Rumours of Glory

by Bruce Cockburn

  I think the song does a decent job of poeticizing the highly complex and extremely destructive connivance of international finance, governments, and militaries. In the few years preceding, I had seen up close the infuriating offspring of such unions in the Americas—grinding poverty, widespread landlessness and the metastasizing of urban slums, environmental degradation, the rich getting richer, the slaughter of the innocents with scorched-earth counterinsurgency strategies—and there would be much more of it to come. Then and now, wherever you look you find the same financial interests at work. When the complaints of the exploited rise above a certain volume, out come the troops, and then the arms companies get rich too. This is a long-recognized phenomenon. On May 28, 1816, former U.S. president Thomas Jefferson wrote to friend and colleague John Taylor: “I sincerely believe . . . that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”

  In its 1999 “Jubilee Call for Debt Forgiveness,” the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops reported, “[T]he impact of debt on the world’s poorest countries is especially crushing. . . . In contrast to the 1980s, when the debt crisis was focused in Latin America and private banks held much of the debt, today’s most heavily indebted poor countries are primarily in Africa and their loans come mostly from the U.S. and other governments and from multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Asian, African, and Inter-American development banks.”

  One of the African nations that the bishops singled out in their report was Mozambique, where I found myself in 1988, shortly after recording my next album, Big Circumstance. It was the first of two journeys I would make to this beautiful but battered African nation. At that time the country was still suffering from four centuries of Portuguese colonialism, associated bad finance, and more than twenty years of civil war. Starvation and preventable disease were at crisis levels, but more critically the war, an experiment in the violence by proxy known as “low-intensity conflict,” was crushing the very fabric of Mozambican society. This war was analogous to the Contra war in Nicaragua, only the impetus behind the anti-government forces came first from white-ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and then from apartheid South Africa. It stands out in modern history as being the first war to feature the pervasive and organized use of child soldiers.

  Mozambique is about twice the size of California, nearly eight hundred thousand square kilometres of mostly rolling bush, broken dramatically in places by inselbergs, solitary mountains rising distinctly out of the tropical lowland. The country is situated on the southeastern African coast, facing the Indian Ocean opposite Madagascar. A group of charitable organizations, operating under the umbrella Cooperation Canada Mozambique (COCAMO), invited me to carry out what was becoming a familiar mission: witness, and then come back and report to the public about my findings. They wanted to generate support for a hunger relief program intended to help some of the estimated half-million people displaced internally by the war.

  It was in Rhodesia and South Africa’s interest to see a neighbouring indigenous, and Marxist, government fail. Their paid-off proxy forces operated under the name Mozambican National Resistance, or RENAMO. Rhodesia, fighting its own war to preserve white supremacy, rightly feared a radical, black-run state on its eastern border. RENAMO was the creation of Rhodesian agents, in cahoots with a few disgruntled Mozambicans. The Marxist government, FRELIMO, had imposed Soviet-style economic plans, which did not translate well in an African context. The results were sufficiently disastrous that it was relatively easy to establish a legitimate opposition, but that was not RENAMO’s agenda. They had no plans for a structure to replace the Marxists if they succeeded in driving them from power; their aim was destabilization. They sought to destroy the entire infrastructure of the country, rendering it ungovernable. This they did quite well.

  Locomotive disabled by RPG round that failed to explode

  The rest of the train. A narrow escape for the engineer.

  FRELIMO soldiers, Mozambique, 1988

  The war began in 1977, just two years after Mozambique won independence from Portugal in a brutal ten-year conflict. RENAMO’s bandit army spread out through the countryside, maiming and slaughtering the civilian population and destroying beyond repair roads, schools, and communications—everything that represented the government. Land mines were used to great effect as the terror weapon they became after World War II, when most warfare worldwide came to be carried on inside national borders rather than between countries. Rural people, virtually all of them farmers, were forced to flee their homes. Poor to begin with, they headed, with nothing, toward any refuge available. Those near the borders crossed them. Those lacking that escape option gathered in rough, precarious camps or around the defended perimeters of cities. Nobody was growing any food, so the urban population was faced with privation as well.

  Cooperation Canada Mozambique was operating out of the northern provincial capital, Nampula, which was surrounded by a ring of squatter camps. The aim of the project was to support the development of an agricultural base in the camps, where it could be protected from attack, to enable the displaced squatters to feed themselves as well as residents of the city.

  In 1988, the war was raging and you couldn’t travel through the countryside. To the outsider, Mozambique was simply a chain of urban islands surrounded by a sea of conflict. In the company of a remarkable Mozambican of Portuguese descent, one of the few who had stayed after independence, named Antonio Carvalho-Neves, I travelled from island to island—Maputo, Inhambane, Beira, a massive refugee camp somewhere up the Zambezi River, Quelimane, Nampula—meeting people from a wide range of backgrounds and conditions, among them a long-haul trucker whose left foot had been nearly severed when his rig ran over a mine. On a subsequent foray he took an AK bullet in the shoulder. He was still driving, to the extent the shattered roads allowed. I thought of the Little Feat song “Willin’,” wondering what kind of truck-driving song I could make out of this man’s story.

  I was accompanied as well, for a while, by a three-man film crew from Montreal that was shooting a documentary on the war as seen through the eyes of Zena Bacar, a Mozambican singer. She was a highly animated, warm, intense woman in her late thirties. She had toured in Europe and become famous nationally with her band, Eyuphuro, but that was before the economy had collapsed to the point where nobody could buy anything, music especially. Zena was originally from Ilha de Mozambique, an actual island that was the landing site of Vasco da Gama, the first European explorer to set eyes on that shore of Africa. The film people would follow her home to see how the war had affected her family. We flew in a small plane from Nampula eastward to the coast. Her uncle lent us a beat-up car to get around in locally. As we drove slowly through the streets of Ilha, Zena unexpectedly assumed a kind of regal air, as if she were in a limousine. Sitting next to the window in the backseat, she was visible to the many pedestrians. People stopped and stared as we passed. We were almost the only motor vehicle, and the only whites. Their expressions suggested nothing but subdued curiosity to me. Zena’s chin tilted proudly upward, basking in adulation only she could see. “My people love me!” she said.

  The northern coast around Ilha de Mozambique had seen less action than other parts of the country, but while we were there a nearby village was attacked. Word spread quickly. The following morning we interviewed survivors, who were very nervous. Some houses had been burnt, but we were unable to find out how many people, if any, had been killed or injured. It seemed as if there was a general fear of reprisal should the “bandits” return. They may not have been far away.

  We returned to the small mainland town in the back of a large dump truck jammed with local travellers, mostly people going to the market. There were a few soldiers. As one of the last to climb aboard, I was pressed against the tailgate—a fine vantage point, despite the rough ride,
from which to watch the countryside roll away in our wake. From time to time I felt something rigid bump the back of my head. Turning to see what it was, I found myself eye to eye with the business end of an RPG-7. The anti-tank rocket launcher, missile in place, was slung casually over the shoulder of a soldier standing next to me. I tapped him on the arm and with gestures asked him if he’d mind moving the thing to his other side. He grinned apologetically and complied. The rocket itself is detonated by means of impact on a button mounted in its nose. It was that I’d been feeling, banging against my head with the lurching of the truck.

  According to former Canadian senator Roméo Dallaire, who as a general in the Canadian army was in command of U.N. forces in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide (and is credited with saving at least thirty thousand people), it was RENAMO that first employed, in a systematic way, the strategy of abducting children and compelling them to fight. Dallaire has gone on to campaign vigourously against the use of child soldiers.

  Marcelino Dos Santos, poet and speaker of Mozambican Parliament, Maputo, 1988

  Children make an especially pernicious force. If you’re a poor government or a rebel warlord and you lack the funds for equipment, bombs, and technology, you turn to your people as weapons. Those who will best do your bidding are kids, kidnapped from captured villages, sometimes as young as six or seven. They’ll do whatever you say, especially if you scare the wits out of them, force them to commit a couple of horrible acts themselves, then ply them with amphetamines and marijuana and ammunition and send them out to destroy. They become an affordable weapons system: boys typically the fighters, girls the pack animals, cooks, and sex slaves. The Mozambican experiment proved the effectiveness of this approach, and it has become an all-too-popular strategy throughout Africa and worldwide.

  When the civil war finally ended in 1992, with more than one million people killed, the bankers—those modern slavers and champions of freedom—moved back in to continue the plunder. As the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops reported, “[I]n 1998, Mozambique’s annual debt service obligation was more than half of its public revenue. In a country still emerging from a sixteen-year civil war, half the rural population does not have access to safe drinking water; 200,000 children die annually from preventable diseases such as malaria, measles, and respiratory infections.”

  Holding the other hand of Mozambique’s child soldiers was the American Christian right. As with Guatemala, it was felt in those circles that rolling back the Satanic tide of Marxism in Mozambique was worth any cost in foreign lives and well-being. In public and to the press, I frequently had to explain that these self-professed “Christians” did not represent me or any number of folks of all denominations who are trying to follow the way of love. There’s an inherent dishonesty in the messaging and actions of some leaders of the Christian right.

  TV personality Pat Robertson was a leading supporter of Mozambique’s bastard resistance movement. It was no secret at the time that RENAMO was a vicious mercenary army working for outside interests to recapture control of Mozambique’s resources and labour pool. In her 1989 book The Politics of the Christian Right, Sara Diamond, a noted critic of lunatic conservatism, reported that on April 25, 1986, Robertson’s 700 Club TV show aired a program, of which I actually saw a portion, called “The Bush War.” (Robertson was fond of prophecies, including a 1976 prediction that the world would come to an end in 1982. While “The Bush War” was not an actual prophecy, as a double entendre it would seem to rate as one of his most accurate.) “The Bush War” was a production of Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, whose reporter, Scott Hatch, claimed to have accompanied RENAMO mercenaries inside their territory.

  “The segment featured film footage of a guerrilla exercise in the use of explosives,” writes Diamond. “‘A guerrilla war is fought with the mind as much as with bullets,’ said Hatch as the camera focused on land mines which RENAMO placed on roads travelled by Mozambican civilians and soldiers. The mines, Hatch noted, were ‘designed not to kill, only to maim,’ thereby creating a long-term hardship of wounded people for the government to care for.” Indeed, the people’s wounds are long term. The mines left in the red soil at war’s end would continue to strike down the unlucky for decades.

  Unsurprisingly, RENAMO also received significant support from within the Reagan administration, whose alliance with the racist government of South Africa was well known.

  To revisit this stuff now rekindles the anger I carry toward public figures like Robertson, who use their visibility to sow hatred, who bless the worst sort of butchers, who enthuse over the cruelty of such weapons as anti-personnel land mines. (In 2005, Robertson would pad his Christian rep by advocating the assassination of Venezuela’s democratically elected president, Hugo Chavez.)

  Both sides in the Mozambique civil war used mines. There is no excusing it. But there is also no lauding it, as Robertson’s crew did—filming and presenting the placing of the mines as if they were a kinder, gentler instrument of human destruction because they “only maim.” In reality, the presence of land mines, especially in a country like Mozambique, where 90 percent of residents are farmers, renders vast reaches of countryside unusable and unlivable, and creates a pervasive terror that won’t go away. Though Mozambique is by no means the worst-afflicted nation, parts of the country remain littered with mines; demining operations are ongoing but painfully slow.

  In supporting RENAMO, Robertson and others were also supporting the use of child soldiers. According to a 2004 investigation by U.S. News & World Report, “The Renamo leaders began recruiting from rural villages, and if they couldn’t recruit able-bodied young boys, they simply kidnapped them. Most of the recruits were 12, 13, 14 years old, but some were as young as 6. The youngest boys often served as porters and servants to Renamo officers, or as spies, but most were systematically trained to be soldiers. They were exposed to the noise of rifle blasts, to desensitize them. They were ordered to kill cattle; then, when they got used to that, to kill other humans, often those who ignored orders or tried to escape. The perimeters of the rebels’ camps were often littered with the skulls of those who had tried to escape but failed.” Coming from a somewhat conservative newsmagazine, this is likely a sanitized version; survivors of RENAMO attacks would have more terrible tales to tell. The article makes the point, though.

  Legions of honourable and compassionate men and women of faith hold conservative views, but ignoring information like this—which was available to anyone in real time, especially someone who has an investigative news crew hanging out with the rebels—exposes the hypocrisy of the institutional Christian right. The suffering promoted or supported by its Bible-quoting leadership is hard for a mere human to forgive. Falwell, Robertson, and their ilk embody a weakness of human spirit, a back door left open to darkness, a deep insecurity salved by acquiring and wielding power.

  At a performance in 1988 I introduced “Gospel of Bondage,” a new song that decried the abuse of Jesus’s message, by saying, “They scare the hell out of me and also irritate me, because I’ve gotten tired of saying, ‘Yes, I’m a Christian, but I’m not one of them.’ So here’s my way of saying ‘fuck you’ to them.” The language is divisive and disrespectful, and some have chastised me for it, but I don’t think salvation depends on whether or not you use four-letter words. Crude language is a cultural issue, not a spiritual one. If I’m in a room with someone from the Christian right, I’m not going to talk to them like that. It would kill the opportunity for dialogue. But if I need to succinctly introduce a song, then a lyrical broadside works. Anyway, the assholes had it coming.

  Tabloids, bellowing raw delight

  Hail the return of the Teutonic Knights

  Inbred for purity and spoiling for a fight,

  Another little puppet of the New Right

  See-through dollars and mystery plagues

  Varied detritus of Aquarian Age

  Shutters on storefronts and shutters in the mind —

 
We kill ourselves to keep ourselves safe from crime.

  That’s the gospel of bondage. . . .

  We’re so afraid of disorder we make it into a god

  We can only placate with state security laws

  Whose church consists of secret courts and wiretaps and shocks

  Whose priests hold smoking guns, and whose sign is the double cross

  But God must be on the side of the side that’s right

  And not the right that justifies itself in terms of might —

  Least of all a bunch of neo-Nazis running hooded through the night

  Which may be why He’s so conspicuously out of sight

  Of the gospel of bondage. . . .

  You read the Bible in your special ways

  You’re fond of quoting certain things it says —

  Mouth full of righteousness and wrath from above

  But when do we hear about forgiveness and love?

  Sometimes you can hear the spirit whispering to you,

  But if God stays silent, what else can you do

  Except listen to the silence? If you ever did you’d surely see

  That God won’t be reduced to an ideology

  Such as the gospel of bondage. . . .

  “GOSPEL OF BONDAGE,” 1987

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/62.

  “Gospel of Bondage” comes third on Big Circumstance, my sixteenth album in eighteen years. It was, as they say, a helluva run, and I may have gotten a little fried from it. The eighties were particularly intense, with hit songs and bigger crowds and busier tours; a swan dive into contentious politics; Reagan and Mulroney elected and then, incredibly, reelected; and the endless . . . motion. . . .