City Profile: Maputo, Mozambique

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It's a hot—very hot—summer's night in Maputo's train station, and nobody's going anywhere. And that's just the way they want it. On a flatbed train car, under the latticed arches designed by Gustave Eiffel, Ghorwane, a local band that have been fusing African rhythms with politics since the early '80s, are shaking up a cocktail of sweaty fans. It's buzzing, but it's not full—not everybody in Mozambique's capital can afford the $6 door fee at Ka Mfumo Jazz Café (formerly Chez Rangel). Most people still get by on just $40 a month.

It's been 10 years since I first visited Maputo. Back then, just three years after the end of a civil war that left the country littered with land mines, this kind of cool did not exist. The shops had food, but few luxuries, mailboxes were little more than garbage cans, and the way forward was along unmarked roads gouged with potholes. There was jazz—the Costa do Sol, at the end of Maputo's Sunset Boulevard, the Avenida de Marginal, was serving up sax and prawns long before an AK-47 made it onto the Mozambican flag—but to get there you had to cling to the back of a pickup truck with another 40 wide-eyed souls.

Today, you can travel in style, in a chauffeur-driven, mint-green-and-chrome '50s-style car. The Havana Transport Company is typical of the city's fast-growing entrepreneurialism—it's owned by a South African who has emigrated to Mozambique. For $50 an hour, Jaime Sumbane with his Panama hat and Dona Flor cigar will take you on a tour of the city.

Driving through Maputo, the potholes are still there, even outside Nelson Mandela and Graça Machel's house, but foreign investment, most notably from the Chinese government, which sent the funds—and the prisoners—to build a new Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a conference center, has put the possibility back into Africa's former salsa and cocktail capital.

Hollywood is already in on the action. Early this year Maputo stood in for Sierra Leone for Leonardo DiCaprio's next film, The Blood Diamond, and DiCaprio was seen at the city's French-African-Portuguese fusion restaurant, Las Brasas, which has a reputation for serving the best steaks in town.

This new capitalism is not to everybody's taste. "Advertising billboards seem to be the new architecture of the city," says Tiago Paulo, a 29-year-old guitarist in the reggae-ska-dub band 340ml, popular in South Africa. In Triunfo, a suburb next to the sea, the high walls and electric fences are a reminder that the wealth is not for everyone.

For American Jamy Bond, a writer who has lived in Maputo for three years and who writes the blog MovingtoAfrica.com, it's the city's new park which inspires hope. "We've watched it go from a mass of overgrown weeds to a beautiful park. I think this captures where the city is headed. People are determined to grow here."

And dance. Always dance. Music is the heart of Maputo, and every night of the week there's somewhere to shake your booty—regardless of how much money you have. On Fridays Xima blasts out marrabenta, Mozambican fusion dance music, to the locals; le weekend is marked by live gigs at the Franco-Mozambican Cultural Center and nearby Gil Vicente; while Coconuts blasts house music for those who were too young or busy warring to enjoy it the first time. And for a moment, when everybody's dancing, it feels like everybody's rich. africaguide.com