Daily Archives: January 22, 2009

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.