Travels in the past

I can feel the circles beneath my eyes sinking deeper and darker. I won't go into the reasons for my recent long hours and lack of sleep, as those reasons are less Mozambique-related than geek-related, and I prefer to keep geekery out of this family-oriented blog. (Though I will mention I've spent the past two hours copying out long strings of hexadecimals from registry keys - because I just googled the keys I worked on and discovered, via www.windowsitlibrary.com, that "The keys can't be read by human beings". I knew Mozambique had changed me, but I didn't realise how much. Probably no one else will be surprised, though.)

Suffice it to say that anything exciting that happened to me in the past ten days or so shouldn't be mentioned on a social occasion, except when immediate solitude is required. So, I resort to past events for this post.

Erik's comment on my previous post reminded me of the best news I've had for weeks, which is that my friend Yerevan Laura, formerly Quelimane Laura (so called to distinguish her from American Laura, the HR manager here), will henceforth be Luanda Laura - having moved to Angola last week to take up a job there. Laura, bemvindo em África mais uma vez, and I'm looking forward to meeting you in Namibia or Botswana or any of the other interesting places that lie between us, next time you need a break.

Alexa with Laura in her Yerevan incarnation. Garni, Armenia, Christmas Eve, 2006.

Laura will recall Simon Norfolk, a long-time resident of Maputo, who after returning here from his first trip to Luanda first wanted to place a papal kiss on the airport tarmac and then to call on the mayor of Maputo to apologise for all the horrible things he'd said about this place for years. I am sure Laura will handle the place rather better: she will at least mix well with all the strong women Simon mentioned.

I just sent Laura a welcome message, which reminded me that she had asked about my visit in February to yet another of her previous locations, Rwanda. She's not the only person I know who missed out on hearing about that trip, so I'll post a quick report here. (In fact it will be mostly copied from the only email I sent which contained any mention of what I was up to in Rwanda. Apologies to those who have seen it before - but I've neglected the hexadecimals for too long already, and I don't have time to write a fresh piece.)

One of the headwaters of the Nile.

I took all these photos on the one day on which I was able to travel outside Kigali. I found a good, professional tour agency very easily, but wasn't able to access any money in my Mozambican account from Kigali, so was limited to the cash I had with me. I hired a car and driver, Gilles, and we drove for about three hours to get to Gisenye, in the west of the country, where the border with DR Congo meets Lake Kivu.

The Rwanda-Congo border post. You may observe how tense things are. When Gilles drove me there, I thought he'd taken me to a market - lots of women with buckets of vegetables on their heads and men pushing bikes with huge bundles attached, going to and fro. It took a while to notice the rope stretched across the road and the Rwandan flag. It's a border which the locals cross because they can get a better price for their produce, or their purchases, on the other side. I felt reasonably sure, though, that if a muzungu started walking around curiously with a camera, I'd have the place about my ears, so I stayed in
the car. The town in the background of the photo is Goma (DR Congo), which was affected by a volcanic eruption a couple of years back.

Lunch hour in Gisenye.

On the way back from Gisenye we heard on the BBC an item about renewed fighting in DR Congo near Goma, during the preceding couple of weeks. Gilles and I were, to say the least, nonplussed. We'd seen no evidence of particularly high tension - plenty of soldiers in Gisenye district, but all of them out on training runs or waving vehicles through checkpoints with no apparent concern for anything other than roadworthiness. We passed a refugee camp - lots of long white permanent-looking tents with "U.N." in tall black letters - which looked very well-ordered, certainly with no obvious signs of a recent influx.

Maize drying in a town on the road to Gisenye.

In three different towns we passed Gacaca courts in session - these are part of a traditional justice system which was revived after the genocide to deal with the huge numbers of perpetrators. They take place in the open air. The first one I thought was some kind of festa or official reception, with everyone dressed up to the nines, until Gilles pointed out the prisoners in distinctive pink uniforms. Thirteen years ago, it happened, and they are still trying the accused - an indication of how many people are implicated.

I must cut short this post now, if I'm to post at all this week. Other details about Rwanda - and past travels in general - will emerge in other dull weeks.

No news

I didn't intend this blog to be a commentary on Maputo news. It's merely for my family and friends who need to reassure themselves that I am still alive and complaining. Recent weeks have been uncharacteristically exciting in Maputo - and I don't mean that in a good way, as the Malhazine posts indicate. Please do not be disappointed if future posts are limited to reports on milk shortages and the like stories which don't lend themselves to interesting photographs.

(Oh, yes, the milk shortage: last Saturday the Indian gentleman in charge of my local merceria was desolate that he couldn't provide my usual two cartons of skinny from the Parmalat factory down the road at Matola. There's a shortage throughout southern Africa, he tells me. I snagged his last carton of expensive Portuguese milk. It's like being back in Quelimane again, where milk drinkers had to hoard for the six months of the year during which the Zambesi was low enough to permit trucks from the south to cross easily.)

As a matter of fact I did get involved in something newsworthy last Thursday, involving a trip with Trudi across the border to Nelspruit to collect something so big and important that customs spent six hours inspecting it and bringing big men from remote places to set their seal on its papers. Trudi's near-perfect self-control in the face of bureaucratic provocation and her tireless polite cajolery are simply jaw-dropping. I took copious mental notes. This is the true sign of someone who knows her way around Africa.

Unfortunately I can't say exactly why we put ourselves through it all, as I've been asked to keep this matter under wraps until an official launch. That might take place next week, if I'm lucky. The secrecy is a little quixotic, considering the imported item spent Thursday night and much of Friday morning parked in front of our office on Avenida 24 de Julho, providing diversion for all the commuters from Matola and the outer western bairros. Suffice it to say that the project which has been dominating my life for the past six months is at last coming to fruition. I'll post the photos the instant I'm given permission.

A Deus, Eyesore

(Anyone who thinks I've made an error in the title is welcome to post a comment with a correction. Shouldn't it be "Ao Deus"? But I'm sure I've seen "Á Deus".)

Last Saturday, 31 March 2007, was five years to the day since I first set foot in Mozambique. The municipalidade celebrated by knocking down the Hotel Quatro Estações (Hotel Four Seasons), a notorious eyesore on Maputo's Marginal. (Every coastal town in Mozambique, and presumably in the Lusophone world, has a Marginal, which is the road which runs along the coast.)

This hotel was not yet complete at independence in 1975, when the Portuguese construction company left the country, abandoning the project. The story is told round here that the departing construction workers first poured concrete down the service shafts of the building, so that the new Mozambican government would never get any benefit from their work. I've walked to the top of the building, and I never saw any evidence of this.

Concrete wasn't necessary, anyway. The new government had no cash to spare to complete the work themselves, and as a socialist government wasn't attracting foreign investment. After a few years open to the elements, the building was in an irrecoverable state. My colleague Trudi, a South African who's worked in Mozambique on and off since 1986, says that ever since her first visit she was encountering teams of visiting engineers, comfortably ensconced in the Hotel Polana (the plushest in the country), whose job it was to determine whether the building could be rehabilitated. Every single team came to the same depressing conclusion.

So it became a well-known Maputo landmark, and, thanks to that urban legend about the concrete, an unofficial monument to Portuguese spite. One always took visitors to Maputo out along the Marginal for lunch at Costa do Sol, and every time, the visitors would crane their necks at the ghost building and ask what the blazes that was all about.

I climbed up the crumbling stairs to the 26th floor in the New Year of 2004 – a friend having given the guards a slab of beer to gain us admission. (The guards generally did a good job: I saw no squatters in the place, and it didn’t look lived-in.) The stairs were perfectly stable, but at every landing was a gaping floor-to-ceiling hole onto the void. They would have made pretty picture windows had the building been completed. As it was, remembering those open doorways onto a sheer drop still makes my skin temperature plummet.

So at 6.00 on Saturday morning I left my flat and enjoyed a leisurely walk to Praça de Destaçamento Femino (Female Advancement) at the edge of the exclusion zone. I’ll own up to feeling a touch of trepidation, after the recent disaster – and something in me quailed at the first explosion, but everything went according to plan.

(Valentin took an excellent video file of the implosion, complete with pretty girl cringing at the first explosion – it wasn’t me – and much colourful language in Portuguese. He promised to share, and I wanted to post it here, but he’s been in Mozambique too long. Rather than wait longer for the file, I’ll post now and hope he reads this and realises he’s developing a reputation.)

Ten seconds of thunder and dust, and it’s gone forever. It left a surprisingly small pile of debris. I suppose it was mostly air.

And it’s no longer possible to photograph views like this.

A small price to pay - except that the new US embassy is to be built at the site, helping the glittering white casino to turn that stretch of the Marginal into Target City (Bairro dos Alvos). (I don’t know if it still does so, but when that casino was located at the Hotel Polana it charged a US$50 entry fee for Mozambican women. Only for Mozambican women.) So we may expect the site to remain an eyesore, albeit on a lesser scale, tall rocket-proof walls surmounted by a forest of aerials. If the street vendors were left to themselves they would hide it behind mazes of seagrass furniture and bright patterned tablecloths, but I guess the marines will be keeping them away.