The day after I arrived, we spent the morning checking up on Preta’s various plans and ventures in a car he’d borrowed from a friend who owed him a favor—Preta had been the go-between who allowed the owner to buy a new car battery on credit. “This is my town,” he said proudly. “I never have trouble getting things in Zambezia.”
You could see how eager he was to keep it that way: Preta drove the car like it was made of glass, rolling gingerly over speed bumps and through the ruts and trenches of the sandy roads in his neighborhood, then cruising at a jogging pace through the swarm of pedestrians in the center of town.
At the market, Preta took over for his cousin briefly to help a customer with a USB key full of music that had inexplicably turned to digital mush, all crackle and hiss. A woman in a bright pink blouse came in with her son and sat on the bench across from me. She was looking for a new song by a pandza artist from Maputo—a sort of fusion of hip-hop and marrabenta, the playful dance music popular in the last years of the colonial era. Preta started clicking through a list of files marked “Mr. Boss,” playing snippets of music that seemed far too short to allow anyone to ID a song. The woman held up her phone. “I have it here if you don’t have it on your computer,” she said.
Preta glared back at her skeptically. “Is that possible? Is there anything this computer doesn’t have?” he retorted, only half joking.
“Well, sometimes that computer doesn’t have new music.”
The internet, I thought, has finally arrived in Mocuba. At last, smartphones were bringing music piracy to the masses, and at least part of Preta’s business might not be able to withstand it. Cell phones had seemed from my first visit to Mozambique to be washing over society in a wave, just as they had and would continue to do around the world. In 2006, I spent a couple of months in a tiny roadside town in the Himalayas, Tapovan, with a single, erratic pay phone next to the barbershop. Ten years later, that seems inconceivable in India, Mozambique, or much of anywhere else.
Mozambique has about one landline for every three hundred people.19 For businesses, families, entire towns, the arrival of cell phones was synonymous with the arrival of any kind of telephone at all. I spoke to a sociologist in Maputo who said his maid, accustomed to traveling home to see her parents in the countryside every six months, hadn’t been since she got a cell phone, but now spoke to her parents more often. Mkesh and M-Pesa have just recently added the possibility of transferring money instantaneously. Minutes are still too expensive for most people to use much, but there are close to eight cell phone numbers for every ten Mozambicans. And we are only at the beginning of the curve—internet users still represent just 6.4 percent of the population.20
Across from the district government office, three men standing in the shade of a large acacia tree called out a hello as we got out, and Preta went over to greet them. As he walked away, one of them shouted after him: “If you have any projects,” he said, “I’m here.”
“I’m a bit desprojectado right now,” Preta countered. He’d joked to me that morning that he was an entrepreneur, but an entrepreneur without money, an empreendedor sem dinheiro. Next door, we entered an airy, wood-floored office that held what was left of Preta’s second attempt to get a computer school off the ground. There was a photocopier, half a dozen desktops, and a laptop where a young man was teaching a single student Microsoft Word in a whisper. Preta said hello and left quickly. This was supposed to have been a kind of cooperative: Preta provided the equipment and enlisted two friends to man the copy machine and teach basic skills. The three of them were supposed to pool revenue to cover basic costs.
Instead, Preta says he started to notice that the toner got depleted, or big stacks of copies had been made with no money coming back in. He had already taken another batch of his computers and put them into storage, but he hadn’t said a word to his partners about closing the place, and he didn’t necessarily plan to. To do so would run counter to the reputation Preta had painstakingly earned over the years. Preta, after all, had spent a long time studiously avoiding bad blood of any kind. When you do business in a town as small as Mocuba, he said, it’s not prudent to make anyone angry. What, I once asked him, would he credit with his success? “I’m very patient with my friends, and I’m never greedy.”
* * *
Each time I’ve been to Mocuba, I’ve stayed in the home of a friend and college classmate of Preta’s, Hortência Pililão, who teaches at an elementary school in town. It’s a tidy, humble stucco affair on a gently sloping triangular lot. The road is a ways off in either direction, with clusters of small houses in between. Hortência’s is two bedrooms with a corrugated metal roof, a freezer, a small television, and a VCD player. Two cases of empty soda bottles in the corner. A plastic table and four plastic chairs, none of which sees much use unless there are guests. Her bed is by far the nicest piece of furniture. In a corner of the living room, a small cement shelf covered in cloth holds a stapler, aloe cream, and a vase of pastel plastic roses.
The walls are decorated with bits of lace hanging under pictures she received at a training years ago. The theme was “development in mountainous areas,” she said; the intent of the pictures was to show the Mozambicans “that you don’t have it bad.” One shows a landscape of Swiss apartment blocks on a snappy, clear day after a blizzard, the whole landscape sagging under mounds of snow. Another shows a lone nomad driving a line of yaks through a snowy mountain pass.
Hortência Pililão and Davane Monteiro met as classmates when the first four-year university opened in Mocuba; it closed amid allegations of fraud before they had time to finish their degrees, so they commuted together to take their last classes in the provincial capital, Quelimane, an hour and a half away.
Hortência Pililão’s simple house passed for middle class in Mocuba: a sheet-metal roof, a television, and a chest freezer she used to sell cold soda to supplement her income as a primary schoolteacher.
Outside, Hortência had used a month’s salary to put in a forty-foot well in 2009, then almost as much again the next year to cover it with a cement slab. The well had water six months a year for a few years, then dried up altogether, so that she had to walk a few minutes each morning to fill buckets at her pastor’s house. Electricity comes over a cable stretched to a twenty-foot section of rail-road steel stuck into the sand beyond the porch, where we’d sit after dinner with Hortência’s teenage twins, Dolman and Amilcar, doing their schoolwork by the light of a single bulb. At night, Hortência takes the lightbulb in from the porch to keep it from being stolen. By daybreak, she and dozens of other women in the neighborhood have already been out sweeping, leaving each dirt courtyard cross-hatched with brush marks and free of loose sand and debris.
Hortência grew up in a remote, mountainous area of Zambezia called Namarroi and had her twin sons as a fourteen-year-old with a father who never gave them a second thought. She sent them to live with an aunt when they were one, then took them back at three and continued to go to school. She wouldn’t finish high school until they were eight years old. She beat steep odds to get a teaching position and build a middle-class home, yet it seems hard to imagine a middle-class existence more precarious than hers.
When I first visited in 2011, the Universidade Mussa Bin Bique was moving to charge 3,600 meticais in monthly tuition ten months out of the year, which amounted to 100 percent of her salary as a primary schoolteacher. At the time, Hortência supplemented her income by selling chilled sodas out of her chest freezer and occasionally got help from Preta or an aunt who worked as a school principal. When her freezer broke, she took it to get repaired and never heard from the repairman again.
When I returned to Mocuba in 2016, Hortência still hadn’t been able to hold on to enough money at one time to buy a replacement freezer. She had poured most of what she made into traveling to Quelimane to finish her degree on weekends after the Mocuba campus closed. As a public schoolteacher, a bachelor’s degree would mean an automatic raise. Like Preta, outstanding fees
were all that stood between Hortência and a diploma. But Hortência was much less sure she’d find a way to pay. Besides, there were other things she was focused on: getting the freezer replaced and seeing her sons through the end of their education. While I was there in February 2016, one of the twins, Amilcar, was home on a break from medical school in Tete. He was going back to finish his first year, as long as they could get together the bus fare.
2
What Can You Do with an Aging Warlord?
ZAMBEZIA
On the northern edge of Maputo, the Benfica market stretches seaward from the main road in a warren of tiny wooden stalls broken into vague sections like those in a department store. Aisles of electronics, tools, and motorcycle parts are followed by stacks of canned tomato paste and mounds of dried fish. Carts of oranges, great piles of coconuts. It was one of the first places I explored when I arrived in Maputo. At the end of an hour’s wandering, the maze of market gave way to a residential neighborhood, with a string of women selling Coca-Cola and bottles of frozen tap water from coolers forming a kind of half-empty buffer zone.
Rosa, sitting on an empty rice sack in the sand, waved a pillow-case and shouted “Cinco, cinco”—5 meticais, about 20 cents at the time—drawing customers to a heap of secondhand bedclothes on the ground.
“You don’t want to marry me?” she asked, laughing, as I passed.
Rosa was from Inhambane, and she’d come to Maputo in 1982. “War,” she said when I asked why. She was born in 1966, in the second year of Mozambique’s war for independence; she turned twenty-six before the country was at peace for longer than a year. When she arrived in Maputo, Mozambique was six years into a marathon civil war between the government of Frelimo, the Marxist party that won Mozambique’s independence from Portugal, and Renamo, an insurgency with backing from the apartheid regime in South Africa. At the time, Rosa explained, things in her part of Inhambane stayed quiet until the day Renamo came out of the bush in her hometown to eat. The rebels looked for houses with metal roofs and multiple rooms. These were houses with “conditions,” she said—running water and the prospect of a good meal. Her father fled as soon as he saw them approaching, a gaggle of teenagers toting AK-47s. Rosa stayed, because, well, “What do you do if they come to your house and sit down?”
“When my father came out of the bush again,” she went on, “Frelimo blamed him for hosting Renamo, and they killed him.” She sighed. “Frelimo killed; Renamo killed; there isn’t anyone who didn’t kill. Today, I vote Frelimo. I know that Frelimo killed my father, but I vote Frelimo. They say you need to go vote, so what do you expect?”
Rosa gave me my first glimpse of a perspective I encountered again and again in Mozambique, an incisive view of politics coupled with the feeling that there were no choices to be had for the average citizen. Frelimo has been in power since 1975, as long as Mozambique has been its own country, and long enough, for many people, to seem like the only plausible option. Indeed, in the early years, this was simple fact. Frelimo ran a one-party state until 1992, when the Catholic Church helped mediate a truce to the grueling sixteen-year conflict that killed more than 1 million people and forced 4 million more from their homes, Rosa among them. When the war ended, the UN gave stipends to demobilized soldiers, or desmobilisados, who agreed to hand in their weapons. Mozambique became a multiparty democracy, and Renamo’s troops became part of the political opposition.
Even after twenty-five years, it’s a role Renamo’s leader, Afonso Dhlakama, is yet to fully embrace. Dhlakama the politician has never managed to match his exploits as a warlord. In four consecutive presidential elections, his share of the popular vote eroded from 48 percent, in 1994, to 16 percent, in 2009, while Frelimo consolidated its power in public institutions.
Today, though, Dhlakama is newly resurgent. In the most recent elections, in 2014, he managed a 37 percent showing even as Frelimo campaigned using fleets of government vehicles.1 Frelimo sympathizers stuffed ballot boxes and altered vote totals at a number of polling stations, yet the ruling party, which looked invincible with more than three-quarters of the vote in 2009, won with its narrowest margin in fifteen years.2 A second opposition party, meanwhile, the Movimento Democrático de Moçambique (MDM), which split from Renamo in 2009, crumpled in its first national campaign.
But even now, it seems far-fetched to think Dhlakama will ever be elected president. Instead, the bulk of his political leverage continues to derive from the threat, real or imagined, of a return to full-fledged armed conflict. Violence has turned out to be a powerful political tool.
As his caucus in the legislature dwindled following Mozambique’s long-fought peace, in 1992, Dhlakama engaged in escalating bouts of political theater, calling for boycotts, demonstrations, revolution, and finally war. In October 2012, just days after Mozambique’s Dia de Paz, the twentieth anniversary of the truce, Dhlakama announced he was returning to the bush. “I am training up my men,” he told the papers, “and if necessary, we will destroy Mozambique.”3 He would not attack of his own accord, he promised, but he and his men stood at the ready to defend their positions in a dusty grove of mango trees beneath Mount Gorongosa.
The next three and a half years brought bursts of ambushes on civilians and skirmishes with the army. At the peak of the conflict, in 2015–16, Renamo carried out 107 attacks in a nine-month period, killing forty people and seriously injuring seventy-nine more.4 Both sides reportedly worked to minimize casualties by warning each other of attacks in advance so as to avoid direct confrontations, and yet, warfare is warfare. Schools closed.5 Police commanders sent officers home with their guns to avoid losing them to Renamo raids.6 Traffic on parts of the main national highway traveled in convoys under military escort.
The larger impact, by far, has been psychological. Many of the attacks aped Renamo’s tactics during the 1980s—burning buses, raiding health posts, and digging trenches in the roads to force trucks to stop—stoking fears around the country that Mozambique was slipping back into war. Renamo reoccupied many of its old bases. In the first few months of 2016, twelve thousand people abandoned their homes and fled to Malawi following clashes between guerrillas and the police.7
Observers suggested that Renamo’s army had fewer than a thousand men, without the resources to wage a full-fledged war. Joseph Hanlon, who covered Mozambique for The Guardian during the war, pointed out that Dhlakama’s ex-fighters are “old men” who have been out of the bush for more than twenty years.8 Dhlakama himself was already over sixty. Whatever arms caches Renamo may have buried in the woods, they had no new source of weapons or ammunition, not to mention cash. As such, it was tempting to see Dhlakama’s return to arms as one more tragic bluff in a quixotic political career. He seemed desperate. As his guerrillas continued to spread terror throughout Mozambique, Dhlakama announced plans to run for president once again, and he dispatched negotiators to hammer out a deal with Frelimo. In Maputo, Renamo’s deputies in parliament continued to debate and vote on legislation as though nothing was amiss.
As negotiations wore on, Frelimo began to seem desperate too, increasingly captive to Dhlakama’s appetite for mayhem. Frelimo made a series of important concessions on electoral reform and eventually signed a renewed peace agreement that did not require Renamo to lay down arms.9
Foreign investment in Mozambican mining and energy alone could reach tens of billions of dollars over the next decade.10 For Frelimo, there was a lot to be lost from the fear of instability; for Dhlakama, much to be gained. “[Renamo] does not understand why,” he wrote President Armando Guebuza after six months of renewed fighting, “we continue to be excluded from enjoying the wealth brought by the peace we helped to achieve and maintain during the past 20 years.” Renamo, the letter went on, needs more money “to remain a political party.”11
Luís de Brito, a Mozambican sociologist I spoke to in Maputo, says Dhlakama never managed to transform Renamo from a guerrilla army into a viable political party in the first place.12 With his return to the bus
h, Dhlakama seemed to concede the point: Mozambique’s largest opposition party was not a party at all, but a militia.
Yet Renamo remains Mozambique’s leading opposition party, and Dhlakama remains its leader. “Far from being Renamo’s death knell, its resumption of hostilities was a political masterstroke,” wrote the Institute for Security Studies, a South African think tank, in its analysis of the elections, under the headline “Renamo’s Renaissance, and Civil War as Election Strategy.”13 “Oddly enough,” the report read, “by pulling out of the democratic process, Renamo was able to demonstrate its commitment to it; at least as far as its constituency is concerned.”
Again and again, Dhlakama has rung the same old bell, threatening to split the country in two. He has called president-elect Filipe Nyusi a “thief” (Frelimo’s spokesman called Dhlakama a “baby”), opened new guerrilla bases, and marched his troops toward the capital, warning the government army to stay ten to twenty kilometers away from Renamo’s men.
All this, writes Hanlon, who has been a scholar of Mozambique since the early years of the civil war, “would surely be considered unacceptable in most other countries.” In Mozambique, it simply underscores the bizarre symbiosis of the two main political parties. Much of Frelimo’s popularity depends on the absence of a credible opposition: for voters like Rosa, the option to vote Frelimo or Renamo is a false choice. Frelimo may govern incompetently, they may govern corruptly, but at some basic level, they do govern. Whether they like Frelimo or not, a great many people in Mozambique doubt whether Renamo could match even that.
Go Tell the Crocodiles Page 5