I am not a fan of short stories but high school English forces you to do things you don’t necessarily want to do. One of the short stories we studied was Flowers for Algernon. It’s a very sad story and has all sorts of morals and themes and messages. It was also beautifully constructed in the swell and rise and the moment of glory and then the gradual fall. It’s a little like Fitzgerald’s perfect 9-chapter balance of The Great Gatsby.

Mozambique reminds me a little of that. There is a sense, walking along the streets of Maputo, driving along the broken-down roads, seeing the tourist resorts that are slowly decaying back to the sea-sand and palm forests, of the end of a gradual decline. As if Mozambique had a sweeping ascent and a moment of glorious, soaring, fantastic success. That moment, the height of the glory of this place is written all over places like Maputo. The Art Deco buildings. The beautiful towers and arches. The palatial buildings. The beautifully laid out botanical gardens. The wide roads. The cathedrals and mosques. It’s easy to imagine the gracious lives of the people of Maputo and the long beach holidays in resorts like Vilanculos.

But the glorious moment passed for Mozambique. When the Portugese left, they left quickly. Within two weeks the colonisers, the people who had ruled and controlled for years, who had shackled the native people and built their ridiculous cathedrals, hotels and mansions, were gone.

What they left is slowly falling down. Amidst a civil war – funded and sustained in part by the Apartheid government in South Africa – the gracious city of Maputo, in particular, and the holiday resorts where the rich people used to stay, have begun the gradual decline.

Have you ever watched those programmes on National Geographic about animals who don’t build their own burrows, who wait until other animals leaves and then, nervously, tentatively, sneak into the abandoned burrows and make their homes? That’s a little of what it felt like. I was particularly struck by it in Vilanculos. I suppose because it’s such a beautiful place. It should be thriving. It should be a gold-mine of tourism income. It is making money for some people. But sitting in a restaurant/internet cafe where the mould on the ceiling is unchecked and where the paint is flaking and where the items on the menu bare little resemblance to those actually available, the place feels so much like it was built by a different kind of people, long ago. As if an ancient civilisation built it and many, many lifetimes later another, less advanced (for the purposes of description and not in any way conceding that is a valid construction) civilisation is trying to survive, is eeking out a living in what they left behind.

Rich was reading a book which talked about Mozambique as slowly sliding back into the sea. It feels a little like that. The gradual decline from a peak, a moment of graduer goes on inexorably. Inside the buildings, silent people go about their daily lives and carry on, not rebuilding, not creating, just, always, carrying on.