Maputo — the place I faintly remember

“Stories about places are makeshift things. They are composed with the world’s debris.” — de Certeau

My Maputo exists in half-remembered glimpses. Blue bags dancing in the breeze, strung up on a tree at a night market. A traffic jam in the dark. People, endless throngs of people, on the pavements — a market. Mosquito nets around my bed. My mom being too scared to go on the ferry. A grey-green sea. Searching for a swimming pool to escape the heat. A bakery with delicious rolls. Tiles on the outside of buildings. Mom trying to remember the Portuguese she picked up in the 90s. Badly cared for taxidermied animals.

We were only there for a weekend, ten years ago. I was thirteen, far too young to care one whiff about politics and the lingering effects of history. But, looking back, I believe that Maputo is where my interest in exploring the vestiges of the colonial past on the postcolonial city began, in trying to wrap my head around a space where I am so obviously an outsider, began.

It was similar enough to what I knew to be disorientating. A glitch, a snag, that left me disorientated. I knew South Africa. I knew eSwatini. I knew English road signs and the architecture the British brought with them. And, as that was the sum total of my experience in this continent, that was how I understood Africa — as a place with a thin layer of Britishness plastered over its surface, a layer that slowly cracked and was worn out, becoming a palimsestic layer, simply another part of a long history of movement and migration and agitation. I was familiar with the remains of Britishness. They were part of my everyday life.

Yet here was a space so geographical near the one I knew, so seemingly similar yet so fundamentally different. Instead of Britishness, there was a layer of Portugueseness, a history that I had never been taught and never bothered to learn.

I would love to end this piece with a series of reflective thoughts on this topic, but I cannot. Ten years later, I’m still in the dark. That one weekend in Maputo is all I know of Mozambique.