Chapter Three

Breakthrough! I’ve finally found something that I can use!

I’ve been trying to motivate myself to tell some stories about my trip from Nairobi to Johannesburg and my night in Dubai, but I just haven’t found it. There are some very interesting parts to the whole thing, but I guess there’s not really any single unified story, despite the long road along which it all happened.

I’ve been in Maputo, Moçambique (yeah, I went there. It’s called a cedilha and I think I love it) for a couple of weeks now and, first of all, the thing you need to realize about Africa is that you can only ever get one or two things done in a day because, well, people only really work a couple of hours a day and you never really know which ones they’re gonna be. So maybe you get to the University at ten A.M. and maybe the archive building doesn’t open until noon. If it turns out that what you’re looking for is downtown in the Bexia (or Lowland) district, you’ve not only got to make your way down there, for all you know, the guy you need to talk to went home at one. The only thing that’s guaranteed is that by four when the games start, no one is in their office.

So I’ve been trying to get into this one building for two weeks. There are four buildings associated with the historical archives directorate. One is on the campus of Edward Moudlane University, the national school, one is on 24 de Julho the upper street of the two major roads in town. In Beixa (sometimes written and said Beira) there’s an admin building where I had to write a letter to the Director General (a pedido, I’m told it’s an essential to getting anything official done, so I’ve kept the file) for permission to use the archives.

The last building is sort of an annex to the National Library which is on 25 de Setembro, the lower main street that runs through Beixa. It’s where the microfilms are kept and it’s been pretty clear for a while that that’s the format in which anything as old as I want would be kept. Still, around here, as with many places, you’ve got to do things their way or they’ll inevitably turn obstinate and it’ll just be like pulling teeth. The appropriate metaphor, I think, is more like waiting for a loose tooth to come out. So finally—yesterday now, because I got distracted from finishing this last night—I not only received permission to go to the annex and an introduction to the woman in charge of the microfilm, I also got the chance to borrow a friend of mine’s research assistant as an interpreter. Sure enough, not an hour in the microfilm office with this girl and I find myself with a catalogue book of documents pertaining to Moçambique from the national archives in Lisbon, organized by author, date and subject. I flip to the chronological section, copy down the call numbers of the first dozen and a half documents and voila! I’m off to make sure they found them all this morning and that I’m one step away from great success!

Of course, characteristically, the one step is inevitably turning into six already. Apparently, the machine that could copy the microfilms for me, something they would be happy to do, is broken. So now I have to find an old school film developer or another library or something that can do it for me. Africa.

1/7/10 – 2/7/10