Because They're Burning Bricks

Posted By Sika on May 28, 2010

Heading into the last little bit of my Mozambique trip and facing the arrival of my mom, which heralded the beginning of the end of my time in Africa, I felt . . .just. . . strange. Not super excited, not super sad, just like the whole idea was unreal and really I was playing hooky from my job at Malawi College of Health Sciences and I was going to get caught anytime now.

I took the walking tour of Maputo from the Lonely Planet. Well sorta. I had to walk to the start of the walking tour, and I try to avoid pulling out my guidebook in the middle of a touristy area because it makes me look like, well, a tourist. So, I missed a couple of things, like the supposedly amazing train station, and the statue of Samora Machel.

Although, I found the statue later.
There’s nothing wrong with the way Samora Machel looked: he wasn’t an ugly guy by any means—he just wasn’t all that good looking, either. I wonder if today we’d accept our savior if he weren’t handsome. Not that looks haven’t always been an issue, and politics and the like used to have the benefit of the pre-digital version of photoshop: commissioned paintings.

Anyway, as I was wandering around, I used Avenida Karl Marx to orient myself—and everytime it made me giggle. It makes sense that Av. Karl Marx is so big: after all, he is the parental unit of communism, But why is Av. Ho Chi Minh so much bigger than Av. Salvador Allende? Is it because, (to be completely American-centric) in the name of stamping out communism, Americans killed more Vietnamese than Chileans? But then we installed and supported Pinochet, so then isn’t it a wash?

I’m probably biased because I love Allende’s niece’s writing and because the whole story of fairly competing ideologies falls apart even more than usual when you look at what the US did to Chile. To be fair, Av. Salvador Allende does have a decent cafe where I stopped to have a falafel (English translation on the menu: vegetable food). But still, I think Allende deserves more. Well, and I also think it’s funny to have street names that commemorate the heroes of communism throughout the world—it seems a bit reaching and unfocused.

I went out to the fort in the baixa, where there was a group of Mozambican and Portuguese business people. Half of them couldn’t stop doing business or get off their phones for 15 minutes to listen to the tour. The rest had bluetooth earpieces, just waiting for something more important to do than look at the fort.

Then again, my fun at the fort consisted of standing by the cannons, making booming noises, and pretending I was firing on unsuspecting dhows. So I really can’t talk about annoying behavior.

Categories: Mozambique, Travel
Tags: Allende, communism, fort, Maputo, Mozambique, tourists