5. The Great Flood
Farewell to Beira – Family Exodus – The Mozambican Gulag
For my parents and the city of Beira, my first, unforgettable station. For Ezequiel, for Tomás, and their daring all the way from darkness to dawn.
[…] “What do you have that you did not receive?” (Paul, Corinthians 4:7) … Every letter that you and I exchange reminds me that we may only hand out what we’ve acquired: Sharing is no casual coincidence, but the cardinal connection. […] (in Abel’s and Ezequiel’s correspondence).
Father Ezequiel S.J. passed away in November 2016, which inspired me to go through our correspondence and to revise some of the diary notes we shared. Having first met Ezequiel at a Jesuit boarding school in Portugal, our paths crossed again in Oxford and Mozambique, and a friendship pursued for many years after I left homeland.
Although reflecting emotions pertaining to an ephemeral world which by now appear to be unreal, I invite the reader to join us in a fragment of our journey. All in all, may our thoughts inspire what Crusoe’s awe might have been when seeing another human footprint in the sand: the miracle of our own existence only becomes real after we suddenly perceive our own image reflected in the universal mirror of creation.
Below I share a written mosaic echoing a diversity of events, from playful to painful. More than excerpts of tidings covering two dramatic decades (1965-1985), their common thread testifies to the historical landslide which forever changed the individual and collective memory of those who lived the tail-end of the Portuguese Colonial Empire.
Ultimately, the tripartite meditations below (my own, my mother’s and Ezequiel’s, parts I, II and III respectively) reaffirm the fact that, against all odds, what we believe to be immutable ground, is invariably undermined by human mischief, the passing of time and the unexpected merry-go-round of fate.
Prelude: My Farewell to Beira (notes from a diary)
Beira, Sofala (1) a water world made of coastal dunes and mangroves, sea spray and burning breeze, a drifting land-bridge where flood and mosquito waves closely follow summer rain and soaring temperatures. Well buried below sea-level, the city is like a man-made oasis implanted at the heart of a watering hole. It took one hundred years to build her, from mud to concrete, thatched roofing to corrugated zinc, brick by brick. Today, as I leave her, I feel as if fragments of the past are bleeding through my veins. Five-century-old boulders washed out from the Portuguese garrison at Sofala were once used to erect its cathedral... a prophecy of dreams doomed to be wasted away?
In my childhood memories I walk hand-in-hand with my mother, Nini or Pequenino (2) burning white soft sand creeping into my sandals. Beside the overwhelming warmth and whiteness beneath my feet, I hear the sound of powerful splashing waves, the brief smoothed surface of the beach with heaps of outpouring clam, their little gooey foot sticking out of the shell as the tide ebbs away; while the breeze grooms the long row of barely rooted casuarina trees scattered along the shore, hiding the sweeping blue horizon which can only be seen after climbing the first row of dunes.
Today, in the closing chapter of my manhood, I leave behind the desolate town as the gloomy twilight and fading shadows settle down and the bleeding sky fades away. Behind us the building stones of halcyon days crumble as a hologram of my past: esplanades, galleries, plazas, sidewalks, street corners, walkways … the founding fabric of my being: households and schools, churches and clubs, hotels and restaurants … the age of innocence, the lazy days of exploit, hand-in-hand with mother and sister: the Municipal square with ‘Lar Moderno’, my family’s furniture shop, in one of its corners; the modest city-center with its cafés, bookshops, movie theaters, market and stores; and further up, as the truckload moves forward into the industrial suburbs, the main road edging which once was father’s pride- “Mobel”, the mattress and furniture industry he created… and with every bump in the road I feel my heart breaking apart, every shred of time and memory forsaken.
All that could be rescued from my family home today is nothing more than cargo. The lorry wobbles along, winding about in a random course to avoid countless holes wearing away the broken pavement. As if emerging from a moving picture, an endless swarm of people walk along the convoluted and dusty road. We are now leaving the suburb at Manga and the Pungwe muddy flats bordered by a vibrant stream of shanties and machambas (3). Inland, where we’re headed, leaving behind the mangrove marshes, coastal forests and waterways, lies the steady ground where Humankind once emerged. Inspired by it I became the archaeologist who would seek what this new nation ignored during the colonial past -its own history. But today I am simply a son who has been left behind by parents thrown away for having the wrong colour. Looking around the unbroken landscape I grasp in a nutshell how terribly thin and gloomy is our human dimension: what is a life-time but a tiny grain of sand enshrouded in a three-million-year spell?
I. Halcyon days
Two fragrances dominate the building-blocks of my identity: seaweed and petrichor. According to season and winds, scents switch between sea vapour to the sweet smell of dust after rain. In harmony with sight and perfume, I hear the cacophony of insect life, blended with the rhythmical croaking of frogs and toads, all noises peculiarly amplified at sunset and rainfall.
Macúti is our home, a higher-ground coastal suburb five kilometers away from the heart of Beira, the second largest Mozambican city raised out of marshland in 1887, a below-sea-level harbour confined between the Pungwe and Buzi river mouths and associated muddy swamps. Our first house has its main door leading into a large veranda enclosed by wall-to-ceiling mosquito nets, pervasive in every window, to keep malaria at bay. The residence is located next to the new hospital built by the Indian Ocean waterfront and a few kilometers away from the city-center. The old one, where I was born, became too small and obsolete. In approaching it, one is easily fascinated by the uptown whiteness of its walls, the vulnerable fencing made up of bushes erected to stop any invasive sand dunes, the majestic height of coconut trees planted among its barren and convoluted gardens.
My first friends in life are Dona Bia and her husband, Head Nurse Senhor Maia, residing in a house located within the hospital premises. I often beg to visit them, an innocent attraction to incompatible settings: the roaming ocean against the silence of the hospital wards and pavilions; the solitude of the seashore opposing the swarming, walking shadows of the sick; life and death, in short. The Maias are lovely people who have no children and are devoted to their life-saving mission. I must believe that they could also save me from loneliness: with an elderly sister and no other children in the neighborhood my existence is often boring. My parents rarely take us to the nearby sandy beach and at times I go there in the company of a domestic servant. At low tide we have much fun in scavenging for clams exposed by the mighty waves and shifting sands; or – if not the season for clam digging – to climb the wooden piers built for shoreline protection.
Before school age I often heard that I must bear solitude and uneasiness, ‘to entertain myself’. My father is invariably busy and my mother, although being a ‘house wife’, often has many family or social errands. There are hardly children of my age to play with. Or if such opportunity occurs, I am perhaps as clumsy or uninteresting. My three-year-older sister sees no point in playing with me with her dolls. With adults I feel generally constrained in having to ‘be’ what I am being expected to: to please and to fulfill a social role. Hence, I am usually best on my own, in earnest devotion to adventure and action, free from adult expectation.
I have no other family in Beira: as a newly married couple, my parents and my future sister left Lourenço Marques (LM) to Beira in 1952. My mother, the youngest daughter to a well-established businessman settled in southern Mozambique since 1905, followed my father to Mozambique’s second largest city in order to start-up a furniture factory and department store. My father left Portugal as a teenager to join his older brother in LM, where he studied Industrial and Commercial Administration. My ancestry comes from the Portuguese highlands: my mother’s family from Celorico da Beira and my father’s from Mesquitela. Both families had relatively extensive agricultural property associated with an impoverished rural elite and blended with, I suspect, secretive ancestry: my paternal grandmother’s family, judging from surname and mindset, had Sephardic Jewish blood. In which case, in order to blend and prosper, they had to convert to Catholicism five centuries ago during the Inquisition. Physiognomy reflect such varied genetic stock, from blond hair and blue or green eyes (my sister) to darker brown and hazel eyes (myself); as well as bearing: from down-to-earth, headstrong and unselfish to proud, stiff and conservative.
Cut away from mainstream Portuguese and extended family roots mean that we live –except for the occasional social visits or holidays to LM or Rhodesia – very much for ourselves in a small city with c. 50 000 inhabitants and a 15 Km urban sprawl from its center located by the harbor. Commuting time must have made some difference though, since my parents decided we should move from Macúti to Ponta Gêa nearer to the city. Under my first decade in life we moved three times, first to ‘Jardim do Bacalhau’, soon thereafter to a semi-detached house close to the Luis de Camões School, and finally to a two-story house near to the once majestic ‘Grande Hotel’. The Hotel is closing down but the large swimming pool where my sister and I often go is still open to the public for a fee.
Ponta Gêa is bounded by the roaring ocean and the extensive mangrove swamps spreading between ‘Praia dos Pinheiros’ and ‘Praia do Arângua’ behind the Municipality. Mangroves are my favorite exploration grounds: I love to go there on my own in pursuit of endless mud tracks with its semi-aquatic flora and fauna where I devise imaginary adventures inspired by Dafoe, Enid Blyton, Dumas and Melville … to arrive home –to my mother’s despair– covered in mud and holding a bucket of small and smelly fish. Off-season, during the far too long rainy season, reading, music and my collection of stamps and miniature ‘matchbox’ cars are the only feasible get away.
It’s not unusual that servants have their quarters confined to the household. These are often located in an adjacent building, next to a garage, or at ground level, facing the back yard of multi-store houses. With joy and curiosity, I regularly join them during their meals (often tasting more enticing and exotic than ours) or on early evenings, when they gather around the fireplace sharing lively stories: such enchanting oral fiction I do not witness elsewhere: they are surely distinct from the adult gibberish I hear in town, down at coffee houses and restaurants. All and all, my curiosity is deeply attracted by their generosity, spontaneity and mindfulness.
My first friend and mentor is Domingos, our cook. A short, well-built, gay personality, he commands respect among all the other younger servants. He has a large social network in town, which he regularly visits in order to buy our household groceries. But Domingos has more than his daily escapades: after work he often endures in prolonging the celebration until the wee hours, before sleepless visiting the bazaar; after which he comes back tipsy, red-eyed, but with his personal charm and civilized behavior unaffected, which even disarm mother’s moralizing rumblings. Domingo blames, understandably, the fact that his drinking habit is motivated by all the temptations induced by his friends. But I suspect that he is another victim of solitude.
The highlight of every other Sunday is ‘Children’s Cine-Club’, with sessions held at ‘Associação Comercial’, Beira’s Commercial Society, and included hilarious screenings of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, among others. With luck, occasional feature films take us to the Wild-West, Sleeping Beauties and White Christmases, many a ludicrous Disneyworld, a virtual reality which we often leave to leap outside to temperatures melting the asphalt or the deluge washing away pavements. Another of my afternoon entertainments included playing hide-and-seek or ‘cowboys and Indians’ around ‘Praça do Município’, the city-center plaza with a central pond and four circular fenced gardens at each of its corners. At nightfall I occasionally escape to nearby buildings where I explore the thrill of using the elevator to stop in-between levels, from where architectural features can be observed from another angle… until my sister discovers my hiding and drag me away to my parents for the usual admonition.
Summer holidays for us, Christmas holidays in Portugal, brings the usual swap of tourism flow. We leave to Rhodesia (‘Zimbabwe’), while Rhodesians invade our coast. The inland plateau has milder temperatures ideal for our summer holidays: as we drive away at dawn from the thin coastal dunes into the slash-and-burn ( 4)summer haze, the floodplain stretches 114 km from Dondo to Chimoio, along the EN6. Where small homesteads rarify - beyond shabby huts, skinny goat and foal - larger property prevails. From the low-lying coastal region, a two-hour westward journey is needed before we can see the horizon from tableland: at that point we will soon be driving through Chimoio towards Manica and the Zimbabwean border, located approximately 280 km away from Beira. This has been the natural route into the hinterland since the beginning of time: coastal forests, mangrove swamps and broad waterways have always persisted as the downstream domain of the river-fed Mozambican plains. Upstream, as the air rarifies and we enter the grey and green plateau where the Inyangani and Bvumba Mountains reside we know that we are soon reaching the Leopard Rock and Troutbeck Inn hotels. An exotic world is waiting us: a world of landscape, language and habits. And so, the puzzlement of suddenly our thoughts popping up differently.
II. The Storm: Grief darkens my heart
“My dear son: Father Ezequiel will tell you details of our escape from Beira to Malawi, bless him for what he has done for us. Many and painful thoughts cross my mind, not the least since we are unable to bid farewell face-to-face and I therefore resort to write you this note as we get ready to leave, hoping that soon it will reach you in hand.
Grief darkens my heart as we leave our home forever. Like Job we had wealth, ‘riches that have vanished like a cloud’ even though we have been kind to everyone, no matter pigment or persuasion. But like Job we are now vilified, accused of serving evil, capitalism, colonialism... Despite how fair and hard we have worked and how legitimate our property was earned. For three years after independence we tried to hold on to integrity and industry, but in vain: the new Frelimo rulers see the white and wealthy as the enemy to be slaughtered. They surely rejoice that we now have lost possessions and prosperity. But we are blessed with each other, children and faith. These treasures have not been taken away, praise the Lord. Your sister has left for Lisbon some time ago, you live far away in Maputo, all of my friends are gone, and there is far too much solitude. Closing the circle, we are told that ‘security services’ are coming after us, as surely as corrupted politicians having their mind to seize all our property. For a similar reason our cousin has been imprisoned in Nampula for half-a-year, father has often been interceding for him at the Portuguese Embassy, but with no avail. If we are to avoid similar fate ourselves, we must leave in haste.
My son: I wish I could blot out the day of my birth but God rewarded me instead with trust and kin. And now we have reached the end of our rope: we cannot see the road ahead of us, but we will still move on without losing hope and faith. Although life is just a breath and we all soon be forgotten, we learn from our ancestors’ wisdom that justice will prevail in the end. We have no other home to go to but we are forced to leave the country which we’re told we do not belong to anymore. Betrayed by both the new African and European rulers to whom justice is an empty word, we are now been hopelessly pushed into exile. Likewise, International rule of law and politics has turned a -blind eye towards countless crimes, namely when properties are being stolen from a large number of people extra-judicially murdered, and many others sent to rotten in ‘Reeducation Camps’. How many are they? How can individuals be accused of ‘treason’ when they started political parties, or expressed political views before independence and still under Portuguese administration? Collaborators with whom and traitors to what end? For favoring democracy, a non-segregated, open and tolerant society?
Unlike you, native to this country, our option was to keep citizenship of the nation that saw our birth, although we had decided to stay where our heart is. But for a price: your father and I, as well as many other like-minded Euro-Africans, have been abandoned by our Portuguese rulers. I was told by someone who heard firsthand Portugal’s Prime Minister to comment in private –as if washing of his hands for the lack of political responsibility towards many of his countrymen in hardship– that ‘it is up to all those left in the Colonies to swim away for their lives, if they so wish’… Hence making clear that his ‘Socialist Party’ comradeship is offered - first and last - to the communist brothers and sisters to whom he and his ‘April Captains’ have given away the Colonies. Speaking of betrayal, History will be their judge.
My son, it will not surprise you to hear that both Blondwe and Father Ezequiel have been a blessing to our lives. Your hand led them to us: the former as a dedicated factory worker, the latter as a spiritual friend. Blondwe-the-fisherman who was for many years your friendly host in your mangrove excursions, until start working at ‘Mobel’. One of three hundred workers which your father is proud to employ, including a blind switchboard operator trained for the purpose. As for Father Ezequiel, he is a dedicated friend and colleague since your Oxford days and a contact we ourselves kept since then. You should be happy to know that they both have been vital to our getaway. Blondwe’s party membership –compulsory in many ways– allowed him to be made aware and able to forewarn us that we risk being detained at any moment and therefore we must flee. Father Ezequiel in now helping us to get away to Lisbon via Malawi: as you know he is from Tete and his regional knowledge and contacts are crucial. It is through him that I send you this letter, which should reach you after we are hopefully safe.
Not only will our factory be taken and given away to a party-member, but I am also told that the Governor of Beira is expecting to ‘nationalize’ our home for his own benefit. It is therefore, urgent that you come here to rescue the personal belongings which we could not take with us. In fact, except some of our clothing, we leave behind all that we possess. Hence, take all you need to your home in Maputo before too long. We are arranging for payment compensations to be given to our domestic workers. It is with great sadness that we cannot properly bid farewell to them either. Furthermore, I do not expect that the funds which we have deposited at the Consulate of Portugal will ever be refunded in Portugal. Many expatriates are hopelessly waiting for similar monies which I understand will never be repaid.
I have a further request: will you please recover the money we’ve hidden at the same spot where you secretly used to listen to ‘The Voice of Frelimo’ radio station broadcasted from Tanzania during the colonial war? We knew where you were headed after dinner. We were aware of your political views, and father had been warned by the Portuguese intelligence police (PIDE) that they were watching you and, by special deference, expected us to ‘rehabilitate’ you before too late... We respected you too much to question your convictions even though, as you may recall, we begged you for discretion. You will also remember that we encouraged your free-thinking and intellectual progress by providing you with an open account at ‘Salema & Carvalho’ and other Beira bookshops. We were aware that many of the books you ordered were blacklisted, but we never attempted to sway your views: like yourself, we secretly desired that the new Mozambique would become an exemplary, democratic, multiracial homeland. We were wrong how it turned out to be after independence, but hope to be right one day.
In seeing our dream postponed, we beg you to give Father Ezequiel the money you will exhume. I understood from him that he seeks finance to the ‘initiation rites’ program for teenagers. He cannot however be seen to possess a large amount of money and therefore I ask you to keep the money and send him instead, as required, small installments.
As in the poetic book of Job, I end my letter to you with a sense of loss, but still without losing hope: “Where is the home of light, and where does darkness live? If I should die, I beg the earth not to cover my cry for justice.” Although our time is up, although cruelty and violence have spread everywhere, life will sprout tenfold at the end of the flood (…)
III. The Downfall: Neither good nor evil can last forever
I have hope even in the darkest days, as I imagine how it could have been different. Once upon a time the old mission had a proud white chapel which over time decayed into a crumbling building beneath a clump of cashew-nut trees, its façade fading away into a greyish-bark tone. The wedlock of plant and plaster, for better for worse. Now I see people sitting around in a circle, the whispering shadows of those living in a forced union in dishonor: People need people in order to survive, particularly in a concentration camp.
Above the door, the scribbled sign reads “I am eyes to the blind and feet to the lame”.
Visions and sounds fall behind as I enter the chapel. Once a week I am allowed to give mass, comforting those trying to survive in hope, inner reason or whatever trust is left in them. I stop by the doorway and close my eyes to let myself blend into the darkness. I breathe in the dampness and decay of its walls, plastic flowers, rotten wood. I summon God to this forsaken place, longing to be heard. I open my eyes to be hailed by a barren altar covered by a soiled piece of cloth which might have been bright and graceful in early days of devotion.
Until being forbidden by the party, my initiation rites brought to this chapel large groups of joyful teenagers: colourful events with banderoles, laughter and singing. I inspired them to understand the three ways of living their lives: to live to imitate, to live to please or to live making one’s life worth living... those were days of spiritual growth, the coming of age, looking for answers: what is holding me back? Do I see how interconnected we all are? How can I find a spiritual direction to my life? … But questioning is invariably forbidden as soon as tyrants decide to put fear out of their minds. I know that they are ultimately frightened to see the young moving ahead from religiosity to spirituality. They know that the vastness of memory, although being a mystery, tends to preserve what is good and discards evil. Now brainwashing has replaced spiritual growth: the songs we monotonously sing have now been replaced by a single theme, a repetitive chorus line.
With the children gone and the old mission converted into a Gulag, the age of innocence became the age of infamy: banderoles show instead crooked, blood-red slogans and the singing is nothing more than cheerless political jargon. Truckloads with newcomers arrive by day, shiploads of old-timers depart by night: coming in for something and going out to nothing. Nothing is lost, nothing is created, reality is an illusion.
Illusion also prevails in the cities, as much as delusion prevails abroad. The ruling and emerging bourgeoisie ignore the countryside, and ‘international aid’ keep feeding the bank accounts of corrupted politicians. Nothing seems to be more real than instant need and greed; the past is only a useful reference as long as memorable lies are recreated; and the bright, socialist future will be a good deal until someone else’s money runs out. But a useful chimera for the time being. I recall however having read that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". War is now back, yesterday being ‘colonial’, today ‘civil’; tomorrow to erupt where the liberation struggle started. Foreign interests will run the country as soon as the local kleptocracy squanders all there is to be easily explored; by then, only the ‘slash and burn’ of natural resources will be left. As for now, justice and truth are distorted, justifying the present for the injustice of the past: no nation will truly raise from such lies.
Tomás, who was tortured to blindness came to me. Confession is a good excuse for confidence. And confidence is sometimes a path to wonder, for once he was a neighbor to Abel. The same Abel, the old friend from my Oxford days and son to my benefactor, whom I had helped to escape from Beira to Malawi. Such synchronicities and improbable encounters are hard to explain. And there is so little we know! As a priest I often question the meaning and purpose of life and the world, the inexplicable paths connecting each one of us to one another and to God; is this why so often, when thinking about the meaning of the inexplicable and the unknown, we end up praying in so many different ways and words?
I pray for Tomás, once an honest Frelimo Officer, betrayed by the envy of his pairs. He offered his youth to the war of liberation, he sacrificed his own body to defend his ideals. He proudly showed me in his pocket a photograph of him as a bodyguard, sitting behind his president in a victory parade in Dar es Salaam. But now only unbearable memories have outlived his eyes, burnt during interrogation and torture. He told me that soon it will all be over. I hear that he and others have recently been dumped in the sea in a sack full of stones. I pray for Tomás, I pray for Joana, I pray for Uria, I pray for Paulo, I pray for Adelino, I pray for Father Mateus, I pray for Lázaro and many others Lazarus by name and fate, their spiritual resurrection in heaven and their honor and martyrdom will be praised as soon as tyranny is broken.
These are days of undefined void, of diminishing existence, of darkness at noon. Despotic times of silence or lies, no rule of law on sight. How many will succumb to an illegitimate regime despising responsibility and committing hideous acts against civil society? A regime that does not define what a ‘collaborator’ or ‘traitor’ is, although ethnic, linguistic, racial, religious and social bigotry plays a role in their arbitrary execution of countless innocents being ‘reeducated’. How can the international democracies turn a blind eye towards such crimes? Why is Portugal ignoring the fact that citizens are being murdered for their role in democratic organizations recognized under Portuguese rule before independence? How will Mozambique and Portugal remember their interconnected colonial and post-colonial past? What is being deliberately forgotten or fabricated? Why is ‘Mozambican Communism’ and what was once ‘Colonial Fascism’ not being compared? For one is ‘African’ and the other ‘foreign’?
Early sunlight accentuates the lines and shapes of my strolling on the dusty floor as I reflect on my crimes: I, the convicted perverter of the youth, the ally helping ‘colonialists’ to flee from ‘popular justice’, the one who offers ‘opium to the people’. Stillness within and without, but the conviction that He is here by my side for my last mass. Ten steps take me to the altar where I bow, five to the small window from where I see the slow string of the faithful approaching. As many of them I have no regrets: I celebrate my choices and rejoice with the present awareness of being needed, to be able to offer the liturgy of love. The seed will surely take root. My children have tasted the true freedom of liberation, and the foundation of true faith and values will claim our place in modernity against the wasteland promoted by the ruling autocrats.
I look around and they look back at me from shadowland: my chapel made into an endless shrine suspended in time and space, holding the few true souls able to see me at the altar. And to understand the meaning of the sacred. From the silence, I hear my voice say: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. And they respond: It is right and just (even if there is presently no rightfulness or justice, as we see cruelty and violence spread everywhere, we believe otherwise).
I try to trust my own words when I say that the biblical flood illustrates how life must be renewed when only evil prevails. Humans were created like He, and 'He will punish animal or person that takes a human life’. I try to accept when I say that the rainbow in the sky - which I have not seen in a long time- is a reminder that light always wins over darkness. Natural law wins every time over Human law. But – without saying it - why are we locked up without even been convicted by the rule of law? Still, don’t lose hope, I hear me repeating: ‘only those who plant seeds of evil harvest trouble’. Say with me: I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the rebirth of the world to come. For it will come. Amen.
(1) Beira and the whole Sofala region will be understood without its geopolitical setting: 30 km South of Beira the first European fortress in South-East Africa was erected at Sofala (and further North at Kilwa, both in 1505), when Muslim merchants lost to Portugal the gold trade with the Mutapa State. However, by the time Beira was born (1887), galloping tides and depleted business had already wrecked the Sofala Fort. East-West, from swamps to the adjacent highland plateau, floodplains hurry up to meet the Penhalonga, Inyangani and Bvumba heights near Mutare, the doorway to Zimbabwe. In-between, along the corridor, the Buzi and Pungwe rivers blend well with the upstream mountain belt biomes, providing rich farming livelihoods to Bantu-speaking immigrants arriving 2000 years ago from their West African cradle. In spite of geomorphological complementarities, Anglo-Portuguese conflicts kept this corridor apart, as the Portuguese ‘Pink Map’ linking Angola to Mozambique clashed with Cecil Rhodes’ ‘Cape to Cairo’ venture: an insoluble intersection. The ‘scramble for Africa’ appeased by the Berlin Conference of 1885 determined the fate of the East-West Beira-Mutare corridor, now constricted as the 250 km waist to an elongated body-mass intersecting the 2 795 km running from South Africa to Tanzania along the convoluted Indian Ocean coastline overlooking Madagascar.
(2) Male servant
(3) Agricultural plots
(4) The old farming (rotational) system of clearing up new agricultural land by cutting down and burn woodland, using its ash for fertilization.