Go Tell the Crocodiles Read online

  © 2018 by Rowan Moore Gerety

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

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  Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2017

  Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution

  ISBN 978-1-62097-277-9 (e-book)

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Gerety, Rowan Moore, author.

  Title: Go tell the crocodiles: chasing prosperity in Mozambique / Rowan Moore Gerety.

  Description: New York: New Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017042781

  Subjects: LCSH: Informal sector (Economics)—Mozambique. | Mozambique—Economic conditions—21st century. | Mozambique—Social conditions—21st century.

  Classification: LCC HC890 .G47 2018 | DDC 330.9679053—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042781

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  For Lena

  Contents

  Introduction: It All Happens on the Margins

  MAPUTO/BEIRA

  1.Small-Town Hustle

  ZAMBEZIA

  2.What Can You Do with an Aging Warlord?

  ZAMBEZIA

  3.Branco é Branco

  ZAMBEZIA

  4.Confessions of a Human Smuggler

  NAMPULA

  5.Where Have You Hidden the Cholera?

  NAMPULA

  6.Go Tell the Crocodiles

  TETE

  7.A Mercenary’s Retirement Plan

  TETE

  8.Neighborhood Headquarters

  BEIRA

  9.The Selling Life

  MAPUTO

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Introduction

  It All Happens on the Margins

  MAPUTO/BEIRA

  Antes deles quererem partilhar o país, antes deles quererem partilhar os recursos, antes deles quererem partilhar o poder, eles já privatizaram a história . . . já fizeram a partilha da história.

  Before they tried to divvy up the country, before they tried to divvy up our natural resources and political power, they had already privatized history, they had already divvied up history itself.

  —CARLOS NUNO CASTEL-BRANCO1

  Dom Jaime Pedro Gonçalves answered the door with a probing squint, peering through horn-rimmed glasses on the other side of a screen. He came outside and invited me to sit down, a tall man bent with age, soft curls of white hair at his temples. “I want to talk with you about peace,” I said, first quietly, and then loudly. The seventy-five-year-old bishop cocked his head to hear, smiled slyly, and raised an eyebrow. “The subject of peace in Mozambique is very sensitive,” he said. “Very sensitive.”

  It’s true. It was a sensitive moment to be asking about the state of play in Mozambique. The parties in the country’s grinding sixteen-year civil war, which ended in 1992, had returned to violence after twenty years of fragile stability. The leader of Renamo, the opposition party, was holed up in the bush while his men staged ambushes on convoys of trucks and passenger buses under military escort, recalling the terrorizing tactics of the 1980s. Thousands of Mozambicans had fled their homes to Malawi, which once sheltered more than half a million Mozambican refugees during the civil war.2 It appeared that troops under the direction of the party in power, Frelimo, or the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, had ransacked villages and burned the homes of people they accused of supporting the opposition. This renewed violence had only exacerbated Mozambique’s worsening economic crisis. A steep drop in commodity prices put billion-dollar natural gas and mining projects on hold, while a series of corruption scandals revealed the rot at the core of large state-owned corporations. Mozambique’s currency, the metical, lost a third of its value in 2015 alone.3

  Dom Jaime, as people in Beira affectionately called him, was the retired Catholic archbishop of Mozambique’s second most important city. Twenty-five years earlier, Dom Jaime had been a lead facilitator in the negotiations that brought peace to Mozambique in the first place. It was Dom Jaime who, in 1988, had boarded a South African military plane in his clerical vestments and landed in the bush in the dead of night. There, sitting by a campfire surrounded by men with AK-47s, he’d dared to broach the subject of peace with Afonso Dhlakama, the leader of the Resistencia Nacional Moçambicana, or Renamo, a group the government often referred to as bandidos armados—armed bandits. “When I went to talk with him,” Dom Jaime recalled, he asked, “‘So—can you guys help me end this war?’” Dom Jaime laughed out loud. “I said, ‘Yes: I’m not here for tourism!’”

  Surely, if anyone could speak freely, he could. Dom Jaime disagreed adamantly. “You can’t speak about [peace] openly, because Frelimo won’t accept it,” he said. The problem wasn’t uttering the word “peace” so much as suggesting what concessions the ruling party might have to make to achieve it. “Violence is all [Dhlakama] has,” Dom Jaime said. “We need to create an environment for democracy, so that his party can be a political party and not an army. But nobody in Frelimo accepts that premise. Who’s shouting ‘peace’ anyway? The president himself goes around saying ‘Peace, peace!’” He paused, incredulous. “But then—you’re the one who’s president!” he said. “You say you want peace and you can’t get it? It’s a joke.”

  Fundamentally, Gonçalves saw the simmering conflict as a struggle over what promised to be boundless wealth from recently discovered reservoirs of natural gas in the Rovuma river basin, near the border with Tanzania. As we spoke, he pointed out, Frelimo’s powerful Central Committee had just finished a meeting in Maputo. The occasion was billed as a reshuffling of the upper ranks of the party’s political operation; Dom Jaime was convinced there were other items on the agenda.4 “The Comité Central met yesterday all of a sudden,” he said. “For what? To plunder the riches of the Rovuma!” His eyes widened sternly. “The resources of this country don’t belong to the state, but to the party,” he said, referring to Frelimo. “And whoever is the head of the party says how it will be. They say they want peace. What peace?” Both sides had participated in ambushes against civilians, he said, fighting over control of the country’s economy while its citizens continued to live in poverty. “They’ve declared war,” he said. “It’s a full-on war. You see, Renamo wants some of the riches of the Rovuma, but now Frelimo has said, ‘No!’”

  For a moment, Gonçalves seemed indignant with the whole line of questioning implicit in the idea of talking about peace. “So, how will it be?” he asked. “A citizen like me, what can I say? It’s very hard to get a grasp on politics in Africa. It’s the politics of dictatorship,” he said. “They do what they want.”

  His tone shifted. “I’ve been to the United States,” he said. “I’ve been to Canada—I studied there. And, in fact, I was amazed with American life, Canadian life—that the citizens have real freedom of speech. They choose their leaders freely. . . . How is that? Lif
e is beautiful! Citizens compete for education, for a better livelihood. . . . On weekends, they go out to hear singers. The good life, isn’t it? I enjoyed life in a democracy,” he said wistfully. “Here, you can’t talk.”

  Dom Jaime Gonçalves died at home exactly two months later. He had allowed me to record our conversation on the condition that I would not share it publicly. “Forgive me,” he said. “I know that I have a lot to say about peace, because I’ve worked for peace. I’m an old man, sitting here now, and my old age has come in the service of peace, of reconciliation between Renamo and the government.”

  It was moving, frightening even, to hear a man who had shown such courage and leadership in the quest for peace silenced by the threat of violence in the twilight of his life. Privately, Dom Jaime offered a biting rebuke of Mozambique’s government and of its backers in the West. It was the United States and Europe, he contended, that allowed the country to turn its back on the promise of the 1992 peace accords he had worked so hard to achieve. And since he need not fear retribution in death, I hope he would approve of my sharing his clarion call here.

  Africa’s “Success Story”

  On my first visit to Mozambique, as a tourist in 2008, I remember being awed at how laid-back it all seemed. Maputo was not the feverish African capital of my imagination, but a sleepy city of Soviet-style apartment buildings and warrens of sheet-metal roofs under a haze of hot sun and Latin-accented marrabenta music. Security guards and day laborers greeted me everywhere with an enthusiastic thumbs-up, a gesture to match the universal greeting Tudo bem? (Everything good?) Time-rich and cash-poor, people were impossibly polite and unbelievably generous, offering a spare seat, a glass of beer, and unhurried conversation at every turn.

  From Maputo, I hitchhiked partway up the coast with a white South African who ran a container-lifting business at the port in Beira. Through vast expanses of coconut palms and thorny acacia trees, we passed village after roadside village where bundles of firewood and neatly packed sacks of charcoal lined the shoulder. The most obvious sign of the war, to my eye, was simply the awful state of the roads. Mozambique’s coastline covers an expanse that would stretch from San Diego to well past the Canadian border. Yet when we reached the turnoff at Inchope, a hardscrabble crossroads of container trucks and stalls selling fried food, after eighteen hours of driving, I could scarcely believe how little ground we’d covered. Already, I’d traveled through regions speaking six different languages, yet two-thirds of the country still stretched out before me to the north.

  Mozambique’s majestic Y-shaped outline, like the maps of so many other African countries, is a consequence of an accommodation between natural boundaries—lakes, rivers, mountains—and colonial ambitions, reached at the end of the nineteenth century without regard for the ethnic and cultural ties the border cleaved in two. Slender Malawi wriggles down into the middle of the country. From South Africa to Tanzania, the coast is a long chain of breathtaking beaches, with the influence of medieval Muslim trade routes felt more and more strongly as you work your way north. Inland, a broad plateau of dry savannah gradually gives way to forests and chains of knobby granite mountains, meeting the highlands of Zambia and Zimbabwe.

  For a long time, independent Mozambique seemed to some to be following a period of extraordinarily painful history with an equally remarkable recovery. Until 1975, Mozambique endured a brutal, if uneven, Portuguese presence dating to March of 1498, when Vasco da Gama first sailed up the coast and anchored off Ilha de Moçambique.5 According to one early Portuguese account, da Gama’s cannons had bombarded the town three times over by the time he sailed for India at the end of the month.6 Today, you can still visit the oldest European building in the Southern Hemisphere, a small Catholic chapel made of coral limestone on the northern tip of the island, built in 1522.

  The Portuguese Empire extended its reach in Mozambique over the course of centuries. The sale of slaves, gold, and ivory along the coast and waterways eventually gave way to prazos, or plantations. The prazos produced cotton, sugar, and peanuts for companies chartered by the Crown but often operating completely outside its influence.7 From the late nineteenth century, the colonial government acted as a broker in men, earning rents for sending Mozambican men to the gold mines dotting South Africa’s Witwatersrand Basin.8 Those who failed to pay taxes or maintain formal employment had a “moral obligation” to give their labor to the colony, building much of the colonial capital, Lourenço Marques, in forced six-month terms.9 Another form of forced labor took hold in agriculture, farther north, as colonial enterprises extracted profits by using state-sanctioned violence to boost recruitment and production quotas. Under Portugal’s dictatorial “new state,” in the mid-twentieth century, the country looked more and more to output from its colonies to propel development at home.

  Like Zimbabwe, Namibia, Guinea-Bissau, and Algeria, Mozambique was forged in a violent struggle for independence that culminated in a break from Portugal in 1975. As in Eritrea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Angola, independence in Mozambique was quickly followed by a protracted war fought in part through Cold War proxy, with support from foreign governments.

  In the mid-1980s, the devastation of the civil war pushed Frelimo to abandon the hard-line Marxism of its early years and turn to capitalism for relief. Frelimo applied to join the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, paving the way for rigid economic reforms backed by the Reagan administration. Exxon got independent Mozambique’s first oil exploration contract; Lehman Brothers was hired to advise the government in restructuring its debt.10 But by 1990 Mozambique was officially the poorest country in the world.11 As then president Joaquim Chissano put it in a speech in Maputo,

  The US said, “Open yourself to . . . the World Bank, and IMF.” What happened? . . . We are told now: “Marxism! You are devils. Change this policy.” OK. Marxism is gone. Open market economy. OK, Frelimo is trying to create capitalism. . . . We went to Reagan and I said, “I want money for the private sector to boost people who want to develop a bourgeoisie.” Answer: $10 million, then $15 million more, then another $15 million. You tell me to do away with Marxism, the Soviet Union and give me [only] $40 million. OK, we have changed. Now they say, “If you don’t go to a multiparty system, don’t expect help from us.”

  Mozambique devalued its currency, slowed reconstruction projects, and slashed salaries for civil servants all in the service of meeting the IMF’s terms for joining the global economy.12 Thanks to IMF-backed reforms, a doctor on the government payroll earned $350 a month in 1991, $175 a month in 1993, and less than $100 a month by 1996.13 For two decades beginning in 1993, Mozambique notched year after year of impressive growth (GDP annual growth averaged 8.6 percent from 1993 to 2012) as the economy clawed its way back from the incalculable damage of back-to-back wars.14

  By 2004, when Mozambique elected its second president in a decade of multiparty elections, more than twenty African countries essentially had presidents for life.15 Robert Mugabe, José Eduardo dos Santos, and Isaias Afwerki were all freedom fighters turned despots. Mozambique, however, had democratic elections praised by international observers.16 Tourism had begun to flourish on the Indian Ocean beaches of the country’s meandering two-thousand-mile coastline.17 Donors funded major health, education, and economic development programs, support that made up more than a quarter of Mozambique’s GDP from 1995 to 2010 and, at times, more than half the government budget.18

  “Success story?” asked the journalist Joseph Hanlon in the title of an article published in 1997, arguing that IMF reforms essentially put the interests of Mozambique’s foreign creditors and investors ahead of those of its citizens.19 Rock-bottom salaries for civil servants, he argued, only encouraged corruption and poor service. Banking restrictions meant that local companies were at a disadvantage in competing with multinationals.

  “The newspapers hint at trouble just beneath the surface,” Jeremy Weinstein, an American graduate student, wrote in 2002 as donors praised P
resident Chissano for vowing not to run for a third term: “Two major bank failures, the assassination of the country’s most respected independent journalist, the continued depreciation of the currency, and stop-and-start talks between [Frelimo] and [Renamo].”20

  Fifteen years later, you could write the same paragraph almost verbatim. Yet for most of the intervening years, lenders (the IMF, the World Bank) and donors (the U.S. and European governments) have largely stuck to the notion that Mozambique’s continued economic growth offset any troubling signs of inequality or political discord.21 “Following a long civil war, Mozambique has made the transition to peace, stability and sustained economic growth,” reads the “About Mozambique” section of the USAID mission’s website, “providing an essential link between landlocked neighbors and the global marketplace.”22

  In 2013, the IMF published a study called “Africa’s Success: More Than a Resource Story,” profiling the high-octane economies of Mozambique and five other African countries. “The main takeaway from the country cases is what my colleagues called a virtuous circle,” writes Antoinette Sayeh, director of the IMF’s sub-Saharan Africa program, in a blog post announcing the report. “All six countries carried out sensible and medium term–oriented policymaking and important structural reforms, which in turn attracted higher aid flows and made it possible for these countries to receive debt relief, releasing their own resources.”23

  Released indeed, but for whom? The single largest private sector project in Mozambique—responsible for nearly a third of exports—is an aluminum smelter that consumes nearly half the country’s electricity but employs just over a thousand people. For every dollar Mozal earns the Mozambican government, its foreign backers earn twenty-one.24 In the south, Frelimo’s Strategic Plan for Agricultural Development includes a large-scale rice-farming project led by the Chinese corporation Wanbao, which stripped thousands of farmers of their land without compensation. Farther north, subsistence farmers have had to make way for South African bananas and Brazilian soybeans, even as the productivity of Mozambique’s small farms has declined since the 1990s.