Anyways, you gotta understand: this country was ruled by the Portuguese for 400 years, fought 10 years for independence, and finally won it in 1975. But Lisbon had actively underdeveloped the country for centuries, so at the point of independence, says Finnegan: "[the government] was left to run an effectively bankrupt country with virtually no trained people. The illiteracy rate was over 90 percent; there were six economists, two agronomists, not a single geologist, and fewer than a thousand black high school graduates in all of Mozambique."
What was already a difficult place starting point, to say the least, immediately became much worse when civil war broke out. The reasons why are complicated - but the short version is that South Africa's apartheid regime (Mozambique's powerful neighbor) created and financed rebel dissidents to exploit the country's weakened state and wage a guerilla war of horrific brutality.
The violence was complete and mostly random. They laid waste to hundreds and hundreds of villages throughout the country: destroying every building, school, and hospital; stealing windows, doorknobs, roofs, farming equipment - anything of value - to sell in neighboring countries for money; ambushing highways, bombing railroad lines and airplane runways; snatching people from their fields or out of bed at night to kill or put to use as they liked; kidnapping children and turning them into child soldiers; raping women, burning fields, torturing peasants. Mostly, the rebels themselves were peasants. They cut off a lot of hands and ears and noses.
And so it continued for nearly two decades. People starved. The rebels starved. Except for in Maputo, the far southern capital, for many years there was essentially nothing left in the country: no food, no goods, no infrastructure. More than a million people died. It was a nightmare that just wouldn't end.
Until 1992, when it finally did. Finnegan travelled throughout the country both before and immediately after the peace accord to document what he saw.
This is the passage I wrote all this to get to. Temporarily stuck in a town called Ile while the war was still raging, he describes:
There was a thatch-roofed lean-to at the edge of the airstrip, which turned out to be, on close inspection, a school. Of the five hundred schools still functioning in Zambezia province, most had no materials whatsoever; they consisted of a teacher and students, who typically met under a tree. The school at the airstrip in Ile had a roof and some rudimentary benches, but no blackboard and no walls. Some children were shyly studying Dividas [his interpretor] and me. They drew close and Dividas asked them their names. There were Luisa Sabado and Victoria Viegas and Zeca Vidro.
Dividas asked who among them was the best student. They giggled and squirmed, and Zeca, a thin boy with huge eyes, was finally nominated. Dividas asked who the best soccer player was. More giggling, more squirming, and another boy was pointed out. Dividas asked to see the school exercise book that Luisa, an angel-faced thirteen-year-old, was carrying. With painful reluctance, she handed it over. It was a geography workbook, tattered from what looked like use by several predecessors. It had scenes of karate fighting drawn on the cover in a childish hand, with the caption "The Five Masters of Xao-Lin." [It] was a movie she had seen in Gurue, Luisa mumbled, studying her feet desperately. She had travelled there by bus, long ago, when the roads were still open. [Fifty miles away], it was the furthest she had ever been from Ile. Yes, she wanted to go to secondary school. Dividas asked her when she planned to marry, and Luisa said, "When I am nineteen." She tried to supress a smile, but that looked difficult to do - her lips had two or three extra flutings, for maximum expressiveness. Their expression in repose was a gentle, precocious irony. Dividas asked if she had heard of America, and she whispered, "No." None of the children had.
Did the children want to hear a story? They did. While Dividas was telling fairy tales to them, I noticed an infant whose mother had drawn close to listen. Although the mother looked healthy, the baby was clearly suffering from severe malnutrition. It was extremely scrawny, with lots of loose, grayish skin and a frightening, monkeylike look. It was clinging to its mother's breast, but it was obviously finding no nourishment there. Its chances of surviving another year were, I guessed, poor to nil. The mother noticed me watching her and looked alarmed. I turned away and studied the children sitting on the ground around us. Most of them were painfully thin. Victoria's wrists were tiny. Several of the children had the potbellies that meant either malnutrition or parasites, and one boy was missing an eye. But none of them were starving, as far as I could tell. All of them had probably lost friends or neighbors or family members to hunger or the war; but as they listened to Dividas, they looked so lovely, so unbrutalized, so oblivious to everything, including the spectral infant sucking frantically behind them, that I found I had, at least temporarily, lost all interest in discovering the details of their hard times.
As Dividas came to the end of "Why the Crocodile Eats People", a teenage girl dressed in a loud, new turquoise dress and white platform shoes walked past, laughing raucously. Her clothes were wildly out of place, and Dividas asked Luisa if the girl was, by any chance "a friend of the [provincial administrator]." Luisa laughed. She was indeed, Luisa said. Luisa herself wore shapeless gray rags full of holes through which her breasts, despite her best efforts, kept falling. Some of the younger children wore nothing but scraps of burlap.
Dividas and I dug through our bags and came up with half a dozen ballpoint pens. We started handing them out. Each child who received one would pull off the cap and slide out the cartridge to check the ink level, while the others cheered or hooted, depending on what was revealed. Luisa got the last pen, and she let the tension build as she slowly withdrew the cartridge. It turned out to be full to the brim. The other children screamed with glee and envy, and Luisa whispered, with devastating irony, "God is great."
[Another planeload of food aid, maize, arrived late in the day] and the children of Ile ran out to the plane with their tin cans. The last I saw of them, they were darting under the district's truck to snatch the stray kernals that fell from the sacks.
That evening I asked Dividas about the prospects of a Luisa Sabado. Would she really be able to go to secondary school? "If the war ends, yes," he said. "But she must be able to leave that area. Even simply to Gurue. She doesn't like the clothes she has. You can see that. She wants a new dress. She says she doesn't want to marry until she is nineteen, but if some boy just a little bit clever, who perhaps works at the hospital, offers her a new dress, she may go with him. Then, if she gets pregnant, the parents will get involved, a marriage will be arranged, and her education will be finished. Or if she gets a new dress from Calamidades [a larger town], some soldier might notice her and start to give her little things. And if she gets pregnant with him, he may not marry her. Luisa's world is small now, because of the war. She is too isolated. Many people in this country are too isolated. It's all because of the war."
Elsewhere, Finnegan concludes: "The history of Mozambique's peasantry was one of bottomless pain and sorrow, and its great store of brutalized rage was now being used, cynically and savagely, to destroy the country's future."
(A Complicated War, by William Finnegan)
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