In Lourenço Marques, as the capital city of Mozambique was once called, the domestics were black; many of the clerks, bus drivers and mechanics were Portuguese; the British-Indians ran the small stores; and among the wealthy were a sizeable European elite. There was a British Club, where, just after Independence in 1975, armed soldiers interrupted a “shower” for a recently born baby and herded the women into a small anteroom overlooking the garden (one woman refused to leave her chocolate cake behind, in spite of the guns and bayonets). 

Everyone then had a long and tiring wait, while the “garden boy” searched furiously among the carefully tended plants for the treasure purportedly buried there. The Club, so Hetty (as I shall call her) told me over lunch at the Bistro, was later requisitioned by the new government, one Sunday just after church, during pre-lunch drinks. “In an afternoon, gone. Just like that.” Soon, most of the expatriates fled, exasperated by the new regime and its socialist aspirations, and Hetty’s family, like the others who stayed in Maputo, as it was renamed, were able to keep only two of their homes, one in the city and a beach house. Their grandest residence, on prime real estate overlooking the bay, was demolished to make way for the President’s palácio. Twenty-five years later, this “theft” as she describes it, still makes Hetty’s blood boil, and I can see her point of view; the trouble is that from my own, that of sister-in-law to a Mozambican, the government’s demands seem quite reasonable. They could, after all, have so easily taken everything.

Now, Mozambique is entering the new millennium as one of the world’s fastest growing economies, some 12 per cent annually, and Hetty, who left in 1983, has returned. As we ponder the past from our respective outlooks, we could be almost anywhere in the world. The Bistro, owned by two energetic South African women (“Now ladies, there’s your mango icecream, your chocolate mousse, your apple strudel”), faces a busy Avenida, shaded by tall acacia trees, and it is hard to imagine either Maputo’s colonial heyday – the immaculate streets, neat gardens, the bandstand in the park down by the port where Hetty’s mother-in-law listened to the local orchestra – or the kind of radicalism that once permeated it: the triumphant march of Frelimo’s freedom fighters, the Saturday 6 am mandatory clean-up activities, the long queues for rationed goods as the government desperately tried to impose some organization on the debacle left behind by the mass exodus of foreigners. The Portuguese, in particular, withdrew in the most unstately way possible, often wrecking whatever lay to hand.

In general, Mozambicans hold no grudges, but one friend of my sister’s refuses either to eat in Portuguese restaurants or drink their imported wine; an isolated and impotent tactic, perhaps, but one that affords him some small comfort. Like many other young people at the time of Independence, who went either to Cuba or to Russia, he studied social sciences for five freezing years in the Ukraine. Afterwards, he was sent to the backwater of Tete (a province renowned for its unbearable heat) to continue his duties as a soldier in the interminable war with the guerrilla movement Renamo, a war initiated and funded by South Africa in 1977 and supported by various right-wing movements in the United States, Germany and Britain.

There are few mementos of the Russian presence in Mozambique: an Avenida named after Karl Marx, another in honour of Lenin, some war murals modelled on the art of the Russian Revolution. When I first visited Mozambique in 1991, I flew from London via Moscow on Aeroflot, and the front half of the plane was entirely occupied by members of the Russian military returning to Maputo. By October of that year, with the breakup of the Soviet Union well under way, Aeroflot had cancelled all their flights in to the country and closed their office; the World Bank and IMF had entered the fray in 1987, and Mozambique was preparing for change. I have visited Maputo a number of times since those heady days when the international co-operantes (as the foreigners who flocked here in 1975 to help out were called). The aid workers and those Mozambicans old enough to have participated in the hopes of the new government pretended that socialism was alive and kicking, and there were all-night parties during which we shimmied to songs that seemed never to end. My sister then lived on the twenty-sixth floor of an apartment block called Trinta trés for its total of thirty-three floors. Often it was quicker to walk up the pitch-black stairwell than risk the single antiquated lift. We made sorties to the shabby but venerable Hotel Polana in the hope of a coffee with milk, and the Café Continental miraculously produced excellent pasteis de nata, the little custard tarts of Lisbon. Now, nearly ten years later, the Polana has been restored and is chock-a-block with teams of international disaster-management experts and consultants (the journalists and camera crews having already left). They have come, of course, to tackle the aftermath of the floods and their relief efforts will undoubtedly be hindered by the latest bout of heavy rain, which started in Maputo and appears to be swamping the northernmost province of Cabo Delgado.

It was while we were driving back from South Africa’s Kruger Park on February 6 that we first realized how serious the rains might be. The road in the satellite town of Matola swiftly disappeared under torrents of water the colour of stewed tea, and we were suddenly mired in a queue of cars waiting to cross a small lake. Young boys, exhilarated by the drama, seized their chance to make a little cash; they simply stood in the worst of the potholes and cheerfully guided us through. It was these outer suburbs of the city that suffered most; I visited one to take photographs for a local NGO, and saw that the road in to the city had caved in, forming a huge ravine, in which lay the mangled wreckage of electricity poles, cables, piping and a house or two. The soil was as red as paprika. Remarkably, everyone was calm, getting on with daily chores, and a woman balancing a large bucket of water on her head, slipped past as I negotiated with a gang of kids clamouring for “fotos”.

Safe in the cement city, as downtown Maputo is called, we have watched on television, in much the same way as any international audience, the devastation of the southern and central provinces of Gaza and Inhambane, where people were stuck for days in tree- or on roof-tops. Here, in contrast to the images of rural chaos – which will no doubt distort the West’s view of the entire country – life goes on much as before; yesterday, during a power cut (a not unusual event even in normal circumstances), a wedding was under way at the gleaming white, grandly titled Palácio de Casamento (aka registry office), the streets were full of satchel-toting schoolchildren, the cafés were crowded, the woman selling bundles of charcoal under a tree was chatting to the woman roasting corn cobs, and when, just after dark, the lights came on, a great cheer went up. The pavements may be cracked, the garbage collection erratic, the public transport a shambles, and the apartment blocks are undeniably the worse for wear, but the architecture is wonderfully varied, the city’s motley charm enhanced by Mozambique’s easygoing acceptance of racial difference (in stark contrast to neighbouring South Africa). Mulattos, or mistos, as Mozambican Portuguese would have it, are commonplace (and extraordinarily good-looking). All of which is not to deny the scale of a calamity in which an estimated 100,000 people have lost everything and many have died, but it would be a mistake to imagine that the entire country has been affected, for it stretches some 3,000 kilometres, from the north-east tip of South Africa to the Tanzanian border.

I attended a conference last week which focused on themes of urban and rural vulnerability. Participants included expatriate aid workers, Mozambicans, a couple of South Africans and representative each from Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe. The translators struggled (“It was a difficult time they were having because those people who were there had no one to inform what is was about all the time they were dealing”) and by late afternoon, after a heavy lunch, some of the conference delegates were fighting sleep. Between these ticklish setbacks, everyone agreed that community involvement in NGO programmes is paramount; as everyone knows, if people have an active and personal stake in the project to hand, there is a much better chance that it will be maintained without NGO assistance. This principle is largely ignored by foreign government donors, who operate on the basis that any charity is good charity and its recipients should be grateful. Clare Short, the British Minister for Foreign Aid, for example, has redirected funds away from English-language classes, surely one of the most obvious targets for British aid, to the already oversubscribed areas of water and health.

A marvellous and unexpected bonus of the disastrous floods has been the decision of many European countries to cancel Mozambique’s foreign debt. It is a benefit which allows the government to retain its autonomy in a way which other forms of aid do not. One health official I spoke to would like to remind the teams of international disaster-management “experts” that, unlike East Timor, Mozambique does have a stable government. But there are no easy answers to the question of how aid should be effectively distributed. Graça Machel has publicly criticized the international community for not responding sooner to the floods; on the other hand, when foreign aid did arrive it was tantamount to an invasion, and has provoked media controversy here about the government’s role in general. Do President Chissano and his ministers have a national strategy of any kind? asked one strident editorial in Savana, an independent weekly paper, whose publisher is Kok Nam, formerly of Tempo. The hard truth is that independent Mozambique, like so many other countries on the continent, has never been completely self-sufficient.

The issue of sovereignty has been trampled on my South Africa’s ruthless destabilization, the Eastern Bloc interventions and the triumph of the World Bank and the IMF, and is more subtly trodden on, nowadays, by the international agencies and NGOs, not to mention the multinationals such as Coco Cola, who recently publicized their benevolent intentions towards Mozambique by donating well over a million dollars. That this thorny issue should now be preoccupying many of the country’s intellectuals is one indication of the peace and relative prosperity of the past few years, during which a new Mozambican middle class has established itself. Yet there is also the danger that a newly dominant foreign elite will rise from the ashes of the last (some of whom are strenuously demanding the return of their abandoned property), unless the government asserts a firmer grip on privatization.

If President Chissano does not wield some of the clout gained from Mozambique’s happy position as the “darling” of the Western donors (so amply demonstrated by the mammoth financial input of the past month), Maputo may end up a mere doppelgänger of its earlier incarnation, Lourenço Marques, and Hetty’s suggestion that the streets revert to their colonial names may not seem so absurd after all.

First published in the Australian Book Review, January 2006.