Maputo was getting on my nerves big time. I was running out of cash. My credit card was not working. Opening a bank account was taking longer than expected. I had a bad cold. Every morning at 5:00, the peacocks of the presidential palace, 30 metres from my window, woke me up with their screeching.
When I packed for Maputo, it was 32 degrees in Pretoria, 500 kms away. Friends in Maputo said it was equally hot there, so I packed dresses. But the weather in Maputo is treacherous. Two days later a nippy wind blew from the Indian Ocean. It remained cold, grey and drizzling for the next two weeks. I wore the same cargo pants and jersey days in a row.
The day I arrived, the municipality pruned the acacias in front of the hotel. Then the next block and the next. Every day, pruning extended like a monstrous disease. Rather call it a mutilation, for the trees were cut too short, leaving bare stumps, like a really bad landmine amputation. Poor timing also, because summer is coming (although it felt like winter) and the shade is welcome.
Workers piled the trimmings on the sidewalks – a LOT of it. And there they remained for the next MONTH. People threw rubbish into the heaps of branches. Sidewalks became garbage dumps. You couldn’t walk on them.
Celia Simao has a fruit stall by the hotel. Celia was angry. The municipal workers blocked her stall with branches. She removed them and neatly swept around with a broom made of twigs: “I got to make it nice for clients”. Now the stench of rotting rubbish surrounded her.
Last year, glue-sniffers and crack-addicts squatted the dilapidated colonial house in the corner. This week, they stole a sack of potatoes from Celia.
It rained. Puddles formed. Mosquitoes attacked. Believe me, I didn’t have to write a story about health risks, I was living it. Malaria accounts for 60 per cent of hospital outpatient visit, an average of 5.8 million cases and 3,400 deaths every year.
One morning, as I leave the hotel, a peacock struts by, dragging its splendid tail among the parked cars. Five more follow. Cars and minibuses brake. Nobody steals them.
“Even during the civil war, when people were hungry and ate cats and dogs, nobody touched the peacocks,” says my friend Teresa.
At sunset, the peacocks – I counted 15 one day - go home with a quick fly-jump over the presidential palace walls.
The taxi driver tells me that Samora Machel, the first post-independence president, brought the peacocks. The night guard believes they date from the Portuguese colonial era.
One day I will find out their origin. In the meantime, I ask neighbours what can be done about the rubbish.
Celia sums it up: “We have complained many times to no avail, we are tired.”
On 5 October, a pathetically old and small truck started carrying the trimmings away. The rubbish remains. And the gorgeous peacocks.