Angoche

I explored the town in the morning, strolling for a few hours before it became too hot. There were some interesting rusting hulks at one of Angoche’s beaches.

I followed a trail sketched out in an excellent Mozambique architecture book authored several years ago by a German expatriate enthusiastic about the subject. Angoche is quite interesting for evoking a sense of past bustle and grandeur that is now long faded. There’s a destroyed viewpoint from Parapato hill where the Portuguese first put their settlement, downtrodden villas, an empty and ostentatiously wide boulevard cutting through town and various statuesque colonial buildings now half shuttered.

My favourite was the public library. Closed but it had a sign on the door forbidding entry to anyone with shorts, flip flops, mobile phones and ring tones (although the third made the fourth an unnecessary dictate unless ring tones can emanate from devices other than phones).

After sitting out the heat of the day in the hotel, in late afternoon I walked around the fish market area. It wasn’t the friendliest vibe that I’ve ever encountered. I have the sense in Angoche that there’s more of an anti-foreigner vibe than in most places in Mozambique, where I don’t feel it. Angoche was where there was a sultanate that successfully held out from Portuguese control for a long time before finally being subdued in the early 1900s. I wonder whether anti-Portuguese sentiment (and by extension anti-white or anti-European) has filtered through the consciousness over that time period. I suspect it can in the attitudes and tales shared by generations of families, especially somewhere like Angoche which doesn’t seem to be benefiting much from other advancements that are happening in various parts of Mozambique.

I still tucked into some fish samosas back at the hotel. No hard feelings for the suspicious glances. And white people are overdue being made to feel unwelcome, given that it’s a skill they specialise in towards anyone non-white in vast swaths of the world.