Mozambique Mysteries

by Lisa St Aubin De Teran

  Attempts were made to clear the rubble from the naturally stony ground. Complicated plans were drawn up, discussions took place and votes were taken about who should do what, but no action was taken beyond shifting a few stones. The walled garden contains almost a hectare of land and the task seemed too huge for anyone to deal with it. At a distance, by email and mobile text messages, I tried to explain that all that was needed were a few square metres of soil for the seeds to be planted and watered and fresh food would be on the table within four weeks.

  For a gardener, it was a simple task; for people with no experience of growing anything, and as luck would have it none of the sixteen staff seemed to know anything about gardening, the instruction seemed like yet another impossible task set from afar.

  Then in February 2005 Mees went out to Mossuril and helped to organize the staff, students and workers into teams. By April, when he left, the first seeds were up and growing in their various beds. By early May, when I arrived, there were lettuce and tomatoes, cabbages, carrots and onions, radishes, peppers and chillies growing in lush abundance. And it was Momade who was making them grow. Ellie, who is a vegetarian, was finally eating something other than rice and beans, and everyone else had enough fresh food to stay healthy. Ironically, Momade had been there all along, but none of the staff or volunteers had thought to ask the students if any of them knew how to make things grow. Of all the class, it was only Momade who had the knowledge.

  In my first weeks at the college, visiting with Lolly and able for the first time to carry out so many of the plans I had for it, I expanded the vegetable garden to include parsley, dill and sage, basil and coriander, beetroot, celery, rocket, borage, courgettes, aubergines, spinach, green beans, melons and watermelons, a passionfruit nursery, a lime tree nursery and a papaya nursery. Then I left these to grow under Momade’s care while Lolly and I and some of the students made a flower garden in the courtyard, digging and planting round piles of rubble.

  Sumaila, a lead student from the group with an extraordinary baritone voice, turned into a star gardener with a feeling not only for flowers but also design. By August, Sumaila was our first student success in the tourism class. Had there been a gardener’s job anywhere in Mossuril, he could have filled it. When such jobs come up in Mees’s lodge, Sumaila can be sure to get one of them. Were it not for his green fingers, he could just as easily get a job in any local restaurant kitchen. He is a natural decorator and designer with a real flare for composition. His hidden innate skills emerged, surprising everyone including himself. He is one of the few villagers to have travelled. During the civil war, he spent three years as a soldier in Beira in the centre of Mozambique. He then spent another three years demobilizing there.

  ‘Imagine my surprise,’ he told me, ‘when one day, I saw this training instructor with a big group of soldiers around him. I went up closer to see what was so interesting, and guess who the instructor was? It was Morripa. From here: from home. I waited some months for him and then we travelled back together. I came back; but life was much easier there. I had a little house and some land and there was always work and the chance to put food in my family’s bowls. Now, if I had a regular job, I would be very happy. And although this may be hard to believe, the gardens we make will be the prettiest in the whole of Mossuril.’

  We set out to turn uneducated fishermen into qualified hotel industry staff, and Sumaila was the first proof that it could be done.

  As the year progressed, other successes would follow with Atija, Ancha, Anifa and Victorino in the kitchen. These were the first students we could have let go with the certainty that each could hold down a qualified job. I had never really had any doubts that it would be possible to jump from Macua to English and slip some Portuguese in between while teaching various groups of students how to cook, clean, wait at table, garden and launder. What was always more of a challenge was how to make things grow in a village that fished rather than farmed.

  Some agricultural experts declared (long distance) that if things could grow in the area then they would already be growing there and that the absence of fresh food had to be due to the inability of the local soil to sustain it. The biggest gamble I took with the college was to defy such opinions and back my own hunch (based on the trees and flowers that did grow locally and stories of vegetables growing there before the war) that it would be possible to successfully market garden in the Cabaceiras. The sustainability of the college depended on this being the case. Therefore, when six months after the college opened there was still not a lettuce leaf in sight, I was very grateful when Momade revealed his hidden talent as a market gardener.

  Momade was born in Cabaceira Grande but taken as a child to help his father grow tomatoes and onions in Cuamba, in the far north-east of Mozambique. It is during this early foray that Momade learnt his skills. When he started the college garden, he planted strictly according to the secret rules of the tradiçao. Other than occasionally finding a stalk of grass tied round a papaya trunk with a cowrie shell attached to it, I don’t know what traditional farming involves. When plants come under attack, Momade jogs away into the bush with a small yellow jerry can and comes back about an hour later with a mysterious liquid called wasi wasi. This he uses to spray against pests. I think wasi wasi comes from a form of acacia mixed with neem, but the variety, although once pointed out to me by Morripa, I don’t know.

  Momade comes to the college at 4.30 every morning and together with the students Dalaty and Vulai waters the vegetables. We have a running battle, as yet unresolved, about watering the plants he has grown and watering the varieties that I add to the vegetable garden. Some of my plants he has tasted or recognized and will water, regardless of whether I check them or not. Others, he has doomed to die. Some, like the spinach, finally gave up the ghost to dehydration, while others, such as the rocket and herbs, he refuses to see as worthy of precious water and have survived only through intercession by me and Dalaty.

  There is something more to Momade’s resistance to certain plants than bolshiness or laziness. He is very proud of his vegetable garden and far from lazy. By June, given his hidden backlog of knowledge and experience, I shifted him away from the students and gave him a full-time job as head of the vegetable garden, or machamba as it is known locally. It is more that he is fighting his corner. He is a traditionalist who doesn’t see certain things as right. He is too young to remember the days when Mossuril was like the Garden of Eden growing every kind of vegetable under the sun; he can barely read or write and can have learnt almost nothing in school because he couldn’t then speak Portuguese, the language in which all schools teach.

  Salads and herbs that I am sure he has secretly tasted and spat out he considers to be intruding on his space. They affront his rights as chief of the machamba. He listens politely to what I have to say and then goes his own way. As a result, several crops were lost and Momade and I have had long and sometimes frustrating talks, which often end in bringing Morripa in to intervene and insist that this or that crop is allowed to grow in our garden.

  Because I am an early riser, I spend a lot of time each day between 4.30 and 6am with the guards and water carriers. We have taken to drinking tea together and eating a breakfast of bread and home-made jam on the well top after the watering is done. This group also includes the students Sumaila and Victorino who tend to the front and back flower and herb gardens.

  The dawn talks have been an invaluable way of getting closer both to the students and the local folklore. From a mutually shy beginning, we now have long discussions over our tea. Individual and group grievances, doubts and questions surface, as do the dreams and ambitions of each of the students and guards. It is thanks to these early morning talks that I now know much more what each of the students aspires to, what they truly find hardest in their lives and what things big and small make a real improvement. Conversation is in Portuguese, with all difficult concepts, for example, about economics or nutrition, translated back into Macua for a better understan
ding by the group. After the translation process, there are often quite heated mini-discussions in Macua, which are very helpful for my own tenuous grasp of that language.

  It is also in these talks, far from the formality of a classroom, that the students can learn more about ‘out there’. In school, questions are still few and far between because the students lack confidence about what they know and understand and no one wants to look stupid. There is less restraint in our dawn sessions and questions abound about geography, history, health and economic development. Each waterer is keen to relay their new knowledge to their friends and family, thereby gradually filtering into the community a sense of what it can achieve, what each family can do and how to do it.

  From October 2005 to February 2006, we were joined by Mussagy, who was both a student and the driver/mechanic. Mussagy grew up mostly on Ilha and in Nampula. He has studied to tenth-grade secondary and has a view of the world which far outstrips any of the other students’. He is often able to confirm as true things Momade and his fellow waterers perceive as outrageous nonsense. Mussagy’s role is somewhere in the middle between the staff and the students. Like a coloured South African as described by Don Mattera, who is too white to be black and too black to be white, Mussagy is too citified, rich and educated to be one of the locals and yet too local to be one of the city folk. We hope that by returning to the Cabaceiras to work with the college, he has helped form an invaluable bridge between the two worlds of the village and ‘out there’.

  Momade aspires to owning a bed and a blanket, nice clothes for himself, his wife and two children, shoes on his feet, a bicycle and enough food on his table so as not to know hunger any more. He fears the outside world and does not want to travel even to Ilha for the sake of it, but when he saves enough money to buy things, he would like to go to Nampula under escort to buy from shops that have a selection. He was in Nampula in 1992 and he was robbed. He says (in Portuguese smattered with the odd English word for emphasis and to show off that he too was a student and has not forgotten what he learnt), ‘Nampulese wait for the chapas from Mossuril to target the incoming passengers. They can spot us from a distance. Yes, they know we come from the coast. Yes, they know we are village people and not used to city ways. They follow us and pretend to show us the way but it is to steal the little money we have saved. It is very frightening to be in the city and not to even have the chapas fare back. I don’t ever want to go back to visit. Even on Ilha, the shopkeepers and market people see us Cabaceirians and you can see them thinking: Aha. There goes an easy target. I will double the price for this country fool.

  ‘Epa! It is like that for all of us. We know it is like that, but what can we do? Sr Morripa can find his way around. He can go wherever he likes on Ilha and no one will mess with him. He has respect.’ Momade shrugs, challenging his companions to contradict him. ‘Well, what do we have? All we have is our poverty: even when we have money in our pocket we are poor.’

  Meanwhile, Mussagy aspires to buying a truck and one day to continue his studies. And one day, he would like to travel abroad.

  Adamji, who is not only a guard but also a founder member of the Varanda team of workers, and whose two wives have divorced him, aspires to buying his own house and having his own bed and mat. He would like the house to have a proper door that can close. He would like to have a chair on the porch and a pot to cook water for tea. He would like to have a coconut palm and a papaya tree and a mango tree in his yard.

  ‘In the evenings, when I am tired from work, I would like to sit back in a real chair and look at the stars with a cup of tea in my hands, sweetened with two sugars. When I feel like eating fruit or a coconut sometimes, I would like to be able to pluck them from my own trees and for people to say: “Adamji has a nice house and yard, look how much fruit he has on his trees.” I would like to go home to somewhere I can call my own and be able to invite my children to come and stay with me.’

  He is fifty-three years old and has worked all his life. When he is too old to work any more, he would like to be able to lay his head somewhere he can call his own. Meanwhile, he is the lodger in the house of one of his ex-wives.

  Vulai would like to be able to put proper food on his table. ‘Proper food,’ he explains. ‘You know: fish and beans sometimes and bread for the children, and even cartons of juice like Dona Ancha sells, and sugar. My mother and aunts live with me. Sometimes the food doesn’t go round. I would like to know that I could work and have fifty meticals a day for us to live on. We could live well with that. Epa! Fifty meticals every day would make us rich.’

  He pauses to think and does some mental calculations, which end in a broad grin. ‘With fifty a day every day, my wife could have a lot of things and so could our children. Maybe I could even save up for a bicycle and save my leg.’

  Fifty meticals is approximately two US dollars. Vulai Ossene is forty-one. He has had serious problems with nerve damage in both his legs. While accompanying him to hospital I have seen his eyes glaze over with the pain on the three-hour ride to Nampula. In the hospital, when a doctor roughly probed his leg, Vulai nearly passed out, but he did not complain. He has a student grant to study at the college: he receives 500 meticals per month (twenty dollars). This is roughly 16,000 meticals per day and is just under a third of what he needs to feel well off. He supports seven people on his student grant eked out with anything he can find to sell. His nightly meals consist mostly of manioc flour boiled in water.

  On the days when I visited his house during the worst of his illness, the manioc flour was eaten on its own: there was no sauce or fish. Arriving at suppertime, Vulai immediately offered me his bowl of food (the manioc flour or ‘chima’). Huddled onto a rush mat in one of the two small rooms inside his mud hut, Vulai’s mother and aunts were also eating their supper. I was introduced to them and they tried to insist that Lolly and I sit and share their meal (of boiled chima). Unlike her son, the old lady and her sisters had three green mangoes between them. They absolutely insisted on giving one of these to me.

  Vulai is still quite shy and retiring. When the market garden was very new, Momade went away for nearly a month without warning and the entire crop would have died unless it received its twice- or, at worst, once-daily ration of water. It was Vulai who stepped in during that summer holiday when the college was officially closed to help Ramon save the vegetable plots. Ramon told me Vulai had volunteered to do it. He was the only one who grasped how important it was to the college to make the vegetable garden work. He came one day and said to Ramon and Ellie, ‘I am too poor not to work: my family will starve unless I put chima on the table each day. I have to go to the salt flats and carry salt and then I have to go and gather fish to sell. If you buy me a sack of farinha celeste or manioc flour to make chima, my family can eat and I can come and work every day on the vegetable garden.’

  After Momade returned, Ramon and Morripa made it clear that our machamba was not a cut-and-burn affair, not a let-it-grow-if-the-good-lord-wills-it-to-rain-and-die-if-not, but something that had to be watered every day without fail year round. Momade retained his supremacy in the machamba courtesy of his years of experience, and Vulai was appointed deputy head.

  The students who prove themselves in various tasks get an extra subsidy. Vulai got his for saving the vegetable garden.

  Momade’s father died some time ago and his mother has no one but her son to support her. Last year, Momade also had two wives, one of whom was financially very demanding, and two babies. (Since few people have jobs in the area, a man with a job is a very good catch indeed.) Momade was always short of cash and was the most regular borrower of the entire workforce. Wife number two was rocking his boat pretty badly. When she ran away to Nampula late in the year, I think her abandoned husband was quite relieved. As we sat round the well he said as much, but he bemoaned the fact that his fleeing bride had taken him to the cleaners. When people own as little as the local ones do, to lose the family cooking pot and bucket, the one ladle and single knife
is a disaster. Despite that, he seems much happier since she left and he claims that he doesn’t care what other men say, one wife and family are all he needs.

  Over a period of some months of observing Momade, I noticed that Vulai and Sumaila, Dalaty and Marufo and also many of the women were physically much stronger than him. After a couple of hours at his job, our head market gardener was slowing down far beyond the habitual slow pacing of his fellows. I had also noticed on two occasions that Momade would sometimes volunteer to help with the morning washing-up, take a pan through to his walled garden and then scrape out its contents and cram them ravenously into his mouth. Each time I caught him doing this he looked embarrassed.

  After the second time, we began to cook up more supper so that a couple of platefuls would be left over in the morning. The watering crew and the guards divided these leftover meals up and devoured them. The more food left over, the more Momade worked, so I began to single him out for feeding up. Extra bread was bought for him and he was given his own pot of jam, a tea and sugar ration and a large cooked breakfast, albeit of whatever there had been for supper the night before. From being a rather silent member of the team, he transformed into a man of many opinions and he took to holding forth around the well during break-times, flaunting his jam and other treats, to the annoyance of Sofia, the head of the kitchen.

  ‘He acts as though he owns the kitchen now,’ she complained, ‘and when he has scoffed his jam, he dips into ours as though it were his right to do so.’

  ‘Luxury’ food can be a bone of contention, because it is tightly rationed and tends to run out. Jam, tea, sugar, and margarine are not really luxuries but they count as such at the college. I don’t like Sofia to be upset about things because hers is a difficult job and she works very hard at it. On the other hand, Momade is the only available local person apart from Morripa who knows which end of a tomato seedling goes in the ground, and who can consistently make a seed bed and get seeds to grow. By jealously guarding his knowledge and refusing to let students have proper access to the growing process, I see that Momade was merely trying to protect his job. I have tried to explain that the whole point of expansion is to get bigger. He has never seen a real farm before and cannot imagine ours spreading beyond the one walled garden. If twenty people could do what he can, then, he reasons, he wouldn’t be so special any more.