So it’s over, and we are now on the plane back to Lisbon. After what has undoubtedly been one of the trips of my life, if not “the one”. Even if my feelings about these last days are still in a turmoil and I know it will take some time to fully understand how I stand regarding my past, there are some conclusions to be taken. First of all, this trip was the fulfilling of a dream. For years …
Tag: Mozambique
A friend kindly provided us with his car and driver and on Monday we set out to discover the city of Maputo. First stop was downtown. I looked at the streets’ names but of course they have all been changed; they were mostly named after Portuguese remarkable citizens, having been substituted by characters related to African and Mozambican history and politics. I found the correspondence with the old names on internet so I could recognize them and tell the …
After a night on the plane I feel surprisingly well and energetic. I look at the travel route on the screen map and see we are almost there. In fact the captain has already announced our descent to Maputo. Again the screen shows us the course taken: a straight line from Lisbon to the shores of the Indian Ocean. Almost eleven hours to get us there but then I remember the sixteen hours it took us back in the …
These four words inevitably remind me of the first scenes of the Disney movie “The Lion King”, one that I find very special, for several reasons – it tells a story of love, courage and tenacity, it has a beautiful soundtrack – featuring the incredibly powerful song “The circle of life” – it takes place in Africa… or simply because it was the favourite of my son Afonso who loved to watch it while sitting on my lap. Now that I …
The girl sat in the backseat of the car together with her brother and Grandmother. After giving some last instructions, her Grandfather sat next to the driver and told him sharply “Let’s go””. The driver started the engine and they came down the path on the left of the house for the last time: she saw, as if in a dream, the tall araucaria tree, the green lawn where she had so often played with her brother; she glimpsed her …
The 25th of April is the anniversary of the 1974 revolution that put an end to more than four decades of a dictatorship regime in Portugal. It also changed my life and that of my family forever and that’s why even after so many years I still have mixed feelings about it, and get emotional when it is discussed. For me there is a life before that day, a peaceful one, of a happy privileged childhood and endless summer days, …
He was born in 1914, the year of the beginning of the Great World War. His parents had both come to Mozambique from Madeira island – first his father and some years later his mother, who had joined her brother. They met and soon they were married. He was the elder son, being followed by three sisters. His father was a successful businessman. When he was six the whole family took a ship to go on a long holiday to …
I was nine and it was my first day of what was called preparatory school (the fifth year of school). It was all very different from the private, small, primary school I had been to in the last four years. This was a huge state school, as schools in the years before the 1974 revolution were segregated. I had managed to find my way to my classroom and there I was, sitting quietly, waiting for the teacher to arrive. I knew …
Your birthday was on the 4th of April. You were born on a distant day of the year 1918, in the city of Lourenço Marques, in Mozambique (nowadays Maputo, a name you hate, I know). You were the third child of Manuel de Freitas and Marie-Agnès Grabowski, what we would call today an “international couple”: he was Portuguese, born and bred on the island of Madeira having emigrated to Mozambique in his early twenties in search of a better life; she …