12 - Ancestral Spirits, Land & Food

Summary

Post-war ruins in Ribáuè town

Ribáuè town is situated on the main road crossing northern Mozambique, more or less midway between Malawi and the coast, in Nampula Province, some 140 kilometers to the east of the provincial capital. The road is national road number 8, and it goes from Nacala, the major port of the north, eastward to Nampula city and further east into Malawi, passing district towns Ribáuè, Malema and Cuamba. Living in Ribáuè town from 1998 to 1999 it took some time before I realized that the town's main street was in fact this national road. Few cars were passing; in the dry season the road was bad, and in the rainy season it became almost impassable. While I stayed in Ribáuè the land cruiser I had borrowed from a Danish NGO considerably increased the car park of Ribáué. Apart from this car there were only four other cars in town: The district administration had a car, the hospital had one, Salama had one (Salama is a local NGO working in community health), and the fourth car belonged to the Catholic sisters, recently installed in a newly built dormitory for secondary school girls.

Like many other district towns in Mozambique, Ribáuè appears to have been a small but neat and tidy centre for colonial administration. Nice whitewashed buildings for hospital and district administration, a police post, a few other administrative buildings, two shops, a football field, a country club and beautiful veranda- houses for the district administrator and two hospital doctors.