ABSTRACT
The image of Pedro repeatedly saying ‘Obama, Obama’ with his big wide eyes, infectious smile and tattered clothes as he followed me through the labyrinth of narrow alleyways that make up Ilha de Mozambique stays with me. It is a refrain that I both smile at and feel saddened by for it is the conditions of history that allow this little boy to understand that my being American equals the promise or ‘audacity of hope’ of someone like U.S. President Obama with his Muslim name and mixed African/American parentage, and what he could potentially bring to this somewhat forgotten place. Ilha is at the same time a tourist’s dream of azure beaches and white sand, a former capital of Portuguese East Africa and centre for a longstanding African slave trade, and a crumbling UNESCO world heritage site (since 1991) that has seen the last of its international funds largely dry up and is now in a state of disrepair and ruins, its thin veil of charm still holding sway however over the few tourists or anthropologists like myself who decide to venture to this desolate island located off the Eastern coast of Northern Mozambique. What follows in this chapter are a series of vignettes or thick description Geertzian stories of fieldwork that I encountered on my visit to Ilha during the month of April 2009. These stories, in turn, have the potential to shed light on what I would like to evoke as ‘romancing the colonial’ – very much a starting point for thinking analytically about the larger cultural and material spaces of colonial nostalgia that tourist industries endorse and which tourists are drawn to, inhabit and experience when they go elsewhere in search of the past. Perhaps some tourists come away feeling a sense of aesthetic and architectural wonderment, and/or a reconciled sense of self in relation to more complex historical contexts than initially imagined. Or perhaps it is simpler than that and the lure of colonial nostalgia makes them leave feeling relaxed after a few days of rest and relaxation, with a bit of colonial history thrown in; a brief respite from a complicated present. There is no one singular response. However, I do want to argue that there is a politics to this indulgence in the colonial past, 1 an emotive and sensory power that suggests both the forgetting (and the remembering in unexpected ways) of the layered conditions of history (and history-making) that make tourism on Ilha a possibility here and now. It is little Pedro following me around, with echoes of ‘Obama, Obama’ ringing in my ears that keep me attuned to how these inflections of colonial nostalgia constantly reverberate and jar with the postcolonial present. Statues, Ilha de Mozambique https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315579214/ae2ee533-7e44-49b1-912b-acbefb278e47/content/Fig14_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> © Pamela Gupta
