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.