Dylan’s song gave you the idea that Mozambique was a happy and romantic place. It made you want to go there right away, but now, driving into it some decades later, I could see that there was nothing to sing about this country, unless it was a lament.
It may have been my imagination but as O’D and I drove along the road, hearing nothing but the thrumming of tyres on tar and seeing nothing but dry countryside and the ruins of small houses dotted around on top of hills, it seemed to me as if an air of menace hung over us.
Not a blade of grass grew on the sides of the road for several metres and although we passed large clusters of huts, there was no sign of people, animals or any other vehicles driving towards us or coming up behind us. There was just the vast emptiness of blue sky, yellow grass and some purple mountains in the distance.
The abnormal silence and lack of activity was eerie. Already rattled by the border jumper incident we had witnessed, I sat tensely on the seat, scarcely breathing and clenched my hands in my lap. If people were running around shooting rifles in a peaceful country like Zimbabwe, what was a warring country like Mozambique going to throw at us?
“Are you sure we’re not going to be ambushed?” I asked O’D when the grassy scenery began to change into bush and trees.
“Look over there,” he told me, pointing into the trees. “It’s full of soldiers. Zimbabwean soldiers. They’re camped all along this road – which is called the Beira Corridor - in order to guard the oil pipeline from Beira to Mutare. It’s costing the Zimbabwean government millions of dollars. That’s why there are all these huts along this road as well. This is the only place where the people feel safe.”
I stared into the trees and saw what I hadn’t noticed before. Soldiers, dressed in camouflage that blended in with the trees, were sitting or moving around dark green tents. Relief flooded through me and I relaxed back against the seat, even unclenching my hands.
“The soldiers are based at the farm as well,” O’D continued. “There’s a camp not far from our houses. They’re using water from the farm boreholes so I’ve arranged a trade with their Commander. In exchange for our water, the Zimbabwe Army gives us some of their rations. Bread, milk, meat and eggs.”
Our journey to the farm was uneventful until we drove towards a place called Antennas. In the distance, two men walked along the road towards us. Dressed in the 1992 Mozambican fashion of dirty rags and bare feet, they carried AKs as a must-have accessory. I tensed up immediately at the sight of the rifles and clenched my hands again. This was it, I knew! O’D also tensed up, I noticed, and tightened his hands on the steering wheel.
“Are they bandits?” I asked fearfully.
“It’s hard to say who they are,” he murmured thoughtfully. “They could be Frelimo, Renamo or just ordinary Mozambicans out for a stroll. Everyone has a gun in this country.”
We kept our eyes fixed on the men but they barely glanced at us as we went by and they plodded along to wherever they were going. Their faces were gaunt and expressionless and there was an awful air of hopelessness about them.
Fourteen kilometres away from the town of Chimoio (once called Vila Pery in Portuguese Colonial days) I saw a sign on the right hand side of the road that read Tabacos da Manica. Here, O’D turned off the tar and for a while we bumped along a dirt road, past a small dam filled with muddy brown water, until we came to fields planted with rows and rows of small green plants.
“Tobacco,” O’D told me, waving a hand at the plants.
“Oh,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “Tobacco …”
A kilometre or so later, we drove around a bend in the road and approached a small guardhouse with a barrier in the form of a long pole blocking our way. An armed and uniformed guard appeared and greeted O’D with a salute and a “Boa tarde” and raised the pole. Further along the road, we travelled past tall tobacco barns, with high thatched roofs and workshops, with tractors and trailers and then finally, as O’D drove towards a small complex of houses, he slowed the pickup and said, “This is it.”
After what I’d seen so far in Mozambique, I must say I was very relieved and pleasantly surprised when I climbed out of the pickup and surveyed my new home. It was pretty, picturesque, a pleasant blend of lush green lawns, shady trees and vibrant flowerbeds. In the midst of all of this, three old houses were set in a semi-circle around a pool shelter and a rectangular swimming pool sparkling with clear, cool, pale blue water.
Inside the house furthest away from the pool, I met the person who had been looking after O’D so well. This was the skinniest little man I had ever seen, naturally skinny, I learnt later. His name was Biasse and for the next nine years or so, his small presence was to loom large in my life.
It wasn’t easy to settle down to life on the Tabex farm. For one thing, O’D had forgotten to tell me that the house didn’t come with a radio or a television. There weren’t any books or magazines to read either and I couldn’t even occupy myself in the kitchen because this was the domain of our skinny little cook.
When O’D went off to work at the Tabex office in Chimoio the next day, I sat in an armchair in a silent house and wondered what on earth I was going to do with myself.
I hadn’t thought to bring any writing paper, so I couldn’t write any letters and as the farm didn’t have a phone, I couldn’t enliven the long empty hours by chatting away to my family or friends.
Apart from drinking coffee under the thatched pool shelter and talking about Portugal to Conceicao, Maciel’s wife, there was absolutely nothing I could think of doing to fill the long empty hours that lay in front of me.
One afternoon a few days later, while I was sitting on the verandah idly watching some ants carting off the remains of a dead grasshopper - you couldn’t get any lower than this where entertainment was concerned - Jake Jackson came to my rescue.
He was a nice man, Jake, tall and bearded and lean. He arrived with O’D and was carrying a large cardboard box which he dumped down on the verandah. “Magazines,” he told me with a grin, “and,” he handed me a red and white can of Coca-Cola, “you can borrow this until you get to Zimbabwe to buy your own radio.”
It’s amazing how a tinny-sounding radio masquerading as a can of Coke can brighten up a house. It’s equally amazing how the more than ten year old South African ‘Fair Lady’ magazines and the ancient ‘Time’ and ‘News Weeks’ can hold your interest and absorb you when you’ve got nothing else to read. And when Jake managed to unearth a television and a video player from one of the storerooms, life on the farm really took an upturn!
After lunch one afternoon about ten days after my arrival, O’D took me on a tour of the town of Chimoio, as well as the Tabex factory.
“Here,” he said kindly, handing me a large plastic carrier bag bulging with dirty, small denomination meticais notes worth about five U.S. dollars. “You can do a bit of shopping as well, when we get into town”. The plastic bag was far too big to squash into my shoulder bag and so I had to carry it in my hand.
Although O’D had taken me out to a restaurant in Chimoio one evening for a dinner of rice and prawns, this was the first time I had seen Chimoio in daylight.
The entrance into the town was not - and still is not - a pretty sight. It had once been a light industrial area but now it was scruffy with broken-down unoccupied warehouses and fenced-off areas full of rusty scrap. Most of it appeared to belong to Aderita, a small bearded man with dancing, sparkling eyes who was a member of the little band of Portuguese residents in Chimoio who had ignored a man called Guebuza’s famous 20 – 24 command and had stayed on all through the war in Mozambique. The 20 –24, by the way, had been an order to the Portuguese to get out of Mozambique within 24 hours, or else - and had only allowed them to take 20kgs of a lifetime’s possessions with them.
The Tabex factory was also in this area, and so O’D drove through its gates to show me his office and the tobacco grading shed.
His office was a spartan grey cement room, furnished simply with a
couple of desks and chairs, a telephone and a computer and printer. A small man was sitting behind one of the desks and O’D introduced me to him.
“This is Zefferino,” he told me, “my assistant. He’s also the Tabex ‘Fixer’ because he’s an expert at knowing how to get around the Mozambican maze of bureaucratic red tape. This expertise consists mainly of knowing who is the right person to bribe.”
We left O’D’s office and walked a short distance over to the tobacco grading shed. The room was large and dimly lit by the daylight that came in through windows high up in the walls. It was full of men and women who were sitting on benches in front of long tables. The tables were covered in masses of dry yellow-brown tobacco leaves and as they sorted the leaves out into different piles and grades, thousands of tiny shreds of tobacco floated up and filled the air around them.
Although the air was full of these minute particles of tobacco, which they were no doubt inhaling deeply into their lungs, not one of these men or women were using the white nose masks they’d been given to protect themselves. They had all pushed the masks casually up onto the top of their heads and were wearing them like some kind of fashion accessory on their crinkly African hair.
On the way back to the car, I wondered how they could endure working in the grading room without the use of their nose masks. Didn’t they care about their health?
“I’ve told them over and over again to wear their nose masks to protect themselves,” O’D told me. “But they just refuse to listen.”
We left the factory and drove on towards the town. There was little traffic on the road because very few Mozambicans had vehicles or even a bicycle.
At the second roundabout on the way into town, I made O’D stop the pick up while I examined a long and colourful curved board which told the story of how the Mozambicans had won their war of liberation against the Portuguese. It was painted in a sort of cartoon-style and it was obvious that the artist had had great fun and had enjoyed himself immensely in depicting the Portuguese as cowardly little twits and the Mozambicans as brave and fearsome.
There were scenes of sallow-skinned Portuguese soldiers with big drooping noses trudging through the bush, while helicopters soared overhead. The soldiers all wore over-large, clumsy black boots and their eyes peered shiftily sideways out of the picture at you. They were scared out of their wits.
The Mozambicans, on the other hand, were painted as strong and fearless hawk-faced warriors, dressed in camouflage and scaring the hell out of their soft, weak European enemy.
In the town, O’D drove around the deserted streets pointing out various shops he thought might be of interest to me. Within no time at all, it became clear to me that if you were someone who liked to shop till you dropped, the shops in Chimoio would definitely have given you a nervous breakdown when you tried to cope with withdrawal symptoms.
Large empty expanses of dusty pane glass looked blankly out onto the streets, with a display or two of an ancient yellowed comic book, a can of tomatoes long past its sell by date, an old Barbie doll, its plastic blotched white by the sun as if it had a virulent skin disease.
“I managed to buy a screwdriver at this shop here,” O’D told me, pointing to a building streaked with black mould. “It was Chinese. It bent as soon as I tried to screw in a screw because the steel was too soft.”
We drove on.
“And this is where I found some ballpoint pens for the office. They were also Chinese. Zeff and I couldn’t get them to write a word until we hit on the idea of soaking them in a jar of boiling water for three or four hours to liquefy the ink.”
“Mmm …” I said. So much for Made in China.
We turned down into some small streets, drove past the railway station where no trains had run for years and where a small, dark, dusty shop sold carafes of wine from Portugal. Dotted here and there in the streets were beautiful examples of Portuguese architecture that made my fingers itch to renovate. Although these houses were badly maintained and streaked with black, the Portuguese had built well and to last. It wouldn’t take much, I knew, to restore them to their former glory.
“This is just like a ghost town,” I said to O’D. Chimoio looked as if a neutron bomb had been dropped on it, leaving all the buildings intact but killing all the people. There was no evidence of the destructiveness of war here; there were no bullet-riddled buildings or bombed out piles of rubble. The only sign of strife was to be found in a quiet, lovely tree-lined street. Here lay the blackened and charred remains of a house a Mozambican government official had once bought for his mistress. His wife, in a fit of jealous rage, had set the house alight one night and burned it to the ground.
We turned another corner, into the main road and drove past a large and well-guarded building that O’D told me was where the Governor of Manica Province was sometimes to be found in his office.
A man walked down the centre of this road towards us. He was completely naked and his hair was long, down to his shoulders in Rastafarian dreadlocks and incredibly matted. He shouted as he walked along, and waved his arms around in the air.
“Mad,” O’D told me. “I often see him about town.”
I was beginning to wonder why O’D had bothered to give me a carrier bag full of money, when he pulled up in front of a shop called Mar Azul. It was a Chinese shop and its shelves were full.
Inside the shop, I strolled down three or four short aisles. There was a lot of food here but it was all in cans; canned fruit, canned vegetables, canned meat, canned fish. There wasn’t any fresh or frozen meat or bread, milk or eggs. Everything was imported from Portugal and South Africa and it was all so very expensive, even for us.
Eventually, just to buy something, I picked up a small bottle of olives and then noticed a counter with a couple of bolts of cloth. This I discovered was material for the capulanas (sarongs) the Mozambican women wore. I chose a length of thin red cotton, with blue fish swimming all over it. It was to be the first of the many capulanas I bought over the years and wore instead of my European clothes. Not only were the capulanas pretty and colourful, they were also comfortable and wonderfully cool and casual in a country much too hot and damp for Western fashions.
Life on the Tabex farm was unexpectedly peaceful and for the next two years we led a placid and almost, but not quite, normal existence. To get out and about a bit and to stock up with supplies, we often drove across the border to Mutare to shop. Mugabe was loosening up Zimbabwe’s economy and the shelves in the shops were full, the roads crammed with expensive cars and the towns bustled with activity. Compared to Mozambique, Zimbabwe was a land of plenty, of milk and honey.
Shopping in Mutare was a pleasure, especially in places like Kingstons and the Book Centre, which were something of a paradise for people as starved of books as we were in a bookless society like Mozambique. Our greatest treat of all, though, was to drive out of the town and up the twisting road in the hills to lunch at the Inn on the Vumba. Here, in the small and homely hotel’s tranquil and rather old-fashioned English surroundings, we ate delicious meals brought to us by ancient white-haired and slow-moving waiters and drank a delightful drink called a “Glog”.
This drink was introduced to us one lunch-time when O’D asked a portly and grizzled waiter if the hotel had any imported gin. After some thought, the waiter went off to make enquiries at the bar and on his return, told us that they did, indeed, have imported gin. This gin was from Scotland and it was called “Glog.”
“Glog …” O’D repeated thoughtfully, never having heard of a gin called “Glog” and as a result suspicious of its origins. Was this another attempt by the Chinese, those great imitators of Western products, to trick consumers into thinking they were drinking genuine, bona fide Scottish-distilled juniper berries? “Bring the bottle,” O’D told the waiter. “I’d like to see the label.”
The waiter ambled off to the bar again and came back with a bottle. With a shaky old finger, he pointed at the label on which was printed the word ‘GLOAG’. “You
see, Sir, “he said, “it is Glog, from Scotland.”
“Mmm …,” O’D muttered. “It looks authentic but it’s not from Scotland, it’s from England. We’d better try it out. Bring us two of these … er … Glogs … and some tonic.”
With Zimbabwe on the rise, some of the people who had left in 1980 when Mugabe had taken over, began to return. When my cousin Arlene and her husband Horst who lived in London, decided to open a clothing factory in Harare, they asked my brother David to help manage it and soon he and Caroline, with my niece Olivia and my baby nephew Tom, arrived back in Southern Africa. Unfortunately, their fortunes were to fluctuate with the caprices of President Mugabe and rose and fell with the country. But all this was still in the unknown future and at the time everything looked quite rosy. Olivia was chosen for a part in the film “Thinking of Africa” and Caroline began to think of starting up her own business. With the return of some of my family, our visits to Zimbabwe now included Harare.
Zimbabwe wasn’t the only country that saw an influx of new residents. In Mozambique too, things were on the move.
When the Rome Peace Accord was signed, the Zimbabwean soldiers moved out and ONUMOZ, the United Nations Peacekeepers, moved in. A large contingent of Italians set up camp on the Tabex farm and although they mostly kept to themselves, some of their officers sometimes came over to our house to talk to O’D about various things.
Compared to the Zimbabweans, I thought the Italians looked - and behaved - more like social workers than battle hardened soldiers. They were young, with soft, smooth, olive-skinned faces and when they talked of the destruction the war had caused to the country and to the people, their emotions overwhelmed them and their brown eyes glistened with moisture. Even the sight of African huts upset them.
“This is terrible … terrible!” they exclaimed one day on my verandah. “To live in a hut made out of mud and grass! We thought they all lived in proper houses, like us!”
Monkeys in My Garden Page 7