SOWETO AND JOHANNESBURG: We had a busy and informative weekend. On Saturday we had lunch with Emily Mnisi, a Quaker woman from near Jo’burg whom I had gotten to know last year when we were both on an international Quaker fact-finding mission in Israel and Palestine. Emily is a special-education specialist who currently trains and supervises the house-parents at a residential farm for some 70 people with mental handicaps, half an hour out of Jo’burg.
Then I had a long conversation/interview with Dr. Mongezi Guma, who is Executive Director of the Ecumenical Service for Socio-economic Transformation. He talked mainly about the topic I first asked him about: the effectiveness or otherwise– as viewed today– of the TRC process whose open hearings were such a prominent feature of South African public life in the 1995-98 period.
The TRC has only now been winding up its final work. On April 15, it presented its final report– including recommendations on reparations to victims of serious abuses under apartheid and on amnesties for perpetrators who confessed–to President Mbeki. He then requested parliament to pass bills funding the reparations. And I think– though I’m not quite clear on this– that parliament is now working its way through this process. So I need to nail down those facts a little better.
Anyway, Dr. Guma was really interesting about the TRC– and he also talked a little about what he did as a church-based social activist during the dark days of apartheid. One of the things he was working on was church-based support for the families of political prisoners.
Yesterday Morning, Leila and I went to the 9:30 worship session of Johannesburg Quaker Meeting. I’d worshiped there before, when I came here in August 2001; and this time they had asked me to stay afterwards and talk a little about the present US-Iraq war. Well, it was a little challenging to get my head around that, so I gave some personal reflections on what I saw as the motivations of the warmongers in Washington– and also on the potential strength of the movement for peace and justice there.
It really has been quite interesting, over this past month, following the news of the US-Iraq war FROM AFRICA. I mean, using force to impose your will on distant lands; doing so in the name of some attractive, “modernizing” ideal; and doing it also with a firm eye on control of natural resources– all these things are very familiar to people in Africa. And they seem SO VERY NINETEEENTH CENTURY….
Well, Emily Mnsisi had been at the Quaker sessions yesterday, and afterwards she had promised to take us on a visit to Soweto. On our way there, we stopped to get something to drink at Gold Reef City, the amazingly kitsch amusement park where on Firday we had gone down the unused gold mine. But yesterday, we went into the casino which is part of the park, as Emil had heard of a nice restaurant inside there.
Well, there we were three Quakers in a casino on a Sunday morning… (Not sure if Leila describes herself as a Q these days; but you get the drift.) For Leila and me, it was our first visit inside one of these huge, ugly, money-gobbling behemoths. People inside there looked so sad in the gloomy light, with their faces lit mainly by the strange flashing tones of the slot machines into which they stared, likes zombies.
That was quite a strange thing to be doing on our way to visit Soweto.
So then, on we drove. And drove and drove and drove. The first stop Emily had planned to go have lunch with an old college friend of hers called Ria, a special-ed specialist who runs programs for the provinicial government here in Gauteng Province. Ria and her family live in Protea, which is in a far-out part of Soweto, so we drove for many miles along a sort of perimeter highway before we got there.
I’ve had Soweto in my mind since 1976 or before. That was the year the schoolkids there all walked out of school on June 16 to protest new requirements that would force them to pass exams in some subjects in Afrikaans, not in English or a native language. The police met the walkout with violence, killing two that first day and many hundreds more over the half-year of insurrection that followed.
The uprising that the Soweto schoolkids started that year spread to all the major South African urban areas (except, apparently, Durban). It did not immediately lead to the victory of the African nationalist/liberationist movement. But it did dent the self-confidence of the apartheid bosses considerable, and it started a longterm process whereby black resistance made the apartheid system fundamentally unworkable and thus forced the National Party to the negotiating table. The economic sanctions imposed on the regime by all major outside powers (except Israel… ) also helped to bring this about.
Oh, wouldn’t it be great if we could see the same support from outside powers for the movement for equality, peace and justice in Israel/Palestine???
But anyway. So, I had known and thought a lot about Soweto since 1976. But I’d never visited it at all till 2001, when Harold Annegaarn took Bill and me on a quick visit by car to some parts of it. On that occasion, I gathered that Soweto is large– but yesterday, I really got a better feel for its true enormity. It is like a huge sister-city to Johannesburg, spread out to the southwest and separated from Jo’burg by the massive, rhomboidal slag heaps produced by the gold mines all round here…. (more to come, later)
Author: Helena
REMEMBERING PAST ATROCITIES, IN MOZAMBIQUE AND SOUTH AFRICA:
REMEMBERING PAST ATROCITIES, IN MOZAMBIQUE AND SOUTH AFRICA: I’m writing this, on Saturday May 3, sitting in the lovely home of our friends Shirley Pendlebury and Harold Annegaarn, in Johannesburg.
Leila and I got here on Thursday evening, after bidding a sad farewell to Salomao in Maputo. But we’ve been so busy that I haven’t blogged since about Tuesday. Too bad! I’d gotten into such a rhythm between experiencing interesting things and then blogging about them almost immediately– but now that rhythm has been all upset. I mean, what is more important in life: having experiences or blogging about them???
Actually, for me as a writer, having the experiences as fully and as “presently” as possible, and then writing about them as well and effectively as I can, are both equally important jobs. (And no, I don’t consider that my writing on the blog is the “best” that I can do. It is, rather, a handy supplement to my notes; a form of five-finger exercize for subsequent writing; and a way to share some of my experiences and reflections in near-real time with anyone including my family and friends who chooses to read them.)
So here are the highlights of what we’ve done since I last blogged:
(1) On Wedesneday morning, we got up early and drove with Salomao and Zunguza to a place called Chiboene, some 40 kms from Maputo, where there was a terrible massacre of local militia trainees sometime in the mid-1980s.
You don’t have to drive far out of Maputo to get into the real, hardscrabble Mozambican “bush”. We left a tarmac-ed road about 15-20 kms out of town and then drove for a further 35 minutes along very bumpy dirt tracks. Lucky Zunguza had agreed to come with us and drive us in his 4×4. There weren’t many high trees where we were, but a lot of scrbby, 4-foot-high bushes, punctuated every so often by either ruined-looking small breeze-block homes or compounds, or by round or rectangular straw huts. As throughout Africa, people were walking along the track carrying work implements or harvested goods, or schoolbooks as they went to school.
Salomao commented that most of the Mozambican civil war had been fought in just such terrain as this– but with the important differece that you’d never see anyone else on the roads, because if they heard a vehicle coming they would hide. Plus of course, back then, many of the roads, trails, and just bush areas were heavily mined. This area– though still quite close to the capital– had only been demined to an “acceptable” degree within the past couple of years.
Luckily, he knew which forks to take as the road divided and re-divided along the way. We came to Chiboene Primary School– a large, spiffy-looking structure that Salomao said had been built since his last visit here two years ago. Scores of kids were playing in its big dirt yard.
We drove around the school, and on into the bush a little. Approaching a small cluster of huts, Salomao called out to a young man to ask for someone to escort us to the mass graves. He’d earlier told me that on his previous visits, there was a local “secretary” who organized the visits. This time, though, it seemed to be in the hands of a group of three local women who came to join us at the boy’s request. One of them hurried off to fetch a big jerry-can of water and a dipper, and the three of them piled into the back of the car.
The graves were, actually, very nearby. There were two of them. both were under the spreading boughs of cashew trees. One was “marked” by a ten-inch-high platform of crumbling cement about 20 feet by 10 feet. Both grave areas were also marked by numerous sprigs of a tough-looking form of impatients growing out of the dun-colored earth.
The women– Priscina, Antonietta Jeremias, and Ana-Paula– were joined by an old man in gumboots. The women picked sprigs from some of the impatients plants and handed them to each of us four “visitors”. Then they kicked off their flip-flops and walked into the grave areas, bending from the waist to clear away dead leaves, twigs, etc., from the grave area. At first, we were at the cement grave. After they’d cleared it, they stood back, and sang a couple of hymns in Shangana, and said a quick prayer. Then, the ritual continued with each of them in turn taking a dipper full of water from the can and sprinkling oit over the grave, and also planting the sprig that she had earlier reserved for herself, into a crack on the top of the crumbling cement, and firming the sprig upright into the crack with wettened earth.
The dipper was then passed around for each of the rest of us to do this turn.
Then, we walked the short distance to the other mass grave– each held the remains of 22 men slaughtered during that massacre, Priscina told us.
Anotnietta Jeremias told us her father had been with the militiamen who were training here when they were killed, but that he had been one of the lucky ones to escape alive.
They dated the event as “somewhere in the mid-1980s”.
They said they’d been living in a communal village not far away at the time, and they had heard the screams of the men being slaughtered, and the firearms with which many were killed.
With Saloamo interpreting, I asked them how they thought about those acts of violence, and whether they still blamed the people who had committed them.
They said they found it difficult to feel blame. It had been such a hard time, altogether, during those years, they said, that it was hard to keep strict accounts of who to blame for what, when. “Sometimes, we even had to smother our own babies in the bush, if their crying would give away our hiding place,” one said. Evidently, issues of “blame” and accountability seemed very different to them than they might in most western-style courts of law.
“But now, the violence is finished, and we just pray that we don’t have violence again,” Priscina summed it up at the end.
I said a few things that concurred with the latter wish, and made them a small gift.
This place is one of only two memorials that Salomao knows about, in the whole country, to the million or so Mozambicans who died during their ghastly, 16-year civil war. I felt blessed and privileged to have been able to participate in the ceremony with the women at Chiboene. Actually, very few people even in Mozambique know about the place. When we met with Archbishop Dinis Sengulane, the Anglican archbishop of Maputo who played an important part in getting the civil-war peace talks started, he hadn’t heard about it– even though the women there said that they had some connection with the Anglicans…
(2) Anyway, moving right along to Johannesburg… Yesterday (Friday) Leila and I took an organized tour down a now-unused gold mine, which was a vivid reminder of the role of western colonial powers both in this area and, by extension, throughout much of the non-western world. Somehow, launching imperialist wars for so-called “strategic” resources seems so terribly 19th century, doesn’t it?
And then, we moved straight across the road to the very new Apartheid Museum that a small group of entrepreneurs has opened up there. It is apparently quite controversial. The Government is supposed to be building a Museum and Study Center and lots of things as part of the follow-on work from the TRC. But these entrepreneurs evidently figured they’d try to break into the market first…
And then, still on the theme of remembrances of atrocity, we all went to “The Pianist” in the evening. Adrien Brody was incredible. But I wonder how Jewish israelis would feel seeing the movie. So very many of the things portrayed in it are exactly what Israel is doing to the Palestinians right now. (That is, in the phase of “concentration” of the Jewish community of Warsaw; but before the phase of “extermination” began.)
“Concentration” of poentially suspect populations was developed most fully in the recent era right here in South Africa, of course: by the Brits against the Afrikaaners during the Anglo-Boer wars. I note that it did NOT make the Afrikaaners into a cuddly, compliant bunch of people….
HAYAT COLUMN DEADLINE COMING UP:
HAYAT COLUMN DEADLINE COMING UP: Oh my goodness, it’s nearly the end of the month. Which means I need to get my head around doing my next column for Al-Hayat. There is so much going on in the Middle East. But probably people don’t need me, from Africa, to tell them about it.
My old nemesis Martin Indyk being quoted as saying that given the failure of Iraqis to come out and greet the US forces as liberators (duh!), then “There is nothing for it but the use of classic imperialist policies of divide and rule” — or something very similar to that.
So Martin, like, it worked for the imperialists did it? Kept their empires safe forever? Made them loved by all who knew them?
But I don’t feel any of my readers in Hayat really need me to point to the silliness of Martin, Ari Fleischer, or the rest of the US neo-imperialists flailing around in the mire of their own retrograde rhetoric.
Have to think of something else to write about.
FINDING FRELIMO:
FINDING FRELIMO: Yesterday morning (Monday), Leila and I had a really good discussion with Afiado Zunguza, the Mozambican head of a conflict-resolution capacity-building organization called Justapaz. In the afternoon, we had a good discussion with Raul Domingos, who had been over-all head of the Renamo delegation at the peace talks, having previously been the chief of Renamo’s military staff. (Domingos was until recently the head of Renamo’s bloc in the parliament;l but a few months ago he was expelled from the party. Now he’s planning how to regroup.)
So anyway, at that point I was two for two on the Renamo principals from the 1990-92 peace talks whom I wanted to interview for the project– alongside the many grassroots interviewees. But I was zip for two on the Frelimo negotiators. Salomao assured me– and I certainly believed him– that he’d been trying hard to nail down appointments with Armando Guebuza, Aguilar Mazula, and Tobias Dai. But still nothing was happening.
Recalling my years of experience of trying to get interviews with elusive people in different parts of the world, I readily endorsed S’s suggestion that maybe we should just “go and sit on the doorsteps of their offices” till something happened.
So this morning, we drove over to Frelimo party headquarters. It seemed strangely empty. And inscriptions on a whiteboard near the lobby confirmed our worst fears. Guebuza– who had headed Frelimo’s delegation to the talks and is now Secretary-General of Frelimo– was indeed still on a visit to China. He’s expected back May– the day I’ll be leaving here for Johannesburg. Bother.
Mazula and Dai have been similarly out-of-town or impossible to find.
A very nice woman at the entrance-desk of the Frelimo office building then helpfully suggested we go upstairs and talk instead to Marcelinho Dos Santos, another senior party member who happened to be in at the time. “Sure!” I said. Gotta get somebody to express a Frelimo point of view.
So it turned out to be a gold mine, in fact. Sure, getting Guebuza’s or Mazula’s or Dai’s recollections on how the issue of possible amnesty was handled in the peace negotiations could be excellent. But I do have good accounts of that now from Domingos, from Andrea Bartolli, and from some written sources like Cameron Hume’s book. (Short version: the issue of possible prosecutions for atrocities was never brought up in the negotiations. It was always regarded as one of the tough issues that shd be left till the end of the talks. And at that point, the sides agreed to a blanket amnesty.)
But what we started to get from Dos Santos were some wonderfully rich recollections from a party veteran of just about the entire history of Frelimo and of Mozambique… It was really a privilege to sit with this veteran freedom fighter and hear him talk. Greying hair, glasses, a baggy big striped daishiki, a lovely smile; a book-stuffed small office high up above the city. Dos Santos is a poet and writer. He reminded me of my late Egyptian friend Lotfi Kholi. (I bet they knew each other. Have to ask DS about that tomorrow.)
When I started to ask him a bit about the “civil war”, he corrected me quickly. “No, it was a war of foreign aggression,” he said.
Reminded me of some of my hometown neighbors in Virginia and the way they talk about what I would call the US “civil war”….
Evidently, Dos Santos belongs to a conservative, old-school wing of the party. But he did make clear, just before he had to break the discussion off, that he thought the 1992 peace acord had been a good one… So when he suggested we could meet again tomorrow, I leaped at the chance to ask him a lot more about how he had come to terms with dealing with opponents whom, presumably, he had considered as somehow inauthenticly Mozambican, but as “agents” of a foreign power instead.
Of course, in my interviews with Renamo people, they’ve made a point of referring ONLY to the “indigenous”, authenticaly Mozambican aspects of their movement….
Tomorrow, we’ll also be visiting one of the few memorial sites in the country.
The project is going really well. I’m racking up the notebook pages. (Okay, mainly Leila’s racking them up.) And I keep seeing really important big insights that can feed back into and inform other areas of my work, like my writing on Middle East issues, as well.
“Ciao” from Maputo.
FORMER COMBATANTS WORKING TOGETHER, AND A CHURCH SERVICE:
FORMER COMBATANTS WORKING TOGETHER, AND A CHURCH SERVICE: Yesterday, we had a really interesting meeting with General Herminio Morais, the former head of Special Forces for Renamo who led the Renamo military team that helped to finish up the peace negotiations that brought the Mozambican civil war to an end in 1992.
Morais had been suggested as a good interview subject by the VAIL project’s research associate here, Salomao Mungoi, who sat with us during our Saturday morning meeting and interpreted for Morais whom he described as a good friend.
All the more remarkable because Salomao had been an officer in the government (Frelimo) forces during the civil war. The two man sat and talked easily together. Both are in their early forties. Each had spent many years in his youth and younger adulthod in military service– and each is now making a serious effort to get the education that the travails of the civil war denied them. Salomao recently completed a B.A. in English; and Morais came to our meeting directly after having taken the latest exam in his law course at Edouardo Mondlane University.
Morais had so many great stories! About his decision to join Renamo in the first place. About the gradually dawning realization that Renamo could not defeat the government forces on the battlefield, and therefore needed to negotiate the best deal it could. About how his views of the people on the other side became transformed from one of “Communists” to one of “fellow-country-men”.
I think two of his best stories were the following:
Firstly, when he went to join the peace talks, in Rome, in June 1992, his counterpart on the Frelimo side turned out to be General Tobias Dai– a man he had been good friends with in his youth. But Dai apparently did not know the identity of the man he would be negotiating with, who still operated always under the nom-de-guerre of “Bob”… “So when Dai saw me, he said, ‘Herminio, its you!’ He couldn’t believe that I had been ‘Bob’ for all those years.”
The second story concerned the way the war ended in the field. He gave most weight, among the reasons the war ended when it did, to the factors of famine and sheer war-weariness. So in the end, the soldiers in the field saw that the negotiations were nearing completion, and many started either deserting their units or fraternizing, in large numbers, with the soldiers on the opposing front-lines. And that started happening on a broad scale even BEFORE the General Peace Accords were formally announced and signed on October 4, 1992.
“It was strange,” Morais said, “because before they had been fighting and then suddenly there was a complete change. It was actually quite dangerous for intermediate-level leaders in the military. They were afraid that their commanders would think they had been complicit in the fraternizing, and that maybe they had been Frelimo agents all along… But then, everyone could see it was happening all over the country, so it wasn’t just a case of traitorous individual commanders.”
He also confirmed the commonly held view that it had been far easier for the military participants in the talks to deal with each other successfully than it had been for the political leaders. “The politicians took four years of talking before they reached the agreement. We did all our business in just four months!” he said…
I can’t tell you how moving it was for me to see these two men, Salomao and Morais, sitting and laughing easily about the old days, given the previous level of hatred between the forces of which they each been a part…
Today, Sunday, was another good day. I started off by going to church with Afiado Zunguza, a cheerful and very welcoiming ordained minister who heads a Methodist peace-and-justice organization here called Justapaz.
Zunguza was not officiating at the service, which was led instead by two African WOMEN ministers and a large group of women lay leaders.
It seems the Methodist church here has some kind of a sepcial “order” of dedicated women lay activists that had been having a three-day conference at this church, culminating today. So about 120-plus members of this organization, all demurely dressed in black skirts, dark red buttoned tunics, and white hats, crowded into the front of the large church building. Some of them were formed into a great choir. Others just sat together in the front pews. Most of the service was conducted in Xitshwa, one of the country’s sixeen or more local languages.
Throughout the two-hour-20-minute service, Zunguza kept me updated with general explanations of what was going on. I, um, sang along by trying to read the words in the hymnal whenever I could. Pastor Joaquima Nhanala gave an animated, beautfully delivered sermon based on James chapter 3. When she was giving examples of the difference between true wisdom and mere “cleverness”, one of the examples she gave was that it might seem “clever: to be able to stir people up one against the other, while true wisdom would be shown by talking and listening calmly to people and trying to find peaceful ways for everyone to get along…. I said a quiet “Amen” to that point!
Interestingly– espeically in view of my experience Friday with the traditional healers– one of the most animated parts of the service ame at the Offertory. Offerings were organized acording to groups within the congregation– first the children, then the youth, then the young adults, then the women, then the men– and finally the visitors. As each group was called, two members of that group would lead its other members joyfully up the center aisle and then stand and hold broad baskets into which the others would place their donations then file back to their seats. There was much singing, some ululating, and a little bit of toyi-toying along the way…
After church, I went running along Avenida Friedrich Engels, the broad esplanade perched over the Indian Ocean; and after that Leila and I had a pretty relaxed day. I’m getting ready for another 3.5 days of good work here before we leave for Johannesburg Thursday evening. But I’ve already started thinking that maybe I should try come back for a decent length of time some time in the not-distant future. I really believe that people in the USA (and probably elsewhere) need to learn a lot more about the incredible cultural and social resources for peacemaking that exist in this country, and I would love to find ways to help that happen.
RELIGION AND ATROCITY
RELIGION AND ATROCITY: I know full well that many terrible actions have been undertaken in the past in the name of “religion”, and that this tendency continues to this day. But still, as I have been pursuing my research project on how societies deal with legacies of violence, I have become increasingly aware that in the aftermath of universe-shattering atrocities, religion can in some cases play some really helpful roles.
(I am writing these thoughts from Mozambqiue. More on that, below.)
Religion can comfort the afflicted. It can help survivors to once again discern some worthwhile structure in the universe. It can provide help in healing wounded spirits, and some lessons on how to avoid iterations of violence and atrocity. It CAN do all these things– which is not to say that it always does them…
Last year, I noticed some religions doing these things in Rwanda– a country that along with neighbors Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo cries out for help in a cruel, atrocity-laden world. Yes, I know that in 1994 some church leaders were deeply imlicated in the commission of the genocide. But it seemed to me that over the years since 1994, other church leaders– especially in the evangelistic protestant churches– were doing an incredible job of helping to heal the deep rifts inside Rwandan society.
I worshiped with one of the numerous vibrant local Quaker communities. Their enthusiastically evangelical worship service– like their social projects around the country– united Hutus and Tutsis, survivors of the genocide along with family members of suspected perpetrators.
I saw the same kind of unifying role being played by Moucecore, the evangelical Anglican mission were I stayed in Kigali.
Here in Mozambique, I was at first mainly concerned with looking at the unique role some local church leaders played in facilitating the peace negotiations that in 1992 finally succeeded in bringing an end to– by then– some 16 years of internecine civil war.
(I was sitting talking with a group of former civil war combatants in a small town here yesterday. And I mentioned– based on my own personal experience in Lebanon as well as my study of other cases, that so-called “civil wars”– i.e., those inside countries– are actually often much nastier and more atrocious than big, formal, inter-state wars. My interlocutors there all nodded and smiled wryly in recognition of this sad truth.)
But I have always also been really interested in the role that many religions– indigenous religions, as well as formal Christian and Muslim denominations and syncretic religions that combine elements from more than one of these roots–played both during and after the war in helping those scarred by war to rebuild their universes and their selves.
On Wednesday, we were talking to the leader of a nationwide group of disabled ex-combatants. He pegged into our meeting on his critches, one trouser-leg hanging empty as he walked. He talked very movingly about how, once the fact of his disablement came home to him– he had been wounded by one of the millions of landmines planted throughout the country– he had lost nearly all sense of his own worth.
“The worst thing was seeing my family look at me and feel sad about me,” he said. “That made me feel so guilty. I couldn’t decide whether to leave the family and go someplace else, or just kill myself… But in the end, it was through going to church that I learned to deal with my disablement. It was the church that gave me a feeling of community, and the church that helped me see I must find a way to live the way I am now.”
Today, Salomao, Leila, and I had two really productive, wonderful meetings with religious leaders. The first was with (Anglican) Bishop Dinis Sengulane, who along with Cardinal Alexander Dos Santos (whom we saw Tuesday) and two other local church leaders had helped persuade President Chissano, back in 1988, that the Mozambique government needed to enter into direct talks with the leaders of the Renamo opposition if it wanted to find a way to end the war.
He shared incredible numbers of deep insights with us– all crammed into a 40-minute meeting. He summed up the principles that had enabled the church leaders’ work of persuasion to to succeed; and described the campaign the churches waged in the community to help prepare Mozambicans for peace even while their leaders were still negotiating.
Sengulane has written a short book about these experiences called “Victory without losers”– in Portuguese only, I’m afraid. But we’ll get hold of a copy. I think I’m pretty good at deciphering written Portuguese– so who knows, maybe reading his book will bring me instant comprehension???
And after that, we drove to the headquarters of the Association of Mozambican Traditional Healers. This was my second visit there. Back in late August 2001, I made a whirlwind visit to them with my friend Breyette Lorntz (who speaks a little Portuguese) and Francisco Assis, an activist with the local Methodist peace organization, Justapaz.
The first time, the meeting had been rushed, ragged, and very inconclusive. One problem was that Francisco Assis did not have a language in common with the Association spokesperson with whom we were meeting, so all items of dialogue had to go through two entire channels of interpretation between me and the spokesman. (Try discussing things like post-violence trauma in such a way: inclarity piled upon inclarity.)
This time, at least Salomao was able to speak to the dozen or so traditional healers who took part in the meeting in a mutually understandable local language. Plus, he was already fairly familiar with the project, since he’s been working with it for a little while already. So communication seemed much better. Until we came to the point that had embarrassed and confused me during the last meeting– the one where the healers flat-out ask for a contribution.
Maybe Salomao and I should have talked about this possibility before. But anyway, I kind of really understood the healers’ point of view when the request came. I mean, here they are, people of incredible wisdom and knowledge. But neither they nor their wisdom gets much respect in the modern world.
Plus hey, people are asking for money for their services ALL THE TIME in the world I come from: but they do so in complcated, ritualized ways like making grant proposals and jumping through all the requisite hoops to try to win those grants. (I know whereof I speak. Believe me.)
So maybe there’s something refreshing about a different tradition in which, as they told me, you should make an offering right at the very beginning in order to pave the way for the good spirits to come to the encounter.
“Otherwise,” one them told us, “if a person seeking help from a healer doesn’t do this, he might even get dizzy and lose his way or not even be able to find his way out of the room!”
“What do you think?” I asked Salomao. “Should I make a contribution?”
“Maybe. Whatever you think.”
I dug into my purse for some meticais (the local currency) and handed them to S. He, Leila, the head of the Association and I were all sitting fairly formally behind a table on one side of the cavernous, nearly bare room where we were meeting. (Not much, if anything, had changed in it since I was there nearly two years ago. These guys are certainly operating on very low budgets.)
The other side of the table, the ten-plus other healers were facing us on low benches. About half were wearing fairly snappy uniforms of blue pants (or skirt) and white shirt with Association insignia in their epaulettes. The words “Salvation Army” did pop into my mind. The rest of them were wearing “normal” Mozambican dress– that is, informal Western-style dress for the guys; pretty African-style dresses for the women. One uniformed guy, a loquacious spokesman, held some kind of a carved stick in one hand and a cellphone in the other.
Previously, I had dug out a copy of one of my Boston Review articles to give them– an offering of some of my expertise in return for some of theirs.
Now, Salomao placed the meticais ceremoniously on top of my article, telling our hosts that I wanted to help them preserve their traditions and perhaps help them buy some paint to re-paint their headquarters.
The placing of this offering on the table was a cause for loud expressions of jubilation. (I think it was the money that caused this, not the article.) One of the women ululated briefly. Others clapped. Everyone broke into broad smiles. Salomao explained that they had said that the fact of my having made the donation– I think everyone knew it was not a large one– meant that I was respecting their way of doing things.
We were, however, near the end of the meeting. Everyone was very friendly as S took a couple of photos and as we all made our farewells…
I haven’t actually written anything here yet about the CONTENT of what the healers had talked about. As with Sengulane– or as with the traditional healer who was part of the group we met with in Bela Vista yesterday– this group also had some really powerful insights. At one point, Marais (the loquacious one) explained that all black people here know well that if a person is coming home from war, then his father should consult a healer and make sure that the right ceremonies are performed on the returning one before he even comes into the house. These ceremonies involve speaking with the spirits of the ancestors to enlist their help in making sure the transition from warrior to peaceable person is a successful one…
This certainly tracks with evrything else I have learned– primarily from the excellent works by Alcinda Honwana and Carolyn Nordstrom– about the attention that Mozambican traditional healers pay to this particularly sensitive transition in a person’s life (as to many other transitions, too.)
So how is American society going to be dealing with all the warriors who’re going to be landing back on our shores from Iraq, over the months ahead? Do we even recognize that this transition from warrior to “regular” person is a significant one at all?
Today, in Charlottesville, my friends Michele Mattioli, Chip Tucker, and Betsy Tucker, and their friends all had court hearings regarding the sit-in they staged at our local Congressman’s office the day President Bush launched the war against Iraq. I remember that in JWN a couple of days after that, I put in some excrpts from the great statement that Michele had composed in order to explain her participation in (and leadership of) the action. One of the exact points she mentioned there was that the US combatants were all decent people who would be scarred by their participation in fighting and killing… Michele, how right you were.
EARTH TO ARI FLEISCHER:
EARTH TO ARI FLEISCHER: Fleischer, I just saw, was warning everyone that
DISCUSSING ESCAPING FROM VIOLENCE, IN A SMALL TOWN IN MOZAMBIQUE:
DISCUSSING ESCAPING FROM VIOLENCE, IN A SMALL TOWN IN MOZAMBIQUE: Today, Leila, Salmao, and I drove out of Maputo to a small town called Bellavista, about 50 km to the south. Salomao has colleagues there who work for the same organization of ex-combatant peace promoters that he does. They had agreed to set up a discussion for us there, for the research project.
Getting there was itself quite an adventure. First, we rented a 4×4 car. Then, we drove down to the little ferry landing near Maputo city center where ferries leave to cross Maputo Bay to the south. The whole ferry experience was really interesting– country people coming and going with their goods to seel in the city; someone yanking a live goat around on a string; etc etc. Many smaller ferries docked, unloaded, reloaded, and departed before the car ferry lumbered across the bay. It was only a short ride. Salomao says they keep talking of building abridge. But for now, it’s just ferries, and the contrast between the two sides of the bay is striking.
Once across, it was just a broad dirt road leading south, around 50 metres in from the coast. S. explained that during the civil war, that whole area was really dangerous. There were som Mozambique army positions there, but there was also a lot of Renamo activity. (South Africa is not far away.) So villagers there could not sleep in their villages at night.
Now, slowly, the area is becoming developed. Parallel with the road were utility poles proudly bearing high-tension wires down to the south of the country. S. said the lines were only completed a couple of months ago, and there were still some disputes about the rights of the joint-venture electricity company to sling wire over some portions of the land where people have farmed etc for many years. His organization, ProPaz, is trying to help the parties resolve some of those disputes.
But apart from that, it was very undeveloped. We passed one other vehicle on the whole trip to Bellavista. Mainly, we saw people walking, walking very long distances bearing heavy loads.
Bellavista was probably a small Portuguese colonial center. Now, it is just a small town, and the administrative center for its district. Salomao’s friends had arranged a really good discussion group– we had two staff people from the local office of the Mozambican Human Rights League, three or four ex-combatants, and the head of the local chapter of the Association of Traditional healers. Mainly, I asked the friends about their views of violence: what was responsible for it; how could it be escaped from; how they accounted for what I am increasingly convinced is the “Mozambican miracle”of having successfully put the violence of their terrible civil war behind them.
I also asked them what they thought of the idea that people who did bad things during war should be punished.
“Then everyone in the country would be in the courts!” said one ex-combatant.
They also talked about the real differences that the coming of peace had made so far in their lives.
Once again, Leila took notes– I am sure they are up to her usual standard! We had eight Mozambican interlocutors, including Salomao– who was also doing the interpreting. The traditional healer (curandeiro) didn’t speak Portuguese, so S found a common Mozambican language to talk with him in.
So of course the eventual amount of material I’ll get out of Leila’s notes will be hugely more than I can write about here.
Anyway, now I need to run. S is taking us to a performance of Mozambican dance and song.
EX-COMBATANT PEACE PROMOTERS, AND A CARDINAL
EX-COMBATANT PEACE PROMOTERS, AND A CARDINAL: The first two substantive days of the research here in Mozambique have been going very well. Plus, my new research assistant (and elder daughter) Leila Rached joined me here on Sunday afternoon. It is a real blast having her here working with me! And in our hours off, the two of us are able to do various things around town that I alone, as a foreign woman, would be much more hesitant about doing.
Yesterday morning, project research associate Salomao Mungoi took us along for a long discussion with his boss Jacinta Jorge, the head of an organization of ex-combatant peace promters called ProPaz.
ProPaz is such an amazing and inspiring organization! It has more than 100 former combatants (from the civil-war era) who currently provide peacebuilding and conflict-resolution/transformation services in four of the country’s provinces. It includes former fighters with the government (Frelimo) forces alongside former fighters from the insurgent (Renamo) side– working together these days.
ProPaz was founded by two of the main organizations of former combatants from Mozambique’s punishing, 17-year civil war: AMODEG, a general veterans’ group, and ADEMIMO, an organization of disabled former fighters.
We (well actually, Leila) took pages and pages of notes from our discussion with Jacinta. She told us a little about her own personal journey through having been virtually “tricked” into serving in the country’s armed forces when she was still a teenager, through her rise in responsibilities in the officer corps (including the stresses of trying to raise a child alone while her husband was at the front-line) — to her eventual demobilization.
She told us that AMODEG had started out as an organization only for former soldiers in the Frelimo (government) armed forces. But that even before the Frelimo and Renamo leaders had signed their nationwide peace accord in October 1992, AMODEG had decided to take in former fighters from Renamo as well, and had changed its name accordingly.
I reflected a little on my recent experiences at ICTR, and with the Rwandan issue more broadly, and asked Jacinta whether she thought that the people who had committed the many atrocities that marked her country’s civil war should also have been punished.
Firstly, she responded by coming back to me with another question. “If they were punished, would that bring an end to the war, or prevent another war from happening?” she asked.
Then, she said it was actually important not to judge people for what they had done during the war, since their participation in it was often obligatory, not voluntary.
Finally she noted that no amount of reparations could replace the lives or limbs lost during the war.
So I guess that adds up to a “no.”
But what a wise person she is. “During a war, both sides are blind to the dimensions of the violence they are inflicting on the other side,” she said. “People may say at the political level that there is ‘bad’ war and ‘good’ war. But war is war, and it always results in the killing of people.”
In the afternoon (still on Monday), we went to the AMODEG heaquarters, which are located on a site that used to be a logistics headquarters for the army diring the civil war — and that a long time before that had played a historic role in the pre-independence foundations of Frelimo. Now, the roof of the main building on the site, a lovely old Portuguese colonial mansion, has long since fallen in. AMODEG’s office is in a squat, more recently built block of offices behind the old mansion. And behind the office was a playground, where during our conversation tw dozen high-spirited md-teens were having a rowdy and enjoyable game of soccer.
That seemed appropriate, because one of the questions I was asking the four civil war veterans seated with us was how they talked about the events of the war with their own children.
By and large, they said they didn’t do so. “There are so many ugly things happen in war,” one of them said, “that we really doin’t want to alk about them with our families.”
One of the things I’m asking people during this phase of the research– especially people who have had close-up experience of war and violence– is what priorities they would establish for societies that are just emerging from recent episodes of atrocious violence. An AMODEG board member was the first to reply: “psycho-social rehabilitation should be the priority,” he said. “Both for individuals, and collectively.”
When the Mozambican parties reached their peace acord in 1992, the UN invested significant amonts of money and attention in trying to help the process of demobilizing former combatants and then helping them reintegrate into society. (I say “significant”, though of course the amounts of money involved in helping deal with more than 90,000 former combatants here absolutely paled in comparison with the billion-plus dollars invested thus far in trying just 50 or so people from rwanda in ICTR.)
I asked the friends gathered at the AMODEG office whether they thought– ten years after the fact– that this UN program had been helpful. “The main gain we got from the whole event was the coming of peace itself,” one AMODEG activist told me. “Because people were so tired of war!”
Again, I asked them if they thought people should have been tried and punished for what they did during the war. “It wouldn’t have made any sense in our situation,” one said, “because everyone would have been in court!”
This morning, we went to see Cardinal Alexander Dos Santos, the frail but ethereal leader of Mozambique’s Catholic church. He had played a historic role, back in 1988-89, in finding a way for the leaders of both Frelimo and Renamo finally to sit down together and start negotiating a final peace.
Dos Santos received us in an upstairs office in his leafy headquarters compound. It was a short meeting, but Leila and I both felt we were in the presence of serene, humorous, grandfatherly, and almost saint-like figure. He laughed as he recalled a visit he and Archbishop Tutu had paid to the US in 1988, when their mission had been to try to persuade the Reagan administration that the frelimo government was not nearly as “communistic” as it had been painted.
recalling the overall process of peacemaking in Mozambique, he said all the churches had had a special role to play: “We had to work hard to create an image of all Mozambicans living together, rather than fighting,” he said. But he immediately aded that actually the task had not proved so dificult. “When Frelimo came back from the bush– well, they might know that this or that person might have killed someone– but it’s finished!” he said.
… All these conversations I’m having here seem to underscore the validity of the judgment that anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom expressed in her fabulous book about Mozambique’s civil war, “A Different Kind of War Story.” “The citizens in Mozambique demonstrated the most sophisticated country-wide conflict resolution practices and ideologies I have observed anywhere in the world.” (p.11)
Of course, I’m trying not to go into these encounters with my mind already made up from my previous reading and my one very short earlier vsit to Mozambique. I’m going to continue to look for counter-evidence. But in the meantime, continuing to explore the various different dimensions of Mozambican people’s “conflict resolution practices and ideologies” is something that I’m definitely committed to doing here.
MAPUTO AVENIDAS:
MAPUTO AVENIDAS: Overcast today, so I was able to go for a nice long walk this morning after the going-to-church plans fell through. I walked over to the lovely broad esplanade that runs along the east (Indian Ocean) side of the old city center, suspended some 80 feet or so up a steep but verdant cliff above the beach-side road below.
The esplanade is now called Avenida Friedrich Engels. I imagine it was once called Avenida Salazar or something like that– back when the city itself was called Lourenco Marques.
It was very quiet. I saw several people out walking, but only one jogger: male, black, in bike shorts. I wonder what people would think if tomorrow morning they saw a female, white jogger out there in regular running shorts. Maybe I could jog in long pants?
Okay, call me a sentamentalist, but I think it’s rather poignant to walk along streets named after the icons of Mozambique’s liberation era. There are Avenidas named after Karl Marx and Mao Tse Tung, as well as Engels.
So here’s Mozambique, a country that is gamely trying to go along with all the World Bank and IMF plans for nassive “structural adjustment” that basically involves dismantling many social programs and the nationalized industries and opening the econ/IMF have NOT yet forced them to rename their streets after Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek. Thank goodness!
(It may yet come.)
And another thing. here in Maputo, as in Dar s-Salaam, I’ve noticed many main streets named after non-native heroes of the African liberation era. Julius Nyerere, Ahmed Sekou Toure, Albert Luthuli, etc etc. But how come you never seem to see that same relaxed but generous mak of inter-country respect being offered in Arab capital cities?
I think the answer has to do with the inter-twined nature of Arab politics, and the still unformed, or at any rate potentially precarious, state of the Arab “state system”. That’s why, if the mayor of Damascus, say, chose to name a big street after Nasser or Gadhafi or Ibn Saud, this act would immediately be seen as having suspect political motives…. Better to stick to long-gone heroes of the Arab past!
I think it’s rather nice that so many African countries’ elites feel able to celebrate each other’s national heroes and (by inference) each other’s liberation narratives.
And talking about celebrating other people’s narratives, when do you think we’ll get a Nelson Mandela Street or an Olaf palme Street or whatever in Washington DC. The only streets I recall there named after furrners are Raoul Wallenberg Place (a small street that was was thus renamed mainly to annoy the Soviets whose embassy is right there), and of course L’Enfant Plaza. Neither of those really celebrates another country’s national narrative… All we seem to be getting in DC and the rest of the USA these days, in the renaming of public spaces department, is endless Ronald reagan this’s and thats.