Lourenzo Marques was what it was called when I used to find myself there from time to time between ships. Now it’s called Maputo. It’s a city that always seems to sprawl everywhere, even back before the Portuguese left. It spills down to the sea in one direction, or maybe that’s where it comes from, then back into the bush, and now it sometimes tries feebly to reach up to the sky but thankfully it just can’t quite make it that far. A city of 2 million souls and counting.

There was a bar called Alfredo’s down near the docks where I used to go to meet up with whoever had come down from Malawi on the new diesel locomotive. That was where most of my friends seemed to work in those days before Frelimo started laying mines along that route, the only way up to the north. Eventually they thought they got what they wanted and the Portuguese left.

Alfredo’s was the place to go in those days. The radio hanging behind the bar sent a never-ending stream of Hendrix and Dylan floating into the humid atmosphere that hung heavily between the tables. That’s where stories were swapped, information was shared and dope was handed out among friends who hadn’t seen each other for some time.

The place was filthy of course. There were rooms for rent upstairs but you never let your hands touch the banister on the way up, and most people took a few bottles of beer to their room to use for washing their teeth. The sheets on the beds were clean enough but there were often bed bugs and the curtains were in tatters. The sun struggled to get through the grime on the windows. There was always shouting in the corridor with doors banging and girls leaving at all times during the night making noises that said they hadn’t been paid enough.

None of us felt the need to eat much when we were ashore. We drank and smoked but not much else except for a bit of fruit from time to time when a child walked past the front door with a load of bananas on her head. We just didn’t feel much like eating, that’s all. Too hot, too humid, and anyway everything edible in Alfredo’s was always dotted with flies.

But this was home. We spent days and nights just being with each other, sitting inside the dark doorway off the street across the road from the docks, or sometimes out the back under the shade of the Jacaranda tree that threw a lacy canopy down over Alfredo’s yard. Beyond the yard were the shunting lines where day and night engines bumped wagons up and down bringing freight from Malawi, Zambia, Rhodesia and wherever else to the docks to be sent on to Europe. In that yard there was always the smell of burning wood mixed up with the smell of dope and the damp, rotting fallen leaves. This was home.