The muthianas use their hands between the rocks and sand covered in seaweed. They use their feet to feel the seabed, to walk further as the tide recedes. They do not go beyond the sea horizon but get close enough to hear the sound of the sea, and, under the blazing sun, murmur songs taught by their mothers and grandmothers, which they teach to their daughters and granddaughters.
This is how some muthianas live in Mozambique Island, a coral island off the north coast of Mozambique, declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1991. Mozambique Island was and still is a meeting point of worldwide cultures. The island holds living testimony to human interactions with the sea, reflecting ways of life, cultural practices, and symbolic visions that continue to shape coastal communities to this day.
Here, women are taught that the sea is not for them, that they belong on the shore. Women grow up hearing, “On the boat, there is no space for women. The day a woman gets on a boat and goes fishing, there will be no fish”. Here, women play both reproductive and caregiving roles. Women are responsible for collecting shells, processing fish, and passing on traditional knowledge to younger generations. The productive role is left to men, seen as those who dominate the space beyond the shore, the seas. They fish, sail, and own the boats.
The women of the island, the muthianas, are much more. They are made up of those who practice freediving, disappearing from the surface with their instinct and the air in their lungs; women who know the tides and the phases of the moon, who don't own dhows but master the art of the currents, sing while cleaning fish, observe the reef; women who carry the memory and pass on knowledge about the sea among sisters and mothers. This mastery, which no one calls navigation or maritime knowledge, is seen simply as survival skills. Without boats, the muthianas have become water women, daughters of the sea.
If women don't belong to the sea, why does the sea memorise their bodies and remember their hands?
At some point, over the years, the sea became divided by gender. What was once seen or addressed as a division of labour solidified as doctrine. What may have been implemented as protection was transformed into prohibition. On an island often described by its immaculate architecture moulded into its buildings, here the heritage is easily observed when built; what is practised when the tide is low is hardly seen. The knowledge carried by delicate hands, by the wet capulana with seawater, by the hands that hold the spear, by the voice in the songs, murmured under the sun, and by the pale skin of salt. These, too, are archives, are heritage.
The institutions responsible for heritage management tend to preserve buildings, protect landscapes, and catalogue monuments. Social roles also need to be preserved. “This is our culture, we say,” shaped by centuries of interaction, exchange, religion, and colonial governance – just like the buildings the tourists come to see. It is our social architecture.
The tide is not fixed, the sea recognises no limits. It is not the sea that dictates or draws the line between what is permitted and what is forbidden. It is not the sea that announces who is allowed to enter; it recognises no categories. It responds to gravity and wind, not to gender. As a child, we watched women returning with baskets full of shellfish, octopus wrapped in their capulanas, their eyes red from the salt of the seawater. All cheerful, chatting amongst themselves and always accompanied. While the fishermen return with their boats full of nets and fish caught in the open sea, they negotiate with the fish to prepare and sell them in the local market, and some even sell them in the fish market. They are the before, the during, and the after. They are not seen as pioneers; they are not known as fisherwomen, only as those who practice what they have been taught.
On Mozambique Island, women may be said to belong to the coast, but the coast is not separate from the sea. It is where the sea begins. At low tide, when the reef appears, and the horizon shines, the daughters of the sea advance, not to dominate a space, but to continue a relationship that has always existed, beyond the language used to describe it.
