HAVANA NIGHTS | February 13th 2008

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Intrigued by its reputation for "naughtiness", Conrad Heine heads to Maputo, Mozambique's raffish capital, for a spell. He finds days of problem-solving and nights of partying in one of Africa's poorest countries ... 

From ECONOMIST.COM*

I stop in Maputo, Mozambique's raffish capital, which I've heard compared to Havana. Like Havana, Maputo is on the coast (the Indian Ocean rather than the Caribbean). Havana, though, has sublime Spanish-colonial architecture; Maputo's concrete-faced demeanour--a legacy of both the Portuguese, who left in 1974, and their independent-Marxist heirs--will not gain World Heritage status anytime soon.

It does have the nomenclature, though. Broad intersecting boulevards seem to go on forever, and bear handles like "Avenida Kim Il Sung", "Avenida Ahmed Seku Toure", "Robert Mugabe Plaza" (!) and, of course, "Avenida Fidel Castro". The Portuguese legacy adds what I imagine to be a similar sunny, against-the-odds, Latin disposition.

I'm here because Maputo is apparently a favoured weekend-break destination from South Africa, with many making the trek from the veld to go diving, and to devour copious prawns, washed down with icy lager. "Maputo has a mildly naughty reputation", said the Financial Times article that inspired me. You'd better like prawns, that's for sure. I'm not sure I'll ever look another in the eye again.

White South Africans are here in numbers, acting mildly naughty. My first evening, a peaceful, contemplative night at the Hotel Cardoso (a beautiful white wedding-cake pile overlooking Maputo Bay), is disrupted by the raucous rat-a-tat of Afrikaner joviality. Large bearded males were warming up for a night on the pull. Maybe I'm too smug: perhaps my own southern-hemisphere mating call grates like that from time to time.

My visit doesn't allow me enough time to head to the allegedly spectacular beaches to the north, where I could put my head underwater amongst whale-sharks. A strong wind makes trips to the islands off Maputo out of the question. So the days pass languidly, as I do the rounds of hotels, restaurants and tourist attractions. It feels a lot safer walking around here than in Johannesburg.

Maputo has few sights, but it boasts some pretty quirky museums (which have clearly seen better days). I'm fondest of the Natural History Museum, housed in an elegant Portuguese-Gothic colonial building opposite the Cardoso. Its rather macabre collection of stuffed beasts displays some shoddy taxidermy, but the star exhibit--an illuminated collection of elephant fetuses at varying stages of gestation--is a jewel. The tuskless little darlings are heart-rendingly moving.

The "Museum of the Revolution" celebrates the struggle against the Portuguese. The heroic, somewhat scruffy, socialist-realist iconography of Mozambique's liberators sits alongside the instruments of oppression--the leg-shackles, whips and sedan-chairs used to make Mozambican lives miserable.

The Portuguese left in 1974 with a certain amount of spite. The lift-shaft of an unfinished high-rise hotel on the waterfront was filled with concrete to render the building unusable. It loomed over Maputo until earlier this year, when it was dynamited in a symbolic ceremony of demolition. Apparently most of Maputo turned out to watch, and cheer.

Uptown, an artists' co-operative displays the fruits of a long and bloody civil war that broke out after independence and lasted until 1992. Artists have been encouraged to turn decommissioned weapons into weird and wonderful sculptures. I relax in yet another café, and scoff another pastela de nata (custard tart) while gazing over the slate-grey, choppy Indian Ocean and the graceful curving coastline. From here it's easy to forget that Mozambique remains one of Africa's poorest countries.

Since the end of the civil war, the Marxist government has embraced free-market policies, and become something of an "aid darling" for the rich world. Consequently, donor money has flowed in by the shedload, with the staff of the various agencies in its wake. I fall in with a group of such expatriates. They become my eyes and ears for a few days. Once again, I kiss goodbye to any chance to do more than scrape the surface: whatever the intentions, this seems to be the business-traveller's lot.

Over a couple of nights, my ear is bent about everything from malaria to AIDS to livestock improvement to flood-relief to structural-adjustment policies. Aid workers have become a new elite, which they freely acknowledge, but they do not hesitate to knock Mozambique's own privileged classes, which seem to be drawn almost entirely from the ranks of the former Marxist cadres and their hangers-on.

They are a hard-partying bunch: this is the nature of a claustrophobic social scene, one that seems to almost completely exclude Mozambicans. Not quite totally, though: at a poolside party in the embassy quarter on my last night, I am rudely shoved aside by a fierce-faced, stick-thin Mozambican Kate Moss look-alike as I head towards the bar, almost taking an inadvertent dip in the process. "We call her the praying mantis", says one of my new contacts. "She's always looking for another guy to prey on." She passes me by.

(*Conrad Heine is an editor for Economist.com. This column is part of his week-long diary about South Africa, published on Economist.com)