Year of 1964

Mozambique was a nice country and, Savannah was the main landscape. I remember, I was eight years old, the travels, we made, by my dad’s car, and I observed the view through the windows.

The scenery was: or fierce, or bland or humanized by great plantations of cotton or kapok. There were, also, the little plantations of the native people: the banana-trees, the mango trees, the cashew-trees, and so on.

In the fierce views I beheld the tall grass: dried up, of a chestnut colour, taller than a man, with the typical scent, a very strong odour indeed, annoying, ubiquitous and impossible to avoid. The trees: half dried up, with a tore apart look, a wild and frightening appearance, many of them dead, trunks without boughs and leafless, thorn trees, and fires, fires with a shroud of black everywhere.

Upon the bland scenery I beheld the low grass, the beautiful trees unique in all the world, its tree-tops flat and green, under this: naked and leafless boughs and trunks, tall and impressive, dwelling of the spirits of ancestral men. The people said: if you cut this, or that, tree, their spirits will kill you! I heard this, many times, in my adolescence.

The humanized landscape, I remember the cotton plantations with its snow like appearance but dried leaves and boughs. The cotton shrub was of an half human height and, the plantation, of many kilometres in length and of both sides the land road. The kapok plantations were extensive and thick of kapok tall trees. They were very nice, fresh in the African heat, green, friendly, welcoming. Beautiful view the kapok plantations. Its recollection is a flight of fancy I many times have.

Upon the little plantations of the native peoples I swear, I swear for my life, I never saw anything!! My dad said: Helena (Helena is my mother) lower their heads quick! (My head and my brother’s head.) Because the native women, upon the little plantations, had naked breasts!