I took a bite of chicken in a white-tableclothed restaurant in Maputo, not expecting what came next. Pedestrians passed by the window, and the city felt akin to some of the world’s greatest. I’d been won over by the wide avenues and chartreuse seascapes, forgetting that Mozambique’s capital city had been mired in civil war for sixty years. In reality, the city’s scars had barely faded.
Everything went pitch black. It was nighttime, and we quickly learned that when the lights go out around the city, you don’t finish a meal. My husband (then boyfriend) and I quickly conferred, plunked money on the table to pay for our dinner, grabbed each other’s hands, and headed out of the restaurant. We could feel the wind of pumping arms, bustling shoulders, and heavy breaths passing by us like ghosts.
Just two days before, we’d taken a bus from South Africa to Maputo, along a two-lane highway lined with burned shells of cars. The country was full of landmines—the vestigial violence of a war that had ended in 1992, six years before our trip—and cars that veered off the highway often met an unlucky fate. My boyfriend was serving in the U.S. Peace Corps near the border of South Africa and Swaziland, and this trip to Maputo was a last-minute diversion before I had to return, without him, to life in the United States.
When we first arrived in Maputo, we stayed at a backpacker’s hostel in an open-air, thatched hut. Signs warning of cholera abounded at the hostel, and while the atmosphere was charming, if not downright Rastafarian, we switched to a mid-level hotel after a successful night at a casino.
Just hours before our dinner-turned-darkness, we’d returned from a treacherous boat ride to and from Inhaca Island, about twenty miles across the bay from the port of Maputo. Inhaca Island is ringed with stunning beaches, healthy coral reefs, and dotted with evergreen forests. The weather was cold and rainy, and my body had failed the test of the turbulent waters.
That evening, with a stomach half-full of chicken and red wine, my husband and I walked quickly down streets, making wrong turns and trying in vain to read the shadowy words on street signs. It was exciting, terrifying, and memorable. I don’t remember the details of how we finally found our hotel, but I clearly remember the exhilarating feeling of fading into Maputo’s streets as chaos threatened to surface.
