The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Indeed, “Crocker was a stoic, with no friends in Washington,” Chas Freeman recalls, “but George Shultz believed in him and that was enough.”

  Crocker, unsurprisingly, appeared to Gersony as distracted throughout the short meeting, and therefore had no guidance for him. None. This seemed to Gersony like a little fact at the time, but it would prove to be of crucial significance later on, when Gersony would come under attack from the right wing as a tool of Crocker for his Mozambique report.

  “I would not have presumed to give someone like Bob Gersony instructions,” Crocker says now. “We operated on totally different planes. Bob was in a position to get information that a diplomat would never get. A diplomat’s life is highly constrained. In eight years as assistant secretary of state for Africa, I was lucky if even once I got to see an elephant. A diplomat, if he or she is any good, wants to be in touch with the Bob Gersonys of this world.”

  So with the approval of Moore and Crocker, Gersony now turned his mind to the whole subject of Mozambique.

  * * *

  —

  To read the history of Mozambique is to experience a particular kind of sadness and ennui. This is not a land of spectacular atrocity and mass murder like Rwanda or Nazi-occupied Poland; nor of utter ungovernability like the dense forest tracts of the Congo; nor of vain and stupid politics for decades on end like Argentina; nor of repeated invasions like Romania. It is simply a land whose human and topographical makeup did not suit the strictures of the modern nation-state, a fate made worse by having suffered the least enlightened form of European colonialism: that of the Portuguese, a nation that because it lacked a robust and modern middle class until relatively late in its history had a cadre of colonials even less humane and competent than other European empires. Mozambique thus constitutes a spectacular land and seaboard with a rather dreary modern story behind it. It is emblematic of Africa, not underdeveloped so much as merely awaiting a new phase of history when the nation-state will not matter as much: when political and economic borders will be more flexible and subtle, thereby liberating its people more than any president or prime minister can do.

  It begins with climate. Despite the Indian Ocean monsoon, a pattern of irregular rainfall culminates in droughts that can last for years, bringing, in turn, epidemics and locusts. Because of the tsetse fly, it was always difficult for a cattle-based economy to adapt and flourish. This put an emphasis on agriculture and agricultural labor, encouraging slavery—and the capture of women especially—to work in the fields.

  The early modern era in Mozambique was a time of petty kingdoms, twelve in number, complicated further by at least seventeen and as many as forty-two languages and dialects. Until the 1960s, there was no direct road or rail link between the north and the south, or between the major port cities, of this long and rambling country. Portuguese rule over this immense geography was burdened by poverty, instability, quasi-fascism, and the lack of a sturdy middle class in Portugal itself. As it happened, the Portuguese inhibited the development of any national identity by dividing Mozambique into concessions, with no central planning or much infrastructure at all. Only in 1942 did the territory come under a single colonial administration.

  The Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Mozambique Liberation Front), or FRELIMO, took power upon independence from the Portuguese in 1975, and was defined by a non-tribal, non-racial modernist agenda as part of its Marxist ideology. But FRELIMO had little presence except in the extreme south and extreme north of the country at the time that the Portuguese left. This led to a brutal, heavy-handed policy in which FRELIMO went after the Catholic Church in central Mozambique, treating it as the historical arm of the Portuguese. FRELIMO confiscated church properties and closed church schools, and then installed political commissars in place of traditional tribal leaders, who, too, were seen by FRELIMO as fixtures of Portuguese rule. Upon independence, FRELIMO also announced its solidarity with the indigenous African political parties fighting the white settler governments in Rhodesia and South Africa. The effect was to encourage the hostility of nearby powers upon which Mozambique’s economy intimately depended.

  Mozambique immediately got sucked into a vast regional war as South Africa attempted to topple the new Marxist regime that had emerged in Angola following that oil-rich, former Portuguese colony’s independence (also in 1975). It was a Rhodesian policeman and intelligence officer, Ken Flower, a character straight out of the mold of Bob Astles and Bill Kirkham in Uganda, who helped establish an opposition military force to FRELIMO called the Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (the Mozambican National Resistance), or RENAMO, whose support and training would be taken over by white South Africa upon white Rhodesia’s demise.3 RENAMO—composed of indigenous black Africans—was also supported by Portugal, and at the time of Gersony’s arrival in Mozambique, when the civil war was more than a decade old, was strongly vying for diplomatic and military assistance from the Reagan administration, as part of the so-called Reagan Doctrine, a strategy to roll back pro-Soviet regimes around the world. RENAMO was tribally based in the center of the country, with much less of an ideology than FRELIMO, and became known to peasants as the Matsanga or the Matchanga, after its first field leader, André Matsangaissa, who died during a raid in central Mozambique in 1979.4

  Grinding on for years, the civil war between pro-Soviet, pro-Chinese FRELIMO and the South African–supported RENAMO had displaced and taken the lives of millions of innocent civilians by the late 1980s, when one of Mozambique’s great droughts hit the country, driving the fighting into even higher gear, as both sides became desperate for food that had to be extracted from peasants. Though Mozambique was a major battleground of the Cold War, ideology was becoming less and less a factor internally. To wit, FRELIMO, by 1988 when Gersony arrived in Mozambique, was already in the process of dropping its emphasis on Marxism-Leninism and the command economy. But this fact was little known at the time and therefore disputed, even as it would become tied up with the fate of Gersony’s work.5

  * * *

  —

  Mozambique was a war-torn, sprawling, fragmented, and irregularly shaped puzzle piece on the map of southern Africa. Therefore, reporting on what was going on in the refugee camps meant covering great distances around the country’s borders. Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, tucked away as it was at the very southern extremity of the country, might as well have been in South Africa; in the days before email and mobile phones it was even more isolated from the interior than most African capital cities. It was not Gersony’s first stop.

  In January 1988, Gersony flew first to Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, a small, peaceful, albeit very repressive pro-Western country, with a prominent salient reaching deep into central Mozambique: bordered by Mozambique on three sides. It seemed to him that every street and building was named after President Hastings Kamuzu Banda. Many women wore dresses embroidered with his portrait.

  The USAID director in Lilongwe was John Hicks, an incisive, dynamic, and extremely smart African American who made all of his contacts available to Gersony. Gersony by this time was cemented into the Foreign Service network, even as he himself was not an FSO, and thus the fact that people reached out to help him was no longer unusual.

  “I want you to meet somebody,” Hicks said to Gersony, introducing him to Steve Shumba, a grandfatherly and charismatic African in his fifties with white hair who immediately put one at ease. Gersony liked the fact that Shumba spoke all the border dialects and was also an embassy agricultural officer, since most Mozambican refugees were small peasant farmers. Hicks assigned Shumba to Gersony for his counterclockwise travels around the southern Malawi salient, where Mozambican refugees were pouring in from all sides. The third person on the trip was Gilbert Ilimu, the driver, a young and enthusiastic fellow who unfortunately had a habit of accidentally running over chickens as they passed through villages.

  The first refugee camp that Gersony and
Shumba stopped at was located on the grounds of the Catholic mission church of Mtendere. It was a well-organized camp with UNHCR, MSF, and many other leading NGOs represented with health and feeding programs. Gersony found no problems with their operations. No aid groups appeared overwhelmed by the influx. Officially speaking, given Gersony’s limited instructions from Washington, his job was over at Mtendere. But Gene Dewey’s words about root causes nagged at him and he became curious: Who were these people? He was interested in more than how many calories they were ingesting daily. And after his experience in western Sudan, he knew that surprises always lay in store.

  So he and Shumba began selecting refugees at random and pulling them aside for one-on-one interviews. The stories he heard were all identical. It was like being back in western Sudan and eastern Chad, except instead of Goran…Goran…Goran, it was pro-Western RENAMO…RENAMO…RENAMO, and Matsanga…Matsanga…Matchanga. “They attacked my village…They killed…They raped…They forced people to be load-bearers [porters].”

  This was interesting, but Gersony drew no conclusions. It was only one camp and a few interviews, with so much more Mozambican frontier territory to cover. He spoke with the parish priest at Mtendere. The priest, with his neat collar, was very articulate, neutral-sounding, affable, and accessible: an American who was a favorite of the diplomatic and donor communities; the go-to man for Westerners in Lilongwe who wanted to be able to say that they had gone out into the field and interviewed an expert source. “Father, what are all these people doing here?” Gersony asked him.

  “Oh, they are all running away from FRELIMO,” the parish priest said.

  “But the people I met said they were running away from RENAMO. Can you find people for me to interview who ran away from FRELIMO?”

  “No problem.”

  It took a while, but he eventually found Gersony two such people. The first was an old woman who had fled five years earlier and was still at the camp. The second was a young man who had fled across the border as a child with the same woman.

  Gersony asked the priest for more people to interview who said they had fled FRELIMO but the priest never managed to produce any, though he kept promising. Gersony stayed at the camp several more days interviewing people. Every interview was virtually the same. RENAMO…RENAMO…Matsanga.

  Gersony now decided to be extraordinarily careful. It occurred to him that the parish priest had been handling multiple cycles of Western visitors, conditioning their vision of the Mozambican conflict. The priest’s was the closest refugee camp to the capital of Lilongwe, and thus the one most likely to be seen by journalists and international officials on short visits. It was a typical story. Diplomatic and media accounts of many a conflict often sound similar for reasons both good and bad, the bad being that the authors of these reports all talk to the same people. So Gersony and Shumba began pulling people aside for interviews right at the border, before the refugees could receive “guidance” from camp officials—whether that guidance be anti-FRELIMO or anti-RENAMO. And he resolved to say nothing about what he discovered once back in Lilongwe, one of the few places in sub-Saharan Africa that had a close relationship with apartheid South Africa. Thus, blaming the pro-Western RENAMO guerrillas for the attacks on civilians would be distinctly controversial and unpopular in this particular diplomatic setting.

  After spending a week at Mtendere, Gersony and Shumba now proceeded to spend more than another two weeks on the road, stopping at every refugee camp down and up the Malawi salient, interviewing all day, each day, Mozambican refugees. The accounts never altered: RENAMO…RENAMO…Matsanga. Shumba would later tell AID colleagues that he had never worked with anyone who had such a magical ability to talk and listen to people, and to extract information from them, as Gersony.

  * * *

  —

  “I was now in the zone,” Gersony reflects. “I was doing exactly what I was made for. I was without further ambition. I sensed that the stories of these people truly mattered. The atmosphere while they talked was charged. This was what I always wanted to do—not to be a bureaucrat in Washington. This was realism: the material at hand, and at ground level. I would rather talk to these people than be president of any country. I had reached the top of my game in Mozambique.”

  He was forty-three years old. By now he had perfected his methodology. He systematically collected the basic data of every refugee he interviewed, except their names, which he deliberately never asked for, assigning them numbers and distinguishing characteristics instead. By not providing their names, they felt safer from retribution and were more likely to talk; by assigning each refugee a distinguishing characteristic—a birthmark, a piece of clothing, a way of talking—he was able to remember them better from memory. Thus (and this was very important to him) he was able to preserve their individuality. It was all an elaboration of a process he had consciously begun in southern Thailand and on the Sudan-Chad border.

  He had other rules as well. He never worked as part of a team. Team efforts reduced everything to the lowest common denominator, he believed. He cleared his mind of everything he knew. He trained himself not to know, that is, to have no assumptions beforehand. He made sure no one was able to reach him. He believed in total immersion in his work, something very possible to do in the predigital age. He never went down rabbit holes. He kept his mind only on the specific questions at hand, since it was easy to get distracted by related issues that others would tell you were just so fascinating. Finally, he always slept with his notebook under his pillow.

  He would begin each interview with his basic checklist:

  Name of the camp where the interview took place

  The age of the refugee

  The sex

  The tribe and ethnicity

  His or her occupation

  His or her home village, district, and province

  The personal identifying characteristic

  His or her assigned code number, and the date of the interview

  The name of the translator

  The checklist was a good icebreaker with the person, especially as it made clear he would never ask their names. But he was transparent about who he was, and his name: “I am Robert Gersony from the U.S. Embassy.” It was very important to conduct each interview in complete privacy: in a shack, in a shed, or under a tree. If anyone wandered toward them he would chase them away. Those being interviewed liked that. If there was a chair he used it. The translator and the interviewee were more comfortable sitting on the ground.

  As in western Sudan, he worked from seven a.m. to nine p.m. He brought candles with him for the evening interviews, as the sun went down in the tropics around six and there was usually no electricity. He never wore shorts, as he considered that impolite. He ate one meal daily: before sleep, often rice and beans with purified water. There was dust not only in the food, but in his nose, throat, and ears. The heat was like a heavy cloak over his head that partially smothered him. There were all sorts of insects and rodents. It was the kind of environment where you needed a stiff drink to fall asleep, except that he never drank, not even beer. Because he was a man of few pleasures anyway, it made the ordeal easier on him than on someone else.

  The ones with the least education were the most useful, because they were the least calculating, he discovered. Again, he never asked Who did it? They will tell you anyway. Don’t ask sensitive questions. They will tell you, and only if you never ask. When they stop talking, don’t ask a question. The silence allows a person to think and then they prompt themselves. And again, use your hands. What did you see? Pulling down an eye. What did you hear? Tugging an ear. Was it big? Holding his hands out wide. For they had to trust the translator. After each interview was concluded, the translator escorted the person away from the site, so that there would be no contamination with the next interviewee who was approaching. The old r
ules still carried forward: Gersony used no tape recorder, no electronics of any kind, just a pen and notebook. When he got back to Lilongwe, he holed up in his hotel room typing out the contents of his notebook.

  He was God’s own witness, listening to the stories of those most affected by history—by wars and conflict—in order to communicate those same stories to high officials when he got back to Washington.

  * * *

  —

  From Lilongwe, Gersony flew to Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, the successor state to white-ruled Rhodesia, which had a long border with Mozambique where he could interview more refugees. In 1988, the degradations of Robert Mugabe’s kleptocratic rule had not yet begun to visibly settle in, so streets were clean, streetlights and traffic signals still worked, and street signs had not yet been stolen to be sold as scrap metal. Stores were still well stocked with local and imported products, and race relations were startlingly good. Tall candelabra trees were about to burst into bright yellow blossoms when Gersony arrived, if he noticed them at all. Evenings were cool and the days temperate, thanks to the mile-high elevation.

  The hotel was especially luxurious. The ambassador, James Rawlings, a former chairman of Union Carbide Corporation, was a political appointee of the Reagan administration. He and his DCM, Ed Fugit, were willing to be helpful, but Fugit warned Gersony that he, Gersony, “had a problem.” Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Organization (CIO) did not want any foreigners in the border area, since Zimbabwe’s leader, Robert Mugabe, was helping FRELIMO protect the railroad from Zimbabwe across Mozambique to the Indian Ocean at Beira, which functioned as the main export route for Zimbabwean goods. Gersony met with local officials, trying to convince them otherwise, but they were having none of it. Finally, they agreed to have two CIO agents accompany Gersony and his embassy translator on all of their interviews of refugees from Mozambique. Gersony gambled that the two agents would not have the funds for three weeks of travel, with the expense of gasoline and occasional hotels.