Misadventures in Geography

With very little exposure to television most of our neighbors know little about the world outside our town. Few people have ventured beyond the distance they can travel in a day, perhaps as far as Beira to the South, Lilongwe or Blantyre in Malawi, or cosmopolitan Harare in Zimbabwe. Very few people have seen the ocean, or even relatively nearby Lake Malawi, and very few have ever been to Maputo, the national capital: just a few political leaders, and teachers and border guards who trained there. We have maps decorating nearly every surface in our home, but these convey no more information to our typical visitors than do the out-of-date calendars and the assorted colorful photo posters or religious decorations covering the walls in our neighbors’ homes. When we put up the USA map we tried to see if Romão would be able to identify what to us are the iconic shape of our country. Without hesitation he told us he knew which country it was, it was Malawi. Most locals are able to recognize the contours of their own country, but still have a hard time locating Mozambique on a world or even a southern Africa map, until we point it out. Our own geographic origins present a conundrum to locals as well. Since non-black Africans make up less than 1% of Mozambique’s population, most people assume we are from somewhere else. Since we speak Portuguese, locals quickly rule out Zimbabwe and South Africa, the origin of most whites they meet, but who rarely speak their language. People most commonly assume we are Brazilian, just like all the Portuguese speakers they see on their Brazilian soap operas. The mining boom has drawn Brazilians to Tete, so the assumption isn’t bad. People are further confused when we tell them we are Americans, from the United States. The United States means nothing to most people and they associate the word America with all the countries in the Western Hemisphere, making no continental distinctions between North and South America. They are also surprised to learn that Portugal is not in America, the difference between America and Europe being very hazy. Few understand the location of the American continent, and that a large ocean separates it from Africa; we are often asked if we came from America by plane or by bus. Janet actually met a former geography teacher while hitchhiking who thought the world was a flat disc; he kept asking what was under the earth, or beyond its edges. Recently one of the party leaders in our town died while at an international congress in Vietnam. People merely stated that his body had to be brought from far away, having little idea of what or where Vietnam may be. Only when we throw out the name Barrack Obama out do people finally get what we mean by the United States of America. But then they are confused because they did not know that Portuguese was the official language of USA. Most people don’t believe that we learned to speak Portuguese here in Mozambique, only reconciling the conundrum by reaffirming how different our brains must be than theirs. We remind them that the former president of Mozambique, Joaquim Chissano, spoke 11 languages, and he was a black man with African brains just like theirs. Rarely can we convince any of our students that we learned the entire language during a 10-week training, the approximate length of a single trimester for them.