Mozambique: Rising from the Ashes
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Mozambique Rising from the Ashes Contents Foreword 3 The first states 4 Five centuries of exploitation 5 The long struggle for independence From independence to civil war 10 A nation in flames 12 The quest for peace 15 The challenge of demobilisation 17 Defence systems down 19 Landmines: a bitter harvest 20 Creating a nation 23 Rebuilding broken lives 26 The dwindling of vast lands 29 Assets of the earth and sea 33 Roads to prosperity 39 The economy: painful choices 42 At the end of the rivers 45 Education: hungry minds 49 Health: the jaded jewel 53 A mother's right 59 The challenge of democracy 61 Facts and figures 62 Further reading and sources 63 Oxfam in Mozambique 64 JENNY MATTHEWS/OXFAM Oxfam UK and Ireland Rachel Waterhouse This book converted to digital file in 2010 A map of Mozambique, showing places mentioned in this book Zambia 1)1 dinu Ocean South \e\ Africa ) International boundaries Swaziland Rivers 0 100 200km Roads | ' , =! Internal boundaries 0 100 200 miles Foreword I ozambican society, its history Nations peace-keeping forces have met and its culture have been with success. Following a Peace Accord in I forged in the fire of 1992, the UN mission ONUMOZ guided international politics. The flames were Mozambique's transition from violent kindled 500 years ago, when the first conflict to nominal peace and democracy. European adventurers arrived to trade in The peace process officially ended gold, ivory, and slaves. In modern times when the nation held its first ever multi- Mozambique smouldered through a party, democratic elections in October series of liberation struggles, fuelled by 1994. Thereupon, ONUMOZ packed up weapons supplied by the superpowers. and left. After a brief exposure in the Then came the ultimate conflagration, glare of international attention, ignited by sparks from the apartheid Mozambique disappeared from the regime in neighbouring South Africa: 16 headlines. Yet for its 17 million people years of civil war, one of the most brutal another struggle was just beginning: to conflicts ever waged in Africa. repair the shattered fabric of their lives, In recent history, Mozambique stands and complete the task of forging a truly Repairing the Beira railway out as one of the rare places where United Mozambican nation. line The first states he modern boundaries of To the north of the Muenemutapa, the Mozambique were not defined powerful Maravi kingdoms straddled Tuntil the late nineteenth century. today's Malawi and northern Mozam- For centuries before that, kings and bique. To the south lived the Tonga warlords rose and fell, populations settled peoples, governed by chiefly dynasties. and migrated, and frontiers between In the land now known a Mozambique, competing societies constantly shifted. farmers grew sorghum and millet, on the The first organised state to control part coast, people fished; in the south, they of the territory now called Mozambique bred cattle.The ruling aristocracies was thirteenth-century Zimbabwe, whose controlled taxes and international trade. rulers lived in stone-walled citadels. Two The Muenemutapa chiefs levied a tax on hundred years later this civilisation agriculture and controlled the production declined, giving way to the of many gold mines, where thousands of Muenemutapa Empire, which at its their subjects were forced to labour and height in the sixteenth century was sweat. They also controlled the gold trade probably the largest and most powerful with Swahili-speaking Arab merchants Traditional Mapiko masks, state of Central and Southern Africa, settling on the coast. Maravi leaders, used in ceremonies of the extending from the Kalahari Desert to the meanwhile, traded in ivory. In exchange, Makonde people in Cabo Delgado Indian Ocean. they received imported cloth from India, JENNY MATTHEWS/OXFAM Persian pottery, Venetian beads, and later, firearms. Arab traders from the Persian Gulf had settled on Mozambique's northern coast as early as the ninth century, mingling with indigenous peoples to create a rich and varied coastal culture. New languages evolved, blending Arabic and Swahili with local tongues; Islamic religion mingled with African beliefs in magic and spiritual powers. Muslim sultans and sheiks ran a flourishing import-export business from East Africa to the Indies. Maintaining their own settlements on the shores of the Indian Ocean, the Swahili-Arab traders established complex commercial networks with African chiefs of the interior — a model which Portuguese settlers were later to adopt. Five centuries of exploitation Gold, ivory — and slavery in the hands of Indian merchants, who had established a vast trading network in When the first Portuguese settlers reached the north and centre of the country. northern Mozambique, at the turn of the It was only at the end of the century, fifteenth century, their aim was not to when competition intensified between the create a unified state — merely to capture European colonial powers in the so-called the lucrative gold trade from the Swahili- 'Scramble for Africa', that Portugal sought Arab merchants. This they eventually did; to extend administrative control through- but from the end of the seventeenth out Mozambique. Its main competitor was century the trade in gold was largely Britain, though Afrikaners and Germans replaced by ivory exports to the East — a were also jostling for territory. trade which was itself superseded from The modern boundaries of Mozambique the 1760s by a roaring slave trade to the were eventually agreed in 1891, by political French colonies, Brazil, Cuba, and bargaining between Portugal — claiming northern America. historic right to the territory — and Britain Conniving with local chiefs and Swahili — keen to extend its neighbouring colony merchants, the Portuguese probably sold of Southern Rhodesia and gain access to at least one million Mozambicans into Mozambique's minerals and ports. slavery before the trade finally died out at Portugal's early attempts to 'pacify' the turn of the nineteenth century. Mozambique met with fierce African Mozambique was thus robbed of untold resistance. In the south the Portuguese human potential, while whole faced the great Gaza kingdom, established communities were driven into hiding in by Nguni warriors early in the century. At the most isolated and hostile recesses of its height, the Gaza kingdom ran from A monument in Maputo their country. south of the Limpopo River as far as the Fort depicts the capture Throughout the first 400 years of Zambezi. The Nguni ruler, Gungunhana, of the Emperor of Gaza by colonial penetration, the Portuguese played off one colonial power against the Portuguese invaders invaders brought virtually no new JENNY MATTHEWS/OXFAM technology to Mozambique. Their one- way process of extracting resources had already laid the foundations for long-term under-development. The colonists tighten their grip Until the nineteenth century, Portuguese rule in Mozambique was limited to a few coastal settlements and a tenuous hold on the lush but malaria-infested Zambezi Valley, settled by Portuguese prazeiros (land-holders) who inter-married with Africans, ran their own slave-armies, and had only dubious allegiance to the Portuguese crown. Commerce was largely other, but his 20,000-man army, armed by to the Catholic Church. Scarce places, high the British, was finally shot down by fees, and age restrictions meant that by superior Portuguese fire-power in 1895, 1960 only one per cent of Mozambican and Gungunhana was forced into exile. children were in secondary school. Medical care was almost exclusively The privatisation off the reserved to the cities, though 94 per cent State of the African population lived in the The Portuguese conquered the Zambezi countryside. Valley in 1902, and the northern Macua and Yao ten years later. But the colonial Exporting people state of the twentieth century failed to In 1926 a coup in Portugal brought the unite the national territory which the fascist dictator Antonio Salazar to power. Portuguese called Mozambique. The Salazar took back control of Mozambique early government was notoriously weak. from the charter companies and formal- Unable to run things itself, it contracted ised the 'Indigenous Peoples' Rule', out the 'pacification', administration, and whereby African and mixed-race people development of most of the colony to were divided into two groups. The tiny private companies, leaving the southern minority who could read and write quarter of the state as a labour reserve for Portuguese, rejected traditional customs, the gold mines of South Africa. and had professional employment were From 1891 to 1941, control of central considered honorary Portuguese or Mozambique was given to the Mozam- 'assimilated' citizens in the eyes of the bique Company, formed with British and law. The rest had no legal rights, were French capital and empowered to raise obliged to carry identity cards, and had to taxes, grant mineral and land concessions, fulfil forced-labour requirements. By the and issue currency and postage stamps. A eve of national independence in 1975, similar Charter granted 100,000 square only one per cent of the African miles of land north of the Lurio River to population had been 'assimilated'. the Nyassa Company, owned by British With the end of the slave trade and the and French interests. The Zambezi Valley declining commercial importance of the was divided among various smaller north, in 1902 the Portuguese moved their concerns, the largest of which was the original capital from Ilha de Mocambique, British Sena Sugar Estates. off the northern coast, to Delagoa Bay in These companies raised their main the far south. The new capital city of income through taxation and forced Lourenqo Marques (renamed Maputo labour from the local population. The after national Independence) became a Portuguese exploited the traditional major international port; much of the city's institution of land chiefs, either by co- infrastructure, including its first modern opting them or by replacing them with wharf, was financed by British capital.