TRANSCRIPT: THEY SANG FREEDOM SONGS AND DANCED THE MARRABENTA
We used to love hearing Samora Machel speaking. That would be outside the city hall. There’s a big square. He would sing, he would move around quite a lot. He would crack jokes. Terrific rapport. And it wasn’t heavy, abstract, ideological stuff. He would say, ‘Some people in Africa are proud that they were colonised by the British. They feel they had a superior class of oppressors than those of us who were only colonised by the Portuguese.’ Everybody would laugh. And then he would say, ‘What’s the matter with us Mozambicans? You go into a restaurant and you’re expecting reasonable service. When we were waiters for the Portuguese soldiers who were oppressing us, we would treat them with courtesy and respect. And now that we are the owners of the place, we have no respect at all. He said the problem is underdevelopment is camping in our minds. We still have the psychology of underdevelopment. We’ve got to liberate our minds.’ It would be very direct material like that, and we loved to hear it. And it was exciting.
We had what were called July activities. July would be the summer month in Europe. So the intelligentsia in the colonial times would all take the plane or maybe a boat to Europe. And they would come back and discuss whom they’d met at the Estoril or in Paris. Now instead of that, we had July activities. We would all travel to the provinces; get to know your own country. And one of their leading intellectuals would say, ‘You know, we knew every single railway siding from Lisbon to Oporto. We didn’t know where the trains went in Mozambique. We didn’t know the rivers of Mozambique. We were told our highest mountain is in the Sierra Nevada. That was in Portugal.’ He said, ‘We had higher mountains in Mozambique, we didn’t even know about them. Get to know your own country.’ And it would be the students, the professors, the teachers, the technical staff and some of the ordinary working staff and we would go to all the different provinces and get to know Mozambique.
Mozambique was overwhelmingly positive for me in terms of the issue of race and that we’re fighting to change the system. There were four lawyers left in Mozambique. And that was partly because people would come out from Portugal, train people to spend a few years in the public service and then retire, go back to Portugal. They weren’t born in Mozambique; it wasn’t their home. And they decamped. Many went to South Africa, some to Brazil, a few to Macao and lots to Portugal. Their children stayed. And their children hated being called Portuguese. White kids born in Mozambique. ‘We are Mozambicans!’ And these were very prominent amongst the students. And the whole Portuguese policy had been to have a few assimilados, black people assimilated into the Portuguese culture – drinking wine, table manners, the Catholic Church, dressing properly, doing folk dances, loving the fado music. And the fact you had a black skin, in that sense, didn’t debar you from participating as an equal, but on the basis of completely assimilating Portuguese culture and suppressing anything that was African in your personality, in your use of language, in your manners and style. But now that generation, their children were identifying with Frelimo, with the revolution, with Samora. Everybody was proud to say, ‘I knew somebody who’s the neighbour of somebody who had a cousin in the armed struggle!’
And its approach to culture was so invigorating. Somebody asked one of the Mozambique leaders, ‘Comrade Sergio, what’s Frelimo’s position on the phrase black is beautiful?’ And he said, ‘Black is beautiful, brown is beautiful, white is beautiful.’ I thought that was a beautiful response. And I developed it later on by saying, ‘white makes itself ugly by using whiteness to oppress others. And whites have got to learn to discover the beauty of themselves, rather than be seen as somehow irremediably tainted and at fault.’ And it wasn’t just a phrase, it was used in practise. You felt it in the daily life in the country.
The attitude to culture was, they didn’t debate about Afro-centred and Euro-centred. They certainly wanted to get away from the smothering impact of Portuguese culture. But they used the Portuguese language as a language of national unity. But they didn’t sing fados, they sang freedom songs, and they danced the marrabenta, which was a very local Mozambican kind of a – not quite a samba dance. And there was an expressivity that was very Mozambican. And they were very proud of their artists. Malangatana, the painter, Chissano the sculptor created a very complex, sophisticated, intense Mozambican art form and style that wasn’t a copy of Portuguese sculpture, Portuguese paintings, just with a Mozambican content. It was original, it was invigorating, it was new. Every school, university, factory had its cultural groups. Everybody sang, everybody danced. I claim, we South Africans have the best singers in the world. Someone in any place can start off singing and four-part harmony will emerge afterwards. People would just join in. But Mozambique had the best dancers. And Samora had this idea: if we had cultural activities in all the police stations, we wouldn’t have corruption and bribery and abuses and so on.
He had a very strong view on the economy. He said we are far too selfish. Every shoemaker wants his own piece of leather. We need co-operatives; we’ve got to work in co-operatives. That’s the Mozambican way of liberated Mozambique… of doing things. It sounded fantastic. We were all so proud. We heard one day: Samora’s father said, ‘Samora, my son, I’m so proud of you. Now can I get back the land that the Portuguese expelled me from right next to the Limpopo River?’ Samora said, ‘Daddy, father, I’m sorry we didn’t fight so the president could give land to his son. We fought so that everybody could have access to the land. The land belongs to the people. We’re going to have big state farms producing food for the people.’ And we felt fantastic, what an example is being set!
And they got Bulgarians to come in and plant rice and suddenly the word goes out: we must stop our teaching at the university and go out to the rice fields because the plants had grown too quickly. Now if you’re getting Albie Sachs to cut rice for you, even with two arms, you must be very, very desperate. It just didn’t work. A lot of money invested, it just didn’t work. And the leather co-operatives just didn’t work. And trying to get ideology – the ideology of socialism – to function in a very underdeveloped country without having the systems to enable it to function well, of distribution, it didn’t work.
There were shortages of food. I think progressive intellectuals love standing in a line with the masses to get our weekly ration of eggs, some butter, bread, flour, salt, sugar, occasionally some meat. You’d wait hours and hours. The bicha, the queue, the line became a feature. So you would go to the market, there was nothing. You go to the shops, there’s nothing. You couldn’t get tomatoes, you couldn’t get fish, you couldn’t get prawns. Everything was being sold on the black market. People would come to the back door. Do you buy on the black market? And then what price do you pay? There was an official exchange rate. It was something like 40 meticais to the dollar. But the unofficial rate was like 1,650. And the people were getting angry. Trains were coming through travelling slowly. The poor would just get on to the trains and help themselves to the food.
And suddenly Samora announces, ‘We’ve got to deal with this, we can’t allow it. We’re going to execute people responsible. We’re going to use whipping.’ So from being the most benign country where there were open prisons, where restorative justice was the basis of doing everything, where the theme of redemption, rehabilitation was very, very pronounced. It was marvellous to see. Suddenly from that extreme… And somebody was executed in public. I remember when the whipping started, somebody I knew – the writer, Luis Bernardo Honwana in government – used a phrase, ‘The first lash fell on my back.’ And it was kind of shocking, it was unsustainable. And that sense of optimism and ebullience is going.
There are no systems. And if people are locked up, you couldn’t go to court to get them out on bail. Somebody with influence or money would go to the station commander to get the person out. And that made me realise, you need systems. And it’s the poor who need the systems, who need the law. It’s not the rich, it’s not the powerful, not that anybody was really rich. But they had connections. It’s the poor who most needed the rule of law. And so I’m beginning to move away from my total scepticism about law being rule-driven and not people-driven and so on, and I’m beginning to have doubts about that.
We had fantastic courts working in the communities, dealing with petty matters, with family matters, very, very important. Giving real justice on the ground with women taking part with men, applying the new values. That was great. But there was nothing in place to deal with serious crime. Stories about the prisons now became bleaker and bleaker. And that ebullience, that elan, that confidence was becoming less and less. One knew something was seriously wrong when Samora Machel gave medals to Marcelino dos Santos, and Marcelino dos Santos gave medals to Samora – each praising the other. When people up in the elite are dependent on mutual admiration to sustain their morale, you know something terrible is happening.
