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  One of the most striking sights in Nampula, the northern provincial capital ringed by some of Mozambique’s largest megaprojects, is the massive granite dome just east of the city, where dozens of informal rock quarries operate around the clock. Smoke rises from the rock before dawn and long past dusk as small groups of two to five men stoke fires to heat the granite where it is vulnerable to cracking. They whittle away at the inselberg—a mass of rock some five hundred feet high and a half mile across—with picks, sledgehammers, and crowbars. The mountain is carted away wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow. It’s backbreaking work that yields barely enough to live, yet it employs far more men than the $1 billion ilmenite mine on Nampula’s coast.

  As I write, a stream of crises has stripped the veneer from Mozambique’s much-touted success. Donors and international institutions that long acknowledged “challenges” and “short-comings” in their otherwise sunny appraisals have been forced to reckon with the consequences of Mozambique’s path to capitalism.25

  Politically motivated assassinations took the lives of nine Renamo officials in 2016 alone, leading some to suggest the existence of a hit squad linked to Mozambique’s secret police. Both judge and prosecutor in a high-profile case targeting a kidnapping ring were murdered two years apart. Police ended an investigation of the judge’s death for lack of progress; a suspect in the prosecutor’s murder recently broke out of jail.26 Gilles Cistac, a prominent constitutional lawyer at the leading public university, was gunned down as he drank his customary espresso on a Tuesday morning in downtown Maputo.27 Cistac had made the mistake of suggesting a legal framework for a power-sharing arrangement between Renamo and Frelimo.

  After four years of on-again, off-again fighting, Renamo and Frelimo have entered a delicate cease-fire. It’s still unclear how the conflict will ultimately be resolved. International mediators went home at the end of 2016, unable to extract meaningful concessions from either side. Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama “wants power Frelimo won’t give him,” Dom Jaime said. As it is, Dhlakama remains in the bush near Renamo’s wartime headquarters, conducting negotiations with President Filipe Nyusi via cell phone.28 He’s said he’s fearful of coming out of hiding because he could be assassinated. But if Mozambique’s next presidential election is to be held successfully, Dhlakama, who earned 37 percent of the vote and an outright majority in half of Mozambique’s provinces in 2014, will have to campaign in public.

  Most damaging of all has been the specter of kleptocracy Dom Jaime raised so starkly on his porch: “The country’s wealth doesn’t belong to the state, but to the party,” he said. Over two decades, many in Frelimo’s old guard, along with two presidents and their families, have used their ties to the state to accumulate vast wealth with impunity.29 At the grassroots, Mozambicans have long bemoaned the cabritismo, or “goat-ism,” of hospital workers and border guards, from the adage that “a goat eats where it is tied.”30

  It’s only recently that cabritismo has reached a scale that threatens to bring down the whole economy with it. In 2016, it was revealed that the government had taken out $2.2 billion in secret loans over the past several years to fund three newly formed state companies with ties to Mozambique’s security services (SISE).31 Three hundred fifty million dollars went to buy boats for a failed tuna-fishing venture. Hundreds of millions more bought military hardware from around the world—France, Germany, China, Israel, Sweden, the United States. Many observers speculated that prices on some of the deals had been inflated to line the pockets of Frelimo’s elite.

  At the outset, Mozambican leaders might have expected that the “wealth of the Rovuma,” as Dom Jaime put it, would allow them to repay the secret loans in time without incident. But the new debt coincided with a drop in global commodity prices that put major gas and oil projects on hold, helping to send inflation out of control. Credit rating agencies downgraded Mozambican debt as donors pulled back and the government defaulted on loan repayments. The scandal sparked the biggest confrontation between Mozambique and its Western backers since the end of the civil war. And yet, as noted by Hanlon, now a development scholar and all-around chronicler of Mozambique, “had it not been for the unexpected drop in oil and gas prices, lenders and donors probably would have allowed it to pass with little comment and a small slap on the wrist.”32

  Dom Jaime became visibly frustrated when I asked him what role he thought foreign governments played in Mozambique’s ongoing political and economic crises. “They support Frelimo’s policies because they’re buying Mozambique’s wealth,” he sputtered. “What do you think the Americans are spending so much money on here? On peace?

  “I spoke to the European Union. I told them, ‘You’re the ones responsible for the failure of democracy in Mozambique, because as long as we’ve had elections in Mozambique, Frelimo has done as it pleased. Frelimo holds elections all by itself and then imposes the results on the people. And then the European Union says, “Long live freedom in Mozambique!”’”

  Even when international observers acknowledge that there’s been electoral fraud or misuse of state resources during political campaigns, “even then, Renamo has to accept the results,” Dom Jaime said. “Your government shouldn’t be playing this double game,” he said. “Money for Frelimo, and ‘peace, peace, peace.’”

  Implicit in Dom Jaime’s critique is the idea that Mozambique’s embrace of global capitalism has always been more important to Western backers than issues of corruption and governance.33 The secret debt fiasco was made possible, on the one hand, by the willingness of foreign companies to profit from suspect deals for military hardware, and, on the other, by the failure of European banks to perform due diligence on the loans guaranteed by the government in Maputo. The president of France himself was on hand for a photo op when Frelimo inked a $300 million deal with a shipyard on the English Channel; when the first illegal loan was discovered, the IMF asked only that it be documented in the national budget.34

  The Rapper

  Five years before I met Dom Jaime, I’d been to a lecture by a rapper called Azagaia that offered my first glimpse of the themes at the center of this book. The venue was a packed auditorium on the campus of Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, in Maputo, named after Mozambique’s most famous freedom fighter. Azagaia had studied geology there just a few years earlier, when he was still called Edson da Luz. Azagaias, I learned later, were the curved spears warriors in Mozambique’s Muenemutapa Empire used in the sixteenth century to fight off the earliest advances of Portuguese colonialism.

  Azagaia told the crowd he was growing his hair out in protest. His hair wasn’t long yet, perhaps two inches coiled in cloud-like tufts he pulled at for show, but it got a good reaction. “It’s a peaceful protest against bad governance,” he said, smiling but apparently not joking. Azagaia urged the audience, 150 or so of the country’s best students, to join him.

  “If you want to know what this country is really like today, talk to your maids and gardeners,” he told them. He railed against the country’s utter dependence on South African imports at the grocery store, and against under-the-table exports of vast expanses of forest in the form of whole logs. “We won’t cut our hair until our demands are met,” he said. Azagaia hoped to redefine the priorities of the leaders he held responsible for the sorry state of Mozambican politics.

  The theme of the talk was government corruption, and as he connected the dots between bribes at traffic stops and state contracts doled out in secret, Azagaia returned again and again to a single point: “Africa é informal,” he said. “What we’re seeing in this country is the informal being institutionalized: Everything important here happens on the margins.”

  At the time, I’d been in Mozambique less than two weeks, based at the university’s nearby African Studies Center on a Fulbright fellowship. I was there to do research on cell phone use, but Azagaia’s observations seemed to follow me wherever I went.

  At the building where I stayed in downtown Maputo, apartment owners paid the doorman a small
salary, but most of his income came from another, off-the-books source: the job gave him control of an empty hallway in the atrium, along with the space beneath the stairs, which he rented out to dozens of sidewalk merchants who stored their things there overnight. Early every morning a steady stream of vendors came through the lobby with the doorman’s blessing to collect huge bundles of women’s shoes and clothing tied up in black plastic. In the evenings they returned to drop off their inventory before heading home to far-flung neighborhoods on the outskirts of Maputo.

  In Mozambique a side hustle is called a biscate. It’s Portuguese for “odd job”—literally a beak-full of work. Everyone has one. I met doormen who wove baskets and repaired bicycles or resoled shoes for the families of maids who worked in the apartments above. Outside the city, housekeepers with access to refrigerators sold ice-cold water to construction workers nearby. Security guards in uniform sold cigarettes and phone credit.

  In my building, a stark midcentury block of concrete built for Portuguese colonists, the original plumbing system had long since been supplanted by a series of makeshift fixes. The pipes were still there, buried behind the walls, but they’d been dry for years. Water came, instead, through the tangles of exposed PVC that snaked their way up a back stairwell and entered the apartment over the balcony wall.

  All these workarounds revealed a society where formal institutions—the police, elections—simply held less sway than I was used to, where the drive to solve problems seldom passed through official channels. Corruption itself is a kind of workaround, but the phenomenon Azagaia described was much broader. There were, of course, standards and rules of engagement for political and economic life, but it often seemed that the most important ones ran counter to what was written down or enshrined in law.

  One day, I went with a colleague, Eduardo Jossias, to see a plot of land where he planned to build a house across the river from Maputo. On our way, we stopped by the local store, a bright cube of royal blue on an otherwise empty stretch of road. Behind it were four men sitting in the shade of a mango tree around a bottle of red wine, carrying on gaily. They were not all that old, but they still had barely enough teeth among them for a single mouth, let alone four. The one who seemed to be in charge was a large bald man with a mustache and a pair of Chinese aviator sunglasses perched crookedly on his nose. They were thrilled to see Jossias, greeting him with calls of “Pai!” and laughing until we left.

  Jossias described the bald man as the dono da terra. I suspect he meant something more than “landowner”: he was a big man around Catembe. I asked what his line of business was. “He has a discoteca, he has two big stores. He went and lived in Swaziland for twenty years and accumulated some money, and now he’s o rico de aqui”—the rich man from here, Jossias said. Jossias seemed to be on friendly terms with the lone policeman stationed in the middle of the road to Ponto d’Ouro. The two exchanged small talk on the way out and the officer waved us onward on the way back.

  Jossias got great amusement out of telling a story about the cop and the bald man. The cop had stopped a young man from the area for something or other and found him to be insufficiently deferential. The young man spoke impatiently and without apology. Eventually, he shrugged the officer off and simply walked away. What good was it wearing a uniform? Feeling slighted by the encounter, the policeman went to the bald man to complain of a “lack of respect.” “Can you see what it’s like here?” Jossias asked. “That a cop will go to a local guy for something like that? He was looking for a solution.”

  When it came to researching cell phones—the purpose that had brought me to Mozambique—I wasn’t getting very far. Phone companies were reluctant to prize open their files and offer any data that would help me understand how and where coverage was growing. Cities and towns were claiming an ever-growing number of young people and strivers from the Mozambican countryside, and I was interested in understanding how cell phones influenced urbanization. The farmers and workers I tried to interview were universally friendly and accommodating, but they often found my questions beside the point. Yes, I have a cell phone, they’d say, earnest and a bit perplexed. It’s great; I just don’t have enough money to use it.

  Occasionally, these interviews did turn up interesting tidbits. In Nampula, I spoke to a young woodcarver, Tino, who came to the city from the Mueda plateau, a storied but dry and isolated corner of Mozambique that had been pivotal in the struggle for independence. Tino and I met one morning in a sleepy café down the hill from where he worked, and he nursed a bottle of Rhino gin while we talked. Asked what he used his cell phone for, Tino repeated an answer I’d heard from many others: “sickness and death.”

  Tino told me a story from two years before we met. There was no electricity or cell phone service in the part of Mueda where his extended family lived, but an uncle kept a phone. Another relative had given it to him on a visit from the city, and he charged the phone when he could to listen to the radio on it or on the rare occasion when he needed to get in touch with someone in Nampula.

  One day, Tino was surprised to get a missed call from his uncle: people in the city call the country, not the other way round. Tino assured me his uncle wouldn’t call just to say hello.

  With so many people chronically short of minutes, Mozambicans have devised ingenious systems to make the best of the things they are able to do for free on their cell phones. They send promotional text messages with advertisements followed by the words “please call me,” or they send “beeps,” when the caller hangs up before anyone can answer and start draining the caller’s credit. Since only outgoing calls are billed, the question of who calls whom is an important one, intricately tied up with social expectations about wealth.

  Seeing his uncle’s beep, Tino knew he had only a short window to respond. To make a call at all, you had to walk to the top of a hill an hour away from the village. His uncle would stand there for a few minutes waiting for a call back. But Tino had no credit either. So he did the only thing he could do: he sent a text message, hoping that his uncle had brought along a younger relative who could read: “Uncle: tell us what’s going on. Once if sickness, twice if death.”

  When word came back to Nampula in the form of two liga me’s—“please call me” messages—Tino told his grandmother. It took three days to raise money for bus fare and for funeral offerings among friends and relatives in Nampula. Tino’s grandmother left for Mueda with a big bag of rice. “She didn’t even know who had died when she left,” Tino explained, “but she went to see the grave. When the family tells us something that way, they only try to inform us and don’t check in again. Money doesn’t live in our pockets, so they know we won’t be able to come the same day.”

  This story captured everything I’d heard about cell phones so far: their usefulness, their expense, the ingenuity borne of spotty coverage, the influence of illiteracy. Most of all, though, it highlighted the sheer drive to pragmatism, the search for an improvised solution where an organized system comes up short. It was a theme I’d come to think of as a corollary to Azagaia’s talk at the university—the reason, as I saw it, so much happened on the margins. In the government, the dominance of the informal may well represent corruption, but for the rest of the country, the margins were simply wider than the page.

  Gradually, I came to see my gleanings about cell phones as part of the larger theme of informality, one that offered a much richer view of Mozambican society when taken whole. Tino and his brother, Beto, were part of a woodcarving cooperative that operated out of the courtyard of the Museu Nacional de Etnografia, turning misshapen logs of ebony and rosewood into ornamental elephants and interlocking columns of human bodies they sold to tourists. On one visit, Beto explained that they also did a decent trade in custom-carved car and machine parts. They made the geared wheels that made CD-ROM drives work, and handles for stoves and soft-serve machines. They made motorcycle brake calipers and parts for film projectors and peanut grinders, a universe of spare parts that the formal econo
my simply couldn’t deliver reliably to northern Mozambique.

  In another neighborhood, I spoke with the local headman, Nuanhua, who had watched the countryside where he grew up get swallowed by the city as migrants poured in after Mozambique’s long civil war. He told me when the first cell phone tower had gone up and how many families had moved there in the last year.

  Then he mentioned casually that his family’s ancestral graveyard was now covered with houses, and took me to see it. Owning land is illegal in Mozambique—a holdover from the country’s Marxist beginnings—yet here was a place where the workings of an underground real estate market were as plain as day: plot by plot, someone had sold off the Nuanhua family cemetery, and tiny stucco houses had gone up amid the graves. It was an illustration of the chasm between the official world and the reality Mozambicans grappled with on a daily basis. If I wanted to understand the texture of everyday life in Mozambique, cell phones weren’t necessarily the best way in.

  Life on the Margins

  Everywhere in Mozambique, people have devised informal solutions to get by where development has failed: turning to the church for “spiritual cures” where modern health care is unavailable, or digging up rubies and tourmaline by hand after dark to avoid detection by the multinationals that own Mozambique’s richest gem fields. This book explores the efforts of ordinary people to provide for themselves where foreign aid, the formal economy, and the government have been unable to. In some cases, these DIY strategies work; in others, they fail completely. In rural areas where the cash economy is tethered to passing cars and buses, you’ll find merchants clustered near bad potholes and beside speed bumps—acutely aware that the best chance of making a sale comes where traffic moves slowly. The roadside economy can be especially brutal, though, too. Regular stops draw scores of vendors holding plastic buckets of produce aloft toward open car windows, desperate to make a sale amid a crush of people all selling the very same thing—oranges or bananas, peanuts or avocados. Sales opportunities come sporadically and last a few minutes at best. Prices tumble by the second. City-dwelling passengers roll down a window, demand the last, best offer for a chicken dangling by the legs, and rev their engines, threatening to leave without buying anything at all. Goats go for six or seven dollars, pineapples for a quarter.