I wondered, as we drifted in on a soft night breeze, what was so strikingly
unusual about the long black band of shoreline spooling out ahead. The wake
of our dhow stimulated light-emitting plankton that glowed in the warm
waters of the Mozambique Channel. Then, as I listened to the low Kimwani
murmuring of the boatmen, I realised what it was. There was no artificial
light anywhere — not a single pinhead of sodium breaking up the solid
darkness of the East African coast.
Mozambique is one of the poorest countries in Africa. The average citizen
receives 1.1 years of schooling, life expectancy is 40 for men and 45 for
women, and most villages have yet to experience electricity. For the past
decade, however, this huge country — almost four times the size of Britain —
has enjoyed one of sub-Saharan Africa’s fastest-growing economies.
True, it started at a wretchedly low point: the 1976-1992 civil war finished
off a system half-wrecked by post-independence Marxist policies. But foreign
capital is finally beginning to flow in, the infrastructure is improving and
a chorus of commentators insist that Mozambique is on the up.
Cabo Delgado in the north is the most impoverished of all the country’s ten
provinces. I spent ten days exploring the 27 tropical islands of the
Quirimbas archipelago, a scattered group extending almost to the Tanzanian
border. It is a quietly sweltering landscape of mangrove channels and fish
eagles, of outrigger canoes freighted with barracuda, and of the lateen
wings of dhows rising from the water like fins.
The reefs here are healthy, compared at least with the degraded coral
elsewhere in the Indian Ocean. Fishing, to start with, is of the subsistence
variety, rather than large-scale commercial. On uninhabited Rolas Island, I
found half a dozen families camped out waiting for their catch to dry on
racks — anglers with the tubular eyes of the sea-bed dweller, octopus,
snapper, parrot fish — and under a makeshift shelter boys were smoking
kebabs of spiny sea cucumber. The women’ s faces, alarmingly, were painted
aspirin-white. This turned out to be the traditional Quirimbas musiro beauty
mask made from the pounded root of a bushy plant (Anita Roddick used it for
a Body Shop product). Before long I was installed under a coconut palm
having my own private spa treatment at the hands of Manessa, a dowager in a
nightie printed with the words “Starry Dreams”. Once applied, the mask is
finished off with a pointillist pattern, in my case involving rivulets of
“tears” signifying that my husband was sleeping with another woman. (When I
finally got through to him on the phone a week later, he denied it.)
Centuries before the railway opened up the interior, Arabian merchants
capitalised on a fortuitous alternation in the monsoon winds to found
harbour towns from Somalia to Mozambique. Lamu, Zanzibar, Kilwa, Mombasa —
ports that retain the ease of the Orient, where you can still drink coffee
served from brass jars by vendors tending tiny charcoal braziers behind the
plain ashlar beauty of the Arab mansions. Pemba in northern Mozambique — the
gateway to the Quirimbas — is among the southernmost of this chain, an
ancient settlement by African standards, characterised by whitewashed
mosques, the languor of the waterfront at dusk, and papery butterflies
fretful among the frangipani.
When the Portuguese arrived in the 15th century they set up their provincial
capital in the Muslim trading port of Ibo in the Quirimbas, and grew fat on
slaves and ivory. Ibo today is a study in sultry dilapidation. I strolled
down the wide streets past colonial villas with walls a metre thick and
blowsy almond trees heavy with swollen pods. In the fort of São João
Baptista de Ajudá, below canons still trained on ghostly pirate ships,
silversmiths sat hunched over their burners, fashioning jewellery using
ancient Arab techniques.
Of course, there’s hardly anywhere to stay, and no restaurants. But the two
places I found were enchanting. First I spent four nights at Quilálea, an
island 34 miles north of Pemba, in a luxurious teak chalet opening on to its
own secluded beach. Unusually, this island has its own reef, so you can
snorkel straight from the shore. It was here that I learned just how
wonderful the seabed still looks in northern Mozambique.
Carpets of soft coral with floppy sapphire tentacles and fuchsia and yellow
polyps exploding from white branches like fireworks, organ-pipe coral with
its blood-red skeleton of upright tubes, tables of hard staghorn and
hemispheres of brain coral with khaki grooves and ridges. Among it all,
great shoals of exquisitely patterned oval reef fish, fusiliers, threadfin
butterflyfish, blue stingrays, blackspotted electric ray, Moorish idols and
silvery-blue False Englishmen with their boxy faces, steep foreheads and
salmon crossbars.
From Quilálea I moved to Guludo, a tiny tented camp on the mainland coast
looking out into the steaming blue of the Mozambique Channel. I am generally
allergic to the term ecotourism on the grounds that if you care about the
environment you should never take a plane, but I left Guludo a convert. The
camp was conceived almost four years ago by an English couple, Amy Carter
and her partner Neal Allcock, a former Arsenal reserves player.
Blonde, frail and still only 25, Amy has the passionate determination of the
visionary. “We wanted to use tourism both for conservation and to help local
people,” she told me as we sat in the motionless afternoon heat. “We have
tried to create an amazing holiday experience in which guests can
participate in local projects.” The pair invested everything in their dream.
Their sole outside asset is a Vespa stored in Amy’s father’s garage.
The accommodation consists of nine plush, box-shaped net tents covered with a
thatched roof that slopes right to the sand. Besides languishing on the
pristine beach, or diving, guests are encouraged to visit Guludo village
half a mile inland. As Amy showed me round the dusty network of streets she
greeted a tailor treadling away on an antediluvian Singer. He was making her
staff uniforms.
The camp gives money each month to a village council, and 5 per cent of
revenues goes to its own UK-registered charity that funds — for example —
clean water programmes (the supply currently comes from a stagnant pond
shared with elephants). Last month, Guludo was Highly Commended in the
Poverty Reduction category of the First Choice Responsible Tourism Awards,
of which The Times is the media partner. But on the ground there is
still suspicion — people are familiar with the broken promises of the white
man.
On my last day Amy drove me to Pemba, where I was to fly to Johannesburg. On
the four-hour journey she pointed out several capital projects funded by the
new inward investment. Outside of each, I noted the country’s flag flapping
in the wind. It is the only flag in the world to bear a firearm — the
silhouette of a Kalashnikov AK-47. This exemplifies the paradox of northern
Mozambique: one senses a phoenix beating its wings in the ashes of civil
war, but also an inability to throw off the past.
Whatever the outcome, this is an as yet unspoilt region teetering on the cusp
of change. You can’t resist change when it brings desperately needed health
benefits. But still, I shall be sorry, when I return, to see that mysterious
coast lit up with electric light.
Need to know
How to get there: Sara Wheeler travelled with Rainbow Tours
(020-7226 1004, www.rainbowtours.co.uk).
Where to stay: A nine-day trip of three nights fully
inclusive at Quilálea, five nights fully inclusive at Guludo Beach Lodge,
and one night’s B&B in Dar es Salaam, costs from £2,145pp. The
price includes flights from Heathrow on Kenyan Airways and Precision Air via
Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and all transfers.
