All posts by Claire

About Claire

Wandering (and wondering) development professional and aspiring aid worker. Contact me on anticipationofwonder[at]gmail[dot]com

Flowers for Mozambique

Mozambique

I am not a fan of short stories but high school English forces you to do things you don’t necessarily want to do. One of the short stories we studied was Flowers for Algernon. It’s a very sad story and has all sorts of morals and themes and messages. It was also beautifully constructed in the swell and rise and the moment of glory and then the gradual fall. It’s a little like Fitzgerald’s perfect 9-chapter balance of The Great Gatsby.

Mozambique reminds me a little of that. There is a sense, walking along the streets of Maputo, driving along the broken-down roads, seeing the tourist resorts that are slowly decaying back to the sea-sand and palm forests, of the end of a gradual decline. As if Mozambique had a sweeping ascent and a moment of glorious, soaring, fantastic success. That moment, the height of the glory of this place is written all over places like Maputo. The Art Deco buildings. The beautiful towers and arches. The palatial buildings. The beautifully laid out botanical gardens. The wide roads. The cathedrals and mosques. It’s easy to imagine the gracious lives of the people of Maputo and the long beach holidays in resorts like Vilanculos.

But the glorious moment passed for Mozambique. When the Portugese left, they left quickly. Within two weeks the colonisers, the people who had ruled and controlled for years, who had shackled the native people and built their ridiculous cathedrals, hotels and mansions, were gone.

What they left is slowly falling down. Amidst a civil war – funded and sustained in part by the Apartheid government in South Africa – the gracious city of Maputo, in particular, and the holiday resorts where the rich people used to stay, have begun the gradual decline.

Have you ever watched those programmes on National Geographic about animals who don’t build their own burrows, who wait until other animals leaves and then, nervously, tentatively, sneak into the abandoned burrows and make their homes? That’s a little of what it felt like. I was particularly struck by it in Vilanculos. I suppose because it’s such a beautiful place. It should be thriving. It should be a gold-mine of tourism income. It is making money for some people. But sitting in a restaurant/internet cafe where the mould on the ceiling is unchecked and where the paint is flaking and where the items on the menu bare little resemblance to those actually available, the place feels so much like it was built by a different kind of people, long ago. As if an ancient civilisation built it and many, many lifetimes later another, less advanced (for the purposes of description and not in any way conceding that is a valid construction) civilisation is trying to survive, is eeking out a living in what they left behind.

Rich was reading a book which talked about Mozambique as slowly sliding back into the sea. It feels a little like that. The gradual decline from a peak, a moment of graduer goes on inexorably. Inside the buildings, silent people go about their daily lives and carry on, not rebuilding, not creating, just, always, carrying on.

And men with guns

Mozambique

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.

My Africa

Why

I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.

My body has frozen in our frosts and in our latter day snows. It has thawed in the warmth of our sunshine and melted in the heat of the midday sun. The crack and the rumble of the summer thunders, lashed by startling lightening, have been a cause both of trembling and of hope.

The fragrances of nature have been as pleasant to us as the sight of the wild blooms of the citizens of the veld.

The dramatic shapes of the Drakensberg, the soil-coloured waters of the Lekoa, iGqili noThukela, and the sands of the Kgalagadi, have all been panels of the set on the natural stage on which we act out the foolish deeds of the theatre of our day.

At times, and in fear, I have wondered whether I should concede equal citizenship of our country to the leopard and the lion, the elephant and the springbok, the hyena, the black mamba and the pestilential mosquito.

A human presence among all these, a feature on the face of our native land thus defined, I know that none dare challenge me when I say – I am an African!

From Mbeki’s speech

Africa. Part of the reason Mozambique was so important for me is that it was my first opportunity to see some more of the continent I love. It is a home, but so much more than the simple notion of home. Sitting on a particularly dodgy bus watching tiny, poor rural settlement after tiny, poor rural settlement pass by, scattered between palm-trees and sub-tropical forests, I was filled, again, with wonder. Strange that sites of poverty would incite such joy. But these are my people. Actually, that statement is probably misleading. They are not my people. My people are the Xhosa people in homesteads where their cattle rest in kraals and their wattle-and-daub huts are thatched with the flowing, wind-swept grass of the wide open African hillsides. My people are the Afrikaaners who cherish a history of defeat and bitter oppression, both against them and by them, and survive to drink another beer and cheer at another rugby match, whose spirits cannot be broken. My people are the urgent, young, white liberals who fight so hard for those who don’t really care. They are the successes of Africa – the academics and business people who will put our continent on the map and bring our uniquely South African brand to life to the world. But these poor people, these rural subsistence farmers in Mozambique are part of my world, part of Africa, too.

Africa. Mozambique was an opportunity to spend a lot of time thinking about how much this continent is home. And also how much this continent is different to my experience of it. In many ways that excites me. The similarities between South African and Mozambique are in the fundamental things – the need, the strength, the perfect smiles of innocent children. The differences are in structures and strategies of development. While these are the things that interest me and occupy my mind, and travelling in Mozambique has crystalised many aspects of these, the fundamentals are what make me smile and laugh and feel that I am among my own.

I long to see more of Africa. I long to be a part of a solution and an answer. I long to roam the plains of Africa and watch the children play.It makes it very difficult, sometimes, to be reasonable about things. It’s sometimes difficult to accept that jumping off a cliff is dangerous when all you can see is the beautiful blue water below. Especially when it’s hot and you’ve been travelling for a while.

I’m back on the job-search. There is so much I want to say, so much I need to say. I will get there now that I am back home and power has been restored. Today, however, I am filled with the urge to take a huge risk, to jump off a cliff and to commit to spending a year in another African country. I shouldn’t because of the wars and the government and the islamism. I shouldn’t because there are rocks in the sea. But I want to. I want to because it’s something and it’s now. But I want it more because it is Africa.

Years of responsibility and the (particularly-gendered) politics of fear have taught me never to take risks like that. Not even for a year in Africa.