by Paul Theroux
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.’
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 enoug
h 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.
Eiffel’s station was far more attractive and better preserved than any in Egypt or South Africa. Ethiopia’s stations were picturesque (though its trains were grim), Kenya’s stations were in ruins, Uganda’s defunct, Tanzania’s just minimalist concoctions from Maoist blueprints. Zimbabwe Railways still maintained solid little brick cottages, like English country stations, but they were on the wane, like much else in that tottering country. I found the Maputo station purely by chance, and went back on two successive days to admire its wood paneling and etched glass, its station buffet and waiting rooms. On the third day I went for a train ride.
Though no one in town seemed to know much about Mozambique Railways, and hardly anyone took the trains, some trains still ran, three lines anyway, including an international express, the slow train to Komatipoort and Johannesburg. No railway timetables were published. The arrival and departure times were scribbled on pieces of paper and tacked to a notice board inside the station. I lingered over the names, loving the destination Zona Verde (Green Zone), but settled finally on the Limpopo Line, for the name alone.
The Limpopo Line, running northeast out of the capital to the town of Chokwe, was the embodiment of all that I loved as well as all that I despaired of in the Africa I had seen so far. The train was a solid and usable artifact, almost indestructible in its simplicity, as well as atmospheric; but it was badly maintained, disappointingly grubby, and poorly patronized. This working relic had been retained because the country was too poor to replace it or modernize it. At the height of its working life this line had carried many people comfortably into the remote bush. Such were the ambitions of Portuguese colonialism that the line had once continued through Gaza Province into Central Africa, linking Mozambique with Rhodesia and Nyasaland. These places were now Zimbabwe and Malawi, and a hundred times harder to get to by any land route than they had been forty years ago and more. One of the epiphanies of my trip was the realization that where the mode of life had changed significantly in the Africa I had known, it had changed for the worse.
The look of the train standing at the station at eight in the morning raised my hopes as much as the procedure required for buying a ticket and being allocated a seat had done. But the train was something of an illusion, and the ticket shuffling just an empty rigmarole. There were few people on board, the train was falling apart, and it seemed as though the gesture-conscious railway staff were just going through the motions. One purpose was served, though: the train was able to accommodate large heavy bundles and crates. As a cargo carrier the train was indispensable and it was a more straightforward and simple conveyance than any of the buses.
The weirdness of this old railway passing Maputo’s new airport at its first stop, Mavalane, made it seem like a ghost train erupting from the past to rattle hauntingly across the present. The station names were printed on a card that was framed and fastened to the wall – Romão, Albasine, Jafar, Papucides, Marracuene, Bobole, Pategue, Manhiça: lovely names, but they were no more than muddy villages.
Manhiça was hardly fifty miles from Maputo, though it took most of the morning to get there. I thought I would get off at this station and then head for Xai-Xai up the coast, which was noted for its beaches and its natural beauty.
‘The flood was here,’ a man said, as we passed a low-lying district of shacks outside the city. He saw that I had been gaping out of the window. ‘The people were rehoused. New people have come hoping for a new flood, so that the government will find them houses.’ But the government would not have paid for that housing; it would have been funded by what an American chronicler of recent history in the country called ‘the Donors’ Republic of Mozambique.’
Africans praying for a disaster so that they would be noticed seemed to me a sorry consequence of the way charities had concentrated people’s minds on misfortune. But without vivid misfortune Africans were invisible to aid donors.
The train passenger explaining the huts wore a tie and importantly manipulated his mobile phone; other passengers wore rags. Women nursed babies in some seats, some children frowned at me, and I could not blame them, for I was the only alien on the train, or so it seemed until I went for a walk from car to car.
The ring of another mobile phone caught my attention. I looked over and saw a young alien woman, head bent, talking confidentially in Portuguese into her small receiver. I kept walking through the rattling carriages to the ka-chink, ka-chink, ka-chink of the wheels bumping over the rail joints. The train was less than half full, quite a novelty for an African conveyance – they never seemed to travel without twice the number of passengers they had been designed for – ten in a car, twenty in a van, eighty in a bus, and Tanzanian trains were just piled with people. Here the passengers sat in postures of repose. Some slept. Others nibbled stalks of sugar cane. I counted sixty-two children: none of them was fussing; they sat in silence watching the drooping palm fronds and muddy fields and the huts passing by.
On my way back through the train I caught the eye of the white woman and said hello. She greeted me in such a friendly way that I paused and chitchatted, until the swaying of the train on the curves swung me and had me grasping seat backs to keep my balance. That sudden train motion was helpful, for it seemed natural for me to avoid it by sitting down across the aisle from this sweet-looking woman.
‘I’m Susanna,’ she said.
‘Paul,’ I said, and shook her hand.
She was young, pale, in her mid-twenties, rather thin, with such a slight figure an
d such a short haircut that you might at first have taken her to be a pretty boy. She wore khaki slacks and a loose sweater and no make-up, as sensible women did when they were traveling alone in Africa, so as not to call attention to themselves; but the result in her case was a look of such stunning androgyny that she compelled my attention. She was from Ohio.
‘I’m going to Manhiça.’
‘What a coincidence,’ I said. ‘Are you a traveler?’
‘I’m on a mission.’
I liked that: it meant so many things. But in her case it was a traditional use of the phrase. She was an Assembly of God missionary, who had decided one day that she was being called to Africa. She had attended Bible college in South Africa and after making a number of sorties into Mozambique she had set up house in Maputo, with the ambition of mass conversion, that is, gulling locals into believing in hellfire and penance. After the dusky pietists submitted, she would offer lessons from other parts of pious Africa, declaiming sermons with the Joycean text, And thereafter in that fruitful land the broadleaved mango flourished exceedingly.
‘How did you happen to decide on a mission here?’
‘Because I’m a sinner saved by grace.’
Sometimes people say, I’ve got the answer to our parakeet problem! Let’s flush it down the john and we won’t have to take the messy thing to Daytona this year! And you don’t know quite how to reply.
But I said, ‘How’s business?’
‘There’s so much to do here.’
‘I thought Jimmy Swaggart was taking care of all that.’ I had seen the man’s books and videos on sale in the Maputo street markets and in Malawi too.
Susanna said, ‘He’s real popular. They love Jimmy Swaggart here. It’s the music and the videos.’
