‘So if I go out and bring back those big bulbs, will you also pay me?’
‘That’s right, so long as they have roots.’
‘At the same rate as Adamji?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So let me get this clear. If I go tomorrow, on my day off, and get all the bulbs I can with roots, you will write them down as money in your book?’
‘Yes, I am buying bulbs and Varanda will buy bulbs and pay your money.’
Daniel left, struggling to hold his plump face in control. He didn’t make it halfway down the veranda before giving a little skip followed by a giggle. Downstairs in the garden, Adamji was waiting for him expectantly. The story was confirmed. They were going to be rich. They knew where to find the bulbs and they would work and dig, carry and count and …
And then they stopped gabbling and swapping bulb stories to grab each other and laugh. When they finally looked up and saw I was watching them, they raised their arms and hoped I would understand: this was the first and only chance they had ever had to make some dream money. This was the first time they hadn’t worked to put food on the table. Adamji saw his door, bed and bike. Daniel saw the vision of a new bicycle with a bell and a pump. And he saw a fancy knife, a bed, a mobile phone and washing-up bowls full of matapa and fried fish, goat curry and rice, potatoes and squid.
‘Eeeeeee!’
For two days, they slogged to bring in giant bulbs and grow rich. Adamji paid off his micro credit and covered the cost of a new bike. Daniel covered a bike and had money over that he spent in his imagination about ten times a day doing accounts in the sand with a stick.
I hadn’t expected there to be so many bulbs or for the combined staff and students to be able to bring so many in. A wild competition started up, in which each tried to break the other’s record.
For the local economy, unheard-of amounts of money were being clocked up. Not since the Minister of Tourism came to visit had there been such excitement. At first, only a group of about ten students and guards were out digging. Each time they returned exhausted and dirty, little huddles of students and Varanda workers poked fun at them. It took about a week for word to spread. That Momade, Vulai, Victorino, Sumaila, Anifa, Fatima and the guards were getting rich. At first no one believed it, but once it sank in, not only did most of the students join, including the bored agricultural novices, but each developed a passion for plants. Students started coming into college with new varieties.
‘I was out digging your bulbs, when I found this,’ they would say, proffering some rare Liliaceae. ‘It has medicinal properties. I haven’t seen it in the college garden – perhaps you would like to plant it.’
Each new variety was gratefully received. And students who had done nothing but nod dumbly when asked anything or squeeze out a whispered ‘yes’ or ‘no’ when pressed to respond, were coming after hours to chat and help protect the bulbs while awaiting transport to the dune location.
When we first started to make a flower garden at the college, all the women and most of the men looked on it with scorn. They could see no point in helping to tend things inedible and watering them was considered a criminal waste of good water. It is still pretty much a mystery to most of the purveyors of bulbs why these bulbs have a value. With their children dying and the food not in their bowls at night – I won’t say ‘not on the table’ because most Cabaceirians are a long way off from owning such a luxury – the idea of spending money to conserve some sand dunes is truly absurd. But bulbs have been seen to have a price. Bulbs and by association flowers have a value which they were not seen to have before. There are no nurseries here or garden shops or florists. A lot of local people will take the first leap out of the poverty pit thanks to flowers. Because of lily bulbs, several dozen people will no longer be forced to live at the very bottom of the economic pyramid.
In the third week, the Varanda workers and the team of college builders, who tend to stand aloof and guard their status as village elders and leaders, decided to join the bulb-hunters. One weekend Ibraimo went out for a day and night with his entire family and piled up 2,000, thereby beating the record to date and getting almost enough money to buy the motorbike he has coveted for the last many years.
A side effect of the bulb campaign has been to create a class of gardeners and plant-lovers. Even Momade has had to recognize the value of plants he would formerly have judged as unworthy of his attention. He has had to rethink his values as his mind was opened up, not so much via his efforts with vegetables and the many hours of explanations thereof, but by flowers.
‘Consider the lilies, how they grow.’
XXXI
The Two-kilometre Sea Snake
IT IS TEN MINUTES PAST four and the sun has risen as I follow Adamji through the salt flats to the ferry. It is a forty-minute walk and the dhow will leave at 5am exactly. At the various wells we pass, clusters of brightly wrapped women carry or guard their canary-yellow jerry cans. For some it is their second trip. When full, each heaves her 20-litre can onto her head and sets off home as though the burden were no heavier than a large yellow leaf.
There are fishermen heading for their boats and other passengers for the ferry. To each one, Adamji calls out, ‘Maskamólo.’ (Good day.)
And each replies, ‘Mocheleliwa.’ (And to you.)
Greetings are essential. Each and every person passed must be acknowledged. For children, even in Macua, it is customary to say ‘Bom dia’, or the more informal joint Macua and London cockney ‘Ta ta’. But adults must be formally greeted and the greeting acknowledged. I trot behind Adamji; we cannot slacken our pace or the boat will leave without us. I alternate between the Portuguese ‘Bom dia’ and the local ‘Maskamólo’. The latter spoken by me, an Akunha, never ceases to amuse. For instance, when I tried it at the well, the ensuing hilarity echoed behind us for fifteen minutes.
There are clay pots again, half hidden in the roots of a baobab. Adamji watches me to see what I will say. I don’t ask. I walk on as though I had not seen them. I know they contain evil spirits drawn from the sick. I don’t know what else they contain except for the tips of fetishes: roots and bones and the intrinsically unmagical frayed ribbons of cloth. The tradição is a mystery that unfolds itself little by little and entirely in its own time. People will tell me things about it if they want to and there will be a wall of silence if they don’t.
Two egrets fly low overhead and land in a fan palm tree, triggering exaggerated panic from the small yellow parrots that nest there. Not much happens at the top of their centennial home, so they wring the most out of every incident. Their basket nests shake with the excitement and the sky is momentarily golden.
We cannot stop; the other passengers move at the local pace and are already far ahead. A young mother catches us up. She has a small baby strapped to her back in a capulana that is starting to slip. She pauses, lowers the half-sack of manioc roots from her head and bends over, untying the offending cloth as she does so. Meanwhile, the tiny baby balances immobile on her back. Slowly, as with most things, she reties the capulana cloth and secures her child before moving on to catch up with the other travellers to Ilha.
Between hedges of red-fruited cactus and thorn trees, her back, swathed in green and yellow tulips, gradually disappears from sight as she twists and turns with the footpath. Her capulana is the same pattern as that of our agricultural students but she is not from the college.
The last stretch of land before the mangrove proper is a wide stretch of compacted sand. It is here that the local football teams play when the tide is out. Beyond it, the tepid water starts. When the tide is in, so is the ferry boat. But the tide is out and we must take off our shoes and roll or hitch up our clothes like all the other passengers and wade to it. I follow Adamji, putting my feet in his watery footsteps, as we pick our way between the pointed palisade of oxygen roots.
A woman with orange gums stained from the twigs that keep everyone’s teeth a brilliant white is making rope out of coconut
husks, which she buries in the sand. Without knowing this, it looks as though a senile lady is making a huge sandcastle. She smiles as we pass. We have met before in her house and at the market.
We enter the forest and the water deepens to thigh-high. It is silent and ghostly, and the red mangrove bark has ring patterns like batik round its trunk. The water is warm and clear. Adamji looks back to urge me on, we cannot linger. After ten minutes of wading through the mangrove glade, we reach shallow water again. Underfoot there are some sharp coral rocks and dozens of tiny fish. The ferry is waiting far out on the horizon and a dozen men and women are walking in the sea. As usual, I have walked too slowly and now we must run on the sandbanks to make up for it. The other passengers are already in the boat except for the mother and child, who are only a few minutes away.
We push on, paddling, wading and then gliding through waist-high water. As we board, Adamji greets the assembled passengers with the more formal, ‘Assalãmo Alaiko.’
There is a mumbled chorus of, ‘Wa-Allaíko-salámo.’
I stick to a cowardly, ‘Bom dia.’
We have between thirty minutes and three hours in this boat in which I already stick out like a sore thumb, so I decide not to stand out even further by trying to merge.
The captain waves the order to get going. We cannot set sail yet because there are more shallows to negotiate. Two of his sons punt us out of the sands and coral rocks with long poles. There is a fair wind and everyone on board is pleased about it. Whispered conversations become debates as the captain and his sons raise the rice-bag sail and we set off across the channel.
After ten minutes, one of the captain’s sons crouches on the deck and bails water out from between the dhow’s rafters. He bails skilfully, proud of his cut-off 5-litre jerry can. This is a state-of-the-art boat. It is 14-feet long and has an iron anchor and a plastic bailing can. However, like all the other, poorer boats, if it were to capsize, it has no life vests or rings, no flare or other alarm, and no radio or phone. If it did have the latter, a friend or neighbour would come out to help, but they should not wait for the coastguard on Ilha because the coastguard has no boat.
Mid-channel, where the water is thirty metres deep, I think these thoughts sometimes. Particularly as when on one occasion our dhow was becalmed for nearly two hours over the sunken VOC (Dutch East India Company) ships from the seventeenth century, and then a vicious wind blew up and whipped us into the mangrove. We arrived after dark and five minutes before a storm. On that evening, the boy-captain and his mate as sole crew were giggling nervously. Afterwards we all admitted that we had thought our hour had come.
‘It was close,’ the boy-captain said. ‘That wind is a bad wind: it brings many complications. We are lucky to be alive. Another five minutes and … eeeeeeeee! … Epa! ’
In local terms, a ‘complication’ or to complicate something is as dire as can be. Macua, it seems, is a language of overemphasis and understatement. It is full of grunts and exclamations. Like many other African languages, these are the non-committal sounds of the oppressed. With a grunt, no tyrant can demand, ‘What did you say?’ and punish you for having given a wrong answer. The range of expression in each grunt is immensely complex and still beyond my grasp.
The dhow ferry is a fine forum for grunt-learning. Communal grunts of awe, admiration, fear and surprise are all awarded to passing fish. In all the times that I have crossed from the Cabaceiras to Ilha and back, I have seen barracuda and dolphins, big beautiful fish, small ugly fish, tiny flying fish, silver leaping fish – but never a hint of the giant sea serpent.
At sea, perhaps because it is the only time we are literally in the same boat, people tell more stories. This miraculous, two-kilometre-long snake is a frequent topic and one that everyone joins in. When present, I am challenged to believe in it. I pledge my faith with an appreciative ‘Eeee!’ and a timely Epa! ’ Although I am sceptical behind these grunts, I can see that in local terms it is easy to believe in. The miracles that many have witnessed with their own eyes make a mere sea serpent almost a paltry thing.
Hundreds of local people have seen a never-ending fish. Not only have they seen it, they have sailed or rowed out to it and joined in the cutting off of flesh sufficient to glut their entire families for days with still hardly any inroad made by their knives in its side. Others saw the woman-fish (the manatee). Others have seen the boys who dive stay down longer than any human can. So those who talk of the man in Naguema who transforms into a lion and the elders who can become bats at night are making lesser claims than already proven magic.
I had never seen whales here, although I knew they swim up from the Cape in October and November and have been sighted regularly off Ilha de Goa. Then in August 2006, with my friend Sofia Bianchi and her son Jacobo (who co adopted Pacino), we all three saw a pair playing less than a hundred metres from the lighthouse shore. And they were as enormous and impressive as their myth. For a fisherman who has never seen a whale before, the abundance of flesh must seem like a miracle. I have seen many manatee, though not here. In some ways, I have contributed to the myths of these particular Macua by bringing magic things like a tin-opener, a digital camera, a laptop that can predict the local tides, and a LED-light torch.
I am not the first person to visit Africa and ‘go native’, nor, I am sure, will I be the last. If I stay long enough, maybe I will come to love Jolly Jus and think Nampula a beauty, and believe in a sea serpent that can feed a village from its self-renewing tail.
Without going to extremes, I am changing. I feel myself change: not into a bat or a lion, but into the person I have always wanted to be in a place that I dreamed of and always wanted to find.
AFTERWORD
FUTURE CHAPTERS OF LIFE IN the Cabaceiras must write themselves; and hopefully, like Morripa, writers will emerge to tell their own story. Meanwhile, visitors are welcome to Mossuril and the college.
It has been said that ‘Africa doesn’t need your money, it only needs your awareness’. I haven’t the heart to tell the people here that it will all be all right because millions of people ‘out there’ are aware that your children are dying. The local poverty is immune even to admirable motions like Fairtrade: it drew the short straw of life so there is nothing, as yet, to trade. The villagers need a chance to help themselves.
They don’t want a handout, they want to change their future and they believe they can do it. In the dull glaze of daily drudgery, a spark has ignited and it needs to stay alight. It is action, not talk, that will keep it burning. Concerned people often think that the problems of the Third World are too great to deal with and don’t know where to start trying. Anyone who wants to can start right here.
Meanwhile, one of the things that makes Mozambique such a rewarding place to live is the fact that visible progress can be seen to be happening. It has not yet directly affected the Cabaceiras as much as it should, but there has been a start. To give credit where credit is due: to the government officials who struggle to fulfil almost impossible tasks, locally, under the leadership of the new and charismatic District Administrator, Benedito Hama Thay. In all credit to them, the following improvements have occurred in the area since I finished writing this book.
The cottage hospital at Mossuril received a new, state-of-the-art ambulance. There is still no doctor, but the dire transport problem was partially solved. I say ‘was’ because just a few months after the ambulance arrived, it broke down and there was either no budget for spare parts or no spare parts available for it. So once again, at the end of 2006, there is no ambulance and the college is often asked to make emergency ambulance runs.
The police force in Mossuril town received the cars they needed and they are now parked outside their still-derelict building.
A brand new police HQ is being built in Mossuril.
Dona Amana, the captain of the coastguard for Mossuril and Ilha Districts, who had no boat at all, now has three, with trained crews to patrol the coast.
A new secondary sch
ool has just been built for the would-be high school children in Mossuril town.
Cabaceira Grande, which had no drinkable water, now has a new drinking well.
The three graceful villas that together form the hospital on Ilha are still in a state of disgraceful ruin, but a splendid red and yellow arcade has been restored at great cost and time outside it. Delightful as this arcade looks, it begs the question why the not inconsiderable time and money spent on its restoration was not put into the hospital it mocks with its mere presence.
It will take billions of dollars to solve all of Africa’s problems, but it only costs four dollars to buy a mosquito net, ten to buy a sack of rice, twenty per month to sponsor a student here, and fifty per month to pay a full-time worker or sponsor a child.
Everything helps and no amount is too small. Be aware: they need our money. For those people who want to help hands on, Morripa and Ibraimo, Atija, Momade, Marufo, Vulai, Sumaila, Anifa, Fatima, Victorino, Sergio and all the others need whatever help you can give. There is something for everyone in this beautiful place, which could live from what we throw away and which is crying out to learn what we know.
For further information, please contact us and look at our website:
www.teranfoundation.org
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
Colégio de Turísmo e Agricultura
Cabaceira Grande, Distrito Mossuril,
Provincia de Nampula
Mozambique
Caixa Postale 81
Ilha de Moçambique, Provincia de Nampula
Mozambique
Mozambique Mysteries Page 33