Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier (20 page)

“Thieves!” I shouted and pointed.

The customs official blinked at me lazily and returned to the business at hand, which was negotiating the highest bribe possible from K. The thieves themselves laughed at me. I glanced at the immigration building, where the owner of the lorry was obviously held up under an avalanche of paperwork.

K was now rifling behind the seat of the pickup, where we had stashed our money. I said, “Look at those guys nicking the fertilizer.”

K nodded. “Ja.”

“If you wait with the car, I’ll run inside and find the owner of the lorry. Half his load will be gone by the time he gets back.”

K shook his head. “Leave the gondies to thieve from each other,” he said. “Now that they’ve stolen everything they can from the wazungu, they have to pinch from their own kin. Special bloody people, hey? Aren’t they? Special.”

The customs official received his bribe and accompanied us to the gate, where the gate guard also insisted on a “price to open the border for you, Mister Petrol.” So we paid again and—in another process of negotiation I was now too hot and too demoralized to follow—the gate guard paid his cut to the customs agent and to another man (dressed in camouflage fatigues, dark glasses, and tennis shoes, with a gun slung across his belly). During this time the owner of the lorry came out of the immigration building. He was a fat black man, perspiring heavily, and overdressed for the Nyamapanda border post. He was wearing a purple, long-sleeved nylon shirt that gleamed in the sun, thick, black nylon trousers, shiny black cowboy boots, and rows of gold chains that appeared out of the folds of fat at his neck and wrists as if they had been surgically imbedded into his skin.

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 a black person prior to 1964 was to enter a world of oppression and misery. To be born a black person in that country from 1964 until 1992 was to be born into a raging, illogical series of wars. To try to understand the events that led to such chaotic misery is a lesson in man’s inhumanity to man.

From 1964 to 1974, Frelimo (Frente de Libertação de Mocambique) rebels fought against Portugal for independence, which finally came in 1975. Meanwhile, ZANLA rebels (massing against the Rhodesian government forces) had been using Frelimo camps in Mozambique as launching posts for raids into Rhodesia. The Rhodesian forces came into Mozambique in an effort to quell both Frelimo and ZANLA. To help serve this purpose, they formed Renamo (Mozambique National Resistance) —whose members eventually included disgruntled Frelimo soldiers, Portuguese who had lost their homes and land at independence, and ex-Rhodesian soldiers.

After Mozambique had gained her independence from Portugal in 1975, the Rhodesians continued to fund Renamo, which was now set on overthrowing the Marxist-Leninist government of Samora Machel. In turn, Samora Machel relied on funds and support from the Communist bloc. When Rhodesia gained independence, Renamo was kept alive by the South Africans (who objected to African National Congress camps in Mozambique) as well as by the United States during the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan’s knee-jerk anti-Communist stance appeared to come at any cost to the people whose lives were at stake on the ground.

The civil war in Mozambique finally ended in 1992, soon after the close of the Cold War. By then there had been more than a million military and civilian deaths. An estimated six million Mozambicans had been dislocated and displaced. The savagery reported from both sides was legendary in scope: rape, torture, forced murders, sex slaves—every possible abuse and insult against humankind and nature can be found in the conflict that had exploded on Mozambican soil.

It would be accurate to say that the only thing to come out of the war was some of the most profound misery to be found anywhere on earth. When the war ended, Mozambique was judged by the United Nations to be the poorest country in the world and 1993 statistics showed it, alongside Angola, having the highest infant mortality rate of any country. Land mines contributed significantly to the crippling legacy of the war.

The United Nations initially put the number of mines in postwar Mozambique at two million, but officially revised it down to one million (roughly one land mine for every eighteen people). Before the devastating floods of early 1999 and 2000 (when mines shifted as far as twenty kilometers, and fishermen were catching mines in their nets), it was reported that four people were killed every month by mines. The United Nations estimates that nine thousand Mozambicans have been killed or injured by land mines since 1980. Few maps were made of the mines laid during the civil war, but the entire country contains minefields. The highest concentration of land mines was in its westernmost province, along the Zimbabwean border, where K and I were traveling.

At one time, there was a lively if limited black market trade in signs pilfered from Mozambique that read PERIGO (danger) or HOKOYO CHIMBAMBAIRA (beware of mines), some of which had the added decoration of a skull and crossbones. It wasn’t uncommon to see these signs nailed proudly to the doors of some of the best bathrooms in South Africa. These signs replaced the more mundane WARNING: CROSSWINDS, which had been in vogue in the eighties. The result, of course, is that although a few South Africans had all the warning they needed lavatorially speaking, the poor Mozambicans were left even more clueless than they had been before about the location of the potentially fatal flotsam of their recent conflict. In the absence of signs, the locals resorted to marking known minefields or areas with unexploded ordnance (UXO, in the lingo of the war-weary) with red rocks, rocks of any description, or even branches pulled into a line.

I LOOKED OUT the window at the life that struggled on either side of the road. There were villages spread out thin and continuous, beside the road. Nothing looked old and established; it all looked rash, and temporary—something that had been erected out of ruin, with a watchful eye toward the next possible catastrophe. Outside one hut, a woman was scraping at the ground with a hoe. Along the verge, a small boy was herding goats; a man was whipping a donkey that lunged weakly under the heavy and ungraceful weight of an overloaded scotch cart. A woman swayed under a bucket of water, a baby bulging from a cloth sling on her back and a toddler trotting in her wake. Life expectancy in Mozambique was about thirty-five. Given the country’s history, that figure seemed miraculously high.

“Why is it,” asked Graça Machel, former Mozambique education minister, widow of President Machel, and now the wife of Nelson Mandela, “that the worst of everything that is evil and inhuman is to be found in Africa? What is wrong with us Africans?”

In the 1970s, K had endured five years of war. The experience had left him (as far as I could tell) still tortured, angry, aggressive, lost. While it is impossible, and perhaps useless, to measure one person’s war against another’s, it is hard to imagine how almost
thirty
years of continuous war have affected the local population of Mozambique; millions of children have grown up knowing nothing but war. For Mozambican youth living and, too often, dying in a sustained, saturated atmosphere of chaos and conflict, the choices were grim. They could either fight (there are no reliable estimates, but it is thought that there were as many as eight to ten thousand child soldiers recruited—some of them kidnapped—during the civil war) or risk life and limb trying to scratch out a perfunctory existence amid the minefields. Girl children who were recruited into the armies and who escaped the fighting were used as sex slaves.

“This was all under martial law when I was here,” said K, nodding into the villages. “All these villagers had to clear out during that time. Some of them went to the cities, or across the borders in Malawi, Rhodesia, and so on, but others went and hid in the shateen. We’d come across their little camps. Just a little bush structure—like a tent made out of branches—and maybe, a mile or two away, you’d find where they had cooked their meal for the day. Then they’d walk miles and miles to their gardens—they’d never sleep close to where they ate or grew their crops. And if we found their gardens, we destroyed those too. Those poor buggers. They lived like animals the whole time. When they could, they caught rats and snakes and ate those. They ate roots and leaves and berries. They were starving and shit scared. They were shit scared of us and they were shit scared of the Porks and they were shit scared of the gooks. Then there was always a pretty good chance of standing on an antipersonnel mine. Imagine! One hundred and ten percent shit scared morning, noon, and night.”

IN THE FACE of such profound human misery, the trifling fact that I was desperate to find a tree behind which to pee seemed almost unmentionably trite. Nevertheless, I finally drew K’s attention to my plight.

“Too many gondies,” he said. “They’ll see you.”

“I’m sure they’ve seen it before.”

“Not a peeing mazungu. At least not a lady.”

“I’m sure it won’t kill them.”

“Okay, okay,” K said. “I’ll find you a tree.”

“It really doesn’t have to be a very big tree,” I said. “In fact, it doesn’t have to be a tree at all. It could be an anthill. A shrub. A pebble. Oh look, you’ve just driven past another hundred million possible places.”

K gazed out at the huts, imperturbably. “Let’s just get through this village.”

“But as far as I can tell, Mozambique is all one solid village,” I protested.

“I’ll hurry,” said K, stepping on the accelerator.

Which was how we were caught, in the middle of what looked like nowhere (but was actually the town of Changara), by two policemen with a speed gun who were sitting on wooden milking stools on the side of the road.

One of the policemen sauntered up to the car. He was very polite. He showed us the speed gun, of which he was evidently very proud. “You can’t excuse this gun,” he told us, rather obscurely. “Man he can lie, but not this equipment.”

K stared with, what I thought was, unnecessary interest at the machine and then asked—in what I assumed was a deliberate snub to my bladder—to see how it worked.

“No, no,” said the policeman. “You can’t unless there is a speeding car.”