Wiado Ibrahim, 39 - BakerWhether the daily schedule is full or not, my watch’s alarm goes off at 7am on the dot. While that may sound early, or at least normal, for some of you back at home, that’s incredibly late for many of Nauela’s residents who are up before the sun at 4am sweeping their dirt patios and pumping water. And even though my drooping eyelids are always pleading for a few more minutes of shuteye, I usually feel too guilty to stay in bed any later than that. Although I have never gotten completely used to this daily program, there’s always a carrot dangling in front of me that keeps me from snoozing for too long. You see, at almost precisely that same morning hour, most days Wiado leaves his house for the market carrying in tow a basket full of precious goodies worth their weight in gold: freshly made bread.
And it’s never a good feeling to start the day by just missing the baker as he rides away (cute rhyme, right?!)
After over a year of conditioning, my body seems to have adapted, programming itself to jerk awake just before the alarm goes off in order to ensure that I don’t miss out on my window of opportunity. Rushing through the house and swinging my front door wide open, I often peer out across the street to see if there are any signs hinting that my neighbor has been busy this morning making bread: smoke rising through the kitchen’s thatch roof, a large bread basket outside waiting to be filled, his kids anxiously darting back and forth across the yard awaiting their share of the morning’s haul – one glorious pãozinho not five minutes removed from the clay oven.
If there are any of these signs or not though, on most days I’ll likely make the two second journey across the road to see if Wiado is baking his locally-famous bread (arguably the best in town due to its generous portion size and slight tinge of sweetness, as well as it not being too dense or under/over-baked). Unfortunately for me, there have been a lot of things that have kept him from making bread these days (i.e., tending to his machamba and repairing the area water pumps) and I’ve either had to simply go without or make the three kilometer trek to the market in order to buy some subpar substitutes from another vender.
It just isn’t the same though.
When you buy the bread in the market it is at least several hours, if not a full day, old. And anyone who has grown used to eating fresh bread knows there’s just no comparison - the weight and substance of bread combined with extreme fluffiness and warmth… if you crack it open and slather the inside with peanut butter and honey, the combination tastes better than any pretender ever could.
Today I’m lucky and triumphantly return home with 10 fresh fist-sized pãozinhos, most of which I devour instantly.
***
Born just outside of Quelimane in the administrative post of Maquivale in 1972, Wiado enjoyed a relatively peaceful childhood alongside his five younger brothers. He attended school until finishing 7th grade and was a familiar face at the local mosque’s Qur’an studies (he can both read and speak basic Arabic). All that changed, however, when Wiado was forcefully enlisted into the army to help supplement FRELIMO’s depleted ground forces in their war against RENAMO. Having just turned 16, it was determined that Wiado was old enough, i.e. strong enough to hold a gun steady, to enter the heat of battle. His younger brothers meanwhile, still too small, were spared and left behind with their parents.
Almost immediately, Wiado was sent up to the Nauela region where he would be stationed for four long years. Although there was regular crossfire, the FRELIMO military strategy in the area was largely defensive. Wiado’s division made camp on top of Mount Nauela (a glorified hill really) and created a protected village at its base for as many local residents as possible.
Food, clothing, and water were precious commodities in the makeshift village, but it was far better than living outside its imaginary walls. “They [the people in the bush] lived like dogs, always running away from something with no clothes on and nothing to eat” reflects Wiado’s wife. Indeed, with the help of the FRELIMO army, the protected villagers ate regularly and had at least some ragged clothes to wear. Even when supporting forces were slow to provide the garrison with their food rations (coming from Gurue or Molócuè), the area soldiers would band together and go out into the night to steal food from the fields of nearby RENAMO farmers - a practice that has deepened hatred between the sides to this day.
It was in this war-stricken scenario that Wiado, a young lonely soldier, fell in love with and married his current wife. Kept in close proximity throughout the war, the couple never spent more than a few hours apart after having first met in base camp. That said, they lived completely different lives during those first few years. While Wiado thrived off adrenaline, busily marauding around shooting off various weapons (e.g., bazookas, AK 47s, etc. ), his wife and the other civilians simply had to endure the long, drawn out waiting game that the war had become. Periodically, the FRELIMO stronghold would receive national updates about the war from radio broadcasts that would provide some hope. Ultimately, however, all anyone was trying to do was survive the present day and all its hurdles.
Upon the fall of the Soviet Union (one of the main financial backers of FRELIMO), FRELIMO was quickly forced to the negotiation table, putting an end to the war with RENAMO (heavily financed by South Africa and the U.S.) in exchange for the promise of democratic elections. Even after the war officially ended though, people were hesitant to be at ease. After all, roaming bands of gunsmen were still prevalent throughout the countryside. Soon, however, various peace keeping entities partnered with the UN began appearing in the area to help with the process of disarmament. The foreigners offered good money to buy up various weapons and the small militias, short on ammo and desperate for cash, quickly handed them over.
In the months that followed, Wiado traveled back home to Quelimane to let his parents know he was still alive and well. This visit was brief though because he needed to quickly return to Nauela to start building a post-war life around his new family. For several years, Wiado’s budding family lived just down the road in Eiope where they tended to their machamba. During this same time period, Wiado sought out extra income by frequenting Nampula City in order to buy capulanas and sell them at Nauela’s marketplace. When the family eventually decided to move closer to town though, Wiado looked into another profession: bread making.
Approaching an elderly woman who had made bread during the civil war for the soldiers, Wiado asked if she would be willing to teach him the business’s ins and outs. At once the lady obliged because she had long since grown tired of the all the hard labor the bread making process required and was looking for someone to pass the baton to. Truth be told, in order to make bread in a rural setting without electricity, the actual preparation of the dough is the least of one’s worries.
First you must spend several days or weeks constructing a brick oven. No easy task… it’s like building a mud house, but smaller. Once that is finally completed, the day before making a batch of bread, you need to go buy and lug a sack of flour (~45 lbs) back to your house (Wiado routinely bikes 20 miles (!) to find flour at a reasonable rate). Then, right before evening time, you can’t forget to go out into the bush to collect a huge stack of firewood to heat up the oven the next morning.
Having not prepared any bread yet, you can finally rest easy… but not for long!
The next “morning,” around 2am, you wake up to start a fire in order to heat up your newly built clay oven. While the wood burns inside the oven, you can busy yourself preparing the dough. Next, as the wood’s embers begin to cool, you remove and set them aside, all the while cleaning the oven’s bottom surface where the dough will soon be placed. Although the embers have been taken out, the clay oven retains so much heat that it is easily able to cook 200+ pieces of bread.
With careful management of one’s time, and a little bit of luck, you can make it to the market and start selling around 7am, the time when demand for bread is the greatest. You wake up at the obscene hour mentioned above because if you don’t get your bread out early enough, you will likely spend all day trying to sell it in a slow market. If you are able to sell it all early however, that will enable you to relax a little before going out and searching for more firewood for the next day’s haul (a sack of flour will last you two or three days of bread making).
Even after all this work, the profit margin in the stingy market is very thin and seemingly hardly worth the effort. Depending on market variables, a sack’s worth of flour will produce a profit of about 300 mets (only $10!), but requires several days of work. Yet somehow bread making is one of the most reliable sources of income in all of Nauela. This is mostly due to the fact that people in Mozambique have practically become addicted to bread, or pãozinho, a tradition brought in by the Portuguese.
When Wiado first started as a baker in the years immediately after the civil war he was the only one for a long time in the area who made bread. Now after having five kids (two girls and three boys), he has to support a large family and the market is flooded with new start-up entrepreneurs. Along the way, due to his hard work ethic and reliability (as a Muslim he doesn’t drink alcohol), Wiado was appointed to be local water pump mechanic (a semi-skilled job that can earn him upwards of 200 mets a day). Now, between bread, his fields, and water pumps, he never gets a break… but that’s just how he likes it. Not only is he making some good money, but he’s also supporting the community around him.
***
Today, Wiado’s parents are still alive and well living in Quelimane. His younger brothers, however, are now spread throughout central Mozambique (Tete, Chimoio, and Zambezia provinces). Luckily, he was the only one in his immediate family who was ever enlisted into the army and had to fight.
That said, it’s still hard for me to imagine that this fun-loving man was once a soldier shooting and killing his “enemies.” I put quotation marks back there because most people didn’t choose sides but were forcefully coerced into fighting for one side or the other. Nowadays, however, these feelings have been validated by numerous transgressions by both sides during the war. Even today, when people go to their respective political rallies here in Mozambique (which are numerous and well attended), they are simply reverting back to their sides of the battlefield. Most people can’t tell you much about FRELIMO and RENAMO’s political philosophy except that they are communists (RENAMO’s outdated response even today) or that they are terrorists (FRELIMO referring to RENAMO’s destructive war tactics).
Sadly, both opinions are simply antiquated propaganda of the war time era. Although they might be off base and not well expressed, ultimately the comments reflect a sharp societal divide, a huge scar that has not yet fully healed. Although it’s hard to think that sometime in the near future Mozambicans will be able to put this war behind them and move forward, I have hope seeing people like Wiado making incredibly positive strides in the community.
