Eiffel’s station was far more attractive and better preserved than any in Egypt or South Africa. Ethiopia’s stations were picturesque (though its trains were grim), Kenya’s stations were in ruins, Uganda’s defunct, Tanzania’s just minimalist concoctions from Maoist blueprints. Zimbabwe Railways still maintained solid little brick cottages, like English country stations, but they were on the wane, like much else in that tottering country. I found the Maputo station purely by chance, and went back on two successive days to admire its wood paneling and etched glass, its station buffet and waiting rooms. On the third day I went for a train ride.
Though no one in town seemed to know much about Mozambique Railways, and hardly anyone took the trains, some trains still ran, three lines anyway, including an international express, the slow train to Komatipoort and Johannesburg. No railway timetables were published. The arrival and departure times were scribbled on pieces of paper and tacked to a notice board inside the station. I lingered over the names, loving the destination Zona Verde (Green Zone), but settled finally on the Limpopo Line, for the name alone.
The Limpopo Line, running northeast out of the capital to the town of Chokwe, was the embodiment of all that I loved as well as all that I despaired of in the Africa I had seen so far. The train was a solid and usable artifact, almost indestructible in its simplicity, as well as atmospheric; but it was badly maintained, disappointingly grubby, and poorly patronized. This working relic had been retained because the country was too poor to replace it or modernize it. At the height of its working life this line had carried many people comfortably into the remote bush. Such were the ambitions of Portuguese colonialism that the line had once continued through Gaza Province into Central Africa, linking Mozambique with Rhodesia and Nyasaland. These places were now Zimbabwe and Malawi, and a hundred times harder to get to by any land route than they had been forty years ago and more. One of the epiphanies of my trip was the realization that where the mode of life had changed significantly in the Africa I had known, it had changed for the worse.
The look of the train standing at the station at eight in the morning raised my hopes as much as the procedure required for buying a ticket and being allocated a seat had done. But the train was something of an illusion, and the ticket shuffling just an empty rigmarole. There were few people on board, the train was falling apart, and it seemed as though the gesture-conscious railway staff were just going through the motions. One purpose was served, though: the train was able to accommodate large heavy bundles and crates. As a cargo carrier the train was indispensable and it was a more straightforward and simple conveyance than any of the buses.
The weirdness of this old railway passing Maputo’s new airport at its first stop, Mavalane, made it seem like a ghost train erupting from the past to rattle hauntingly across the present. The station names were printed on a card that was framed and fastened to the wall — Romão, Albasine, Jafar, Papucides, Marracuene, Bobole, Pategue, Manhiça: lovely names, but they were no more than muddy villages.
Manhiça was hardly fifty miles from Maputo, though it took most of the morning to get there. I thought I would get off at this station and then head for Xai-Xai up the coast, which was noted for its beaches and its natural beauty.
‘The flood was here,’ a man said, as we passed a low-lying district of shacks outside the city. He saw that I had been gaping out of the window. ‘The people were rehoused. New people have come hoping for a new flood, so that the government will find them houses.’ But the government would not have paid for that housing; it would have been funded by what an American chronicler of recent history in the country called ‘the Donors’ Republic of Mozambique.’
Africans praying for a disaster so that they would be noticed seemed to me a sorry consequence of the way charities had concentrated people’s minds on misfortune. But without vivid misfortune Africans were invisible to aid donors.
The train passenger explaining the huts wore a tie and importantly manipulated his mobile phone; other passengers wore rags. Women nursed babies in some seats, some children frowned at me, and I could not blame them, for I was the only alien on the train, or so it seemed until I went for a walk from car to car.
The ring of another mobile phone caught my attention. I looked over and saw a young alien woman, head bent, talking confidentially in Portuguese into her small receiver. I kept walking through the rattling carriages to the ka-chink, ka-chink, ka-chink of the wheels bumping over the rail joints. The train was less than half full, quite a novelty for an African conveyance — they never seemed to travel without twice the number of passengers they had been designed for — ten in a car, twenty in a van, eighty in a bus, and Tanzanian trains were just piled with people. Here the passengers sat in postures of repose. Some slept. Others nibbled stalks of sugar cane. I counted sixty-two children: none of them was fussing; they sat in silence watching the drooping palm fronds and muddy fields and the huts passing by.
On my way back through the train I caught the eye of the white woman and said hello. She greeted me in such a friendly way that I paused and chitchatted, until the swaying of the train on the curves swung me and had me grasping seat backs to keep my balance. That sudden train motion was helpful, for it seemed natural for me to avoid it by sitting down across the aisle from this sweet-looking woman.
‘I’m Susanna,’ she said.
‘Paul,’ I said, and shook her hand.
She was young, pale, in her mid-twenties, rather thin, with such a slight figure and such a short haircut that you might at first have taken her to be a pretty boy. She wore khaki slacks and a loose sweater and no make-up, as sensible women did when they were traveling alone in Africa, so as not to call attention to themselves; but the result in her case was a look of such stunning androgyny that she compelled my attention. She was from Ohio.
‘I’m going to Manhiça.’
‘What a coincidence,’ I said. ‘Are you a traveler?’
‘I’m on a mission.’
I liked that: it meant so many things. But in her case it was a traditional use of the phrase. She was an Assembly of God missionary, who had decided one day that she was being called to Africa. She had attended Bible college in South Africa and after making a number of sorties into Mozambique she had set up house in Maputo, with the ambition of mass conversion, that is, gulling locals into believing in hellfire and penance. After the dusky pietists submitted, she would offer lessons from other parts of pious Africa, declaiming sermons with the Joycean text, And thereafter in that fruitful land the broadleaved mango flourished exceedingly.
‘How did you happen to decide on a mission here?’
‘Because I’m a sinner saved by grace.’
Sometimes people say, I’ve got the answer to our parakeet problem! Let’s flush it down the john and we won’t have to take the messy thing to Daytona this year! And you don’t know quite how to reply.
But I said, ‘How’s business?’
‘There’s so much to do here.’
‘I thought Jimmy Swaggart was taking care of all that.’ I had seen the man’s books and videos on sale in the Maputo street markets and in Malawi too.
Susanna said, ‘He’s real popular. They love Jimmy Swaggart here. It’s the music and the videos.’