The Frango King.

---

Rui is wrapped in a bedsheet and sleeping under the cashew tree when I set off for the train to Nampula. He wipes the sleep from his eyes, raises half-heartedly, offers to walk me to the station. I pat his shoulder and thank him for the offer, but tell him to go back to sleep. “Estou bêm,” I assure him. The early pre-dawn blue has begun to show in the sky, and sleepy Cuamba doubtless has few surprises between here and the train station. The askari opens the gate and wags his hand and sends me off, no doubt grateful to dispense of his responsibilities before heading back to bed. Stray dogs prowl through the street trash; a truck idles outside the bakery, the driver slouched in his seat. At the station, two surprisingly patient queues have formed, waiting to board. I unstrap my bags, ease them to the floor with a mighty oomph, and wait for the ticket man to wave us onto the train.

I’ve been up since three and we board at half-past four, and it’s well past five with still no sign that we’re ready to labor from the station. I’m standing at the window, watching the day break through a thick scrum of clouds above the hills, while some massive, menacing insect - a six-inch cockroach with pincers and wings - lurks in the gravel beside the tracks. In my second-class compartment, a young mother fusses with her wide-eyed infant, passing him back and forth with the father who waits on the platform, smiling and cooing, apparently not making the trip to Nampula. Two other girls, plump twenty-somethings, climb onto the fold-away beds, rearrange some baggage, and promptly drift into oblivion. At half-past five, without a signal or sigh, we suddenly lurch forward, gather speed, and leave Cuamba and its morning slumber in our dust.

It is a beautiful trip into the countryside, which begins almost as soon as we’ve left the station. Early morning mist burns from the tops of the inselbergs, the great granite formations which ring the town like watchtowers. Villagers are already beginning to rise and tend to their machambas, their small family plots. Men in dress pants and buttoned shirts pedal rickety old bikes over dirt roads. Fields of rice and broad-leafed banana plants stretch on either side of us, acacias spreading their parasols over thatched-roof huts, half-dressed children dangling from cashew trees. In little villages we’re approached with bags of onions, bunches of bananas, unripe mangos, loaves of warm bread. In a neighboring compartment are two middle-aged men with a light, sun-browned complexion and European features - Portuguese transplants, I suspect, who have happily planted their roots in Mozambican soil. They’ve been stocking up on produce since our departure. At each station they stick their heads out the windows, barking, haggling, scrambling for plasticos - plastic bags - to fill with the latest haul. Soon there are carrots and cashews, peppers and limes, being wrapped up and secreted away for safe keeping. The wives - young, pretty Mozambicans - arrange and rearrange everything. There’s a great tumult, hearty laughter, a sense of well-orchestrated havoc that suggests they’ve been doing this for years.

With their weathered skin and paunchy stomachs and impeccable disregard for fashion, I suspect these men are the Portuguese analogs of the countless British ex-pats I’ve encountered in East Africa during my travels: past their prime, chased by failures, retiring to a comfortable life at a favorable exchange in the tropics. In Cuamba they boarded with a great flourish, porters heaving their suitcases and coolers onto the train amid a general commotion of throaty commands and wild gesticulations. By dint of birth and complexion alone, they are part of a certain low-level African aristocracy - big fish in the small pond that is Cuamba. I imagine they’d be no more in their element in Maputo than in the clamorous streets of Lisbon. But here, in the bush, they are patrãoes of the highest order. In each station our windows are besieged, tomatoes and carrots being raised to the sky for their inspection, small girls in dirty smocks waiting on the fringes, hoping for a bit of change.

It is late in the day when we reach Nampula, about which I’ve heard few kind words. Already I’ve been warned of the bandidos and ladrãoes who terrorize this, Mozambique’s third-largest city. I have learned, in the past 18 months, to take such dire warnings in stride. In the clear light of day, few places ever seem half as bad as the rumors would have it. But sure enough, as I’m squeezing through the crowd that’s come to greet our arrival, I can feel a hand - decidedly not my own - tugging at my pants pocket. I grab a wrist, find the body it’s attached to, and exchange a long, hostile look with a young, rumpled street vagrant. His face is tight, lined, utterly guiltless; he offers no apology or explanation, no sheepish acknowledgment of the wrong he was about to commit. I let go of his arm and he turns away, disappearing into the crowd. My pockets are no less empty now than when he first grabbed for them; then the momentum of the crowd carries me to the street, and I’m swept into a bright hot afternoon in Nampula.

It’s as I’m laboring through the streets, dog-eared guidebook in hand, that I can again appreciate the virtues of traveling light. A growing haul of books swells in my backpack; sneakers and tents and sleeping bags dangle from various loops and straps, an easy grab, I suspect, for anyone with swift hands and a sharp knife. The first hotel I come across is closed for renovations; the second, nearly twice my daily budget; the third - Pensão Nampula - has already been scored from my mental list, after reports from fellow travelers of used condoms on the balcony. I stand on the corner, squint into the heat, wipe the sweat from my forehead. Lengthening shadows creep across the sidewalk. Almost on cue, as I wearily wait for salvation, a taxi pulls up with a cheery toot of the horn. I employ my mangled Portuguese to ask the driver for a place that’s cheap, safe, reasonably clean. Minutes later I’m lugging my things up the stairs of the Hotel Brasilia, turning the air conditioner to full blast, and washing off the grime of the day’s journey under the cold trickle of my showerhead.

After my dingy stay in Cuamba, the Brasilia feels luxurious, almost reckless. At 700 meticais - or nearly 30 US bucks - a night, it’s putting a sizeable strain on my budget. But it’s one I’m willing to cope with during my short stay in town. The tidy en suite facilities, the massive A/C unit thrumming in the wall, are part of my growing acknowledgement that small doses of comfort are the only way to make the rigors of the road more bearable. It is the Christmas season besides, and in the spirit of giving, I decide to give myself a break from day-time temperatures that, if the papers are to be believed, have been soaring to 38°C - close to an even century on the Fahrenheit scale.

The days are punishing, but I’ve found comfort with strategically made pitstops throughout the day: the Girassol, a posh hotel with a sub-arctic Internet café on the ground level; the Shoprite, with its aisles of plenty cooled by a brisk, A/C-regulated breeze. I’m also finding the heat to be the perfect excuse to spend long afternoons lingering over delicious plates of grilled chicken at local restaurants: A Marisqueira, with its broad windows looking onto the traffic of Av. Eduardo Mondlane, and the smartly named Frango King. A knack for grilling chicken - frango - is something Mozambicans apparently inherit in the womb, and my time in Nampula - despite the warnings - is proving to be a palatable time indeed.

Which isn’t to say the city hasn’t, at times, lived up to its reputation. Sipping a cold 2M outside the Pensão Central, a grubby hotel/restaurant just a half-block from the train station, I’m warned by the waiter not to leave my cellphone sitting on the table. Nampula has “muitos ladrãoes,” he notes with some alarm, and they’ve been known to snatch anything off the street that isn’t more or less nailed down. Later, outside the market, I’ll encounter a different sort of menace: the city’s notoriously corrupt police force, who had already managed to shake down a friend earlier in the week. Rifling through my passport, looking for signs of anything amiss, the pair seem a grim advertisement for the forces of law and order. A passerby finally manages to intercede on my behalf, offering assurances in English that the police here will do me no harm. But when he offers to give me a lift to my hotel just a block away, I have a sneaking suspicion that I’ve only managed to trade one shakedown for another. I thank him kindly, rebuff him in two languages, and then swiftly continue on my way.

Despite the hassles I’m oddly fond of this city, with its wide sunlit avenues and faded Art Deco buildings and long-dead neon signs, like a relic of 1950s Lisbon. One night, having dinner with Marie, Elene and the others as they make their way back to Malawi, I meet an Australian farmer, Geoff Younger, who shares my appreciation for Nampula. Having spent the past three months in Namialo, a scruffy junction town an hour’s drive toward the coast, he’s come to see this city for what it must represent to your average João: civilization. The signs of commerce, of wealth, of life in Nampula don’t extend far beyond the city’s frayed fringes. From here it’s 300 miles to Lilongwe, in Malawi; some 500 miles to Beira, Mozambique’s second-largest city. If you’re going to make it in the dusty hinterlands of Nampula province, or even neighboring Niassa, it’s probably through this energetic town that your path will lead. Having drinks with Geoff at a swish lounge in the Girassol, with an affluent crowd of Mozambican businessmen and Indian traders and wispy girls in sky-high stilettos reclining on the banquettes, I get the feeling that the aspirations of most of the 20-somethings in a 100-mile radius probably involve the hauteur to wear designer jeans and buy overpriced drinks in the company of your handsome peers in the Girassol.

Behind the Museu Nacional de Etnografia one afternoon, I meet a group of young craftsmen who have made the long journey to Nampula with such thoughts in mind. They’re part of a local craft collective, and they’re squatting in the shade of a great flowering tree, chipping and sanding away at masks and statuettes. They are from the Makonde tribe, of northern Mozambique, known for producing some of Africa’s finest carvings. I watch one of the men making careful incisions with his chisel, carving little wedges and nooks into a hunk of ebony, sweat beading on his forehead. In Montepuez or Mueda, he would find few buyers for his work. But here, in bustling Nampula, with its small ex-pat community and its moneyed locals and its tourists passing through en route to Ilha de Mozambique, there’s a chance he’ll catch someone’s eye with the elegant statuettes he labors over in the shade.

Inside the shop - a dim, thatched-roof hut cluttered with statues and masks and necklaces - Jaime Rafaeli, the spokesman for the collective, shows off some of the group’s carvings. The agrarian life of the Makonde, he explains, is celebrated in each statue. Here is the mother with firewood bundled on her head; here is the father carrying his hoe to the field, “para trabalhar”; here is the daughter filling a gourd with water. Each member is carefully intertwined with the others, as if the delicate balance of Makonde family life is such that each relies on the other for support. The larger statues are breathtaking in their complexity: dozens of children and grandchildren sprouting from the roots of the avôs, the larger-than-life grandparents carrying the burden of the extended family on their smooth, rounded shoulders.

Outside Jaime sits barefoot on a sheet of cardboard and rubs sandpaper over a small female nude. Born in Mueda, at the foot of the Makonde Plateau near Tanzania, he came to Nampula at the age of 16, lured to the employment opportunities of this economic heart of northern Mozambique. He is smiling and gregarious, and the fact that he doesn’t speak a word of English is only a minor stumbling block. The nude he is working on has taken him less than a week; the more complex statues - like the one on which I just plunked down 60 bucks to grace my hypothetical mantelpiece - might take up to a month and a half. I have heard that the most famous Makonde artisans will spend months working on vast, intricate pieces that might then be sold for thousands of dollars to some fat-pocketed foreigner. Jaime’s hopes seem more humble; he chips and scratches away, sanding away the minor imperfections. Nearby a group of capoheira dancers leap and kick and tumble on a small stage, while a crowd of young students watch, dazed and delighted. I ask if I can take a picture of Jaime as he works, and he turns his head up to me, smiling broadly, while his hands still move in a blur.

---