Thursday, May 13, 2004
THE SEA
It can be such a miraculous number of colors! There are lots of shades of blue: light light blue, just like the sky, so that the horizon is invisible; darker, shiny blue; lush turquoise blue with a twist of green; dark deep blue. Then sometimes it's not blue at all. Around sunset it is especially changeful, now pink, now purple, now green. Foam is white, and the underside of waves is brown; the flashing reflection of the sun is too bright to be classified by color, it's gold and white and silver and yellow but mostly just blinding; and the when the moon dances upon the water... aahhh... Later at night, the sea is black.
I'm still not doing justice to the variety. For it can be several colors at once. For example, it may be pink and blue at the same time; maybe pink and blue in different places, but it might also manage to be pink and blue at the same place. Impossible, you say? It would seem so, but light is more devious and dexterous than you think, and only a huge, glassy, chameleon creature like the sea can make you realize it.
I watched a wave, or waves, at a spot on the beach. I am confused between singular and plural because, on the sea, there are many waves, moving forward one after another, but at the edge of the water, there is just one, which surges, then dissipates in the sand and slides back, then pushes upwards again. Well, this wave was constantly switching between blue and brown! When it was moving in, I saw its underside, catching the sun and churning with sand, and it was brown. But then as it sunk, it all turned to sky blue, the retreating waters and the wet sand together. Every few seconds, brown, blue, brown, blue.
God is the greatest artist. A few days by the sea in Mozambique were a precious reminder of that.
Keep reading, I've got some stories left: I'll tell more about the robbery, and about the charm of Mozambique's Marxist street names, and even some very old stories from Malawi, including a bitter old colonialist I met in Liwonde...
It can be such a miraculous number of colors! There are lots of shades of blue: light light blue, just like the sky, so that the horizon is invisible; darker, shiny blue; lush turquoise blue with a twist of green; dark deep blue. Then sometimes it's not blue at all. Around sunset it is especially changeful, now pink, now purple, now green. Foam is white, and the underside of waves is brown; the flashing reflection of the sun is too bright to be classified by color, it's gold and white and silver and yellow but mostly just blinding; and the when the moon dances upon the water... aahhh... Later at night, the sea is black.
I'm still not doing justice to the variety. For it can be several colors at once. For example, it may be pink and blue at the same time; maybe pink and blue in different places, but it might also manage to be pink and blue at the same place. Impossible, you say? It would seem so, but light is more devious and dexterous than you think, and only a huge, glassy, chameleon creature like the sea can make you realize it.
I watched a wave, or waves, at a spot on the beach. I am confused between singular and plural because, on the sea, there are many waves, moving forward one after another, but at the edge of the water, there is just one, which surges, then dissipates in the sand and slides back, then pushes upwards again. Well, this wave was constantly switching between blue and brown! When it was moving in, I saw its underside, catching the sun and churning with sand, and it was brown. But then as it sunk, it all turned to sky blue, the retreating waters and the wet sand together. Every few seconds, brown, blue, brown, blue.
God is the greatest artist. A few days by the sea in Mozambique were a precious reminder of that.
Keep reading, I've got some stories left: I'll tell more about the robbery, and about the charm of Mozambique's Marxist street names, and even some very old stories from Malawi, including a bitter old colonialist I met in Liwonde...
BACK IN THE USA
I had a rough trip back to the US: we got robbed our last night in Mozambique, and then the airline lost my suitcases on the way home! I cancelled the day in Kenya I was planning to spend: without money, and shaken up by the robbery, it seemed less appealing. I have a few stories left to tell though, so keep reading. Meanwhile, I'm starting up my old blog again, which has quite a different tone.
I had a rough trip back to the US: we got robbed our last night in Mozambique, and then the airline lost my suitcases on the way home! I cancelled the day in Kenya I was planning to spend: without money, and shaken up by the robbery, it seemed less appealing. I have a few stories left to tell though, so keep reading. Meanwhile, I'm starting up my old blog again, which has quite a different tone.
Thursday, May 06, 2004
MOZAMBIQUE
Not everything went well with our litle one-week vacation in Mozambique. We were surprised by the high prices, higher than in some much richer countries and often much higher than the Lonely Planet would have us believe. Beaches are the main attraction of southern Mozambique, and we got to one on our second day, the "Costa do Sol" (Sun Coast) on the outskirts of Maputo, bu, thinking the out-of-town beaches might be better (more pristine, and on the open ocean rather than the bay) we rented a car and headed north to Bilene, based on a vague recommendation from someone in the airport in Jo'burg. Stupidly failing to check the book (this time it's not the Lonely Planet's fault) I thought it would be a short, hour or hour and a half, drive, but it was 140 km and took all day Saturday; on Sunday, after spending most of the day on the beach, the drive home took us well into the night. In Malawi, driving at night is dangerous because the roadsides are full of pedestrians and bikers which are hard to see. Mozambique is more developed and less crowded, so there are fewer people on the road but more cars, some of which are absurdly slow trucks, going at 30km/hour while long and miserable backlogs of cars pile up behind them, constantly sliding a bit into the right line and hoping for an absence of headlights so that they can pass en masse.
Bilene does have a nice beach, and a walk along it at night was a very haunting experience, because there was a huge moon overhead, but also because the waters of the lagoon were so still and clear that you could see right to the bottom, and watch the way the ripples refracted the moonlight, concentrating it in moving lines and webs on the sand. Touch the water with your foot and the moon-webs would come into motion, rippling outwards in glistening circles... In the day, we would have liked to swim a bit more, and as for soaking up the sun, we stupidly didn't bother with sunscreen, and it took me about three days to recover from the sunburns. That night, as our little car splashed our way into rain-drenched Maputo to look for a hotel, I was really suffering. And the first few places we tried were full. Finally we found a guesthouse, beautiful place, great deep brown wooden floors, sculptures and jungle vegetation around the swimming pool, huge plush furniture, jade-colored tiles in the bathroom, high ceilings, spacious, elegant... Despite the $85/night bill we decided to stay two days. But we got a bit of disappointing travel advice from one of the guys there. The Maputo Elephant Reserve, and Punto d'Ouro, a beach with dolphin tours, were only reachable by 4-wheel drive. My pocketbook was reeling by this time, so for the last three days we found a little backpacker place along the Costa do Sol, and returned the car, to rely on the minibuses to get in and out of the city. Finally, a good deal: it was clean, friendly, very close to the beach, with a wonderful balcony, on the top floor, looking out on a palm tree with HUGE leaves, about 20 feet long. My fiancee had to work on her final on paper (she's supposed to be in school right now) so the last three nights are turning out to be quite pleasant, laid-back, and cheap. My sunburns are subsiding. Yesterday we bought a huge supply of foodstuffs at the market, including two crabs and a kilo and a half of prawns, and cooked them at home. Mm-mm! (Even if seafood is very labor-intensive to eat.)
Even if we weren't the shrewdest or most fortunate of Mozambican tourists, impressions of the country have been interesting.
LANGUAGE AND DEVELOPMENT
The biggest question that interested me in my first few days here is this: Why is it that Portuguese has become the native language of many Mozambicans, while no Malawians seem to have become native in English? I first learned about native-Portuguese-speaking African Mozambicans when I met the wife of our transporter friend in Blantyre. Here in Maputo it's quite noticeable. The conversations you overhear in the street seem to be in Portuguese. People can understand my Spanish decently well. On the streets, you see Portuguese everywhere, which doesn't prove much per se-- in Malawi English was everywhere-- and yet it's more abundant and colloquial here.
I have several theories about this. The one my fiancee believes is that there are just too many different "tribes" here, so they needed to learn Portuguese in order to communicate with each other; in Malawi, Chichewa was widely enough spoken that it wasn't so necessary to adopt a European language. But that doesn't quite seem to explain it. Just because Mozambique "needed" Portuguese as a national language, doesn't explain why, in practice, people would adopt it. In Malawi, I didn't quite understand why they used English as much as they did, since Chichewa seemed fairly universally understood. English is an international language, useful for trade, of course, but that hardly explains why streetsigns, advertisements, school textbooks, newspapers were exclusively in English when most of the population has a pretty feeble command of English and even the best-educated seem to like switching into Chichewa to explain things that are unclear. Malawians seem to have an inferiority complex about their language, anway: they call it a "vernacular," and I remember the man in the hut in the village who insisted, rather than answering my Chichewa in Chichewa, on answering in English, saying with stiff pride, "I an educated man. Can speak English."
The role of English puzzled me greatly, in fact. It always seemed to me they should just use Chichewa as a national language, even if it was so obscure and lacked international recognition-- like the Czechs and the Finns, for example, who going happily speaking and writing and publishing newspapers and conducting government business in their language, even if to all but a few million speakers their language seems extremely obscure. And in thinking about why they didn't, I started to think of all the things a full, upstandnig, self-respecting language needs. Speech and grammar and speakers are not enough: you also need a literature, including translations but preferably some masterpieces in the language itself. You need good writers to develop good style, to develop an advanced vocabulary. You need libraries, and preferably internet resources... Maybe Chichewa just didn't have the literary sinews it takes to be a national language, and that was why so much of Malawi's national life was conducted in English, even if it was the language of the colonialists which few Malawians really knew well.
So anyway, all this makes me quite impressed with the native fluency of so many Mozambicans in Portuguese. And it makes me wonder: is that part of the reason why Mozambique is so much more successful than Malawi? Mozambique has enjoyed very fast growth in recent years. A big reason is that they're so close to South Africa, of course. The sea helps, too, and the Mozambican government is probably a lot smarter than the Malawian. But does their command of a European language change the culture somehow. This has the feel of a Latin country. The women dress to be more beautiful here, they wear their hair long, and public display of affection is more acceptable. The architecture is Mediterranean, and I often imagine I'm in Latin America or Portugal or even Italy.
So, back to the question I started with: why do Mozambicans speak Portuguese so well? Maybe it's because the Portuguese were here longer: the British arrived in Malawi only in the late 19th century, whereas the Portuguese were in Mozambique centuries earlier. But they left the place almost untouched, staying mostly on the coasts, until the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century. Mozambicans have much more reason to resent the Portuguese than Malawians the British. Whatever the British may have done elsewhere, in Malawi they came as missionaries and humanitarians, stopped the slave trade, and governed with relative wisdom and moderation (though a certain dose of racism mars the picture, of course) and left willingly enough in the end. The Portuguese were slavers, conquerors, made no investment in the African population when they finally moved in, and fought to the bitter end before suddenly abandoning the country to a horrific civil war.
Which all leads me to a disturbing thought: did the Portuguese cause Mozambicans to learn the Portuguese language, and with it absorb Portuguese/European culture a bit more, thus enabling them to be more prosperous now, while the British actually did the Malawians a disservice with their humanitarianism and moderation which allowed the Malawians to stagnate? Or was the civil war, perhaps, useful, tearing the country out of its traditional ways and energizing it to embrace the modern world? Hmm... well, probably Mozambique's success can be explained in less politically correct ways, so there's no need to run the risk of resorting to such heretical thoughts. But being here, and comparing it to Malawi, it's hard to silence the idea.
Not everything went well with our litle one-week vacation in Mozambique. We were surprised by the high prices, higher than in some much richer countries and often much higher than the Lonely Planet would have us believe. Beaches are the main attraction of southern Mozambique, and we got to one on our second day, the "Costa do Sol" (Sun Coast) on the outskirts of Maputo, bu, thinking the out-of-town beaches might be better (more pristine, and on the open ocean rather than the bay) we rented a car and headed north to Bilene, based on a vague recommendation from someone in the airport in Jo'burg. Stupidly failing to check the book (this time it's not the Lonely Planet's fault) I thought it would be a short, hour or hour and a half, drive, but it was 140 km and took all day Saturday; on Sunday, after spending most of the day on the beach, the drive home took us well into the night. In Malawi, driving at night is dangerous because the roadsides are full of pedestrians and bikers which are hard to see. Mozambique is more developed and less crowded, so there are fewer people on the road but more cars, some of which are absurdly slow trucks, going at 30km/hour while long and miserable backlogs of cars pile up behind them, constantly sliding a bit into the right line and hoping for an absence of headlights so that they can pass en masse.
Bilene does have a nice beach, and a walk along it at night was a very haunting experience, because there was a huge moon overhead, but also because the waters of the lagoon were so still and clear that you could see right to the bottom, and watch the way the ripples refracted the moonlight, concentrating it in moving lines and webs on the sand. Touch the water with your foot and the moon-webs would come into motion, rippling outwards in glistening circles... In the day, we would have liked to swim a bit more, and as for soaking up the sun, we stupidly didn't bother with sunscreen, and it took me about three days to recover from the sunburns. That night, as our little car splashed our way into rain-drenched Maputo to look for a hotel, I was really suffering. And the first few places we tried were full. Finally we found a guesthouse, beautiful place, great deep brown wooden floors, sculptures and jungle vegetation around the swimming pool, huge plush furniture, jade-colored tiles in the bathroom, high ceilings, spacious, elegant... Despite the $85/night bill we decided to stay two days. But we got a bit of disappointing travel advice from one of the guys there. The Maputo Elephant Reserve, and Punto d'Ouro, a beach with dolphin tours, were only reachable by 4-wheel drive. My pocketbook was reeling by this time, so for the last three days we found a little backpacker place along the Costa do Sol, and returned the car, to rely on the minibuses to get in and out of the city. Finally, a good deal: it was clean, friendly, very close to the beach, with a wonderful balcony, on the top floor, looking out on a palm tree with HUGE leaves, about 20 feet long. My fiancee had to work on her final on paper (she's supposed to be in school right now) so the last three nights are turning out to be quite pleasant, laid-back, and cheap. My sunburns are subsiding. Yesterday we bought a huge supply of foodstuffs at the market, including two crabs and a kilo and a half of prawns, and cooked them at home. Mm-mm! (Even if seafood is very labor-intensive to eat.)
Even if we weren't the shrewdest or most fortunate of Mozambican tourists, impressions of the country have been interesting.
LANGUAGE AND DEVELOPMENT
The biggest question that interested me in my first few days here is this: Why is it that Portuguese has become the native language of many Mozambicans, while no Malawians seem to have become native in English? I first learned about native-Portuguese-speaking African Mozambicans when I met the wife of our transporter friend in Blantyre. Here in Maputo it's quite noticeable. The conversations you overhear in the street seem to be in Portuguese. People can understand my Spanish decently well. On the streets, you see Portuguese everywhere, which doesn't prove much per se-- in Malawi English was everywhere-- and yet it's more abundant and colloquial here.
I have several theories about this. The one my fiancee believes is that there are just too many different "tribes" here, so they needed to learn Portuguese in order to communicate with each other; in Malawi, Chichewa was widely enough spoken that it wasn't so necessary to adopt a European language. But that doesn't quite seem to explain it. Just because Mozambique "needed" Portuguese as a national language, doesn't explain why, in practice, people would adopt it. In Malawi, I didn't quite understand why they used English as much as they did, since Chichewa seemed fairly universally understood. English is an international language, useful for trade, of course, but that hardly explains why streetsigns, advertisements, school textbooks, newspapers were exclusively in English when most of the population has a pretty feeble command of English and even the best-educated seem to like switching into Chichewa to explain things that are unclear. Malawians seem to have an inferiority complex about their language, anway: they call it a "vernacular," and I remember the man in the hut in the village who insisted, rather than answering my Chichewa in Chichewa, on answering in English, saying with stiff pride, "I an educated man. Can speak English."
The role of English puzzled me greatly, in fact. It always seemed to me they should just use Chichewa as a national language, even if it was so obscure and lacked international recognition-- like the Czechs and the Finns, for example, who going happily speaking and writing and publishing newspapers and conducting government business in their language, even if to all but a few million speakers their language seems extremely obscure. And in thinking about why they didn't, I started to think of all the things a full, upstandnig, self-respecting language needs. Speech and grammar and speakers are not enough: you also need a literature, including translations but preferably some masterpieces in the language itself. You need good writers to develop good style, to develop an advanced vocabulary. You need libraries, and preferably internet resources... Maybe Chichewa just didn't have the literary sinews it takes to be a national language, and that was why so much of Malawi's national life was conducted in English, even if it was the language of the colonialists which few Malawians really knew well.
So anyway, all this makes me quite impressed with the native fluency of so many Mozambicans in Portuguese. And it makes me wonder: is that part of the reason why Mozambique is so much more successful than Malawi? Mozambique has enjoyed very fast growth in recent years. A big reason is that they're so close to South Africa, of course. The sea helps, too, and the Mozambican government is probably a lot smarter than the Malawian. But does their command of a European language change the culture somehow. This has the feel of a Latin country. The women dress to be more beautiful here, they wear their hair long, and public display of affection is more acceptable. The architecture is Mediterranean, and I often imagine I'm in Latin America or Portugal or even Italy.
So, back to the question I started with: why do Mozambicans speak Portuguese so well? Maybe it's because the Portuguese were here longer: the British arrived in Malawi only in the late 19th century, whereas the Portuguese were in Mozambique centuries earlier. But they left the place almost untouched, staying mostly on the coasts, until the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century. Mozambicans have much more reason to resent the Portuguese than Malawians the British. Whatever the British may have done elsewhere, in Malawi they came as missionaries and humanitarians, stopped the slave trade, and governed with relative wisdom and moderation (though a certain dose of racism mars the picture, of course) and left willingly enough in the end. The Portuguese were slavers, conquerors, made no investment in the African population when they finally moved in, and fought to the bitter end before suddenly abandoning the country to a horrific civil war.
Which all leads me to a disturbing thought: did the Portuguese cause Mozambicans to learn the Portuguese language, and with it absorb Portuguese/European culture a bit more, thus enabling them to be more prosperous now, while the British actually did the Malawians a disservice with their humanitarianism and moderation which allowed the Malawians to stagnate? Or was the civil war, perhaps, useful, tearing the country out of its traditional ways and energizing it to embrace the modern world? Hmm... well, probably Mozambique's success can be explained in less politically correct ways, so there's no need to run the risk of resorting to such heretical thoughts. But being here, and comparing it to Malawi, it's hard to silence the idea.
