The Zimbabwe election is today, although the main opposition candidate has dropped out. Finally the New York Times came through with an article about what has been in all the papers here for more than a month. I heard that some Mozambicans will be marching in solidarity with the opposition later this afternoon. They will depart from Robert Mugabe Plaza in downtown Maputo.
I finally did an interview with one of the filmmakers who worked on Time of the Leopards, the Mozambican/Yugoslavian co-production that I took the name from for this blog.
The story was an amusing one: The filmmaker in question, Licinio Azevedo, wrote a government-sponsored book documenting stories of the revolutionary war in a New Journalism style. For whatever reason, Yugoslavia hoped to participate in adapting one of the stories into a feature film.
He and another Mozambican writer were taken to Yugoslavia to work on the script. They were given rooms in a pretty hotel on a mountain in a forest and were told the screenplay had already been written by a Yugoslavian. They read the script: The first scene began with a Mozambican woman running through the forest pursued by two Portuguese soldiers. She arrives at a lake, takes off her clothes, and jumps in nude. One soldier shoots. The other halts him: “No! Don’t shoot! I love that woman.”
Licinio and the other writer giggled at this. Frelimo guerrillas were known for their prudish morals and formal attire, the thought of a lady guerrilla running nude through a forest was silly. The thought that of a Portuguese man falling in love with her over the course of the chase even more so.
They continued reading. Next scene described Frelimo guerrillas attacking a Portuguese prison to liberate their captured commander with… helicopters? The Yugoslavians were dismayed when the Mozambicans told them Frelimo had never had helicopters. “But how had they won the war without an air force?” they wondered. The Mozambicans guaranteed the guerrillas had made do. The Yugoslavians insisted then that instead of helicopters there would be all-terrain vehicles armed with machine guns. The Mozambicans explained that in the jungle, where the war for independence was fought, nobody had all-terrain vehicles, that supplies were carried on the tops of women’s heads, like everything else in Mozambique. They began to clash with the Yugoslavians, who insisted that without Jeeps and helicopters there would be no point in making the movie.
At this point I think Licinio quit and went back home. I still haven’t seen the movie so I can’t say how it turned out, except that he thought it was silly.
For anyone with even a mild interest in African history, I highly recommend a peek at the Aluka Project before they start charging for subscriptions at the end of June. It’s basically an Internet repository for historical documents from Africa, including a whole section on liberation struggles, periodicals, posters, rock art images, even plant specimens. Typing in “Mozambican cinema” turned up 230 documents. Very cool.
My last six weeks in Mozambique have arrived, and I’ve been busy conducting my last few interviews, transcribing them, and working on an article for a magazine in the U.S. about my time here (more on that if it’s actually published, but for its length I’ve spent an absurd amount of time on it.) I’m not particularly looking forward to going home. I still don’t know where I will be living, what I will be doing, and I’m having the usual doubts about the career path I’m on, that I was sort of miserable working as a journalist before, the usual predictions about the end of print media, etc. boring etc.
I’ve been house-sitting for the past month in a very nice apartment where I have a corner office with a glimpse of the bay outside of one of the windows. I’ve spent most of my month here in this room, writing, gazing out the windows at the laundry lines and the crumbling concrete skyline of Maputo’s apartment buildings, at dawn and at dusk, marveling at how happy it makes me to sit in a room with lots of windows, white walls, parquet floors, a big wooden desk, and a nice view, writing.
As I learned in Chile as a high school exchange student, the reason it’s nice to spend a whole year in a place is that you learn more in your final three months than you do in all the nine months that precede it. Your grasp of the language is complete, you know your way around, you’ve made friends with local people that go beyond the inevitable stereotypes and fears and cultural misunderstanding you may have had when you arrived.
I’m trying to savor the rest of my time here. I know I could have published more on this blog, but somehow the idea of putting everything I observe and witnessed on the Internet seems a desecration, a premature birth that borders on miscarriage, something that’s put forth in the world unformed but then can’t be reclaimed, aged in a barrel, mulled over, and obsessively rewritten. That said, I’ll try to update a little more during these last few weeks.
Once upon a time, Guinea Bissau (or at least Amilcar Cabral) was the intellectual heart of some of the first initiatives to end Portuguese colonialism in Africa. Today we learn that total anarchy has turned the country into what the Guardian calls “the world’s first narco state.” A fascinating article about a particularly messed up place.
GDP of Mozambique (2007): $17.82 billion
Combined earnings, top 50 hedge fund managers (2007): $29 billion
I helped a reporter from a UK paper do a story on how Zimbabwe’s economic decline has affected its outlet to the sea, a path through Mozambique known as the Beira corridor. Here are a couple of photos from the port city of Beira, which is full of kitschy modernist architecture in advanced stages of decay.
The photo below is from the border, where people were purchasing massive quantities of food to take back into Zim. I have better photos of the scene there, but I want to see if said UK paper would like them before I post them on the blog. In case you’re the sort who flips through stories of mass affliction in Africa, Zimbabwe is going through an economic meltdown and has an inflation rate of 100,000 percent, so everybody is desperate to get foreign currency. You may not be able to get milk or sugar at a supermarket in Zim, but Zimbabwean milk and sugar was everywhere on this side of the border because they can sell it for money that’s actually worth something. It was a fascinating trip.
Also the area where Mozambique borders Zimbabwe is absolutely beautiful — the landscape suddenly changes from low veld to mountains as you climb the Great Escarpment. Zimbabwe’s situation really is a pity.
Is it the refrain “I’m sorry I haven’t written in so long” starting to get repetitive? I mean it in all earnestness.
I have been traveling for almost a full month. First, for work, I went to the flood zone along the Zambeze river in central Mozambique on assignment from IRIN.
The resulting articles can be found here and here.
Then, for vacation, I went to northern Mozambique. We started in Nampula and went to Ilha de Moçambique, capital of the country until the 19th Century, one of the oldest European settlements in East Africa, now a decaying backwater cum tourist destination.
The history is dramatic — battles between the Arabs and the Portuguese, then the Portuguese and the Dutch, slave trading and capricious colonial nobility.
The architecture gives it a sort of ghost town charm and the museums are interesting, but I think if USAID were serious about its tourist development programs the priority would be putting some kind of sewage system in place on the island. Taking a sunset sailboat ride just gets depressing when it involves witnessing two dozen villagers taking a crap into the sea. There’s something fully inhumane about watching someone do their business out in the open because they have nowhere else to go, particularly if you’re sitting on some lovingly restored verandah drinking a cocktail with money in your pocket and a well-appointed bathroom back at the hotel. You sort of just want to leave.
We went north to the unremarkable city of Pemba, then to another island called Ibo, another example of the Swahili village- Arab trading post- Portuguese settlement-colonial ghost town trajectory, including sordid history of traffic in slaves and ivory.
Here we participated in a community homestay thing that was kind of awkward. Maybe it’s considered ascetically virtuous for a tourist to spend a night without plumbing or electricity.
You are giving money to the community I guess, but in our case the community was the Frelimo district administrator (surprise) so these things are all relative.
The lady of the house cooked up a pretty tasty fish curry with coconut rice for us on a wood fire though, to her great credit.
Finally we went back to Maputo, bussed to South Africa, rented a car, and went to Kruger National Park. We saw many animals.
The highlight was probably having to drive in reverse for ten minutes while an enormous elephant walked semi-threateningly in our direction,
and seeing three lions sleeping away the afternoon, seemingly undisturbed by the parade of cars and descending electric windows and cameras clicking.
I hope to go back here before I leave.
Went to the city of Quelimane, province of Zambezia, to report on the floods in the area. It was a sad scene, though there’s a different way to tell the story than the way they like to tell it on CNN (and the way I told it in my first perfunctory article on the subject.) Now that I’ve actually interviewed some relocated people, I will do a better one.
First, however, some thoughts on the local airline situation. Plane tickets to fly within Mozambique are quite expensive — a round trip ticket up north can easily set you back $500 USD. As of last week there were two local airlines, but then Air Corridor’s single plane had an unfortunate encounter with a bird on the runway, and now there is only one. (Air Corridor is now suing the Maputo airport for letting people grow vegetable plots around the airport, claiming it encourages plane-bird conflict.)
So perhaps Linhas Aereas de Mocambique (LAM) was merely swelling its chest over its newfound monopoly, but I had a grand all-night tour of Mozambique last night. The flight from the company better known to English speakers as “Late And Maybe” was supposed to leave at 19:00, fly south for a stop in Beira, then continue southward to Maputo — a two-hour affair. Instead, we left Quelimane at 02:00 a.m. flew an hour north to Nampula, then flew back over Quelimane, returned south to Beira, then to Maputo. I got home at 07:30 a.m. Having to disembark at every city made sleep impossible. I felt like I should have woken up in a different time zone, at least, but I am only two hours from where I started.
Just a few pictures. Also I have a new article up on IRIN about whether Mozambique will succumb to the natural resource curse.
