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.