RESIDUES OF TIME AND IMAGINATION IN MOZAMBIQUE
Photographs and texts By Juan Orrantia
1. Reflections. Imagine places and moments that speak to the passing of time. Think of moments that carry within them a mixture of memories and dreams. Of past realities and imagined futures being lived in the everyday.
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3. Remains. There are places and rooms where old colonial desires seem to roam like fading specters. Walking beaches like Catembe or the port city of Beira one encounters traces that speak of past forms of leisure and a nostalgic sense of grandeur. After independence, the Grande Hotel, once built to impress, became police quarters, some say torture chambers during the civil war, and more recently home for the displaced. The layers of change accumulate in these spaces, their surfaces hardened by the sea breeze.
“Commerce and violence converge in the figure of the modern hotel, its genealogy stretching back to the garrison and the inn. Hotels are the creations of empires: mansionis housed the military delegates of Rome as they moved about their conquered territories; the corners of the thirteenth-century Mongol kingdom were connected through a postal service whose messengers lodged at relay houses; the American railroad instituted the block hotel for masses of travelers across the expanses of the nation. Now that global capital has entered its own imperial phase, the hotel space is where contests over the monopoly on legitimate violence enter the cash nexus of globalization. The hotel is also the domicile of the nomad. It is a concrete yurt, a space of deterritorialization—understood not as the erasure of place but as one half of the process of decoding and recoding, fixing and unfixing, by which surpluses magically appear. The hotel generates surpluses through movements of bodies, commodities, imaginings, rumors—and their endless creative couplings. (…) A space of production without limits.” (Daniel Hoffman, p56 . 2005. “The Brookfields Hotel (Sierra Leone)” Public Culture, 17(1): 55–74)
4. Routes. Roads bring migrants, they take tourists, they are paths to follow for those seeking refuge. During the civil war, the highways and railroads that connect Maputo, Beira and Harare were constantly attacked and mined. After almost fifteen years of landmine removal, those less traveled still remain to be worked on, the fields along them being quiet spaces, sometimes of risk. Standing at the edge of the apparent emptiness of these fields was like looking at parchments where stories of loss and continuation have been inscribed.
Along the roads I saw signs and markers of time lying silently. An hour away from the city of Chokwe, running along the tracks that go to Zimbabwe, where machambas (agricultural plots) are the only thing to be seen in the dry landscape, open fields of desolation extend to the sides of the tracks. It is places like these, out of the reach of hard capital investment or even high levels of population—but not that this means that they are not full of people-- that are still plagued with landmines. When the mining removal process began in 1994, strategic places and structures like main roads and bridges were initially cleared. The process still continues and is now reaching areas of the country—mostly in the countrysidethat had not received previous attention. With government funds running out, they outsource to NGO’s, some of which use animals to sniff out the residues of TNT. As men, women and rats grid out the empty landscape, the threat remains for those who must wander off into these fields in order to plant or simply gather wood to sell as charcoal on the side of the road.
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5. Conjunctures.
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At the end of my journey I went to the docks as an exercise in historical imagination. Much of Mozambique’s history was built around ports. Being there today was a form of engaging the connections and interruptions of flows of capital and desire. As cargo comes and goes amidst the screeching sounds of metal, the rumbling engines and hollow growls of ships, the material residues of such movements settle against the splashing waves.
Š Juan Orrantia