Africa’s Latin Quarter

At the invitation of local leaders, St. Aubin de Terán has converted one of the larger colonial houses into a school where villagers train to work in the hotels that will inevitably be built along the nearby coastline. Local people, whose cash income averages $5 per family per month, fear that unless they prepare for the future, jobs in the hotels will go to better-educated people from southern Mozambique. Needing capital to invest in the community, local leaders see hotel wages as the first step.

Our conversation turns to the omnipresent ngo workers, to Maputo and its expat restaurants that line streets bearing the names of Vladimir Lenin and Kim-Il Sung. Everywhere I travelled in Mozambique, 99 percent of whose population defines itself as black African, businesses were run by European consultants, white South African businessmen, wizened Portuguese bureaucrats, mixed-race Mozambicans with European surnames, Portuguese-speaking Indians, or immigrants from the Middle East. “I know colonialism has ended only because I’ve read my history books,” St. Aubin de Terán tells me.

The survival of the Louis Trichardt memorial can be interpreted either as evidence of multiracial tolerance or, more sombrely, as a sign of the covert persistence of colonial racial hierarchies. A few weeks before meeting St. Aubin de Terán, over lunch in Lisbon, one of Portuguese Africa’s leading intellectuals snarled at me: “Mozambique is a fraud! If it’s the perfect developing country, why is it so poor?” Mozambicans’ unfailing politeness camouflages the fact that their country ranks 172nd out of 177 nations on the UN Human Development Index. For many citizens, the paradoxes of belonging to a Portuguese-speaking culture on the Indian Ocean are overshadowed by the hardships of living in an African country with African problems.

On my last night in Maputo, I went to the Teatro Avenida to attend the Mozambican premiere of a play called Love Requiem for Widows. Most of the spectators were young people in their twenties. The play’s action, which revolved around the efforts of a mother to bring her son, a deceased dictator, back to life, yielded at intervals to bursts of music, dancing, and African drumming. The cast ran the racial spectrum from black to white. Actors from Mozambique and from Mayotte, a speck in the Indian Ocean that remains an overseas department of France, were collaborating to tour the play through Mozambique, with performances in the original French for students, and a Portuguese translation by Mia Couto for the general public.

The morning of the opening performance, I had the chance to speak with Alain-Kamal Martial, the play’s thirty-three-year-old author, at a café next door to the theatre. Martial tells me that Mayotte’s racial mix includes a large contribution from the Makua ethnic group, which inhabits the region of northern Mozambique where Lisa St. Aubin de Terán lives. Many Makua were deported to Mayotte as slaves in the nineteenth century. Reacting against an official culture that denied this history, Martial recreated it in one of his first plays, La rapture de la chair. “Our ties with Africa were cut in the nineteenth century. Francophilia erased our history. I’m not rejecting Europe,” says Martial,who is completing a doctorate at the Cergy-Pontoise University in Paris, “but Mozambique is the world that is closest to us, and language shouldn’t be a barrier.”

The Mayotte and Mozambican actors in Love Requiem for Widows have learned enough of one another’s languages to act in both versions of the play. “We’re performing in the French of Mayotte and the Portuguese of Mozambique,” Martial stresses. “They’re cut off from the other Portuguese-speaking countries, and we’re cut off from the French-speaking countries in West Africa. But it’s the cultural exchange that makes the linguistic exchange possible.”

His words make me hesitate. Surely language and culture are synonymous? But Mozambique’s African cultures, even when modified by ethnic mixing, provide bridges to surrounding countries, while the use of a national language spoken nowhere else in the region shores up a sense of shared distinctness among people who have many different ethnic and regional allegiances. It’s a tantalizing recipe for balancing the contradictory pressures exerted by multiculturalism and globalization, a clue as to why, despite its bleak poverty, Mozambique is so often idealized. Martial’s lucid gaze becomes misty. In his soft Indian Ocean French, he murmurs, “I dream of writing in Portuguese.”