By E.C. PHILLIPS

  The ships that sank during the colonial era still bear fruit for natives of the island; many of the items from these old vessels are bought and sold amongst the locals. Men scour the wrecks for silver coins which silversmiths then refashion into stunning bracelets and necklaces.

From these ships, glass beads once used to trade for slaves, have been washing up on the shores of the Island for hundreds of years. When boats would sink off the coast full of cargo, the crates of beads sunk  to the ocean floor and as time decayed the wood, the beads were scattered from the crates by the strong tides.

Young boys collect the beads from the sand and restring these artifacts into necklaces called Missangas that they sell for a dollar or two. Its strange to handle the necklaces and imagine the journey they have been on before arriving in my hands. The story of the beads seemed too fantastic to be believed, but several archeologists confirmed it.  It was odd to think that I was acquiring a good that had been meant to be sold here hundreds of years ago and not in exchange for money but in return for slaves.              
  

Of the few visitors who come to the island, many are yachts making their first African landfall after sailing from Madagascar. Meeting two families who had just made the journey across the Indian Ocean, I was regaled with stories of pirates, thieves and smugglers, tales that hinted at the largely lawless expanse of sea that spread out beyond the island. The feeling of being at the periphery of human civilization here was part of the atmosphere of Ilha de Mocambique. One can sense that for centuries this has been an exotic port town once bustling with sea traffic, ivory and gold passing through the hands of many different nationalities.
 

Though historical monuments and museums normally bore me, the Palace of Sao Paolo, the governor’s mansion during the Portuguese colonial era, gave me the eeiry feeling of returning to another time. Every detail has been restored or preserved and our guide’s story of each room was told in an unaffected manner, but in a way that suggested that the owners would soon be back. The whole island has this feeling; it is as if the former tenants of Ilha de Mocambique, traders and pirates, nobles and slaves, had only left the week before and would soon return to take up life here again.
 

Though the island was declared a UNESCO heritage site in 1991, few visitors have begun to arrive. The almost complete lack of tourist infrastructure has probably discouraged many people from coming, but as Mozambique opens up, Ilha de Mocambique may become another Zanzibar.  The island is as I would have imagined Zanzibar during the hippie era, an almost mythical destination where the lines between ages are blurred. Unlike Zanzibar, the island’s remote location, two hours east of the provincial capital Nampula, has largely protected it from the onset of modernity and the long civil war shielded it from overdevelopment.

  What will become of Ilha de Mocambique in the future is questionable; when transport to the island improves, there may be a flood of tourism that could destroy the fragile tranquility of the town. In April, Danny Glover and screenplay writer Joslyn Barnes plan to start filming a movie about the Haitian revolution on the island, bringing Ilha de Mocambique into the limelight of Hollywood fame. For now though she remains as the Portuguese poet Luis Camus wrote of her in 1657, “ a unique woman, lying sensuously in a state of abandon, in a sea of colours, sunworshipping on the beach.”