“I didn’t know that a race like yours felt the suffering of others,” he said earnestly. “Now that I see that you are, in fact, understanding what we are going through . . . that gives us the idea that you can’t just limit yourself to the régulo.”
The régulo himself wasn’t home when I visited Namilepe. But regardless of his motivations, the tragedy in all this is that it’s up to the régulo to conduct negotiations on behalf of the community in the first place. Put aside the allegations of self-dealing and petty corruption and consider this example reported by Nicholas Hess, an American student doing dissertation research in Gaza Province, in southern Mozambique. Hess’s fieldwork took him to a community on the Limpopo River where a consortium of international investors had recently launched a project to produce ethanol from tens of thousands of acres of sugarcane:
This community was advised by a government official to sign away a substantial piece of productive land next to a river. During the interview I was presented with a stack of unorganised legal documents, all written entirely in English, that gave the company a 50-year lease on the land and complete freedom to indiscriminately use and pollute the soil and water supply. In addition, the contract mandated that any subsequent legal arbitration would be handled in South African courts and that the community received only a small percentage of the profits. The community leader, an 82 year old woman, was illiterate, did not speak Portuguese (let alone English), was not given independent counsel and was genuinely surprised when I outlined some of the details of the contract to her.54
A second academic account of the same project, ProCana, cites the leader of another village inside the investors’ concession area: “ProCana just came here and met with the leaders of the communities and in the first meeting leaders had to sign. Some of them just wanted to drink so they took their 300 meticais because they thought it was a government project and that they had no choice at all. But then when the community found out, they were very unhappy. They were upset with the leaders for signing before being informed and they were upset with the project because they would be left with very little space for their cattle.”55
Even local leaders who take bribes to give projects their stamp of approval are acting on the basis of terribly little information. ProCana ultimately fell apart for other reasons: investors came to see its promises of sky-high ethanol yields—held in secrecy in proposals submitted to the Mozambican government—as unachievable.56 The project was dissolved, but not before thousands of Mozambicans were moved off land by the Limpopo River, the water they used to grow rice and graze cattle turned over to a higher purpose.
In Namilepe, Regalo, too, is having doubts about Nova Algodoeira’s future prospects. In his office in Alto Molócue, he got out a binder with a xeroxed map that said “ARCOPA” at the top and pointed to the hillside in dispute. With one finger, he traced the outline of the tract where ARCOPA had hoped to expand. Growing cotton couldn’t be viable in the long term without access to more land and better irrigation, he said. “I can’t predict the future, but we need to get bigger to have a viable production unit, to keep machinery there, to keep a technician there. Somewhere on the order of five hundred hectares. We’re not going to go all the way there from here only to keep a machamba that can’t produce anything.” He couldn’t see giving up the land. “It was in ARCOPA’s plans to expand and expand,” Regalo said. “We just want to carry out our plan. I’m old. Really, we want to do things that are worthwhile. So, if we see that corn is more productive than cotton, we’ll do corn.”
At vastly different scales, the plight of people displaced by Nova Algodoeira and ProCana reflects a failure to hold corporations accountable. Investors can gain access to land cheaply and generally keep it with taxes of less than a dollar per hectare per year. And in spite of what the land law allows, there’s not much penalty for promising results and failing to deliver.57
Sixty days a year, Kutula and his neighbors pick cotton for Nova Algodoeira on their old land. Scarce as cash income is, they can’t afford to refuse. They and Regalo disagree about how much he pays. Three or 3.5 meticais per kilo, he said; they insisted it was 2. As I left Regalo’s office in Alto Molócue, I came alongside a man in the street and asked whether it was common to see so many people gathered outside. The women had been promised 10 meticais per hundred-meter row they weeded, he said. As it turned out, he was also waiting to be paid. After they weeded, they were told they’d be paid only if they transplanted and spaced the cotton seedlings evenly. So they did, he said. It’s a hirer’s market.
4
Confessions of a Human Smuggler
NAMPULA
One of my favorite haunts in Nampula is a windowless Somali restaurant near the colonial downtown, the only part of the city where you’ll find structures taller than two stories. It’s a drab concrete box painted turquoise and surrounded by decaying modernist apartment buildings built for officers in the Portuguese Army during the 1960s, when Nampula became the hub for Portugal’s losing battle to stave off Mozambican independence.
Inside, sitting at tables with pink water pitchers and vinyl tablecloths decorated with fruit, men eat with their hands and sip juice boxes imported from Dubai. They laugh and carry on in a mixture of Somali, Swahili, English, and Portuguese, and congregate in groups of three and four at the windows of cars idling at the curb. Sometimes someone will run out of the restaurant and whistle up at the balcony of an apartment building across the street, gesticulating excitedly with a napkin clutched between his fingers. It’s a run-down, treeless block, charming in its own way. V-shaped trails of soot left by the rain run down the facade of each apartment building to a sidewalk patrolled by Mozambican teenagers. Just standing in one spot, you can buy fake Ray-Bans, peanuts, school supplies, phone credit, cigarettes, and green coconuts. The neighborhood is known as Bairro dos Poetas, or the Neighborhood of Poets, and sometimes as Bombeiros—Firefighters—after a fire station there.
Over the years, Bombeiros has become a hub for immigrants from all over Africa. Nampula’s well-heeled will tell you to not to set foot there after dark, or to avoid it altogether. But during the months I spent in Nampula, I lived just around the corner. Bombeiros was where I went to get internet access when it was out at home, or to get my fill of street life. The center of the neighborhood is all market, with the Somali restaurant sitting on the uphill edge. A dozen intersecting alleyways crisscross the hillside below it, crowded with cubby-like shops manned by immigrants from around the continent: Somalia, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Burundi, Tanzania, Kenya, Malawi, Guinea, Senegal, Mali, and only a few Mozambicans.
Some came to Mozambique as asylum seekers; others were drawn by Bombeiros’ flourishing trade in gemstones and Chinese goods. Sitting cross-legged on rugs or perched on tiny wooden stools, most shopkeepers in Bombeiros deal in both categories simultaneously. Each stall overflows with household appliances, fabric, and cheap clothing, but a jeweler’s glass is always within arm’s reach, to inspect the rubies, emeralds, and garnets that rural people dig up in the countryside and carry into Nampula wrapped in bits of paper.
For three weeks running in June and July 2011, the Nampula police made weekly sweeps in Bombeiros, pulling up in a cloud of dust just outside the restaurant and detaining groups of foreigners as quickly as they could. Each time, during the lunch rush, a dozen officers appeared with their charcoal-gray uniforms and ancient assault rifles, riding in the open back of a large truck. People in Nampula call the patrol cops cinzentinhos, “little gray ones.” There is a joke Mozambicans tell that says that all the patrol cops, or cinzentinhos, are small and skinny, because they are poorly paid, but that all the traffic cops, who stop cars along the highway, are fat, because they have better opportunities to solicit bribes. “Have you ever seen a skinny traffic cop?” someone will ask you, and you will say no, because, in fact, you never have. During their lunchtime sweeps, the cinzentinhos scattered along the block and down the alleyways behind the restaura
nt, flushing out Somalis and Ethiopians, whose light skin and aquiline features made them easily recognizable in the street.
Ostensibly, the police were looking for forged IDs among the neighborhood’s many foreigners. The document in question is called a Declaração de Circulação, or Travel Declaration, which gives asylum seekers the right to move freely throughout Nampula Province, or, in some cases, all of Mozambique. They are printed in the back room of a one-story bungalow near city hall, at the Nampula office of the government’s Instituto Nacional para o Apoio aos Refugiados—National Institute for Refugee Support, or INAR. The documents are simple black-and-white printouts with the bearer’s name and photograph and a few lines of text. But INAR and the police both said that there were Somalis doing the job with home printers somewhere in Bombeiros, and they were determined to find the counterfeits.
Whether they found Travel Declarations or not, the police didn’t stop to inspect them. Instead, they tucked the papers away in their shirt pockets and hustled the men off to load them in the truck. Each time, groups of fifty-odd Somali and Ethiopian men were arrested and spent twenty-four hours in a holding cell so small they had to take turns standing and sitting. Always, the following day, the men were released in Marratane, Mozambique’s lone refugee camp, which lies twenty miles to the south.
At first, it was hard to get the police to admit that any arrests were taking place at all. The morning after the second sweep, I made a visit to the cinzentinhos’ whitewashed fortress of a headquarters, rising high above the city a few blocks from Bombeiros. A cadet at the gate led me upstairs and back down again as superiors of higher and higher rank each declined to comment, one after the other. One of them finally insisted that I was in the wrong place: the police department only makes immigration-related arrests, he explained, at the behest of the Interior Ministry’s provincial migration office. Ten minutes later, the provincial director of migration assured me that no arrests had been ordered.
When I returned to the provincial police headquarters that afternoon, I found a handful of Somali men whispering in a huddle beside an empty flatbed truck parked across the street. These were the envoys of the Somali business community in Bombeiros, who delivered thermoses of tea and buckets of spiced rice to the men detained inside, and who hoped to negotiate with the police for their compatriots’ release.
Almeida Canderinho, the second-ranking cop in Nampula Province, received me in a wood-paneled office by the entrance to the compound. Asked about arrests in Bombeiros, Canderinho spread his arms wide, as though he were measuring a fish. Ripples of disbelief spread across his forehead. “Is it a crime to walk down the street?” he gasped. “Is it?” No one’s documents had been taken, he assured me, and no one had stayed the night. Perhaps, he thought, some people had been told to “sit and wait” for INAR and the UNHCR to clear up the matter of identification, but the only incident he knew of had been miles from Bombeiros, on the highway, near Morrupula.
When noncitizens were held by the police, Canderinho said, they weren’t detained, but retained. “If you want to use the bathroom, you go. If you want to go buy something, you go—but the door is not locked. We can’t take anyone’s documents,” he went on. “We’re not allowed to.” Even so, Canderinho allowed, the department had been having some trouble with foreigners lately. When people get to the refugee camp at Marratane, he explained, “they don’t even stay there for three days. Someone shows up with a container truck and starts to take people away. Now, we don’t know who these people are or where they come from. So, are you a refugee or are you a militant? Are you using Mozambique as a transit country or are you staying here?”
While we spoke, a few yards beyond Canderinho’s office door, the compound gate was raised to make way for the same blue flatbed I’d seen outside, inching backward up the narrow driveway. When it exited a few minutes later, three dozen Somali and Ethiopian men rode in the back: the truck was headed to Marratane.
Nampula’s police spokesman, an effusively polite man named Inácio Dina (who has since been promoted to serve as the national police spokesman), eventually spoke freely about the arrests in Bombeiros, taking up Canderinho’s line of argument. The men the police had picked up were in fact “alleged” and “so-called” refugees: they had no intention of seeking asylum in Mozambique, as they claimed, but only wanted to use the country as a corridor to get to South Africa.
Since 2010, Marratane had been flooded with thousands of migrants from the Horn of Africa, including nearly four thousand arrivals in the first half of 2011. But the vast majority quickly disappeared from the camp altogether or were later discovered heading south under the cover of night. And in this, Canderinho and Dina both were right: the migrants were headed for South Africa, known to many in Bombeiros as the “USA of Africa.”
What the police never seemed to consider was why this was happening: with few hopes of finding a better life through the world’s overburdened official refugee system, Somalia’s “so-called” refugees have devised their own informal workaround. Those who can afford it hire smugglers to do what the UN can’t or won’t do for all of them: send them to the USA of Africa, or to the USA itself. They get there by way of Tanzania, Mozambique, and half a dozen other “transit countries” along the way. It’s illegal, it’s risky, and it costs far more than applying for asylum through the official channels, but it works enough of the time that many migrants from Somalia have come to see it as the best among several bad alternatives.
The UN calls this mixed migration—a flow of people across borders in which there is a mixture of different types of immigrants: refugees, asylum seekers, and economic migrants, as well as victims of trafficking, who have been deceived or coerced into leaving home. On the one hand, mixed migration involves refugees fleeing political persecution or armed conflict. They hire smugglers to avoid the indignities of being a refugee in a place like Kenya, where they are unlikely to find a life outside of crowded camps. On the other, it includes people in search of a better livelihood, portraying themselves as refugees to enjoy the privileges that label can afford—ideally, citizenship or residency in an affluent country. Over the years, the cumulative weighing of odds by people fleeing Somalia has built up a well-organized smuggling industry, based in Nairobi and bankrolled by the diaspora, ever growing and famously entrepreneurial. In 2008, an estimated twenty thousand Somalis and Ethiopians hired smugglers to help them reach South Africa.1 Mozambique, which covers nearly two thousand miles of the route from Mogadishu to Johannesburg, has become involved mainly as an accident of geography.
One vexing consequence of mixed migration, for destination countries and transit countries alike, is the need to figure out who is who: which migrants deserve special benefits or exemptions from the immigration process, and which ought to be turned away? While I was in Mozambique, for instance, nearly all the Ethiopians and Somalis attempting to enter South Africa were young, able-bodied men, traveling without their wives and children. When they told South African authorities they were seeking asylum—that they had fled home because of war or political persecution—immigration officers began to ask the obvious question: where are your families?
To get as far as the South African border, the men had traveled thousands of miles and crossed three countries or more—well beyond what they needed to do to outrun Al-Shabaab in Somalia or political repression in Ethiopia. Were these refugees or simply “so-called” refugees? Or were the categories of economic migrant and asylum seeker mingled within each individual?
South Africa, through a combination of its wealth, its asylum laws, and its proximity to some of the world’s poorest countries and refugee hot spots, has become one of the globe’s strongest magnets for mixed migration. In 2010, and again in 2011, it received more applications for asylum than any other country in the world.2 By the end of 2012, the government faced a backlog of more than three hundred thousand applications awaiting a decision.3 Recently, South Africa has begun to reevaluate the policies that have helped
to make it so appealing to asylum seekers: historically, applicants for asylum have been registered at the border and issued temporary ID, which allows them to seek work or start a business wherever they choose, regardless of whether their applications are ultimately approved. But by the spring of 2012, advocates noted that South Africa was no longer accepting asylum applications from Ethiopians and Somalis who showed up at the border. As an observer with the group Lawyers for Human Rights put it, “They’re not willing to accept the entire continent’s refugee burden.”4
When it became clear that South Africa’s policies were becoming more restrictive, officials at the International Organization for Migration worried about “knock-on” effects in neighboring countries. They observed that border controls in Zimbabwe and Malawi, to the north, also seemed to be tightening as a result of behind-the-scenes diplomatic pressure from South Africa.5 The police sweeps in Nampula could be seen as part of the same reaction.
Yet whether they admitted it or not, it was hard to see what the police hoped to resolve by making arrests. A government lawyer at INAR candidly told me that claiming to seek asylum, even under false pretenses, is not a crime in Mozambique. Moreover, after detaining more than a hundred men, the authorities found no false documents, issued no fines, and filed no charges.
The police spokesman, Dina, revealed these details sheepishly the week after the third sweep, with a reluctance that suggested he was often in the position of explaining away his colleagues’ excesses. Periodically, he gazed out the window of his fourth-floor office down onto the wreckage of a dozen impounded cars and decommissioned police trucks that filled the yard behind the building. The detainees said the police had also taken dozens of working cell phones, a tidy pile of cash gleaned during intake, and bribes paid to avoid arrests, but Dina didn’t mention it.
Go Tell the Crocodiles Page 13