Go Tell the Crocodiles

by Rowan Moore Gerety

  A half hour later, Dhlakama’s security chief, a tall man with a hint of a mustache and neatly styled hair, came onto the terrace for a juice box and explained the exchange with the police. “That’s just provocation! In Morrumbala, we found a plainclothes police officer with a gun. . . . He had three foreign passports with him too. ‘Where are the owners of these passports?’ we asked. He said nothing. So we said, ‘Then you must be a bandit,’ and we seized his weapon. Then he went running to the police station. When we got here, those police officers came down and asked for the weapon, and we told them to send the police chief.”

  Maria Inês Martíns is one of the seven Renamo deputados in the national legislature who lent her government-issue truck to Dhlakama’s tour through the north. At nine thirty, she arrived from another, less luxurious guesthouse on the other end of town and wiped the sweat from her brow. “O Velho ainda não pareceu?” she asked. O Velho—the Elder, or the Old Man—is how Dhlakama’s inner circle refer to him in the third person: “The Old Man hasn’t showed up yet?”

  He had not. Even when he is on tour, Dhlakama keeps the pace of a politician contemplating retirement. Martíns took a seat on the terrace, facing the mountain. Over her shoulder, I saw His Excellency’s door open for the first time all morning. Two aides stood outside in suits. Through the doorway, I could see Dhlakama, wearing a towel, doing push-ups on the floor.

  Martíns has been in the assembly since 1999. She chairs the legislature’s External Relations Committee as well as Renamo’s own women’s organization. Martíns became a deputy at the most optimistic moment the Mozambican opposition has seen since the end of the civil war. President Joaquim Chissano had discredited both himself and Frelimo through a series of corruption scandals that trailed the country’s shift from Marxism to a free market economy. He barely beat Dhlakama in the presidential elections of 1999, giving Renamo 117 seats in the Assembly of the Republic, just nine shy of a majority.

  By 2009, Renamo’s contingent in the assembly had dwindled by more than half. While we spoke at the Tumbine, waiting for O Velho (pronounced O VAIL-yo) to get dressed, Martíns seemed worn down by the ordeal of being a lawmaker in the permanent minority. She complained of what she called Frelimo’s “dictatorship by vote”—the party’s practice of voting in a unified bloc, comprising, at the time, nearly 80 percent of the seats in the assembly. The practice allows Frelimo to set and enact its own legislative agenda, essentially without input from lawmakers outside the party. Martíns gave the example of the Cesta Básica, or Goods Basket, a monthly food subsidy that would be given, in kind, to needy families around the country. The measure was introduced in April 2011 over strenuous objections by the opposition, who argued that the logistics involved made the initiative impractical. “We said, ‘This will not work. How are you going to get this program to function?’” Martíns recalled. “‘How can you apply it?’ But they insisted, ‘It will work.’ This country is vast—‘How will you distribute these baskets?’”

  Thanks to Frelimo’s sweeping majority, the $10 million measure was passed without pause. Within three months, Prime Minister Aires Ali was already calling the program into question: “We’re going to analyze the situation as a function of the [global financial] crisis,” he said in June.27 “And the budget that was approved for the cesta, where will that be spent?” Martíns demanded rhetorically. “That’s what the opposition is asking.” Ultimately, the program was called off; its budget allocation was never explained.

  It is hard to fault Renamo for frustration at the stalemate they face in the legislature. But the party seems past any productive engagement with Frelimo and, often, even with the government as a whole. Renamo’s answer to the failures of Frelimo rule has been to hoot and holler and cry foul, not to organize or scheme. Writing in 2004, Hanlon captures Renamo’s legislative style neatly:

  Renamo has never become an opposition in a European or US sense, where the party out of power proposes alternative policies, suggests legislation, and tries to amend government bills in ways that would benefit its constituency. . . . Renamo makes no effort to, for example, challenge spending priorities or amend IMF-imposed policies in ways that would benefit the poorest. Renamo limits itself to speeches, often vague and confused, criticising Frelimo, and to disruption. In some cases Renamo creates a cacophony with horns, kazoos and whistles to disrupt proceedings; in December 2000, President Chissano’s state of the nation speech was simply drowned out.28

  Both Hanlon and Luís de Brito, the Maputo sociologist, would blame part of Mozambique’s stalling democracy on the fact that each of the main parties—Frelimo and Renamo—thinks of itself as the only legitimate political party in the country. Carlos Nuno Castel-Branco, an economist who works with de Brito at the Institute for Social and Economic Studies, calls this the “privatization of history,” with each side laying claim to its own narrative of Mozambique’s national identity—“Frelimo, because it fought against Portuguese colonialism, and Renamo, because it fought for democracy.”29

  When Frelimo won independence for Mozambique, the guerrilla movement became the government, and that government became a one-party state. Renamo, meanwhile, was founded to overthrow Frelimo, not to compete with it. “Not only was Frelimo historically a singular party, which still considers itself a singular party, but Renamo has always had exactly the same position,” de Brito told me. “In the first years after the war, it wasn’t so obvious,” he went on. “But after ’99, it became clear that Renamo was not a political party, except in the formal sense. It is a movement which has a single leader in whom all powers are concentrated. [He has no] political clarity nor any actual political program, but simply the ambition to be in power.”

  “You know,” the lodge’s proprietor told me glumly, “politically, everything revolves around money. So I have heard—I have heard,” he repeated—“that Frelimo sometimes gives him a lollipop for him to shut up. This is the way it works.”

  When Dhlakama came out for breakfast, he was in a mood to reminisce. It was past eleven, and he was dressed in the same uniform as the night before: khakis, navy blue blazer, starched white shirt, and horn-rimmed glasses. In conversation, Dhlakama has the unhurried cadence of a man who is used to being waited upon. His sentences unfold in a warm, husky baritone, punctuated by frequent full-throated laughs. You get the sense that he is not often interrupted.

  His Excellency took a seat across from Martíns at the table next to mine and smiled broadly. “Will you buy me breakfast?” he asked the deputy. Martíns laughed and rolled her eyes, and Dhlakama ordered Nestlé Ricoffy, a powdered blend of coffee and chicory root, whipped to a froth with condensed milk, and prego no pão, tenderized steak in a bun. A fondly nostalgic look came across Dhlakama’s face as he perused a mental catalogue of American politicians. “Dahn Burrr-tone,” he said, chewing each syllable studiously. “Jeh-see Ellms.” These two, Senators Jesse Helms and Dan Burton, were Dhlakama’s grandes amigos. “They didn’t know me, but because I was fighting for democracy, they supported me,” he said.

  At the start of the Mozambican civil war, in spite of U.S. backing for anticommunist rebels in Angola and Nicaragua, both the Carter and (later) Reagan administrations officially supported Frelimo’s Marxist government. As the Cold War grew more intense in the early 1980s, the U.S. State Department met with a rising chorus of opposition from a cohort of right-wing politicians, led by Jesse Helms. In the early years after independence, Frelimo was ardently secular, and some of its most repressive policies were reserved for religious groups: it nationalized the property of the Catholic Church (which included churches and schools that became state institutions), while thousands of Jehovah’s Witnesses were deported or sent to reeducation camps.30 As a result, it fit neatly into the religious Right’s conception of communism as a worldwide foe of Christianity.

  Evangelical missionaries in Rhodesia and South Africa helped paint Renamo as a force for God in Frelimo’s Marxist stronghold. By the mid-1980s, Renamo was getting sympa
thetic coverage on outlets like Pat Robertson’s TV show, The 700 Club, and financial support from Christian groups based in the United States—Christ for the Nations, Don Ormand Ministries, and the End-Time Handmaidens, among others.31 One letter circulated on behalf of Rhodesian missionaries in the United States sought funds to “outfit the entire [Renamo] army with Bibles.”32

  A plaque bearing a scrap of paper with George Washington’s original signature, given to Afonso Dhlakama by one of his right-wing backers in the United States. “President Afonso Dhlakama (‘The George Washington of Mozambique’),” the inscription reads. “For his extraordinary and historic efforts on behalf of freedom in Mozambique.” (Photograph courtesy Afonso Dhlakama Jr.)

  Renamo received an additional boost in stateside PR with the publication of The Mozambique Report: Eyewitness Testimonies of Persecution and Atrocities, a booklet by a South African missionary named Peter Hammond. Hammond was a veteran of the South African Army who considered the apartheid-era military to be a “missionary force.” The Mozambique Report described Renamo as “freedom fighters” and detailed numerous instances of mutilation and violence against Mozambican civilians, inflicted—Hammond claimed—by government troops.

  Later, he would allege that Mozambique’s first president engaged in cannibalism and “pledged his soul to Satan.”33 But at the time, Hammond’s credibility was not yet in doubt in Washington, D.C. Senator Helms read The Mozambique Report into the congressional record and stirred support for Renamo among his conservative colleagues in Congress.34 When Melissa Wells, Reagan’s nominee for ambassador to Mozambique, denounced Renamo’s attacks on civilians, Helms rallied twenty-eight Republican senators to sign a letter of rebuttal and blocked Wells’s nomination for nearly a year.35 When she was finally confirmed, Wells made a series of fact-finding missions throughout Mozambique and found that Hammond had simply attributed to Frelimo the very atrocities that had actually been committed by Renamo.

  “She insulted Renamo and called us bandidos,” Dhlakama scoffed, telling his side of the story. “We’ve had bad luck with American ambassadors.” He turned to Martíns: “Who was that black woman that I went around insulting? The one who said ‘Frelimo! Frelimo?’” Martíns didn’t remember; it turned out to be Condoleezza Rice.

  Though he is short on specifics, Dhlakama still considers Renamo a “right-wing” political party. Even at a time of unprecedented cooperation between the Mozambican government and multinational corporations, he railed against Frelimo’s “communism” and lamented the lack of incentives given to investors in Mozambique. In his speeches, Dhlakama continues to get a lot of mileage out of the unpopular Frelimo policies that gave Renamo support during the war—travel permits called Guias de Marcha, the forcible creation of communal villages, and, especially, the persecution of churches: “Frelimo are communists,” he said at one rally. “Now, they say they aren’t communists anymore, and we’re supposed to believe them? Twenty-five years ago, you weren’t allowed to pray, but now they say they believe in God?”

  “The world is false,” he said earnestly. “When I write my book, whomever reads it will cry, because I’ve suffered a lot.”

  At last, after noon, an aide appeared at the steps to the terrace. “Sua excelência?” The party had been waiting for hours.

  “Everything’s ready?” Dhlakama asked, mildly indignant. “Why didn’t anyone tell me? I’ve been waiting for you all. I just want to drink one more cup of coffee.”

  The largest crowds I saw in support of Dhlakama were in the place we visited that afternoon, Majaua, a tiny hamlet deep in Zambezia, Mozambique’s poorest and most populous province. The road that leads to Majaua is a packed dirt track skirting the Malawian border. Along it, you pass great yellow fields of wild grass and clusters of thatched mud huts whose color changes gradually from red to brown with the makeup of the soil. I was riding in the back seat of the third of seven pickups, next to Torres, who was in charge of Dhlakama’s PA system.

  Like most of the people Dhlakama surrounds himself with, Torres was a great nostalgic. For all the Mozambicans I’d spoken to outside of Dhlakama’s cortège, the war seemed to be a terrible, and now, after two decades, mercifully distant memory. It hardly ever came up directly, except to explain some contingent circumstance—why someone was only just now completing high school in their thirties, or why they’d grown up living with a distant relative. Torres seemed to look on the civil war as his heyday, although he’d never been a fighter. For a group whose base had always been in the countryside, Torres was one of Renamo’s rare urban organizers. He recalled carrying Bibles under his arm to secret gatherings disguised as prayer meetings, and making arrangements with an underground member who worked for the electric utility to create a blackout while Renamo plastered Nampula with their posters.

  We stopped in a series of villages along the way where supporters had nailed campaign posters from the 2004 election, seven years earlier, to mango trees along the road. At each of them, men on bicycles would race along behind the convoy until they were submerged in a cloud of dust. Some of the campaign stops were involuntary. Banging away in the middle of the road, one group barred our path with drums until Dhlakama stepped down from his pickup and said a few words through a translator.

  The people he was speaking to are so isolated from the rest of Mozambique that they might as well live in neighboring Malawi. They share a language, Chichewa, with the folks on the other side of the border, and speak next to no Portuguese. They count in English. Their tiny brick churches bear plaques branding them as Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, both missionary groups that entered Mozambique from Malawi when it was still the British colony of Nyasaland. The rest are not Catholics, like the Portuguese, but Anglicans. They buy and sell their goods across the border and spend Malawian kwacha rather than meticais. There are no Mozambican radio stations that reach Majaua. Cell phone service in the area is from Zain, a Malawian provider. Maputo must seem to them impossibly remote, abstract. Yet they are Mozambicans, and they support Renamo by the thousands.

  When we reached Majaua, His Excellency stepped down into an adoring scrum on an unbounded soccer field marked only by wooden goalposts. A few local old-timers kept up a fierce form of crowd control, yanking children by the arm and admonishing them sternly, preserving a buzzing circle of open space where Dhlakama walked. His entourage followed along, buffeted by the crowd, and a group of former Renamo soldiers sang chants where Dhlakama’s name was a prominent refrain: “Our father, Dhlakama, our father, Dhlakama, lead us to victory, father Dhlakama.” At one end of the field, two pickup trucks backed up so their beds stuck out under the crossbar of the goal. Torres clipped speakers to the goalposts, wedging them in place with the aid of lengths of sugarcane.

  In Majaua, a tiny hamlet along the Malawian border in Zambezia, it seemed as though the entire district had come and waited for hours to hear Dhlakama speak. A banner on the road read “Welcome His Excellency, the Source of Democracy.”

  Dhlakama danced and laughed with his ex-guerrillas and listened to a song composed by a young man named Dias Francisco Guilhermo, who was three years old when the war ended. Guilhermo played a homemade three-string guitar and sang in a charming nasal voice. The chorus went like this: “No, no, no, I haven’t forgotten the time of war. No, no, no, I won’t forget the time of war, the time of war, the time of war.” The rest of the song recounted the struggle of life during the war—the hunger, the exhaustion, the heavy burdens that people carried over long distances. Afterward, I went and talked to him. Why are you a Renamo supporter? I asked. “Because my father was a part of Renamo itself,” he said. There you have it.

  It’s tempting to look at local support for Renamo as the stuff of cultural legacy, carried forward by men like Ofece and Guilhermo because they’ve never believed in anything different. And yet, to people in Majaua, the idea of Renamo rule is also the counterfactual of a lifetime. It is the opportunity to imagine their district with roads, with electrici
ty, with a high school—with any of the things you might take for granted if your interactions with government weren’t confined to altercations with armed border guards.

  As it was, the dominant political issue in Majaua seemed to be the matter of border crossing. Majaua is a prosperous farming community, in terms of yields, but it is too remote and the roads are too muddy for merchants on the Mozambican side to come to the area to buy the corn and beans they produce. People in Majaua don’t simply live off less than a dollar a day, as the statistic has it. Mostly, they don’t live off dollars at all. They eat what they grow and exist on the margins of the cash economy, scrounging soap, salt, and cell phone credit as they are able. Guilhermo complained that when they cross the border to sell their corn, the border guards confiscate it. “I don’t know why they don’t let us cross,” he said. “All I know is that they are robbers and thieves.” They solicit bribes—in Malawian currency, no less, he complained—“and if you refuse, they will beat you as they please.” What Guilhermo wanted above all, he said, was democracia. What is that? I asked. “Democracy would be something where I can walk from here to anywhere.” Life in Majaua is certainly better than it was twenty years ago, but not better enough for people like Guilhermo to give up the idea that there is an alternative more promising than Frelimo rule.

  Western scholars often refer to Mozambique as a darling of the donor community, receiving consistently high aid flows since the end of the civil war. In 2006, aid to Mozambique was nearly $80 per capita, or almost twice as much as its neighbors Tanzania and Malawi.36 Only a handful of African countries received more foreign aid than Mozambique in 2015; all five of them—Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Kenya, and Nigeria—have at least twice as many people.37 Mozambique is known, in travel guides and investors’ briefs around the internet, for abandoning Marxism in favor of structural adjustment, pulling itself up from the devastation of the war, and becoming a “fledgling democracy,” with free elections and peaceful transfers of power.