You can see the boats sail into Pakaquiteta beach every morning, carrying people and possessions from an area in Mozambique that is known as “the land of fear”.
More than half a million people have fled from northern parts of the country’s most northerly province, Cabo Delgado, and thousands of evacuees have sought sanctuary on this scruffy-looking beach, located in the heart of the region’s biggest city, Pemba.
This exodus has been fuelled by a vicious band of Islamist extremists who have opened a new front in the war on terror.
Extremists have become a serious threat to people in Mozambique
The conflict began in late 2017 and has cost the lives of at least 2,500 people – but it has gone largely unnoticed in the rest of the world.
The consequences are impossible to miss in a spot like Pakaquiteta, however. Families have erected tents and lean-to structures in the middle of the beach and they beg for food from passers-by.
“How long can you go on living like this?” I asked an evacuee, called Zena Dade, who has been living on the beach for the past nine months.
“We don’t know how we are going to get out of this situation. We haven’t had any help,” she replies.
The mayor of Pemba, Florete Simba Motarua, told us that the population of the city had grown by 138,000 people over recent months and admitted there was “pressure on everything”.
He said: “Clean water, hospitals, children going to schools. We don’t have schools. The international community must come and help us.”
Camps have been set up for those who have been displaced
In the neighbourhood which adjoins Pakaquiteta beach, we found thousands of new arrivals who had squeezed themselves into the impoverished community.
We met the Tchato family, who were sat around a dank open-air compound at the end of shadowy passage.
They had been driven from their farm in a town called…
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