Ape Rifle

In urban Canada, the pervasive use of heavy-duty vehicles stems mostly from environmentally destructive ego-tripping as opposed to any actual utility in road navigation. The proverbial marketing image of an SUV climbing steeply up the Rockies reveals itself to be utter nonsense when, in reality, said machines spend the majority of their lifetimes cruising well-paved expressways and idling in expansive parking lots. As a result, I suspect such vehicles are now designed to be little more than big and shiny- a suspicion brought about by the observation of such vehicles having just as much a propensity to get stuck in snow as their much smaller, car-like counterparts. The ‘utility’ aspect of SUV has grown largely meaningless and, judging by the girth of our waistlines, so has the ’sport’.

In the northern reaches of Mozambique around Pemba, however,  a whole other reality was to be found. To describe the road network there as rudimentary would be to erroneously imply that the rough dirt tracks which comprised the vast majority of it could be considered roads at all. Two lonely single-lane paved highways served the region’s sparse road traffic, the only chance at a journey in which one’s backside was not irreparably damaged. Unfortunately, these oases of pavement where often only the very start or end of a long journey: to get to most villages involved the lengthy navigation of cratered dirt tracks, many of which were further obliterated during the heavy summer rainfalls. The infrastructural engineering feats of industrial humanity have yet to encroach on this space, and the landscape still dictates, often limiting, the scope of human movement. There was nothing unusual about spending several hours to travel a mere 20-30km. 

Pemba, as the provincial capital of Cabo Delgado, was somewhat of a diamond in the rough in this regard. Isolated on the tip of a peninsula by an enormous bay, its old colonial core had a small network of paved streets on which travelled the town’s traffic of motorcycles, scooters, pickup trucks, battered sedans and beaten up chapas (the Mozambican version of the globally ubiquitous private minivan service, complete with East Asian characters still painted on their sides). The main road stretched from the old port through the town centre, past the airport and down the peninsula and out onto the mainland (where it became one of the two cherished paved highways). A half-hearted police checkpoint left over from more tumultuous times marked, quite literally, the boundary between this small pocket of urban bustle and the vast interior beyond. 

Under these conditions, heavy-duty 4X4 vehicles were not symbols of conspicuous consumption gone awry but rather essential tools to anyone in the business of semi-serious road travel. In and around Pemba, that consisted in no small part of NGOs, international development agencies and government ministries- in fact, most vehicles in town apart from the white sedan taxis and chapas had some manner of logo, national flag or donor agency name plastered on their doors and bumpers. One was never in doubt that ‘development’ was one of the major employers and key industries in the area, for better or worse, populating the roads with shiny Japanese pickup trucks (the Land Cruiser being a particular favourite).

The organization I worked with had its own small fleet of such vehicles, manned by a dedicated team of pothole-hardened drivers. They were responsible for the driving on all field trips, generally trying to maximize speed and distance covered while minimizing bodily injury. They were a friendly, talkative lot (as drivers always are, it would seem), laughing and chatting away while honking some poor unsuspecting cyclist into the roadside brush in a cloud of dust. My experiences of the road in Mozambique consisted largely of sitting in the passenger seat as these men worked their magic over potholes and around ditches.

Of course, the roads in this region were not all fun and games. For reasons that an economic geographer could better explain, the roads passed right through the heart of villages, or alternatively created village clusters as people erected their huts on the side to sell firewood, warm Cokes and faded David Beckham t-shirts. This caused a particular problem when it came to the two paved highways in the region, however, as they played a risky dual role as high-speed thoroughfare and residential pedestrian street. It was a semi-regular occurrence for high speed travel along the lonely highway to turn a corner into a pseudo-market taking place on and across the roadway at a crucial road junction. The preferred response? Lots of honking and a number of leaping people, goats and chickens. 

Unfortunately- but unsurprisingly -in these conditions, pedestrian road fatalities were slowly becoming part and parcel of the scene in the area. On one particular field trip, the vehicle in which I was traveling had reached a central junction (’central’ in these parts meaning a cluster of huts and shacks made from mud, wood and grass) when we were waved down by the police. I thought we were being randomly controlled as part of the profitable enterprise that is law enforcement in such places. Instead, the police chatted calming with the driver and the next thing I knew a few uniformed officers had hopped in the flatbed of the truck and we were back on our way. They weren’t pulling us over- we were giving them a lift! I felt that particular sense of bemusement possible only when one finds themselves witnessing the culturally surreal in a foreign land, the perfect fodder for laughs and nostalgia over drinks with friends at a later time and another place.

My sense of bemusement waned when I learned the purpose of these hitch-hiking cops. Not being up to scratch in high-speed Portuguese, I caught next to none of the conversation that led to our vehicle doubling as a police cruiser. A co-worker along for the ride, however, humoured me and explained what was going on. There had been an accident in one of the village down the road, and the police officers were needed at the scene- but they had no way of getting there (perhaps their vehicle and/or fuel was being used for decidedly non-official purposes at the time by someone else, which was nothing out of the ordinary). They had asked the driver if he could give them a lift to the scene of the crime, because we were heading that way anyways.

The police knew of the accident, I learned, because the driver involved had told them about it as he passed through the junction where we had picked them up. Apparently, the man had hit someone on his way through a village, but had not stopped for fear of being attacked by the angry residents. So he continued on and duly informed the officers at the next police post. What became of this driver I never found out, but my guess is he went undisturbed on his way.

A little while later, our vehicle slowed as we approached the village in question. There was a crowd gathered on the road side, comprised of everyone from the village elders to the usual mischievous toddlers with wild hair. It was not uncommon for a vehicle passing through a village to cause a certain amount of waving and shrieking on the part of the younger residents- I’m sure foreign faces passing at high speed can be exciting when you are a kid. Within this crowd, however, there was little sense of welcome. The people were not hostile, but neither were they warm. Instead a cold hush seemed to permeate the scene, with people’s eyes exhibiting tension and uncertainty. As we stopped, I saw the source of their consternation.

In the middle of the road lay the victim of the high-speed accident, deceased and peacefully draped with a blanket. The small outlined shape was that of a child. 

The police officers hoped out of the back of the pickup truck and thanked our driver for the lift. The eyes of the village were fixed on our vehicle and the white faces inside it, and a combination of unease and guilt started to wash over me. Guilt for what? I’m not really sure, to this day. But in that particular instance anything and everything that had to do with development and privilege somehow felt responsible. The sort of privilege that values those able to travel by car over those trying to scrape an existence out of selling wood on the roadside, or toiling all day in fields of maize. 

Before the situation could even begin to sink in, we were off on our way. Our pickup truck, sporting shiny agency logos and a donor country flag or two, took off back into the dirt, leaving behind the dead child to an angry village in mourning. They couldn’t leave the mortality behind with a shift of gears and a cloud of dust- my surreal memory of a transient event was their much more permanent tragedy. 

Despite my best efforts to immerse myself in my current Canadian environment, my mind often wanders back to my life on the beach in Mozambique. Ok, not literally on the beach- but still no more than a ten minute cab ride (or, when feeling more adventurous, a forty minute walk) away. I spent eight months enjoying such a state of affairs, and finding myself now in the midst of a far more northern winter it is not surprising that I still long for those days now many months past. Having a remote stretch of tropical African coastline at your doorstep is rarely a bad thing, and its absence becomes slightly more conspicuous when battling cold winds on the evening streets of a darkened North American downtown. 

Of course, as it always goes with such experiences, the mind has a tendency to retain the beautiful while muting the more troublesome. Life in Pemba, like anywhere else, had its good and bad sides. The positives are both easy to list off and hard to forget: a stunning tropical setting, a pace of life that redefined relaxed and a people whose warmth and joie de vivre never let on that the country had been in brutal conflict for the better part of the past thirty years. On the negative side, the slow pace and isolation could be stifling from both a personal and professional perspective, leaving one to feel cut off from the ebbs and flows of the wider world.

And then there was the ever-present threat of malaria. In my case, at least, the suspense didn’t last very long- I got it two weeks after arriving there. While that might seem morbidly humorous in retrospect, I don’t recall being particularly amused at the time. Actually, I mostly just remember sitting in the back of a pickup truck, sipping on a warm bottled soft drink as vintage Snoop Dogg drifted out of the speakers and I waited to find out if my fevered delirium was indeed mosquito-related.

Good or bad, the memorable aspects of Pemba were most often to be found in the raw state of both landscape and the human condition in such a place. If modern China is what you get when a money-drunk developmental state tries to order and polish every square inch of land (with decidedly mixed results), then northern Mozambique is far on the other side of that scale: a place where government, regulation and industrial commerce barely register on the radar. In this environment, where people’s capacity to manufacture landscapes is to be found somewhere between extremely limited and non-existent, events which would seem shocking in other more heavily ordered places emerged as normal occurrences, woven into the fabric of the raw tropical landscape.

One such event took place on a weekday sometime in the fall of 2006, when I found myself not at work but at the beach, thanks to a holiday afforded by one of Mozambique’s numerous revolutionary, independence and peace treaty commemorations. Going to the beach on such a day was sheer relaxation, as it was guaranteed to be largely devoid of anyone (Pemba’s main beach-going day was Sunday, when the whole city would descend on the same strip of sand in a cacophony of football games, laughter and cart-wheeling children). The main strip of sand, Wimbe, was touristy in the same way that Pemba can be considered a city- very tenuously. It consisted of a single stretch of small holiday bungalows , a few restaurants and a beach disco- all slightly overgrown around the edges and sporting the strange look of Portuguese colonial architecture (and considering how long the Portuguese stayed, think 1970s concrete modernism, not 19th century).

On that particular afternoon, I found myself immersed in the regular seaside routine of reading, loafing and tropical daydreaming. As per usual, some of the familiar faces were to be seen: co-workers, local and expat foreign aid/development staff, old Portuguese-Mozambican businessmen, government officials, South African bush pilots and perhaps a Cuban doctor or two. This ensemble could also include young Christian evangelicals from southern American states, doling out free ice cream to recruit fresh young souls (I suspect the latter were looking for sweets rather than God). Throw in the occasional cross-Africa backpackers, and you had quite the motley crew of individuals. 

The day was shaping up to be relaxing in an ultimately forgettable sort of way; with the heat of the sun and the hum of the surf, mental activity was at a bare minimum. Collapsed on a chair under a parasol, sometime in between sipping on a Sprite and pretending to read, I managed to look up.

And to my surprise, I saw a crowd of people gathered on the beach. That wasn’t so normal.

The crowd was animated and had its attention turned towards the ocean. At first I struggled to see the source of the commotion, and then I noticed two men swimming towards the shore quite powerfully, dragging something behind them just under the surface. Small boats often loaded and unloaded in the waters just off the beach, with the crew wading back and forth through the water with goods, so I wasn’t quite sure why this particular instance was causing such a scene.

And then the two swimmers emerged from the waves with a corpse in tow.

The crowd moved quickly to surround the bloated body, looking on as if this was merely an abnormally large fish lying on the sand before them. The patrons of the restaurant bar alongside me started to stir, murmur and get up for a better look, roused out of their tropical beach daze. “Must have been a fisherman who fell off his boat in the bay”, someone said, “it looks like he’s been out there a while”.

As the large majority of us stood around rather dumbstruck, someone took the expected course of action and alerted the police. In Pemba, however, it was questionable what exactly that would accomplish: police officers spent the huge majority of their time manning profitable traffic checkpoints, strolling along the beach or standing guard in front of their station with rusty-looking AK-47s. Their baggy, ill-fitting uniforms gave off an air of earnest ineptitude- I highly doubt they received the funding or training necessary to make them more than a casual presence on the town streets (well, when they weren’t confiscating scooters or shooting up suspects, that is).

A few police officers eventually showed up on the scene, but they mostly managed to just stand around looking as befuddled as the rest of us. Unsure of what to do with the dead body, they eventually moved on to the more routine police task: dispersing the crowd with an air of authority. In the midst of it, someone got a hold of a a canvas sheet and covered up the corpse. There was more discussion and standing around on the part of the authorities, but eventually they moved on and left. They didn’t take the body with them. 

With the departure of the police and the dissipation of the crowd, things drifted back into the normal state of affairs. People chatted, sipped on a beer or went for a dip in the warmth of the Indian Ocean. The beach hawkers moved on, bringing their large display boxes of chocolates and sweets with them. A few children ran around laughing and playing in the sand, already oblivious to the covered corpse a few feet away. The sun beat down as usual, and the midday stillness of the tropics was settling back in. I returned to reading, or maybe writing- or most probably daydreaming in a half-awake state. The harsh heat of Pemba had a way of minimizing shock and muting reaction.

But whenever I looked up from my reverie, the picture-perfect tropical scenery upon which so many holiday myths are built included this ghost on the sand, this quiet human casualty of the seas. While it would be tempting to twist this event into an allegory about how all was not well in paradise, I cannot do so- all was in fact quite normal in paradise, the good with the bad in life and death.

The body was still on the beach when I left much later that afternoon.   

Jay Peak, Vermont, USA

McGill University’s New Music Building…or the headquarters of a sinister organization?