Dismantling Violence in Mozambique.

Muttart

Dismantling Violence in Mozambique

I love this country and I hate it. It is my country, its blood flows in my veins. No one who has not lived like this can understand. The war has gotten into us all, it lives in us, affecting our every move and thought. If I walk outside I wonder if today is the day I will die … the terror lives in me … the war lives in us.

In her ethnography A Different Kind of War, Carolyn Nordstrom (1997) gives a detailed account on how the war stories Mozambican civilians told each other helped them survive the atrocities of war as they rebuilt their devastated lives and society. After a long and meaningless war during which one million out of sixteen million Mozambicans died and four million people were dislocated from their homes by only sixty thousand military and rebel troops, civilians were determined to dismantle the violence and establish peace (Nordstrom 212).

Nordstrom traveled throughout Mozambique and did intensive research in the north-central province of Zambezia from 1989 to 1996. During this time she experienced war, along with the civilians, and diligently recorded their stories which helped her “to understand the presence of self and creativity that average people exhibit in both surviving military violence and forging new worlds to replace those shattered by war” (Nordstrom 9). She was an engaged observant and hence an active and reflexive producer of knowledge. In her book, Nordstrom includes myths, songs, stories, and poetry that reveal ordinary people’s and children’s resistance to war and their “world making and self-affirmation” (204).

War makers in Mozambique were numerous. The politicians, the soldiers, the looters, the traders, the merchants, and the civilians of all ages, were participants in the war, one way or another. They shared a “culture of war” but each experienced war in a unique and different way. She concludes that it was this “shared culture, this cross-fertilization of ideas extending beyond local and regional communities … [that] ‘created the conditions for new ways of coping and knowing’” (11). She recognized a “creativity” in ordinary people, not only to survive but to rebuild their lives in a new and imaginative way. This paper will explore Nordstrom’s notion of understanding war and creatively overcoming violence through shared stories.

Nordstrom argues that violence is a learned cultural product. She disagrees with the Hobbesian notion that “the natural state of humans is a violent one” and that only the elite or the institutions can achieve order in a state (12). In Mozambique, she came to realize that “innovative solutions to society and war were instituted largely by average citizens who found themselves on the frontline of political violence they neither started nor supported” (Nordstrom 13). Mozambicans had the courage and the skills to resist violence. For they too had realized that violence is learned, and therefore, can be unlearned.

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Violence was multi-layered. It was not only physical but also psychological. A woman expresses: “they have not just killed my family and taken my home, they have killed my soul. They have spit on it and killed it” (Nordstrom 114). Civilians were “exposed to homelessness, hopelessness, helplessness, and inhumanity” (Nordstrom 141). People experienced violence at many levels and in different ways. For many violence was insufficient food and goods, or being a deslocado (an outsider in a new area), or not knowing if other family members were alive or dead, or not being able to give the dead proper burials, or physical torture (rape, mutilations), or sleeping in the bush like animals (Nordstrom 121-125).

War exhausted the Mozambicans. “The killing fields of Africa” saw “the most violent and devastating [war] of contemporary times” (Nordstrom 39). Therefore, Mozambicans were not only interested in survival but also wanted to put an end to the meaningless killings. They began “the war against war” (Nordstrom 147). They set out to “de-legitimize violence” and “reconstruct a new political culture” (Nordstrom 143). Healers and teachers started physical and psychological care, believing that violence is learned therefore can be unlearned. “They treated violence like any other disease” and helped the deslocados to build new places to live (Nordstrom 144). Rituals were performed to commemorate the dead. Continuous cleansing ceremonies were held to heal the physical and emotional wounds. People who returned to their villages were given physical and spiritual baths in order to reclaim a new life and reenter their communities. “Reintegration helped a person reconstruct a viable life” (Nordstrom 146). Anger was redirected by allocating land to people to restart farming. Returning soldiers underwent ceremonies which “removed the war from them” (Nordstrom 147). Ceremonies were also held to calm the spirit of the dead, whose death was meaningless, or they were deprived of a proper burial, so that their spirits would not come back and harm their families and communities (Nordstrom 161,162). Stories of atrocities were shared. Children sang:

To talk about a child

is to talk of millions

of ragged faces

innocent victims …

To talk about a child

is to shout loudly

DOWN WITH CORRUPTION

DOWN WITH WAR

LONG LIVE PEACE.

Ordinary Mozambicans were determined to put years of dehumanization aside and build a new socio-political culture for themselves. The dynamic to survive was more powerful than the dynamic of violence itself.

In resistance to the government troops of Frelimo and the rebel troops of Renamo, a third group emerged. Manual Antonio, a curandeiro (healer and spirit medium), formed the traditional army, the Parama, to save the country from the atrocities of Renamo. He claimed to be “’the blood of the people.’ … He represented the will of the people to free their lands and lives” (Nordstrom 59). Manual Antonio ‘vaccinated’ his troops through rituals to make them resilient to bullets and taught them to respect the civilians. But soon they too became violent and abused their power leaving the people with no protection against violence (Nordstrom 61). Thereafter, civilians were left to their own means of survival.

Mozambicans refused to be just passive victims. They proved to be capable of re-creating their identity, their community, and eventually, their country. In 1994 they held democratic elections and re-established a Frelimo government (Nordstrom 226). The progress of their restoration was a slow one since they needed new ways of thinking and acting. “A constant exchange of information, goods, problems, and solutions continually reshaped the social landscapes and cultural realities of people’s lives” (Nordstrom 96). At the same time as they constructed a peaceful present, they creatively negotiated a brighter future. They assumed new identities by refusing to further participate in the war. They kidnapped back their sons and husbands and cleansed them from the violence; thus regenerating a healing community (Nordstrom 147). They exchanged information about where to find goods, where to avoid travel, how to address the soldiers, where to sleep at night, when to flee their homes, which group is planning a raid on their village, etc. The people who survived to tell their stories were not only exchanging experiences but also they were exchanging strategies of survival. “The realities of the war linked people in powerful and undeniable ways” (Nordstrom 39). These shared stories and conversations gave them courage to endure the present, the will to have hope and the strength to build a future. Their stories became public and their unnecessary suffering was acknowledged. “Words serve to give voice to the unspeakable … Words serve to construct a tomorrow in the face of chaos” (Nordstrom 79). These personal truths paved the way for peace and served as a means to control violence and to empower the people to construct a better future.

The narratives led to creative means of resistance because the stories themselves were constantly changing. People learned to be wise in the way of narrating. They knew what to tell to whom and why. Concealing was also part of the conversations. Civilians learned the dangers of knowledge and speech; they became wise in the ways of listening and speaking; for, “Survival depends on giving the right answers in the right contexts” (Nordstrom 81). Information was constantly altered creatively for reasons of fear and necessity; speaking correctly meant survival. Therefore, sharing stories was imperative for Mozambicans.

Narratives of war increase “the repertoire of thinking” and allows “self-reflexivity” (Nordstrom 191). Stories of unlearning violence perpetuated a new vision and hope for the future (Nordstrom 217,218). “The circulating knowledge about surviving and resistance, about world-making and self-affirmation” became a reality and not just a dream (Nordstrom 204). Reaching beyond the point of mere survival and rebuilding a new identity was a transcendence that Nordstrom recognized as “creativity”.

Similarly to Nordstrom, Michael Carrithers (1989), a British anthropologist, asserts that narratives give rise to “creativity, inventiveness, or imagination” to find “new ways of handling old and new problems” (Carrithers 203,204). Carrithers also postulates that “humans are culturally labile” and that their learning repertoire includes both aggression and peace and that “sociality allows for peacefulness to vary among societies” (Carrithers 187,188). The Mozambican society is flexible and changing in terms of accepting and refusing violence. They proved that they can learn and unlearn violence. They are “calculating beings … able to calculate the consequences of their own behaviour” as well as the “behaviour of others” as it is apparent in their skill of sharing knowledge and telling stories to suit their needs (Carrithers 199). Their “social intelligence” of reconstructing stories had the power of persuasion and thus, “conveye[d] moral standards” (Carrithers 203). Carrithers concludes, “Individuals’ sociality is the condition which makes possible collective changes” (Carrithers 207). It is this emergence of individuality that Nordstrom observed in the civilian Mozambicans who, out of chaos and shuttered lives, reconstructed their socio-cultural practices.

In conclusion, the importance of stories in A Different Kind of War is twofold. First, they helped Nordstrom to understand the war and make sense of the injustices. Second, the stories helped the people of Mozambique to survive the war while they shared their experiences and realized that they were not alone and that they could collectively forge a new life. Their gruesome experiences linked people and empowered them to take collective action against violence. Creatively they set out to “take the war out of people” and to dismantle violence from individuals and communities. Hopefully the terror of war remains in them and the scars on their bodies and their souls will continue to be a lesson restraining them from repeating past mistakes.

Bibliography

Carrithers, Michael. “Sociality, Not Aggression, Is The Key Human Trait”, in Signe Howell and Roy Willis (eds.): Society At Peace: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Routledge, 1989, Chp. 10 (pp. 187-209).

Nordstrom, Carolyn. Another Kind of War Story. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.

Nordstrom’s interview with Anna, a civilian (Nordstrom 122).

Written by a secondary school student in Zambezia province, 1991 (Nordstrom 138,139).