Behind the “The Mosque of the Comorians” in the middle of Litine, is a house which is striking in its elaborate window sills and facade design. It conveys the curious feeling you have to get used to in Ilha, of a house displaying the shell of a dried out plaster cast with no inside and full of cracks, because the substances which should be giving it life, have vanished. Inside, however, a big family is living and trying to keep the walls together and a roof over their head, but the life which is being lived, is something completely different from what once created the house. Inside the old walls, a new house of cement blocks is also growing, replacing the old one as it slowly collapses.

The house which belongs to the Kanarere family, was built by a man named Alvaro Pereira de Lima who was a misto with a Portuguese father. He was an employee in the big store Mercantil near the park in front of the secondary school in Ilha, which used to sell everything and supply the garrison in the fort. Probably the house was constructed in 1942-43, a strong house constructed with imported cement floor. Molde Andigg, my local historian explains that Mercantil sold cement, so the employee would have access to good quality cement. The walls, however, are originally constructed in a solid pau a pique construction, with a vertical core of mangrove (laca laca) and lot of lime and coral stones.

2. The house of women

In 1964, Mariamo Kanarere bought the house, because by this time she had too many children to keep living in her father’s house in Bairro Macaripe. Today she claims her 12 daughters with their children and grandchildren, are all living in the house. The house now has 5 bedrooms and a room in the annex in the backyard. It is a house of women, who all live without the fathers of their children. This is quite common in Ilha. The women may continue having a relationship with the fathers of their children, but they also have other women in other houses where they stay more of the time. The houses traditionally belong to women, and especially men share their time between different houses and move often.

Mariamo first bought a house near the road when she wanted to be the head of her own household, but because she did not have an agreement with the neighbourhood secretary, someone else who wanted to pay more, came and bought the house as well. While she was crying about the lost house and waiting for her money back, an uncle who was in charge of Alvaro de LIma’a house came to her, and she decided to buy the house in Litine.

3. The phantom

There was, however a belief that the house in Litine was haunted because it was so big and beautiful. The house had a pump drawing water directly from the well into the bathroom inside the house and a false ceiling of fine wood where you did not see the beams of the roof. You can still see the nicely finished remains from the original roof construction jutting out through the facades. There might be a demon living in such a house, people believed, and would be reluctant to buy it. Mariamo Kanarere, however, went to Nacala, where Alvaro de Lima’s wife Alicia now lived in a big house, after his mother and sister in Ilha had died, and with her they went to the municipal council in Ilha and organized all the documentation for the house which still is hers until today. She paid 50 Escudos for the house at that time, she claims.

The first day Mariamo and her family of women moved into the house, they had refreshments, did the dishes after eating and left them to dry. When returning some hours later, the dishes had been moved, and nobody had seen anyone taking them outside. This type of phantom or demon, which magically move things, are quite common in Ilha. There are stories of bags of rice having moved magically from the market to someone’s house, from goods moved magically from the customs house to a man’s shop in the middle of the night, for example. People believe there being no doubt that it was caused by the demon, when nobody was seen moving the things. Since nobody saw the big fortress in Ilha being constructed, it was also believed until recently, that it was constructed one night by a demon. The people with demons often also seem to have cats around, according to stories I have heard so far. This demon continued in the Kanarere house for a whole week, without anyone being able to explain the washing-up phantom. In order to get rid of the demon, Mariamo had to call curandeiros, the local witch doctors, to break the spell. This helped, and until today there was no new phantom in the house.

4. The spirit of the house

Currently the spirit of the house is under threat by gravity and water infiltration, not by phantoms. Mariamo has replaced one wall at a time inside the house, as they have collapsed over time. The facades are generally still standing, but water is coming in on one side due to the bad state of the roof. A new roof of macuti with all the bamboo and everything needed, is beyond the means of the Kanarere family. They try to patch up the roof as much as possible with macarasse leaves when they can. The lady of the house would not like the house to lose its original structure. She is proud of the house and would like it to keep the facade with beautiful doors and windows towards the street, which is still noticed by passers-by, who complement her on her house.

1. The Ruin

One of the first houses you notice when you pass through the bairro of Areal in Ilha de Moçambique, whether you are walking by foot inside the bairro or driving on the street dividing Areal and Litine, is a quite remarkable ruin of an old house still partly covered by terracotta roof tiles, hovering above the rest of the corrugated iron or macuti roofs.

The house has 55 cm thick stone and lime construction walls, and through the two central living rooms, according to the classic plan type of the area, there is access to a veranda covering a large broken cistern and steps leading into a little garden courtyard with charming trees.

In later years, the backyard has been made smaller as the annex house at the back has grown to accommodate more people of the family of 20 which bought the house after independence. The ruin suggests another time, when life in Areal, which is among the neighbourhoods situated higher in the landscape, was fresh and with green trees, when the house had indoor toilet and bathroom facilities. Water came from a cistern collecting water from the tiled and well ventilated roof, and part of the house not yet become a heap of coral stone rubble, where now a temporary bathroom of rice sack sheets is installed.

The house was built in 1914, according to Molde Andigg, senior resident of the neighbouring bairro, and considered one of the people who best knows the history of Ilha. It was built by a Portugese called Florentino Lopez Nogueira who was a lawyer and secretary in the colonial adminitstration. When he was old, he moved to Marangonha and in the end lived in the town centre. He had a daughter who married an African, Molde explains. Now nobody from the family is left in Ilha.

2. Orchestra Bambi

In the 1940s and 50s, the house belonged to a Chinese merchant living on the mainland called Masaa. He had an African wife and their daughter moved to Macau. He rented the house to a man from Quelimane as a place to have parties. “It was the dance club where everybody went, people from all the bairros, from 9 o clock at night until til morning. Everyone were together in the club, including the white people, nobody had problems with that.” The stars of the club was the Orchestra Bambi. They had percussion, concertina, and were a lot of fun. Dancing wasn’t prohibited, but you had to dress well. There was no restaurant or real bar, just music, which was enough to make a party. People brought wine themselves. The Portuguese administration, however, didn’t like “brincadeira”, in this context meaning people not taking things seriously and carrying out all the necessary paperwork, and since the club wasn’t leaglized with the authorities, after 5 years the government closed it down. In 1951 the chief of police came and announced the end of the dance club.

As Molde is talking to me about the interesting ruin, his face lights up whne he remembers the music. “There was a gramophone there, and we played music from the radio or live music like the Orchestra Bambi. We had records from Brazil called JV1, JV2, with songs and rumba.” Rumba was the great hit, and Molde starts to sing a song

“Scandalosa – um dia uma velha là em Cuba dansava a rumba, dizeram qu’era scandalosa. Scandalosa – dansei, mas nenhum m’incomoda a rumba por ser maliciosa. Scandalosa – …………. a minha vida deliciosa……”

3. The cyclone

Muzé Ibraimo is now the owner of the house. He bought it in the 1980s, and had never dreamt that such a good house could collapse. He thought he had a place secured for his family for the rest of their time. Still during one cyclone, on the side of the house which is not supported by the cistern, the foundation was partly washed out, and two rooms in the house collapsed, leaving it open to the elements and the ceramic Marseilles roofing tiles falling down. Repair works needed to put the large walls and tile roof in order, is beyond the capabilities of his family. Muzé is from a family which used to be relatively wealthy in the bairro, but as employment oportunities have been reduced to almost none, it is difficult for him to take care of the large family.

In those times after the war when the house was a dance club, there were more than 100 shops in Ilha. Life was good. Then the port moved to Nacala, and slowly the businesses and the shops moved. Muzé used to have plenty of work at the port, which in the 1980s closed completely. He could bring home money every day, a situation which is long gone. Today he is waiting for his children to get an new oportunity in a different world and is the owner of a ruin which could be an intriguing frame for a small neighbourhood museum…. We could play rumba and the recording of Molde’s singing. The history of the swinging 50´s in Ilha would be an interesting addition to the folklore which currently shapes the image of the southern part of Ilha.

We have gone to visit coconut plantations in Sanculo and Cabaceira where the macuti roofing tiles are made. Bounamate Surviro lives with his seven wives on the plantation in Mussengere, Sanculo and sells the macuti in Ilha. To arrive at the plantation, we drive to the end of a winding road and park the car by one of the salt mines. We hitch up our trousers up and wade through a small delta where the water level reaches up to our thighs. We are following groups of ladies on their morning walk to the sea to collect mussels, crabs and other sea creatures and to visit the well at the coconut plantation.

Chali Asafe is one of four workers living on the plantation, all part of the extended family taking care of the plantation. He is busy making macuti tiles when we arrive. The tile makers produce ca 1000 tiles in a season, which is the time between the harvests of coconuts, normally 3-6 months. The tiles are sold in bundles of 5 which cost 20 meticais in Ilha – ca 75 US dollar cents. When the leaves turn red, they have matured enough to be used as waterproof roofing. They may be cut or fall naturally and are then left to dry in the sun for two weeks before immersion in water to be tied to a stick which is made out of the central spine of the leaf. A plant fibre from another type of palm, dried and immersed in water, is used to tie the tiles. From one coconut palm leaf you can make two roofing tiles if they are well made, Buonamate tells us.

Buonamate doesn’t know how many palm trees he has or how big the plantation is, but suggests it takes two hours to walk from one end to the other. Chali suggested three hours. The palms nearest to the workshop area are hybrids planted in the last 15-20 years. Many of the very tall natural variety, bred on site, are 80-90 years old and dying. In the three cyclones since 1994, 200-300 palm trees fell. The hybrids mature a couple of years faster than the natural variety, give fruit earlier and are today the preferred species. In the south and also some parts of Nampula, the yellowing disease killing palm trees have affected the old variety rather than the new hybrids. The quality with respect to the macuti is the same as the natural species, and in fact the young trees have a better oiliness and thus give the best macuti roof.

Bounamate Surviro’s land does not reach the beach and is thus not yet a tourism investment area. Before sending one of his workers to fetch coconut juice, jumping up the tree trunk with nothing to secure him, Bounamate tells us how he has one wife for each day of the week. Putua the driver and my research assistant Fefé have been very curious about this. All the seven wives have one day a week, the same day every week, when they expect him to eat and sleep in their house, the seven houses distributed along the edge of the plantation. If during that day, there is a lot of work at the plantation, the wife of the day will bring his lunch to Bounamate at his workshop. Struggling to improve the productivity of the plantation, there is a very well organized family life at the plantation at the end of the road past the river.

As mentioned briefly in the entry about the FRELIMO office in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania was host to the liberation movements from many of the neighbouring countries not yet independent in the 1960s. In fact, heritage sites of the liberation struggle of especially ANC from South Africa, have been documented in a project by the Tanzanian Division of Antiquities, part of which was published in 2010[1].

The former Organization of African Unity (OAU) led a Liberation Committe based in Dar-es-Salaam from 1963, with objective to coordinate, unify and provide aid to the liberation movements of the neighbouring countries. The Liberation Committee was closed in 1994 after South Africa finally held democratic elections.

The heritage identified and documented by the Department of Antiquities in a project from 2007 covering the Dodoma and Morogoro regions, include the ANC headquarters, training bases or freedom fighting camps, and educational facilities of different kinds. The Kongwa Liberation Movement Military Training Area in Dodoma region, was used by liberation movements from South Africa, Namibia, Mozambique, Angola and Zimbabwe and includes a residence for the first Mozambican president Samora Machel. At the moment the site is used as a community secondary school with 520 students. In the same district you can find the Samora Machel Trench, constructed in 1967 for military training. There is also a graveyard for freedom fighters from different countries and an airstrip.

Documentation of sites in other regions of Tanzania and development of legal protection for the heritage sites are among the next steps in the project which is part of a larger capacity building programme of heritage management in the Antiquities Division by the Government of Tanzania with Swedish assistance.

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[1] All information in this post from ‘Identification and Documentation of African Liberation Heritage Sites in Tanzania: Morogoro and Dodoma Regions’, Cultural Heritage Development and Communication Section, Division of Antiquities, Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism, Dar-es-Salaam, May 2010

I noticed the FRELIMO office driving from the airport. It is located in a main street leading through the city centre, where all the buildings are painted the characteristic pink of the National Housing Corporation. The ground floor covered in laquered dark wood panelling and wall to wall carpet, of the building constructed in the 1950s, now has an empty reception area and a lawyers office where I meet Paul Magese, who is an apprentice there and who shows me around. Two offices are locked, because they still belong to FRELIMO, contain their property and are being used when the party come to hold meetings in the old headquarters, Paul explains. Above are normal housing units – coveted by anyone who can get their hands on them in the terribly expensive rental market in Dar-es-Salaam, where NHC runs a parallel rental market at a fraction of the price, with all the privileges and problems this leads to.

Not far from the FRELIMO office, we turn in towards the historic city centre again, where Samora Avenue is one of the main streets, which before the destruction of the old shop houses by new skyscrapers, was a major shopping street. Already arriving with the taxi from the airport, I talk to the taxi driver about what a hero Samora Machel was, and how he remembers when he died and it was a special moment in Tanzania. “They were all here, the ANC, FRELIMO, the Zambians and the Zimbabweans”, he says proudly, emphasizing how the histories of the neighbouring countries are closely linked. At the already mentioned debate at the Goethe Institute I talk to Walter Bgoya, publisher, intellectual and expert moderator of the debate. He is friends with the politicians who were fighting for independence in Mozambique and flew to the independence ceremony in Maputo where he walked from the airport to the city centre among celebrating crowds; an unforgettable moment.

In the LAM inflight magazine the current issue is devoted almost exclusively to Mozambican writers remembering Samora and what he meant for them, in this 25th year since his death. The heritage of the father of the nation, greatly loved by the people, has received new monuments all over Mozambique this year. The next day is a national holiday to remember Mwalimu Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. The link to the discussion of building conservation is interesting. What is really important for local identity in the city?

During my stay in Ilha I am working with the Conservation Office improve heritage management in the 7 bairros making up the “macuti town”. There is currently quite a lot of confustion as to how to treat this part of the World Heritage site. In order to proceed with recommendations, I have bought a flip chart, pens in different colours and decided to conduct small workshops and public meetings in “the community” in order to understand different points of view with regards to the heritage value of the macuti houses. 

The ideas of “participatory planning” have been part of development practice since the 1990s, and today any self-respecting NGO seems to have manuals on participatory planning and community involvement. There are databases with hundreds of titles in several languages, referring to almost any kind of process which involves asking the people who are supposed to benefit from development projects what their priorities are, or even just conducting training sessions explaining the programmes to local communities. Using mapping as part of processes understanding environmental problems, land use issues and management of waterways and infrastructure services has become well established as good practice and a way to bring out knowledge of the physical environment shared by the communities. I intended to employ some very basic interactive techniques to add alternative views to an understanding of the architectural and urban heritage in the southern part of Ilha de Moçambique and to facilitate a discussion.

Meetings

I called meetings through the 7 bairro secretaries in order to discuss my ideas for urban management policies which could improve conservation of the built heritage of the macuti bairros. I was surprised when large numbers turned up, most of them having no idea what the meeting was about. This is generally the way public meetings are called. I put up laminated A3 size photographs of macuti houses as their streetscapes, which attracted a lot of attention. There was a general feeling that people were happy I came to their bairro to talk to them. Normally the leaders of the bairros are called to the other side of town and expected to communicate what happens at various workshops to their communities.

However, there was also the general expectation that I was coming to help them with some kind of development project, being involved with the government heritage management office and generally being a white foreigner assumed to come with pockets full of money. When I turned the discussion around to ask them what they could do to generate income to help maintain the crumbling family houses of macuti and pau a pique, there was a bit of confusion but also people who came up with ideas of being a tourist guide selling handicrafts or other ways small businesses could be made out of the heritage in the bairro. Poverty and lack of supply of the increasingly expensive macuti leaf, is making it difficult for people to maintain their houses and cover the roofs, irrespective of whether they are World Heritage or not.

Mapping

Based on the people showing interest at the meeting, often dominated by the women owning macuti houses but not havingt he means to keep them in good order, I called a mapping session with a smaller group to see how the macuti houses could fit in with the general idea of heritage in the bairro, which had been discussed at the public meeting.Some bairros had a very clear idea of what the heritage of their bairrro was. Marangonha has an old well which existed before all the macuti bairros were constructed and in which the legend says a white man put a crocoldile, and the map in the bairro reflected the square around the well. Then was added rows of houses closest to where we were sitting when doing the exercise and ending in the corner market called “the night market”, which is important for the bairro and has a history going back to at lest the 1920s.

Other bairros started drawing all the houses which belonged to someone “important” in the bairro, more or less all their friends and neighbours who had been living in the bairro for a long time. In Litine the old madrassas were drawn, where a sheikh from Yemen, from the Comores or from the old families on the mainland had established schools and taught. The houses of artesans and dances were identified. Generally shops were indicated, and a lot of importance was given to the stories of the staircases giving access to the low lying neighbourhoods from the streets running higher up. At points in the process I intervened in the discussion in the local language I still don’t understand, to ask whether things they drew were “heritage”, and at points this was forgotten in the process of mentioning what was really important to them when identifying sites in the bairro. The old football club could maybe also be heritage? Which attributes of urban history and urban identity carry the heritage values??

The drawings will be drawn digitally and made into maps the communities can use, possibly as part of a form of tourist information. Some of them will be presented in a forum at the cultural festival coming up at the end of October. As part of my research they open up a window for me to see how the urban identity and history of the bairro could be represented by the group present and initiating the discussion of what urban heritage may be in this part of Ilha. There are other initiatives going on based on immaterial heritage conservation and training of people to conduct cultural tourism tours. Linking these to the urban heritage could be partly achieved through the maps. The process could continue to include writing of histories linking school children with the older members of the community, for example, linked to the museum, if there was capacity to run such a project. As was said by the Brazilian consultant in creative industries who came by last week, “culture is not a scarce resource”. Heritage may be a scarce research, though, and is still generally seen as such.

Leaving Ilha by boat for Cabaceira Grande at high tide means you can sail all the way through the tops of the mangrove trees and up to the landing place just behind the church Nosso Senhora dos Remédios. Cabaceira Grande is just opposite Ilha on the mainland, one of the areas the Swahili population of Ilha moved to when the Portuguese occupied the island in the 16th century. The church is one of the oldest in Mozambique. It dates from the 1570s, with beautiful Goan decorations on the front porch added a couple of centuries later and after having been destroyed by warring zimbas, been rebuilt and given to and later taken from, the Jesuits expelled in the the 18th century. It has the most elaborately carved Indian flower pattern door I have seen in the district of Ilha de Moçambique. The church was renovated around 1900 and appears white and bright in postcards from the beginning of the 20th century. The last restoration works to the church were done in 1969, along with the extensive conservation improvements done to the whole of Ilha at the time, in order to make it into a “historic city” and prepare it for tourism.

The church is deserted apart from the caretaker coming out of a modern school building next door. The church is in use. There appears to be a congregation of eight souls in Cabacaira Grande. Behind this building starts a large coconut plantation belonging to one of the guesthouse owners in Ilha. Only the sound of a hundred coconut palms is heard, until you notice life in some of the small houses nearby and a child starts screaming violently. A short walk away, under swaying coconut palms, you see the substantial two story abandoned governor’s summer palace. The palace is mainly a construction from the 18th century, although there is a plaque on it saying it dates from the 16th century and there is a veranda of reinforced concrete with iron rods hanging loose. Someone has planted great quantities of tomatoes which are almost ready to eat, in the cleared garden behind the building.

A neoclassical educational institution from the late 19th or early 20th century, lies a bit further along the road. This building is also empty. However, under the palm trees between the large abandoned buildings, people have built small houses, and slowly we realise there is a bit of traffic on the road passing towards Mussoril. Another dhow lies next to ours in the landing place behind the church.

We enter the boat again, and captain Assumane skillfully manouvers the heavy sail made from canvas cloth in different shades of grey and beige sewn together, to move against the wind as we pass through the mangrove one more time. This time the desitnation is a bit further north, near the wide white perfect sand beach facing the open sea, which we reach by walking across a piece of land which is very narrow now that the tide is at its highest. The sun is just about to set. A running engine of a pick-up truck spoils the quietness reminding us of people collecting mangrove poles for the inteste construction works going on nearby, where the beaches are being developed for tourism. We choose to ignore this for now and enjoy a little quiet holiday out of time and place a short boat trip away from Ilha.

End of postcard. Back to work.

If you go to the national tourism fair taking place next week in Marraquene outside Maputo, you may find my colleague Alfa from GACIM (Gabinete de Conservação da Ilha de Moçambique) with a stack of the A4 two side printed and two times folded brochures presented here. Inspired by material from sister conservation centre in  Rauma in Finland, we have decided to start producing very simple black and white brochures with drawings and text about various issues related to conservation on Ilha de Moçambique. We can print and distribute them ourselves here from the office. The brochures to come may be on single houses and monuments, urban development and on building techniques and maintenance.  The brochures will have the same format, font and backside with the map of the island from the 1982 Aarhus report and the 1991 listing documentation, becoming a form of logo. This is the first brochure. Do you like it?

Living in “mud huts” was by Karume seen as an impossible condition for people to be free. This sentiment is still echoed all over Africa today, from the magnificent adobe constructions of Djenne to the Macuti Town of Ilha de Moçambique. Thus Karume called his socialist brothers in the DDR to help him plan a modern city for modern, free people in Zanzibar. This resulted in a town plan of 1968 requiring demolition of the “mud huts” and the building of apartment blocks in the plattenbau technique of the German Democratic Republic. The engineers, the deisgn, the materials, all came shipped from the GDR, and the first phase of the plan was carried out with six storey apartment blocks skirting straight new roads in the areas nearest to the commercial centre. Only a small part of the ambitious planning scheme has been built, however, forming a cross on the urban plan, around which the urban fabric remains according to the logic by which it was first laid out by the freed slaves and the working classes of the 19th century.

The GDR apartment blocks were at first difficult to fill with inhabitants, since the style of living was so alien to the daily life and neighbourhood concepts of the Zanzibaris. Living a modern life with modern appliances and thus creating modern people, was a central aim for the project, and when President Karume heard comrades were cooking with coal on the verandahs and not using modern electrical equipment, he is said to go patrolling the area to check whether fires lit up in the apartment blocks at the time of meal preparation.

The fact that people in the Ng’ambo before the socialist revolution, were living in homes constructed partly with earth and other organic material, did not necessarily meen that they were living in poor conditions. Garth Myers[1] has shown how 80% of housing in the areas demolished were in fairly good condition. Often the houses were constructed with a significant amount of stone and lime, possibly with a limed floor and corrugated iron sheet roofs. Some of the large, solidly plastered houses in the area could only with very great difficulty be classified as mud huts, even if they might have been started with a pole and mud construction and then modified and improved over time, as is common practice in the region.

A wall in Ilha has to be dismantled in order to remove the tree which lives in it. This made me think of what Professor Carrilho wrote about the moment in time when the historic city centre was abandoned, before rehabilitation started on the island of Ibo. The free translation is completely unauthorized, with a wish to transmit if only a small echo of the poetry of the original. From the Preface to ‘IBO – A Casa e o Tempo‘ by Júlio Carrilho. (Edições FAPF, Maputo, 2005)

“Thus one learns how the trees assume the ways of the houses. It is not the inverse, what is taking place. Because the houses are so weary from exhaustion that they don’t have the capacity to house anything any more.  They are left to be carried away by time, left to be swept away by the winds and the monsoons, left to be cradled in the opaque comfort of the full moon evenings. And they sleep in a restless sleep as they are extricating themselves from the memories of the bustle which once inhabited their courtyards.

Few people inhabit what is commonly called the historic centre. … Who today deifine its urbanity is the exuberant nature. She is taking possession of all the stones like someone greedily recuperating what she has lost. The stones come to life. They are invaded by a new urgency. First, a new insignificant offspring of a plant emerges in the fold of a corniche. The root slowly invades the openings and the invisible cracks in a wall and seizes it like a constrictor swallowing fast. Thus aroused by greed, the plant allows itself to stay, digesting the form of the wall and adapting itself to it like it had always been its own. The tree now isn’t only a tree. It is a wall. Or better: The walls have become plants. They accept the entrails of another owner and live again. Not because there would be people inhabiting them. They live again because now it is the walls which live in the plants. They  live again because the memory of the old owners, the laughter of the children, the silent protests of the slaves, the movement of the wheels of the rickshaws over the polished coral floor, all this is being digested by the roots filled with the eagerness of the green. Until one could say, with the propriety typical of the architectonic jargon, that the plants of the houses have been transformed into the houses of the plants….”