On Sundays, starting very early in the morning, this feira is a fabulous, colourful and chaotic market. I mostly come to Nampula on weekdays to shop and to visit government offices, so I am hardly ever there on a Sunday. But the market is exciting and full of things I want, rather than need, to buy; so I try and manipulate trips and even flights into Nampula to include being able to attend this pooling of local energy and cottage industry. The few times I have been, I have shopped till I dropped there. The first couple of times I was also robbed. This is standard procedure for locals and foreigners alike.
The market is packed and the lanes between stalls are labyrinthine. Foreigners attract a crowd which quickly turns into a mob. The best way to negotiate it is with a local guide. There are numerous homeless boys in the town centre and it is easy to take a couple with you as guides and negotiators. This is a paid job, but the 20 to 50 dollar-cents it costs you will probably earn back on your first purchase. The locals know the real prices. The goods on sale seem so cheap to a Westerner that it is hard to know when they have been doubled and tripled for the Akunha.
Once you have been thoroughly pickpocketed there and realize that if you take a handbag or wallet with you, you will be again, and once you have a local guide trotting along beside you like a small protective knight, you can wander freely past the hundreds of stalls of local crafts. What’s so nice about the Sunday market is that it isn’t for tourists, it’s for local people to buy what they need and rural sellers to sell what they can. The mat-weavers and basket-makers, the carvers and metal-workers, broom-makers and rope-makers are all there. In fact, there are thousands of local people with their entire families there, buying, selling, cruising, touting, bartering, stealing, gossiping, meeting cousins from out of town and exchanging news.
Sometimes, new staff members want to go to Nampula so as not to go stir-crazy in the bush. They plan a night out, an evening of fun, and a day of luxuries. It is new staff who do this because anyone who has been there regularly knows that it is a pretty dead city with less lively discos than the local ones; shopping is deeply frustrating and often unfruitful and the general stress-factor tends to knock out its visitors rather than filling them with fun.
But, to be fair, when visits to Nampula are paced and a few hours are dedicated to shopping, after which the shopping list is abandoned, the city does have some places where a visitor can spend a lazy day, such as sipping drinks on the terrace of the Hotel Tropical or by the bamboos of the Italian-owned Copacabana opposite it.
The trick is in the pace. Nampula is frantic: there are vendors all over the sprawling streets. Every shop has a queue and the service is painfully slow. The idea that shops should be attractive to the consumer hasn’t really caught on yet, so the existing ones are designed more on the warehouse principle. Some even have metal grids over their counters to keep the customers back. You can rarely see what you want to buy and you can rarely buy what you see.
When Michelle, our visiting chef, tried to buy a gas cooker to donate to the college, she could hardly believe how hard it was. It took two abortive trips to not buy one. It took hours and hours of stress and frustration. Newly arrived, she and Lolly set out for a girls’-night-out trip to the city. They talked about it for days before, and plans were made, and shopping lists compiled. They set off from the sticks full of enthusiasm and came back two days later looking older and wiser.
Phone calls home fell prey to random drop. Long emails full of first impressions disappeared off the screen before they could be sent. Most of what was on the shopping list was out of stock, or never had been in stock, or might be back in stock next month but don’t hold your breath. And the tiny part of the shopping that Michelle had been able to get had taken the best part of the day to purchase.
This is how you buy, for example, a nail or a broom, a door hinge or a pot of paint, a screwdriver, screws or just about any other item of hardware. First you park your car and offer to pay a small boy to protect it from thieves. Know your small boy, though, or he might be one of the thieves. If you are on foot, then God help you because it is very hot and dusty, and the sparse traffic includes gleaming new 4x4s driven by their wealthy owners up and down the main streets at perilous speeds. So, on entering a shop:
Join the queue and wait to be served and be ready to be ignored.
Ask for what you want, such as some 4-inch nails, and be ready for the super-bored shop assistant to tell you the size you want are not in stock before you have even managed to specify it.
Suggest there might be some four-inch nails in stock and ask the assistant to find out.
Wait while one assistant grudgingly asks another. Use the spare time to start getting used to the stifling, toxic atmosphere.
Wait a very long time for either a) To be told they are in stock, or b) To be told they aren’t in stock.
If what you have asked for is in stock, wait a very long time while the price of your nails is written out very slowly, then wait again for the chit to be handed to you.
Either queue at the cash booth or try to get the attention of a very bored cashier.
Pay for your nails.
Wait while your money is counted three times.
Wait while your change is counted equally slowly.
Wait to receive the change and receipt.
If you need an official receipt, it is not the same as the one you have just been given, so ask for an official one and be prepared to wait up to forty minutes longer to get it.
Take the cash receipt back to the shop assistant.
Wait while the shop assistant hands it to a stock assistant and the latter disappears with your nails.
Resist the temptation to grab your purchase and run: it isn’t yours yet.
Yet another bored assistant will hand your purchase to the despatch counter.
Show your cash receipt to the despatch assistant.
Wait while he verifies your receipt price against the price on his stock list. This can take long enough for you to pop out for a cold drink and return, but if you are unlucky and miss your moment, the process goes back to step one again.
Receive your purchase.
Get stopped by a guard at the door who will check your purchase against the receipt you had better still have in your hand.
Go and buy something else but bear in mind all shops close at noon and will not open again until two. And don’t forget that most government offices do not open in the afternoon. Look at your watch and discover that you just spent two to three hours buying some four-inch nails.
The whole process can be multiplied by the number of things you need to buy. On a building site, that is a lot.
Some days I get so tired of the endless procedure that I do leave the hardware store mid-purchase, have a drink, take a few deep breaths and go back in with a bit less consumer rage. The whole process is so absurd and the people involved in many of its steps are so obviously trying to waste time and alienate their customers that I have taken to observing the farce with the eye of an amateur social anthropologist to see what lies behind it all.
I often shop in Nampula with Morripa, who seems to be almost immune to the frustration of having entire mornings wasted. Despite being a more patient victim of it, he has also analysed the process. He reckons it is the poor man’s revenge.
‘Most of the shops in the province are owned by Indians. They were the traders with money under the Portuguese. When we got independence, the Portuguese were given forty-eight hours to get out of the country and they were only allowed to take five pieces of luggage each. That was the 48/5 degree you may have heard mentioned before.
‘Since the Portuguese owned more or less everything and they left it overnight, the one class who could step in and buy them out were the Indians. We black Mozambicans couldn’t: we didn’t have any money. So that left the Indians even richer.
‘There had never been much respect or kindness from Indians to blacks, and with the Indians’ sudden rise to extra wealth and power, they too
k to despising their black workers more and more. Of course, we don’t have their education, and as you can see in the shops, there is no way anyone can learn to run a shop or set up a rival one because all the work is divided. No one person knows what there is or how to sell it.
‘The shop assistants are not bad people, but some of them have been working in there for thirty years, day after day, and they hate it. They can’t steal from the shop because every screw is counted, and they never even get to smell any money, and yet everything is designed to humiliate them and treat them like potential thieves.
‘No matter how far down you push a man, he can always fight back somehow. One of the few ways left to the Mozambican worker is sabotage. You see, it isn’t his shop. He doesn’t lose money if the owner does. The assistant doesn’t lose a client if a client gets really cross and leaves. It is the owner who will suffer. That’s the point, you see: get at the owner, lose him his clients, have people curse his name. It’s a small victory, but at the end of the day it is theirs, the shop assistants’.
‘It is sad for our future and for the economic development of our country because such sabotage is widespread.’
Over the last couple of years I have tried to make friends, bit by bit, with some of the saboteurs. It took surprisingly little to break through the sullen barrier to a few at least of them. As soon as they see a glimmer of interest, to a man, they try to jump the counter and offer their services to work at the college. In one hardware shop there are two assistants so insistent that I save them from their horrible jobs that I have had to stop going because the Indian floor manager has become suspicious and spies on us, and I am sure if he were to hear how they plead to be taken away from their semi-serfdom, they would lose their meagre employment. Nampula is full of people who would jump to replace them, who would ignore the insults from the management and the scorn of the cashiers to be able to take home a salary.
Baboons obviously have more clout than Akunhas, because when I take Pacino shopping with me, we get a lot better service than when I go on my own.
Shopping in Nampula often includes buying more yellow ochre pigment to keep painting the college’s outside walls as yet another of them gets re-plastered and ready to paint. Because the building is enormous, it drinks up hundreds of gallons of paint. We mix the colour ourselves by adding the yellow ochre powder to lime and water. But we used so much that we bought up the entire stock available in Nampula Province. After the main stores had sold out, we scoured other ones. For some reason, though, I had missed a very big store, called Armazenes Ganil; I was told that they had yellow ochre in stock.
Sure enough, they had one 25-kilogram sack left. While buying it – at treble the speed of anywhere else, thereby suggesting a marked reduction in sales sabotage, and therefore a much worker-friendlier boss – I saw the shop had lots of hardware supplies that we were in the habit of buying elsewhere.
I started looking around and a lugubrious, rather elegant Indian gentleman asked me in perfect English if I needed any help. I was doubly surprised because unsolicited help is the last thing I had come to expect in a Nampulese hardware store, and few foreigners speak such excellent English as this man did. I complimented him on it.
‘I lived in Leicester,’ he told me with the same deadpan expression. ‘I went there for a holiday and stayed for fifteen years. But it was cold there. Very cold, so I came back.’
I told him that I had a sister who had lived in Leicestershire and that I knew the city well. We reminisced about the Phoenix Theatre there, and the Odeon Cinema, this bread shop, that café, the public libraries.
On the strength of our British Midlands connection, his charming manners and his efficient staff, I switched my not inconsiderable custom to this shop, of which he is the owner. I look forward to our brief conversations. When Lolly and I were contemplating a visit to Lichinga, he even offered to arrange for us to stay with his sister there. Vakháni vakháni, I find little islands of calm within the urban frenzy. Sr Ganil has an aura of extraordinary calm, of the long-suffering, almost saintly variety.
Thus, on the upside so far, Nampula has two bar terraces and Sr Ganil. And, if I stop trying to give it marks out of ten as a holiday resort, it also has a large museum worth visiting, with a small, not-to-be-missed craft centre behind it where Macua wood-carvers and gold- and silversmiths make traditional craftwork. I should really go back to the top and say that Nampula has very nice filigree silver worked into bracelets, necklaces, chains and earrings.
When city trips come up there are usually several village people or college staff who need to go to town. Some need to renew a visa, to see a doctor, to apply for a document, to visit family or to shop. The local sporadic transport is by chapas: a truck or minibus packed with travellers, each of whom pays a fare. It is four US dollars each way from Chocas to Nampula, eight dollars return. The minimum wage is just under two dollars a day. Only the happy few earn minimum wage; most workers get less than half, some less than a quarter in a full-time job, such as a guard or porter. For local people not attached to the college and Varanda projects, the eight-dollar return fare (200 meticals) is out of the question. For those on our payroll, it is still a huge bite out of their monthly budget. Being offered a lift is probably one of the biggest ways local people can be helped in the short run.
There are a handful of villagers who left and returned and have made good. Two of them have made good enough to buy trucks, and another couple have motorbikes. Beyond the village, in Fabulous Chocas-Mar, there are dozens of people, mostly Indian, who have 4x4 trucks and Land Cruisers which regularly make the run to Nampula and back. Chocas has become a beacon as constant to NGOs and their consultants as the lighthouse of Ilha de Goa is to ships. Whereas the lighthouse blinks in vain on what used to be the trade route to Goa, Chocas’s beacon, in the guise of the Compleixo Turístico (complete with a fish menu and cold beers), lures a steady trickle of new cars to its terrace tables. These cars also rattle and race up and down the dirt road to Naguema.
Therefore, one might think, there would be enough lifts to ferry at least the most needy local people to Naguema (where regular transport starts) or even to Nampula. This is not the case. Lifts are not given and most locals don’t even bother to try hailing one: they know there is no point. They know that they are beneath consideration ‘out there’, and that ‘out there’ starts where their own village ends. Even locals who have made good tend to extort ridiculously high transport costs from their fellow villagers. In the middle of the night, if a child is dying in the Cabaceiras and a life could be saved by getting that child to the cottage hospital in Mossuril, parents and family have to start running around to find a car and driver. The nearest place is Chocas, so several family members will run several kilometres there to start asking. If they are lucky, a car owner will get out of bed and drive on to Mossuril; meanwhile, the sick child has been carried the four to six kilometres to Chocas (depending along which track and from which part of the village the walk starts). The driver will then ask for anything up to twenty dollars to make the run. The child is dying, time is short and every minute counts. No local can pay twenty dollars so time is lost in negotiation to reach the bottom-line price of 150 meticals (six dollars, or between six and fifteen days of the entire family’s income). A few families have been able to borrow it. There are no lifts on credit; locals have to pay up front. If there is no money, there is no lift.
The child is dying, dehydrating, and there is under an hour to jog to Mossuril. It is another four kilometres to the hospital. The family set off carrying the child. Mostly, the sick die en route; the family walk all the way back with another small corpse to bury under the frangipani trees.
‘Dr’ Rocha is the village nurse and he runs a health post which is open six days a week. But there is no doctor and no electricity and therefore no refrigerator for all those medicines that have to be refrigerated. So there are very few medicines and no way to deal with serious cases here. If ‘Dr’ Rocha is not in the
village, there is no one to help. If the case is serious, Dr Rocha will send them on to Mossuril anyway.
For those villagers who fall sick during the day, the same transport nightmare is involved, but it is easier to get a driver when he is up than to persuade one to get out of bed. Assuming a patient can get to Mossuril, on arrival at the cottage hospital there will be beds, nurses, medicines and saline drips, though no analysis can be done after dark. Without a doctor, the cottage hospital is not able to treat the serious cases. So these are sent on to Monapo (on the way to Nampula), where there is a proper hospital with doctors. But Monapo’s is a small hospital and it serves an enormous area. Understaffed and understocked, it, in turn, has to send serious cases on to Nampula.
Like it or not, all roads lead to Nampula. Actually, there is only the one main road in and out, just as there is only one railway line. Each cuts through the city, not making that metropolis any calmer.
XXVII
In Search of Our Lady of the Cures
THE LOCAL CHURCH, THE beautiful, battered Church of Our Lady of the Cures (Nossa Senhora de Remedios, 1549), sits with its back to the sea. Its latticed portico stares into a palm grove and the mangroves on the salt flats wherein no souls live. The church is as solidly built as a fortress and exudes a curious aura of resignation, as though by some foreknowledge it knew it was doomed to languish without priest or congregation.
Once a week (or two weeks, or three) a travelling priest comes from Monapo, and once a week, up to thirty-nine tenacious local Catholics gather to pray in Macua. The average Sunday attendance is fifteen, but at Easter, Whitsun, Christmas and on certain saints’ days, there are more. Sometimes the faithful arrive but the priest can’t get there, in which case Victorino unlocks the church and the flock holds its own service. I imagine that once, long ago, this important historic church was packed. Even now, with a village priest, the flock would stand a better chance of thriving.
Mozambique Mysteries Page 28