Go Tell the Crocodiles

by Rowan Moore Gerety

  All of this is true enough. But the space, or at least the perceived space, for meaningful dissent in Mozambique is minimal. Corruption has worsened steadily in recent years, and there is a crushing sense, in conversations with ordinary Mozambicans, that there is no avenue of recourse against the abuses of the ruling party.38 People are afraid to speak their minds, and a Renamo rally is one of the only opportunities they have to come out, en masse, in a joyous show of dissent. It doesn’t matter that Dhlakama speaks unconvincingly of revolution. No one else in Majaua is speaking out at all.

  Although more than 1 million Mozambicans (out of 15 million total) died in the fighting between Renamo and Frelimo, some scholars still disagree as to whether the conflict can truly be called a civil war.39 In its early years, in particular, it was often called a war of aggression, or a war of destabilization, because of the apparent incoherence of Renamo’s attacks against Mozambique. “Don’t invest any money,” Renamo’s U.S. spokesman once told a group of American businessmen. “We will blow up anything you build.”40 It was thought obvious that Renamo’s interests were simply those of the Rhodesians and, after 1980, the apartheid government in Pretoria.

  Yet Renamo’s cruel tactics toward Mozambican civilians seemed counterproductive for an insurgency that relied on peasant labor and intelligence to feed themselves, to plan their movements, and to transport their gear. How was it that they could stage ambushes over such vast swaths of the countryside without alienating the people who lived there?

  By the mid-1980s, it was clear that Renamo had taken on life independent of its backers in South Africa. Out of the international gamesmanship of white supremacy, the rebels crafted local rationales for the war. Renamo found a rallying force in widespread opposition to some of Frelimo’s core policies: the government forced resettlement in communal villages; it required peasants to contribute precious crops and work hours to state-run cooperatives and farms; it sidelined tribal authorities in the name of Marxist liberation. Renamo proposed to destroy all that and more. In the words of the political scientist Carrie Manning, “Renamo’s defining feature during the war was that it was whatever Frelimo was not.”41

  Stephen Lubkemann, an American anthropologist who worked in southern Mozambique in the 1990s, has described the conflict as a “fragmented war,” for the lack of a coherent national agenda among supporters of either side. He argues that it was common for the political stakes of the war to be subordinated to the village-level spats in any area where fighting took place.42 This makes the appeal of each side seem rather like a mafia’s: warring factions provide protection and personalized violence in exchange for political support. But the analogy helps to explain how the everyday disputes Lubkemann presents as examples—a man’s jealousy of his brother’s prosperity, mutual mistrust by two wives of the same husband—could escalate to lethal proportions during a war. A Human Rights Watch study estimated that more than 6 million AK-47s entered Mozambique during the war, not to mention handguns, grenades, and land mines.43 To make his case, Lubkemann retells the story of neighbors who had a long-standing dispute over a wild honeycomb in the bush near their village. One neighbor, he writes, “actually managed to obtain a landmine through a family member who was a part of the government militia, and planted it near the honeycomb. The other man and his wife were both hit by the landmine when they visited the honeycomb. The man died instantly and the woman was fatally injured. She died later the same day after crawling back to the village.”44

  Renamo and Frelimo became the vehicles for the escalation of any conflict, the airing of any grievance. And for Renamo, that principle remains valid today.

  For four days, the party slept in Milange, making half-day outings to communities in the surrounding bush, never setting out before eleven a.m. Dhlakama was adamant that we avoid showing up too early, before his supporters had come back from the fields for the day, or had the chance to pour in from the surrounding countryside. In the evenings, Dhlakama grilled local party officials about outreach, making sure they’d sent enchentes, or “filler-uppers,” to each stop in advance. The day we left, Dhlakama was more prompt than usual. Torres called at eight thirty and told me to meet the convoy at the gas station. Filling seven trucks took about an hour, so I sat on a stone wall eating banana bread with B, a young cameraman from the independent TV network TIM. Dhlakama was perched a few yards away in the open door of his pickup. Holding a calculator on his knee, His Excellency peeled bills from a Bible-sized stack of meticais to pay for gas. “You see that?” B asked me. “Dhlakama takes the money out of his pocket. No one else touches it.” Is it always like that? I wondered. “Every time!” he said. “Dhlakama? Porra!”—Fuck!

  B had already been covering Renamo for three weeks as they toured through Nampula and Cabo Delgado. He explained that fieldwork by television reporters in Mozambique is financed largely by the institutions and people being covered. The best gig, he said, is covering the Millennium Challenge Corporation, an aid and development organization that pays a $50 per diem for food alone. There were only so many stories to squeeze from an erratic stump speech, so B made time on the road with Dhlakama to film quick spots on working conditions in Milange’s tobacco warehouses, or crop prices in the market. “The guy won’t let you go,” B confided over beers one night. “You tell him, I can stay for four days, and he says okay, but then he changes his mind. That guy? Shheeeeee! He loves to be on television.” Dhlakama was fond of making himself scarce or unapproachable as B’s departures neared, sending stern messages through intermediaries to get the camera to stay an extra day. “Don’t you see there are journalists here filming?” he asked the population of Morrumbo, a tiny hamlet we reached after three hours on dry dirt roads interspersed with wheat and onion fields. “Our friend came all the way from America to be here,” he said, waving a hand in my direction. “I’m not whispering this stuff like this,” he said in a stage whisper. “Everyone is hearing it. [President] Guebuza himself is hearing it!”

  Everywhere Dhlakama spoke, dozens of well-worn Hero-brand bicycles were stacked against trees and buildings, testament to the distances his supporters had come to hear him preach revolution.

  In Gurué, Dhlakama spoke in the middle of a soccer field at the tip of a nose-shaped ridge the town’s sprawl covers like a bandanna. With a wide panorama of steep inselbergs and rolling tea plantations bathed in late afternoon sun, he could not have asked for a grander setting. I found myself on the sidelines standing next to a man in his forties who wore a baseball cap and threadbare, baggy khakis. “Do you support Dhlakama?” I asked him. He paused. “What he is saying—his voice—you can understand it. You can accept it. You can hear it. But Frelimo has ideas too—” he said. “We children are here in the middle between Renamo and Frelimo. We’re like a plant that is in the water. When the wind starts blowing to the left, the plant will follow. When the wind starts blowing to the right, the plant will follow there, too. When the wind stops, the water is still, and so is the plant. You know, when a child is beaten, it runs to its mother. We’re fleeing. The world is tearing itself apart from one end to the other. Whatever words we hear, we’ll follow.”

  He was pleased to hear Dhlakama speak of a revolution; he thought there was a chance a revolution would bring more jobs. The man declined to give his name, so I asked if I could identify him by his profession. “That’s the problem,” he said. “I don’t do anything. I only work in my garden; I sell charcoal.”

  I was scheduled to interview His Excellency at nine o’clock the next morning. Aides were coming and going from Dhlakama’s front door, waiting, just as I was. The military guards were packing and unpacking their bags, doing laundry, taking catnaps with their guns positioned under their mats like pillows. I asked a group of three how long they’d been with Renamo.

  Crowds lined the road for the better part of a mile to see Dhlakama roll into Gurué at sunset.

  “Eeeeeeeeeee,” came the reply, as if to count the years in vowels. One joined in 1981 at age thirte
en, another in 1982 at age eleven. “I grew up in the war; I got married in the war; I had my kids in the war.” He laughed. The third couldn’t remember. He considered this for a moment and then pointed to his waist and said, “I joined when I was this tall.”45

  Over the previous week, I’d been struck at the commitment of these guards to their peculiar cause, serving as the personal army of a retired warlord and sometimes politician. To continue to camp and clean their guns daily twenty years after their war had ended, to live the lives of child soldiers well into adulthood, even after they had families. Most of the men are now over forty, but they’ve known little else. They joined Renamo as boys and have a fierce, quasi-religious devotion to Dhlakama. “A lot of people support our president, right?” one of them asked me in Majaua, grinning as he looked over the crowd. By dint of habit, belief, manipulation, or charisma, somehow, Dhlakama managed to make them stick around.

  A pair of soldiers from Dhlakama’s Presidential Guard, coated with dust from head to toe, show off roasted field rats—a dry-season delicacy—at a roadside stop on the way to Gurué. Many of the men in the Presidential Guard joined Renamo as children and traveled everywhere with Dhlakama, riding in the bed of each pickup in the seven-car convoy.

  The megalomania of the whole enterprise was striking. In a week of public appearances in Zambezia, Dhlakama did not once mention the name of any of the legislators traveling with him—local, provincial, or national. Seven members of the national assembly had taken weeks away from work simply to watch their president perform. When they appeared onstage, it was only to lead the crowd in cries of “Dhlakama O Ye! O Ye!” or to translate. Dhlakama didn’t hold meetings with local officials or residents or outline any program more specific than revolution. He made threats and sketched derisive caricatures of the government: his only policy prescriptions were taunts at Frelimo.

  But these are not the effects of old age or senility. The French anthropologist Michel Cahen noted Dhlakama’s narcissism even in 1994, while traveling with His Excellency during his first presidential campaign. “Although Renamo’s membership may be overwhelmingly civilian now,” he wrote just a few years after the war, “the organization still continues to function with an exclusively military mentality. With the exception of some of the few competent provincial or national leaders, no one takes even the slightest initiative and everyone remains waiting for orders, even concerning such trivial details as what kind of drinks and sandwiches to provide for reporters. The consequences are disastrous and affect all levels of the organisation. Renamo may be a civilian party, but it is not an exaggeration to say that the political department . . . does not function at all.”46

  Still, B and the two other reporters I met on the Dhlakama beat were actually receptive to a good share of Dhlakama’s criticism of Frelimo. They agreed that state institutions had been politicized, that electoral fraud was a problem, that the ballooning exports of unprocessed wood and minerals were not benefiting most Mozambicans. But they saw something fundamentally hollow and ineffective in the way Dhlakama ran his operation on the road. “Dhlakama is right,” B told me over beer and chicken in Gurué. “What he says is true. But what kind of government would they have?” This was one of B’s refrains throughout our itinerary, when Dhlakama heaped slurs on Frelimo or tallied up his own gas bill. “He couldn’t govern,” he’d say of Dhlakama. “He just couldn’t.”

  Dhlakama’s whimsy and micromanagement often seemed to interfere with any political organizing that Renamo might have accomplished on their sweep through the country. When the journalists were given money for meals, B told me, they went to Dhlakama’s room and watched him take the cash directly from his wallet. For dinner, then again for breakfast, and again for lunch. “The party’s money stays with him,” B said.

  Partly, I imagine, this is so because Dhlakama doesn’t see the money as being the party’s money at all. While he maintains that he receives only a small stipend from the party, Dhlakama has never disclosed how much he is paid. The majority of Renamo’s funding comes from Mozambique’s state budget, which, with the support of Western donors, funds political parties in proportion with their representation in the assembly.47 Renamo’s funding fell dramatically after the election in 2004, along with its shrinking minority in parliament. But since seats in the assembly were awarded according to votes cast in the presidential election until recently, there is a sense in which Renamo still owes all its funding to Dhlakama’s personal appeal. After thirty years with Dhlakama at the helm, no one in his inner circle seemed to question this.

  In the mornings, before he stepped outside, Dhlakama could usually be found in his room, manually entering sheets of prepaid scratch cards in a small collection of cell phones. He used $15 cards in batches of $100 or $200 for each of the major cell phone providers—MCel (owned by the Mozambican government) and Vodacom (part-owned by Armando Guebuza, president of Mozambique from 2005 to 2015).48 The man spent a lot of time on the phone. B said he never called twice from the same number. Understandably, Dhlakama felt he was at risk of having his phones tapped, so he bought SIM cards on the street and changed numbers as often as possible. What is harder to understand is why Dhlakama felt the need to personally scratch off the little foil film on each card and punch in the lengthy codes himself. During all of this, it was generally understood that Dhlakama was not to be bothered. So it was that, at one thirty, though I’d been waiting half the day, Martíns emerged from Dhlakama’s bungalow at the Catholic mission and told me that O Velho had too much work to see me.

  His inner circle treated him more like butlers than like campaign operatives: they didn’t manage O Velho; they simply gave him his space.

  At times, it was as though all distinction below His Excellency had dissolved. Renamo’s deputies in the national assembly were simply old military buddies of the Presidential Guard who had decided to put on button-downs. On our way to Gurué, pickup number five nearly lost a wheel. All six lugs came loose and rattled off into the brush by the side of the road. The convoy stopped when the problem became apparent, and a small committee—deputies, aides, and soldiers—went to work while the rest of us crouched in the sun and chewed knots of sugarcane.

  While we waited, it came to light that a member of the Presidential Guard had taken the liberty of having sex inside a deputy’s truck the night before and been caught in the act—like a member of the Secret Service having sex in a congressman’s car. A colleague went to tell the truck’s owner, and the deputy went out to see for himself. He knocked on the window, but the offender refused to open the door. Now he was sheepishly dodging guilt without comment while his comrades had at him. The mocking exchange kept nine of Dhlakama’s entourage going at a good clip for about twenty minutes, with frequent bouts of laughter that climaxed with the following line: “You know, maybe we’re having car trouble because you had sex in the car. People who have sex in their houses don’t usually have this problem.”

  Even in their critiques of Frelimo, B and his colleagues took pains to highlight the ruling party’s competence. On our last night in Gurué, I sat on B’s bed as he and a radio reporter traded half-scared, half-admiring exclamations about the party’s work ethic and ruthless efficiency. “Frelimo is a machine; those guys can work,” B said. “You see them in the office at one, two a.m.,” the radio reporter countered. Junior cadres stayed up all night to plan their rallies and conferences—whatever it took to get things done. Frelimo’s capacity for organizing and political discipline verged on the sinister. Yet each of them lamented the fact that colleagues from the capital would likely be sent to the Tenth Frelimo Party Congress, later in the year. “Luxury hotel, $100 daily stipend,” B said. “Poooooorrra,” the radio reporter exclaimed. Fuuuuuck! “Frelimo?” B said in his characteristic tone of challenge. “Shheeeeee! Frelimo is a machine.”

  One hallmark of Frelimo’s political skill has been the party’s ability to pass the baton from one leader to the next: Frelimo itself has never become personified by a
single head of state, and it has repeatedly resisted splintering at times of internal strife. While Dhlakama alone has faced off against four successive Frelimo heads of state, there have been no splits, resignations, or expulsions of high-level Frelimo officials since independence.49

  In December 2011, interim elections were held in three cities where unpopular Frelimo mayors had resigned within days of one another. Ostensibly, each one stepped down for personal reasons, though it was widely presumed that the party had leaned on them, so that more popular Frelimo candidates might take their place before the general elections two years later. Renamo did not take part in the elections, and Frelimo’s candidates faced only MDM, the newest party in the opposition. Unexpectedly, the MDM candidate in Quelimane—by far the largest of the three cities—won in a landslide, hinting that the balance of political power in Mozambique was shifting.

  On December 8, 2011, the day after the by-elections and two weeks from Dhlakama’s self-imposed deadline for revolution, the president granted him an audience in Nampula, the first time the two men had met since Guebuza took office in 2005. It lasted less than an hour; only Dhlakama spoke with the press afterward, suggesting that Guebuza did not take the meeting all too seriously. The conversation turned on “matters that affect the country at the political, economic, social and democratic levels, and national reconciliation in this country,” Dhlakama told reporters. Guebuza “listened and took note of all the questions dealt with.” The meeting did not necessarily preclude Renamo from holding demonstrations, Dhlakama said, but it signaled “consensus” and a return to dialogue between Renamo and Frelimo.50 In other words, no revolution was necessary.