COMPAGNIE DE MOZAMBIQUE Poem by Jan Jacob Slauerhoff

The Compagnie de Mozambique
Owns all Beira
And the land beyond
And Manga too
And the blacks who labour there
And bushes planted in beds with care.
It owns everything here
The Compagnie de Mozambique.

The animals living here too:
Not only the shambling oxen
With their tsetse flies,
Fluttering birds and insects one can't see
It owns too.

It grows tiresome
Summing them all up,
But what else is one to do
When one's sitting waiting
For a bus (run by the Compagnie)
That won't come,
Hearing a warbler chirping along,
Like a compromise,
With its funny two-note song,
Twixt nightingale and cricket!

(The Compagnie de Mozambique
lays no claim to it.)

António Menano too,
The famous fado singer
Whose dark and muffled voice
Makes all women weep and swoon:
Who cheered all Portugal's sorrows.
Menano too
Now belongs to the Compagnie de Mozambique.

Eight miles away
He works on a plantation;
He grew rich when all thronged to hear him,
He grew poor when he gambled and lost,
Of course speculating in shares
Of the Compagnie de Mozambique.

He's contracted for seven years
As a doctor on the plantation,
Gives injections and decides
If a black man who's done wrong
Is fit enough to be flogged,
For the regulations
Are strict and yet humane
In the Compagnie de Mozambique.

Shall we give money to buy him out,
So he can sing once more of mournful ecstasy?
No.
Menano long since has drunk himself hoarse
On the whisky that's imported
At a knock-down price
And supplied to the employees
Of the Compagnie de Mozambique.