CHAPTER 8
In any adventure, time does what it does: an hour is an hour; a minute is a minute; a second is a second.
It’s the perception of time that changes.
Time is picking up pace a little. The single-prop Cessna pirouettes around a wing over a kink in the Lugenda River. From up here, its skin looks scaled with sandy mounds and rocks as the mid-afternoon sun glimmers off the water’s surface.
It’s been a few long weeks of nail-biting logistical gymnastics, and a drawn-out morning of scruffy transit lounges and impassive passport control agents. But our plane has left the rumble strips of turbulence behind. We’ve broken through the Coliseum of storm clouds into a mild-tempered blue. We’re finally here, about to touch down in Niassa Special Reserve in northern Mozambique, one of the wildest and most remote protected areas in East Africa.
As Dave the missionary pilot tees us up with the landing strip below, we draw eye level with a pod of greying granite inselbergs that spy-hop out of the plains, their crowns as blunt as beluga whales and fuzzy with trees that are the scale of barnacles against their profiles. We shudder slightly as the wheels touch down on the dirt runway that’s been cut into the miombo woodland by hand.
Dave taxis us to a stop. There’s no air traffic controller out here. The welcoming party is a few Landies idling under a tree, and a lone shed or two.
This assignment is a marmalade-dropper — the kind that when the news arrives, the toast stops half-way to your mouth, and the marmalade slides right off. A veteran nature photographer for the oldest and most prestigious magazine in its genre needs a writer to join his team on an assignment to a small conservation project working in a reserve in East Africa.
This is the biggest African wilderness the world has never heard of, I jot down in shorthand in one of my notepads. Bigger, even, than Switzerland. But it’s also one of the poorest parts of the world. We’re flying in to a place where the locals get about mostly on foot or by bicycle, while trophy hunters cruise in on charter flights that cost a king’s ransom.
Our team has a king’s ransom. It’s that kind of a gig.
Niassa has been a prime game hunting area since Colonial times, and was declared a hunting reserve in 1954. After Mozambique got its independence from Portugal in 1975, the country disappeared into a black hole of civil war for 15 years while the US and Russia slugged out their Cold War ambitions in another developing world backwater. Once the dust had settled, so to speak, the Mozambican government declared this vast region a protected area. Niassa Special Reserve is unique because of its size, and its remoteness, but also because it’s one of the few formally protected areas on the continent where Indigenous communities have been allowed to stay here on their ancestral lands. Most protected areas adopt the colonial-style ‘fortress’ conservation model, where locals get hoofed out by management authorities, a fence thrown up around the reserve, and the wildlife guarded with a militarised boots-and–guns approach.
Most of Niassa is rented out to hunting concessions, but some parts are used strictly for conservation and less bloody forms of tourism. We’re here to visit an initiative where a local village is working with conservationists to pilot a tiny but seemingly effective collaboration that’s addressing poaching, while allowing the locals to have autonomy in their partnership with the conservationists so they are able to steer their own development through the proceeds of tourism income.
The plan is to spend three weeks here, to see how the villagers live out ordinary lives in big game country, inside a reserve where there are no fences keeping the wilderness and the villagers apart.
There’s just one problem. There may be a group of bandits heading our way, with hand-me-down Kalashnikovs and murderous intent.
‘If it bleeds, it leads’
There’s nothing quite like a beheading to bring in the news crews. Droughts and famines are slow-burning. Africa’s revolving-door coups are becoming a bit passé. The continent’s ongoing food woes are so yesterday.
Cabo Delgado, on the other hand.
Cabo Delgado province is in the naughty corner — sorry, in the far north-eastern corner — of Mozambique, and it’s given the Western press some stellar headlines recently: roaming bands of militants; firebombed villages; captured locals; molested women; gun fights around big private infrastructure investments; a peppering of Islamic brainwashing and the odd Medieval-style beheading.
The place has been a smouldering fire pit for years, never quite recovering after the civil war, but in the 2010s things flared up again. This is in part because of grinding lack of development, poverty, youth unemployment, insurgent groups tapping into the simmering discontent, and the perception that government isn’t managing natural resources fairly and squarely. The arrival of big mining interests— wanting to root about in the bedrock for ruby deposits, and offshore oil and gas — has ignited the already dispossessed locals.
One of the developments that seems to blow fresh oxygen on the coals is a port upgrade at Pemba involving an agreement between a public-private company and the state, something which forces 800-odd families from their homes without compensation.
Human Right’s Watch also explains in one BBC interview that ruby mining was previously something that small artisanal miners did. Now, foreign interests have sauntered in and struck up lucrative deals with power brokers in the Mozambican government. Contracts are opaque, and the profits not trickling down to the Mozambicans on the ground.
Imagine: you’re hungry, living with the bare minimum, can’t get a job, and then you see a bunch of foreigners walking off with the family silver, with your government’s blessing.
Small wonder a few hot-heads surface who aren’t having any of it anymore. By 2017 a bunch of locals — reports refer to them variously as ‘unknown individuals’, an ‘armed group’, or ‘extremists’ — attack police stations and government buildings in the port town of Mocimboa da Praia.
True to journalism’s nature, if it bleeds, it leads, and these bandits dish it up by the ladle-full. The little space that northern Mozambique has claimed in news headlines in the past decade are ghoulish and trope-laden accounts of irrational savages, drunk on ideology and prone to medieval-style dismemberment.
In the negative spaces between these pugnacious headlines, though, are stories that are far more ordinary, but by no means mundane. Stories of the every-day lives of people who just happen to live in one of the remotest parts of East Africa, and who carry with them the lore and practices of a lineage that has lived as part of the wilderness here since pre-history.
Our team of three has come to Niassa to tell this story.
Today, the Indigenous Yao, Mecua, Ngoni, Matambwe, and Makonde ethnic groups still inhabit the area, the descendants of lineages that have lived and traded across the region since long before the upheaval by Europe’s appetite for expansion.
Like Kodak snaps from the ’80s, these ancestors’ albums of record are in the Stone Age artefacts found in relic campsites and mark-making on granite canvasses. Their way of being is also still present in the culture which gives a glimpse into the animist connection with nature, even as they’ve blended Islam — the spiritual import that became the more dominant religion in the area — into their spirituality.
This is not a story of a pristine Eden, or some romantic notion of God’s unspoiled original garden. It’s a story of people living in Eden, and shaping it and being shaped by it as they do so. It’s how they’ve come to draw on its fruits and forests and creatures, devising a husbandry of and in the wilderness that preserves its abundance, while living so lightly on the land that it’s hard to see the tread of a footprint.
It’s also a story of suffering and want, of how this region has become one of the poorest on the globe, and why the people still living here — inside the reserve, and out — have been left behind when many other parts of the continent have enjoyed the development benefits of schooling, healthcare, and political stability, and working economies that put food on the plate and running water in taps and on-demand heat beneath a cooking pot.
The lives of Niassans can possibly be seen as a demonstration of the very thing that many governments see as an intractable point of opposition: that it’s a toss-up between development, or protecting the environment; we can’t have both.
But maybe here we can find an example of how we can, in fact, ‘leave no one behind’ as the Sustainable Development Goals ask, while not trashing the planet as we do so.
This is the story of one village, and the conservationists working with the villagers, that seems to show that we can have both, development and conservation. Moreover, these are not villagers needing handouts, they have their hands on the tiller of their own lives as they choose the shape and form of how they will develop themselves: planting banana orchards; keeping chickens and ducks in a place where they can’t keep much livestock for protein or wealth-building; running school feeding schemes; putting solar systems in place; the gruelling task of digging a 5 km-long trench around the entire village, as a kind of dry moat to keep hungry elephants away from their mango trees.
It’s a complicated story to tell. We have to do so in an immaculate 2,500 words and with only 15 or so photographs. I have three short weeks in which to gather the material for its telling.
The old ways
There could be odes written to the Mozambican November. Some call it ‘suicide month’, although I’m sure this is in part to ham up the notoriety that draws the trophy hunters who are in search of Hemingway’s Africa. These are the high-rollers whose cash keeps the reserve afloat, and who are only too happy to shell out eye-watering sums in exchange for tales of daring-do: days of stalking dangerous quarry on foot; trees as tall as an apartment block and broader than a bus; tsetse flies and sleeping sickness; scolding heat; malaria; sun-blistered skin; a fuck-off set of buffalo horns or a morticianed lion’s head for above the mantlepiece. Not your fair-weather tourist outing, for sure.
Outside of the hype, November is the pause at the top of a breath. That moment where your lungs are filled with air, and you’re waiting for the rains to rumble through on the exhale. When they do, the place will become almost impassable for four months, such is the extent to which the flood plains, well, flood.
The dust is just settling after our arrival, and the community liaison is giving me a quick reccie. We’re headed along the Lugenda over a road that’s throwing the Landie about so as to feel that your teeth might be rattled from their moorings.
Ahead of us, on the road to Mbamba, is a caravan of bicycle’d fishermen who are making the best use of the pre-wet season, and don’t seem at all troubled by the heat. They’re acclimatised in the way that Sherpa are to the low-oxygen Himalayan air. The village is about 10 km upriver of the landing strip, and the men seem not to notice the swaddling air, or that they’re strolling through big game country.
Here be lions, buffalo, hippo, elephant, hyaena, wild dogs, badgers, antelope, crocs — the whole gamut. Although it’s not a seething throng of busyness out here in the bush. There’s loads of space for everyone to play nicely together, barring the occasional testy encounter between humans and more-than-humans.
This is pretty much the same commute these fishermen have been doing here for generations, except for the more recent addition of bicycles. They’re heading back home after a weeks-long stay at a fishing encampment along the river, where they plucked nyingu, a kind of mudsucker, and campango, a freshwater catfish, from the current. They’ve finished curing their catch, where they dry and smoke the fish over open fires, the alchemy of which turns the scales pewter and the flesh parchment-dry, giving it a shelf-life of weeks.
They ship the catch to market using the same kind of hand-woven baskets their ancestors made way back when, and travel along similar age-old trading routes that still crisscross the area. To this day, fishermen sell some of their catch to traders coming in from as far away as Cabo Delgado province and even across the northern border to Tanzania.
The dried fish is as valuable as newly minted coins in a world where the cash economy is still just a trickle and protein is scarce — since being declared a reserve, hunting for the pot or to trade isn’t allowed. Fishermen barter some of their catch for other foods, like cooking oil or rice, or they may trade some for clothes in the local market.
In the old days, people lived entirely off the woodlands and rivers, collecting wild meat, honey, fruit and nuts, firewood and medicinal plants, and catching fish. More recently, they’ve added crops to the mix, growing fields of maize, peanuts, beans, sesame, sorghum, and cash crops such as tobacco in the lands around their villages.
There are just over 60,000 people living in hamlets across Niassa, according to the most recent census, one of which is Mbamba.
The best laid plans: Part I
The plan is to embed ourselves with the local Yao community, many of whom live in Mbamba.
We will travel to the sacred Chemambo pools, a two-day hike from Mbamba, where we will encamp on a sandbar so we can document the days-long ‘chonde-chonde’ ceremonies, where worshipers will plead with their ancestors for happiness, health, and abundance.
The photographic team already has rare footage of this pilgrimage, captured during a previous visit. It shows pilgrims stirring up a drumbeat with their feet, as they sing and pray and splash about reverentially in the spring’s cleansing waters. Traditionally, they leave offerings of food and money at an alter, usually a young baobab tree, whose hallowed girth they swaddle in white fabric. Baobabs are sacred to the Yao. In this custom, these trees are antechambers to the numinous, where people have gathered for centuries to call on the spirits of their forebears.
The Yao also believe that when someone dies, the person will enter the body of another creature, like a snake, or lion, or elephant.
Local lore has it that here, at the Chemambo sacred pool and in a time before their ‘grandparents’ grandparents’, the spirits of a Yao chief and his family entered the baboon troop living around the spring. Chief Mambo, and his family — the Chemambos — died after throwing themselves into the pools following a village conflict. They have lived on in the baboons ever since.
To this day, pilgrims perform ceremonies in which they give the baboons offerings of peanuts, dried corn, or porridge so that they can continue to nourish these ancestors.
If they don’t give the animals food, one traditional healer explains, the spirits will go hungry.
But before we can begin packing for this excursion, we hear the news: there’s a bogy on our six, to coin airforce lingo.
The intel comes in via a morse-code of WhatsApp messages from people dotted about the north-east of the reserve.
A group of bandits has splintered off from the rabble-rousers in Cabo Delgado, and has crossed over into Niassa. Details are sketchy, although the village of Chitande gets a reference. It’s 56 km north-east of us as the crow flies.
No one knows how many — about 20-odd people in all? — or how well armed they are, but they’ve stirred up some trouble in at least one village. We need to have grab-bags at the ready.
For the uninitiated — which most definitely is me at this point — a ‘grab-bag’ is a ‘don’t panic, but we need to leave now’ bag. I’m not entirely sure how this goes, but I let common sense prevail. As I decamp in the square rustic cabin overlooking a placid Lugenda that should be my digs for the next three weeks, I divvy up my gear.
Pile one: notepads, recorder, batteries, pens, camera. If everything goes according to plan, this will be the work pile.
Pile two: the basics for surviving a few days in big game country without, shall we say, facilities. Water bottles, water purification tablets, first aid kit, snack-type food, sunhat, sunscreen, warm top, headlamp, extra batteries. This is the ‘grab bag’.
Pile three: everything else goes neatly into the chest-of-drawers. There isn’t much, you have to travel light on these kinds of gigs, so it’s the wash-and-wear gear for the full three weeks.
The best laid plans: Part II
The plan is to watch a Yao honey collector scale the bole of a giant baobab on a nighttime foray to collect chunks of golden sugary comb hanging beneath the canopy using a tree-climbing method that’s been handed down from grandfather, to father, to son.
Thup-thup-thup.
The photographic team already has the footage of the bare-chested Luís Kaliambwela Iwene as he scales the leviathan. The tree is so big it makes other woodland trees look as waif-like as Giacometti figurines. These two beings — the tree and the man — are illuminated by firelight and an iridescent moon. Kaliambwela is 28 years old; the tree, easily half a century.
Thup-thup-thup.
Kaliambwela uses little more than wooden stakes hammered into the tree’s hide with a hand-hewn mallet. Bare-footed, he squats on the stakes as he methodically pegs into place the next step of the rudimentary staircase that takes him ever higher. Wearing little more than cut-off denims, he climbs the tree with the ease of a high-wire acrobat, hoisting his tools as he goes: a coil of rope made from knotted-together lengths of tree bark; a plastic bucket; a kitchen knife hanging from his waistband.
Thup-thup-thup.
When he reaches the summit, Kaliambwela moors himself before coaxing to life a smouldering torch tip with the touch of his breath. This is a bundle of dried thatching grass that he’s hauled up with him, half as long as he is tall, but which looks as small as a burning matchstick from the ground below.
Hunter-gatherers have long used their mastery of fire and smoke to conjure honey from behind bees’ defensive veil, but even so, these raids don’t go unpunished.
Honey collectors do get stung, Kaliambwela says into the camera in one earlier interview, and sometimes it can get too much. They’ll keep at it, if the honey’s obvious to see. But if the bees' attack becomes unbearable, and they’ll beat a hasty retreat.
On those days, they’ll stoke up a bigger fire, or set up at another tree.
On this day, though, when the photographic team is trained on him, the bees acquiesce. Kaliambwela is free to slice into the hanging combs with his knife, occasionally swatting at his face as he breaks off a few chunks and lowers them to the ground in the bucket dangling from the end of the bark rope.
Honey has traditionally been the Yao’s only year-round source of sugar. Seasonal fruits wax and wane, but a bee’s work ethic doesn’t. Although the hives are often tucked away inside the woody nooks or hollow torsos of trees that are much smaller and easier to access than the baobabs. To find the hives, though, Yao honey hunters have struck up an unusual relationship with a local cuckoo.
The greater honeyguide bird is one of the few animals that can digest bee’s wax. It’s lipid-dense and delicious, but also hard for the birds to reach, because hives are often tucked away deep inside trees. To get to the stash, the birds have learned to recruit other animals to help.
The honeyguide’s guiding prowess is so well documented, it’s scientific name even says as much: Indicator indicator.
But there’s something extra special happening here, between the cuckoos and the Yao. They’ve formulated their own unique language so they can help each other to the honey.
Right here in Niassa, researchers have documented how the honeyguides have trained humans so that they can commandeer two useful technologies: fire, and the axe.
When cuckoos in these parts see a person, if they know there’s a hive nearby, they utter a chattering call to let the person know that there’s honey to be had. If an attentive Yao hears this call, they answer with a distinctive brrrr-HM, brrrr-HM, brrr-HM.
Like the call-and-response of a church choir, the Yao are saying they’ve heard the call, and they’re coming.
The bird then leads the way to the hive, flitting from tree to tree with the honey hunter in pursuit, the two calling to each other. Once at the hive, the honey-hunter will pacify the bees with fire and smoke, crack the bole open with an axe, and pull the honeycomb free. Once they’ve strained the honey from the comb, they leave some for the birds so they can share in the delights.
The photo team has documented all of this already. Now I will get to witness this ancient practice first-hand, and talk with the men who have been schooled by their fathers and grandfathers in a practice that goes back time immemorial.
Only, the bush telegraph brings news that the insurgents are moving closer. They’re about 60-odd km north of us now, and they’ve hit another village. It seems they’re doing this so they can resupply — medicines, food, cash — and in the process they’re getting into firefights with the village constabulary. There may or may not have been some deaths.
Plan A is to keep on with the research. Plan B, if the security threat gets closer, is to grab the grab-bags and head up into the nearby hills on foot with a local ranger and wait things out. Or we’ll bundle into the conservationists’ Landies and head inland along the river.
The best laid plans: Part III
The plan is to interview all the big-wigs at the reserve’s headquarters at Mbatamila, about 50 km west of the conservation centre. I raid Piles One, Two, and Three to create Pile Four: an overnight bag for a trip to HQ.
A government chaperone has been sent along with our team to make sure we don’t get up to mischief, and we’re pretty much joined at the hip from the moment we arrive. So when I hear that there’s a chance to hitch a ride to the headquarters in a four-seater fixed-wing — a trip that’ll save a day of driving over jaw-shuddering roads — the two of us end up cheek-by-jowl in the back of the plane, watching the patchy looking vegetation below and noting the occasional sign of illegal mining or logging.
The government handler is on speed-dial with all the necessary ministers, which brings in more intel. The insurgents have ambushed a tourism operator vehicle. No info on whether or not anyone was hurt. They’ve also taken some villagers captive, but the first fearful assumptions — mutilation, murder — are quickly put to rest. Looks like they hoped the locals would guide them through the woodlands and on to the next village. No real harm done, it seems.
The last point of contact, Mitope, 44 km north of Mbamba.
The best laid plans: Part IV
At the start of day four — it’s a Saturday, but such things often fall into insignificance on assignments like this — the chaperone’s demeanour doesn’t match the bonhomie of the morning. His usual cheer — which I’m told later should’t be entirely trusted — is gone. Now, he’s guarded, inscrutable, and engaged in high-velocity exchanges in Portuguese over the phone.
I’d been looking forward to ticking the last round of interviews off the list, so I can return to the conservation centre and get ready for our trip to the Chemambo sacred site.
More news, just in. Word from the top, direct from various ministers, is that the government’s having none of it. The militants are about 40 km from Mbamba now. It’s unclear how fast they’re moving, or in what direction, but they’re probably on foot, they’ve got ‘senior’ personnel in their ranks, and there’s a ‘commandant’ calling the shots, whatever that means.
The government is about to send in security forces to take them down. A hundred troops will arrive tomorrow, the chaperone says, and they’re ‘not coming to protect the wildlife’. This could mean war. The whole thing could be over in a day or two, or the insurgents could dig in indefinitely. Niassa could be the next Cabo Delgado.
Whatever the case, the road route we had planned to use for a vehicle escape will likely be a war zone 24 hours from now.
Our team leader is on the phone. The charter plane is available today, but then Dave and his wings head off on another job in Zambia or somewhere. We’ve got ten minutes to decide: call him in now, and get the hell out of dodge; or stay in Niassa, and let the cards fall where they will?
If we stay, we’re on our own. The government chaperone says he can’t guarantee our safety. The conservationists have enough on their hands, without having to babysit us, too.
It’s hardly a choice. The team leader gives Dave the green light: come and fetch us. Someone offers to throw the last of my things into my bags while the chaperone and I hustle for a ride back to the team. Spare chopper, anyone?
Flight paths
In any adventure, time does what it does: an hour is an hour; a minute is a minute; a second is a second.
Our perception of time depends on how much adrenalin we’ve got pumping through the pipes.
I don’t have any of that, as our chopper thunders over the miombo canopy, broken here and there by a weather-streaked inselberg. Time feels as mundane as waiting in the queue at a supermarket check-out. It’s hard to connect with the potential danger somewhere down there, not far beneath the aircraft’s skids.
What I am connected with is the fact that the chopper has been repurposed for hauling cargo, so all the soft furnishings have been stripped out. There’s no cushioning here — butt bones press into cold metal as the blades hoist us home.
You’d never say we were fleeing a potential mini war zone, but for the tall fellow in military-type fatigues up front with an assault rifle about as long as I am tall and a walkie-talkie clipped to his chest.
I take a picture of my dusty hiking boots, feet crossed at the ankles, and write an obtuse caption for posting on social media later: ‘the aircraft just keep getting smaller — down to a chopper with its back seats stripped out. Today’s unexpected turn of events.’
When our team reconstitutes, the energy is electric. We have a few high-voltage disagreements about micro-decisions made in the previous hour. I later realise there are several games of political chess being played in the background, which I’m naively unaware of and which nearly get the story check-mated once or twice, but that’s another story.
Our bags are stacked in what’s effectively our departure lounge — an open-air space with a thatched roof and whole tree trunks as pillars keeping it up — as we wait for Dave the missionary pilot to fly in from Nampula. The conservation group’s handyman — a twinkly eyed character with a ZZ Top beard — says he’s not going anywhere without his viola and violin, which in their cases look like something you’d hide a Tommy-gun in a prohibition-era mob movie.
We make distracting small talk and strategise about how to salvage the story until our ride touches down on the landing strip. It’s a calculated hour or two as we weigh every passenger, and every item of luggage to ensure we aren’t a kilo over the carrying capacity of the single engine plane. Then we cram ourselves in, along with as many of the conservationists as the plane can fit. The rest of the team will leave tomorrow in a convoy by road.
A phone picture captures the backs of everyone’s heads as we buzz back to Nampula. The social media caption will later read: ‘When you can't choose your seat with online check-in, but you're on first name terms with the pilot, so you ask for the special seat at the back of the plane so you can have both windows... but he warns you, in a heavy Texan drawl, that it bucks around back here and you might need the barf bag.’
The politics behind our visit become even more complicated with our unexpected departure. Those trying to control the story’s narrative don’t want the press to get wind of the fact that an international news crew has just been airlifted away from a potential war zone as Cabo Delgado’s conflict spreads. We have to stay mum about what’s going on, so I limit my communications to one or two short text messages to emergency contacts, saying I’m coming home ahead of schedule and not to say anything to anyone. A few digital hieroglyphs come back by way of acknowledgement: a shocked face emoji, a teary emoji, an explosion emoji.
A touch of the vapours
The poison arrives like a category five hurricane. First, the quiet before the storm, just some clouds bruising on the horizon. But the disquiet soon confirms that you’re directly in its path, and you brace for impact. When it makes landfall, it is brutish, delivering hours of hell and damnation. And then, just like that, it’s gone, leaving in its wake levelled buildings, debris, and shock.
I’d dropped my guard. After the gritty outdoors of the reserve and its rustic food, possibly dazed by the speed of the evacuation, my over-confidence must have been inflated by the high-gloss tiles and AC of a Nampula hotel.
Travel rule number one: never eat the salad.
I eat the salad, and the fresh fruit.
I spend our second in-transit day coiled in a fevered heap on the hotel’s bathroom floor, a world away from bandits but in a twist of vapours and bile.
When the putrefication releases me back into the folds of the bedding, I look forlornly at the reporter’s notebooks scattered about the covers. Each one, with a home-made Dewy system scribbled on its front cover in anticipation of a return-trip where they should be bulging with shorthand notes and the odd mud streak: Niassa 1 of 5; Niassa 2 of 5; Niassa 3 of 5; Niassa 4 of 5; Niassa 5 of 5.
Only 1 of 5 has anything notable to say for itself. The rest are virgin pages. Not even a dog-ear.
A king’s ransom spent to get there. Now we’re returning with a bandit’s budget worth of words.
I’m too flat to be any more crestfallen.
The team goes its separate ways, and by the time I wash up in the departure lounge at Jo’burg International Airport for the final leg home, I realise there’s been another grave error of grooming judgement.
It’s 8 am on a Monday. Migration season for the corporate types. The people queueing at the boarding gate are so crisp, they could have been ironed by a marine. Marinated in eau de cologne, one of them is broadcasting an early-morning business call at a decibel or two louder than strictly necessary, but at least we now know how important he is. The queueing people are high gloss, lethally pointy shoes, and hair that’s so carefully styled you can’t see the sculpting gel holding it in place.
I’m wilted on one of those steel benches that’s designed to be just unwelcoming enough that you don’t make yourself at home. My wash-and-wear bush clothes are clean and smell faintly of hotel-issue hand soap, but they’re more crease than fabric. My boots are hungover with dust. The sunhat, which is trying to make a break from beneath the flap of the backpack, has a rude smear of sunblock and sweat-salt. I manage somehow to spill coffee down my bosom.
This world in front of me.
The one I’ve just left behind.
My eyes fix on the floor, in a chasm between the two.
In-between spaces
Our team can buy a quick-fix solution to get ourselves out of Niassa. The Mbamba villagers can’t. They resort to the only option available: hoofing it to safety, on foot, by road.
The smart-phone-enabled bush-telegraph captures some record of their passage, a single photo that is iconographic in its telling of their flight into exile: a caravan of civilians, possessions bundled on their heads or hoisted in carrier bags, kids trailing, all headed in a single direction, away from danger.
Overnight, villagers become refugees.
Bits of information trickle through in the proceeding weeks. The militants don’t arrive in Mbamba after all, and we don’t hear news of the special forces’ movements. But a few people on the ground express their worry that the villagers won’t be home in time to plant this year’s crops. There’s going to be a hungry season in 2022: a time when the larders are emptied of the previous season’s harvest, but before they can stock up again.
This is what author and professor Rob Nixon calls the slow violence of environmental disaster: in the aftermath of the single disruptive events that grab the medias’ attention are the losses and suffering that get missed in the headlines and head-counting.
This account — Mbamba’s displacement, their food supply disruption, and the causes — is one of the many stories that inhabit the negative spaces between the lead-character events that hold our news focus so singularly. They’re the stories that go unseen because there’s no one to witness them, or pay attention, or give their stories a theatre in which to play themselves out before an attentive audience.
Lighting the fuse
A red bulb flares on the map over a place called Chiuca, close to Mitope, about 50 clicks north of Mbamba. The caption reads: ‘Event type: Conflict against civilians. Fatalities: 0. Notes: On 25 November 2021, members of an Islamist militia attacked Chiuca, in the district of Mecula (Mecula, Niassa). Casualties unknown.’
As our team leaves Niassa on 27 November 2021 and is mercifully taken off the boil, a civil society organisation has its researchers trained on the region. The Red Cross Red Crescent is pulling together bits and pieces of information relating to human displacement and conflict in the region. This is no easy task when there are so few journalistic or civil society boots on the ground, and the government tries to keep a choke-hold on information from inside the country’s borders.
When the Red Cross Red Crescent report Cyclone Kenneth: climate, disasters and conflict in Cabo Delgado arrives on my desk, it comes with the distance of hindsight and long after the magazine story I’d been commissioned to write has been midwived into the world.
Starting with the 2017 skirmish between the rabble-rousers and the constabulary at Mocimboa da Praia on the coast, the researchers put dabs of digital red ink on the map to show every data point to mark a noted conflict, and of people uprooting, moving and resettling.
There’s a fair number of red flares on the map in 2017 and 2018. Eight clashes between extremists and police in 2017, and three acts of violence against civilians. Ten battles with police in 2018, and 53 acts of violence.
Then Cyclone Idai hits the Mozambican coastline in the southern summer of 2019, flattening 90 per cent of the coastal city of Beira. Six weeks later, Cyclone Kenneth makes landfall a bit further north, pummelling Cabo Delgado, which was already a political tinderbox. From here, the map is like a time-lapse of fireworks taking off, explosions of red lighting up and spreading out from a central ignition point.
2019: 35 battles with police, 161 acts of violence against civilians.
2020: 6 clashes with police, 49 acts of violence against civilians.
2021: 69 battles with police, 121 acts of violence against civilians.
2022: 887 ‘organised acts of violence’, with fatalities estimated at 5,695.
One of those dots — in late November 2021 — correlates directly with our team’s emergency evacuation.
This story captures better than most the time and geographical scale of the climate crisis and its impacts. The fuse to this disaster is lit generations ago as industrialising countries begin pouring their carbon pollution into the atmosphere. The Cabo Delgado region is already destabilised because of the very global forces that enabled those Global North countries to muscle-up using fossil fuels and other resource extraction. The bomb goes off with the record-breaking Cyclones Idai and Kenneth hit back-to-back, both fuelled by Global North pollution. The shock wave takes two years to spread, but our team is on the far edge of its blast radius when it reaches into Niassa in November 2021.
More importantly, the people of Mbamba are the ones hit most severely by its force.
The Red Cross Red Crescent writes that ‘this is the first time in Mozambique’s recorded history that a drought, a series of severe cyclones and floods occurred consecutively… the unprecedented scale of climate change induced natural hazards have created a new set of risks, impacts, and drivers in the region’.
We need to better understand ‘how the dynamics of government, conflict, and climate change interact to exacerbate insecurity in a state like Mozambique and in vulnerable regions such as Cabo Delgado’, the report concludes.
Into the void
When the door to my apartment swings open, the place is the same sarcophagus that it was after the last misadventure.
In the pile of awaiting emails is another from the new neighbour. This time he wants to know who’s responsible for pruning the five or six lavender bushes along his garden fence. I explain why it’s his job, rather than the body corporate’s. He’s having none of it, though. After a few hours of email exchanges that press deep into the night, it’s clear that the only response he’ll accept is one that absolves him of the responsibility.
My internal editor abandons her post.
‘Ok, not to worry,’ I hammer out in final reply. It’s bedtime, for heaven’s sake. ‘I’ve got some secateurs. I’ll cut the lavender. Do you prefer a tight crop? I’m partial to a wilder look in a garden.’
I don’t hear back from him on this particular issue.
Our relationship never recovers.
It’s a relief to crawl into my own bed, but a few more saplings of goodwill towards man wither under the heat of this exchange, and the weeds of misanthropy fill the empty canopy space left by their departure.
It’s the festive season, though, and the rest of the Western-colonised world shuts up shop for the holiday. Faux snow inside our fake-cold shopping malls; real snow outside those up north.
Fa-la-la-la-la la-la-la la-la.
I choose, instead, to flee from the world of people and into a labyrinth of storytelling for the next few weeks.
Tis the season to be jolly.
There may be a few cul-de-sacs and a minotaur down here, but at least there aren’t any humans.
Fa-la-la-la-la la-la-la-la.
Ancestral spirits, AK47s, honey, pewter fish, baobab rubies, beheaded heads and lengthy tales, baboons, sacred ambushes, charmed bushmeat, drums, traps, bullets, chess.
Check-mate.
The night before we’re whisked out of Niassa, I’m hanging out in the communal dining room at the reserve’s headquarters, waiting for the chaperone to return from a phone call and an update on our security status. This is one of the few places that has a satellite feed bringing in the messages of civilisation for the small screen.
Some or other Mozambican retail chain is doing what they do the world over at this time of year, running an ad to punt some or other festive season discount. They’ve got a family of four to ham it up in a studio where their cheer is as fake as the snow props and as plastic as the tree. Father, mother, teenage girl, pre-teen boy — because the nuclear family is the norm, no? They’re as black as the African East Coast’s best. They’re singing a Christmas ditty. In Portuguese.
Fa-la-la-la-la la-la-la la-la.
It was quaintly amusing at the time.
Tis the season to be jolly.
Nothing makes sense now.
Fa-la-la-la-la la-la-la-la.
Somewhere out there, fireworks. New Years. A new year. Another new year.
Write, write, write, right, left. Starboard. Port. Sherry.
The Niassa story comes together, salvaged through some act of merciful juju.
Then it’s the next deadline. Deadline. Dead. Death. Dying.
Scalped chicks. Methane bombs. Charred ’roos. Magma fires. Beaten Biko. Mute. Parchment-dry giraffe corpses. Decaying dead infants. Cullinan diamond. Bangladesh rots. Burn, burn, burn.
January, February, March, march, march in obedient single file. March into the Capitalist meat grinder. Odebient. File. Jauyrnury. hTe. Marcrh. FirSe. Featers. Mise. Heate. Tepremture. Crabon. Amtosfir. 7 *#\ ….
Break.
I need a break.
Google finds the closest place for an escape from this relentless gods-damned grind. I make a reservation.
First thing Monday, before the rush hour traffic has even congealed, an Uber pulls up alongside where I’m waiting on the pavement, a weekend bag stuffed with not much more than a few changes of clothes and a book.