Dark Star Safari

21. Faith, Hope and Charity on the Limpopo Line

Back in the dorp of Nelspruit, among the orange groves and jack-fruit trees and the fields of floppy-leafed tobacco, I looked at my map and saw that I was only seventy miles from the Mozambican border — about the same distance as Barnstable from Boston — and so I caught a cross-border bus to Maputo. I knew in advance that I would be doubling back across the border, which meant four immigration bottlenecks, two each way, and long lines. But anything was better than flying. I kept thinking of Nadine Gordimer introducing me: ‘He came from Cairo! On a bus!’

The bus was filled with Africans, many of whom were Mozambicans who had crossed the border to shop in Nelspruit for items that were unobtainable in Maputo. Two Indian men in skullcaps hogged the four seats on the front row of the top level. The men pulled off their shoes and sat cross-legged and the pong of their cheesy feet filled the upper deck. Because it had been advertised as a ‘luxury coach’ a movie was shown on the overhead TV set.

The movie, Jack, starring Robin Williams, had seemed a facetious thinly plotted and sentimental trifle when I first saw it in 1997. But travel-weary and with a big birthday behind me, the message of ‘live all you can’ from the prematurely aged Jack speaking at his high school graduation, made me absurdly emotional. A scene involving fart gas and explosive crepitation had the Indians clutching their sides in hilarity and laid one of them straight in the aisle, giggling. For a dose of reality I glanced out the window at the mud huts of the Swazi people in the direction of Piggs Peak, ruled over by the Ndlovukazi, their queen mum, the Great She Elephant of Swaziland.

Across the long hills, through the stone mountains, when we came to the first shanties I knew we were at the in-between land near the border. Riffraff mostly, no one looked at home here, people newly arrived or waiting to leave. The bus stopped. We lined up and walked through the formalities. The South African officials were efficient, the Mozambican protocols lacking in substance — for example, there was hardly enough ink on the immigration officer’s stamp to make an impression on my passport. About an hour and a half of this and then we were on our way, going down a good Mozambican road that the South Africans had built as a gift. We had passed Komatipoort, where there was a railway station, but there had been no trains running that day.

‘There were floods here last year,’ the African next to me said. ‘All this was under water.’

That had been in the world news, as African disasters always were — earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, massacres, famines, columns of refugees. And these are the lucky ones! Images of inundated fields, people clinging to treetops, and helicopter rescues had appeared on TV for a week, before becoming old news. The trouble with such disasters was their unchanging imagery — viewers got bored with them for their having no silver lining and no variation. For a catastrophe to have legs it needed to be an unfolding story, like a script with plot points, and preferably a happy ending. The ending of the Mozambican floods was the news of cholera and poisoned water, of thousands of people who had been made homeless, and hundreds who had drowned like rats.

‘And the worst was when the floods moved the landmines,’ the man said. ‘Picked them up and floated them all over the place. There was a grid saying where they had been put but after the floods the landmines were all in different places and couldn’t be located.’

Ray, the landmine expert I had met in the Sudan, had told me this was largely a rural myth in Africa. It was rare for whole minefields to move like ghost landscapes. And anyway dogs could sniff them out. I suggested this to the man in the seat next to me.

‘I saw a woman chasing a pig,’ he said, to contradict me. ‘It was near my house outside Maputo. Suddenly there was a huge explosion. The woman’s head was up a tree. Her arms and legs were all over the place. I mean, she stepped on a landmine in her own garden that had not been there before.’

Maputo appeared as a succession of outlying shanty towns and soon we were traveling from one district to another, with not much improvement in the look of things. Maputo was a true version of an African city, miles of slums and local markets, leading to the main streets and shops in the center of the city — a few tall buildings and rows of street lamps surrounded by miles of blight and danger: uncontained urbanization.

When the bus stopped and I got out I was besieged by beggars and taxi drivers and chewing gum hawkers and shoeshine boys and opportunists shrieking ‘Meesta!’ I surrendered to a taxi driver and asked him to take me to the Polana, a decayed wedding cake on the seafront, which had somehow survived from colonial days.

‘Any advice?’ I asked Candido, the driver.

‘Don’t walk at night,’ he said.

He explained the recent exchange rate of their devalued currency, the metical. This ride was 60,000, and a meal might be 175,000, and a bus ticket to South Africa probably half a million. A hundred dollars was about two and a half million meticais. The rate had changed for the worse since my trip to Beira.

‘And be careful of naughty boys,’ were Candido’s parting words. ‘They will steal from you.’

South Africans went to Mozambique the way Americans went to Mexico, for ‘color,’ a whiff of the gutter and the slum, cheap eats — fresh tiger prawns especially — ‘the real Africa,’ authenticity, and ugly knickknacks; also for snorkeling and swimming and whoring.

The fleshpots and the pleasures were in southern Mozambique and the coast just north of Maputo. Beira and the province of Zambezia, where I had been before Zimbabwe, were almost inaccessible by road from the capital. The north of Mozambique was like another country, sharing a border with Tanzania and possessing an East African culture, with remote villages inland, ancient fishing communities on the coast, and some of the best artisans and carvers in Africa, the Makonde people. No one went there.

In contrast, the deeper south of Mozambique was southern African in every respect — industrialized, detribalized, overpopulated, and crime-ridden, sharing a border with Swaziland and the South African province of Kwazulu-Natal, half a day’s bus ride to the prosperous seafront city of Durban.

Maputo was much praised as a desirable destination, but it was a dreary beat-up city of desperate people who had cowered there while war raged in the provinces for twenty-five years, destroying bridges, roads and railways. Banks and donors and charities claimed to have had successes in Mozambique. I suspected they invented these successes to justify their existence; I saw no positive results of charitable efforts. But whenever I articulated my skepticism about the economy, the unemployment, or even the potholes or the petty thievery, people in Maputo said, as Africans elsewhere did, ‘It was much worse before.’ In many places, I knew, it was much better before.

It was hard to imagine how much worse a place had to be for a broken-down city like Maputo to seem like an improvement. Some hotels and villas and shops and cafés existed from the Portuguese time, but that period had ended decades before. The grotesque fact was that from 1482, when Captain Diogo Cão planted the Portuguese flag on the coast of the Congo, the 500-year history of the Portuguese in Africa was one big racket of exploitation — at first the slave trade, then diamonds and oil in Angola, and agriculture in Mozambique.

Outsiders with no memory praised Maputo. But Maputo was a seedier version of its previous incarnation, the seedy former capital, Lourenço Marques, with higher walls around the villas and more barbed wire and much worse roads. Having seen the country’s interior, I knew what lay beyond the pale — blown-up bridges, devastated towns, ridiculous roads, defunct railway lines, no lights, no water, no telephones, no public transport. Perhaps the rural poverty that I had seen accounted for the large influx of people into the cities. It was easy to see that Maputo had all the characteristics of many African cities — a sprawl of shanty towns and poor markets, idle people and lurkers, an appalling vastness and a look of desperate improvisation. Maputo was in no sense a metropolis but, like all the other African cities, a gigantic and unsustainable village.

Not heeding Candido’s advice, and against my normal practice of staying inside at night, I went for a walk in Maputo to look for a place to eat. The long bus ride from Nelspruit had left me needing exercise. If I walked fast, I reasoned, my chances of being robbed were reduced.

Like jackals, some small boys leaped from the shadows and followed closely behind me, calling out, ‘Hungry, hungry.’

I kept going, encouraged by the lighted shop fronts, the night watchmen, the cafés. This was the main street of the upper town. The port was down below in the commercial district. The boys, four little bony forms, smelling of the street, crowded me and snatched at my fingers. They had sad embryonic faces and small sticky hands.

‘Give me money,’ each one said in turn.

I had prepared myself for such an encounter. There was nothing in my pocket, I wore a cheap watch, I was carrying very little money. I said no, and picked up my pace; but they stayed with me.

Waiting to cross the street, I was still flapping my hands to prevent them from being snatched at and one boy, the most poised and persistent of the four, assumed a scolding tone.

‘If you give me something I will leave you and you can go,’ the urchin said with a good command of English. ‘But if you don’t give me money or what-not, I will follow you and I will not leave you, and I will ask and ask.’

It was an impressive piece of hectoring, and portended a great career for the boy in politics or law, but I told them all to go away. As I spoke, some better prospects appeared — two young white women carrying shoulder bags and looking bewildered and benevolent. Gnat-like, the urchins whirred off to their new victims.

I found a restaurant, ordered the predictable meal, seven dollars’ worth of tiger prawns, and talked to the owner, Chris. Like many other entrepreneurs in Mozambique he was a South African, a junk dealer by trade. The junk business had boomed in Mozambique while the various wars were being fought, producing scrap metal in the form of bombed bridge girders, blown apart truck chassis, shattered railway cars, steel rails, iron pipes, and crashed plane fuselages.

‘We made good business. Buy for forty, sell for eighty. Ship to India, Turkey, Singapore.’

But destruction had waned in the country. So much had been wrecked, there was little left to destroy. Chris’s father had gone back to Greece to live in retirement, and Chris had started this restaurant, not as profitable as junk dealing, but a business with a future.

Walking back to the hotel I saw that, as it was late, the streets and sidewalks were filled with loiterers, prostitutes, urchins, beggars and people doing what people did in African cities at night, some sleeping as though mummified in gauzy ragged blankets in the brightest doorways for safety.

On my way to Maputo’s railway station the next day I stopped at the Natural History Museum to see what they had in the way of ethnographic material. The answer was not much. Among mounted creatures with their straw stuffing falling out (a toppling elephant, a mangy eland, a mildewed lion), there were some unusual Makonde carvings of figures with upraised arms, looking like stylized and pious Egyptian devotees. But the rest were just unremarkable spears, shields, dippers, bowls, arrows and bangles.

No objects I had seen in any African museum (Nairobi, Kampala, Dar es Salaam, and Harare) could compare with the African objects in the museums in Berlin, Paris, or London. of course, much of that stuff had been looted or snatched from browbeaten chiefs. But every year there were many so-called ‘tribal art’ auctions all over the world, and as far as I could tell this material never found its way back to Africa. And with some notable exceptions, the great pieces of African art were in private collections outside Africa. Africa itself was a disappointing destination for anyone looking for good examples of African art.

Photographs in the museum of old customs of northern Mozambique showed people with tattoos and scarification, grinning boys with teeth that had been filed into sharp fangs, and naked men and women. The intention was to depict the customs as freakish, for also in the photos were shocked bystanders, Africans in mission clothes smiling in horror at the bare buttocks of their fellow Mozambicans. The pictures had been taken in the provinces north of Zambezia, in Nampula, Niassa, and Cabo Delgado — places that were easier to reach by crossing Lake Malawi or penetrating from the back roads of southern Tanzania.

This hinterland — the largest part of Mozambique — looked inviting to me as an enormous area without roads or commerce, where missionary planes sometimes landed but which otherwise was cut off from the rest of the country. Looking at the artifacts and the photos and the detailed map in the museum I thought that if I ever returned to Africa I would travel to this forgotten wilderness. I had found on my trip down the Shire River and into the Zambezi that rural Africa was not a lost cause, as the cities seemed to be — that there was often in the life of the village enough of a repository of tradition for there to be the remnants of decencies that were still vaguely chivalrous.

One of the place names in that wilderness, Quionga, was chiseled in stone on a war memorial on the Praça dos Trabalhadores, The Workers Plaza, another African irony, with idle men and young lay-abouts all over it. The memorial site, in front of Maputo’s main railway station, was an odd monolith of the 1930s carved in a thirty-foot chunk of granite. It was an art deco representation of a big busty woman, holding a sword and flanked by a rearing serpent, and inscribed Força on one side, Génio on the other. In Portuguese on the plinth was the fond inscription, To the combatants, European and African, of the Great War, 1914–1918, with the names of the battles, all of them buried settlements in provincial Africa, strange jungle skirmishes between the Portuguese and the Germans on the remote borders of their colonies, Quionga among them.

How like the perverse Portuguese to record Quionga as a victory. Perhaps the mention was face-saving, for it had been a humiliating defeat, one of many in Portuguese East Africa during the First World War. Portugal had entered the war only in 1916. That same year, some Portuguese officers commanding an army of Africans launched an attack across the Rovuma River on the disputed northern border of German East Africa, hoping to win Quionga back.

The Germans were ready for them, they counter-attacked — General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck leading the charge, with 2000 Africans. The Portuguese force fell back, then retreated and kept retreating, for hundreds of miles through the bush, and von Lettow-Vorbeck pushed south, marauding, resupplying by plundering from settlers, and putting the Portuguese to flight with his rag-tag army of African warriors. By the end of the war von Lettow-Vorbeck had driven halfway into Portuguese territory, almost to the Zambezi Valley.

The war in Mozambique was one of the more hideous charades of colonialism. It was easy enough to imagine a monocled and crazed Klaus Kinski with an aquiline and sunburned nose in this bush-bashing role, the aristocratic general from German East Africa, with his armed but barefoot Africans, advancing through the bush to fight the indignant but helpless Portuguese, with their armed but barefoot Africans. All this African madness because of an insane war in Europe. The whole thing would have been comic except that at the end of the war, after the Armistice, pleading for Quionga to be restored to them, the Portuguese claimed that 130,000 Africans were slaughtered fighting for Portugal in Mozambique. Thus, the monument.

Maputo’s main railway terminal, dating from about 1910, seemed to me the most beautiful station in Africa. With its distinctive iron dome it had been designed by Gustave Eiffel and was easily as elegant as his tower in Paris though hardly more practical. In its shape and lines it was an aesthetic satisfaction, uplifting to anyone with the wit to appreciate it, but otherwise serving no purpose except to accommodate the few underpaid employees of the railway — Caminhos de Ferro de Moçambique — which was slowly chugging towards obsolescence.

High and broad-shouldered, made of plaster-faced brick, painted green and cream, and with a plump iron dome and a prominent clock high up on a cupola, the station was such a marvel of architectural frivolity that it was a wonder the thing had not been pulled down. Little sentimentality was shown for colonial structures in independent Africa. Since they represented the pomposity and wealth of the white overlords in the oppressive years of overlordship, they were usually the first buildings to be vandalized or defaced.

By the time Eiffel was commissioned to design this station (as well as the Iron House near Maputo’s Botanical Gardens) he had been disgraced by his involvement in the Panama Canal scandal. Though Eiffel had joined the Panama Canal Company merely to lend his illustrious name to a troubled project, he was convicted in 1893 with Ferdinand de Lesseps and some others, for misusing funds — specifically, bribing French politicians to approve a loan, in order to buy time for the failing company. His sentence was set aside. This pioneer in aerodynamics and innovator in metal — freed but shamed — took a back seat in his world famous design firm. His masterpieces were behind him — the tower in Paris, the dome of the Nice Observatory, the Tan An Bridge in Indochina, the Bon Marche department store in Paris, the Maria Pia Bridge in Portugal, the armature for the Statue of Liberty. What had been Lourenço Marques’ railway station — in a distant city, in a remote colony — even today, almost a century on, showed the hand of a master.

Eiffel’s station was far more attractive and better preserved than any in Egypt or South Africa. Ethiopia’s stations were picturesque (though its trains were grim), Kenya’s stations were in ruins, Uganda’s defunct, Tanzania’s just minimalist concoctions from Maoist blueprints. Zimbabwe Railways still maintained solid little brick cottages, like English country stations, but they were on the wane, like much else in that tottering country. I found the Maputo station purely by chance, and went back on two successive days to admire its wood paneling and etched glass, its station buffet and waiting rooms. On the third day I went for a train ride.

Though no one in town seemed to know much about Mozambique Railways, and hardly anyone took the trains, some trains still ran, three lines anyway, including an international express, the slow train to Komatipoort and Johannesburg. No railway timetables were published. The arrival and departure times were scribbled on pieces of paper and tacked to a notice board inside the station. I lingered over the names, loving the destination Zona Verde (Green Zone), but settled finally on the Limpopo Line, for the name alone.

The Limpopo Line, running northeast out of the capital to the town of Chokwe, was the embodiment of all that I loved as well as all that I despaired of in the Africa I had seen so far. The train was a solid and usable artifact, almost indestructible in its simplicity, as well as atmospheric; but it was badly maintained, disappointingly grubby, and poorly patronized. This working relic had been retained because the country was too poor to replace it or modernize it. At the height of its working life this line had carried many people comfortably into the remote bush. Such were the ambitions of Portuguese colonialism that the line had once continued through Gaza Province into Central Africa, linking Mozambique with Rhodesia and Nyasaland. These places were now Zimbabwe and Malawi, and a hundred times harder to get to by any land route than they had been forty years ago and more. One of the epiphanies of my trip was the realization that where the mode of life had changed significantly in the Africa I had known, it had changed for the worse.

The look of the train standing at the station at eight in the morning raised my hopes as much as the procedure required for buying a ticket and being allocated a seat had done. But the train was something of an illusion, and the ticket shuffling just an empty rigmarole. There were few people on board, the train was falling apart, and it seemed as though the gesture-conscious railway staff were just going through the motions. One purpose was served, though: the train was able to accommodate large heavy bundles and crates. As a cargo carrier the train was indispensable and it was a more straightforward and simple conveyance than any of the buses.

The weirdness of this old railway passing Maputo’s new airport at its first stop, Mavalane, made it seem like a ghost train erupting from the past to rattle hauntingly across the present. The station names were printed on a card that was framed and fastened to the wall — Romão, Albasine, Jafar, Papucides, Marracuene, Bobole, Pategue, Manhiça: lovely names, but they were no more than muddy villages.

Manhiça was hardly fifty miles from Maputo, though it took most of the morning to get there. I thought I would get off at this station and then head for Xai-Xai up the coast, which was noted for its beaches and its natural beauty.

‘The flood was here,’ a man said, as we passed a low-lying district of shacks outside the city. He saw that I had been gaping out of the window. ‘The people were rehoused. New people have come hoping for a new flood, so that the government will find them houses.’ But the government would not have paid for that housing; it would have been funded by what an American chronicler of recent history in the country called ‘the Donors’ Republic of Mozambique.’

Africans praying for a disaster so that they would be noticed seemed to me a sorry consequence of the way charities had concentrated people’s minds on misfortune. But without vivid misfortune Africans were invisible to aid donors.

The train passenger explaining the huts wore a tie and importantly manipulated his mobile phone; other passengers wore rags. Women nursed babies in some seats, some children frowned at me, and I could not blame them, for I was the only alien on the train, or so it seemed until I went for a walk from car to car.

The ring of another mobile phone caught my attention. I looked over and saw a young alien woman, head bent, talking confidentially in Portuguese into her small receiver. I kept walking through the rattling carriages to the ka-chink, ka-chink, ka-chink of the wheels bumping over the rail joints. The train was less than half full, quite a novelty for an African conveyance — they never seemed to travel without twice the number of passengers they had been designed for — ten in a car, twenty in a van, eighty in a bus, and Tanzanian trains were just piled with people. Here the passengers sat in postures of repose. Some slept. Others nibbled stalks of sugar cane. I counted sixty-two children: none of them was fussing; they sat in silence watching the drooping palm fronds and muddy fields and the huts passing by.

On my way back through the train I caught the eye of the white woman and said hello. She greeted me in such a friendly way that I paused and chitchatted, until the swaying of the train on the curves swung me and had me grasping seat backs to keep my balance. That sudden train motion was helpful, for it seemed natural for me to avoid it by sitting down across the aisle from this sweet-looking woman.

‘I’m Susanna,’ she said.

‘Paul,’ I said, and shook her hand.

She was young, pale, in her mid-twenties, rather thin, with such a slight figure and such a short haircut that you might at first have taken her to be a pretty boy. She wore khaki slacks and a loose sweater and no make-up, as sensible women did when they were traveling alone in Africa, so as not to call attention to themselves; but the result in her case was a look of such stunning androgyny that she compelled my attention. She was from Ohio.

‘I’m going to Manhiça.’

‘What a coincidence,’ I said. ‘Are you a traveler?’

‘I’m on a mission.’

I liked that: it meant so many things. But in her case it was a traditional use of the phrase. She was an Assembly of God missionary, who had decided one day that she was being called to Africa. She had attended Bible college in South Africa and after making a number of sorties into Mozambique she had set up house in Maputo, with the ambition of mass conversion, that is, gulling locals into believing in hellfire and penance. After the dusky pietists submitted, she would offer lessons from other parts of pious Africa, declaiming sermons with the Joycean text, And thereafter in that fruitful land the broadleaved mango flourished exceedingly.

‘How did you happen to decide on a mission here?’

‘Because I’m a sinner saved by grace.’

Sometimes people say, I’ve got the answer to our parakeet problem! Let’s flush it down the john and we won’t have to take the messy thing to Daytona this year! And you don’t know quite how to reply.

But I said, ‘How’s business?’

‘There’s so much to do here.’

‘I thought Jimmy Swaggart was taking care of all that.’ I had seen the man’s books and videos on sale in the Maputo street markets and in Malawi too.

Susanna said, ‘He’s real popular. They love Jimmy Swaggart here. It’s the music and the videos.’

‘I guess they haven’t heard that he’s Elmer Gantry,’ I said but didn’t get a rise — maybe she hadn’t read Sinclair Lewis? — and so I added, ‘A fake, a snake-oil seller, an old hypocrite.’

‘He’s a sinner saved by grace,’ she said making the phrase sound like one word. ‘Like me. Like you.’

‘Thanks, but not like me. I have my faults but being like Jimmy Swaggart is not one of them.’

‘We’re all sinners saved by grace.’

Her calling me a sinner was not quite so offensive as it could have been, because all the while she was smiling and looking like Peter Pan. And of course the insinuation had a teasing, almost coquettish implication of naughtiness, as though she was saying You wicked man! So I let it pass. As far as I was concerned this was just small talk on the Limpopo Line.

‘How long do you figure you’ll be on your mission?’

‘The Lord guides me. The Lord sent me here. I’ll stay as long as the Lord wants me.’

‘What does the Lord want you to do in Mozambique?’

‘He wants me to tell people about Him so that they can be saved.’

‘What about homosexuals? Do you have any views on them?’

‘Homosexuality is an abomination. It says so in Leviticus.’

A Christian childhood, a lifetime of travel, of sleeping alone in hotel rooms with nothing but the Gideon Bible to read, and many years of close textual analysis to flesh out the preachers in my novels The Mosquito Coast and Millroy the Magician, had given me enough experience in scripture to reply to evangelists like this, who seldom expected a rebuttal. And anyway we were on the Limpopo Line in Mozambique, with nothing else to do.

‘Leviticus says a lot of things that no reasonable person can agree with,’ I said. ‘The Mosaic law is full of weird prejudices. Chapter fifteen is all about a woman being an unclean abomination when she’s menstruating and how she has to sleep alone then. I wonder how many Christians obey that one? Chapter eleven says fish without scales like tuna fish are an abomination. By the way, if you follow that logic so are calamari and shrimp. That makes marinara sauce an abomination. Leviticus eleven six says that rabbits are cud chewers and that’s why you can’t eat them. Ever hear of a rabbit chewing its cud? Later on, Leviticus says that a man can’t marry a non-virgin or a divorced woman, and that priests can’t cut their beards.’

Susanna was undaunted and stubborn. She said, ‘Not just Leviticus. In Romans, Paul says that homosexuality is a sin.’

‘You’re wearing pants,’ I said. ‘What does Deuteronomy say about that?’

She smiled, looking gamine, perhaps knowing what was coming.

‘The Bible says that women are forbidden to wear men’s clothes.’

‘Sometimes you have to interpret scripture,’ Susanna said.

‘I was hoping you’d say that. Deuteronomy, twenty-two five, condemns a woman who wears an article of man’s clothing as an abomination,’ I said. ‘You are wearing trousers. I don’t have a problem with them. Moses says that the Lord does.’

‘I guess I just interpreted it.’

‘That’s fine. Why don’t you interpret Paul on gays?’

‘I don’t hate homosexuals, but they’re committing a sin.’

‘Then why not kill them? Leviticus twenty thirteen says that sodomites must be put to death,’ I said. ‘And if you eat tuna fish and wear men’s clothes you are committing a sin, too, aren’t you?’

‘I know I’m a sinner,’ she said cheerfully. ‘We’re all sinners saved by grace.’

‘Do you believe in evolution?’

‘I believe in the Bible.’

The happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance is not the works of Shakespeare (as Buck Mulligan says) but the Holy Bible.

‘Adam and Eve? Garden of Eden?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long have humans been on earth?’ I asked. ‘You would say, what, something like four thousand years?’

‘Between four thousand and six thousand years,’ she said.

‘You know this as a scientific fact?’

‘It’s in the Bible.’

Such people had one book in their library, containing all history, all science, all geography, all nutrition. She was not alone. She would have agreed with the absurd notion propounded by the conflicted Philip Gosse, fanatic Christian and avid scientist, ‘that when the catastrophic act of creation took place, the world presented, instantly, the structural appearance of a planet on which life had long existed’ in other words (the words are those of his son Edmund in his chronicle of a weird childhood, Father and Son) ‘that God hid the fossils in the rocks in order to tempt geologists into infidelity’.

You just wanted to weep, not for her smug, pig-headed ignorance, but what made it all worse was that Susanna was here in Mozambique spreading disinformation and fear.

‘Call this a feeble rational quibble,’ I said, ‘but humans have been on earth for two million years. And Mesopotamia was settled at the date you give for the Creation.’

And in the year 1498, Vasco da Gama landed on Ilha de Mozambique, on the north coast of the Portuguese territory. Ten years later, priests were sent out from Lisbon and a vigorous trading center and missionary enterprise was started: Susanna’s antecedents in proselytizing — five centuries of this! But from experience I knew that there was no way that I could dissuade her from her belief, no light that I could shed.

I said, ‘I don’t want to argue. I know I will never change your mind. I simply want to tell you that I don’t agree with you and that you’re inconsistent. Tell me what you’re doing in Mozambique.’

‘Teaching scripture and also trying to set up a center to get prostitutes off the street,’ Susanna said, an answer that also echoed over 500 years on this coast. ‘Their families send girls out to make money. And people come here from Europe looking for them — Germans on sex tours get child prostitutes in Mozambique.’

‘How do you stop that happening?’

‘We have a street mission. We pray. We help the prostitutes.’

‘Don’t you find that men try to pick you up?’

‘All the time,’ she said. ‘They say horrible things to me. But I say, “Christ is my husband — I’m married to the Lord.” ’ She shrugged. ‘They just laugh.’

‘I take it your mission is mainly concerned with prostitutes, then?’

‘Quite a lot,’ she said.

I told her what I had read in The Road to Hell, that men encouraging child prostitution were criminals, but from an economic point of view a woman choosing to go into prostitution was making a rational decision. It was one of the rare chances for a woman to make real money. Susanna was not impressed with this argument.

I had a job in a factory, sitting at a machine, and then I realized I was sitting on a gold mine, the prostitute says, summing up her calling. The snag with trying to persuade prostitutes of the wrongness of their profession was the crystal logic of this. Leviticus also had a great deal to say about harlotry — the ones that could and couldn’t be temple harlots, how it was forbidden to marry them, how the Lord said to Moses: Go, take yourself a wife of harlotry and have children of harlotry.

Susanna said, ‘Not just prostitutes. I mean, the sex is terrible. People here have sex all the time.’

‘Africans tend to have sex within their own age group,’ I said, quoting the Samburu elder I had met in Kenya.

‘No,’ Susanna said. ‘Boys sleep with grannies. Girls go with men. Women commit adultery. They start having sex when they’re six or eight years old.’

‘Maybe playing at it,’ I suggested. And I thought, really if you were looking for graphic illustrations it was more satisfying to discuss sex with a Christian like Susanna than with a jaded libertine.

‘No — doing it,’ Susanna said, her face clouding over. ‘I was up in Nampula, and we talked to a chief about condoms. He said, “You don’t eat sweets with the wrapper on. You don’t eat candy that’s in paper. You don’t carry an umbrella if it’s not raining.” He just laughed at us.’

‘I don’t understand the part about the umbrella.’

‘Neither do I,’ she said. ‘But AIDS is a problem because no one does anything about it. Lots of people in our church have AIDS. Three of my co-workers have AIDS. It’s terrible. They have sex with four-year-olds, thinking it’s a cure. They pray to their ancestors!’

‘I think it’s good that you’re concerned with AIDS, but really when you condemn people for praying to their ancestors you sound like you’re condemning them as pagans. “Destroy your heathen idols.” Isn’t that what the Taliban say?’

Mozambicans were not sufficiently unhappy, not poor enough, not sick enough, not adequately deluded: they needed to feel worse, more blameworthy, more sinful, abused for merely having been born, for Original Sin was inescapable. And like all the other missionaries, Susanna was determined to bully Africans into abandoning their ancient pantheism that had been inspired by the animals and flowers of the bush; by the seasons, by their home-grown hopes and fears.

So this Christ-bitten nag and everyone like her sought Africans out in remote fastnesses such as Nampula to abuse them with the notion that they were sinners, to browbeat them into arcane forms of atonement, such as screeching hymns, and the dues-paying routine of tithes and the destruction of their ancient artifacts of veneration.

But speaking softly, I suggested these arguments to her and wanted to add, as Henry James had said in a letter to a do-gooding friend, ‘Only don’t, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses — remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another’s, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own.’

She held her ground but later let slip the fact that she had once had a husband. She reluctantly disclosed that she had been married for three years and was now divorced. This I found wonderful.

‘The Bible says that divorce is not an option,’ I said in the sort of scolding tone I imagined she would have used on a gay person. ‘Aren’t you afraid of incurring the wrath of God?’

‘My husband was abusive. I prayed. He beat me. “I want you to worship me!” he said. He hated that I loved the Lord.’ She looked tormented. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I just prayed.’

‘I think you did the right thing by leaving this man, if he was horrible,’ I said. ‘But a pious Christian would disagree with me. A Christian might say, “Be a martyr for your faith! He beats you — he kills you for loving the Lord, and you go to Heaven. You can’t lose. The sinner will see his crime and feel remorse, and repent. So you both end up in Heaven.” I’m not saying I agree, but isn’t that what’s supposed to happen?’

‘I still don’t know if I did the right thing,’ she said.

‘You definitely did the right thing, but it wasn’t by the book,’ I said. ‘All I’m saying is that you should be as open-minded when you’re dealing with gays.’

She said nothing. I thought of changing my seat. But she was a compellingly decorous bigot with sex on the brain, and we still had not reached Manhiça. I stayed put and was glad I did, for with time to kill Susanna told me how she ran a shelter in Maputo — another admirable effort. Street kids were invited to stay there, where they were given baths and food and clean clothes. She had been doing this for two years and over that length of time she had gotten to know the street kids — boys mostly. One night when she was getting out of a car, some boys accosted her and begged for money, and then seeing that she was alone slashed her bag and stole all her money. She recognized the boys as ones she had bathed, fed and clothed at the shelter, and what’s more, they recognized her as an easy target.

The shelter, too, seemed like another duff scheme, like rescuing prostitutes from the lucrative streets of Maputo, one of the few ways of making a living in Mozambique that was unconnected with weeding maize. Not for the first time I was reminded of Mrs Jellyby and her obsessive busybody philanthropy.

We came to Manhiça. Susanna said, ‘I’m going to pray for you. For your happiness, and health, and your family, and your safe travels.’

‘I’m going to pray that you stop using the word “abomination” for gay people,’ I said. ‘Also, I’m going to pray that you read a history book and a book of paleoanthropology and that you stop calling these poor people sinners. As if they haven’t got enough to worry about!’

We had arrived late, I had missed the bus to Xai-Xai, and there was no other way to go there, except by matatu or by chapa, as these overcrowded minivans were called here. Now that I was reading the South African newspapers regularly I kept seeing items about minivan crashes and multiple deaths, so I had sworn off them, as death traps. I had made it safely, so far; I did not want to press my luck by imperiling myself any further. I ate lunch in Manhiça — caldo verde, soup of mashed potatoes and greens and garlic, the dubious culinary legacy of the colonial masters. Obscurely irritated by my to-and-fro with the missionary, who believed herself to be in sole possession of the truth, I decided to take a taxi back to Maputo.

The next day was a national holiday, Samora Machel Day. Machel had been Mozambique’s president from independence in 1975 until his death in a plane crash, an event that looked like part of a sinister plot, in 1986. The holiday was the fifteenth anniversary of the crash. No one seemed to mind that Machel had been the leader of a chaotic and bankrupt country. The political and economic failure was not entirely of his own making, but he had presided over it. On the posters he was depicted as a benevolent bearded figure in combat fatigues and a Fidel cap, over the slogan Samora — Nossa Inspiração — Our Inspiration.

‘Machel was nobody,’ a sour Portuguese named Da Silva said to me at the Polana. ‘He was just a hospital worker. His job was to carry out corpses from the wards. I know! My wife worked in the hospital.’

Da Silva could hardly be blamed for being bitter. His house in Maputo had been confiscated. He had returned to Maputo from his home in Johannesburg to try to obtain some compensation. His forcible exit from the country in 1974 had been undignified.

‘They said my wife was a prostitute. They made us into refugees. We had nothing. We had to run away. I am here but you know what? I want to cry. They have destroyed this country. The only people here are opportunists and thieves. Angola is better.’

That was news to me. I had been under the impression that Angola, still divided by a civil war, was an impossible and dangerous place. Chaotic Mozambique was at least peaceful.

Da Silva said, ‘My son is there,’ and winked at me and made a finger-rubbing gesture to indicate his son was raking in the bucks.

I used the two-day Samora Machel holiday to sit on the bluff by the Indian Ocean to write. I was nearly done with my erotic story, now novella-length, well over 100 pages. It was a pleasant task, like whittling a block of wood into a discernible shape. Then I put it aside and looked at the Indian Ocean and thought about my trip, how far I had come; and what remained, the train trip from Johannesburg to Cape Town.

The last leg of my safari I contemplated with mixed feelings. I was eager to take this train, I was sorry my trip was ending. I was not travel-weary. This mode of travel suited my disposition. I had kept the promises I had made for my peace of mind: no deadlines, no serious appointments, no planning ahead, no business, no mobile phone, no email. If anyone inquired, I was unobtainable. I had remained unobtainable. No one knew I was in Mozambique. This sort of disappearance made me feel wraithlike and insubstantial, as though I had become a ghost without the inconvenience of dying in order to achieve it.

For the exercise, I walked to the Samora Machel celebration at the Praça da Independencia, which was at the top end of Samora Machel Avenue, near the Botanical Garden. I passed the Iron House, the ‘Casa de Ferro,’ and admired it as another of Eiffel’s designs. Children were running and jumping under the statue of Machel. The plaque on the statue’s base had been vandalized, making the inscription indecipherable. In the plaza, soldiers were dancing with each other, men and women dressed the same, bopping clumsily in combat boots, laughing as they stumbled.

I left Maputo the following morning early on the good bus, hummed across the savanna, swayed into the low hills, the usual snags and odd looks at the border posts, then the perverse miracle of South African freeways and beautiful houses and dismal orderly squatter settlements. I was in Johannesburg before dark.