ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a series of vignettes or thick description Geertzian stories of fieldwork that the author encountered on his visit to Ilha during the month of April 2009. These stories, in turn, have the potential to shed light on what he 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 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. The author argues that there is a politics to this indulgence in the colonial past and wants to explore this indulgence in the colonial past even as he recognizes and supports the initiative to protect these invaluable sites of history and heritage on Ilha de Mozambique.
