I was so glad to be heading down the Zambezi I told them both it was a delightful story. In the late 1990s, I had read of riots against Indians in Zambia, accusing them of trading illegally in human body parts. The rumor then was they were killing Africans and disemboweling them, and selling their hearts and lungs and kidneys to Western hospitals, to make money in the organ donor business. Even some Westerners believed this improbable story to be true.
The land beside the river was featureless and flat, a grassy floodplain with low forest in the distance. We paddled among the floating trees and logs in the middle of the river where the current was strongest, the eddies giving the water the cloudy muddy bubbles you see on the surface of a chocolate milk shake. The wide river moved slowly and we had to go on paddling, yet the current helped enough so that I was able to sit back from time to time and reflect.
I was happy. The riverside villages were sorry-looking but self-sufficient. No one in the government either helped them or meddled with them. I had sometimes been uncertain stopping at one of these places, but on the river, borne onward by the muddy water, watched by fishermen and herons and (only their bulging eyes and nostrils showing) the pods of hippos, protected by Karsten and Wilson, I was the nearest thing on earth to Huckleberry Finn. I had fulfilled one of my fondest yearnings at the outset of my trip, for this was the territory I had lit out for, and cruising down this empty river in a hollow log was pure Huck Finn pleasure.
About two hours after turning from the Shire River into the Zambezi I heard a loud chugging, the working engine of a tub-like vessel making its way from a landing on the north side of the river.
The engine noise was the barge at Caia, big enough to serve as a drive-on ferry for trailer trucks. A British aid group called the Mariners had devised this barge from twelve ‘uniflotes’ and the reassembled parts of eight junked engines. The Mariners were led by an Englishman called Chris Marrow, and many of the men, like Chris, were servicemen turned aid workers. This barge-ferry was the only way a wheeled vehicle could travel the hundreds of miles from southern to northern Mozambique.
Caia was a settlement of shacks, drink shops, and squatting Mozambicans.. I hopped ashore and held the boat for Karsten, but he stuck out his arm to shake my hand.
‘We are going back,’ he said.
Just turning around, hurrying upstream to the Shire and heading home. There was still time for him to get back to the confluence of the Shire and the Zambezi; but it was all upstream for him from now on. Karsten was looking at the ragged men and boys on shore — they were pestering him, asking him where he had come from — and I knew he was thinking: There are bad people here. Anyone could see that a ferry landing on a wide river would attract the opportunists and the predators and the homeless riffraff and the lost souls. Instead of helping him land, I palmed some money as a tip and slipped it to him so that the watchers wouldn’t see, and I shoved the dugout back into the current.
Meanwhile the ferry had docked, its lines secured, and a big top-heavy truck of fat sacks was being driven up the embankment and heading towards a line-up of other trucks. With boys tagging along offering to carry my bag, I went to where the trucks were parked — four of them now. A group of men sat on a restaurant veranda, drinking and eating.
‘Okay, meesta,’ one of them said, laughing at the approach of a mzungu.
‘Bom dia,’ I said, and asked whether any of them was going to Beira.
‘We are all going,’ a man said to me. He was sitting with a spoon in his hand over a bowl of chicken and rice.
‘Can you take me?’
Instead of replying he made a motion with his head and I took this to mean yes. His name was João. I bought two beers and gave him one and sat down with him. We bargained a little about the price, for I had vowed that for the sake of my family I would not ride on top of any more trucks. After a while he wiped his face on his shirt, paid his bill and we left, four of us in the cab, about fifteen Africans clinging to the bags of beans on top. Beira was 200 miles away, on a soft road of sand and mud that led along the old Portuguese railway line. Railways and roads had connected all the provinces in Mozambique. In colonial times there had been a plan to build a railway bridge across the Zambezi at Caia. Part of the foundation had been set into the embankments, but the idea was premature and perhaps grandiose. Even in Caia and its outskirts there were tipped over railway cars and rusted broken locomotives.
This hinterland had only recently opened. For twenty-five years two guerrilla actions, one after the other, turned the interior of Mozambique into a war zone. There was first FRELIMO’s decade-long struggle against the Portuguese. After independence in 1974 an anti-FRELIMO movement called RENAMO was formed, supported mainly by white South Africans and an assortment of right-wing well-wishers in Portugal and the United States. In the RENAMO war millions of people were either killed or displaced, bridges blown up, communications shattered, roads closed, towns and villages depopulated by massacres. Because of this civil war, the Mozambican Zambezi, from Zumbo to the delta in the Indian Ocean, and the main tributary, the Shire River, were inaccessible to outsiders as well as to many Mozambicans. Throughout the war, the Mozambican bush was a heart of darkness, just as dangerous and confused and hard to penetrate.
It was only four o’clock, so we had about two hours of daylight. In those two hours I saw that every bridge along the road had been destroyed — blown up or burned; every railway track had been twisted apart; and all the older colonial buildings were roofless ruins.
In the middle of nowhere we made a pit stop. Seeing me headed off the road to relieve myself, João said, ‘No!’ And waved me to the edge of the truck. He pointed into the woods and said, ‘Landmines.’
It was the conventional wisdom in rural Mozambique that you were not to stray off any main road, nor were you to deviate from any path, for only the well-trodden ways were sure to be free of landmines that had been set and hidden by all those different soldiers, all those well-armed factions.
Darkness fell. We traveled down the wet mushy one-lane road in a tunnel of our own orange headlights. We came to Inhaminga. In Portuguese times Inhaminga had been a good-sized railway town, with a wide main street of two-story shop-houses and large villas enclosed by garden walls. But guerrilla conflict and neglect had turned Inhaminga into a ruined settlement of collapsed buildings and rusted machinery and broken rolling stock. Seeing me in the cab of the truck, youths screamed at me.
‘White people never come here,’ João explained.
‘How odd.’
We arrived at the coast, the edge of Beira, in the early hours of the morning. Since leaving Blantyre in Malawi I had not seen an electric light, or a telephone, or a paved road, or piped water. I did not lament this, I found it restful, for it was not a country in decline — this part of it, anyway, could not fall any farther. Some months before the people had experienced the worst that nature could throw their way, deep, devastating floods. They had survived, though as everyone said, the worst aspect of the floods was not the destruction of the crops and huts, but the uprooting of the landmines, for these explosive devices had floated and moved into different and unknown positions.
The town of Beira was also a ruin. João dropped me at a hotel on a side street. I slept until mid-morning and then went for a walk among abandoned buildings along streets where grass had sprouted. The most interesting building I saw in Beira was the one that had been the Grand Hotel — a huge skeletal structure facing the Indian Ocean. The whole place, a big decrepit gambling resort, had been taken over by plunderers and invaders. These homeless people were living in the guest rooms and had cooking fires going on the balconies and rigged up tents on the verandas. Some were emptying buckets of shit over the rails, their laundry was limp on strung-up lines. The building was a vast crumbling pile of broken stucco and rusted railings, filled with ragged squatters. Smoke issued from most of the rooms. I supposed that for some people this looked like the past, but to me it had the haunted look of a desperate distant future, an intimation of how the world would end, the Third World luxury resorts turned into squatter camps.