Maputo by a South African

Found this online today and thought it was a great article on Maputo.

Revisiting MozambiqueMonday, 08 September @ 20:14:02 Topic: Wits News

"I’ve done it again. Once more I have singularly failed to get past Maputo. Every time I take the trip to Mozambique I promise myself that this time, this time I will press on and reach the fabled beaches of the North: Maxixe, Xai-xai, Inhambane… And then somehow I never do. Maputo, ardent steaming crumbled city by the sea, it seems that I can never leave you behind.

Maputo is six hundred kilometres to the north of Durban, and you could say that it is Durban’s torrid cousin. You can pick out the family resemblances: the broad suburban boulevards, the roadside march of flame trees, the all-pervading mugginess. But Durban is an Anglo-Saxon creation. And if Durban is English Africa, then Maputo is Africa translated into Portuguese. And if you sit at a street-side café just before siesta time, sipping a bitter coffee and idly listening to dealmaking going down at the table alongside, it’s clear which translation is the more beautiful.

Sitting at Chicken Piri-piri with my cousin Guinivere: we slouch on stainless-steel tubular chairs and chat, keeping an eye on the passing scene. Service has improved immeasurably since the last time I was here, four years ago. The waiters seem to be the same aging crew, dressed in the same colonial black-and-white, but a two-hour meal-time has been slimmed down to a snappy forty minutes.

The road island in front of us is crammed with curio vendors, selling everything from the indispensable batiks to lovingly hand-carved pieces of ivory, fresh from under-policed game reserves.

As ever, the citizens of Maputo are impeccably turned out. The passing businessmen are dressed in the Latin manner, with broad-collared shirts in shades of bright pastel, open at the neck. The more casual ones pass by with their shirts untucked. A gaggle of schoolgirls flounce past in non-regulation footgear, hair artfully kinked, ties worn in a Y down the front of their snow-white shirts. A self-assured young buck decked out in camo gear and a revolutionary bandanna struts up and down along the road island, yelling out comments and wisecracks.

One of the most delightful legacies of Portuguese rule are the mulatta women. As an acquaintance once said to me while we sipped beer and watched the passing parade: "I pity the white girls in Maputo. They don’t really stand a chance." They pale in comparison.
Black, white and latte, the women sail past in bright-hued African robes, or sashay along in skirts and high heels. The country is as poor as a church-mouse, but the most hard-up city-dweller dresses like it’s a vocation.

High heels especially are a vocation in a city like this: these chic senhoritas are gold medallists of urban perambulation. Their feet deftly side-step the potholes and the yawning cracks in the pavement, artfully skirting the treacherous patches of rubble. Decades ago the Portuguese planted handsome trees down the length of these boulevards, but over the years of the civil war their great vital roots rose up, pulverising cement, pushing aside concrete slabs. The debris lies there still: no-one has attended to it yet.

Reconstruction is slow. Throughout the war, Frelimo ring-fenced the capital and held it. Much of the rest of the country went to hell, a cruel inferno of landmines and limb-chopping massacre. Maputo was spared; Maputo was left to follow a gentler curve of decay.

On the first afternoon, before lunch, we go for a stroll down the Avenida Friedrich Engels. The name is austere; the avenue is not. It borders the sea, and the houses that line it are the haunts of the influential and the well-to-do. Walls are high and freshly painted, armed guards dot the driveways, the cars are big and glossy. Past the first-world embassies drive the wives on their way to pick up the kids from karate lessons at the international school. This is where the rich and renowned retreat after a day overseeing the nation’s affairs.

But no-one has seen to the park. It lies across the way, wedged between Friedrich Engels and the sea, a narrow bumpy plain of yellowing grass, unevenly thrusting its blades at the neglected trees.

You could grow dizzy, standing on that road, turning your head from left to right. On the one hand, sure-footed power immures itself in moneyed mansions. On the other, yellow untended ground surges past venerable trees, gathers strength at the brink, and plunges precipitously down to the sea.

We cross the road and plough in, picking past grounded flurries of newspaper and plastic. The park is almost unpeopled: a couple sit on a circular bench that barely contains the trunk of a tree. A stroller makes his way down a path; two middle-aged men converse in the shade. At one end of the park a stairway leads down to nowhere. The grass rustles about our shins as we walk; if it were any longer we’d be on the look-out for snakes. Nobody has seen to the park.

Perhaps in time all of the parks will be attended to. The parks and people and the streets and the buildings and the roots of the trees: so I believe. Socialism may be dead, but the spirit lives on here. In the best of worlds the government will turn the tools of Big Capital toward pressing social ends. And that is a part of this city’s charm: the sense that in time it will all be paved over, made over into something bright and new. So I walk the streets in a state of premonitory nostalgia, knowing that one day all of these scenes will be gone.

The city is a wreck but blazing life surges and streams over its dilapidated surfaces. The short skirts and the high heels assuredly pick their way over the decrepit pavements. Near the presidential palace, stunning green-and-blue peacocks hop nimbly over tectonic cracks in the sidewalk. Gilded teenagers josh back and forth as they swagger down shabby broken streets on their way home from the finest schools in the land.

There are more paradoxes than these. Unemployment is high, but people walk with a sense of purpose. The state is corrupt, but things get done. Twenty years of civil war, and the people are the friendliest in the region. The army base in the north-west of town is the most dependable dealer of drugs. Crime is low, even though a decade ago Kalashnikovs were as cheap as lives. (The government solved the AK-47 problem by outlawing the private ownership of weapons. Radical notion.) In fact, your biggest danger in Maputo these days is the police.

On the morning of the second day I had my run-in with third-world cops. Travel tip: never cross the road in Maputo without your passport. In my particular case the problem was compounded because I’d lost my room key moments before. It’s one thing to escape immediate arrest and blag your way back to your front gate, but it’s quite another to stand there and feign really bad Portuguese for fully half an hour while you fend off irritable constabular grabs at your arm and the staff run about looking for the spare key, discovering it doesn’t work, and then taking a hammer and chisel to the door in order to get at the passport in the back pocket of your jeans.

After all of that my English cousin was pretty shaken, and I wasn’t feeling too hot myself. Breakfast was in order.

After a very late night, it’s pleasant to start the day at a pavement café. Prices are a little lower than in South Africa, and the coffee is strong and good. You pick from a range of pastries and toasted bread. At the moment the métical is trading at 3,000 to the rand, and most places drop the last three zeros when they present you with the bill, leaving pleasingly denominated amounts: coffee, 15,-.

It’s just after ten, and the joint is surprisingly busy; suited businessmen cluster at adjacent tables. Breakfast on their way to a late start to the day, perhaps, or would it be a mid-morning snack? Street vendors swoop and swarm; they are unblinkingly ignored by the indifferent patrons. Maputo has a refreshingly forthright approach to the street-vendor problem. Some places have guard-rails between the tables and the street; the bigger ones hire baton-wielding guards. It’s a fairly amicable stand-off: if diners see something they want they just raise a finger.

Newspaper vendors pace back and forth, parading their wares. The headlines scream a story that a South African general plotted with President Chissano to kill Samora Machel, but the serious papers aren’t touching it.

I speak Portanhol, which is espaňol masquerading as Portuguese: Spanish channeled through the nasal passages, you might say. I lean over and ask the businessmen what they make of the tale. "I don’t believe it." They are unanimous. "No, no, not him. He wouldn’t do that."
Pause. "One of the other high-ups, maybe..."

It’s not surprising that the bogeyman in this tale is South African. We are despised, after all, by our Mozambican neighbours. It’s the truth: we are not loved. And it’s not hard to see why. For if Mozambique is our Mexico, then we are their U.S. of A. Black or white, we come across the border in our big air-conditioned cars, throwing our rands and dollars about, buying up the land, closing extortionate deals, speaking loudly in English and expecting to be understood.

We built a spanking new road to Maputo not long ago, so we could truck goods down to the harbour. That highway looks like we annexed a fifteen-metre-wide strip of Mozambican land, tarred it, and lined it with yellow SOS phones all the way down to the sea. But it is seen as a channel of deliverance too, and it has attracted a sort of official cargo cult. "Mantenha a EN4 limpia", say signs along the route: "Keep the N4 clean." And, sure enough, you see women labouring away at the roadside, gathering the litter and sweeping up with handheld brooms.

After years of giving in to easy digs at expat Americans, it’s unpleasant to find yourself on the receiving end of such mingled awe and disdain. Now I know how decent Americans must feel when they travel. Even in the short time I was there the incidents stacked up.

At a trendy bar I spoke to a young Mozambican, and the first thing he said was, "Oh no! South Africa! And I’ve just been saying such terrible things about your country!"

And at the Caixa nightclub, I danced with a girl and bought her a drink. Leaning back with her elbows on the bar, she asked me where I was from. "Africa do Sul," I said. She took it quite well. It’s not like she flinched. But she sort of paused, and then nodded with a curious air of resolve. As if saying to herself, "Well, I’m dancing with a South African. Okay. Okay."

And then when I was hassling with the cops something very interesting happened. The watchman pleaded with them in Portuguese, "Please, he’s just a visitor here. He’s on holiday. He can’t know all the laws of the land."

The temperature rose immediately. One of the skinny young cops spoke heatedly, his voice sharpening and hardening. It was a little fast for me to follow, but it went something like this: "Listen, do you know what they do in South Africa? There they find you with no passport and they don’t wait. They don’t argue. They throw you in a van and they lock you up and then they ship you back home."

Perhaps one can be too hasty in bad-mouthing third-world cops…

On the second afternoon we go to visit the art museum. I generally make a stop there whenever I’m in Maputo, but still it takes us an age to find it, fighting through rush-hour traffic and one-way streets, over potholes and rubble and dust, past Muslim-capped war cripples propelling antique three-wheeler chairs through rivers of cars. Some of the streets are labelled London-style, with blue plaques on the sides of the houses. Others have the names on poles. The streets in Maputo are a monument to everlasting Socialism: Go down Avenida Mao Tse-Tung, and take a left into Karl Marx. If you reach Vladimir Lénine you’ve gone too far…

Our map is abysmal. After we cross a major intersection that has a four-way signpost in the middle with no lettering on it at all, we decide to park and go by foot. Even then, we nearly walk right past the nondescript building with the discreet white lettering on its glass doors: Museo Nacional das Artes.

For once, a country’s National Art Museum lives up to its name: this one has no foreign art in it at all. I don’t suppose Mozambique can afford it. A polished-wood banister leads you upstairs. At the top of the steps, at your back, a great canvas by Malangatana erases the wall. It is easy to play up the Latinity of Mozambique, but Malangatana’s style is something else: a patchy colonial education has let him take up European tools for African ends. The painting is a cacophonous concord of colours: tortured reds, ochres, jungle greens. Malangantana is a sort of indigenous Hieronymous Bosch, and the painting is crammed with haunted figures, faces betraying bewilderment, madness, sorrow, fear. They are jammed up against evil bird-men, disembodied mouths, ownerless eyes, all curving chimerically into each other in a crowded promiscuity of pain. Here on the top of the stairs Maputo’s genial surface drops away, and you look down a pit twenty years deep, a pit of war and shame.

The exhibition hall itself is tiny, a single salon-sized room, and we are the only visitors. We wander among canvases and sculptures. The Makonde of northern Mozambique were surrealists who took no lessons from Dali or Tanguy. Consider this work in dark wood by Celestino Tomás: a monstrous man-beast - Goofy with fangs – lasciviously eats his own foot, all the while reposing unselfconsciously on the head and limbs of a grumpy megacephalic, the latter resignedly performing a sort of obscene yoga in order to keep him hoisted in the air.

We stay for less than an hour. I always make a point of coming back here, but the museum never changes much: it’s a minute enclave of whitewashed order amid the tender chaos of rebirth that storms on outside. The first time I came here, the bathroom was without running water. But at the basins the staff had thoughtfully laid out: a jug, a cloth, a piece of soap, and a towel.

On my last night in Maputo, somewhere past midnight, I find myself deep in beer-sodden conversation with a blond-haired Californian communist. The language is broken Portuguese. The place is a rutted rubbled side-street outside a nightclub. The crowd seems to prefer outside to inside – there’s more room on the dancefloor than out here in the road. The atmosphere is archly Latino –signage in Spanish: muy caliente, very hot; the DJ pushing out a steady stream of Macarena followed by TBD followed by Ritchie Valens followed by Ricky Martin. Nothing I don’t recognise: it’s like any Western nightclub, except that it’s better-lit, and any tune without a sway to its beat is stopped at the door.

Jason is an anthropologist in Africa. He’s telling me that socialism will prevail. It’s all too ridiculous. An American Communist: the last of his tribe. Somewhat to my surprise, I find myself fighting the other corner.

I tell him that Socialism is dead. By now we’ve switched to caipirinhas. And English, thank God. I share with him my vision of a post-socialist Mozambique, harnessing Big Capital in the service of old ideals. Jason snorts. "Frelimo has sold out," he informs me. He leans in. "Listen," he confides, "capitalism has failed." I confess I am a little startled. Haven’t heard that one in a while. Seeing my scepticism, he takes a step back. "Look around you," he cries, sweeping his arm theatrically to take in the fragmented street, the neon shop windows with nothing on display. "See what foreign investment has wrought," gesturing grandly at the cracked and crumbling facades. He spreads both arms wide, his face aglow with mock beneficence. "Savour the fruits of liberalisation, my brother!"

I should remind him of the civil war. And twenty years of Mozambican socialism. I should tell him that what this place reminds me of most is Eastern Germany in 1992. I should, I really should, but I’m laughing too hard for the words to get out.

Losing an argument is a great way to make a new friend. A shot of tequila, and he invites me over to meet his buddies. Three feisty mulatto youths, decked out in shades of khaki (red star at the breast) and peaked guerrilla caps. The makings of a revolutionary cell, I muse. The leader, the loyalist and the intellectual. The leader has long braided hair; the thinker is thin and intense with black horn-rims. I’m loving it. True to form, the intellectual weighs in with his latest grand idea, voice brimming with quiet intensity. They’ve come up with a brilliant big-name beer ad, he says. This is no mere rhetoric: they’ve conceptualised it and shot it, and now they want to market it. Do I know anyone in advertising?

I don’t need to write an article on Maputo. Maputo writes itself. - Michael Prytz"

This article comes from journalism.co.zahttp://www.journalism.co.za/