Island of Mozambique – Mozambique
Travel with Patrícia Brito to a place that is unique in the world. An island whose magic can be found in the architecture of the buildings and the people who live in them.
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I cover Cidade da Ilha de Moçambique from north to south and back to front, as if I was collecting footsteps, absorbing every instant that shows me the minute details of everyday life on each corner.
This island made of time and mixed races has something beautiful and unrepeatable that springs from the bare and ruined walls and gets under our skin The colours of the Indian Ocean, a Portuguese and Muslim and black and Indian soul. Traditional capulanas and saris wandering about the ruins, children in uniform or barefooted in colonial streets, Portuguese voices and macuas burbling in conversation, the smells of complicated lives that arrive from the city of Makuti, poor and grey, below sea level. And the Indian Ocean. Turquoise and sapphire like an idyllic postcard, softly lapping the coast between Forte de São Sebastião, to the north, and Igreja de Santo António, to the south.
In the city of stone, the reconstruction of ruins, the rotten walls speak of Portuguese days that unfurled over 500 years, of illustrious visitors like Vasco da Gama and Luís de Camões, whose statues look east and west, one challenging the seas and the other making demands of the skies.
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I lean back against the old walls of the Forte de São Sebastião, a symbol of Portuguese colonisation, to hear the sounds that come from the incredibly blue sea, with the handmade boats far off and the fishermen with their trousers rolled up, looking for shellfish at low tide. On the way to Igreja de Santo António, on the southernmost tip of the island, there is a quarter where the fishermen and common people live, simple folk with their tables set, two chairs, and little more than the four walls of their houses; people who discuss prices and trifles in the weekly market outside the church.
I’ve fallen for the place. I travel on the caravelas of Vasco da Gama who, on his second trip to India, founded the Island of Mozambique, a cosmopolitan city that would become the capital of Portuguese East Africa until 1898. I get lost among kind and helpful people who ask to be photographed and smile; those who use dirty and threadbare Sporting and Benfica shirts; people who are proud to belong to this piece of land connected to the “mainland” by a 3.5 kilometre bridge, the gateway to a surprising time machine.
When I bid my farewell, I take with me the words of the Mozambican poet Rui Knopfli in A Ilha de Próspero glued to my soul: “In broad daylight / I see you drift off to sleep in the distance, / Island of Mozambique, / and I write you these verses / of salt and forgetting.”
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by Patrícia Brito
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