It was an impressive piece of hectoring, and portended a great career for the boy in politics or law, but I told them all to go away. As I spoke, some better prospects appeared — two young white women carrying shoulder bags and looking bewildered and benevolent. Gnat-like, the urchins whirred off to their new victims.
I found a restaurant, ordered the predictable meal, seven dollars’ worth of tiger prawns, and talked to the owner, Chris. Like many other entrepreneurs in Mozambique he was a South African, a junk dealer by trade. The junk business had boomed in Mozambique while the various wars were being fought, producing scrap metal in the form of bombed bridge girders, blown apart truck chassis, shattered railway cars, steel rails, iron pipes, and crashed plane fuselages.
‘We made good business. Buy for forty, sell for eighty. Ship to India, Turkey, Singapore.’
But destruction had waned in the country. So much had been wrecked, there was little left to destroy. Chris’s father had gone back to Greece to live in retirement, and Chris had started this restaurant, not as profitable as junk dealing, but a business with a future.
Walking back to the hotel I saw that, as it was late, the streets and sidewalks were filled with loiterers, prostitutes, urchins, beggars and people doing what people did in African cities at night, some sleeping as though mummified in gauzy ragged blankets in the brightest doorways for safety.
On my way to Maputo’s railway station the next day I stopped at the Natural History Museum to see what they had in the way of ethnographic material. The answer was not much. Among mounted creatures with their straw stuffing falling out (a toppling elephant, a mangy eland, a mildewed lion), there were some unusual Makonde carvings of figures with upraised arms, looking like stylized and pious Egyptian devotees. But the rest were just unremarkable spears, shields, dippers, bowls, arrows and bangles.
No objects I had seen in any African museum (Nairobi, Kampala, Dar es Salaam, and Harare) could compare with the African objects in the museums in Berlin, Paris, or London. of course, much of that stuff had been looted or snatched from browbeaten chiefs. But every year there were many so-called ‘tribal art’ auctions all over the world, and as far as I could tell this material never found its way back to Africa. And with some notable exceptions, the great pieces of African art were in private collections outside Africa. Africa itself was a disappointing destination for anyone looking for good examples of African art.
Photographs in the museum of old customs of northern Mozambique showed people with tattoos and scarification, grinning boys with teeth that had been filed into sharp fangs, and naked men and women. The intention was to depict the customs as freakish, for also in the photos were shocked bystanders, Africans in mission clothes smiling in horror at the bare buttocks of their fellow Mozambicans. The pictures had been taken in the provinces north of Zambezia, in Nampula, Niassa, and Cabo Delgado — places that were easier to reach by crossing Lake Malawi or penetrating from the back roads of southern Tanzania.
This hinterland — the largest part of Mozambique — looked inviting to me as an enormous area without roads or commerce, where missionary planes sometimes landed but which otherwise was cut off from the rest of the country. Looking at the artifacts and the photos and the detailed map in the museum I thought that if I ever returned to Africa I would travel to this forgotten wilderness. I had found on my trip down the Shire River and into the Zambezi that rural Africa was not a lost cause, as the cities seemed to be — that there was often in the life of the village enough of a repository of tradition for there to be the remnants of decencies that were still vaguely chivalrous.
One of the place names in that wilderness, Quionga, was chiseled in stone on a war memorial on the Praça dos Trabalhadores, The Workers Plaza, another African irony, with idle men and young lay-abouts all over it. The memorial site, in front of Maputo’s main railway station, was an odd monolith of the 1930s carved in a thirty-foot chunk of granite. It was an art deco representation of a big busty woman, holding a sword and flanked by a rearing serpent, and inscribed Força on one side, Génio on the other. In Portuguese on the plinth was the fond inscription, To the combatants, European and African, of the Great War, 1914–1918, with the names of the battles, all of them buried settlements in provincial Africa, strange jungle skirmishes between the Portuguese and the Germans on the remote borders of their colonies, Quionga among them.
How like the perverse Portuguese to record Quionga as a victory. Perhaps the mention was face-saving, for it had been a humiliating defeat, one of many in Portuguese East Africa during the First World War. Portugal had entered the war only in 1916. That same year, some Portuguese officers commanding an army of Africans launched an attack across the Rovuma River on the disputed northern border of German East Africa, hoping to win Quionga back.
The Germans were ready for them, they counter-attacked — General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck leading the charge, with 2000 Africans. The Portuguese force fell back, then retreated and kept retreating, for hundreds of miles through the bush, and von Lettow-Vorbeck pushed south, marauding, resupplying by plundering from settlers, and putting the Portuguese to flight with his rag-tag army of African warriors. By the end of the war von Lettow-Vorbeck had driven halfway into Portuguese territory, almost to the Zambezi Valley.
The war in Mozambique was one of the more hideous charades of colonialism. It was easy enough to imagine a monocled and crazed Klaus Kinski with an aquiline and sunburned nose in this bush-bashing role, the aristocratic general from German East Africa, with his armed but barefoot Africans, advancing through the bush to fight the indignant but helpless Portuguese, with their armed but barefoot Africans. All this African madness because of an insane war in Europe. The whole thing would have been comic except that at the end of the war, after the Armistice, pleading for Quionga to be restored to them, the Portuguese claimed that 130,000 Africans were slaughtered fighting for Portugal in Mozambique. Thus, the monument.
Maputo’s main railway terminal, dating from about 1910, seemed to me the most beautiful station in Africa. With its distinctive iron dome it had been designed by Gustave Eiffel and was easily as elegant as his tower in Paris though hardly more practical. In its shape and lines it was an aesthetic satisfaction, uplifting to anyone with the wit to appreciate it, but otherwise serving no purpose except to accommodate the few underpaid employees of the railway — Caminhos de Ferro de Moçambique — which was slowly chugging towards obsolescence.
High and broad-shouldered, made of plaster-faced brick, painted green and cream, and with a plump iron dome and a prominent clock high up on a cupola, the station was such a marvel of architectural frivolity that it was a wonder the thing had not been pulled down. Little sentimentality was shown for colonial structures in independent Africa. Since they represented the pomposity and wealth of the white overlords in the oppressive years of overlordship, they were usually the first buildings to be vandalized or defaced.
By the time Eiffel was commissioned to design this station (as well as the Iron House near Maputo’s Botanical Gardens) he had been disgraced by his involvement in the Panama Canal scandal. Though Eiffel had joined the Panama Canal Company merely to lend his illustrious name to a troubled project, he was convicted in 1893 with Ferdinand de Lesseps and some others, for misusing funds — specifically, bribing French politicians to approve a loan, in order to buy time for the failing company. His sentence was set aside. This pioneer in aerodynamics and innovator in metal — freed but shamed — took a back seat in his world famous design firm. His masterpieces were behind him — the tower in Paris, the dome of the Nice Observatory, the Tan An Bridge in Indochina, the Bon Marche department store in Paris, the Maria Pia Bridge in Portugal, the armature for the Statue of Liberty. What had been Lourenço Marques’ railway station — in a distant city, in a remote colony — even today, almost a century on, showed the hand of a master.