“After independence, Mugabe said, ‘If you want to stay, stay; if you want to go, go.’” Hickman shrugged, smiling. “I stayed. I think there were about thirteen of us.” Within a few weeks, a black general approached him with some advice. “He said to me and one other white guy, ‘If you stay out of politics and just focus on doing your job, you’ll be fine.’” Now, looking back on his mercenary years from the comfort of a patio chair, he appeared noncommittal and reserved. Neither regret nor pride disturbed the calm of his face. “I kept my head down,” he said.
Under Mugabe, Hickman reached the rank of lieutenant colonel, and in 1984 he was sent to Tete as the commander of four thousand Zimbabwean troops stationed in Mozambique. His main task was to protect the transport corridors between Zimbabwe and Malawi. On the job, Hickman got to know the Indian Mozambican merchants, including Danilo’s father, whose forebears came to Mozambique as cashew traders in the first part of the twentieth century. The businessmen relied on Hickman’s protection to bring their goods to Tete, and he met Danilo as a young boy. At the peak of the war, it took a week for trucks to reach Tete from the port of Beira, a few hundred miles away. But Hickman and his troops kept the roads moving, surviving “a few dustups with Renamo,” he said, in the process.
Renamo was founded the year after Frelimo won Mozambique’s independence from Portugal, the same year that Jesse Hickman arrived in Salisbury. Initially, Renamo was sponsored by the Central Intelligence Organisation of the Rhodesian Army, the same agency that recruited Hickman. While Ian Smith still ruled Rhodesia, Mugabe and ZANU-PF fought the colonial army with Frelimo’s support. Samora Machel, Mozambique’s first president, was a vocal proponent of the Pan-African solidarity that had helped Frelimo take power the year before. Prior to independence, during a decade of guerrilla warfare with the Portuguese, Frelimo was based in exile in Tanzania, then under the leadership of its first black president, Julius Nyerere. With Nyerere’s blessing, they ran a school for young apparatchiks in Dar es Salaam and conducted military training along Tanzania’s southern border.
After achieving independence, Machel paid it forward: Mugabe’s forces kept bush bases within Mozambique and even launched ambushes on Rhodesian forces from across the border. Renamo began as Rhodesia’s response, a rebel group whose mercenary origins could be camouflaged and melded with homegrown grievances against Frelimo rule. By fomenting insurgency in Mozambique, Rhodesia hoped to disrupt the fledgling government enough that it would be forced to withdraw support from rebels across the border.
Over the next sixteen years, Renamo waged a brutal guerrilla campaign throughout Mozambique, focusing their disruptive violence on the institutions of Frelimo’s new socialist state—schools, rural health posts, and lojas do povo, “stores of the people,” or government stores. Without going so far as to articulate a coherent political platform, Renamo asserted itself as a defender of democracy and the people’s ally against Frelimo’s socialist agricultural policies. Scholars still dispute the extent of Renamo’s popular support, but the group had important backers in the white-ruled governments of Rhodesia and, later, in apartheid South Africa, as well as in the CIA, which viewed the Mozambican conflict as a proxy war against the USSR. All three groups had reasons to fear the rise of a stable, leftist black government in Mozambique.
In 2007, Hickman suffered a serious stroke on his right side that left him “talking funny” and forced him to step back from the constant sale of meat and beer and potatoes by which he earned a living. He decided to put the Why Not? up for lease and asked Danilo to help him find a tenant. Danilo came back several weeks later with Louis van der Bank, whose name suggests just the sort of grandiose anecdotes that cling to the man like lint. Louie is a stout, flamboyant character with a rippling neck and a wiry, reddish goatee. He wears V-neck T-shirts and a Kangol hat and appears to make no effort to ward off the brutal sunburn that Tete can inflict on the pale-skinned.
People tell a story about Louie and the bridge that Hickman was charged to protect during the civil war. For much of the 1980s, the South African Army provided food, arms, and communications equipment to Renamo fighters in the bush. Van der Bank, a white Afrikaaner, served as a pilot flying tactical missions into Mozambique in support of Renamo. At a pivotal moment, the story goes, van der Bank, on a low-flying salvo over Tete, received orders to bomb the bridge that was the city’s lifeline. The bridge’s elegant pilons and cables stretched in a gentle arc over the eddying blue of the Zambezi. Beyond it, a nineteenth-century Catholic church overlooked an expanse of sandbars and tall reeds, humble mud houses stretching out across the veldt. Van der Bank couldn’t do it. He couldn’t let the bombs go on such a lovely scene. Tete was spared.
Nearly thirty years later, the city would reciprocate. In 2004, Tete made headlines in investors’ newsletters and trade monthlies around the world as the site of one of the planet’s largest undeveloped coal basins. Soon after, Vale do Rio Doce, the world’s second largest mining company, and Rio Tinto, the third, each leased sizable concessions and are now in the midst of building multibillion-dollar mines nearby. Upscale hotels and restaurants have sprouted across town, and houses built to “Western” standards rent for upward of $5,000 a month. The street corners are clogged with young men shouting “Boss, boss!” at passing pickups, hoping to sell phone credit to the expatriates who have descended on the city with the boom. It is a far cry from the Tete that Hickman first discovered in 1984, when there were only a few dozen cars in the whole city, and Hickman was the only white man he knew of in the area who wasn’t an aid worker or a priest.
Nowadays, the Why Not? attracts its most boisterous crowds on Sunday mornings, for the South African rugby equivalent of Monday Night Football in the United States. When I visited, the town was awash with the fortune seekers of the global mining industry—Australian and South African men in their thirties and forties with lots of money and little in the way of entertainment. So the Why Not?, with its Afrikaaner-friendly menu and rugby broadcasts, represents a sort of homecoming for them. “You wouldn’t believe the business I’m doing over there,” Louie told me.
Danilo got to know Louie while he was studying in Johannesburg. These were Louie’s high-rolling days as a hotelier. Today, he still retains the expensive tastes of that profession. At bars, he drinks his whiskey from a personal bottle, ice bucket on hand, and he wears a large diamond earring on an otherwise bare head. As only a foreigner would, van der Bank wears shorts and flip-flops under expensive blazers. Beaming with paternal pride, he likes to tell the story of his daughter, Kandra, who has just bought a house with the proceeds of a shoot as Miss October for Playboy South Africa. “I didn’t give her anything—she doesn’t need to ask Daddy for anything!” he says.
Van der Bank is easy to talk to. He rolls his r’s and belly laughs heartily at his own jokes. He is also one of the only expatriates you will meet in Tete who seems to have an unabashedly positive opinion of the city. “I love it here!” he insists. But van der Bank might never have come to settle in Tete if it weren’t for an incident, years ago, that put him flat out of the hospitality business at home: early in the aughts, he was pulled over in southern Mozambique driving two thousand tablets of Mandrax, a form of methamphetamine popular in South Africa, to Maputo. He served three years in a Mozambican prison, and when he got out, Danilo threw him a lifeline: Jesse Hickman was looking for a tenant.
“Louie’s a good boy,” Hickman said cheerfully when I asked him about van der Bank. He didn’t dwell on it. Hickman has seen a lot over the years; perhaps he liked the idea of giving someone a second chance. Few trajectories of shifting political allegiance require a greater reinvention of purpose than Hickman’s, though he remained in essentially the same position all the while. In five years, with only a series of stoic “yes, sirs” sent up the shifting chain of command, Hickman went from fighting to preserve minority white rule in Rhodesia to fighting in support of the black Marxist government of a neighboring country while it fended off an insur
gency funded by apartheid South Africa. When ZANU-PF came to power in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), Renamo’s backing shifted to Pretoria, where the government was incensed by Frelimo’s support of black freedom fighters like Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko in the African National Congress. The apartheid government took up where Rhodesia had left off, funding Renamo’s campaign of destruction to cripple Mozambique’s lingering commitment to Pan-Africanism. But Hickman was basically unmoved by the shift he’d undertaken from the “white fellows” to the “black fellows,” as he put it.
In 1988, Jesse Hickman turned fifty. In eight years of service in the Zimbabwean Army, he’d had only indirect dealings with Mugabe. He had shaken his hand at public events and sat in on a handful of meetings at the Presidential Palace. But he began to sense a sea change. “Mugabe was in the process of getting the white guys out,” he recalled. It would be more than a decade before Mugabe began seizing white-owned farms and businesses around Zimbabwe, pushing many of the country’s white settlers to leave as he reapportioned their assets among his allies. The full effects of this purge wouldn’t be felt until 2007 and 2008, when hyperinflation emptied Zimbabwe’s grocery stores and turned its “100 trillion dollar” notes into souvenirs. But it was undeniable that Mugabe had begun his transformation from freedom fighter to idiosyncratic autocrat, and Hickman thought it best to get out of the army of his own accord.
Hickman left his post in Mozambique, took his pension in one lump—$170,000—and bought a house in Harare. It didn’t last. He and his wife divorced, and she returned to the States with their daughter while he stayed in Africa with their son. He moved to Beira, the Mozambican port that also serves landlocked Malawi and Zimbabwe, as well as being Renamo’s historic stronghold. There, Hickman went to work for a transport company dispatching freight along the same corridor he’d protected in Tete, and he met his current wife. Together, they opened a discotheque and returned to her native Tete five years later, after the civil war ended.
Ever since, he has been “making good money” off a patchwork of businesses ranging from logistics to farming to bars and nightclubs. Twice or three times a month, he visits his farm in Cateme, thirty miles outside of Tete, where he raises pigs and chickens with the help of a Mozambican caretaker. At the farm, Hickman sleeps on a cot in a canvas tent like an enlisted man. He doesn’t make much money from it, he says, but he likes it too much to give it up. Hickman’s most famous venture is a club and motel called Paraíso Misterioso—Mysterious Paradise—that sits just beneath the bridge on the banks of the Zambezi. Hickman built the Paradise himself, and he remembers it as a fun place to spend a Sunday afternoon, drinking beer beneath a canopy of palms: the Paradise has one of Tete’s only swimming pools, and a shaded courtyard filled with carved wooden statues—busts of koi fish and muscular men paddling a dugout canoe. These days, Hickman rents it out to the Hassam family, who also own gas stations, general stores, and rental homes around the city. It looks as though the Paradise hasn’t received so much as a lick of paint since Hickman first opened it, yet it’s undergoing a revival all the same. Mining money has been a boon to Tete’s hospitality industry. Rooms at the Paradise go for more than $100 a night, and there are packed pool parties with live music every weekend afternoon.
But Hickman doesn’t get out much. He stays home, in an air-conditioned room he calls his “little office,” with a flat-screen satellite TV and broadband Internet. The coal boom has done wonders to connect Tete to the rest of the world. And though Hickman has not returned to the United States since 1976—“I don’t miss it,” he insists—he has re-created something of the suburban basement hangout in his corner of Mozambique. He watches Jerry Springer reruns most days, and every Sunday and Monday in the fall, Hickman stays up until four a.m. to watch NFL games on DSTV. Unsurprisingly, he is a die-hard Steelers fan.
He hasn’t seen his daughter in twenty years, but he remains in daily contact with her and the rest of his family in the United States, largely thanks to Facebook. His daughter is even considering a visit to Mozambique. “It’s as if I never left,” Hickman said. A few years back, Hickman’s son, who managed the nightclub business with his father, moved to the United Kingdom in order to “have more white friends,” Hickman said. He winced ever so slightly, knowing how this might sound to American ears, but Hickman insisted it was simply a matter of his son’s finding a place where he would feel at home. The boy had grown up with the children of white officers in the Rhodesian Army, as far from a harmonious multiracial upbringing as you could find anywhere. He now works security at a nightclub in Leeds. “He’s happy,” Hickman said. That was enough.
Every couple of months, Hickman drives his Dodge minivan up into Malawi, where he visits a missionary hospital in Blantyre and receives medication for his stroke. He also visits Shoprite, for those necessities that are hard to find in the Zambezi valley: peanut butter, potato chips, cheddar cheese. “They’ve got a real mall up there,” Hickman said. “You should check it out.” His wife insists he’s going blind, but she can’t do much to stop him from driving. Do you ever think about going back to the United States? I asked him before taking leave. Hickman shook his head emphatically. “My whole problem in the U.S. is that I couldn’t get used to civilian life. I can’t imagine going back. Especially now,” he added. “I’d be a social welfare case. No way.”
By the time Jesse Hickman settled in Tete, he was already well-known there, beloved after a decade protecting the city through a brutal stretch of history. In Tete, Hickman became a successful restaurateur and a gentleman farmer. He found love again after his marriage fell apart. But his prominence was also tied up with a special kind of anonymity. Above all, Mozambique had given him what he wanted most—a quiet, contented retirement, a place to be suspended beyond the reach of American society.
For foreigners, anyway, that mix—of anonymity and opportunity, of carrying the cachet of a Western passport unmoored from life in the West—is still a core part of Tete’s appeal. As much as the city has transformed in the years Hickman has lived there, it is no less a frontier town. The coal boom has slackened in the years since I was there, in 2011, but there’s no doubt mercenaries of various stripes are still showing up in search of cash and cold beer.
The mercury scarcely dipped below ninety degrees in the two months I spent in Tete, even at night. Concrete walls radiated heat long after sundown. Locals often took straw mats out into their yards to sleep with a breeze. The weather dominated conversation to the degree that you might have thought the city was in the middle of a flood or a hurricane. “Calor!”—Heat!—was a kind of casual greeting. At noon, I would often take refuge for the price of an espresso on the air-conditioned top floor of the Hotel Zambeze, where you could meet South African security guards who had done stints in Iraq for Blackwater, and drilling contractors riding waves of industrial activity around the world.
“Tete is the ass of the world,” a white South African woman told me in the air-conditioned bar atop the Hotel Zambeze one afternoon. “They must have forgotten this place.” She took a drag of a Pall Mall looking out over a span of river where boys spent the day jumping off an old pier into the Zambezi. Women washed their clothes on the bank in the sun.
“Can you imagine what this place was like before all these companies rolled in?” she asked. “It’s a proper taste of Africa, my friend.” The woman had come to Tete a few months earlier for an exploratory mining venture that went bust. Now she was planning on opening a restaurant, which she seemed to see as a potent civilizing influence on the city. “Last year, we had Why Not?, we had Le Petit, and what else?” she asked. “It’s expensive too—when phase two of the [Vale] project begins,” she said, “this place—people aren’t ready. It’s going to become more expensive than Angola. These people, they have learned the word ‘dollar’ and gone crazy with it.” She was eager to ride the wave.
One day I sat across from an old Portuguese man who grew up in colonial Maputo when it was still called Lourenço Marques.
He’d built a career in Lisbon exporting hotel and restaurant equipment to Mozambique and Angola. Most of what he had to say about Tete could be summarized as “Weren’t the colonies nice until we handed them over to the Africans?” It’s a trope you hear all the time from white foreigners in Mozambique. When he was in Tete forty years ago, in his telling, the city was clean, there was no hunger, people had the opportunity to get educated, the buildings had paint on them. It was as though he couldn’t fathom a connection between that city and this one, or the web of privilege that made either place pleasant for a Portuguese businessman.
Mozambicans have many of the same complaints: slow service at banks or restaurants, bribe-seeking policemen, broken plumbing, bad roads, intermittent blackouts. But a little money makes all the difference. For a price, someone else can drive your car, wash your clothes, keep a generator running, carry your water. “Everyone has maids here,” I once heard a Portuguese man say at a sidewalk cafe in Maputo. “Even the maids have maids.” In a way, there’s no clearer explanation of class or privilege than the sum of one’s exposure to these daily indignities.
How much better to enter a needy society at its upper crust, with access to the climate-controlled Wi-Fi and coffee on the top floor of the Hotel Zambeze? I was often amazed at the social capital the phrase “American journalist” seemed to unlock at stores or government offices—the access to authority, the gifts of time and goodwill. For Jesse Hickman, for the foreign drillers and miners, or for me, being an “outsider” in Tete is something of a misnomer. All too often, it’s ordinary Mozambicans left on the outside of their society’s caprices, striving for a seat at the table.
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