Dear Mahlako, There is a lovely road that runs through Nelspruit in Mpumalanga and the Komatipoort border to Mozambique. At the end of it lies a city once known as Lorenco Marques — now Maputo.
A week here reflects the good that has happened since the end of the war in 1992, glaring poverty and deprivation persist.
I did not try to learn Portuguese. That is touristy, treacly and futile. All I could really figure out were the words “Ben Vindo”, which means welcome,
because I saw it at entrances to service stations. That is why I wish I could say to you Ben Vindo a Mozambique.
The hotel I am staying at, Hoyo Hoyo, is a demonstration of the country’s pricing mechanism inefficiencies pitched at a tourist market. For R300 a night I sleep in something similar to the Rhodes University residences we slept in for R130 a night when we attended the Grahamstown Arts Festival — a single bed, the most basic wooden furniture and a shower only.
The best part of the city is a stretch of road that runs from the port and bends round the Polana area, with the world-famous hotel and its new swanky shopping centre. There is a portion that is a far less grand version of Cape Town’s Sea Point, with mansions overlooking the two beaches: Maritimo and Costa do Sol.
I am at a restaurant named after the latter, owned by the Petarakis family since 1938. It claims the Swaziland royal family and Tom Jones among some of its famous diners. I am following in the footsteps of an obdurate, backward royal clan and a pop idol that predates the current versions by three decades.
The menu reveals one of globalisation’s most glaring failures. Mozambique was once a leading exporter of cashew nuts. However, on the advice of the World Bank it not only privatised its cashew nut processing plants, it opened them to competition. That, plus the devastation of crops by war, led to the collapse of the cashew nut processing industry. Now it ships what little it produces to places like India. How ironic: one cannot eat a cashew nut cake in a country that once produced its key ingredient in abundance.
The architecture around the Polana is functional but unimaginative: simple shapes in drab colours, with the exception of the headquarters of the Banco Standard Totta, a Standard Bank subsidiary, which has an English, not Portuguese, inspiration.
Taxis here are a rip-off. When I travelled to the Mozal aluminum plant outside Maputo, a 45-minute trip, the meter taxi there cost me R130 and a minibus taxi back just R2. Resorting to minibus taxis was a reminder that I am not a tourist and it was a revelation.
The taxi drivers have no concept of overload and, in hot weather, the concoction of sweaty workers and traditional beer makes for a heady brew. Communication problems with the taxi marshal led to me being lost in an area that demonstrated the desperate need for infrastructure revival.
The area is shockingly decrepit, with a market teeming with people and tomatoes that teeter on the brink of splattering on to the pavements. The roads look like they were pulverised and left to rot, with more soil than tar, brick or whatever they were made of.
The Mozambican government must make sure that foreign investment is linked to rehabilitating infrastructure. This can be through linking this as a condition to foreign investors who brew beer and, as Vodacom will be doing soon, offer cellular services. Alternatively, the government can review some of its generous tax holidays and redirect them to rebuilding the public infrastructure.
A poignant moment proved to be an artistic highlight. At a photographic exhibition of the work of Alf Khumalo, there was a telling photograph. It shows Graça Machel at the funeral of her former husband, Mozambican president Samora Machel. She is clutching the hands of fellow mourners. While all around her are grief-stricken and forlorn, she stares ahead, weary but stern. I have raved about her grace, but resilience is her virtue.
I think we can help Mozambique with more than the R30-billion we have pumped in over the past five years. We can export the values that make us succeed as an economy: for one, the English language, and not just to facilitate interaction with a local lass or to avoid getting still water when you requested sparkling, although both would be welcome. A substantial proportion of adults cannot speak the language. As a result they are cut off from opportunities such as being hotel receptionists and jobs with foreign companies. Moreover, it keeps them out of any hope of travelling through the region, even to try their luck on the fringes of our economy as informal traders.
Otherwise, Portuguese remains a strange but charming language that gives the beach a lingering buzz on a Sunday afternoon.
I wish I could tell you in Portuguese that I wish you were here.
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