MAPUTO, Mozambique — Scores of vendors at the fish market in Maputo sell redfish. Because of the mercado’s close quarters, market dynamics at work mean that products go for a similar amount no matter which stall you go to.
Enter the redfish. Despite the laminated price-sheets intended to curb the complex bargaining negotiations that define the open-air bazaar experience, our self-declared guide took it upon himself to ensure we got the best price. His relentlessness saved us a few cents and irked most of the vendors we came into contact with.
Toward the entrance-exit, a woman unveiled a thin sheet that revealed boxes of squirming crabs. We paid for a kilogram and she gave us a little more, which is how I learned the Xangana word for thank you: kanimambo.
The social dynamics at play—greetings, handshakes, shouting, arguments—animated the scores of live lobster, shiny fish, and even squid that lined the market stalls. One aggrieved merchant wouldn’t let us leave until we admitted it was unfair that his friend had lowballed us to poach our sale. We agreed, it was unfair.
Competition isn’t limited to redfish. A sea of would-be cozinheiros, or cooks who fire up seafood for marketgoers, welled up to make the argument that their grill is better than all the rest. But the resident-expert in our group, an English teacher who has lived in Maputo for most of this year, already knew a guy. We sauntered over to his stall, confident as could be.
Except it was closed. The cook wasn’t picking up the phone and his competitors continued to jostle and shout. The resident-expert cracked a joke—Look, more mlungu (white people) just walked in!—that dissipated some of the tension that had begun to build. In another clever move, he faked a phone call to pretend his friend had named a replacement. It felt like a papal conclave.
Sitting down for dinner, we handed off our goods to the chef and waited. A South African man, unprompted, lamented the decades-long course of what he perceives to be the downfall of his nation. “There’s shit running through the streets of Durban,” he said. None of us had ever been there. His friend, a Mozambican who lived for many years in Scandinavia, nodded intermittently and unconvincingly.
The evening breeze and the looseness of a few beers set in as we bid the South African farewell and worked our way through crab, squid, and—at last—the redfish. “Eh,” someone joked. “Probably would’ve been better from that other guy’s stall.”
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