On the way to work

I was fiddling around with the moviemaker software on my laptop this afternoon and put this together. These are pictures I took on my way to and from work in the field over the past few months. The song that accompanies the video is by Brenda Fassie, a popular South African (Zulu) singer here in Mozambique and in South Africa. The song is Vulindlela.


The first time I visited Mozambique was in 2004, just after Brenda Fassie's death. Her songs were played almost non-stop on the radio for almost a week. My friend Jotamo liked playing them on the landrover's tape deck as we trundled across the coastal savanna of Matutuine District going from village to village to do interviews. Now I associate her music, and this song in particular, with the landscape here. It plays in my head as we bump along the sandy roads.

Interestingly, the name Vulindlela is also the name of a rural, coastal region in KwaZulu-Natal located just south of Durban. It is just a little too far south to be part of Maputaland though.