Photo Essay on Madjadjane and Gala

I opened my email this morning and saw that my photo essay about landscape and livelihood was published online late yesterday afternoon. This is a link to the pdf.

Some of the photos will look familiar to blog readers, but the essay provides an outline to how Mazingiri Ronga live in the Maputaland landscape.

More photos from this October

River Road along the Futi River, Madjadjane, Mozambique.
Tihaca (Momordica balsamina) is an edible wild vegetable.
Xihaha (Opuntia ficus) is used in medicine for asthma treatments.
Waiting on the roadside to sell charcoal.
Me on the River Road.
Marracuja (Passiflora edulis) - passionfruit
Making mfuma - a paste of macuacua pulp that can be stored for future consumption.
Fire is used to clean fallow land in preparation for machambas (fields) where maize, cassava, and peanut will be grown.
A black catfish (~30 lbs.) harvested from the Futi River.
Little boys make carrinhos out of scrap wire, tin cans, and anything else they can find - including someone's old kewpie doll.
Building a new research lab/museum/office at the IUCN ecotourism lodge.
Selma and her cousin.
Constructing a new kitchen.
Dusk - a thunderstorm with heavy rain is blowing in.
Dawn.
Xavito making esteiras in his family's fabrica

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.

Student Presentations: Anthropology and Geography

Linda Manjate is an anthropology student at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane. She is interested in the connections between environmental, community, and personal health. Her research will look at how the Reserva Especial de Maputo affects the health of Gala's and Madjadjane's residents, the status/abundance of medicinal plants within reserve boundaries, and whether differences exist between medicinal plants harvested for personal use and market sale. lmanjate at yahoo dot com dot br


Vânia Pedro is an anthropology student at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane. She is interested in traditional wild plant knowledge and how people acquire this knowledge. Her research is looking at how plant knowledge is transmitted and the relationship between types of knowledge transmission and plant management practices. vania.pedro at nambu dot uem dot mz


Sergio Julane is a geography student at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane. He is interested in the socio-economic and physical environment factors that influence where people choose to live and build their homes. His research will assess the spatial distribution of homesteads in Gala and Madjadjane; looking at the influence of factors such as water supply, soil fertility, and livelihood. sejojulane at yahoo dot com dot br

Student Presentations: Biology

Ângelo M.M. Francisco is a biology student at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane. He is interested in how ecological factors influence people's decisions about using space, locating their homes and agricultural fields, and choice of resource harvest locations. a.fra2006 at yahoo dot com dot br


Márcia Langa is a biology student at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane. Her research will assess firewood harvest in Madjadjane and Gala. She is interested in the types of firewood people harvest, local management practices of firewood harvest, and potential damage to vegetation caused by over-harvesting or poor management practices. marcia_langa at yahoo dot com dot br


Leocadia Naiene is a biology student at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane. She will be collecting climate data from Mozambique's National Meteorological Institute, as well as conducting oral history interviews with older residents of Madjadjane and Gala about climate and vegetation changes and storm events. By comparing data from both sources, Leocadia will build a picture of the area's environment and changes to such over the past 50 years (at least). leoangy at hotmail dot com

Research Preparations & Presentations

From L to R: me, Vania Pedro, Linda Manjate, Angelo Francisco, Márcia Langa, Leocadia Naene, and Sergio Julane

My research group finally got to present publicly today. Even if the public that turned out consisted of 4 professors and a geography student. I was very disappointed. We originally planned to present our research proposals last week, and I had sent out emails early last week in anticipation. About an hour after I got out the last email, I got a call from Cornélio requesting that we move the presentation to this week because people at the Dept. of Natural Area Conservation (Ministry of Tourism) wanted to attend. He wanted to give the students an extra week to polish up their presentations since they would be presenting to more than just the department. Okay. That sounded good. DNAC is a potentially good connection for students who are looking for work or internships after they graduate. So, I emailed everyone again. Unfortunately, two of the people that would have definitely attended were in the field today.

Students got their titles to me by Monday. I forwarded the flyer to Cornelio for posting in the biology department. I came in Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday to help polish the presentations as best I could, but some of the language stuff still flys over my head. Late Wednesday, I received 2 flyers for posting in Geography and Anthropology. Angelo and I walked them over to the other departments and posted them, but I didn't have a good feeling about it.

Anticipating that people would be a few minutes late, we used our extra time to upload everyone's slide shows and correct last minute typos. I learned that attention to detail surpasses national boundaries. Mozambican biology, anthropology, and geography students are just as picky as their US counterparts when it comes to making presentations look good. They might even be more detail oriented. Angelo spent 10 minutes making sure all his fonts matched and were large enough for easy viewing. Linda and Vania (picture) looked over their presentations to anticipate potential questions - which they then proceeded to ask one another.

Angelina Martins, a botany professora that I am working with, showed up about 20 minutes before we were to start. Cornélio had asked her to introduce our group, and make sure we had a projector set up. Already done (that was me being anal retentive). A colleague of Sergio's from geography showed up a few minutes before 2PM to see what we were planning and to support Sergio who was pretty nervous about presenting. (He did a fantastic job BTW.) Then Esmeralda Marianas, an anthropology professora, arrived a little late but she had just gotten out of a meeting and rushed over. Esmeralda is going to be teaching ecological anthropology next term and co-supervises Vania and Linda with me. Cornélio Ntumi and Eunice Ribeiro, both biology professors, arrived an hour into the presentations, but they had warned me that they might be late because they had to attend a thesis defense for another student.

That was our audience. I can't tell you how disappointed I was - pissed off might be a better term. The students worked very hard to improve their presentations - practicing, rewording slides, reformatting to make them clearer, etc. We presented to ourselves and our audience of one. I am not counting the professors because we've been working with the students all this time already. Well perhaps Esmeralda counts since she didn't know too much about the biology projects in advance. But no DNAC, no other professors or students from biology, no professors from agronomy (they were invited). Remember, I didn't have a good feeling about posting the flyer so late in geography or anthropology. One can always hope, but the pragmatic part of me did prepare to be disappointed from that direction.

I can post their work here and reach a huge audience. Over the next couple of days I will be posting a description of the projects (and linking to presentations if I can figure out how to do this). I will post a picture of each member of our Maputaland Landscape and Culture Research Group (the link goes to a separate but related project), with the title of their research, a brief description of the project, and contact information (they requested the last part). If you are interested please comment.