Mahabou and M'Gombani

 

This Sunday afternoon was lovely and fine, so we set off to walk up and around the Pointe Mahabou, a cliff on the other side of Mamoudzou where the very first sultan of Mayotte, Adriansouli, was buried. Other cars were driving up, so I started driving up too, then got shouted at because P wanted to walk up and didn’t see any point in giving the car a workout. Drove back down again, parked at the bottom, got out of the car and P started shrieking. One of the back tyres was half flat. Got in the car again, drove to the nearest petrol station, blew the tyres back up. Right. Try again.

The Pointe Mahabou is a cliff with a bumpy red-earth track leading about half-way up before branching out into four or five smaller tracks. We heard music up there and asked a lady sitting on a bench, who answered Oui to all of P’s questions… don’t think she understood him that well. We went up to listen, but got stared at by a group of about twenty ladies sitting down and chanting while two men beat drums, so we fled fairly quickly. A bit lower down, another group of people were cooking a freshly-killed water buffalo. Another lady told us that they were having a party for Maoulida Shengué, as this month is the lunar month the prophet was born. As it’s calculated following the moon, it changes every year.

  

We went back through M’Gombani, next to Mamoudzou, as the music group had recently inaugurated a brochetti there, and P wanted to show me where they’d eaten and played. A tiny little restaurant in the middle of nowhere, I would never have thought to go there if I hadn’t known there was something there.

 

Comments

[gifts to pakista]

wonderful article i like it.