The alluring sadness of Mozambique Island

I had a good reason to find my way to Mozambique Island. It was here that Vasco da Gama had his first run-in with a wealthy Muslim society on his voyage to India, and it was from here that the Portuguese ran their East African empire for nearly four centuries. But driving down the traffic-free, litter-edged road from Nampula, with Mozambicans in colourful, elegant costumes stopping to watch our car pass, it seemed this once strategic outpost could disappear under the placid coastal waters and no one would notice.

That would be a crying shame. Mozambique Island is an extraordinarily atmospheric place: an elegant colonial capital turned ghost town and playground for the kids who live, as their ancestors have for centuries, in a tight-packed village of thatch huts at the southern end of the island. The main square, with its rusty bandstand and its bloated, peeling neoclassical pile of a hospital—a reminder that temples to health became more important than churches to the plague-ridden colonists—comes alive at the end of the school day with games and shrieks of laughter. Near the island’s northern tip a football match is under way in the shadow of the forbidding old fortress, with its ancient chapel perched prayerfully above the sea. The schools are modern and orderly; kids want to learn here. But there is no way out. The nearest university, a serious young man tells me, is hundreds of miles away, and the money to get there is not to be had.

The island’s industries are fishing and tourism. Every evening, at the village beach opposite the mainland, the boats come in, crowds gather, and the blue and green nets are stretched to dry across the sand. Some of the produce goes to the few cafes with palm-fringed sunset views, or the couple of airy hotels that have opened in the former mansions of Portuguese grandees. Fine living, on the cheap, with reality revving up its battered old moped on the doorstep. Mozambique island is a UNESCO world heritage site, and there are tourists, mostly Europeans who look like ghosts in a place that memory forgot.

I set out down the dusty lanes lined with eyeless houses, getting lost, taking my bearings by trees sprouting out of crumbling walls, and being rescued by the same soon-familiar faces. To the south, the fort. To the east, a statue of Camoens, the great mythologiser of Vasco da Gama’s voyages, staring across to India. To the west, oddly looking back to mainland Africa, a bronze statue of Vasco da Gama himself, strong and stern in Crusader garb, his fist clenched against his chest, his sword ready to be drawn from its scabbard, his unbrookable eyes gazing ahead. The statue was toppled in a recent cyclone, and though it was put back on its plinth, the letters that once spelled the name Vasco da Gama were torn off and were never replaced. Larger than life but stripped of its meaning, it seems a fitting comment on its subject’s latter-day reputation.

Behind Gama is the handsome redbrick governor’s mansion, which was the Jesuit College until the Portuguese outlawed the society that spearheaded most of their missionary work. Its rooms are heavy with dust and viceregal portraits. The building’s water was collected in a rooftop tank: water everywhere, not a drop to drink, the lesson the Portuguese quickly learned about the perils of a seaborne empire. Nearby is the old naval yard, littered with rusting cannon, the pier a bare frame sagging into the sea. My serious young guide, in bright Friday whites from the mosque, wants to show me these things. He is proud of them; there are no traces of the flourishing Arab port that Gama found in 1498, and these are the reasons people come here. But he and his friends have harsh things to say about the island’s former masters, and he prefers to take me to Makuti Town, where all the locals live. We go past the mosque and into the market selling soap and toothpaste, past the single shower block to the hut where his family of twelve lives and his mother is scraping the washing outside. At the southern tip we greet a group of old men guarding the gate of a Muslim cemetery—saying “Salaam alaikum”—and enter a mouldy old church, where a coffin stands on a plinth in the middle, concealing the remains of no-one knows who, decaying away.  Round the other side is a paradise beach that curves gently into the Indian Ocean, a whitewashed chapel on a point, a few boats bobbing at sea. It could be an unspoilt spot on the Mediterranean, until you turn back and face the two worlds of Africa and Europe, quietly jolting side by side.

You can see the island in a day, or you can stay longer and drink in its mystery. There’s something bordering on the obscene about people living in poverty showing you around the ruins of colonialism, even if tourist dollars pay for mopeds and clothes and the occasional car. But perhaps for selfish reasons, I hope this awkward historical anomaly stays slumbering in its crumbling pride. See it before it’s too late? Not really; it’s unlikely to be too late for a long time to come. Much better, see it to wander quietly and think about men who wanted to impose their ways on another world, and how time, eventually, caught them out.