Under the Trees in Mozambique by Graham Simmons

Mozambican sculptor Pekiwa (Nelson Augosto Carlos Ferreira) talks about how his life and work are intimately involved with wood and trees. “I’ve always worked under the shade of a tree, in direct contact with nature”, he says. “It’s in my blood”.

Pekiwa’s father A.C. Ferreira (aka Govane) was also a sculptor. Danish journalist Søren Knudsen describes meeting him in Mozambique in 1988:
“The country at the time was racked by indescribable bestial warfare”, she says. “Govane was living on the outskirts of the capital Maputo, but had to move when it became a war zone. But he kept on working, with all his carvings depicting the horrors of war. It was my first encounter with the indomitable Mozambican appetite for life, which can survive almost anything.”

Mozambique’s civil war, which racked the country from 1975 to 1992, resulted in nearly a million deaths. One side effect of the conflict was the deskilling of the people, who used to harvest the country’s valuable timbers for wood-turning and other crafts. Even in the barren west of the country, trees provide respite from the dust, which would otherwise be all-enveloping.

I set out to visit Mozambique from neighbouring Malawi, gritting my teeth and prepared to eat a lot of the aforementioned dust. Armed with a map from the now-defunct RETOSA (Regional Tourism Association of Southern Africa), the plan was to travel from the Malawian capital Lilongwe to Mozambique via the shortest possible route, hoping that the border post at Nayuchi-Entre Lagos would not itself be defunct. I was over-optimistic, to say the very least.

You could call the “road” from the town of Nsanama to the border a mere goat track – except that no self-respecting goat would dare be seen on it. The “reward” for entering Mozambique after a choking horror trip atop a clapped-out pickup truck was a sight of what could well be the last remaining billboard proclaiming “The Peoples’ Republic of Mozambique”, a short-lived political entity that burst onto the world scene with super-Marxist zeal back in 1975.

But my stay in the country lasted just ten minutes. “You can’t go further without a visa”, says the Mozambican border official, “and we don’t issue visas here! You’ll have to go back into Malawi, and then cross over into Mozambique again at Mandimba, 150 km north of here”.

The next day, wiser but no less peeved, I cross from the Malawian border town of Chiponde to Mandimba, in Mozambique. From the Mandimba village market, a surprisingly good road leads to the provincial town of Cuamba; a rusting military tank along the way is the only sign of the civil war. For now, village development is top of the agenda.

Cuamba is a gracious town of wide, dusty but tree-lined streets and grand colonial buildings, laid out in the evident hope that one day a city will rise here. The Portuguese have blessed the region not just with town planning but also with their excellent cuisine. Indeed, you would be hard-put to find a bad meal in the whole of Mozambique, where even the most meagre feed is accompanied by fresh hot bread rolls and thick, chunky, home-made piri-piri sauce, so fiery that it nearly bores a hole through the roof of your mouth.



Cuamba is also the jumping-off point for one of Africa’s great train rides – the Cuamba to Nampula non-express. It seems that the main raison d’être of the train line is to allow trackside vendors and passengers to exchange their wares. Many merchants, their baskets filled with plastic bags, ride the train just to buy produce along the way and then sell it at a profit on the coast.

Surprisingly, the train gets underway dead on time, at 5 am. Driver Gili Fonseca has now been making this trip for over 29 years. In that time he has seen war, floods and famine. But now, people just want get on with their lives and build a new future.

The train rock ‘n rolls through a fantastic landscape of craggy mesas puncturing the sky, towering over parched bushland awaiting the rains. Hand-operated pumps in most villages now ensure a good supply of drinking water – a far cry from the days when cholera and other water-borne diseases were rife. Further along the track, trees in impossibly vivid shades of green offer shelter, while banana, papaya and mango trees, their branches sagging under a huge weight of fruit, grace the village compounds.

When we stop at Malema station, seemingly a million vendors descend on the train, selling potatoes, okra, chickens, garlic, capsicums and other produce. Malema itself is an anomaly: a working town with bakery, pub, bank and fine old Portuguese-style houses right in the middle of nowhere. At another station a vendor offers her specialty - delicious samosas cooked in the finest oil, for about five cents apiece. Many sellers leave happy, but many others go home empty-handed, with full produce-hampers and no money.

The train also offers just what is needed for such a long trip - a plentiful supply of good, cold MacMahon (sic) beer. Paolo, a doctor returning from his home town of Cuamba to his posting in the city of Nampula, is well-and-truly plastered before we’re halfway there. I’m just hoping that he won’t have to see any patients that particular evening.

Along the last 100 km, eucalyptus trees planted by the Portuguese bring on a sudden, unexpected attack of homesickness. But finally, after eleven long hours, we reach Nampula, Mozambique’s third-biggest city. With good shops and restaurants, Nampula is certainly worth a stopover. But ignoring the advice that a few town desperadoes are willing to steal anything immovable, I nearly come to traveller’s grief when one such character makes off with my belongings. Had he not dropped the bag when pursued, I might still now be begging on a Nampula street corner.

Nampula is also the jumping-off point for one of Mozambique’s finest attractions – Ilha de Moçambique, the original Portuguese capital and now with a UNESCO World Heritage listing, it’s a three-hour minibus trip back through 500 years of history. Ilha is the most atmospheric place imaginable, a living, breathing monument to the days when Portugal used the island as a staging post on the route to Goa in India. It’s great to wander the tree-lined lanes, visit the grand Governor’s Palace Museum, a tribute to the lavish lifestyles of the former colonial masters, or just revel in the exotic African-Arab-Portuguese cultural mix.

A prolonged stay on Ilha de Moçambique, an island joined to the mainland by a three-km long causeway, is highly recommended. There are two or three excellent boutique hotels and restaurants on the island. The one and only souvenir shop is located in a brand-new Moorish-style arcade, but there is little doubt that when Mozambique’s craft industries are revived, the textiles and carvings will attract worldwide acclaim. And when decent transport infrastructure is also in place, Ilha will become the hottest place on the international tourist circuit – until it overheats and travellers move yet elsewhere.

I take lodgings at Patio dos Quintalinhos, aka Casa do Gabriele after its innovative Italian designer. The place has the feel of a Mediterranean boutique hotel, and the service is tops. It seems that no request is too difficult. The only possible downside is its proximity to the Green Mosque – but the sound of a muezzin’s voice at 4 am is OK once you get used to it.

Islamic settlers have been on Ilha for over a thousand years. The first to arrive were Omani Arab traders, who came in the tenth Century (around the time they colonised Zanzibar). They intermarried with local Africans, who together with the colour-blind Portuguese make for an intriguing ethnic cocktail.

Sculptor Pekiwa spends a couple of months every year on Ilha de Moçambique, before returning to the Mozambican capital Maputo. “I feel more creative here,” he says. His sculptures made from sandalwood and old railway sleepers now grace the grounds of O Escondhido, the finest hotel/bar/restaurant on the island.

Sadly, I too have to leave Ilha de Moçambique and fly from Nampula to the Mozambican capital, Maputo. But Maputo certainly has its own charms. Named after a Ronga tribal chief, the city wears its myriad historical layers like brilliant but sometimes fast-peeling coats of paint. Successive waves of Bantu, Austrian, British, Portuguese, Frelimo Marxist and now South African investor settlers have all left their marks – and the result is a uniquely exhilarating cultural mix. The most throbbing area of town is the Baixa, where old Portuguese houses and revolutionary-era buildings held together by little more than crumbling mortar are juxtaposed against modern high-rise condos.

The Baixa, and Maputo in general, also has one hugely saving grace – trees! They hang and bloom over everything from clapped-out tenements to the colonial-period city market. They shade the wide boulevards. Their fronds sway gracefully in the breeze along the seashore. They invite the visitor to come back again and again.

And given Mozambique’s unique and evolving charms, such a call is hard to resist.