him wondering if that had been such a good idea after all. He changed the subject but I pushed it back to the Andean egg. Eventually he told me that he had personally eaten several of them.

  At that point, the offending delicacy arrived hot from the pan and was placed in my lap. Morripa nodded to me to crack it open and set to. Nothing happened and he ordered salt and piri-piri pepper to be brought. Both arrived and I continued to look at the egg in my lap and Morripa continued to encourage me to eat it.

  Finally, crestfallen, he asked me, ‘Don’t you like eggs from Peru?’

  I wrinkled my nose. ‘It’s not the egg: it’s the Peru bit. Peru is so far away …’

  He looked at me and then stood up. ‘Come with me,’ he said, leading me out of the pergola to a small yard beside the outside kitchen. Pointing to a large bush, he said, ‘That is a Peru.’

  A very stately and very ugly turkey emerged from the shade and gobbled its way towards us.

  If all our linguistic misunderstandings were as easily solved, both he and I would have an easier time of it. Since then I have worked hard at my Portuguese and he has done the same with English. Our lingua franca is now Portuguese and the times when Mees asks me to translate something and I have to admit that I can’t because I have no idea what Morripa has just said are getting fewer. Each time a muddle is clarified, he laughs like a child with his perfect alabaster teeth gleefully displayed.

  Deep down, there is a well of sadness which his eyes occasionally reflect. Sometimes, when I observe him off his guard, I see a man carrying an enormous burden and worrying if he will have the strength to take it to its destination. When provoked, he is the most diplomatic person in the world. When truly angry – a formidable sight – he clams up completely and the anger flashes in his eyes. Jealously protective, anyone who damages or disrespects me or Mees, Varanda, or the college, or any of his own, incurs his seething wrath.

  Despite the power and authority he exudes, he is physically weakened by serious asthma. He is prone to bronchitis and pneumonia. But he is a workaholic, punctual to the minute and entirely reliable.

  Before he joined Varanda as its local manager, he was a government tax inspector. Before that, for fifteen years he was a military hostage negotiator. Before that, for two years, he was a volunteer soldier in Frelimo’s army defending his country against a vicious outside attack. Twice he was one of only two in an entire battalion to survive a battle. He has lived extensively in Russia, China and Cuba, and has travelled to many of Mozambique’s neighbouring states.

  He works five full days and one half day every week for Varanda. He is also the director of the college; he builds houses and farms manioc, pumpkins, tomatoes and sheep. He breeds poultry. He is writing a memoir. He studies. He is an active member of the village committee. He is starting a prawn farm with sixty-three local villagers. He has a wife on Ilha and a large family there and common-law wives in Cabaceira Grande, Cabaceira Pequena and Nampula. He has twenty-seven children, each of whom he cares about deeply, helps bring up and educate; I have tested him and I know that he not only remembers each and every name but also each and every birthday.

  Given all the above, a great mystery is how does he find the time to go courting? Yet Morripa is a tremendous flirt and the best ‘catch’ in the village. It is believed that no female can ride on the back of his scarlet Honda without getting pregnant. I have personally ridden many times and disproved this theory, but each time we twist and turn through the dirt tracks of our and other villages, there are screams of lewd anticipation from the men and women we pass.

  Several of our students are his children and one of our students has a three-year-old child by him. For some Western men, there is something almost threatening about Morripa’s prowess both as a local motivator and sexual mover.

  How he came to be what he is and to achieve what he has must be told by him to do it full justice. His story combines that of hundreds of thousands of other northern Mozambicans. It is as though in one immensely vibrant body the essence of all his fellow men has been combined.

  Tall, ebony-skinned, gleaming and dressed to kill, he is the closest friend I have here. As each old pleat of his densely packed life unfolds, I realize that our relationship is more intuitive than anything else. It will take many years to really know him. It took only a few hours to really appreciate him. Every day, across the whole of Mossuril District from Naguema to Cabaceira Pequena, he is my calling card, my reference. It is not he who works with me but I who work with him.

  His is a name to conjure with and a face to count on. A walk down any street, be it a red dirt road in the bush or the stony streets of Ilha is a slow process. Every few metres we must stop and greet as Morripa is hailed like the local hero he is.

  XXIII

  The Staff and Students

  WE HAVE A PHOTOGRAPH, TAKEN just before the Minister of Tourism arrived, of all twenty-one of the first students standing on the portico steps in their new uniforms of tartan capulanas or trousers and beige shirts. I bought the shirts in the Waterlooplein market in Amsterdam as an ex-army bargain: one hundred, for one hundred Euros. The capulana cloth came from a little shop in the bush up a dust track behind Morripa’s house. We bought four rolls and the local dressmaker sewed all twenty-one outfits overnight. The photograph is full of expectation and was taken on a wave of euphoria. Since then, there have been almost daily dips and highs. Now, no new group of students will probably ever look so excited because no new class will ever be venturing quite as far into the unknown.

  When the college opened with its twenty-one students, the head boy was Morripa. I pointed out that since he was also a director of the college it was a bit bizarre for him to be a student as well. He pointed out that it wouldn’t do for his peers and juniors to know things he didn’t.

  ‘Imagine if my own children can speak English and I can’t. I want to learn everything there is to learn. You cannot imagine how hungry we are here to learn things. I am not embarrassed to go to school at my age. I went to secondary school on Ilha when I was thirty-nine. I sat in a little desk with twelve-year-olds either side of me. They laughed the way people always laugh at Cabaceirians. We are the idiots, the backward ones. Well, I went every day with Marufo from Cabaceira Pequena. We went by boat at dawn, and when there was no wind, we rowed. When we could not return, we slept over on Ilha, and when the sea did not let us go we made up the work the next day.

  ‘Here in the village everyone laughed as well. Why was an old man like me going to school? Well, I got my tenth grade and I got a job as a tax inspector and now I am the local manager of Varanda and a director of this college. They don’t laugh any more. I have a motorbike and mobile, my house has beds and tables. My children eat well and wear shoes. I know that knowledge is the key to everything. As a friend, teach me all you know.’

  Muanema, the oldest of the students, is fifty. I discovered later that she had been tagged onto the student list by the community elders because her husband had an accident and was paralysed from the waist down and the two of them were virtually starving. By joining the first class, Muanema got a subsidy which keeps them going.
To her great credit, she tries very hard to keep up, but with zero schooling and limited Portuguese, language and learning just don’t sink in any more. I know the feeling; I got too old to just ‘pick up’ Dutch. After four years of living in Holland my Dutch is about as shaky as Muanema’s English. But she is stubborn and loyal and not just here for her subsidy. She cares about the college and is proud to be part of it. As a compromise, she found her way to the outside kitchen and bonded with Atija and her team; Muanema now spends most of her lesson time there.

  Cooking for thirty workers a day and also for the students and staff, Atija’s crew are already under pressure. Just as Atija used to be a student who is now in a job, so Muanema has found her own job within the college and will spend the rest of her working days there. Now that she doesn’t have to pretend to want to learn English, she is actually picking up more of it than she ever did in class.

  To start with, ‘tourism’ is an alien concept. The first lesson at the College of Tourism – o colégio – is to try and explain what a tourist is. For people who leave their village only because they are forced to by fear or famine or the need to survive, the idea of choosing to leave your home and then squandering vast amounts of money abroad is more than just bizarre: it is madness.

  ‘Who in their right mind would willingly go to where they have no family?’

  ‘Who would choose to eat strange food and sleep under a strange roof?’

  ‘What sort of human pigs piss – and more – inside a house?’

  ‘How disgusting is that, when there is all the bush and the mangrove to do your business in!’

  And when someone can afford to rest, they trudge around under a burning sun staring at and photographing the sea and the sand, the mangroves and ruins. Why?

  It is puzzling enough to the historically cosmopolitan islanders on Ilha, but in the Cabaceiras, where tourists have yet to arrive, it is harder still to explain. Most of the local people have never seen a tourist so they have no idea what one is. Turísmo is a meaningless word much vaunted and desired without most people grasping what it entails. There is a rumour that when tourists come they will bring wealth and economic development, but few people grasp how that will happen. So few visitors come to the Cabaceiras that whenever someone from the college goes into the village, children run and hide and shout ‘Akunha! ’ as they might once have shouted ‘Pirates!’ in the olden days.

  As a way of bridging the gap between the college and the village, we have taken to hiring ‘Dr’ Rocha’s stereo system once a week and running local music on it via our generator. Between two hundred and three hundred young people and children come to the college’s cultural centre to dance and drink lurid vermilion Jolly Jus and eat bread rolls. It has been a good way to recruit new, younger students. For people who barely speak Portuguese, have only three or four years of very basic primary school, who don’t know what a tourist is and have never seen a farm, a College of Tourism and Agriculture on their doorstep can be a little bit too strange to join.

  Even when Morripa and the current students try to explain that the college exists to train people so that they can have good jobs, not many people comprehend, because there are no jobs here beyond those supplied by the college itself and Varanda. The average Cabaceirian family of five, with two adults bringing in money from fishing, shell-gathering, peddling matches, Jolly Jus and torch batteries, and whatever else can produce an income, live on between forty and eighty dollar-cents a day. The higher rate is only sixteen dollar-cents per day per person. The concept of a regular salary at a living wage is beyond the dreams of most of the villagers, including our students. We explain it over and over again, but the women, in particular, don’t get it. There are no jobs for women within their experience so how can someone suddenly give them money? We explain that the money is for work, but that doesn’t sink in because life is one long task from 4am, when they go to fetch water, until dusk when they finish planting, weeding, harvesting or grinding their manioc, and no one ever paid them for it.

  One day, news of a spate of robberies in Nacala drifted into the village and aroused sensations of outrage and shame. Ibraimo shook his head and wondered what the country was coming to. ‘Such things could only happen in Mozambique,’ he said. ‘What must such reports make you think of us all?’

  I told him that theft was international and universal. In fact, there had just been a particularly bad robbery at my office in Amsterdam. Ibraimo, the mangrove guide and deputy foreman of Varanda, stopped me short and, wide-eyed, asked me to repeat the story. After hearing the details, he was amazed.

  ‘Are you saying there are thieves beyond Nampula?’

  When I reiterated that there were thieves everywhere, he was speechless. He went off shaking his head. I could hear him in the carpentry workshop telling Mestre Canira and some other workers in Macua that there were thieves in ‘Dona Lisa’s and o Mesi’s village’. During the day, everyone pondered this and came back to it, almost visibly shifting their entire perception of foreigners and ‘out there’.

  The more time I spend here, the farther away ‘out there’ seems to be. After so much success and so many failures, I have stepped out of whatever race it was I used to want to win. Now I want to be the one who stands by and cheers when Morripa and Ibraimo, Mestre Canira, Sergio and Marufo, Vulai and Momade, Sumaila and Victorino, Ancha, Amina, Atija and Sheik Namana lead their people out of the economic slavery they live and die in.

  Being their cheerleader started as a hobby and then, as hobbies will, it began to take over my life. Like a brightly coloured capulana, I try to wrap it round my life. When it comes untied, I rearrange it. It comes untied a lot as we find our way and discover who our friends and allies are and who they are not.

  In Cabaceira Grande, where once a complicated system of wells and irrigation channels watered market gardens and palm and cashew plantations, there is now such a water shortage that women sometimes walk for hours with a 20-litre yellow plastic jerry can on their heads to bring back the bare necessities. Were it not for the ruins, it would be hard to imagine such a poor and backward place could ever have been a centre of thriving enterprise and home to foreign dignitaries, let alone that this was the case until only thirty years ago.

  The set has been here for centuries. The scenery is of fallen splendour gathering dust: from the former Governor General’s summer palace to the ancient parador wrapped mysteriously in a high wall. The former is home to dozens of bush squirrels with striped tails who dislodge the last of the roof tiles.

  XXIV

  Vakháni Vakháni

  AFTER THE CONFUSION AND culture shock of the first group of volunteers, we have changed the criteria of what a volunteer needs to come here. The first group was very carefully sifted and selected; each had a special development qualification or at least some aspect of their CV that would make them of particular use out here. One was an HIV prevention specialist, another had quartermaster’s skills, others came from a background of educational development, and so on. When it came to the crunch, though, none of these skills were put into action and many of the basic requirements needed to manage here were missing.

  Like everything else, recruiting has followed a giant learning curve. What we look for now are willing hands, with an emphasis on the willing. People have to want to help the local community. Volunteers have to have a sense of humour, they have to have initiative and common sense and they need to have travelled before. On arrival, the culture shock is enormous.

  I can only blame myself for not personally testing the first group of volunteers to arrive. The almost immediate breakdown of their group leader was something that neither he nor I could have foreseen, but a leaderless, uncohesive group, dropped into the chaotic start-up phase, was a recipe for disaster.

  Some of the first group would probably have been pretty good if they had arrived even a few weeks later, or if they had believed that the college would work. Some of the group rose above the bickering and were fantastic. Most notable
of these was Mauro Annacarato, who stayed for six months; long enough for the villagers to keep asking when he is coming back.

  The stars of the staff group were Ramon and Ellie, who travelled out from London via Zimbabwe and endured a baptism of fire on their journey only to be greeted by a second trial when they arrived to find a new but disintegrating team to work with.

  There was a lack of faith from some of the volunteers and their own group leaders, but the project was also a new concept and hard to believe in. It had never been done quite like this before. To start something up requires a lot of patience, stamina, initiative and faith. For young people coming straight out of the comfort zone, the poor conditions (and they were very poor) of the college itself were enough to dash all their hopes. With a leader and rallier they believed in, I think most of the group could have pulled through; without that guidance, it was too tough a task. But no matter what some of them felt at the time, their presence did ‘make a difference here’, as the Minister of Tourism predicted it would when he visited the college on its first day, and by having had the guts to come here in the first place, they did allow the college to start.

  It was a rocky start and I don’t think anyone much enjoyed it, not least the sixty-three local workers who had worked so hard to get it ready and habitable in time.

  No matter what occurred during the first ten weeks, the fact remains that the first group of volunteers started the college. That most of them refused to believe it would work is now irrelevant, it has worked and it is working. Local villagers who only spoke Macua can now communicate in basic English and a first group of them could find and hold good jobs within the tourist industry. It still remains to be seen what overall percentage of the students will get their diploma, but there is every reason to believe that most of them will succeed.