The tourists come to
sunbathe, swim and snorkel midmorning, and, in the afternoon, dine and wine in
the splendour of a 'fantasy’ hotel while the 'natives' spend the whole day
eking a living out of fishing… and ferrying stranded visitors on their backs to
the often submerged jetties
The aircraft finally taxied to a stop. As usual, the
air hostesses formed a guard of honour and beamed artificial smiles as they
bade everybody goodbye. Some of the passengers were in no mood, though, to
return artificiality for artificiality. They hurriedly went down the gangway to
land on a long stretch of macadamised platform that looked like a disused
tarmac. In twos and threes, they plodded their weary legs to the terminal
building and meandered their way to the kiosk that passed as arrival hall where
stern-looking immigration officers and customs men and women were lying in
wait. Welcome to Maputo International Airport, Mozambique.
For the itinerant journalists among the passengers,
it was another opportunity to know more about Africa, their continent. One of
them was particularly ecstatic. He had longed to visit the country since he
missed a golden chance to do so in 1986 when he was a member of the media team
that accompanied the then foreign affairs minister, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi,
on a whirlwind tour of the frontline states. The itinerary had included visits
to Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and a stopover in
the then Congo (Brazaville) on their way back home. Somehow, they managed to
visit all the countries except Mozambique for what they later gathered to be
security reasons. The country was engaged in a civil war and flying on the
periphery of the South African airspace (then under the grip of the apartheid
warlords) to reach Maputo could compromise the safety of the entire entourage.
After failing to secure a safe passage to Mozambique, Lagos (then Nigeria’s
seat of power) ordered a detour. A few months later, the Mozambican president,
Samora Machel, was to die in a mysterious plane crash along the same route
while on his way back to Maputo from a neighbouring country.
Today, apartheid is officially dead in South Africa.
The civil war in Mozambique has ended. The Mozambican people are out of the
trenches, salivating their freedom on the major avenida (avenues) of Maputo and the lanes in the ghettos. Tourists
and mercantile opportunists are hovering around what remains of the poor
country after the Portuguese settlers had run away with the capital and skills
that could make the crippled nation stand upright again. While the
market-driven economy is still being propped up by donor nations, the country,
itself, is taking advantage of its tourism potential.
Mozambique, like some African countries on the
fringes of the Indian and Atlantic oceans, is blessed with natural, beautiful
beaches that spread over 2,515 kilometres on the Indian seaboard. The beaches,
coupled with an array of magnificent mountains and ‘fantasy islands’, constitute
a magnetic pull of sorts that draws tourists to the country with a force which
Isaac Newton, the discoverer of the Law of Gravitation, may even find difficult
to explain.
It is this unexplainable force that probably drew the
Nigerian journalists invited to witness the 2006 CNN/Multichoice African
Journalist of the Year Award ceremony in Maputo to undergo a sea trip to
Inhaca, one of the much-advertised ‘fantasy islands’. The promo was too
inviting to ignore: “(Tourists) depart from the Maputo Mariner or Catembe Jetty
(tide dependent) at 0800 hours. On arrival at the island, you can visit the
beach or swim and snorkel in the lagoon or enjoy a walk to the east side of the
island to see the pelicans and flamingos…”
They all jumped at the offer, oblivious of the
ominous warning that the “tour may be cut short due to weather conditions”.
Even if they were aware, there was no stopping this bunch of crazy,
adventurous, bubbling journalists. Would they have cared a hoot about the
unfolding re-enactment of the age of discovery which their journey to Inhaca
symbolised? The euphoria was too much and off they went to brave the waves to
seek a new world which is just a mere dot on the mighty Indian Ocean! They
wanted to see the legendary birds that feed on fishes and swallow snakes, the
coral reefs that look like pre-Cambrian sedimentary rock formation on the
beach, and the ever-changing coastline subject to the whims and caprices of the
tidal currents that sometimes kiss the shoreline in a dazing, even idyllic, romance
or, if in a foul mood, hold it in a ‘tsunamic’ death grip.
They saw hell!
Yes, hell they saw. Ocean waves hit their boat at
speedy intervals with a force strong enough to torpedo their dreams but, like
the early explorers who set sail to discover Africa and the new world, they
persevered and pursued their once-in-a-lifetime chance to sail out of Africa to
‘discover’ their own ‘new world’. They saw the massiveness of God’s creative
imagination in the ocean waters that spread endlessly to seemingly nowhere. The
more they looked, the more they saw. Water, water everywhere but none to drink.
These latter-day mariners were teased to no end. What a paradox! The salty
ocean waters could not quench their thirsty minds. That was even the least of
their worries. Marooned in the middle of ‘giant’ waves and predatory sharks
cruising somewhere in the deeps, they began to understand the full meaning of
life. It takes only the brave, the courageous and the daring to embark on kamikaze trips to conquer new heights.
The history books and the famous Guinness
Book of Records are full of examples of brave men and women who defied the
deeps, the heights and even the force of gravity to rediscover the essence of
man in the universe. Great explorers like Christopher Columbus, Amerigo
Vespucci, Vasco da Gama, Mungo Park, David Livingstone, John and Richard Lander
and a host of others once dared the consequences to expand the frontiers of
their immediate environment by plunging into unknown waters and territories.
They dared, like the modern-day scientists who have put men in space, on the
moon, and now in a floating station thousands of kilometres away in outer
space. The trend continues even on a personal level. For instance, a woman has
sailed round the world in a solo effort. Multimillionaire Richard Branson (of
Virgin Airlines) has attempted to fly round the world in a hot air balloon. It
is all in the quest “to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield” like
Ulysses, Alfred Tennyson’s poetic character. For the advancement of learning,
men of ideas will continue to experiment and raise the stakes for the rest of
mankind.
The journalists, many of whom are admirers of late
Tai Solarin, the renowned educationist and writer, took a cue from the old
master and model who once said that if man had to be looking and looking all
the time before leaping, many a man would remain transfixed while the rest of
mankind would have leapt and conquered new territories. They damned the
consequence by setting sail across the Indian Ocean in an open boat with rain
coats as lifejackets! And, like the old explorers, they endured the turbulence
of the waves to ‘discover’ an island where opulence and poverty compete for
attention. The tourists come to sunbathe, swim and snorkel midmorning, and, in
the afternoon, dine and wine in the splendour of a ‘fantasy’ hotel while the
‘natives’ spend the whole day eking a living out of fishing, selling coconuts
and ferrying stranded visitors on their backs to the often submerged jetties.
The story of Inhaca is like the story of Africa, of
which it is a part. For centuries, the continent remained unknown, unexplored
and unexploited by the outside world. Then came the age of 'discovery', Vasco
da Gama and company came calling and the continent’s destiny changed,
culminating in the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884/1885 and the partitioning
of the continent into British, French, German, Belgian, Spanish and Portuguese
colonies. Mozambique, as a Portuguese colony, was fully exploited and drained
to the dregs until 1975 when the ‘natives’, under the political aegis of
FRELIMO, finally secured their flag independence after waging a guerilla war
for 11 years.
But it is not easy to shake off 500 years of
political, economic and, even, mental colonisation. The Portuguese hold on
post-independence Mozambique is all-encompassing. Once listed as the world’s
poorest country in terms of per capita income, Mozambique is a country whose
economy is still being largely controlled by the Portuguese, the Arabs and,
lately, the Asians who own most of the big companies and control the support
services.
With the death of Marxism, the country has opened its
doors to foreign investors, a euphemism for capitalists, though the avenues (avenida), lined with red acacias and
lilac jacaranda, still bear telltale signs of the past experiment championed by
the late Samora Machel. Most of them are named after Marxist-Socialist leaders
like Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet state, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Ghana’s
Kwame Nkrumah, Guinea’s Ahmed Sekou Toure, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere (of the
Ujamaa socialism fame) and the father of the nation himself, Machel. The usual
Marxist slogan — “The Fatherland or Death” — is no longer etched on public
walls and billboards. What remain standing are the statues and mosaic murals of
the much adored Machel.
Today, reality has crept in through liberalisation of
the economy, thereby “opening sesame” for international wheelers and dealers.
And once again, the brave, daring but, of course, rapacious entrepreneurs who
had once fled to safety in Portugal and South Africa during the war of
liberation are back to “strive, seek and find” new opportunities in Mozambique.
For latter-day adventurers like these entrepreneurs and the never-say-die
journalists who braved the odds to seek new frontiers, Inhaca Island will
always remain a metaphor for courage.
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