Evening out with the gang in Beira, Mozambique

Mozambique was my home from 1967 until 1975 when I moved down permanently to South Africa - the first years I lived there during holidays from school in Rhodesia, and university in South Africa, but in 1974 I started working full-time in Beira as an articled clerk at a firm of South African Chartered Accountants.
My Portuguese was pretty good by then as I had learnt the basics in Angola between 1960 and 1962, and used it extensively during my holidays in Luabo, a sugar estate on the banks of the Zambezi, some 250 miles (400 kms) from Beira, so had no problems using it daily at work, even though many of our clients had English-speaking staff.
I had gone into Auditing primarily because my father was an Accountant, but I had also met a young auditor in Luabo, who had come from Beira as part of the team that audited the sugar estate books, and he worked for the company I joined, though he left the firm shortly before I started. We hung out together - he was a lot younger than the rest of the auditing team and only a couple of years older than me - while they were on the sugar estate and became friends, so met up when I moved to Beira.
Phil was English, but his mother had re-married a Portuguese man when he was very young so he had been brought up in Beira and spoke Portuguese like a native. The rest of our regular "gang" comprised of John (Portuguese father and South African mother), George (Greek, but lived in Beira all his life), and Nando (Portuguese), and the 5 of us hung out most evenings, sometimes meeting up with others (notably a couple of other Greeks), but generally we started out at the Mexicana - a cafe just outside the city centre. 
The Mexicana was a regular haunt for other ex-pats too - it had a bar attached as well as the regular coffee shop, and had tables on the pavement as well as indoors, and was always buzzing. Back in those days you could sit and nurse a coffee or soft drink for hours and no-one would bother you! They also made the best toasted cheese sandwiches I have ever eaten (before or since!) and later on it became my lunch-time spot!
Phil and I were working, though neither of us earned that much, Nando was helping support his family, so had left school to work at lowly paid jobs, helping at home as his father had walked out years before leaving his mother to provide for him, his older sister (who at the time was expecting her first child from her husband was away in the army doing his 5 years' national service), and her mother who also lived with them! George and John were still finishing High School - not that unusual in Mozambique at the time, even though they were both around 20 years old. They got "pocket money" from their families and back then money went a long way - if you had £5 in your pocket on Friday night you could afford to eat out Friday and Saturday, catch a movie both nights, and still have some money left over for a couple of beers Sunday evening!
We rarely drank alcohol back then, it was just something we didn't do and not a conscious decision - though Phil and Nando rode motorbikes (Nando a 50cc and Phil a 350cc), and George and I drove (coincidentally we both had Ford Cortina 1600 estates - his belonged to his father), and coffee and/or soft drinks were cheap. So we met up at the Mexicana and decided what to do that evening - which sometimes meant we sat around and chatted all night!! Sometimes we would head back to "George's Garage" - as he was a pretty good motorbike mechanic and a steady stream of guys would turn up for him to do repairs for them. He used to get them to strip the bikes down following his instructions and then did all the technical stuff, which often entailed swapping the 50cc internal parts (50cc bikes didn't require a licence!) for 85cc kits. This used to increase the top speeds from (unlimited!) 50mph (80kph) to 60-70mph (96-112kph), but at maximum speed the engines didn't last long as the crankshaft and all other components were not up to the additional strain!!
So whatever we decided to do had to be cheap - as Nando had very little left after helping his family out, and wouldn't allow us to pay for him. The cinema was a good option - it cost next to nothing to get in, and though the films were pretty old for the most part it was a nice diversion - our favourites being kung-fu movies, sometimes obscure ones starring Bruce Lee!!
During 1974 they decided to abolish movie censorship, and though this didn't mean that there was an influx of pornography in the cinemas it did mean that content was a little more, shall we say, salacious! Compared to what is shown on TV today in everyday programmes it was very tame, but at the time some of this was considered titillating! One evening we watched a foreign language film, subtitled in Portuguese, and there was a simulated rape scene - again nothing shown, not even a bare breast, but it certainly excited many of the male members of the audience, including some of our group!
When the movie ended someone suggested we head to "Miramortes". I asked what this was, and they said they would show me - so we jumped in the car and set off. "Miramar" means sea-view, from "mira" and "mar", and "miramortes" means "dead-view" - it is an apartment block overlooking the cemetery! This particular apartment block is where the "ladies of the night" live - some of them work the many night-clubs in Beira (it is a port town) so from around 23.00 men start gathering outside the apartment block, many sitting on the pavement, waiting for the club girls to come home - as it is cheaper than going to the club and picking one up there where you will also be paying a "club fee"!
I was told that the "better" girls are the ones who work the clubs, but that many others were "available" inside. I was already pretty horrified by this but went inside with my friends - George and John in particular seemed fairly familiar with the layout! We went up in the lift to the 10th floor from where we could see most of the other floors - the building was "U-shaped" with the lift at the base of the "U" and an open courtyard below so we could see the two open corridors on all the floors below us. Almost every door we could see had a queue of men outside!
By now I was nauseated by the sight. Men were going in and out of these apartments at an alarming rate, and on one occasion a scantily clad woman came out and called across to a friend, asking how she was doing! We were only there a few minutes, but in that time several men went into each apartment. I looked at Phil, and he looked as shocked as I was, even though this was his home town, and suggested we leave - and rather reluctantly, George and John agreed (Nando hadn't joined us as he had work early in the morning). Before driving away I asked the others if they really frequented that place, and they admitted that occasionally they did. Knowing that condoms were not in common usage back then (it was also a Catholic country so birth control was illegal!) I asked about diseases, and they admitted that "getting a dose" was commonplace too, but they had a friend at the hospital who gave them free shots! "Miramortes" was never again mentioned in my presence.