The island of Mozambique

UNESCO Courier, May, 1997 by Patrick Lages

The little island of Mozambique, which lies four kilometres off the coast of Africa just opposite Madagascar, was for hundreds of years a major centre of intercontinental maritime trade. It was occupied by Arab merchants from the tenth century until the end of the fifteenth, and in the sixteenth century became a port of call on the route from Europe to the East Indies opened by the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama. In 1507, the Portuguese built a fortress on the island where the Customs House stands today. A later fortification that has survived is the fort of St. Sebastian, which was built between 1558 and 1620 and is inspired by Italian Renaissance military architecture.

Mozambique harbour grew rapidly during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its business houses stood on the sea front, along a rocky belt where boats with a shallow draught could land at high tide. Over the years a town of twisting streets lined with flat-roofed houses took shape around a central square.

The town as it appears today has a strong architectural homogeneity which is largely due to the use over the centuries of the same building materials, mainly limestone from quarries in the south of the island, and wood for beams and framework. The decorative style of the facades, with their cornices, high rectangular framed windows and rows of pilasters, is equally homogeneous. The flat roofs, designed to collect rainwater and compensate for the island's lack of freshwater springs, and a rectangular ground plan in which space is divided into six square rooms also uphold a general impression of unity which encompasses the smallest houses roofed with palm leaves - the macuti that constitute around a quarter of the city - as well as the most luxurious residences. The preponderant architectural influence is that of southern Portugal, although there are undeniable Arab and Indian elements.

THE COLONIAL TOWN

After crossing the three-kilometre-long bridge that links the island to the mainland, the visitor comes to a cemetery surrounded by white walls. There is a white chapel, and a child's white tomb in the form of a sailing ship stands out among the other funerary monuments, notably the Muslim tombs, which are more unobtrusive. Some distance away, a nineteenth-century Hindu temple and crematorium illustrate the island's cultural pluralism.

Arab and later Portuguese, Mozambique island was visited by such exceptional men as the traveller Fernao Mendes Pinto, who stopped off there in 1537, and the poet Luis de Camoes, who lived there between 1567 and 1570 while completing his epic, The Lusiads, a hymn to the great Portuguese explorers of his time. His statue stands in a small square by the sea. But Mozambique's colonial splendour, victim of the vicissitudes of time and history, is today no more than a memory. The abolition of slavery, which gradually brought a lucrative trade to an end, then the opening of the Suez Canal, which moved the East India route northwards, inevitably condemned the town to decline.

Apart from the ancient fortifications, only half of the town is stone-built. The visitor's eye is immediately drawn to the hospital, a majestic neo-classical building constructed in 1877 and recently repainted white, with a garden decorated with ponds and fountains. For many years it was the biggest hospital south of the Sahara.

VANISHED SPLENDOUR

Behind the half-open doors of prosperous town houses can be seen neglected but once well-tended gardens. In a Mediterranean-style cafe with chequerboard floor tiles, superannuated fans churn the air in a vast room where a handful of customers sit around tables with inlaid chessboards. The menu, painted on the wall by a local artist, never varies: fish, mixed grill, salad. Opposite, the church of Our Lady of Mercy offers its immaculate facade to the sun. Built in 1635 on the ruins of an earlier church destroyed by a Dutch bombardment in 1607, it is one of the oldest buildings on the island. It houses a small museum of sacred art, and during the services the singing of the faithful is punctuated by the insistent beating of tom-toms.

The perfectly preserved St. Paul's palace, with its walls of red ochre with white edging, has claims to be the island's most beautiful monument. A Jesuit school founded in 1610, it was destroyed by fire sixty years later and rebuilt in 1674. From 1763 until 1935 it was used as the residence of the island's governors. It was converted into a museum in 1969 and today houses a fine collection of European and Indian furniture of different periods so that it looks for all the world like a royal dwelling. It is connected to the sea front by a small square with Art Nouveau street-lamps where two-coloured paving stones evoke the undulations of the ocean swell.

A MICROCOSM OF HUMANITY

On the sea front, the colonial town slowly gives way to fishermen's houses. On the shore the people from the poorer neighbourhoods go about their business. Women and girls queue beside a fountain for a little fresh water. Children run around and always end their games by diving into the sea shouting with joy. Mozambique's population has increased by over 50 per cent since 1968, largely because of the war and the refugees displaced by it. The town market is one of the island's liveliest spots. A rigorously symmetrical quadrilateral, with small towers rising at each corner, it was built in 1887. Its wares are mainly fruit and small fish set out on trestle tables. Under the shady porches of houses a century old, street vendors sell individual cigarettes, biscuits, sweets and fizzy drinks to passers-by.