It’s always dangerous to pass judgement on a country you don’t know, somewhere you have visited for a very short time, as a tourist, not really being part of it. There is a good chance you’re wrong, that your exceptionally limited experience doesn’t give you the full picture. But there are some things you notice, there are things you see.

One of the things I notices, from the first day in Maputo, was the men with guns. On every corner, it seemed, down every street, were armed guards. Police patrolling in pairs, each with AK47s, swinging them back and forth, tossing them around nonchalantly. Army men riding around on the backs of open trucks, trucks fitted with rows of seats, front-to-back, back-to-back, six on a side. Army people sitting in rows, back-to-back facing out towards the ordinary people with their huge guns at the ready.

You sometimes see policeman with guns in South Africa. Sometimes, particularly in Joburg, you even see a JMPD officer with an AK. Sometimes they’re running roadblocks and one or two people have big guns, just in case. More often you see them on the cash-in-transit vans. People avoid the cash-in-transit security guards. Being too close to them increases the risk of dying.

In Maputo there are men with guns everywhere. But it seems it is not enough. Every building with fresh paint, has a private security guard. I come from the land where private security companies are king. But in South Africa the guards sit inside the guard-houses and in the fancy foyers of the many, many fancy buildings. Maputo has less fancy buildings and very few modern buildings. But outside those pretty buildings where the decay has been arrested with a coat or two of paint and there is something left to protect, there is a security guard sitting on a chair on the pavement. I suppose most of these guards don’t have guns. In the culture of men with big guns, one starts to assume.

I don’t know what it means. I am too far away to speculate. Mozambique is a society with huge disparity between rich (and tourist) and poor, it is a country with a terribly recent and horribly violent civil war. Perhaps it is a society where the guns are just a reminder of something else.

But it is also a country where we were struck by the lack of doing, the lack of agency. Perhaps it is purely my social conditioning and I am much, much too far away to make any real assessment of the situation but I found myself, all the time, thinking of the ‘men with guns’ and ‘Weeping’:

I knew a man who lived in fear.
It was huge, it was angry it was drawing near.
Behind his house, a secret place
was the shadow of the demon he could never face.
He built a wall of steel and flame
And men with guns to keep it tame.
Then standing back he made it plain
that the nightmare would never ever rise again.
But the fear the fire and the guns remained.