Mozambique

Harry’s Mozambique is Maputo, with Kieran, and his framing is the usual one: a country better known for headlines than holidays, and he intends to be honest about whatever he finds.

What he finds is a city he enjoys considerably more than he expected — not the best in Africa, he says, but one of the better ones.

Obs: the video carries a long eSIM sponsor read and a card sponsor. Only the travel content is recorded here.

Observations

From Madness in Mozambique’s Maputo! 🇲🇿

The history, as Harry narrates it:

• Portuguese colonisation held the whole coastline, and the remnants are still visible in the buildings, the food, the culture and the language.
• Independence, which he dates to 1977, was followed almost immediately by the country becoming a communist state.
• A civil war lasting about sixteen years, in which over a million people died. He describes it as a Cold War proxy conflict — one side armed by the Soviet Union, the other by South African and Anglo-American interests — with famine and chaos alongside the fighting.
• The first president was assassinated on a flight back from Zambia, was the first Mozambican president to visit the United States, and was widely loved. Obs: his name is rendered inconsistently in the subtitles and is not written here.
• It is still effectively a communist country ideologically, in Harry’s reading — a “fake democracy” where the ruling party has held power for over 25 years and where he doesn’t believe the results are real. He points at a picture of Che Guevara in a slum as the visible sign of it.

Practicalities:

• The currency is the metical.
• Immigration took five minutes — the smoothest African airport experience Harry says he has had, and he credits preparation: visa approval obtained online in advance, money ready, documents printed, and being first off the plane — see prepare before you land.
• ATMs are a genuine problem. One swallowed his card on arrival, and the next four he tried were all out of service, which he took to be a city-wide fault.
• Maputo is among the most expensive cities in Africa, which Kieran flags and Harry accepts.
• Poverty is extreme and widespread, wages are low, and Harry’s summary is that people are getting by and the hustle deserves respect.
• The north is where the danger is. Islamic State is active there; the south and Maputo are, in his description, somewhat peaceful.
• Portuguese is the language and English is little use. He says repeatedly that he needs to learn it, and the day is harder for the lack of it.

The flag, which he and Kieran spend some time on: Mozambique’s is the only flag in the world carrying a modern rifle — an AK-47, alongside a book. Guatemala’s has an older gun; Haiti’s and Bolivia’s have cannons.

On filming, which is the observation he seems most pleased by: nobody tells him to stop. He contrasts this directly with West Africa, where he says they’d have been stopped repeatedly by this point, and Kieran notes that the touts here are among the worst he’s seen while the atmosphere isn’t hostile at all.

Places

• Maputo