Cruising the blue waters H
ANGING on a wall in the old governor’s palace on Mozambique Island — or “Ilha”, as it is known in these parts — is a disturbing painting. It’s a huge work, with vibrant colours.
The picture shows a group of half-naked people huddling together on a sunstruck beach. Behind them is a deep, dark forest on which they have turned their backs so they do not see the faces of the two warriors peering at them from the tangled undergrowth. The people on the beach are clearly shipwreck survivors, making their way north along a hostile coast to the safety of the Portuguese outpost at Ilha.
The painting may refer to the wreck of the galleon Sao Joao which ran ashore near present-day Port Edward after being battered by storms, but it could be a remembrance of any of the vessels lost on this coast during Portugal’s 500-year reign in Mozambique.
The painting is just one of Ilha’s many treasures. The palace itself is a beautiful building, preserved almost as it would have been when the last Portuguese governor departed the island for the new capital at Lourenço Marques. Other treasures are the fresh water cisterns, built in the 16th century; the Chapel de Nossa Senhora de Baluarte, and the fort against which Dutch, Omani and French invaders expended vast amounts of gunfire but failed to dislodge the men inside.
I arrived on Ilha by ship which, really, is the only way to get there. For one thing, you will voyage on the same ocean sailed by Vasco da Gama. The island came to me on the morning breeze — the scents of woodsmoke and grilled chicken. Fishing dhows cruised around the bay and the sun gleamed off the walls of the fort.
We went ashore in boats from the MSC Sinfonia and landed at the jetty as sailors have done for more than a century. The 2.5km-long island — named for trader Sheikh Moussa Ben Mbiki — is weighted with history which presses in from all sides as you walk down the narrow streets. The town is a maze of alleyways fronted by ochre-coloured buildings, opening onto dusty squares where fig trees grow through cracks in the masonry.
Life goes on here as it always has. Kids swim in the clear water and people wade through the shallows to board dhows to ferry them across the bay. I wander the streets, inhaling the smells — damp stone, woodsmoke and dust, the whiff of periperi and sea salt in the air. I visit the little chapel where sunlight pours through the walls, then listen to how my voice booms and echoes in the fresh water cisterns.
Then I climb the ramparts and sit on an old cannon to look at our ship gleaming like a white seabird on the bay. I crack open a cold Laurentina Preta, and think of the lunch that awaits at a restaurant shaded by casuarina trees and know that life is good. — Paul Ash