Part 63
Writing about my wife Hero in my last blog, sparked off memories of the times we visited Mozambique, where her parents lived. It was and is a very different place from anywhere in South Africa and is located on the northern border of South Africa’s KwaZulu Natal province on the East coast. Its climate, its vegetation, its language, its culture, and so on, provide an interesting contrast to the more British-oriented culture of South Africa.
Briefly then, its earliest inhabitants seemed to have been the Khoisan or bushmen, who eventually drifted south, no doubt driven by the Bantu people in the 1st to the 5th centuries, migrating from central Africa in search of new, less-populated lands. Many of the Bantu people continued south, forming the Zulu, Xhosa, and Sotho tribes plus smaller groups that now represent the majority of South African citizens of today.
The Bantu people who remained in Mozambique split into a number of tribes, the largest being the Makua who occupy the northern regions adjoining both Tanzania and the Republic of the Congo. To the south, the Tsonga people predominate and are closely related to the Shangaans. Both of these tribes can also be found in neighboring Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Anyway, after Hero and I were married in 1965, we would do a Christmas and New Year’s pilgrimage, firstly to Swaziland where my parents lived at that time. This little country borders on both South Africa to the south and Mozambique to the north. Crossing over into Mozambique, the country changes quite dramatically, from mostly subtropical to full-on tropical vegetation and increased heat and humidity.
In the 1960s, good roads in Mozambique were few and far between. North of the capital, then known as Lourenco Marques (now Maputo) even the main roads consisted of two concrete strips wide enough apart for most vehicles to put their left wheels on the one strip with their right wheels on the right strip. This led to some very interesting moments as oncoming cars or trucks had to move across to put only their right wheels on the one strip and their left wheels on a variety of different and usually rough surfaces.
The worst were the truck drivers who, because of their size, tended to play chicken with oncoming vehicles, remaining on the two strips until the very last moment, forcing many fainthearted drivers right off the road. I confess that when driving on alone on those roads, I quite enjoyed the game of chicken and remained on the strips until the last moment when opposing the truck drivers. It tended to freak them out. My philosophy was that the truckers were bullies and the remedy for a bully is to bully them right back!
Lourenco Marques in the 1960s was a marvellous place. Full of good restaurants and excellent local cervejas (beers). The Portuguese culture and language predominated. Local food consisted mostly of Chicken Piri Piri and, best of all, Mozambique prawns and rice in hot Piri Piri sauce. I’ve never tasted better prawns in my life.
Many families, including their children, ate out in the evenings, arriving usually anywhere between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m., leaving around midnight. It was a very social environment with the strains of Portuguese Fado music in the background. Of course, most people also had a siesta at midday, so they were well equipped to eat and party until late at night, when it was much cooler.
Hero’s parents had a large single-story house in the exclusive suburb of Polana, with avocados and mangoes growing prolifically in their garden. The Hotel Polana, a couple of blocks away, was at the time one of the great hotels of Africa. Hero’s parents and her brother Hector would traditionally spend New Year’s Eve at the Polana, where the ballroom was filled to capacity and the guests were treated to world-class entertainment by an Italian band called “Cinque di Roma.” Amazingly, in the block of apartments where we now live in East Grinstead, West Sussex, England, a former professional guitarist, Mel Buckley, actually played with the band for a time in Mozambique. What are the odds?
Although I loved the atmosphere of Mozambique, I found the heat and humidity to be terribly oppressive. Christmas time was, of course, the height of the African summer. However, we also went for lunch on occasions to a delightful family-run restaurant right on the beach in Katembe, a ferry ride away from the city on the far side of the bay. This was ideal in that lunch could take up to four hours, with endless plates of Piri Piri prawns washed down with the local beers, “Laurentina” or “2M.” Every half hour or so some of us would cross the beach just yards away and dive into the lukewarm waters of the bay. Eat, drink and swim, was a wonderful sybaritic ritual!
The only dramatic time Hero I experienced in Lourenco Marques was the year they had a tropical typhoon. It rained and rained and … rained! The roads to South Africa were closed. Bridges had been washed away. The city’s second-best hotel, the Cardoza, standing on a cliff overlooking the seafront a short distance away, was almost engulfed in a landslide as the cliff gave way.
Many streets were under water, with some foolhardy character driving through the water only to have their car disappear into a huge sinkhole in the middle of the street. We actually witnessed one funny moment when a young chap was proudly riding his bicycle when he suddenly disappeared into another hole in the road.
We were trapped in the city for ten days before conditions improved and we were able to return to South Africa. Ironically, during that time the city’s waterworks were under water! There was no fresh water available, but the consumption of beer and wine reached record levels.
Those glorious days did not last forever. Mozambique gained independence from Portugal in 1975. A growing number of communists in the country had formed a political party called FRELIMO which initiated a civil war in 1977 and gained control of the country. South Africans were banned, and the country was quickly plunged into extreme poverty. Many of the Portuguese families who had lived in Mozambique for generations fled to Portugal or to neighboring South Africa.
My father-in-law, Zacharias Falas, had virtually all his wealth confiscated, his bank accounts frozen and the money simply disappeared. Hero’s brother Hector was imprisoned for the “heinous” crime of refusing to leave one of the family factories to the workers. Many of the Portuguese shop owners simply closed their shops and left the country. Shortly afterwards, an enterprising African would open up a shop and, for a brief time, do a roaring trade – until the stocks ran out! They had no concept of how to obtain further goods except to actually pay for them. By then they had spent all their income on luxuries and often booze. Very sad.
After some years, the FRELIMO were defeated, and the country has slowly returned to a degree of normality; but the halcyon days of the sixties and seventies are unlikely to return. Hero’s parents are long gone and the once-thriving Greek community in what is now Maputo is a fraction of the size when my late father-in-law and others owned many of the largest businesses in the country, which included Zach’s yeast and many processed foods factories, the breweries, cigarettes, car dealers, etc.
The times we spent in Mozambique revealed a glimpse of a fading colonial lifestyle that was disappearing all over the continent of Africa. It is an inevitable and necessary step forward from colonial to self-rule. Tragically, it came at a terrible cost for the very people, the Africans, who were meant to benefit from independence. Many of them were plunged into a degree of poverty far worse than during colonial rule. Happily, some African countries have started to emerge from this painful transition into a more stable situation. Mozambique has not yet returned to its former glory, but it is moving in the right direction – and the prawns are still good!
As we prepare for radical change in IT with the advent of ExoBrain’s revolutionary new technology, our team is working hard for the change to be as painless as possible and profitable for all in the shortest possible time. Change inevitably brings confusion, but it is our intention to reduce it to a minimum before humankind will enjoy the relief of using computing systems in the way they should have been designed in the first place!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.