Ilha de Mocambique–Mozambique Island–Muihipiti: A Personal Account

Mozambique Island is a tiny island among the many that crown the coral reefs stretching along the coast of the Indian Ocean off northern Mozambique. If the sea rises, as it might according to the worst climate change scenario, the island will soon disappear. At the moment it is still very much alive.

I first came to Mozambique Island in 1979 when I was working as a cooperante, or solidarity worker, in the Ministry for Education and Culture in Maputo. I had been invited to the island by the head of the National Service for Museums and Antiquities, Ricardo Teixeira Duarte, who, during our visit, suggested that I move to the island to supervise the restoration brigade, which had been started two years earlier in order to maintain the declared historic monuments. I accepted, and an application was made to the minister Graça Marchel for my transference. And so it was that I found myself at Mozambique Island in early 1980, as the only foreigner besides the legendary Padre Lopes, who had spent a lifetime on the island as the moral adviser to both Christians and Muslims.

discovered Mozambique Island—as Vasco da Gama and many after him have done—and am still doing so. I found a small city floating in the sea, just one square kilometer, divided into two separate townships: the old colonial capital and the former indigenous quarters, now more neutrally known as “Stone Town,” and “Macuti Town.” The first had recently been abandoned, but the other was crowding with people.

I got a small team: two youngsters from Maputo, Maurício and Carlos. We established the first conservation office on Mozambique Island after independence.

I obtained Usam Ghaidan’s Lamu: A study in conservation from 1975. I wanted to do a similar baseline study, but where to start without any resources other than a pencil, paper, and a measuring tape?

We engaged in a draft plan survey of all buildings on the island and we introduced a building register based on building blocks and architectural units. The idea was to make something like Nolli’s Pianta Grande di Roma, but we went further than Nolli. We showed the interior of all buildings in Stone Town and all roof types in Macuti Town. Ambitions were not lacking. It took a long time, but, if nothing else, we had time. The map provided the basis for the study of building typologies.

In 1982, the Ministry for Culture and Education was divided into separate entities for culture and education. The new Secretary of State for Culture, Luís Bernado Honwana, visited the island prior to his appointment and asked what we were doing. I showed him the Lamu report and he agreed with the plan for Mozambique Island. After that point the office had unconditional support from the central level.

In 1983, a group of professors and students from the School of Architecture in Aarhus, Denmark, did an overall building evaluation and complementary studies of selected buildings. Things were taking off.

But the war, nursed by foreign interests, which ravaged the country following independence, drew nearer, until the island was virtually cut off from the mainland and the works halted. In a hectic team effort between officials from Mozambique and the School of Architecture in Aarhus, the information was collected and compiled in a report: Ilha de Moçambique Relatório—Report 1982–1985, later known as “The Blue Book.”

Mozambique Island was inscribed on the World Heritage list in 1991 and shortly after, in 1992, a peace accord was signed that brought an end to the centralized socialist political system in Mozambique and introduced parliamentary democracy and a market economy. This was the start of escalating development of the island that continues today

The colonial city had been abandoned and most buildings nationalized by independence. The local population in the former indigenous quarters had lost their livelihoods. During the war the population increased from some 7,000 people to around 17,000. The island became a haven for locally displaced people, but degradation was accelerating and the buildings were pillaged.

The obligatory adherence to World Bank politics and change to a market economy after 1992 led to the abnegation of state property. A sale of properties on the island took place without considering the heritage value, which gave cause for speculation. The UNESCO answer to the situation followed the donor trend of the time by focusing on social and economical development. In 1997 the “Programme for Sustainable Human Development and Integral Conservation” was presented, but very little happened on the ground until the “Action Plan for the Management of the Mozambique Island World Heritage” was finally agreed upon between the Mozambican Government and UNESCO in 2006. The island was given a special status through a government decree and the new Mozambique Island Conservation Office was opened on the island in 2007. A new integrated development plan for Mozambique Island was drawn up by 2009 and a heritage management plan was created in October 2010. But the lack of funding, the lack of local technical capacity and perhaps the lack of a coherent policy, left the island open to all sorts of private investor initiatives.

In the last decades before independence Stone Town had gone through a process of restoration works supporting the colonial “Luso-African” interpretation of the island as an idyllic place where local expressions and identities were assimilated into a superior and civilizing European culture: the island as a showpiece of the good colonization, justifying continued colonial presence. Tourism was seen as the driving economic force. But the island was physically, socially, and culturally divided in two: the colonial town, with its mulatto culture of mainly Portuguese expression and Catholic belief, and the indigenous quarters of Macua-speaking Muslims.

After independence the colonial Stone Town culture vanished, leaving only the empty buildings and urban structure, while the indigenous Macuti Town culture gained force; neither of them, however, were ever the favorite of the revolutionary government in Maputo. Seen from their perspective, Mozambique Island remained a remote place, on one hand holding heavy testimony of oppression and on the other maintaining a rather exotic and potentially counter-revolutionary culture. The government’s attitude toward the island was always ambiguous, but tourist development was still on the agenda.

Now a new mixed group of retired non-local and foreign people, adventurers and investors, are somewhat setting the agenda in Stone Town, promoting tourism, festivals, and cultural events. Some sporadic restoration works are taking place, often romanticizing the nostalgic features of the idyllic Luso-African dream, while most of the monumental buildings a still dilapidated. Macuti Town is seeing a gentrification process in the better areas, while the poorer areas in the old quarries are turning into slums. In the meantime, the island has changed status from being a city in itself to being the “Old Town” of a greater urban area including extensive informal suburbs on the mainland. Some improvement of infrastructure and urban planning is taking place, but cannot keep pace with the development.

Conservation of a historic city is not conservation as a museum piece. Urban conservation is urban transformation—maintaining valuable features and storytelling details for the next generations to learn about their history. At the moment, Mozambique Island is undergoing an uncontrolled transformation, where a lot of these values are being lost.

The question remains: what to do with Mozambique Island, and how to do it?