“I understand ecology as a way of getting closer to essential questions about the nature of our relationship with the land,” Couto tells me in his office in the low white colonial building where his company is located. “These are the same reasons that make me write.” He notes that Mozambique’s African languages, one of which he spoke well during his upbringing in the central part of the country, do not distinguish between nature and culture. When Couto speaks of the land, he means both the planet we live on — he played an important role in developing Mozambique’s Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park — and the nation. His fiction is haunted by the paradox that Mozambique, having shed colonial status only in 1975, has begun to define its nationhood just as globalization is dissolving the concept of the nation-state.
In Sleepwalking Land, the narrator is told that “nothing of your land belongs to you, and even the sky and the seas will be the property of outsiders.” The Last Flight of the Flamingo, a witty postmodern novel about UN soldiers who spontaneously combust, leaving behind only their blue peacekeeper helmets and their penises, fulfills this prophecy by portraying the international organizations that flooded into the country in the early 1990s as the new colonialists. The insight is pushed to an almost unimaginable extreme in the novel’s final scene, where Mozambique disappears, leaving the surviving characters staring over the edge of a precipice.
Of the eight countries that have Portuguese as their official language, six are clustered around the central Atlantic Ocean. A steady commerce of popular music, television soap operas, novels, athletes, and politicians gives Portugal, Brazil, Angola, the Cape Verde islands, Guinea-Bissau, and the tiny two-island republic of São Tomé and Principe shared cultural references. The two remaining members of the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Nations (cplp in its Portuguese acronym), which was founded in 1996 and resembles the Commonwealth and La Francophonie, are Mozambique and East Timor, next door to Indonesia. Distant from the Atlantic home of the Portuguese language, and with their economies dominated by powerful English-speaking neighbours (Mozambique’s by South Africa, East Timor’s by Australia), both countries have been predicted to switch to English. But while the jury is still out on East Timor, which only gained independence in 2002, in Mozambique Samora Machel’s dream of a republic unified by the Portuguese language may come true.
Steady urbanization has lifted the proportion of Mozambicans who speak Portuguese to an estimated high of 45 percent of the country’s 21 million people. Even the haughty South Africans, resigning themselves to sharing southern Africa with two Portuguese-speaking nations (Mozambique and oil-rich Angola), have introduced Portuguese as a subject in their school system. Furthermore, the consolidation of Mozambique’s linguistic and political identity has attracted many foreigners, and three consecutive respectably democratic elections since 1992 have brought ngo workers flooding into the country. The children of Portuguese colonialists who fled in 1975 are returning from Johannesburg and Lisbon to work in Maputo businesses, and foreign writers have also been drawn to Mozambique. The Swedish detective novelist Henning Mankell lives for part of the year in Maputo, where he manages the Teatro Avenida, one of Africa’s most dynamic theatres. More recently, the British novelist Lisa St. Aubin de Terán has moved to rural northern Mozambique, to run a development project.
To reach St. Aubin de Terán’s tourism and agriculture school for rural youth, I rode in a packed pickup truck from Mozambique Island, the fortified outpost off the country’s north coast that served as the colonial capital until 1898. The island is connected to the mainland by a single-lane causeway a kilometre and a half long. At low tide, the mud flats glimmer, and the dozens of women and children scavenging for clams and crabs far out from the shoreline look as though they are walking on water. I got down from the truck at a side road on the mainland, and walked through a village to a beach to wait for a dhow to cross the straits that divide the headland from the coast of the region where St. Aubin de Terán lives. The dhow moored in shallow water. As I seized the gunwales and pivoted myself on board, I saw that the Mozambican passengers, unable to pull themselves up, were being dragged on board by the crew. I became conscious of the poor nourishment of many of the people around me.
The dhow’s triangular sail unfurled, carrying us across the straits. On the other side, the crew dropped us off in waistdeep water, and we waded ashore for some 300 metres. A gaunt young man wading beside me offered to guide me to the village of Mossuril. After we had walked for ten minutes, he demurred, his energy fading. In an almost inaudible whisper, he said, “I have malaria.” He soon stumbled into a relative’s hut next to the dirt path. I kept walking.
In Mossuril, a young man offered to guide me to “Mrs. Lisa’s school.” We hiked four kilometres inland on dirt paths that passed mud-and-wattle huts, cramped subsistence plots growing potatoes, goats tied to trees, and head-high anthills with crooked, handle-like tops. As I passed, infant children murmured good morning in Portuguese, and giggling little girls burst out of huts and shouted, “Whitey! Whitey!” The dun-coloured walls of the numerous abandoned Portuguese colonial houses haunted the forest. Cool winter rain soaked my shirt as we approached the school.
St. Aubin de Terán, a tall woman, came out to greet me wearing a baggy sweater from which protruded the head of a baby baboon she had adopted. The author of seventeen books of fiction and travel memoirs, St. Aubin de Terán, fifty-five, lived for many years in Venezuela and later in Italy. Her travels in Africa began with a dream of setting up libraries. Her latest book, Mozambique Mysteries, describes her relationship with the district where she now lives. Claiming some African ancestry through her Guyanese father, she came to Mozambique for personal reasons, “after having had a number of unsuitable husbands.”
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