Calamity's New Face

A journalist reporting in the midst of Mozambique's brutal civil war once wrote about a young girl who, standing near him, pointed to the sky and whispered, "calamidades." Calamity. The year was 1988, and the journalist was in Morrumbala in the province of Zambezia. By the journalist's account, he didn't know what to expect. Perhaps the keen young observer was tuned into the early rumble of an incoming war plane, or perhaps warning of the onset of a torrential downpour that could lead to an equally devastating flood.

The journalist looked to the sky, to the southeast where the girl's small finger pointed, and saw nothing.

The rain fell gently. The child, thin, shivering and clad in burlap, continued to point to the sky, repeating the word: calamidades.

Calamidades was the child's shorthand for the Mozambique government's Department for the Prevention and Combat of Natural Calamities, and what this particular child noticed was a distant airplane approaching their airstrip near the Morrumbala mountain. (1) The calamity, as it turned out, was already present in her starving body, and her ears were acutely tuned to the hum of relief approaching from a distance.

Nearly 20 years have passed since that plane arrived in northern Mozambique bringing food and clothing to that weary child and her family. In June 1999, with civil war comfortably behind the country, the corrupt and discredited "calamity department" was replaced by a slimmed-down and modernized National Institute for the Management of Emergencies.

These children, now grown, still talk about calamidades, except that in urban Maputo, the colourful word has taken on a slightly new meaning.

With $100 a month, a Mozambican need not be too concerned about where his or her next meal is coming from. That level of income even leaves a little extra to spend at the local used clothing stores, shopping for calamidades, the word now used to describe the boatloads of used clothing donated by wealthy nations and sold in poor ones.

Timoteo showed me his shoulder bag, a stylish grey bag with the initials DKNY branded on its top. It's in good condition, which also means that it wasn't cheap. Calamidades, Timoteo said, are becoming very expensive. He spoke as if they have a cool allure about them, not unlike, I suppose, teenagers at home who shop at the local Value Village in search of the prized bowling shirt with some stranger's name embroidered on the breast pocket.

He pointed at the running shoes on my feet. Another example of something that he could buy at the local calamity shop, he said.

For those living in the city, Mozambique has taken a small step back from the precipice of poverty. Enough of a step back that these children have now grown up and purchase their calamidades at local shops rather than waiting for them to arrive by air drop.

A tentative step, but a hopeful one.

In urban Mozambique, calamity has become a good thing.


(1) William Finnegan, A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

The Deafening Echoes of War

Flooding, drought, and cyclones have filled the news over the past three months in Mozambique. The southern capital of Maputo has -- for the most part -- been spared these destructive forces.

Until now.

Laura and I sat at home, writing a few emails to friends and family, when the distant rumble of a strange African thunderstorm started. It must have been far off in the distance, because we couldn't see a cloud in the sky. The storm must be just over the trees.

The thunder claps rolled in with a fury, getting louder and louder. The shockwaves were more intense than I had ever experienced. At several points, I looked outside, believing that a truck had hit our building. We decided to shut our curtains in case the windows shattered. As I was standing in the front window doing so, I noticed one dark cloud off in the distance. Then I noticed that it had a tail trailing down to the ground.

The thunderous booms grew in power.

Neighbours' windows were blown out, but I didn't realize that the experience was much more severe for others in the city until we made some phone calls. The country's largest armoury was on fire again, flinging old soviet projectiles in every direction. For more than four hours, munitions as small as bullets and as large as vehicles were sent flying kilometres away, killing, maiming and destroying houses.

Mario told me that the armoury was in Malhazine, right beside Zimpeto. Suddenly the tragedy was brought a frightening step closer to reality for us: we have a friend in Zimpeto, a Canadian visiting for two weeks, working at an orphanage there (more on that next week).

Our cell phone reception was lost briefly as we tried to make contact. The electricity was spotty, as well. We finally received word back from the orphanage: please pray. Projectiles were flying over their heads. Everyone was huddled together in a small building, volunteers comforting orphans, volunteers comforting volunteers. It was a frightening, albeit accidental, war zone in an otherwise-peaceful country.

A shell tore through the roof of the chapel where they were scheduled to be worshipping but thankfully were not.

Once again, by the grace of God, Laura and I were protected in our cocoon, but had no way of helping our friends as the danger unfolded.

I didn't fully grasp the magnitude of what was happening until the next morning when I drove to Zimpeto to get Julie and bring her to the airport for her scheduled departure. Malhazine is right in between our home and Zimpeto, forcing me to drive by the now-quieted armoury. Crowds were gathered around trying to learn what they could. Holes were punched in large buildings; small, simple houses were flattened. Military personnel were gathering large ordnance from people's yards, placing them on the backs of trucks and parading them down the street to the false safety of their storage facility. Back to where the explosions started.

Only a kilometre before arriving at the orphanage, I passed a psychiatric hospital that had been destroyed.

Once at the orphanage, the first person I encountered was a long-term volunteer whose children Laura teaches at school. She and her husband were visibly shaken, feeling the burden of caring for their own family and the hundreds of scared orphans under their watch. At that point, they still weren't sure where all the children were: frightful of war, Mozambicans' habit is to run aimlessly (recall Olga's frayed nerves last time this happened).

The government is reporting the death toll at 96. That's how many bodies are accounted for in the morgue, but everyone knows more will be found over the coming days. Hundreds of people crowd the hospitals maimed and wounded. The hospitals have run out of blood for transfusions.

I was relieved to hear that there were no injuries at the orphanage, and that Julie was fine, though shaken. We spent the morning at the airport, waiting for the uncertain hour of her departure as the airport's damaged runway was repaired.

By late morning, rumours were circulating that the explosions had resumed. Laura's school was closed early; Julie's orphanage was evacuated.

By early afternoon, the airplane that would take Julie home had arrived from Johannesburg, and the crew seemed more eager than normal to make a quick exit. As Julie boarded, I wondered if their haste was because the plane was so late already, or because of the black smoke visible on the horizon at the end of the runway.

Barely half an hour after landing, the plane had loaded its new passengers, refueled, and was again airborne. It was soon a speck in the sky, distancing itself from the chaos below, safely on its way to Johannesburg.

Olga's Frayed Nerves

I was reflecting this week on a question that I asked in a posting back in July. Before setting foot in Mozambique, I wondered what remnants I would find of a protracted civil war that has certainly, I thought, left some emotional and physical scars on this country and its people.

This week, I heard a story involving Olga, whose wedding we were at in the fall, that reveals an interesting example of the frayed nerves with which some people still struggle.

Last Sunday, Olga was injured and briefly hospitalized in what she believed was the resumption of the country's once-protracted and bloody civil war, which ended with a ceasefire in 1992.

She wasn't wounded by fighting; instead, her injuries were sustained as she jumped out of the window of the minibus taxi that she was riding in when she heard the eruption of explosions and gunfire. Fearing for her life, she desperately wanted to flee.

As it turns out, she need not have been alarmed. The country is still at peace, but ringing in her ears were the haunting noises of the civil war era: for 45 minutes on Sunday afternoon, obsolete mortar shells and other military equipment exploded in a fire apparently started by the heat of the African summer.

The scars of battle are deep. And for some people, like Olga, fear simmers just below the surface.

A Culture Lost

A couple of years ago, Mel Lastman, the outspoken mayor of Toronto, embarrassed himself and our city with a demonstration of his lack of knowledge about Africa.

On the eve of travelling to Mombasa Hamisi Mboga, Kenya, Mr Lastman joked with reporters that he feared being hoisted into a vat of boiling water while natives danced around him.

He was preparing to travel to Kenya to promote Toronto's 2008 Olympic bid. The remark didn't help our city's chances to win the Olympic Games and vault itself onto the international stage, and the Olympics were eventually awarded to Beijing.

(Yes, there are infrequent reports of cannibalism in Africa, just as there was in Germany in 2001.)

Fears of boiling pots of cannibal soup aside, the tragic reality is that much African culture, like much native culture in North America, has been lost in large measure because of historic ignorance not unlike that exhibited by Mr Lastman in Toronto.

Traditional tribal languages have also been pushed aside in favour of European languages, though this is changing somewhat.

Laura and I recently had the opportunity to visit a cultural village established to celebrate the heritage of the Shangana tribe, which is the predominant tribe in southern Mozambique. We witnessed traditional clothing and dance, and partook in a traditional meal.

The meal, as it turns out, was very similar to the one that we experienced at Paulo and Olga's wedding. Traditional food, it seems, has not been lost.

The most significant difference was the wedding's lack of traditional appetizers: worms, crocodile and impala. These delicacies weren't in short supply at the cultural village. (Laura and I were thankful that they were well sauced!)

The very fact that we had to travel to a living museum to witness the traditional culture of the people in whose land we are immersed is telling. Today, many Mozambicans (particularly men) have shed traditional African flamboyancy in favour of the standard uniform of westerners' clothing: pants and a shirt.

In some places, this is because of used clothing arriving courtesy of westerners' donations. Evidence of this is common. People have no inhibitions about wearing t-shirts with tourist slogans scrawled across their chests, or sweatshirts advertising some little-known college in the United States, or someone's long-forgotten amateur softball uniform.

In Africa, a shirt's often just a shirt.

But this doesn't accurately paint the picture. Many Africans in Mozambique wear clean and well-pressed clothing. Tasteful clothing. But not traditional African clothing. Their colonizers taught them to wear Western clothing.

Men don't wear copalanas anymore. Civilized men don't wear skirts.

Contempt for the culture practiced by the majority population of the derisively-named Dark Continent was widespread among colonizers. Ian Smith, the last European Prime Minister of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), demonstrates this contempt in unapologetic fashion in his 1997 memoirs:

It is difficult for people who have never lived in this part of the world to appreciate that sub-Saharan Africa is different. It was the last part of our world to come into contact with western European civilization... The wheel had not even evolved, nor had the plough. The change which has taken place is absolutely phenomenal, and is a tribute to what the white inhabitants did over a period of ninety years. (Smith, The Great Betrayal, p. 55).

The colonialists and the naive, it would seem, saw native Africans as monkeys in the jungle needing to be modernized. Or exploited.

It's shameful that so much of African culture has been lost.

And it's a shame that Africa must battle its image as a continent where visitors will be encountered at the airport by a throng of salivating cannibals dancing in their leopard-skin loincloths.

A Coat of Fresh Paint and Some Dynamite

Cape Town is a beautiful city, a wealthy city. If it were ripped from its African roots and floated across to the other side of the Atlantic, it would fit in without much trouble amongst the cities of North America. It is not without crime and poverty, but it also has a feeling of promise and hope.

I have heard repeatedly that, 30 years ago, there were many African capitals in this same situation. Maputo, the evidence would show, was among these.

Jeffrey Sachs, in his insightfully- and optimistically-written bestseller, "The End of Poverty," backs my anecdotal evidence with hard data: sub-Saharan Africa has increased in both the absolute number and proportion of population living in extreme poverty over the twenty-year period of 1981 to 2001. Africans have, on average, become poorer over the past quarter-century.

The core of Maputo consists of high-rise buildings built with typical Portuguese architecture along wide, tree-lined avenues. It whispers secrets about a long-past beauty, but today many of its buildings are crumbling.

The towering Four Seasons hotel reveals some of Maputo's worst-kept secrets. From a distance, it is a hotel that stands as a proud beacon on the shores Indian Ocean. Surely it has entertained scores of the world's wealthy and famous.

A keen observer will notice, however, that the hotel has never hosted a single guest. Its unfinished concrete frame stands as a beacon of distrust, not pride. This distrust resulted in policies such as the infamous "24-20" edicts at the end of the revolution, by which minister of the interior (and now current president) Armando Guebuza evicted any white resident suspected of being a counterrevolutionary. Guebuza's edict gave such suspects, without so much as a trial or opportunity for defense, 24 hours to leave the country and restricted them to 20kg of luggage each.

The Portuguese fled, leaving the civil service and most businesses without a sufficient number of trained employees to allow for a successful transition of power. The Four Seasons hotel was left unfinished, and rumours have circulated for the subsequent three decades about sabateurs having poured cement down the elevator shafts and through the plumbing; rumours that the Portuguese architects had fled with the drawings.

It is nothing but an empty, vacant, abandoned shell, and has never been anything but an empty shell.

Behind the hotel is a massive crater serving as a reminder that, during the floods of March 2000, hundreds of homes and countless lives in the Maputo suburb of Polana Caniço were washed out into the ocean.

There has been a long line of companies that have attempted to complete or redevelop the hotel, but for 30 years company after company has walked away and the rumours of sabotage have persisted. The latest proposal is that the US government is going to implode the building in February to make room for a new oceanfront embassy and residential compound.

If these plans come to fruition, the disappearance of this blight will represent for some Mozambicans another step along the cathartic path to reconstruction. And for countless others, its implosion will have no greater impact than providing an afternoon of cheap entertainment.

A Property Development Diversion

Laura and I have been keenly interested in remaining flexible while in Mozambique, keeping an eye out for the greatest needs and adjusting our work as necessary.

It should come as no surprise that the harvest is plenty, but the labourers are few. There’s no shortage of work for us to do here, but matching the greatest needs with our skills and interests is an on-going challenge.

OMS, the organization that we are attached to while in Mozambique, is developing a post-secondary institution that will offer seminary training to aspiring pastors.

By North American standards, the project is relatively small. Once completed, it will be a 15,000 square foot, four-storey concrete block and glass structure.

On several occasions, the project manager for the facility construction has asked for my assistance to keep the project moving along.

* * * * *

Maputo is a sprawling city whose many low-rise concrete buildings are due for more than just a fresh coat of paint. Much of the city was built by the Portuguese and, when they fled (which coincided with Mozambique's independence in 1975), they left behind a void of professionals and skilled trades workers. Buildings that were under construction 30 years ago remain unfinished, though where possible the completed floors are occupied.

This isn't to say that people in Mozambique lack the capacity to build and maintain major infrastructure works; rather, that it's incumbent upon the leadership of a nation to train up its people with the requisite skills to do so. The Portuguese withheld such education in decades passed, and Mozambique still suffers for it.

It would appear that safety regulations are almost non-existent in Mozambique. I recently heard of a gentleman from South Africa who witnessed the stringency of safety regulations in Canada and wondered how we ever get any work done. I suspect that someone from Mozambique would wonder the same of South Africa.

I've seen a hard hat on the construction site once. It was upside down, full of water, being used by one of the workers to clean some tools.

The project is behind schedule by several months. In fact, by the original schedule it should have been completed before I arrived in Mozambique. Here's just a flavour of the challenges faced on this project:

• Labourers who have a very real and immediate need to feed their families. In the African context, it is not practical to withhold significant payment because the workers are quite literally hungry. Payment in small amounts -- even $20 at a time -- is often a strong encouragement to maintain the project’s momentum.

• Several contracts with sub-contractors are for labour only, making it our responsibility to ensure that materials are present -- a risk they will not accept because of the difficulty in securing supply, and because they don't have sufficient working capital to carry an inventory. For example, the labourers who have been hired to lay tile on the hallway floors and bathroom walls ran out of materials earlier this week. I travelled with an assistant to nearly a dozen shops over two days before finding tiles -- similar in colour, and not quite the right size. But close enough.
  

• Business that is transacted largely in cash, which requires a strong record keeping discipline. Imagine trying to build a college without writing a cheque. To add to the challenge, the project’s contracts and suppliers deal in three different currencies: Mozambican meticais, South African rand and US dollars.

• Not having assurance of the funding necessary to complete the project. This is typical for not-for-profit capital projects, since potential donors often want to see a building rising out of the ground before committing their donations.

• Design coordination issues (and incomplete designs) that need to be managed. This is a problem with construction around the world, but is exacerbated in a culture where, according to author David Maranz, “People tend to accept immediate, cheap, or even quasi-legal solutions when dealing with business matters, rather than take care of matters properly, deal with technicalities or delays, or incur additional expense.” (Maranz, p. 182.)

* * * * *

After visiting the 12th shop, I returned with Geraldo, our Mozambican project assistant, with my small car loaded with enough tile and grout to keep the workers busy for a few more days.

When we arrived, the tilers were sitting around playing a game of checkers -- one side using bottle caps, another side using small stones. Geraldo called them over to collect the new materials, yelling (in English), "Come on! Time is money!" He looked at me and laughed, wondering if I'd ever heard that expression. The tilers wouldn't have understood the words, and even if they had've been in Portuguese, wouldn't have understood their significance.

"I heard someone yell that in South Africa once," Geraldo explained to me, with a grin on his face. "Those guys work hard."

A Day to Honour Samora Machel

It's amazing how many times over the past couple of months we've shook our heads saying, "This just doesn't happen in Canada..."

Today is just another one of those days.

Yesterday, I was thinking about how busy my day today was going to be. I already had a couple of meetings scheduled, plus Portuguese lessons, when the director of Laura's school asked me to fill in for a sick teacher.

All of that changed by mid-afternoon, when rumours started circulating that the government declared the following day -- today -- to be a national holiday. How can a government declare a holiday less than 12 hours before it starts? How will everyone be informed? Don't businesses and schools need to prepare to be closed?

In Mozambique, people have a way of knowing. Rumours about holidays spread through the city like a grassfire on the dry savannah.

As one young man, Timoteo, explained to me, "We Mozambicans like our holidays." I can't argue with that.

At first, Laura's school had thought that it would stay open -- until rumours of government fines convinced them otherwise. Laura helped the school's director phone all of the parents to let them know that they would have to make alternative arrangements for their children.

* * * * *

Twenty years ago, October 19, 1986, Samora Machel, the first president of the independent Republic of Mozambique, died when his plane crashed in the hills of South Africa. There is no official explanation for the cause of the crash, but every Mozambican knows what happened: South Africa's apartheid government, under President P. W. Botha, planted a false beacon in the hills, steering the plane off course and causing it to crash into the hillside.

(As an interesting historical footnote, Samora Machel's widow, Graça Machel, later remarried apartheid-fighter Nelson Mandela, who became the President of South Africa.)

Samora Machel is still seen as somewhat of a national hero, albeit a controversial one. For today's celebration, the government hung banners in the streets reminiscent of Machel's tenure as president of a socialist state struggling against capitalism. This banner stretched across Avenida Vladimir Lenine, near our apartment:

"SAMORA COMMITS US TO CONTINUE THE
STRUGGLE UNTIL THE FINAL VICTORY."

When I asked my friend Mario about Samora Machel, he spoke with a bit of admiration and even romanticism in his voice -- similar to the way in which he speaks of his deceased father.

I can't argue with the purpose of the holiday. I just would have thought that the government would have seen it coming and could have planned ahead a bit further. But that's not the African way.

Kruger Park

This past weekend, Laura and I visited one of Africa's treasures: Kruger National Park in South Africa. At 20,000 square kilometres, the enormous wildlife preserve is nearly three times larger than Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario.

Driving around the park is an experience that is stereotypically African. Kruger is famous for its animals. People come to observe animals commonly restricted to zoos living in their natural habitat. We spotted elephants, giraffe, lions, zebra, buffalo, hippopotamus and rhinocerus. Impala -- small deer-like animals -- are plentiful. Vervet monkeys and baboons are commonly seen playing on the side of the road.

Tourists come to Kruger Park to shoot (with a camera, of course) the Big Five game animals: lion, elephant, cape buffalo, rhinoceros and leopard. In previous centuries, these were the most sought-after by hunters because they were the most dangerous to hunt. We managed to spot four of the Big Five, but the fifth -- the leopard -- proved elusive.

Unlike Algonquin Park, which is great because campers are able to trade their car for a canoe and really experience the wilderness, tourists in Kruger are allowed out of their cars only at very specific and well-controlled points.

Even the most docile animals can be dangerous. We've heard on numerous occasions that the lazy hippopotamus kills more humans than any other animal.

Kruger National Park shares a border with Mozambique. Unfortunately, since Mozambique's civil war, these wonderful African animals have become extremely rare here -- in fact, we've yet to see any animals in the wild.

Some people have told us that they were killed by hungry soldiers. Some people have theorized that they were scared out of the country by the gunfire. They are gone, whatever the cause.

It's spring in the southern hemisphere, which means a couple of things: Kruger Park, like most of the continent, is very dry right now. The rainy season, along with the heat of summer, will start in a couple of months. It also means that we saw many animals with their young, like this young zebra feeding from its mother.

We couldn't cram all of the photos we wanted to onto a single web page, so we created a short video featuring some of the animals that we watched while driving around the park.

Our accommodation while in Kruger was a small chalet within a gated camp. For our protection, we were required to be within the gates by sundown (6:00pm).

Immediately out our front door (and past the electric fence) flowed the Sabie River, in which we saw elephant and hippopotamus at play, and a multitude of colourful birds. The rest camp also had a beautiful main lodge with a store, a cafeteria and a restaurant. We ate our meals sitting on a large veranda overlooking the Sabie River, with the warm Africans spring breeze blowing and birds serenading us from above.

(We heard that it snowed in Ontario this weekend.)

Kruger Park, less than a two-hour drive from our door in Maputo, is a great spot for relaxation after the intensity and stress of living in a foreign land. We can't wait to go back.

Thanksgiving for Two

Yesterday was Thanksgiving Day in Canada. Most of our Canadian friends and family are probably eating left-over turkey sandwiches at work today (it's true -- you are, aren't you?).

Being in Mozambique and knowing no other Canadians celebrating this holiday, we feasted by ourselves, and had a wonderful time.

The Canadian government formalized Thanksgiving as a holiday in 1957, naming the second Monday of October a public holiday, "for general thanksgiving to Almighty God for the blessings with which the people of Canada have been favoured."

Previously, the holiday had been celebrated for numerous reasons: the end of combat, the end of cholera, the restoration of health and, most commonly, a bountiful harvest.

(This past week, on October 4, Mozambique had a public holiday in recognition of the 14th anniversary of the end of their civil war. Peace is still fragile, though many Mozambicans are tired of war, both in their own country and around the world.)

Despite being half a world away from Canada, this was a Thanksgiving Day for which we had many reasons to be thankful. We are in need of very little in life. Arguably nothing.

As if to emphasize the point, the electricity went out in the midst of cooking our meal. Knowing that many people in Mozambique don't have electricity, and those who do see it as a bit of a luxury, we weren't sure what pressure the electrical utility faces to restore the power when it's out. Children played in the streets, oblivious to any problem. (Thankfully, our dinner continued to cook on our butane stove.)

Once the power was restored, our Internet was spotty, though in the end we were able to talk to family and friends.

We feasted on a chicken so small that it would have been a stretch to feed a family of four with Thanksgiving-sized portions. Laura spiced her helping with piri-piri, just to make Canadian Thanksgiving a little more Mozambican.

The chicken was stuffed with dressing. Delicious dressing.

We also had pumpkin pie, though made with butternut squash, since in Mozambique pumpkins are things only read about in used children's books donated through relief agencies. Laura's first attempt at making a pie crust from scratch was a big success. (My attempt at whipped cream, using "boxed cream" that needs no refrigeration and has a shelf life measured in months, was less successful.)

We had plenty of delicious food. Laura even brought a left-over chicken sandwich to work for lunch today.

I don't know why we have so much when others so close to us are hungry, but for our lot in life, we can be thankful. And for that of our neighbours, we can work towards equality.

Mozambique's Colonial Roots

A couple of days before our departure, I was handed a book written by William Finnegan called A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique. It was given to me by a member of OMS’ board of directors – he was given it as a Father’s Day present this year, but thought my need for it was more pressing than his own.

It has proven to be an insightful account of Mozambique’s history, so I thought that I'd share some of it with you to provide a brief glimpse into the country that Laura and I will call home for the next 11 months or so.

Mozambique was, for many centuries until 1974, a colony of Portugal. To this day, it is strongly influenced – both positively and negatively – by this heritage. Finnegan writes:

The fact that some people scarcely realize they live in a country called Mozambique is, in light of the region’s colonial experience, unsurprising. Portugal, which declared the place an administrative unit to begin with, never had the wherewithal to turn it into anything of the kind.

The thought of living within a country’s boundaries without knowing anything of its governance – or even of the existence of a higher order of governance beyond one's own village – is astounding to me.

Throughout centuries of colonial rule, Mozambique was plundered for its gold, its ivory, and – most devastatingly – its labour:

In the nineteenth century, [the major international trade] was in slaves. Powerful slave-raiding states grew up, and the entire northern half of Mozambique was impoverished and almost depopulated as more than a million people were captured, sold, and shipped to Brazil, the United States, and the Caribbean islands.

Many of those who were fortunate enough to not have been kidnapped and sold into slavery were unable to benefit from their own labour nonetheless:

The South Africans agreed to pay part of the wages of Mozambican mineworkers directly to the Portuguese in gold. Since an average of 80,000 Mozambicans were working legally in the mines after 1910, these remittances became the mainstay of the colonial government’s budget.

This is Mozambique’s sad history of abuse, even before the nearly 30 years of war are taken into account (from 1964 to 1992 -- see The Scars Must Be Deep). As one BBC correspondent noted, “Mozambique is one of the poorest countries in Africa not because it lacks natural resources, nor because Portugal left it undeveloped, but rather because Portugal actively underdeveloped it.”

I’m hoping to hear stories from those who have actually lived some of the more recent of the country’s fascinating history to see glimpses of how it impacts their present lives.

All quotations are from William Finnegan, A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

The Scars Must Be Deep

Yesterday, a group of Kashmir terrorists detonated 8 bombs on the public transit system in Mumbai, India, killing over 200 people.

This morning, Israel stepped up its offensive against its neighbours by attacking Lebanon in response to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers.

Earlier in the week, Japan was rumoured to be considering “pre-emptive strikes” against military targets in North Korea in response to the latter’s missile testing program.

The world is a violent place.

I’m too young to remember whether or not Mozambique’s 30 years of war – which ended in 1992 – ever attracted the sort of international attention paid to some of the more infamous conflicts of the past half-century. It was certainly violent enough to warrant such attention: according to a report by the UN, 900,000 Mozambicans were killed, 3,000,000 were driven from their homes, and a further 8,000,000 faced starvation or severe food shortages – not throughout the 30-year period of conflict, but just during the 8-year period prior to the release of their report.

There was nothing ordinary about the conflict. A US official once described the warfare as “one of the most brutal holocausts against ordinary human beings since World War Two.”

Perhaps the world has attention deficit disorder, only able to focus on a few conflicts at a time. Dare I suggest that Mozambique, being a poor African country with a communist government and without oil resources attracts little attention in the western media? Or maybe – hopefully – I’m too young to recollect the attention that was garnered.

Either way, no war is just another war, and no death is just another death. The tragic reality is that, like in Rwanda, neighbour killed neighbour. Mozambique may be several years ahead of Rwanda with respect to reconciliation, but the scars must be deep, and may still be raw.

I wonder what, if any, evidence of these old wounds we’ll witness when we finally arrive in Mozambique?

For An Eye, Only An Eye

Many nations appear to subscribe to the seemingly retaliatory philosophy described in the Old Testament: “eye for eye; tooth for tooth.” In a discussion about the potential for retaliatory action to the public transit bombings in India, a colleague named Eddy suggested to me that the oft-used quotation was not originally intended to justify retaliatory behaviour, but rather was intended to prevent excessive retaliation, instead limiting it to an equal, non-escalating response – i.e., for an eye, only an eye. Personally, I subscribe to a different standard: I don’t believe that a problem has ever been resolved with violence. But given the alternative, I like Eddy’s insight.