The doorman of any five-star hotel is invariably a busy man. “It’s been a busy morning,” an apologetic Luis Nhaca told me when we met at Maputo’s Hotel Serena Polana in February 2015. “The queen of Spain was here. Can you come back at nine?”
Built in 1922, the Serena Polana resembles a cross between the Grand Budapest Hotel and a European casino, plopped down in Mozambique’s capital. Its 153 rooms have housed a number of illustrious guests, including the current Aga Khan, former American presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, as well as Queen Elizabeth II. Nhaca has met most of them—or at least held open the door for them.
When I returned at 10 am, Nhaca was all smiles, inviting me to stand with him at a shady spot near the hotel’s revolving door. His uniform of a red jacket and a black bowler hat was covered in nearly five hundred badges. The badges are souvenirs he has collected from guests over the years—they represent non-profits, oil companies, Portuguese football clubs, enough flags to open a small gift shop at the United Nations.
The story of the man wearing the badges, however, was more fascinating than how he acquired them. Nhaca speaks four languages, including his native Tsonga, and used the three European ones—Portuguese, Spanish and English—to regale me with stories from his life.
He was born in 1960, and grew up in a small home close to the Polana golf club. At the time, colonial building restrictions divided the city. The native Mozambicans lived in informal structures in one part, while another was restricted to European residents. The Serena Polana was part of the European quarter, not far from his childhood home.
“I was fascinated by the Portuguese golfers I saw as a child. I would come home and cut the branches off trees and make artisanal clubs,” Nhaca said, grasping a branch of a potted tree in the hotel foyer to demonstrate. With his crude equipment, he would peer into the course and imitate the swings of the colonial elite.
As a teenager, he discovered a new love—football. He fondly recalled following the exploits of the Maputo-born legend Eusebio, who was the top scorer in the 1966 World Cup and one of the greatest to ever play for Portugal. Nhaca was a tall child and a natural goalkeeper. He played competitively in Maputo, but grew disenchanted with the sport after a disagreement with his captain.
Nhaca paused his narration to greet a tuk-tuk driver who regularly stops by the hotel to take guests on a tour of Maputo’s architectural highlights. These include a steel house built by Gustave Eiffel that proved too hot to inhabit in a tropical climate, an old Portuguese fortress and a plethora of Art Deco buildings that led an architect I met to call the city a “little Miami.”
The city Nhaca grew up in was one of stark contrasts, in which the fascistic Salazar regime applied itself haphazardly. One could buy a Coke in Maputo but not in Lisbon, where Salazar resisted its introduction on the grounds that it was an addictive substance and a symbol of American imperialism. Portuguese secret police tortured prisoners in a grand home located in the Polana district and then transported them to Xefina Island, which is visible from the hotel.
In most of the communist world, golf was dismissed as a decadent bourgeois sport that needed to be expunged, and consequently it was banned in the Soviet Union, China and North Korea until the late 1980s. The Marxist-Leninist Mozambique Liberation Front, which replaced the Portuguese in 1975 and is known by its Portuguese acronym Frelimo, adopted a different policy: they flung open the doors of the country’s two golf clubs. The older course is in Beira, a few hours to the north of Maputo and was first laid out in 1907. Since independence, Mozambique has built no new courses but at least two new courses tied to real-estate developments are on the drawing board.
Nhaca began working at the hotel in 1979—first in the storeroom, then in the laundry. He played golf whenever time allowed. When the doorman died a decade later, Nhaca leapt at the opportunity to replace him. He carried on his predecessor’s tradition of accepting pins from the guests to put on his jacket.
At the time, the Frelimo government was caught up in a brutal civil war against the anti-communist Mozambican National Resistance, known as Renamo. “During the civil war, it was a tough time for golf,” Nhaca said. “Maputo was filled with many refugees from the countryside. The course suffered from people walking across it, assuming it was a field or a park.”
Nevertheless, he continued to train and play against foreigners living in the city. He entered his first tournament with four clubs he had borrowed that day. In 1983, he won a tournament, the third he had ever entered. Six years later, with the civil war waning, a Swedish businessman living in Maputo agreed to sponsor Nhaca.
Once peace was restored in 1992, Portugal’s national airline, Transportes Aéreos Portugueses, sponsored a golf tournament in Mozambique. The winner would be sent to a tournament at a resort in Portugal’s Algarve region. Showing me a badge commemorating the event, Nhaca said he handily won the Maputo tournament, and finished a creditable third in Portugal. It won him recognition as Mozambique’s first golf champion, a rare feat for a lusophone African country in a sport dominated by English-speaking nations.
“During apartheid, Zimbabwe was really the golf powerhouse in southern Africa,” Nhaca said, “but now South Africa has greatly improved in both amateur and professional play. Since the end of apartheid, I have played in South Africa. Johannesburg has some of the best courses on the continent.” One of his favourite golfers was Nasho Kamungeremu, the first black Zimbabwean to win a major title, whose career was cut short in 2007 when he died of a heart attack at the age of 34. Tiger Woods is another favourite.
As Nhaca began to offer his views on Woods’s personal foibles, a man in a suit approached him. He wore only one pin on his jacket, identifying him as a Turkish Airlines executive. A colleague had managed to break off the heel of his leather shoes, he said, and he was wondering if Nhaca knew a cobbler. The doorman knew just the place, and promised to direct the man’s driver.
When we resumed our conversation, I tried to make a crack about having to wear such a heavy suit, but the joke was lost in translation. We soon began discussing his participation in the annual Africa Zone 6 golf tournaments, which has allowed him to travel throughout the continent. Grabbing my wrist to emphasise his point, he assured me the Nyali course in Mombasa is the most challenging in Africa. He had played the 2011 edition of the continental tournament there. It was not the layout that he found difficult to overcome, but the oppressive Kenyan heat. “That night, I took off my gloves and was able to squeeze them like a towel.”
The Turkish executive returned with his friend, who was limping in his broken shoes. Nhaca called a taxi over with a gesture as practised as his golf swing. He leaned into the car window and explained to the driver how to get to the cobbler, then opened the door for the two men.
Nhaca’s large hands have greeted many of the world’s potentates, from the enlightened—Nelson Mandela—to the unsavoury—Robert Mugabe. He told me he misses his favourite world leader, former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “This man is simpatico. He is really kind and he remembered me on his second trip. He said, ‘How is the best doorman in Africa?’ I have photos with him at home. He treats everyone the same.”
When I mentioned da Silva’s hands, Nhaca’s face changed to a serious look as he folded one of his fingers to mimic the Brazilian leader’s old injury and nodded. He searched his jacket for the buttons Da Silva gave him, but could not find it. This was not surprising. Each time the famous jacket is cleaned, he must painstakingly remove the buttons by hand and place them on his alternative jacket.
Nhaca dreams of one day opening a golf school to grow the sport in Mozambique. He continues to play every Saturday. “I could play golf again on Sunday, but I rest with my family,” he said. He has five children and nine grandchildren.
He told me that golf has taught him a lot about life. “The great golfers play not from tee to green, but from green to tee box. They work backwards to figure out every shot they will need, never losing sight of the flag. It is the same in life. If you plan to go to the top of the mountain, you must work backwards from its summit.”