MAPUTO

Africa: Maputo

"SOUL AND SHADY DEALS IN SEVERE & STYLISH CITY"

Ten years later, Suzy Bell revisits a city where she survived being shot at – dangerous, beautiful Maputo. Daniel Boshoff took the pictures.

With a butter knife, a 50-something Vrystaat (Orange Free State) farmer picked at a blister the size of an old R1 South African coin. “What you doing?” I quizzed. “A blerry spider bite me here and she laid her eggs in my hand. Check,” he prodded at the blister, and bloody hell, inside were four black spider eggs. “I’m just waiting for the day these guys decide to hatch and I’m gonna nail the bastards.” He cranked up the volume of his TV. The South African Broadcasting Corporation’s (SABC) talking-head; iconic news-yapster-icon, Riaan Cruywagen, was coming at us live in a caravan park in Maputo.

The first time I visited Maputo, I was dangerously exploring a city I never knew. I arrived by Kombi with two Irish dudes I’d met the night before at a Durban curry restaurant in neighbouring KwaZulu-Natal. We camped at a trashy R10-a-night caravan park off the beachfront’s Avenue de Marginal. The campsite was crawling with members of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB). These were the Christian-soaked, unashamedly nationalistic right wing party, claiming they were in Lourenço Marques. “We’re escaping the black take-over in South Africa,” he snarled.

I was there just after the elections. UN troops were everywhere. Sheiks in turbans with AK-47’s and camo-clad armed security guards outside Casa Elefante fabric shop in Avenue 25 de Setembro. Saw a heavily armed entourage that had enough ammo to blast Hotel Polana’s guests to neighbouring Inhaca Island. They were simply guarding Café Continentaal, a popular pastry shop.

It was 1994. Mozambique was attracting everyone. On the south coast of Maputo, the sea-side resort of Ponta De Ouro was teeming with lobster red-bellied Natal South Coast fishermen. On the beach with their Bible-black 4X4’s they filled glutinous freezer-chests that spilled over with Couta (King Mackeral), Kingfish (Jacks), Marlin, Sailfish and Wahoo. Off the Bazaruto Archipelego, local spear fishermen were catching Parrot fish. Daily. After two decades of civil-war, no-one was thinking about saving fish.

Glossy magazine travel writers were catching Hotel Polana’s crystal windowed lift to wallow decadently in Maputo’s five star luxury at $200 a night. They sipped Bombay Sapphire Gins on the terrace of the Club Navale yacht club, wrote about the “friendly locals” and raved about the “cheap Tiger prawns at Costa Del Sol”. They dubbed Maputo’s crumbling villas in the Portuguese Gothic Maunelini style, as: “modernist architecture”.

On my first visit I checked into a skanky hotel in a street with no name. I was offered diamonds, a house on the outskirts of the city, fake Christian Dior in exchange for a strip, and named of drugs I didn’t know. Welcome to Maputo. This is the place with a mantra that through a newly found charka will chant: “it’s illegal to be legal,”. The prawns were cheap at R15 for 2 kilos, cashew-nuts at R17 a kilo, a shoe polish for 35c, and at Mercado Centrale I scored 1300 Meticais to the Rand.

Maputo’s 24-hour dance-a-thon drink fest is where the evening’s entertainment is getting wasted and dancing till dawn to Tabanka Djazz. Despite the self-imposed evening curfew I knew nothing about, I followed Eric Clapton singing Portuguese into De Museo. It’s a series of 60 grass-hut shebeens jammed into the size of half a rugby field. Had fish and chips for R1,50 washed down with cold Laurentina. It’s never easy finding your way back to your hotel in Maputo, because if you’re not in the centre of the city, don’t bother looking for street names – ‘cuz there aren’t any.

Even though Air France announced their first weekly flight from Paris to Maputo, I didn’t meet any Parisians. I was rubbing shoulders with wily street children.

I met a charming poet, Job Chicolo, who gave me a poem neatly typed on blue airmail paper.

“What I just appreciate in a poem is not through meaning,

neither its structure.

But I feel myself amused:

I do smile; I do jump, I go fast,

I disappear sometimes into my own figure.

I do really feel like I’m speaking with God!”

Maputo is a poetic city. That’s if you allow yourself to be romantic and you’re open to meeting strangers. Less romantically, blind beggars, deep sockets instead of eyes, were led by nimble children across dirty side-streets. “Meticais, meticais,” the children jabbed me with their pencil-thin fingers. The main city centre streets were littered with skeletal remains of burnt-out cars.

Maputo ten years on. Still blazing hot, (94% humidity), but no longer blazing cheap. At famed Maputo restaurant, Costa Del Sol be prepared to fork out R400 for a plate of peri-peri prawns. The streets are clear of burnt-out cars and very few street children roam. We stayed at a fabulously dodgy hotel, Pensão Central, off 24 de Julho near Praça da Independencia. Our hotel had tatty appeal with pistachio walls, art deco cupboards and polished parquet floors. It soon transpired at only R60 per night, we had unwittingly booked ourselves into a house of ill repute! But it’s conveniently close to the Cathedral which marks the centre of the city. It’s a white wedding cake of a Cathedral that chimes on the hour on the corner of streets Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.

African motifs, lion, sunflower, tree or elephants embedded in traditional cloth are draped around women’s waists or in turbaned hair. Local designers in Cape Town are now working with this style of traditional cloth to create dresses, shorts, hand bags and cushion-covers. “For me, everything is bright and alive in Maputo,” reckons Maputo-born Ira Manhice, a student studying fashion design in Cape Town. “Luckily in Maputo we don’t have MTV so that has not spoilt the people. We watch Brazilian TV, for silly soaps and listen to Latino music.”

She reckons the nightlife is very different compared to Cape Town. “In Maputo it is so much more tropical, very Latino,” explains Ira. And dressing up seriously stylish is crucial. When I meet Ira she is wearing a tailored Impala skinned jacket she dyed midnight blue. Her snow-white turban, like some majestic hat towers above her like her matching skyscraper heels. “The women of Maputo are very proud” insists Ira. “Even the poorest feel the need to be sexy and beautiful. At night clubs everyone is always dancing like couples, not salsa but passada, a dance with very close body contact. It’s very sensual dancing. The music is Latino and R&B – all in Portuguese.”

Ira sees Maputo as a very female city because it’s the mothers she says who support the families. She reckons they bring in more money than the men. “Most women always have another business on the side,” she explains. “Like my mother, she is a teacher but on weekends she buys meat or wine in Swaziland and re-sells it in Maputo.”

Eating out in the main streets of Maputo has certainly lost its charm. There are now more Italian restaurants than women wearing traditional capulana. Villa Italia, Café Milano, Belissima, Pastelaria Nautilus, Pasteleria Wimbi…. there’s even a St Elmo’s. For the most authentic lunch in Maputo - fresh barracuda with chilies and boiled potatoes - there’s the Radio Mozambique Social bar just above the Jardino Tunduru (Botanical Gardens). This is where the local cats hang-out. It’s also where an old boarding house phone rings but no-one picks up. The TV plays back-to-back re-runs of Magyver – but no-one watches.

In Maputo you can hook up with nu-afro-beat funkster, guitarist and vocalist Chico Antonio living on the 12^th floor of a flat on Eduardo Mondlane. Chico is legendary in Mocambique. He has performed with the Marrabenta Orchestra and now has a cranking six piece band we hope will get sponsored to tour South Africa. Despite nursing a hellish hang-over, he agreed to meet us to Café Continentaal for fresh pastes des nates. It helped that we names dropped Coffee Beans Route musical creative, Iain Harris, a great fan of Chico and Maputo.

That night we cruised to the Centre Culturel Francő Mozambiquan, the cultural hub of Maputo for music, theatre, art exhibitions, film and live concerts.

It was a hypnotic evening of jazz with visiting Swiss/Dutch composer, Susanne Abbuehl, a student of the famed master singer, Dr Prabha Atre in Mumbai. “And May came home with a smooth round stone,” sang the warm, soothing voice. She flick-flacked with consummate ease from James Joyce’s “the twighlight turns from amethyst….” to lullaby chants of Hindi-jazz poetics. A meditative performer, the beguiling Susanne resembles a Euro-Trance sangoma. Her vocals, like this city, spacious, yearning and vulnerable. The Cathedral chimed and the Red-Wing Starlings swooped across the stage making outdoor jazz in Maputo a near spiritual experience.

Celebrated pianist, Wolfert Brederode’s has hand that melted like wax onto his piano. Drummer, Lucas Niggli, performed like a Buddhist monk high on sonic-ecstasy. He is also part of the avant-garde trio, Steamboat Switzerland. These creatives, like Chico, our Paul Hamner, Busi Mhlongo and Pops Mohamed, like Susanne Abbuehl’s jazz band, are experimental, ethereal and sophisticated.

Whether you’re into jazz or wild nights of drinking or both, whatever you do resist the urge for a romantic late evening stroll on the beach, as you’re still likely to get mugged, or as I was ten years ago, hair-raisingly shot at. My saviour a UN sheik in white who brandished an AK-47! My only comfort that wild night while soaking in a hot bath of Jack Daniels at the Parisian Embassy was Winston Churchill’s fuzzy chirp: “There’s nothing more exhilarating than being shot at with no result.”

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TRAVEL FACT FILE:

HOW TO GET THERE?

www.flysax.com or call 0861 606 606

From Cape Town: South African Express flies Mondays and Fridays from Cape Town to Maputo from R2 842.

MALARIA: Malaria area - take anti-malaria precautions.

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PICTURE CAPTIONS:

caption 1: GUNS ‘N PALMS: Maputo pot-plant street seller Laurinho Arvindo in Avenue Vladimir Lenine. Picture: DANIEL BOSHOFF

caption 2: AFRO-BEATSTER: Musician Chico Antonio in Maputo’s Jardino Tunduru Botanical Gardens. Picture: DANIEL BOSHOFF

caption 3: NIGHT’S CATCH: A Mocambiquan fisherman supports his family from the sea. Picture: DANIEL BOSHOFF

caption 4: LULLABY CHANTS: Susanne Abbuehl in concert at Maputo’s Centre Culturel Francő Mozambiquan. Picture: DANIEL BOSHOFF