Yesterday’s three-hour walking tour of Bairro Mafalala was a thought-provoking experience. I went with a new friend, Kari, whom I met through a local tour group – Maputo a Pé. Kari is from Norway visiting Maputo and Mozambique for five months while researching a university project. A student specializing in Social Anthropology, she arranged the tour through Iverca, a cultural and environmental tourist guild.
Iverca Association
Iverca Association is an “NGO guild led by students and tourism professionals”. They promote and develop Mozambican tourism, culture, and environment. Iverca Director, Ivan Laranjeira, and his associate, Anna, guided our tour.
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Today, 22,000 people live in Mafalala’s “labyrinth of wood and zinc houses with streets of earth and alleys marked by metallic plate walls”.
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Segregation in Maputo
In the 1970s, Lourenço Marques (Maputo) was a broken city – a Portuguese colony where blacks and whites were forced to live separately. Whites lived in a ‘cement city’ on the banks of Maputo Bay. Blacks lived in the ‘caniço (cane or reed) city’ – a set of “peripheral neighborhoods in precarious condition with poor infrastructure and substandard community facilities like water, electricity, and sanitation“.
The Portuguese required “indigenous people to wear identification cards” and limited their access to the cement city, public transportation, and recreational areas. These restrictions ended when Mozambique won independence from Portugal in 1975.
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“Marrabenta is not just a musical style, it’s a way of life. It has to do with how we dress, talk, and behave. It’s our history.” Mozambican Singer Mingas
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Independence from Portugal 1975
After Independence, the people renamed the capital city from Lourenço Marques to Maputo. The former border separating black and white regions, Caldas Xavier Avenue, became known as Marien Ngouabi Avenue, after the President of the People’s Republic of the Congo. Today, Marien Ngouabi Avenue is a busy road “in no way reminiscent of segregation”.
Mafalala Resistance and Cultural Change
During the 40s and 50s Mafalala was the “nerve center of political agitation, and the place where intellectual resistance began”. Writer José Craveirinha and poet Noémia de Sousa were key figures in the resistance movement and wrote Mozambique’s first “anti-colonialist manifesto”. As culture changed, “Marrabenta became the barrio’s new music”.
Bairro Mafalala suffers from “drug abuse, high unemployment, crime, and an overall sense of malaise”. Water is a continuing problem, and electricity is available, but many can’t afford it. During our tour, we met residents expressing anger and frustration about repeated power loses.
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Mafalala is the historical home of Mozambican artists, intellectuals, and important cultural and political figures. It was home base for FRELIMO, the resistance movement that fought for independence.
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As we walked the rough dirt streets and toured points of interest, Ivan provided narrative on the history of and life inside Mafalala. Many intellectuals who played important roles in Mozambique’s history and culture lived in the Barrio:
- Samora Moises Machel first president of Mozambique
- Joaquim Chissano second president of Mozambique
- Eusébio da Silva Ferreira world-renowned soccer player
- José Craveirinha poet and writer
- Maria Mutola Olympic gold medalist and 800 meter runner
- Noémia de Sousa poet and writer
- Fany Mpfumo singer and composer
- Mia Couto journalist and writer
- Camilo de Sousa filmmaker nephew of Noémia de Sousa
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“To read Noémia de Sousa is to read Mozambique. Her father was a Luso-Afro-Goesa (Portuguese African) and her mother Afro-German, marking her deep experience of being Mestiço.”
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“Born in Mozambique and educated in Brazil, Noémia de Sousa was a poet and newspaper editor. Jailed briefly in Mozambique for her political activism, she later lived in Lisbon and France. She edited the women’s pages of newspaper O Brado Africano from 1949 to 1951. Her poems were circulated in the mimeographed collection – Sangue Negro (Black Blood). One of the first African women poets to gain a wide literary audience, de Sousa often published under the pseudonym Vera Micaia.”
Photography
Photographs are permitted in a few areas of Mafalala. Some photos in this post are by our Iverca guide. Ivan Laranjeira. Others are from the personal archives of Elarne and Fedo Cariano and Alejandro de los Santos Pérez’s book Mafalala, Cultural Guide of the Historic District of Maputo.
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During the 40s and 50s, Mafalala was the nerve center of political agitation in Mozambique.
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Sights along the walking tour included the:
- José Craveirinha and Noémia de Sousa house-museums
- Masjid Baraza built by Muslims from the Comoros Islands
- Murals, graffiti, and craft markets
During the colonial period, Portuguese only allowed Catholicism to be practiced openly. It was necessary to camouflage mosques like Masjid Baraza, which has existed since 1928, but was only marked as a mosque after Mozambique gained independence from Portugal in 1975.
Tufo da Mafalala
We ended our tour with a performance by Mozambique dance group Tufo da Mafalala. Makua women originally from northern Mozambique formed the group. Their performances have enabled the unique dance group to earn a living. They’ve appeared throughout the world. At the end of the performance, Kari and I joined in for a short dance!
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“The work of José Craveirinha represents an unequaled legacy for Mozambican literary, social, and political history.”
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Festival da Mafalala
Iverca promotes the Mafalala Festival, lasting a month each year. The 2017 Festival “introduced an innovative program based on preserving the neighborhood’s traditional, historical, and cultural legacy”. The festival features Marrabenta shows and traditional singing and dancing.
Mafalala seemed a smaller version of Soweto, a famous South African township near Johannesburg, which I visited several years ago. Soweto was “at the forefront of the fight against apartheid”. Like Soweto, Mafalala struggles with transportation, water, waste, energy, and other infrastructure problems.
The tour left me in a bit of a mental stupor but more knowledgeable about Mozambique and its history and socio-economic environment. I’m still comprehending much about this complex and fascinating country.
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“Mafalala Festival (or Festival da Mafalala) is a multi-disciplinary event held every year for a month in the historical Mafalala district in Maputo.” Music in Africa
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Maria Mutola
An interesting side note is that during the 1990s Maria Mutola, Mozambican Olympic gold medalist and 800m runner, attended high school in Springfield, Oregon USA. She lived and trained in the Eugene-Springfield area (known as “Track Town USA“). Mutola competed in six Olympic Games and was an Olympic gold medalist in 2000. I retired in Oregon in 2007, after living in San Francisco for almost 40 years.
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