7 November - Fish and fishing

I think we started to feel at home here today. After a dreadful night’s sleep we woke late to go to 9.00am Mass at Shangani Church, a much more attractive church than the Cathedral and very obviously a parish church serving the relatively well-off district of Shangani. The choir was in fine voice; the singing is powerful, the harmonies rich and the rhythms compulsive. The ululations which emanate spontaneously, made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

One interesting feature of Mass is the emphasis placed on the collection. Before the offertory, 4 children processed to the altar bearing four wooden chests, each marked with the name of a saint. Members of the congregation step forward and make their donation in the saint’s box of their choice. The boxes are closed and the children go. They are followed by four more children bringing four more boxes for four more saints and the collection is repeated; and finally, four more children and four more boxes for four more saints. Twelve children, twelve boxes, twelve saints. We were spoiled for choice. Caroline went for St Benedict and then could have kicked herself. If she’d waited, she could have had Padre Pio. We’ll see how often they change the saints’ names and report on who’s in and who’s out.

After Mass we went down to the fish market and watched small wooden canoes empty their catch. One man had caught the most enormous sting-ray, whilst another was gutting and cutting a huge tuna with a knife a mallet resting on a piece of old lino. This is subsistence fishing. It can seem quaint and the fish market is included in Lonely Planet itineraries, but it looked a hard life to me. Wives and children were waiting in the stinking shade of wooden lean-tos for dhous to return at sundown. There was a stench of rotten fish everywhere and the beach was littered with debris and fish carcasses.

The legacy of the economic regeneration planned by the British fifty years ago,  is to be seen a few hundred yards down the shore from this daily fish market. It’s a great white elephant of a port, intended to support a ground-nut export scheme. The British, having coerced local farmers to switch to ground-nut production from subsistence farming, only then discovered, that neither the soil nor the climate could support growth of ground nut plants, and the whole project folded, leaving Mtwara a dilapidated backwater.

Caroline with Kevin and Muksini

After lunch, we ended up on the beach at Msemo and I tried snorkelling for the first time. The sea was murky, being stirred up at high tide but even today, in two feet of water, the sea was teeming with fish. Two young boys approached us. I was, I am ashamed to say, apprehensive at first, having being warned so strenuously to be on one’s guard. These two boys, Kevin and Muksini, turned out to be two Form I pupils of mine who had recognised me and chose to sit and chat about themselves and their families for half an hour or so. They were clever, very polite and Kevin even made some helpful suggestions as to what I should teach them tomorrow morning.