Spending Some Time in Maputo’s Lovely Decay : Mozambique’s capital is usually a fine barometer of the rising and falling fortunes. The city is on the upswing again. Will it spread to the rest of the country?

Reminiscences of the old days, from a table in an aging restaurant on the beachfront five miles out of town:

“My father used to cart water out here in an old Chevy,” says Emmanuel Petrakakis, who today manages the Costa do Sol. It’s 50 years since his parents came from Greece and made famous their proprietary way of grilling the giant prawns that fishermen scoop up along the shore. “We didn’t have water then. . . .”

He stops to contemplate the state of municipal services in the capital of a country with the world’s lowest per capita income, $130 a year. “We didn’t have water then, as we don’t now.” A wan smile. “It’s a vicious circle.”

Behind Petrakakis’ chair, a bustling Western film crew sets up for a shot. They’ve spent the day shooting a feature film on the matchless beach fronting his restaurant, and before taking over the place for some interior shots they will sit down to a buffet of the restaurant’s specialty.

Maputo is currently enjoying an upswing. One night not long ago, the Costa do Sol had a record crowd of more than 500. That went far to eradicate some of the grimmer memories of life in this city.

“We went through stages where we only had boiled cabbage and Angolan fish to serve,” recalls Petrakakis. “Prawns were hard to get because prices were controlled. But we were packed, because we were allocated beer by the government wholesaler. For a couple of years--1979-80--we were one of the only two or three restaurants actually functioning.”

One can read the swelling and ebbing fortunes of Mozambique over the last 15 years, as well as its astonishing potential, in the story of this breathtaking city built on a series of stepped terraces facing out toward Madagascar and the Indian Ocean beyond.

Known for its first 194 years as Lourenco Marques (after Vasco da Gama’s navigator, who first sailed into its broad bay in 1544), Maputo was once a world-famous playground, a Mediterranean city painted in swimming-pool blue and blinding eggshell white. South Africans seeking escape from their own society’s humorless puritanism flocked to the nightclubs and bordellos on the Rua Araujo. When the cabarets closed at midnight, they roared up the beach to the Costa do Sol “with their ladies,” as Petrakakis puts it, for grilled prawns and beer.

There was a bullring in which the matadors worked from horseback, Portuguese style. (A genuine Portuguese troupe toured once a year.) Every hotel promoted its rooftop restaurant’s views of the city and bay. It was said that if, as colonists, the Portuguese were shortsighted and contemptible, as builders of colonial cities they had no equal in Africa.

Then came 1975, and a Portuguese decolonization so abrupt it resembled air escaping from a punctured tire. The Mozambique Liberation Front, then as now known by its acronym Frelimo, had been hectoring the colonialists from the bush for 15 years, but in 1974 a coup overthrew the dictatorial Salazar regime in Lisbon.

Portugal’s new leaders hastily withdrew from all its costly African possessions. In Lourenco Marques the Portuguese departure was characteristically petty and resentful. Just as upcountry farmers drove their tractors over cliffs rather than leave them to Frelimo, bureaucrats in the capital smashed their office light bulbs as they left, and threw the maps of the city sewer lines onto a bonfire.

After independence, life in Maputo was still inescapably governed by the conditions the Portuguese left behind. One was the sheer dearth of trained personnel. Carcasses of vehicles accumulated along the streets like flotsam because the colonialists, needing to support 250,000 immigrant Portuguese (many of them unskilled), had barred Africans from the mechanical trades.

In Africa’s British colonies the settlers were mostly farmers; in French West Africa they were shopkeepers and civil servants. But in Mozambique the Portuguese occupied an employment spectrum reaching far down into menial trades.

Hearing a visitor wonder aloud why the colonialists made no effort to train doctors or administrators from among the African population, Sergio Vieira gives a snort of amusement.

“You’re setting your sights too high, my friend,” says the assembly deputy, chairman of the local university’s Center of African Studies. “Doctors! In this country even the bus drivers were Portuguese--even the man who drove the garbage truck!”

In the confident habit of that era of independence, the city’s new proprietors removed as many physical and spiritual reminders of the colonial period as they could, replacing them with symbols drawn from their own canon.

The city name was the first to go, as the prime reminder of the colonial era. Street names memorializing Portuguese notables were eradicated. Rua A. W. Bayly became Avenida Julius Nyerere, after the president of neighboring Tanzania. The Rua da Princesa Patricia, which ran past the central hospital, was renamed for Eduardo Mondlane, a Frelimo founder who died in the independence struggle.

As the new government’s Marxist doctrinairism hardened, other heroes were commemorated: Part of the U.S. Embassy compound still stands at the corner of Avenidas Kim Il Sung and Mao Tse-tung.

In the countryside the lives of Mozambique’s subsistence farmers had long settled into a changeless routine of drought and starvation and terror of armed bandits and guerrillas. Maputo’s lifestyle had a different rhythm, rising and falling incrementally as things got a little better, then a lot worse.

The nadir, according to the city’s long-term residents, came in 1984. In March a nonaggression pact between the Mozambican government and South Africa, which financed and trained the guerrillas, raised spirits. But instead of ending, rebel activity escalated in the wake of the deal.

“Everybody’s spirits just plummeted,” recalls a longtime Maputo resident.

Meanwhile the government’s socialist policies had brought commercial activity to a screeching halt, and there was almost nothing to buy on Maputo’s shelves. Even matches were rationed.

“In those days, there were only three things you could buy in the city,” recalls an aid official who has lived in the country for two decades: rat poison, a very inferior type of toilet paper and, mysteriously, attachments for an obscure brand of Yugoslav vacuum cleaner.

“Those you could get in any store in town,” he says.

The Frelimo government resisted the impulse, visible in Africa’s other fledgling socialist societies, of nationalizing every private company in sight. But it regarded such enterprises with unblinking hostility, and did its damage by imposing a system of price controls and distribution rules that ensured that no one had the food or raw materials they needed to survive.

From there things gradually improved. The so-called Nkomati peace accord began to show some effect, and a sadder but wiser government lightened the harsh restrictions on business. By last year, the shops were again so replete with goods, much of them imported from South Africa, that the Portuguese company operating two “dollar stores” in Maputo, where any imported consumer item can be had for payment in dollars or rand, considered shutting down.

Lately, change has come even faster. Mozambique’s Marxist era ended Dec. 1 with the implementation of a new constitution eliminating all references to socialism in the law of the land, and legalizing the creation of opposition political parties.

The next day came the first breakthrough in peace talks between the government and rebels of the Mozambique National Resistance, or Renamo: Agreement on a limited cease-fire covering two sensitive railway corridors in southern Mozambique, and restrictions on the 7,000 Zimbabwean troops guarding a crucial oil pipeline along one of the corridors.

Meanwhile, Maputo’s dazzling Mediterranean spirit has re-emerged, mixed with genuine African vitality. That’s visible some nights at the Mini-Golf, a bright open-air cafe and discotheque on the beach road heading out toward the Costa do Sol. On one recent evening the entertainment was provided by a three-man band called Tananaz, two South Africans and a Mozambican playing to an immaculate beat under a clamshell-shaped copper canopy.

The crowd of diplomats’ and ministers’ kids swilled South African beer and dipped into platters of immense prawns. Not far from the stage was a party hosted by Marcellino dos Santos, one of the four original members of Frelimo and today chairman of the People’s Assembly, the chief legislative body.

Given his elegant suit, his courtly goatee turned a distinguished gray, and his languid delight in the music, it was hard to remember that in earlier times Dos Santos exercised his authority to ban discotheques from Maputo and decree miniskirts illegal. At the end of their set, the members of Tananaz presented him with a copy of their latest album, inscribed with their autographs.

Today the South African presence is ubiquitous. After having helped turn the country into a near wasteland through its support of the uniquely destructive Renamo guerrilla movement, the South Africans are now investing in Maputo’s future.

A South African company is renovating, in partnership with the government, the Hotel Polana, an elaborate pile on a cliff facing the sea. If by one estimate Mozambique has imported more cars in the last year than in the 15 years before that, clearly most of them have come from South Africa. Try to change American or European currency into local money at any hotel, and the cashier is likely to apologize that he is out of (nearly worthless) Mozambican metacais--but he can give you South African rand, which can be spent anywhere in town.

On the beach road at the foot of town one passes by a modern, walled and guarded housing complex named “Helena Park”--it’s the namesake of Helena Botha, the wife of South Africa’s foreign minister Roelof F. (Pik) Botha, a frequent visitor here, and it’s designed to accommodate in secure luxury the hundreds of South Africans now living in Maputo.

Perhaps more than South Africa’s, however, the economy that drives Maputo today is that of international aid. Mozambique’s implacable emergency and its convincing steps toward democracy and the free market have brought hundreds of millions of dollars into the country, most of it settling as if by gravity in this grand city at the country’s very southernmost tip.

Local businessmen find it impossible to retain their painstakingly trained staff in the face of the onslaught of relief agencies paying European salaries.

“The best business in town is charity,” complains a prominent Portuguese-Mozambican businessman. “The donors are flooding us with petty programs, creating artificial needs. Italian aid brings in equipment that takes only Italian spare parts, so it rots. Mozambican companies can’t compete on salaries, so the donors rape us of our skilled people, paying them 10 times a good Mozambican salary. If I don’t train staff, I don’t grow, but now I have a building, location and clients, and no people left.”

Still, no amount of money can eradicate the legacy of 30 years of war in the countryside. Actual warfare has never been waged on Maputo’s streets, but Mozambique’s armed forces cannot keep guerrillas and bandits from menacing even its immediate suburbs and the city cannot be safely exited by road. One recent weekend, the official newspaper, Noticias, reported a bandit raid on a wedding party in a hamlet just over 11 miles from the city line. Four adults were killed, the report said, and 25 children kidnaped.

Renamo attacks on the power line bringing electricity in over the South African border have more or less ceased. But the blackouts continue because the trestles have been blown up and rewelded so often that in hot weather they simply fall over. Food is expensive and scarce, and Western aid workers estimate that as many as 40% of Maputo’s children are malnourished.

Signals of the country’s and city’s fragility are never hard to find. Maputo’s increasingly congested traffic is an indication that more cars have been imported here in the last two years than in all the prior 13 years of independence, by one estimate. But the Persian Gulf crisis hit the place hard--just as the Soviet Union, a supplier of oil virtually for free in the Marxist era, stopped shipments under pressure of its own economic crisis. So Mozambique’s oil bill will soar from zero to $140 million a year. Around the end of November, oil was so scarce that jet fuel disappeared from Maputo, forcing the national airline to cancel flights.

But the city’s reputation for excitement is slowly coming back.

“We used to get 80% locals in here,” Petrakakis says. “Now it’s 80% foreigners.” He looks back on the past with the resignation characteristic of people whose lives and fortunes are bound up with a place of uncertain destiny.

“Someday this country had to be born,” he says. “A lot of people suffered, but it couldn’t go on being a province of Portugal. Today we’re all the product of that Mozambique that started up, with all its dreams and mistakes.”