Lodger

‘Cockroaches of Maputo’, or more specifically, of my flat, is becoming a regular blog series of mine. I’m not sure it’s going to win over many fans. I clocked this rather large morsel at the end of my Portuguese lesson this morning.

Ilídio and I had spent a good chunk of the lesson having a chuckle about street shenanigans in Maputo. Hustling is not as pronounced as in other cities but you don’t have to move far to be accosted by hawkers selling artistic wooden face masks, bags of potato chips or pineapples.

I was hustled by minibus conductors when travelling to Namaacha at the weekend, although the word conductor conjures up images of uniforms, caps and whistles. They’re usually in ragged clothing, clinging onto the outside of minibuses that already have 20 in a space where 12 would be cozy.

‘Inhambane! Inhambane! Inhambane!’ they yelled at me as I walked towards the bus station. ‘Inhambane this way, amigo. Inhambane! Inhambane!’

‘I ain’t going to Inhambane hence my chosen direction of travel away from where you are frantically gesturing.’

It was a carbon copy of this incident in Sri Lanka and similar to the type of interaction rife amongst tuk-tuk drivers in Cambodia. There, I used to step out of a tuk-tuk at my destination directly in front of another tuk-tuk driver who would leap into action. ‘Tuk-tuk! Tuk-tuk! Tuk-tuk my friend?’

‘I’ve just alighted from one brother, as you patently saw.’

Ilídio had a laugh over these japes as I was recounting my weekend in Namaacha, which was full of police escorts, drunks in the market and street hustlers.