I had dinner with B a few weeks later. With Christmas past and no revolution in the works, I’d stopped trying to keep abreast of Dhlakama’s antics. “Sheeeeeeee,” B said, predictably, when we sat down. “I didn’t know you were in town. You missed it.” What? I asked. That afternoon, B had filmed the provincial conference of desmobilisados in the hangar-like prayer hall of the Community of Sant’Egidio, the Catholic lay charity that mediated the peace accords that ended the civil war. This was an internal meeting of the party, held, Dhlakama announced, at the request of his former soldiers. The first part of it was open to the press. While cameras were rolling before an audience of several hundred Renamo rank and file, the desmobilisados began to speak out against O Velho, accusing him of “protecting” Frelimo while he repeatedly put off protests to unseat the ruling party.
“Gentlemen, Dhlakama is compromised,” one said, standing up.51 “We want our weapons so that we ourselves can start a new war,” announced a soldier from Mogincual. “We’ve reached the conclusion that Dhlakama is wrapped up with Frelimo.” Maurício Silvano introduced himself as a veteran of the “war for democracy.” Silvano thought Guebuza had cut Dhlakama a generous check when they met in December. “If Mr. Dhlakama is eating out of the same plate as Guebuza, that’s his business,” he said. “But we want to start with the demonstrations, and if possible, this very day,” he added, to loud applause.52
In all, nine former soldiers stood up to point their fingers at Dhlakama, B said. Several approached the stage as they spoke, but Dhlakama’s bodyguards held fast, and the man himself remained seated with an indulgent smile, waiting for the protests to pass.
“My brothers,” Dhlakama replied when the hubbub settled, “you are right to say that you are tired of waiting, and you are right to accuse me of eating with Guebuza. But I want to tell you to stay calm.”53 He was supposed to have a second meeting with Guebuza, he said, but it hadn’t taken place because Guebuza’s mother fell ill. In fact, Guebuza had been away in South Africa at an international conference. “If I were compromised,” Dhlakama said, “I wouldn’t be here. . . . I was already in Frelimo: I left Frelimo in 1977,” he continued. “The protests will begin next week, and whomever opens fire on the protesters will be killed on the spot.”54 A state news service reported the event as a hoax: “Men who claim they once fought for Renamo on Saturday insulted and threatened Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama at a public meeting in the northern city of Nampula—but left journalists covering the event wondering whether it had been staged to give the impression that Dhlakama is a moderate, under siege from extremists in its own party.”55
Over the next few weeks, a group of several hundred desmobilisados set up camp outside Renamo’s Nampula offices, awaiting Dhlakama’s orders to begin their long-postponed protests.56 As usual, a large police detail was assigned to keep watch over the gathering. As they had in Milange, the police and the desmobilisados exchanged taunts periodically, but things came to a head only early one morning in March. Police and Renamo desmobilisados (no one admitted to shooting first) opened fire on one another, killing one man on either side.57 It was the first time in twelve years, and only the second time since the war ended, that Dhlakama’s men had exchanged fire directly with the police.58 Police reinforcements moved in swiftly, arresting thirty-four Renamo members and restoring something like order, but as you’d expect, ordinary people in Nampula were terrified.
Afterward, each side hastened to spin the event as it suited them. Dhlakama did not step outside his house, but Renamo officials claimed, variously, that Guebuza had called Dhlakama to ask him to maintain the peace, that Dhlakama had called Guebuza, that the police had attacked “defenseless desmobilisados,” that seven police officers had been killed, and that a group of one thousand soldiers was being summoned from Sofala.59 The police, meanwhile, maintained that Dhlakama’s Presidential Guard had fired first and attacked a police vehicle and that the desmobilisados were in Nampula not to protest Frelimo rule, but rather to claim backpay from O Velho.60 To me, both possibilities are still convincing even after four years of sporadic violence. Dhlakama’s own motives are transparent enough, but I’m not so sure what’s driving Renamo’s guerrillas to stay in the bush. Is it devotion to their father, to the warped ideals of grown-up child soldiers? Or perhaps a stubborn promise from Dhlakama that a steady paycheck awaits them when peace returns.
“He has his version, and I have a different vision of reality,” Guebuza explained to the press after meeting Dhlakama in Nampula.61 Guebuza’s successor, Filipe Nyusi, has taken a decidedly different tack. After months and months of deadlock between Dhlakama and Guebuza over a meeting location, O Velho and Nyusi quickly reached a compromise. They met twice at the Maputo hotel where Dhlakama stayed following the presidential election in 2014, emerging from their second meeting “wreathed in smiles,” according to the state wire service.62
Conflict and reconciliation seemed to be moving forward along parallel tracks. Negotiations over the makeup of Mozambique’s army went through 104 fruitless rounds before collapsing in May 2015. Dhlakama wanted to see his men reinstated, with equal power in the armed forces for Frelimo and Renamo. Frelimo had kept the army deliberately small for twenty-five years, largely to avoid the threat of a coup, doing much of the recent fighting with Renamo through special police units called the Rapid Intervention Forces, or Forças de Intervenção Rápida. A few weeks later, Dhlakama signed an agreement with the government to rid the civil service of undue Frelimo influence, but he ordered an attack on government troops in Tete the very same day.63
By the end of September, Dhlakama had returned to the bush, saying he feared for his life: “If I am not dead, it is because God is still with me,” he explained later.64 This rhetoric had been a staple of Dhlakama’s repertoire for more than twenty years, but for the first time since the end of the war, it finally seemed credible. There had been two separate attacks on Dhlakama’s convoys as he traveled in Sofala in September.65 Assassins seemed comfortable picking off more and more important figures in Dhlakama’s entourage. There were whispers that Frelimo hard-liners were pursuing the “Savimbi option,” a reference to the Angolan opposition leader who was assassinated in the midst of a political impasse in 2002.66
When this second, shadow war began, some of the men I’d met as part of Dhlakama’s political entourage began to show up in newspaper photographs with guns in Gorongosa, having traded their loafers and button-downs for green fatigues and black berets. I read that Armindo Milaco, a child soldier who had risen to become a Renamo deputy in parliament by the time we met in 2011, had been killed in a government raid near Dhlakama’s base.67 A lawmaker one day, a guerrilla the next. That, I thought, was the Renamo way.
But by 2016, it no longer seemed to matter whether Renamo’s top brass were in the bush or in the city, whether they thought of themselves as guerrillas or politicians. Manuel Bissopo, a sitting deputy in parliament and Renamo’s secretary-general, was shot across the street from Beira city hall after a Wednesday morning press conference.68 Later in the year, as Dhlakama continued to threaten to split the country by force, a member of Renamo’s negotiating team was killed on a jog along the Maputo waterfront.69
This seesaw of attacks and negotiations continued through much of 2016. President Nyusi and Dhlakama finally agreed to a ceasefire during a phone call the day after Christmas.70 As of this writing, that peace has held for nine months, although Dhlakama remains holed up in an encampment under the stars.71 “The war is over,” he told reporters recently, speaking by cell phone from Gorongosa—this, for now, is how he is holding press conferences in Maputo.72
With presidential elections on the horizon in 2019, and with them the need for both sides to campaign safely, three groups of negotiators are hashing out the elements of a more durable peace: leadership roles for Renamo in the army, a more decentralized national government, and—unmentioned but perhaps just as important—the innkeeper’s “lollipop,” or some kind of payout for Dhlakama.73<
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Government troops have withdrawn from Renamo bases (some, though not all), schools have reopened, and the convoys have stopped on the main national highways.74 Even Dhlakama has softened his stump speech, speaking of a “truce without deadlines.” He wants to reassure the world, he says, “that Mozambique now has another image, an image of peace, tranquility and of a country that has all the conditions for investment.”
It remains to be seen what peace deal could satisfy a man who earned 37 percent of the vote. If history is any guide, Dhlakama will cling to the ability to put up armed resistance as long as he possibly can, with no guarantee his demands won’t shift again. Mozambicans, meanwhile, are caught between two parties who think democracy means they always win.
3
Branco é Branco
ZAMBEZIA
A terra não se vende, mas compras.
The land isn’t for sale, but you can buy it.1
Late one night in November 2014, a large tractor pierced the whir of crickets as it came to life beside a soybean field some forty miles outside the town of Alto Molócue. It was planting time, and the field was covered in the scraggly beard of weeds, roots, and dry stems left from the last soybean harvest. Dragging a massive plow, the tractor made its way from end to end and through several turns, bright-white headlights guiding the way.
Anselmo João, a soybean grower from the area, was one of the first people to stir in the ruckus. Namilepe is not the kind of place where people are accustomed to hearing heavy machinery as they sleep. No one there had ever used a tractor to till a field at one a.m.
João got dressed and went outside with two neighbors. Through the starlight, he could make out enough of the scene—the thrum of a large motor tracking behind a wedge-shaped beam of light—to know that someone was plowing a field that didn’t belong to them.
In fact, the field was João’s, or at least partly his. For the last eight years, João has been part of a collective that grows soybeans for seed, working on contract for a company in Maputo, Lozan Farms, through a system called machambas em bloco, or “block fields.” Members of the group store seed together, time their plantings and sell their crops collectively, and share equipment and labor. Small commercial cooperatives like these have been a bright spot in Mozambican agriculture. They are not common, but in pockets they’ve managed to work around some of the basic obstacles to scaling farms by sharing assets and working together to gain access to markets.
Farmers in the Associação Lozan Farms are a prosperous bunch. In the space of a few years, members have reroofed, then rebuilt their houses in brick and corrugated steel, sent children to college, purchased tractors, and gradually expanded the footprint of their farms. In a country where most farms are tiny—the median a single hectare (two and a half acres)—several members of the Associação Lozan Farms farm eight times as much land or more.2
“We went straight out to see the truth, and we found the machines there working,” João recalled in disbelief. They stood by the field and yelled to the driver, then waved their arms as they crossed his headlight beams, but there was no reaction. “Three of us walked out in the middle of the night to try to get the tractor to stop, and he wouldn’t even slow down.”
By the time the tractor stopped, more than thirty acres—an area equivalent to some twenty-five football fields—had already been prepared for planting. Nova Algodoeira, a Portuguese cotton company with an operation based in Alto Molócue, was doing the work.
The next day, members of the association watched from afar as Nova Algodoeira’s workers returned with a seeder and planted the whole area with cotton, taking over in a day what might have taken them weeks to plant, about 20 percent of the land they farmed as a group. Then they decided to take the land back. The day after Nova Algodoeira finished seeding the parcel, João’s group gathered nearby.
As Marques Dias recalls, it took some convincing to get everyone to follow through. “There wasn’t a single person who had the courage, or the conviction, I had,” Dias told me. Dias is an activist. He chairs the advocacy committee for the provincial chapter of a national smallholders group, União Nacional de Camponeses, or UNAC. He’d heard other stories of land disputes between agribusinesses and locals who occupied desirable farmland, some on a much grander scale, and he was convinced that as long as they could keep a united front, the problem wouldn’t last.
“So I got everyone together and said, ‘Hey, we can’t be afraid,’” Dias recounted. “‘We have to sow our soybeans—all of us—no one can sit out. No one can hold back. If one of us doesn’t take part, that will be another problem.’”
This was their land, wasn’t it? Who begins planting in the middle of the night? Where was the piece of paper that gave the cotton company the right to come in? But even with backing from Maputo—Lozan Farms held the legal certificate that gave the association rights to that particular stretch of land—it was a slow start.
“All of us will sow, whether you have one hectare or more,” Dias urged, “and when the cotton sprouts, we have to cut it. We can’t leave it. These were our ancestors’ fields!” Dias and his fellow farmers were born in Alto Molócue. They were cousins, sisters, in-laws. Their kin had lived and farmed chunks of land along the Namilepe for generations.
While Dias and his neighbors were sowing, António Regalo, the Portuguese director of Nova Algodoeira’s operations in the area, drove his pickup truck out to Namilepe and came as far as the edge of the field, only to stand and watch, then leave without saying a word.
Marques Dias is part of a soybean-farming cooperative in Namilepe, Zambezia, that has repeatedly had to fend off incursions from a Portuguese-owned cotton company that claimed rights to the land.
Once the cotton and soy both sprouted, though, Regalo proposed leaving both crops in the ground until harvest. João, smiling, seemed to see this as pure trickery. “They knew the soja doesn’t have much strength,” he said. “The cotton would choke it out.”
When it came to pulling out the cotton, members, again, approached the work with hesitation, hanging back to see who would go first. There were rumors that Regalo was going to try to make the association pay 25,000 meticais in damages for every hectare of cotton they pulled out.
The end result was just the opposite: Regalo’s tractor had saved the association weeks of work, clearing fields for planting in a fraction of the time it would have taken them with smaller equipment. All members had to do was sow their seed. It seems like Regalo even helped you, I said to Dias, tentatively, and he began to laugh. “Yes, yes,” he said. “We made good profits that year.”
A year later, though, members of the Associação Lozan Farms again found a tractor and two excavators working in broad day-light to clear land on another parcel that belonged to them, just below the first. The routine repeated itself: unanswered pleas for the drivers to stop, a hurried meeting of the members, and a phone call to Lozan Farms’ headquarters in Maputo.
This time, they took their complaint to the posto administrativo—the nearest government office—and received official blessing to send Nova Algodoeira packing. Again, they planted soybeans where the cotton company had tilled the land, and again, the association was spared the expense of tilling a large field.
Dias’s group has something most rural farmers do not: a title, or DUAT—Direito de Uso e Aproveitamento da Terra—the legal document confirming their right to the use and improvement of the land.
DUATs are still the exception to the rule of land tenure in Mozambique: according to the World Bank, of a total of 3 to 4 million parcels in the country, fewer than 5 percent have been formalized with a DUAT.3
Land disputes, or conflitos de terra, have become a hallmark of development and investment throughout Mozambique. What makes Anselmo João and Marques Dias’s experience with the cotton company noteworthy is not that there was a dispute in the first place, but the fact that they won out so easily.
Mozambique’s land law stipulates that land cannot be sold. Land be
longs to the state, and anyone who occupies it gets the right to do so in one of two ways: occupying a parcel continuously in “good faith” for ten years or more, or submitting a proposal to the government to use it for a set period and a specific purpose.4
Most of the land in rural areas like Namilepe falls under the rubric of “customary use,” which allows parcels passed down from generation to generation within a local community to be grandfathered into the legal system without a DUAT.5
In practice, though, rights stemming from customary, or traditional, use have proved devilishly difficult to uphold, sometimes even when they are formalized.
By 2009–10, “community” land rights had been mapped out across 12 percent of Mozambique’s total landmass. But a study of these “delimited” communities by Mozambique’s Judicial Training Center (Centro de Formação Jurídica e Judiciária), a branch of the Ministry of Justice, found one out of every six they surveyed in “open conflict with a private investor or the state.”6
Some contend that conflict has been a feature of every major land deal during Mozambique’s boom years. Examples abound: not far from Namilepe, in Lioma district, hundreds of soybean farmers cried foul soon after a Portuguese holding company was awarded a concession that included land they’d farmed in cooperatives for years. When it came time for planting, the company, Quifel, targeted rich land that had already been cleared—regardless of whether it was included in the original concession.
In Chikweti, Niassa, in Mozambique’s far north, a huge forestry project powered with money from a Dutch government pension fund and managed by the Lutheran Church made front-page news in the Netherlands after Mozambicans resorted to vandalizing equipment and burning pine and eucalyptus plantations to make their frustrations heard. Chikweti Forests of Niassa is the subsidiary of an investment fund founded to promote “forest-based investments with high potential returns and a strong ethical, environmental and socio-economical profile, including community development.” But the company had ended up seizing twice as much land as the Mozambican government had originally awarded it, and reneging on promises to compensate those who had been displaced.7
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