{"id":14217,"date":"2011-06-16T02:38:32","date_gmt":"2011-06-16T02:38:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=14217"},"modified":"2014-12-27T01:55:15","modified_gmt":"2014-12-27T01:55:15","slug":"africa%e2%80%99s-latin-quarter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=14217","title":{"rendered":"Africa\u2019s Latin Quarter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Africa\u2019s Latin Quarter<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Walrus<\/a>
\nJuly 2008 (Escape: Summer 2008)<\/p>\n

Stephen Henighan<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Despite bleak poverty, Mozambique\u2019s<\/a> multi-ethnic literary culture thrives<\/em><\/p>\n

In downtown Maputo<\/a>, the monument to the origins of apartheid<\/a> is just off Karl Marx Street. Maputo, with its manageable proportions, dreamy views over Delagoa Bay<\/a>, and cosmopolitan restaurant scene, is one of Africa\u2019s most pleasant capital cities. I walked to the apartheid monument through windblown red dust and young people lugging buckets of water into high-rise buildings. Most modern conveniences\u2014such as traffic lights, credit cards, and cellphones\u2014work in Maputo, but a few, such as the water supply in apartments, are unreliable.<\/p>\n

Mozambican literary culture, which I\u2019d come to Maputo to explore, is rooted in the country\u2019s history as a Portuguese colony that gained its independence through a Marxist-Leninist revolution in 1975<\/a>, and in its proximity to neighbouring South Africa<\/a>. Nowhere are this history\u2019s contradictions more evident than in the Louis Trichardt Memorial Garden. On the back wall of a patio sunk below the street, a plaster frieze depicts Trichardt, a stout Afrikaner<\/a>, leading oxen through the wilderness in the late 1830s. A trilingual inscription in Afrikaans<\/a>, Portuguese, and English, under the heading \u201cThey Harnessed the Wilds,\u201d lauds the Portuguese colonialists for their hospitality to the South African Voortrekkers<\/a>, and their solidarity in fighting off \u201cnative tribesmen.\u201d Most self-respecting Marxist revolutions would have demolished this racist kitsch, but Mozambique, a coastal nation with a tolerance for strangers, prefers to allow all the dissonant chords of its past to resonate at once.<\/p>\n

\u201cMozambique is a crossroads,\u201d Mia Couto<\/a>, the country\u2019s best-known writer, tells me. \u201cThings happened here that are unique in the history of Africa. There\u2019s an acceptance of others, a way of receiving others, that I haven\u2019t found in other African countries. This doesn\u2019t mean that we\u2019re better than others, but rather that there\u2019s a very long history of relating to outsiders.\u201d…<\/p>\n

…Mozambique\u2019s racial mixing dates back to between AD 300 and 800, when a vast wave of people of Indonesian descent invaded the East African coastline.<\/strong> Travelling in coastal Mozambique, I passed through areas inhabited by tiny, fine-boned people with remotely Asian physiques. The African languages spoken by these people contain vestiges of Malay<\/a> vocabulary. There was even significant trade with China<\/a>, and the spread of Islam brought a tradition of marriage alliances with the Arab traders who dominated Mozambique\u2019s economy in the early Middle Ages<\/a>. The residue of this period is evident not only in the high-cheekboned racial inheritance of people in northern Mozambique, but in the country\u2019s many mosques, ranging from the Aga Khan\u2019s<\/a> shimmering Ismaili<\/a> mosque in downtown Maputo to the tiny, green-painted huts used for worship in villages. Too poor to build minarets<\/a>, the villages designate their mosques with crescents raised on poles.<\/p>\n

Portuguese colonialism, which began with the arrival of Vasco da Gama<\/a> in 1498, intensified Mozambique\u2019s racial mixing. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, unable to manage the sprawling, distant colony, Lisbon<\/a> assigned Mozambique\u2019s governance to the Viceroyalty<\/a> of Goa<\/a>, the Indian jewel in the crown of the Portuguese empire. In defiance of every stereotype of colonialism, Africans in Mozambique had a European language imposed on them by administrators who were ethnically Indian. Many of these Portuguese-speaking Indian civil servants or adventurers intermarried with local leaders. In the Zambezi Valley<\/a>, in central Mozambique, mixed Indo-Portuguese-African elites broke away from government structures to form autonomous settlements known as prazos.<\/p>\n

In the nineteenth century, these palisaded outposts fought a sixty-year war of resistance against Portuguese colonial authority, only succumbing to the central government in 1902. Miscegenation<\/a> between Europeans and Africans was less common in Mozambique than in other Portuguese colonies, such as Angola<\/a> or the Cape Verde islands<\/a>, but the roots of Mozambican identity spring from a tradition that assumes everyone descends in part from an outsider.<\/p>\n

The frelimo<\/a> guerrilla movement, which led Mozambique to independence from Portugal in 1975, promoted interracialism and the Portuguese language\u2014at the time spoken by just a sliver of the country\u2019s population\u2014as the keys to building a nation from the more than twenty distinct ethnic and linguistic groups inhabiting the country\u2019s long Indian Ocean coastline. Photographs of early meetings of the new government, in the Museum of the Revolution in downtown Maputo, reveal a sprinkling of white, mixed-race, and South Asian faces among the black majority…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Africa\u2019s Latin Quarter The Walrus July 2008 (Escape: Summer 2008) Stephen Henighan Despite bleak poverty, Mozambique\u2019s multi-ethnic literary culture thrives In downtown Maputo, the monument to the origins of apartheid is just off Karl Marx Street. Maputo, with its manageable proportions, dreamy views over Delagoa Bay, and cosmopolitan restaurant scene, is one of Africa\u2019s most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1295,1649,12,459,8],"tags":[6546,6545,6544],"class_list":["post-14217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-history","category-media-archive","tag-mozambique","tag-stephen-henighan","tag-the-walrus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}