Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [62]
I leaned out of the window of the car. “Those boys stole from you,” I shouted, pointing at the youths who were lounging, without apparent panic, against the wall of a kiosk selling packets of cigarettes and bottles of orange juice.
The owner of the lorry ignored me, but approached the boys, hand extended. The boys counted out money and handed it to the fat man. “Look at that”—I jabbed K in the ribs—“what is going on? He’s getting money from the boys that stole from him.”
“Read the sign on the door of the pickup,” said K in a weary voice.
I craned my neck around and saw the name of a European aid organization emblazoned in blue letters on the white door.
“Welcome to the New Africa,” said K.
I WAS INTRODUCED to Mozambique, at least the first hundred kilometers or so, from the point of view of someone who had (in the last three hours) drunk two beers and half a liter of water and had not braved any of the available rest rooms in Nyamapanda. From Nyamapanda through the heart of north-west Mozambique, there was a straight, new road (widely graded on either side) that had all the hallmarks of an aid project. It looked like an elaborate gift, hastily bestowed and incompletely explained. Road signs were impressive for the places they pointed to (declaring grandly EN103 TETE and EN258 SONGO and EN258 ESTIMA), but the distances to these towns were not given.
K, who was last on this patch of earth more than twenty-five years ago, couldn’t remember how far it was to the next town either. “I think we bombed it anyway,” he said, not very helpfully, “and if we didn’t, they did it to themselves.”
Until a few years before, this road (the original road, left over from the days of the Portuguese) was so damaged and broken that in the rainy season it could take up to a week to travel fifty miles. It suffered not only from neglect, but from mines, and had to be demined before it could accept traffic. The removed mines left holes in the surface of the already uneven road, which became a mire of craters and ruts as soon as the rains fell. But it wasn’t just roads that were mined; arable land, power lines, bridges, railroads, airports, schools, factories, and cattle-dip tanks were mined by both sides during the civil war.
Mozambique had been colonized by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. In 1752 the Portuguese proclaimed Mozambique their colony and in the same year began to trade in slaves, which by the 1820s accounted for 85 percent of all exports. By 1912, when the diabolical practice was finally stopped, two million people had been shipped out to the sugar plantations of Brazil and Cuba.
Like the rest of Africa, it was not until the early 1960s that the local people were able to exert the kind of pressure on their oppressors for the colonial power to take the threat of insurrection seriously. Until then, the population of Mozambique had been carelessly and brutally exploited for the benefit of Portugal. Peasants were forced to grow cash crops, either on their own smallholdings or on plots owned by Europeans, and the vast majority of the population was subjected to horrific working conditions, including forced labor. The only natives to have any rights of citizenships were the assimilados—the less than 1 percent of the population the Portuguese considered civilized.
The only way for blacks to attain the status of assimilados—which gave them the same civic and political rights as the whites—was to speak Portuguese fluently, abandon their traditional way of life, and hold down a “suitable” job. They were a people caught in a terrible purgatory: striving for trappings of whiteness in a world that was predominantly black but where blackness was treated with staggering disregard and abuse.
The history of Mozambique’s wars reads like a synopsis of an idea to end the world, skip the Day of Judgment, and send everyone straight to hell. To be born in that country as