Go Tell the Crocodiles

by Rowan Moore Gerety

  “‘Voce, sai daí!’” You, get out of there.

  “This is the basis of our complaint,” he said, as though he were facing António Regalo directly. “Look, you’re standing there at home thinking, ‘This is too much. You’re going to destroy my house; you’re going to destroy my orange tree; you’re going to destroy my cassava plants. And where will I end up? At least give us something!’ And that’s when he’d pull out 1,000 meticais, maybe two, hand it over, and say, ‘Okay, now get out.’”

  “They didn’t calculate what to pay based on what people actually possessed there, whether there was a house or an orange tree. Everything was destroyed”—he paused here to mime the sweep of heavy machinery with one arm—“whether people were satisfied or not. They just handed out money and the person had to leave.”

  Earlier in the day, Anselmo João had given me a similar version of events, and at first, I was taken aback. A string of questions rattled out: Did anyone show them documents? How did they agree on an amount for each house? How much advance notice was there? How much time did he give them to move once they got paid?

  “He didn’t give them any time,” João said of Regalo, while we sat beneath the thatch roof sheltering the tractor Caixão rents out to other members of the association. “It was only, ‘We bought this field, mister, get out!’ He had the tractor running there behind him. And, pronto, the person in question left.”

  With more clarification, it seemed Regalo had gone about clearing the parcel over the course of a few days, paying families to leave more or less on the spot as tractors reached their homes.

  “That day, all you heard was loud complaints,” João said. “‘We’re homeless, desalojados, where are we going to live?’”

  “Since branco é branco,” João continued, a faint grin softening his resignation, “não havia de discutir.” Since a white man is a white man, there was no discussing it.

  Delicate flowers were just starting to unfurl from tens of thousands of Nova Algodoeira’s cotton plants, filling a fertile belt of black soil above the river. João’s neighbors, meanwhile, had been reduced to coaxing cassava from hard, sandy ground just beyond it, to the north. “Everyone was lamenting the sand there where they’re trying to figure out a way to live now,” he said.

  Branco é branco is a phrase I’ve heard again and again in talking to Mozambicans about land. Essentially, it means there’s no stopping them.

  “Where did the phrase come from?” I asked João. We were sitting in white plastic patio chairs just yards from the edge of the cotton field. João and Caixão laughed out loud. “Is that how they talked when you were a kid too, ‘branco é branco’?” I asked João, now in his seventies.

  “Simmmm!” he said insistently. Yessss! There was more laughter.

  “Because white people have what they need in life—they have means.”

  “Do you remember hearing it for the first time?” I asked.

  “My story is this: when a white person came around . . . he’d get to the régulo’s house, the régulo would invite the people to gather round, and say, ‘Ja recebemos um branco.’” We have a white guest. Régulo is the Portuguese word for Mozambique’s hereditary chiefs. Historically, régulos had authority over local land and community disputes, based partly on their role mediating a community’s connections with ancestral spirits.21 During the colonial era, the Portuguese worked to consolidate control over rural Mozambique by making régulos represent state interests at the local level—extracting labor and taxes, or upholding colonial laws.22

  “This white man came to deal with such and such—either a field, or he was starting a store, or something else,” João went on. “So, if the spot in question, if there was someone who already lived there, he was informed, ‘Sir, get out of here; this white man is going to do some work here.’ And from there, you had to clean up and get out of there. And they’d give you a bit of change, and then you had to get out of there. You had to be grateful for whatever you got.”

  João threw up his hands with finality.

  “And you’d say . . .?” I asked.

  “And you’d say, ‘branco é branco.’”

  At times, foreigners’ interest and influence on the Mozambican economy can seem inescapably modern—the mining of minerals used to make white paint and toothpaste, the cell phone–enabled chatter of the Chinese logging industry, the harnessing of farmland not to grow food for export, but to grow biofuels. And yet the land conflict in Namilepe is an example that reaches straight into the past, through several generations of displacement.

  In the colonial era, Anselmo João explained, Namilepe was home to a farm where he worked from the time he was a boy, weeding cabbage and potato fields and harvesting melons in the lowland flats by the river. Hundreds of acres more—from the river up to the régulo’s house, about a thirty-minute walk, João recalled—were planted with corn. The whole plantation was owned by a Portuguese family.

  A few of the buildings still stand: a store gradually being conquered by vines, an eroding clay-brick warehouse without a roof, neat rows of cotton planted right up to their foundations.

  Anselmo João stands by the crumbling outbuildings of the colonial farm where he worked as a boy, weeding cabbage and potato fields and harvesting melons in the lowland flats by the river.

  A handful of families, João recalled, had had to abandon their homes to make way for the farm. When the operation shuttered after independence, they were quick to reclaim the land: colonists had taken the most productive areas for themselves. Soon afterward, the Mozambican government started a plantation of its own.

  “Those of us who lived within the machamba started to work with the empresa,” he said, referring to the state-owned company. “It was a choice: those who left here chose their land somewhere else. And the people who got to stay and work for the company, the company arranged houses for them, and left them there.”

  It was a pattern seen throughout the country. In an effort to salvage some of the engine of the colonial economy, Frelimo took up the same plantation approach to agriculture the Portuguese had, dusting off equipment that, in many cases, had been deliberately sabotaged by colonists who abandoned their holdings amid the war for independence.

  Frelimo envisioned a kind of cooperative utopia, using modern practices and collective labor to multiply the bounty of each acre. But there was another lesson this approach impressed on Namilepe, too. “When it came to the land,” as João put it, “the population had no rights left to defend.”

  Civil war ultimately undid the government’s farming ambitions in Namilepe as well. By the late 1980s, rural Zambezia had been ravaged by nearly a decade of Renamo ambushes on anything associated with government. Counterassaults laid waste to communities deemed sympathetic to the guerrillas. A generation after the war, the most palpable evidence of its devastation are hundreds of hollowed-out buildings and half-standing walls, like the ones that mark the former plantation in Namilepe, abandoned to the elements after an attack, or actively burned to the ground.

  In the center of Alto Molócue, seat of the county that includes Namilepe, there’s a large concrete office building built in the austere midcentury style of the colonial government, divided neatly in two. On the right, a fresh coat of yellow paint and neat lettering welcome visitors to a recently renovated tax collection office. On the left, it appears nothing has been touched since the building was shelled in the 1980s: a massive concrete wall on one end looks as though it might fall at any moment, hanging in permanent half-collapse.

  After the state farm in Namilepe planted its last crop, brush and trees slowly began to grow up in what had been a vast expanse of corn. People who had been displaced returned to the plantation again, building houses and carving out parcels of pigeon peas, cassava, and squash.

  The first hint of renewed outside interest in Namilepe didn’t come until ARCOPA’s arrival in 2008, starting the cycle anew.

  A fascist colonial government, a black Marxist government, a
nd a multiparty capitalist democracy: over the course of several generations, people in Namilepe have had their most fertile land seized under all three, with little given in return. What can we make of this?

  The law, of course, has become much friendlier to ordinary Mozambicans today than it was under the colonial regime, or even under the stricter impulses of Frelimo’s early Marxism. Yet for all the changes that have swept through Mozambique since independence, the distance between the law and its application can sometimes seem insurmountable.

  To reach Namilepe, enforcement and empowerment both must cross barriers of education and literacy, climb over broken motorcycles, nepotism, and the unpaid salaries of government workers, and break through the entrenched entitlement of the rich over the poor. On the other side of all those obstacles is the peasant experience, changed in critical ways, yet somehow marked by a fundamental continuity with respect to the powerful. No matter what else has changed, it seems, branco é branco still remains.

  For his part, António Trebouco Regalo, director of Nova Algodoeira’s operations in Alto Molócue, still seems much the same man he might have been in 1968, when he arrived from Portugal at twenty-one to serve in the colonial army.

  Regalo works out of a low-slung stucco building on the out-skirts of Alto Molócue. Rows of cotton seedlings run from behind the office right up to the service road wrapping around the company’s warehouses, nearly to the edge of the street, as though the company sees each square foot of grass as a hit on profits.

  When I visited, at seven a.m. on a cloudy Monday morning, more than forty women festooned with brightly colored capulanas were seated along a low wall beside the building and gathered around the entrance, waiting, they said, to be paid.

  Inside, I passed through two well-kept offices manned by Mozambican clerks looking through longhand account books, and into a disorderly back room with the lights off and a large safe in one corner. Regalo shuffled about in the baggy dress clothes of a man more at home in the field than in the office. He’s a small, rotund man with dark eyes and mussed hair, his face at rest in a soft grimace. Regalo looked up from an array of motorcycle parts, padlocks, and stacks of paper laid out on the desk before him, flashed a weak smile, and motioned for me to sit down.

  At age twenty-eight, Regalo left military service, settled on a stretch of rich land in Nampula Province, not far north of Namilepe, and started planting cotton. “I had more than a thousand hectares of cotton when I ran my business,” he said wistfully. “I was a young man. I was young, very young.” He began his farm just before Mozambique won independence from Portugal. Many colonial settlers left rather than accept the new terms of existence under Frelimo. Regalo stuck it out for another decade, until the disruptions of the civil war meant he could no longer import fertilizer or replacement parts for his tractor. “It was a communist country,” he said. “We didn’t see a future, didn’t see a way to earn anything for ourselves, for our old age.”

  After the war was over, though, Regalo returned and stayed. “I like to be here.” He shrugged. “I earn a good salary, I have a good job, and I’ve been here until now.”

  The operation Regalo runs today is in many ways an heir to the colonial enterprises that dominated Mozambique in the early to mid-twentieth century. Nova Algodoeira’s offices and blue-and-white warehouses were built in the 1950s by Companhia dos Algodões de Moçambique, whose concessions once covered half of Moçambique and Zambezia Provinces, an area the size of New York State.23

  Today, the company both plants its own fields, Regalo told me, and engages local farmers as sharecroppers, providing fertilizer, pesticides, and equipment in exchange for a share of the yield. That side of the business, Regalo said, “doesn’t work very well, because the people aren’t very motivated to grow cotton.” After years of trying to expand its footprint in Zambezia, the company grows its own cotton on close to fifteen thousand acres, and it sharecrops just a fraction of that amount.

  Regalo wasn’t sure how to explain this. “The way I see it, before independence, people here weren’t motivated to grow cotton on their own because there were a lot of weeds and they didn’t get good results,” he reasoned.

  “The only work some people do today is strolling around town,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “There’s no interest in picking up a hoe and starting to work.”

  What this dim view of Mozambican smallholders leaves out is the system of forced labor that allowed the Portuguese to build a cotton industry in Mozambique in the first place. In the 1930s, after a period of tumultuous government that left Portugal nearly bankrupt and helped lead to a military coup, the regime of a right-wing António Salazar resolved to get more out of Portugal’s colonies. Mozambique would be the engine that made Portugal’s domestic textile industry flourish by providing a steady supply of cotton to replace the imports that fed the looms in Lisbon factories.

  By the end of the 1930s, huge swaths of Mozambique were divvied into concessions for a small number of state-sanctioned cotton companies. The firms enjoyed monopolies as buyers in the areas where they operated, and the assurance that they could rely on the colonial government to enforce cotton-growing quotas imposed on every adult living within the bounds of their territory.24

  In Nyasa Province,25 local administrators imposed a quota of four hundred kilos of cotton per year; in other areas, Mozambicans were forbidden from tending the crops they grew for food except after five p.m. and on some Sundays. Colonial administrators enforced such provisions with whips and clubs and the threat that those who refused would be sent to work on government railroads and tea or sugar plantations with no pay at all.

  “If we refused to grow cotton they arrested us, put us in chains, beat us, then sent us to a place from where we didn’t come back,” an old woman in Niassa told Frelimo militants in an interview recounted by Eduardo Mondlane, the founding father of Mozambique’s independence struggle.26

  Peasants resisted mightily: they fled cotton-growing zones, burned the crop and scattered its ashes through the woods, filled cotton sacks with pebbles to make weight, and robbed colonial warehouses in order to resell the cotton elsewhere to meet their quotas. A Cabo Delgado man interviewed by the historian Allen Isaacman in 1979 recalled living on a mountain where a group of refugees hid in caves and rolled boulders down on top of Portuguese soldiers trying to drive them out by force.27

  In one successful ploy practiced throughout the country, Isaacman writes, whole villages of farmers fooled colonial officials into thinking cotton wouldn’t grow on their land at all, by agreeing collectively—and in secret—to cook their cottonseeds before planting them. “Once this collective decision had been made, those involved went through all the motions of clearing, sowing, and weeding, but few or no plants germinated. Cotton officials and the colonial authorities were naturally surprised at the low yield, which they attributed to the poor quality of the soil or other natural deficiencies. By repeating the subterfuge over a two- or three-year period, many peasants freed themselves from the tyranny of the cotton regime.”

  “The Africans in this part continually fabricate excuses why they have not seeded any cotton yet,” complained an agriculture official in Nampula Province in 1947. “This year it is the lack of rain.”28 Farmers refused to accept cottonseed distributed by the colonial government and skipped rounds of required weeding as it grew.

  To colonial administrators, all these were evidence of Mozambicans’ “laziness and bad will”—not, as Isaacman points out, “conscious efforts to maximize food production.”

  By some measures, resistance worked: official figures from the early 1940s show that across the northern part of the country, Mozambicans cultivated an average of only two-thirds of the minimum area colonial law required.29

  Yet cotton was extracted in ever greater quantities, often at the price of widespread hunger, as the forced labor system gobbled up both the space and the free time people needed to grow things they could eat. In 1927, Isaacman reports, Portugal’s colonies co
ntributed only 5 percent of the cotton needed to sustain its textile industry. By 1953, just twenty-five years later, Mozambique alone produced all the cotton required for Portuguese industry and a surplus for export besides.30

  A sour look spread over Regalo’s face as I relayed the peasants’ side of the story. “It’s not true! We’re here to do things in a consensual way,” he protested. “This followed negotiations; it was voluntary,” he said. “People presented themselves to move and get compensated.”

  Regalo didn’t dispute that these “negotiations” happened with a tractor running in the background, clearing away the neighbors’ houses, or that the amount of compensation was determined with a tape measure—based solely on the square footage of people’s plots, rather than the value of the crops and homes within them.

  The group I’d spoken with in Namilepe seemed most worked up by the costs and time required to replace what they’d lost. Metal roofs and wooden rafters had been damaged as the houses were dismantled in a hurry, or simply knocked down and left for salvage. Rosa Paolo, an old woman in a purple shawl, had rattled off a list of the trees Nova Algodoeira’s tractors had uprooted when she lost her home. “Banana, mangueiras, laranjeiras, pera abacate,” she said. Banana, mango trees, orange trees, avocado. “And they only gave me 3,000.” At the time, 3,000 meticais would have been about $100.

  “They got 10,000!” Regalo objected. “Some got 12,000!”

  I ceded the point: let’s say they did get 10,000 or 12,000 meticais. Did $300 or $400 really seem like enough for people to give up houses, mature fruit trees, and some of the most desirable farmland in the area?

  “In America, $300 might be just enough to find a place to sleep, right?” Regalo ventured. “Here, the quality of life is very different. I’m not saying you become rich with $300, you stay poor, but you can organize something to help yourself. And besides, that machamba, people may have had small little plots with houses there, but they had houses in other places too. If someone owns a little bit of land, he’ll treat it well, plant trees, he’ll do things well because it belongs to him,” Regalo said.