Go Tell the Crocodiles

by Rowan Moore Gerety

  Dhlakama, for his part, is relevant mainly as a foil to the ruling party. Without forty years of Frelimo rule, there is no entrenched cabal for Dhlakama to decry, no Goliath that could plausibly turn him into a David, nothing that might justify his extremism.

  As it is, Dhlakama’s political position is as strong as it’s been since the 1990s. Young people—perhaps too young to remember the carnage of the war—have been quoted in the press supporting Dhlakama’s hard line. Dhlakama’s all-or-nothing negotiating strategy is gradually eroding the wall surrounding Frelimo’s political power. To voters, it seems, a vigorous opposition, even one led by Dhlakama, is better than the alternative.

  There has always been a core of truth in Dhlakama’s assaults on Frelimo. Though Western governments have tended to look on postwar Mozambique as a success story, Frelimo supporters acknowledge that peace has not delivered all they’d hoped. Corruption and patronage are widespread, and the fruits of Mozambique’s development thus far have gone mainly to a tiny political elite. Former president Armando Guebuza, who stepped down at the end of 2014, is thought to be the country’s richest man. A recent World Bank study concluded that while Mozambique had the world’s sixth-fastest-growing economy between 2000 and 2010, indicators of rural poverty remained unchanged since the end of the war.14 Poor Mozambicans are awaiting a more credible politician to take up Dhlakama’s rallying cry: “We want to say to Guebuza, you are eating well; we want to eat well too.”15

  I spent a week following Afonso Dhlakama through the Mozambican countryside in July 2011, after a long, halting dance by phone with the minions in Renamo party headquarters, who referred to him only as “His Excellency the President.” For nearly a month, Dhlakama had been clamoring through remote hamlets in the North, preaching revolution and flirting, in the spaces his speeches left unfilled, with a return to civil war.

  There was no discernible logic behind the timing of Dhlakama’s tour. It had been two years since his loss in the last presidential election, and he had been in a sort of political hibernation ever since. In fact, Dhlakama seemed to be breaking a promise. On the campaign trail in 2009, he vowed never to run for president again if he lost. And he did lose, badly. When Renamo’s fifty-one deputies took their seats in the national assembly after the 2009 elections, Dhlakama called them traitors and said they had no connection to the party. He moved away from Maputo and took up residence in a lavish home in Nampula, in the North, calling for the dissolution of parliament. One of the deputies granted an anonymous interview to a weekly paper in Maputo: “What is Dhlakama doing in Nampula that is useful for the party?” the deputy asked.

  In time, Dhlakama softened his position and the deputies remained in office. But under his leadership, Renamo has only drifted further and further from the actual practice of politics. If we take him at his word, Dhlakama is holding out for the creation of a transitional council to rule the country until free and fair elections can be held, though—in spite of documented pockets of fraud—international observers have repeatedly called Mozambique’s elections “free and fair” already.16 At the time, I wondered why Dhlakama was on tour at all.

  With the exception of intermittent coverage by local radio and one independent television network, Televisão Independente de Moçambique, or TIM, Dhlakama’s tour was largely ignored on radio and television. But he did make himself heard: for weeks on end, while he rabble-roused in the north, an unattributed advertisement ran repeatedly on the state-run network TVM, or Televisão de Moçambique, with no title and no introduction. A voice brimming with urgency described images of devastation as they flashed across the screen over ominous orchestral music. Famine. Destruction. Schools and hospitals bombed. Roads destroyed. “If you support that program, then you need only look to Somalia,” the voice said. The stills showed emaciated refugees and UN food trucks in an arid landscape. Viewers were reminded to preserve the peace, and then the commercial ended abruptly: an attack had been made on a nameless antagonist, but one whom no Mozambican would fail to identify. It seemed somehow that Frelimo bought into Dhlakama’s own propaganda, as though saying his name would only add to his power. Frelimo and Renamo seemed to face off with dueling paradoxes: Dhlakama crusaded for reform of a political system he refused to engage, while Frelimo agitated for peace by playing up the possibility of renewed war. I hoped that meeting Dhlakama would help me understand the future of democracy in Mozambique.

  The people on the phone in Maputo were exceedingly polite. Renamo has long been marginalized in the Mozambican press, and the phrase “American journalist” seemed to flatter them endlessly. Yes, yes, I would have an audience with His Excellency, but it was difficult to work out his schedule. They would call me again tomorrow. Each time we spoke, Dhlakama was headed to a rally in a different city and they gave a different date of return.

  While we played phone tag for three weeks, I had time to consider what it would be like to interview someone with a long list of war crimes to his name. What I’d read about Dhlakama before visiting Mozambique inspired terror. During the war, Renamo was notorious for its coercive recruitment of child soldiers, kidnapping boys as young as six or seven, and for its uniquely gruesome brand of violence against civilians, which often included public mutilation: cutting off limbs, breasts, and facial features, castration, and even crucifixion.

  At times, Renamo combined these terrible specialties—mutilation and forced recruitment of children—by making young recruits murder their own neighbors and relatives, as a way of cementing their bond with the rebel army.17 To instill a fear of traveling in the population, Renamo burned whole buses full of passengers. When they conquered a town or village, Renamo set fire to houses, torched fields, and, as one war reporter put it, “destroyed whatever could not be carried away.”18 Renamo even published figures on the number of villages it claimed to have destroyed: nearly fifteen hundred in 1981 and 1982 alone.19

  Journalists reported excesses among Frelimo’s soldiers too, but Renamo’s reputation for destruction was unique. It was rumored that Dhlakama and his fighters, called matsangas, had supernatural powers, that they were bulletproof, even immortal, and that they could cast spells of confusion on their adversaries, making the matsangas invincible.

  What could you ask of a man like that? Would he own up to any of the war’s excesses? Did he stand for anything more concrete than revolution?

  As a rule, buses in Mozambique leave early. After a five a.m. departure from Mocuba, I arrived in Milange before nine a.m., cramped and mildly disoriented from the minibus’s constant seesawing over the badly rutted road. To the giggling disbelief of my fellow passengers, I was dropped off directly in front of the Renamo office, where I’d arranged to meet Dhlakama’s convoy. In Mocuba, Frelimo’s local headquarters is a brilliant candy-cane-colored building two stories high, with a first-floor shop that sells blenders and refrigerators. Renamo’s office in Milange was striking for its humility: a two-room stucco house without electricity, bare of paint and nearly so of furniture: inside, there was a single desk, two chairs, and two small benches. The bathroom was a tattered tarp enclosure out back—no hole, simply a patio of urine-stained bricks. The courtyard was already full of supporters there to welcome His Excellency. While they waited in the mottled shade of the office yard, old women wearing wraps printed with Dhlakama’s face sat on the ground with outstretched legs. They fanned themselves in the heat and tended a dwindling fire where they were boiling cassava whole. There were men with drums and a marimba, and a woman with a whistle who led a circle of frail dancers in song:

  Renamo, Renamo, that’s who brought democracy to Mozambique.

  Dhlakama, Dhlakama, that’s who brought democracy to Mozambique.

  And,

  Angry, angry, we are dying angry because our president never wins.

  Lieutenant Lemos Buelekue Ofece, a desmobilisado with a birdlike torso and a rattling voice, took me around party headquarters to meet his former comrades, who introduced themselves by military rank and ful
l name. All of the veterans still carried ID cards issued by the UN in the early 1990s, as part of a hefty and largely successful program of cash grants for soldiers returning to civilian life. These IDs were their only formal proof of their status as veterans, and it seemed as though they had been waiting for years to show them to someone who might report their grievances more widely.

  Not long before, Frelimo had drafted new pension legislation limiting government benefits to those who fought in the war for three years or more, and which counted a soldier’s service beginning only at age fifteen.20 Though Renamo has never publicly admitted to recruiting child soldiers, this last provision made a sizable portion of Renamo’s army, which had done most of its fighting before they turned sixteen, ineligible. The men brandished their UN IDs like badges, surefire proof of their eligibility for benefits and of the injustice of their situation. But the legislation had already passed.

  Afonso Dhlakama was born on January 1, 1953, in Mangunde, a village of scrubby veldt and baobab trees in southern Sofala Province, where his father was the régulo, or traditional chief. Régulos in the colonial era were typically aligned with the Portuguese government, which sanctioned traditional authority as a means of subordinating it. Dhlakama was educated in the local Catholic mission, and as a young man, he worked as a schoolteacher.21 He fought in the Portuguese army against Frelimo. He defected in 1972, joining Frelimo’s guerrillas less than three years before they won independence in 1975.22

  Nowadays, Dhlakama speaks of his time in Frelimo with pure derision: “I’ve already been in Frelimo,” he’ll say to supporters who accuse him of “eating with Guebuza,” the president of Mozambique from 2004 to 2014. “I was a commander in Frelimo, and I left Frelimo thirty-five years ago. Why? Because they are communists!”

  It was as a soldier with Frelimo that Dhlakama first met André Matsangaissa, Renamo’s commander in the early years of the civil war. After independence, Matsangaissa was expelled from the army for theft and imprisoned at a Frelimo reeducation camp in Gorongosa. Curiously, he was freed in 1977 by forces from the white-ruled government of Mozambique’s neighbor to the west—Rhodesia, or present-day Zimbabwe. At the time, Mozambique’s new government was following the example of Tanzania, which had sheltered Frelimo in its independence struggle against the Portuguese. In turn, independent Mozambique offered a refuge to the African National Congress, which fought apartheid rule in South Africa, and ZANU-PF, a guerrilla army led by Robert Mugabe fighting for black rule in Rhodesia.23 When Mozambique closed its borders to Rhodesian trade in 1976, Rhodesia retaliated with its own campaign to disrupt the Mozambican economy and force Frelimo to withdraw support from black rebels across the border. It was Rhodesia’s Central Intelligence Organisation that created MNR (later Renamo) in 1975, and which brought Matsangaissa back to Rhodesia.24

  Matsangaissa was killed in 1979 in a Renamo raid on the town of Gorongosa, and it was Dhlakama who took his place. Rhodesian backing of Renamo dissolved following Zimbabwean independence, but the apartheid government in South Africa took over where the Rhodesians left off. The Frelimo government was sheltering South African rebels as well, and the apartheid government began providing training, arms, and logistical support to Renamo: anything it could to undermine the Mozambican state.

  Dhlakama’s popularity in Milange was startling. Here was a politician who had delivered nothing to speak of in twenty years, yet who could nevertheless count on hundreds of subsistence farmers to give up a day’s work or more and wait to greet him on the side of the road. Dhlakama seemed like the patron saint of dashed hopes, the people’s best chance to voice their frustrations with a system that did little to improve life in Milange from day to day. All afternoon, it was rumored that he’d be arriving any minute, so the local party chief encouraged the crowd to keep up their chants and percussion: “Today is an important day to show ourselves!” he cried. “Let’s make enough noise so people from Frelimo come and join us.” It was important for His Excellency’s convoy to roll up in the midst of a feverish rally. But Dhlakama was waylaid in Morrumbala, a good three hours off. During a break in the middle of the afternoon, a group of his bodyguards had encountered an off-duty police officer in a restaurant, seized his weapon, and held him captive in a hotel room.25 The delegation couldn’t leave for Milange until they negotiated the policeman’s release.

  When Dhlakama did show up at nightfall, it was at the head of a line of seven gleaming Ford Ranger pickups flying the Renamo flag. Traveling along with His Excellency were seven of Renamo’s deputies in Mozambique’s parliament, who received the pickups as part of their official compensation, a dozen bodyguards and their cook, a handful of Dhlakama’s political aides, a cameraman and newscaster from TIM, and a local reporter from the government radio network, Rádio Moçambique.

  Dhlakama stepped eagerly from the lead pickup with a smile, one hand raised to the crowd. Short and stout at age fifty-nine, Dhlakama had gently sloping features and a dense cap of gray hair.26 He wore the same uniform throughout my visit: penny loafers, a blue blazer, and a starched white dress shirt with French cuffs. Within seconds, Dhlakama picked me out as the lone white face in the crowd and extended a hand over a group of eager supporters. “Você é o americano?” “You’re the American?” he guessed. “Welcome!” Flanked by the local party chief, Dhlakama strode to the center of the courtyard and awaited his introduction. “Hurray for Dhlakama!” the party chief prompted the crowd over a megaphone. “Hurray for Dhlakama!” the people echoed him. “Hurray for Dhlakama! Long live Dhlakama!”

  Dhlakama was in no mood for a rally. He apologized for his tardiness and pled fatigue from the road, then strolled leisurely past a line of military police to his rooms at the Tumbine Lodge. I trailed behind him, hoping to ask an aide what time the convoy would take off in the morning, but no one knew. Instead, Dhlakama himself interrupted his conversation with a deputy from the national assembly and turned to me: “Which state do you live in?” he asked in Portuguese.

  “California,” I told him.

  “Ahhh, California,” Dhlakama said longingly. “Isn’t that where Jimmy Carter is from?”

  “I think Carter is from Georgia,” I said. It was unclear whether he heard me.

  “Yeah,” he mused. “[Carter] invited me there a long time ago. His NGO was monitoring elections here. I went to California and he showed me where his parents are buried and the place where he was born.” Dhlakama seemed deeply satisfied.

  “Jimmy Carter is a friend, in spite of being a Democrat,” he said. “My party’s friendlier with the Republicans, as part of the family of the Right, but the Republicans are complicados.”

  Complicado is a Mozambican catchall for all things negative that are better left unexplained. Variously, complicado can mean complicated, demanding, devastating, impossible, deceitful, unreasonable, indiscreet, angry, unsettling, dangerous. As a single adjective, it can occasionally take on outsized or absurd powers of description, as when, in the reporter William Finnegan’s narrative of the Mozambican civil war, A Complicated War, Mozambicans described their country’s tragic situation as, simply, complicado.

  Dhlakama paused for a beat. Then he said, “I want you to be my English teacher.”

  By seven thirty the next morning, the lodge was buzzing. It was a clear, sparkling day. Behind a row of motel-style rooms, jack pines and stark green meadows crept up the flanks of Mount Tumbine to a brilliant, white-flecked sky. The aides were up and dressed in pressed slacks and button-downs, moving purposefully about the parking lot. His Excellency was nowhere to be seen.

  In a meadow beyond the lodge, Dhlakama’s security detail was eating breakfast in shifts, bivouac-style. A half dozen men in olive-green uniforms and berets sat by a canvas lean-to and scooped cornmeal and stewed dried fish from pots over a charcoal fire. They ate with their AK-47s lying across their laps. An equal number stood at attention, guarding the perimeter of the lodge. Again, no one knew what the day’s schedule was or where the group was headed: “Ye
s, yes,” the aides begged off when I asked them, “we are just waiting for the president.”

  Before His Excellency emerged, I sat on the lodge’s small restaurant terrace drinking instant coffee. An operative named Torres said the lodge was the fourth place they had sought out a bed for Dhlakama, and he had been worried about the quality of the accommodation. When he was not on tour, Dhlakama split his time between lavish homes in Nampula and Nacala, on the coast. In Milange, other arrangements had been made, only to fall through at the last minute, for what Torres suspected were political reasons.

  Renamo’s convoys always draw a heftier police escort than they ask for. As a condition of the peace signed in 1992, Dhlakama retained a force of several hundred Renamo fighters as his “Presidential Guard,” or personal security retinue. When he travels on land, he is never with fewer than a dozen of them, and the police like to follow behind in equal numbers. The Mozambican government now maintains that Dhlakama’s Presidential Guard is illegal, though it has not tried to disband them. Throughout Dhlakama’s itinerary in Zambezia, a pickup truck carrying eight military police trailed the convoy at a discreet distance, reliably visible in the rearview mirror. Ostensibly, both the police and Renamo’s own guards were there for Dhlakama’s security and that of the lesser politicians traveling with him. But the primary threat to public safety always seemed to me to come from the antagonism that arose between the two groups. Each had members who fought on opposite sides of the civil war. Any contact between them was like flint on steel.

  Now Dhlakama’s strong men were facing off with a group of helmeted military police officers clustered around the lodge’s entrance, preparing to hand over the gun they’d confiscated in Morrumbala. The journalists from Rádio Moçambique and TIM, the television network, were standing by. One of Renamo’s collared security personnel began to taunt the government cops: “While we were making war, you were still in primary school.”