Tofo

The Inhambane peninsula has been settled for centuries by Bitonga fishing and farming communities, and the bay behind it was one of the earliest points of contact between the Portuguese and this coast. Tofo itself, facing the open ocean rather than the sheltered bay, stayed a small fishing settlement: a place where boats were launched through the surf and the catch was carried across the peninsula to the market in town.

Sea bathing brought the first outsiders. In the late colonial period the beaches east of Inhambane drew holidaymakers from the town and from further inland, though little was built above the dunes. Independence in 1975 and the civil war that followed ended that traffic almost entirely, and for two decades Tofo was again a village of fishing families.

The modern village dates from the peace of 1992 and, above all, from the discovery by divers of what lies just offshore: a narrow continental shelf that brings deep water and plankton close to the beach, and with it manta rays and whale sharks in numbers seen in few places. Dive centres opened through the late 1990s and 2000s, backpackers followed the South African self-drive traffic, and research groups based themselves here to study the big animals. Growth has been rapid and largely unplanned, and the village now lives from the sea in two ways at once.

Tofo has two populations living side by side. The older one is Bitonga, a fishing culture of the peninsula in which boats are shared, crews are family, and the catch is sold on the beach or carried to Inhambane; the newer one is a floating community of divers, instructors, researchers and travellers, many of whom came for a season and stayed. The result is a village where Portuguese, Bitonga and English are all heard within a few metres.

Music follows the southern Mozambican pattern, marrabenta and pandza in the bars alongside South African house, and the province is the home of the Chopi timbila xylophone orchestras, proclaimed a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2005, whose heartland is the Zavala district south of Inhambane. Craft stalls sell wood carving, basketry and painted cloth, and capulana is worn daily by local women.

Conservation is part of the local identity in a way that is unusual for a Mozambican village: research teams tag and photograph mantas and whale sharks, and there is a long-running argument, common to such places, between fishing livelihoods and protection of the animals visitors pay to see. Sunday churchgoing is widespread, and the ordinary courtesies of greeting and unhurried conversation matter as much here as anywhere else in the country.

Tofo is a village of a few thousand people, part of a peninsula whose main town, Inhambane, is about 22 km away and where most administration, schooling and shopping happen. Households depend on fishing, small-scale farming of cassava, maize and coconut, market trade, and work in tourism as boat crew, guides, cooks, cleaners and security.

The pattern of the day is set by the surf and the boats. Crews push out at dawn, dive boats follow through the morning, and the market fills as the fish come in. Afternoons are hot and slow, and the beach bars take over in the evening. Seasonality is sharp: work is plentiful in the South African holiday weeks and the dry-season months and scarce in the wet middle of the year.

Infrastructure is thin. Electricity reaches the village but cuts are routine, water is drawn from boreholes, the sand roads are hard on vehicles, and cyclones periodically damage lodges and houses along the dunes. Rising land values on the beachfront, pressure on fish stocks, and the gap between tourism earnings and local wages are the issues people talk about.

Everything starts with the catch. Prawns, crab, calamari, rock cod and other line fish are grilled with garlic, lemon and piri-piri, and lobster appears when the boats find it; the cheapest and often the best version is bought at the market and cooked at a stall or taken back to a lodge kitchen. Matapa — cassava leaves pounded with groundnuts and coconut milk, frequently with prawns — is one of the country's best-known dishes, eaten with rice or xima, the stiff maize porridge.

Coconut is everywhere on this coast, in fish curries, in rice and drunk straight from the nut, and Inhambane's groves supply the cashews that are roasted, salted and sold by the bag. Portuguese habits survive in the bakeries and cafés: crusty rolls, custard tarts, chamussas, and frango à piri-piri from roadside grills.

The drinks are simple: cold 2M and Laurentina beer, sugar-cane spirit, strong coffee, and fresh juices from mango, cashew fruit and baobab in season. Palm wine tapped from coconut palms and drunk young is a speciality of the peninsula's villages.