A Culture Lost

A couple of years ago, Mel Lastman, the outspoken mayor of Toronto, embarrassed himself and our city with a demonstration of his lack of knowledge about Africa.

On the eve of travelling to Mombasa Hamisi Mboga, Kenya, Mr Lastman joked with reporters that he feared being hoisted into a vat of boiling water while natives danced around him.

He was preparing to travel to Kenya to promote Toronto's 2008 Olympic bid. The remark didn't help our city's chances to win the Olympic Games and vault itself onto the international stage, and the Olympics were eventually awarded to Beijing.

(Yes, there are infrequent reports of cannibalism in Africa, just as there was in Germany in 2001.)

Fears of boiling pots of cannibal soup aside, the tragic reality is that much African culture, like much native culture in North America, has been lost in large measure because of historic ignorance not unlike that exhibited by Mr Lastman in Toronto.

Traditional tribal languages have also been pushed aside in favour of European languages, though this is changing somewhat.

Laura and I recently had the opportunity to visit a cultural village established to celebrate the heritage of the Shangana tribe, which is the predominant tribe in southern Mozambique. We witnessed traditional clothing and dance, and partook in a traditional meal.

The meal, as it turns out, was very similar to the one that we experienced at Paulo and Olga's wedding. Traditional food, it seems, has not been lost.

The most significant difference was the wedding's lack of traditional appetizers: worms, crocodile and impala. These delicacies weren't in short supply at the cultural village. (Laura and I were thankful that they were well sauced!)

The very fact that we had to travel to a living museum to witness the traditional culture of the people in whose land we are immersed is telling. Today, many Mozambicans (particularly men) have shed traditional African flamboyancy in favour of the standard uniform of westerners' clothing: pants and a shirt.

In some places, this is because of used clothing arriving courtesy of westerners' donations. Evidence of this is common. People have no inhibitions about wearing t-shirts with tourist slogans scrawled across their chests, or sweatshirts advertising some little-known college in the United States, or someone's long-forgotten amateur softball uniform.

In Africa, a shirt's often just a shirt.

But this doesn't accurately paint the picture. Many Africans in Mozambique wear clean and well-pressed clothing. Tasteful clothing. But not traditional African clothing. Their colonizers taught them to wear Western clothing.

Men don't wear copalanas anymore. Civilized men don't wear skirts.

Contempt for the culture practiced by the majority population of the derisively-named Dark Continent was widespread among colonizers. Ian Smith, the last European Prime Minister of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), demonstrates this contempt in unapologetic fashion in his 1997 memoirs:

It is difficult for people who have never lived in this part of the world to appreciate that sub-Saharan Africa is different. It was the last part of our world to come into contact with western European civilization... The wheel had not even evolved, nor had the plough. The change which has taken place is absolutely phenomenal, and is a tribute to what the white inhabitants did over a period of ninety years. (Smith, The Great Betrayal, p. 55).

The colonialists and the naive, it would seem, saw native Africans as monkeys in the jungle needing to be modernized. Or exploited.

It's shameful that so much of African culture has been lost.

And it's a shame that Africa must battle its image as a continent where visitors will be encountered at the airport by a throng of salivating cannibals dancing in their leopard-skin loincloths.

Os Emprestimos

When I started learning Portuguese, I learned the word for "loan." Emprestimo. I thought that it would be a useful word to know when dealing with microcredit and business development.

I didn't realize how often I would hear it from individuals asking me for a loan. Queria um emprestimo, por favor.

Of course, the request is never that direct. Not in Africa.

We've been asked for many loans or gifts (the lines are rarely so clear) over the past months. This week, it was our empregada who asked for a loan. The conversation went something like this:

"Good morning, patron. How are you?"

"Good morning, Alzira. I'm doing fine, thanks. How are you doing today?"

"I'm fine as well. Laura is at school today?"

"Yes, she's at school."

"My mother is sick right now, but she's in Chokwe and I don't have enough money to visit her."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

(Notice my Western-style response: directly responding to the explicit statement. I didn't detect a request for a loan buried in there!)

I had inadvertently forced her to ask more directly:

"Could I have a loan for two hundred so that I can travel there this weekend?"

Even here, when my ignorance has forced her to be more direct, she avoids using the key words that I would understand: dineiro or meticais. Money or dollars. I almost missed the question. Then I realized that I had heard the key word: emprestimo. Still, I wanted to clarify:

"Two hundred meticais?"

She looked embarrassed, perhaps because I made the request more direct by using the word meticais. Or perhaps because she was asking for a loan in the first place.

Some people have advised us against lending money to Mozambicans. Their reasons vary.

Some people think that when Africans ask for a loan, they really have little intention of repaying it. In this case, if she had've asked for the $8 outright to visit her sick mother in a different province, I probably would have obliged.

Some people argue that we're not doing anyone any favours by helping them to live above their means. I'm sympathetic to this point, but I'm also sympathetic to her sick mother. And I would rather let her make a bad decision about her life than force my own decisions onto her.

In a perfect world, Africans would save their money so that they had some left over for a rainy day (or perhaps a more apt metaphor would be for a drought). In a perfect world, they would have enough to eat every day as well.

I can give her a loan because I can secure it against her future wages -- after all, those wages come from my wallet. But that's not the point. The point is that we have a cultural bias towards savings, in part stemming from the comfort that comes from a stable political and economic climate.

Africans have had too turbulent a history to be able to count on their savings having any value tomorrow.

Instead, African culture permits the borrower, not the lender, to determine the level and legitimacy of their request. In some ways, that's a freeing thought. At least this time, I won't worry about whether or not I'm helping or hurting.

Yes, Math is Important!

I had the opportunity of acting as a "quantity surveyor" recently on our post-secondary school construction project. I was asked to measure the amount of work that the tilers had completed to ensure that they receive the correct payment.

If they receive too much, especially in Mozambique, they would still ask for payment when the work was actually done. It's important to not pay in advance.

Africans have short memories, especially when they're on the winning side of a financial transaction.

We have some contracts in this situation. Some workers have received more money than they should have for the amount of work done to date, and the result is foot-dragging for the rest of the project. Having already been paid, they have little incentive to work.

That cultural reality is perhaps at the heart of a World Bank report that recently re-affirmed sub-Saharan Africa’s standing as the most difficult region in the world to do business. Amongst these countries, Mozambique is no exception as it continues to experience the pains of emerging from its post-independence days as a single-party socialist state.

Mozambique did particularly poorly on the sub-categories of "Enforcing Contracts" (7th worst) and "Employing Workers" (18th worst).

On this day, the tilers were requesting payment for their work. Their contract stipulates that they be paid in three equal installments over the course of the project. With roughly two thirds of the work having been completed, they were asking for their tenth payment.

I calculated the value of the work done to date. Melvin, the site supervisor, calculated how much money they had received to date. The balance owing was a meagre $8.

"Math is important," the trade's supervisor told me, exasperated. "I asked for an advance here, and an advance there. I didn't know it would add up to so much!"

* * * * *

Record keeping is incredibly important in Africa. That's true anywhere in the world, but here it seems that if we don't keep records, nobody will.

This is true even for well-educated people, like my language instructor, Jeronimo. We discussed an hourly rate for the lessons, but never discussed how long they would last, and never entered into any sort of written agreement. When I told him that I was finished, he told me to tell him how many hours we had spent in class over the 12 week period.

I asked him if he had kept records as well. He said that he had, as a smirk grew over his face.

I then told him the number that I had recorded, and he wrote it onto an invoice for me to pay. Maybe he knew how many hours we had been together, but I'm not convinced.

* * * * *

I can say with confidence that the tilers hadn't kept track of how much they had been paid to date. A just person would pay the tradesworkers what they are owed for the work completed. A merciful person, seeing the worry grow across their faces, may pay them a little extra in advance.

Getting that balance wrong is one of the factors for which many construction projects, particularly those by humanitarian and religious organizations in third-world countries, seem to go over budget.

Where should the balance be struck?

A Coat of Fresh Paint and Some Dynamite

Cape Town is a beautiful city, a wealthy city. If it were ripped from its African roots and floated across to the other side of the Atlantic, it would fit in without much trouble amongst the cities of North America. It is not without crime and poverty, but it also has a feeling of promise and hope.

I have heard repeatedly that, 30 years ago, there were many African capitals in this same situation. Maputo, the evidence would show, was among these.

Jeffrey Sachs, in his insightfully- and optimistically-written bestseller, "The End of Poverty," backs my anecdotal evidence with hard data: sub-Saharan Africa has increased in both the absolute number and proportion of population living in extreme poverty over the twenty-year period of 1981 to 2001. Africans have, on average, become poorer over the past quarter-century.

The core of Maputo consists of high-rise buildings built with typical Portuguese architecture along wide, tree-lined avenues. It whispers secrets about a long-past beauty, but today many of its buildings are crumbling.

The towering Four Seasons hotel reveals some of Maputo's worst-kept secrets. From a distance, it is a hotel that stands as a proud beacon on the shores Indian Ocean. Surely it has entertained scores of the world's wealthy and famous.

A keen observer will notice, however, that the hotel has never hosted a single guest. Its unfinished concrete frame stands as a beacon of distrust, not pride. This distrust resulted in policies such as the infamous "24-20" edicts at the end of the revolution, by which minister of the interior (and now current president) Armando Guebuza evicted any white resident suspected of being a counterrevolutionary. Guebuza's edict gave such suspects, without so much as a trial or opportunity for defense, 24 hours to leave the country and restricted them to 20kg of luggage each.

The Portuguese fled, leaving the civil service and most businesses without a sufficient number of trained employees to allow for a successful transition of power. The Four Seasons hotel was left unfinished, and rumours have circulated for the subsequent three decades about sabateurs having poured cement down the elevator shafts and through the plumbing; rumours that the Portuguese architects had fled with the drawings.

It is nothing but an empty, vacant, abandoned shell, and has never been anything but an empty shell.

Behind the hotel is a massive crater serving as a reminder that, during the floods of March 2000, hundreds of homes and countless lives in the Maputo suburb of Polana Caniço were washed out into the ocean.

There has been a long line of companies that have attempted to complete or redevelop the hotel, but for 30 years company after company has walked away and the rumours of sabotage have persisted. The latest proposal is that the US government is going to implode the building in February to make room for a new oceanfront embassy and residential compound.

If these plans come to fruition, the disappearance of this blight will represent for some Mozambicans another step along the cathartic path to reconstruction. And for countless others, its implosion will have no greater impact than providing an afternoon of cheap entertainment.

Who, Us? Unwelcome?

As comfortable as we have become in Africa, it's useful for us to remember that the country printed on the front of our passports is our home. Everywhere else, we're just visitors.

And everywhere else, we're just guests who can be asked to leave.

Part of our vacation in Cape Town was spent plumbing the ranks of South Africa's Department of Home Affairs, trying to seek permission to stay in the country long enough to finish our 7 days of vacation. The problem started quietly in September with a boarder official who neglected to stamp our passport on our way out of South Africa.

And then, just as quietly, another forgot to stamp it on the way back in six weeks later.

This time, because of the missing stamps, it looked to the boarder guard that we had overstayed our welcome in South Africa on our previous visit. We would still be allowed in the country, but we had to speak with someone at Home Affairs. And just to be sure that we would, he scribbled instructions to that effect across our visa in our passports.

This note was written at Jeppe's Reef, between Swaziland and South Africa. We had the first several days booked in Kruger Park. After that stay, the ink on the notation dried a little further as we traveled to Cape Town, and further still as the government offices closed early on Friday and sat locked up over the weekend.

The day before we were set to become illegal in South Africa, we finally found our way into Home Affairs and were received by a lady with a long list of requirements to fulfill: we can fix this problem for you, but you'll have to have proof of exiting the country (difficult when we arrived in a private car), proof of sufficient funds to finance our stay (difficult since we have no bank account in Africa), and pay R425 each as an application fee and R2200 as a security deposit, refundable once we leave the country.

We scrambled to assemble these things, and returned the next morning to speak to a new person behind the counter. This new person, a man, was friendlier but after several hours had only bad news.

Unfortunately, our application was denied, and there was nothing he could do. He had even checked with his colleague, who agreed that the visa could not be extended. We had to leave the country that day. No matter that Maputo is 1,600 km away, and no matter that we had no way to travel that distance.

Luckily, the man was friendly despite his no-nonsense message. He pulled out a scrap piece of paper and started diagramming for us why we were unwelcome in his country. The missing stamps in our passports fabricated a story that we were living in South Africa, staying from temporary visa to temporary visa, leaving only long enough to have a new visa issued. He was sympathetic enough to my corrected version of our situation that he was willing to let us speak to his boss, though he initially thought even this to be futile: "It will be difficult to assemble the machinery of management to get this approved in a single day," he said on our way out.

We found his boss upstairs, a busy bureaucrat who found importance in being seen to run from task to task. "If you try to chase two rabbits," he counseled us, fretting among the stacks of paper burying his desk, "you're not likely to catch either one." He proceeded to shake his head and wonder why he couldn't heed his own advice. I tried to gain his sympathy by commenting that he appeared to be chasing at least a dozen.

He listened to our story, and made a note on a scrap of paper for us to bring downstairs to the man at the counter. His penmanship was the calibre of an important doctor, and it seemed that his prescription must have been for us to wait in line for several more hours.

Back downstairs, the friendly man at the counter stapled this note to our paperwork and passed the file to the next bureaucrat to process, who also sent it up to Mr Fudd, the wabbit hunter, to approve our "unique case." After an hour of silence, we ventured back upstairs. By evidence of banging his fist against the plasterboard office partitions, Mr Fudd's day wasn't improving, but he too was surprisingly friendly and helpful. Our paperwork was found within a foot-thick pile to be processed whenever time permitted, but he pulled it out, wrote another prescription, and sent us back downstairs.

Within 30 minutes we had new visas allowing us to stay in South Africa until April if we so desired, and without having to pay a penny for the permit. It turns out that we were, once again, welcome to stay.

The Contrasts of Cape Town

There are plenty of places on this continent, and in this country, that experience greater poverty than urban Maputo. There are certainly a few wealthier places, as well.

Nowhere are these contrasts as sharp as in South Africa, and perhaps nowhere in South Africa are they as distinct as in Cape Town, where we spent some holiday time over Christmas.

Cape Town is a city of wealth unknown in Maputo, even if that wealth is only a thinly-brushed veneer.

Traveling from the airport, we passed entire neighbourhoods of Africa's trademark corrugated roof shanties, and plenty of evidence of more solidly-built but equally small housing provided by the government. The seeds of progress. Cape Town's poverty was quickly left behind as we reached the office towers and tourist shops that make up the city bowl.

Cape Town is the legislative capital of South Africa. It's the city where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island in the height of the country's disgrace called apartheid, and where he later took his seat as the post-apartheid republic's first president.

Immediately beside the seat of legislative power is a museum that was once a slave lodge prominent in a city that served as an important hub of slave trade activity. The museum that now celebrates racial freedom creates parallels between South Africa's apartheid experience and the Civil Rights movement in the United States, drawing inspiration from the latter that South Africa can move beyond its racist history.

Simo, who lives 2,700 km away in Malawi but works in Cape Town part of each year to earn additional money, was our host at a small bed and breakfast that we used as our staging ground as we prepared our day-long excursions into the city. He preferred home: sure, Cape Town is beautiful, but the problem is that it's on the ocean. When people have no money, they have nowhere to go for fresh water. At least people in Malawi, situated on a large in-land freshwater lake, don't die, he said.

The fact is that people in Malawi die far too frequently of starvation, but Simo's point was that there are certain benefits to being able to live in a country where survival doesn't depend on participation in a formal trade-based economy. Simo's life back home, where the lakes are full of fresh water and the neighbourhood's trees shed plentiful fruit for the taking, is free of the complexities of a global world.

We met another man who also lives in Malawi but works in Cape Town's booming tourism industry to be able to send money home. Working as a hotel porter is far better than the harsh conditions faced by the previous generation, who traveled to South Africa to earn money working in the gold mines of Johannesburg.

* * * * *

Cape Town continued to build upon our image of Africa as a continent of natural beauty, as well, and in so doing drove the stake deeper into the heart of the mythology of Africa as a dry, desolate and depressing desert (click on any of the photos below for a larger version):

• Cape Town's signature Table Mountain (also pictured above) is appreciated most after a sweaty and occasionally difficult two-hour climb.

• The Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens illuminate the extreme diversity of plant life in the Eastern Cape, like the famous protea family of flowers.

• Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope, focal points of natural beauty and often mistakenly thought of as the southernmost tip of Africa (even the tourist shops traded on this mistake, selling a wide variety of goods incorrectly emblazoned with the slogan, "Where two oceans meet.")

• Boulders Beach, a small sandy patch of False Bay where the photogenic African penguins spend their days hobbling around under the sun and enduring the paparazzi-flashes of streams of tourists.

• Similar hot spots where entire colonies of seals compete for attention and the prize of being captured on all manner of digital devices (or could it be that they just want to be left alone to lay on the rocks and bask in the heat of the sun?)

• A spectacularly developed waterfront, including the Two Oceans Aquarium, providing up-close examination of southern Africa's spectacularly colourful sea life.

Once again Africa, a hugely underrated continent, has not failed to show off its impressive natural beauty.

Alzira, empregada

Mozambique, like third-world countries in general, is characterized by low labour costs. As a result, everything is done manually. Here, for example, lines are painted on the roads by a guy with a big brush and a can of paint. The street sweeper is literally a lady holding a hand-made broom.

Because of the low labour costs, many middle- and upper-class residents of Mozambique can afford guards and cleaners for their homes. Alzira is the empregada (which translates simply as, "worker") that we inherited with our apartment to come and clean it once a week.

Alzira's husband died less than a month before we arrived, leaving her to tend her children by herself. She's only able to find work twice a week, so we decided to keep using her to provide her with much-needed income, though we appreciate the help cleaning as well.

Her wage is 140,000 meticais (about $5.75) per day, a raise of $1 over her previous employers. Combined with another part-time job that Alzira has, her weekly income is about $10. We also pay her an extra 10,000 meticais for her transportation to and from work.

We decided that if she was going to work for us, we'd like to visit her home and see how she lives, too. And once we were there, we knew that it was the right decision. The shy and reserved Alzira who avoids making eye contact in our apartment vanished. In her place was a broadly-smiling Alzira who was proud to show us her home and her children.

She lives in a simple house, the entire yard being perhaps 1,000 square feet. The main building is a brick structure where the "living" is done (mostly sleeping, really). There's also a kitchen at the front of the property, strung together with spare materials, and a hole in the backyard where she is slowly building a washroom with money that she saves.

I thought that it must be strange having a kitchen and a washroom outside the house, but learned that many Mozambicans think we're just as strange for wanting them inside. The difference is a function of several factors:

• Most cooking is done over open fires (of wood or charcoal), or with gas for those who can afford it. Keeping the kitchen outside reduces the pollutants in the house where the family sleeps.

• Not having to endure winter months means that "outside" and "inside" are boundaries that get blurred. Alzira's kitchen and washroom are just as close to her bedroom as are ours; the major difference is that our hallway happens to be covered by a roof, whereas hers is not.

• A family's kitchen and bathroom are functionally operational before a structure is built around them. For instance, cooking can be done in a fire pit beside the house before the walls of a kitchen are built around it. In Africa, homes are built in phases.
  

And, of course, because everything is done by hand in Mozambique, Alzira conducts these construction projects on her own. Her form of savings is very typical: when she has extra money, she buys building materials. She'll continue building once she has accumulated enough material.

A Clean Observation

I want to take a moment to applaud the cultural sensitivity of a major multinational corporation.

I recently purchased a box of OMO, the local laundry detergent produced by Unilever, the company behind such popular brands of consumer products as Lipton foods, Becel margarine, Vaseline, Sunlight detergent and Dove soap.

As I tore into the box this morning, I noticed that there was no scoop inside, so I had to actually consult the box to learn how much detergent to use to wash our clothes.

The directions don't say how much to use for a washing machine, because so few people in Mozambique actually have that luxury. Instead, the directions demonstrate putting a handful of detergent into a plastic tub for laundry.

These plastic tubs are ubiquitous in Mozambique. I instantly recognized it on the side of the box as being the same size and shape as the buckets that I see everywhere: in people's homes, at their preschools, and being carried by women on top of their heads as they walk down the street.

Whatever good or evil there may be to multinational corporations, Unilever gets a bonus point for cultural sensitivity. Good job.

...And a Filthy One

Sometimes when we snap the two padlocks closed and lock our front door, we are lulled by the comforting illusion that we have left the third world behind us.

But don't be fooled: it's just an illusion.

We've been having a problem with the washroom on our balcony -- it seems to flush fine, but hours later the dirty water reappears. Absolutely lovely.

The source of our plumbing problem was revealed to us this week in a charming e-mail from the apartment's previous tenants:

About the problem with the toilet. We had Zacarias, the plumber, come out and investigate it. He said those bathrooms where never built properly. The refuse from the one next door flows into your toilet and comes through the pipes into the bowl.

We did not have much trouble since the people next door were gone most of the time we were there. We just flushed it down a couple of times each day when they were home. Also, when we were leaving for a trip, we poured some bleach into the bowl.

Thankfully, we have two washrooms, and the one that we use most frequently (always, in fact) doesn't have this problem.

Of course, last night we couldn't flush any toilets, or wash dishes, because the water was off. It was restored sometime overnight. That's just Africa.

Homes and Cell Phones

I've been meeting with a young man named Mario twice a week to practice speaking Portuguese. I've been paying him for his services because it's truly been helpful, and because, at 24 years old, he's trying to finish school and look after his younger brother at the same time. He's looking for work as a translator at embassies, or as a chef. He loves to cook.

I met Mario at a local church that I attend more frequently than any other right now -- perhaps once every second week. He took the initiative to approach me for a job, and takes his commitment seriously.

Mario just showed me his new cell phone. It cost him $80, which I loaned him as an advance on his salary, to be paid back over two months.

The ubiquitous cell phone is a major asset in Mozambique. Just yesterday I heard about someone who is in hospital suffering stab wounds from a screwdriver. The thief coveted her cell phone.

By contrast, Mario is also paying a mortgage on the house he lives in. Because banks in Mozambique aren't interested in such small loans (and may not consider his meagre structure to be suitable for a mortgage anyway), the home's previous owner holds the mortgage (and title to the house, until Mario has completed his payments). Mario pays whenever he can put together some savings. He's not expected to pay monthly.

The house will cost roughly 20,000 meticais nova familia -- or about $800.

In other words, I just lent him 10% of the value of his house to buy a telephone. I was shocked. Surely that's an obscene amount of money for a phone.

Laura and I dropped him off at his house recently, in a subdivision of Maputo called "Polana Caniço." The house has three rooms, but it's only half-built: only one of the rooms has a roof, which consists of corrugated steel sheets set across the tops of the walls. There are holes where windows, or at least iron grates, might eventually go.

Some common features of homes in Canada are unnecessary and unheard of here. You have a heater in your home? Everybody does? Most Mozambicans don't understand the Canadian climate, and don't care to.

And other common features are luxurious. Like running water, which Mario doesn't have.

He doesn't have electricity either, because he can neither afford to hook it up nor afford to pay the bills. It's all too easy to forget the luxury that we are enjoying in Maputo: our electricity costs about $40 a month, purchased in advance on a pre-paid card. By contrast, the minimum wage in Mozambique, for those fortunate enough to have full employment, is US$58 a month.

(And even still, I don't know how common adherence to that official statistic is. A news service recently reported that soldiers in the army will receive raises to boost their salaries above $38 per month. Not even government employees receive minimum wage, it would appear.)

Cell phones are as expensive here as they are in Canada, which make them exceedingly expensive for the average Mozambican. They're also extremely important: potential employers need to know how to reach him.