Evaristo Faife is the region’s headman. It is he who reopens doors to a world that doesn’t require sophistry. Next to him are two countrymen, Sindique and Valicho. They have all experienced various wars, and have no wish to recall those turbulent times. The men agree to show me around and to help me in my work of recording the fauna that survives along the banks of the Sangussi River.
Next day, I meet a group of South African tourists who are there for birdwatching. That is how they introduce themselves, as if they were proudly claiming some rare ethnic identity. They are accommodated in tents, with few comforts, but in total harmony with the local inhabitants. They are on the lookout for rare and endemic birds such as the palm-nut vulture, the blue quail, and the green-headed oriole. I’m not too surprised to encounter such a group. The area to the north of Dondo is, in fact, an important international focal point for birdwatchers. The birdlife found there is famous for its rarity and for the number of species that are endemic to the area. They invite me to have dinner with them, and we share some tinned food accompanying a rice concoction they have all had a hand in making. They are happy because, that afternoon, they have been watching groups of wattled broadbills, a protected bird that can only be found in flood-prone grasslands, the tandos.
We fall asleep to the gentle but monotonous croaking of the frogs. These musical reptiles remind us that the surrounding area is a region where land and water vie with each other. Between the great Savane and Sangussi rivers, there are dozens of small water courses that flow from the grasslands towards the sea. Not far away, other tourists enjoy the Savane beach, to the north of the city of Beira.
At night, I tell the headman the story about my brother, and his use of Inhaminga as a means of emotional blackmail. The man laughs. Then a certain melancholy invades Evaristo Faife’s face, and he says:
“Your brother was right: this place is more remote than abroad.”
“That’s not true. Aren’t we all together now?”
“Yes, but how long did it take you to come back here?”
I am silent. A nightjar sings nearby. I don’t want to give an answer about the length of time between my visits. In that peaceful atmosphere, the only thing I feel like doing is making time slow down.
Article published in İndico, July 2004.
Flying Places
The plane seems to hesitate, surrendering to the landscape down below that lazily reveals itself to us as we gaze at it from our position as temporary birds. It is not flying over places that marks our memory. It is the extent to which those places will continue flying within us.
Here’s Luanda, the Angolan next to me murmurs. He speaks with the excitement of someone making a first discovery. For me, it’s not the first time. But it is the first time I have sat on a flight next to an Angolan who has just visited Maputo and has admitted that the capital of Mozambique left him at a loss for words.
My friend and travelling companion confessed that while he found it difficult to accept, Mozambican cities were inspiring. Now, as we fly over his hometown, he finds reasons to avoid comparisons. They aren’t fabricated reasons: the war, the refugees, the galloping urban expansion that swallows the city and steals its civic symmetry. All this has turned Luanda into an unmanageable space which, now that peace has returned, has to face the challenge of overcoming its predicament. In the end, Luanda’s problems aren’t so distinct from those of Maputo. The difference merely lies in the degree of intensity with which, and the lapse of time since, each country put its respective war behind it.
The city’s streets confirm that impression of chaos common to large African cities. The hectic traffic, the thousands of youths who have transformed their bodies into showcases for goods, the intense colours, the mutilated figures who preserve the scars of a time of suffering: these are the brush strokes of an initial portrait. Gradually, however, the city breaks free of this first impression, and we see how old Luanda, what remains of one of the oldest African cities, hasn’t yet been swallowed up.
This is a marked difference with Mozambique: our cities that face the Indian Ocean are much more recent. We’re not just talking about civic construction. We are talking about internal architecture, an architecture of the soul that, in Angola, forged a Creole elite. A small part of the city was the possession of this Angolan elite even before Independence occurred. This social phenomenon occurred later and more prosaically in Mozambique. I have visited Luanda on a number of occasions over the last thirty years. What I have seen, and still see, is a city that awakens and moves in an unconstrained way. The weight of its long history and its more recent wounds haven’t dampened the energy of Luanda’s inhabitants and their capacity for resistance.
My last visit left me very surprised, and in a positive way: the problems, some of which were structural, were still there, but dynamic changes were making themselves visibly felt.
“Things are happening here,” an Angolan writer told me.
It’s true that the modernization occurring here is sometimes carried out to the detriment of that which should be sacrosanct: the cultural and historical heritage, the deepest roots of the place. Whoever has travelled the world knows that this isn’t a local phenomenon. It’s a kind of absurd price, a deal that has to be negotiated in the face of the greed of those who think of quick profits at all costs.
Late in the afternoon, I stroll alone along the corniche and contemplate the jumble of houses looking out over the bay. It’s impossible not to be left with this image in one’s memory. And at night, they take me through the turmoil of the “Ilha,” the Island of Luanda. I was already familiar with the vitality of its nightlife, and the parties that only finish the next morning. A playful way of overcoming all constraints. We walk in a limbo of effervescence, and feel this area justifies the creativity that forged semba, kizomba, kuduru, the way these rhythms proved able to travel and mingle in other distant lands. The same thing happened with local expressions such as bué, cota, and estamos juntos. All made in Angola.
But there’s something of Maputo in all this nocturnal merrymaking, and I love the similarity that occasionally shows its distinctive quality. My travel companion — who is having dinner with me — contemplates the lights on the other side of the bay, and sighs before saying:
“It reminds you of your hometown, doesn’t it?”
I nod in agreement, knowing only too well that the question has another meaning. And I smile not so much at my interlocutor, but because I seem to see the lights of Maputo mirrored in the bay of Luanda. After all, my friend and I know that places cannot be compared. Like people, each one of them occurs at one single moment in time, in one single, unrepeatable life.
Article published in İndico, July 2008.
A Boat in the Sky Over Munhava
At weekends, we would visit Munhava. It was right there, only two districts away, but it was as if we were going to another nation. We would cross just two areas, Matacuane and Esturro, but it was a journey across continents. I was in the back seat of the car, and had to crane my neck to see the streets. For most of the journey, I gaze at the canopies of the coconut palms and the herons that balance on their long leaves. Being a child is having a lot of sky overhead. This illusion flashed by through the car window: to be in the sky, the birds didn’t even have to take off.
Even today, Munhava has more sky than ground. And in my daydreamed memory, that’s how I recall visits to the area, where the city’s water tank stretched upwards like a grey giraffe. We would spend Saturday afternoons there and sleep at the Fernandeses’ farm. The Goan couple were so happy that we didn’t realize they were going mad. My father had been a colleague of Amarildo Fernandes at the railway company, and their friendship had outlasted this shared experience. At the time, I didn’t understand how they could playfully exchange secret messages: