Chimoio

The town grew out of the railway. When the line from Beira towards Salisbury was built in the 1890s, a settlement was established on the Manica highlands in February 1893 as a terminus and supply point; it was renamed Vila Pery in 1916 in honour of João Pery de Lind, the Portuguese governor whose measures had pushed the district's development. The setting mattered as much as the railway: high enough at about 750 metres to be cooler and healthier than the coast, with good soils and reliable rain, it drew Portuguese settler farmers who planted maize, vegetables, citrus and tobacco on the surrounding plateau.

For most of the colonial period Vila Pery was a farming and processing town — mills, a textile factory and depots strung along the railway — and the administrative centre of a district whose older wealth lay in the alluvial gold of Manica, worked long before the Portuguese arrived by miners linked to the Mutapa state and the Zimbabwe plateau. At independence in 1975 the town took the name Chimoio, and most settler farmers left almost at once.

The civil war of 1977 to 1992 hit Manica hard: the corridor was a strategic target, rural districts emptied as families moved into the town for safety, and Chimoio's population grew sharply as a result. Its position also drew in the wider regional conflict, and a camp associated with the Zimbabwean liberation war was attacked by Rhodesian forces near the town in 1977. Peace restored the corridor traffic, and since the 1990s Chimoio has grown again as a provincial capital, transport town and market for highland farming, with renewed clashes on Manica's roads in the mid-2010s now behind it.

Chimoio sits in the Shona cultural world as much as the Mozambican one. Manyika and Tewe are the everyday languages of the town and district, both closely related to the Shona spoken across the border, and Ndau is heard from families with roots to the south. Portuguese is the language of school, office and signage, and many traders and workers move easily between all of them, adding English picked up from Zimbabwe.

That closeness shows in music and everyday culture: Zimbabwean sungura and gospel play in the markets and chapas alongside Mozambican pandza and South African house, and cross-border trade and family ties have been part of town life for a century. Traditional religion remains strong in the countryside, where spirit mediums and healers are consulted on illness, rain and land disputes alongside clinics and churches, and Catholic, Pentecostal and Zionist congregations all have large followings in the bairros.

Manners are formal and unhurried. Greetings come before business, older people are addressed with deference, and loud impatience is considered bad behaviour. Football is the town's shared entertainment, played on any open ground and followed on television in bars, and weekends are shaped by church, family obligations and the market. Weddings, funerals and initiation ceremonies draw wide family networks in from the district and are the main occasions for large gatherings.

Chimoio counted about 239,000 people at the 2007 census and has grown a good deal since, and it is the largest city in Manica province. Most live in bairros of block and thatch or sheet-metal houses spreading along the roads out of town, with the colonial grid at the centre holding the offices, banks and shops.

The town lives off the corridor and the land. Lorries, buses and freight trains passing between the port of Beira and Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi support haulage, fuel, repairs and hospitality; the surrounding highlands produce maize, potatoes, tomatoes, bananas, citrus and tobacco that are traded here; and there is small-scale manufacturing, milling and timber work. Provincial government, schools and the hospital are large employers, and gold from Manica's workings finds its way into the town's trade.

The rhythm of the day starts before dawn, with produce arriving at the market and chapas filling for the first runs; by late afternoon the streets are busy with people returning home, and the town is dark and quiet early. The issues people discuss are the state of the corridor road, electricity and water cuts, the price of food and fertiliser, rural road access in the rains, and the pull of work across the border in Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Chimoio's cooking is highland cooking. The staple is xima, stiff maize porridge, eaten with relishes: beans, pumpkin and cassava leaves stewed with groundnuts, dried fish brought up from the coast or the Zambezi, or a little goat or chicken. Sadza-style dishes and flavours shared with Zimbabwe are familiar here, and groundnuts appear in sauces as often as coconut does on the coast.

Manica's vegetables and fruit set Chimoio apart from the rest of the country: potatoes, tomatoes, cabbages, carrots, onions, avocados, citrus and bananas from the cooler plateau fill the market and travel down the corridor to Beira. Frango à zambeziana, chicken cooked with coconut milk, garlic and chilli, is one of the best-known Mozambican dishes and is eaten here too, and grilled chicken with piri-piri is the everyday restaurant meal.

Portuguese habits persist in the centre — bread rolls, prego sandwiches, rissóis, custard tarts and strong coffee — and chamuças, fried pastries of Indian origin, are sold on the street. To drink there are 2M and Laurentina lagers, sugarcane and fruit juices, and in the bairros home-brewed maize and sorghum beers made for family gatherings.