City In Shock

(I now understand why the journalistic cliché in the above title exists.)

Late on Thursday afternoon, while I hunched over my computer testing new offline banking software, occasional far-off rumblings and weird inner-ear sensations kept tapping at my concentration. I put them down to heavy trucks going past (our office is on the main road from South Africa) and focussed on my app. I had one "what the f was that?" moment when the building seemed to shake, but the software issues were a lot more pressing at that stage, and the moment didn't last.

Then around 17.30 I heard a terrific crash from the front of the office. From the CEO's office, in fact, and hearing our dignified CEO resort to body-function Anglo-Saxonisms probably did more to persuade me that an emergency was in progress than did the broken glass or the shaking building.

My first thought was that the building was under attack, and I joined my colleagues (by this hour just the overworked management remained in the office) in a cautious creep towards the front windows, expecting to see a small mob of disgruntled clients assembled outside, stones at the ready. There was indeed a crowd on the footpath and median strip outside, lots of them pointing at our shattered windows, some of them laughing, some of them frowning and frightened, but no one threw anything.

I could hear the CEO Ben explaining, calmly as ever, that his windows were broken but he was fine (it transpired that he was on a conference call at the time). Then the windows and the entire building shook again, and I felt the shock in my ears.

We all retreated from the windows, reasonably sure we weren't under attack, but not sure of what exactly was happening. My boss Wesley rang the security company and found out that the arms stockpile out at Malhazine was exploding. The crowds on the street were watching smoke and fireballs rise over the rooftoops.

Our office is maybe five kilometres from Malhazine, but the explosions were strong enough to shake the building every minute or so. The traffic outside the office was bumper-to-bumper - people from Malhazine and the surrounding bairros were crowding on to chapas (minibuses) out of the area to escape. Now and again an ambulance would go past with its sirens wailing, but compelled to crawl along, negotiating a path between trees and parked cars on the median strips. There are only three hospitals in Maputo (a city of over a million people) and each of them has (I think) only one ambulance, but the private clinics had sent their vehicles in as well. The Red Cross had drafted its project vehicles for ambulance use too - no sirens, but loudhailers informing everyone around that they were bringing the wounded through and would everyone please make way.

My colleagues and I were safe enough in the building, provided we kept away from the windows, and none of us wanted to venture into that traffic. Ben moved into an inner room and impertubably continued his conference call, I shut down the servers and other hardware to protect them from the shock waves, Laura from HR tried to contact the staff who lived near Malhazine to check that they were okay. This gave her a lot of trouble - the cellphone networks were choked. Our credit supervisor Catarina arrived from the field, badly shaken. When the explosions started she had been in a crowded market maybe three kilometres from Malhazine, negotiating with a defaulting client, when a piece of shrapnel fell out of the sky and dug a hole in the ground very near by. Fortunately no one was hurt that time, but everyone, sensibly, fled the market. It took Caterina over an hour to drive the two or three kilometres back to the office.

Eventually the traffic thinned enough for us to leave. I took a lift home with Wesley and Laura, driving down the main road of Avenida 24 de Julho. I couldn't at the time understand why there were so many people lining the streets or crowding into any open space - later I heard that everyone was afraid of being trapped in a building which was demolished by the completely random bombardment. (Residential buildings in this part of town are all multi-storey, so a building collapse isn't something you can expect to survive, but after Catarina's story I was still surprised. Everyone gazed intently in the direction of the explosions, even when their view of the smoke and fire was blocked; perhaps they thought they could see shrapnel coming and run from it.) There were plenty of other broken windows and lots of shattered glass on the pavements. Shops which are normally open were shut with doors and windows barred. Extra guards stood about with semi-automatics, motorists were twitchy, pedestrians even less predictable than usual. No police in evidence, though - one assumes they were all closer to the scene of the action, though in the general jumpy mood it still felt like a lapse to me. The guards at my apartment building huddled together, talking and speculating - we could hear the explosions from there, maybe eight kilometres away, and my windows rattled a bit. Later I went out to one of my regular cafés to catch the TV coverage, and the management had seen fit to post a guard with a hefty rifle at each door.

The explosions seem to have stopped around 23.00 - certainly I wasn't woken during the night by rattling windows.

Next morning I was in the office around 6.00 to do the end-of-day processing which usually happens during the night. I still had no idea of the scale of the casualties, until Laura, who drove me in, searched on the internet and found a death toll of 22. Theresa and Benedita who live out Malhazine way both turned up and reported that their immediate families were fine, but Benedita's cousin who also lives there had two children missing. Zela from the branch downstairs had given her empregada the day off so that the poor woman could go searching for her child in the hospitals. The credit officers ventured into the affected areas to see if their clients were still there. And so on. The death toll rose during the day as more information came in. People were ringing radio stations to ask if anyone had seen wives or husbands or children who hadn't returned home since the disaster. Probably many of those will eventually turn up; by all accounts a lot of people were afraid to return to the area. There's unexploded ordnance scattered through people's backyards out there. I haven't heard any count of houses demolished yet.

So. The official line is once again that the explosion was caused by the heat of the day. I say "once again" because this same weapons stockpile also exploded, on a much smaller scale, back in January. At that time we all thanked god that no one was killed and the responsible officials swore up and down that they would move the stockpile to a less populated area. When I heard about the explosions my first thought was they must have been in the process of moving it and someone got careless; instead, the powers-that-be trot out the old heat explanantion. I don't know much about munitions and can't argue with it, though I'm skeptical. While it was hot on Thursday, it wasn't a scorcher by Maputo standards - the previous few days had been cool - and there are other stockpiles further north, where temperatures get even hotter.

But there is absolutely no doubt that the appalling death toll was caused by locating this highly dangerous stockpile in a residential area. An hour's drive outside Maputo you can find largely undeveloped open spaces; if the weapons had been stored there, an explosion of this scale might have taken out a few goats. It was a completely preventable disaster, caused by bureaucratic inepititude.