‘There were floods here last year,’ the African next to me said. ‘All this was under water.’
That had been in the world news, as African disasters always were — earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, massacres, famines, columns of refugees. And these are the lucky ones! Images of inundated fields, people clinging to treetops, and helicopter rescues had appeared on TV for a week, before becoming old news. The trouble with such disasters was their unchanging imagery — viewers got bored with them for their having no silver lining and no variation. For a catastrophe to have legs it needed to be an unfolding story, like a script with plot points, and preferably a happy ending. The ending of the Mozambican floods was the news of cholera and poisoned water, of thousands of people who had been made homeless, and hundreds who had drowned like rats.
‘And the worst was when the floods moved the landmines,’ the man said. ‘Picked them up and floated them all over the place. There was a grid saying where they had been put but after the floods the landmines were all in different places and couldn’t be located.’
Ray, the landmine expert I had met in the Sudan, had told me this was largely a rural myth in Africa. It was rare for whole minefields to move like ghost landscapes. And anyway dogs could sniff them out. I suggested this to the man in the seat next to me.
‘I saw a woman chasing a pig,’ he said, to contradict me. ‘It was near my house outside Maputo. Suddenly there was a huge explosion. The woman’s head was up a tree. Her arms and legs were all over the place. I mean, she stepped on a landmine in her own garden that had not been there before.’
Maputo appeared as a succession of outlying shanty towns and soon we were traveling from one district to another, with not much improvement in the look of things. Maputo was a true version of an African city, miles of slums and local markets, leading to the main streets and shops in the center of the city — a few tall buildings and rows of street lamps surrounded by miles of blight and danger: uncontained urbanization.
When the bus stopped and I got out I was besieged by beggars and taxi drivers and chewing gum hawkers and shoeshine boys and opportunists shrieking ‘Meesta!’ I surrendered to a taxi driver and asked him to take me to the Polana, a decayed wedding cake on the seafront, which had somehow survived from colonial days.
‘Any advice?’ I asked Candido, the driver.
‘Don’t walk at night,’ he said.
He explained the recent exchange rate of their devalued currency, the metical. This ride was 60,000, and a meal might be 175,000, and a bus ticket to South Africa probably half a million. A hundred dollars was about two and a half million meticais. The rate had changed for the worse since my trip to Beira.
‘And be careful of naughty boys,’ were Candido’s parting words. ‘They will steal from you.’
South Africans went to Mozambique the way Americans went to Mexico, for ‘color,’ a whiff of the gutter and the slum, cheap eats — fresh tiger prawns especially — ‘the real Africa,’ authenticity, and ugly knickknacks; also for snorkeling and swimming and whoring.
The fleshpots and the pleasures were in southern Mozambique and the coast just north of Maputo. Beira and the province of Zambezia, where I had been before Zimbabwe, were almost inaccessible by road from the capital. The north of Mozambique was like another country, sharing a border with Tanzania and possessing an East African culture, with remote villages inland, ancient fishing communities on the coast, and some of the best artisans and carvers in Africa, the Makonde people. No one went there.
In contrast, the deeper south of Mozambique was southern African in every respect — industrialized, detribalized, overpopulated, and crime-ridden, sharing a border with Swaziland and the South African province of Kwazulu-Natal, half a day’s bus ride to the prosperous seafront city of Durban.
Maputo was much praised as a desirable destination, but it was a dreary beat-up city of desperate people who had cowered there while war raged in the provinces for twenty-five years, destroying bridges, roads and railways. Banks and donors and charities claimed to have had successes in Mozambique. I suspected they invented these successes to justify their existence; I saw no positive results of charitable efforts. But whenever I articulated my skepticism about the economy, the unemployment, or even the potholes or the petty thievery, people in Maputo said, as Africans elsewhere did, ‘It was much worse before.’ In many places, I knew, it was much better before.
It was hard to imagine how much worse a place had to be for a broken-down city like Maputo to seem like an improvement. Some hotels and villas and shops and cafés existed from the Portuguese time, but that period had ended decades before. The grotesque fact was that from 1482, when Captain Diogo Cão planted the Portuguese flag on the coast of the Congo, the 500-year history of the Portuguese in Africa was one big racket of exploitation — at first the slave trade, then diamonds and oil in Angola, and agriculture in Mozambique.
Outsiders with no memory praised Maputo. But Maputo was a seedier version of its previous incarnation, the seedy former capital, Lourenço Marques, with higher walls around the villas and more barbed wire and much worse roads. Having seen the country’s interior, I knew what lay beyond the pale — blown-up bridges, devastated towns, ridiculous roads, defunct railway lines, no lights, no water, no telephones, no public transport. Perhaps the rural poverty that I had seen accounted for the large influx of people into the cities. It was easy to see that Maputo had all the characteristics of many African cities — a sprawl of shanty towns and poor markets, idle people and lurkers, an appalling vastness and a look of desperate improvisation. Maputo was in no sense a metropolis but, like all the other African cities, a gigantic and unsustainable village.
Not heeding Candido’s advice, and against my normal practice of staying inside at night, I went for a walk in Maputo to look for a place to eat. The long bus ride from Nelspruit had left me needing exercise. If I walked fast, I reasoned, my chances of being robbed were reduced.
Like jackals, some small boys leaped from the shadows and followed closely behind me, calling out, ‘Hungry, hungry.’
I kept going, encouraged by the lighted shop fronts, the night watchmen, the cafés. This was the main street of the upper town. The port was down below in the commercial district. The boys, four little bony forms, smelling of the street, crowded me and snatched at my fingers. They had sad embryonic faces and small sticky hands.
‘Give me money,’ each one said in turn.
I had prepared myself for such an encounter. There was nothing in my pocket, I wore a cheap watch, I was carrying very little money. I said no, and picked up my pace; but they stayed with me.
Waiting to cross the street, I was still flapping my hands to prevent them from being snatched at and one boy, the most poised and persistent of the four, assumed a scolding tone.
‘If you give me something I will leave you and you can go,’ the urchin said with a good command of English. ‘But if you don’t give me money or what-not, I will follow you and I will not leave you, and I will ask and ask.’