The words of one of the hymns reflected this militaristic attitude, this metaphorical approximation that I have been referring to:
We are soldiers of the people
Marching forward
All this has to be seen in its context, without any rancour. In the end, this was how Beloved Fatherland saw the light of day: an anthem which sings of us as one people, united by a common dream.
The Fourth Shoe:
The Idea that by Changing the Words, Reality Changes
One of our countrymen was once giving a presentation on our economic situation in New York, and at a certain point he spoke of the black market. It was as if the end of the world had arrived. Angry voices were raised in protest, and my poor friend had to stop, without really understanding what was happening. The following day, we received a small dictionary of terms that were deemed politically incorrect. Terms such as blind, deaf, fat, thin, and so on, were banished from the language.
We have been pulled along by these cosmetic preoccupations. We are reproducing a discourse that privileges the superficial and suggests that by changing the icing, the cake becomes edible. Nowadays, for example, we hear people hesitating over whether we should say “negro” or “black.” As if the problem lay in the words themselves. The strange thing is that, while we amuse ourselves discussing this choice of words, we still go on using terms that are openly derogatory, such as “mulatto” and monhê (although the etymology of this latter word isn’t immediately insulting).
There is a whole generation that is learning a language — the language of workshops. It is a simple code, a kind of creole half way between English and Portuguese. In fact, it’s not a language but a vocabulary package. It’s enough to know how to manipulate one or two fashionable terms in order to talk to others (that is, to not say anything at all.) I strongly recommend some of these terms, such as for example:
sustainable development;
awareness or accountability;
good governance;
capacity building;
local communities.
These terms should preferably be used in a PowerPoint presentation. Another secret to cut a good figure in workshops is to be able to use abbreviations, for a “workshopper” who is worth his salt knows these codes inside out. Let me cite a possible sentence from a hypothetical report: the MGDs from UNDP equated themselves with NEPAD from the AU and with PARPA from the GoM. For those in the know, half an acronym is more than enough.
I’m from a time when our worth was measured by what we did. Today, what we are is measured by the spectacle we make of ourselves, by the manner in which we place ourselves in the shop window. The resumé, the business card (full of titles and flourishes), the list of publications that almost no one has read, all this seems to suggest one thing: appearances now have greater value than our capacity for action.
Many of the institutions that ought to be producing ideas are now producing reports, which clutter up shelves and are doomed to a useless archive. Instead of solutions, problems are found. Instead of action, new studies are recommended.
The Fifth Shoe:
The Shame of Being Poor and the Cult of Appearances
The hurry to show one isn’t poor is, itself, proof of poverty. Our poverty cannot be a reason for hiding it. The one who should be ashamed isn’t the poor person but the person who creates poverty.
Nowadays, we experience an obsessive concern with exhibiting false signs of wealth. The idea has been born that the status of a citizen derives from the signs that distinguish someone from those who are the poorest.
I remember that I once decided to buy a new car in Maputo. When the salesman saw the car I had chosen, he almost had a fit. “That one, Mr Couto? Surely, sir, you need a vehicle that is compatible.” It is a curious term: “compatible.” Compatible with what? I ask you.
Our lives are a stage performance: a vehicle is no longer an object with a function. It is a passport to a status of importance, the source of vanity. The car has become a reason for idolatry, a kind of temple, a true obsession in our self-promotion.
This illness, this religion that one might call “cardolatry,” has afflicted everyone, from government leaders to street kids. Boys who can’t read may well know the makes and details of all manner of cars. It’s sad that their horizon of ambitions should be so empty and limited.
Our schools urgently need to exalt humility and simplicity as positive values. Arrogance and exhibitionism are not, as some would have it, expressions of some inherent African power culture. They are the expressions of those who accept packaging over contents.
The Sixth Shoe: Passivity in the Face of Injustice
We are predisposed to denounce injustice when it is committed against ourselves, our group, or those of the same ethnicity or religion as ourselves. We are less willing when the injustice is directed against the “others,” or furthermore, when perpetrated within silent zones of injustice, these areas in Mozambique where crime remains invisible. I refer in particular to the following:
domestic violence (40 percent of crimes are the result of domestic aggression towards women);
violence against widows;
violence against or maltreatment of workers
violence against or maltreatment of children.
We were deeply shocked by the recent advertisement which stated that white candidates were preferred for jobs. Immediate measures were taken and this was absolutely correct. However, there are opportunities for discrimination that are just as serious or even more so, and that we accept as natural and beyond question.
Let us take that advertisement in a newspaper and imagine that it was worded correctly instead of racially. Would everything have been all right? I don’t know whether you are all aware of the print run of the Notícias newspaper. It has a print run of 13,000. Even if we assume that each copy is read by five people, we have to accept that the number of readers amounts to fewer than the residents of a district of Maputo. It is within this world that sales discounts and access to opportunities are shared. I mentioned the print run but left aside the problem are shared. Why are the messages of our newspapers restricted in their geographical circulation? How much of Mozambique is left outside?
It’s true that this discrimination isn’t comparable to the racist advertisement because it’s not the result of an explicit, self-conscious act. But the effects of discrimination and exclusion from these social practices must be a cause for reflection and cannot be classified as normal. This “district” of 65,000 people who have access to information is today a nation within a nation, a nation that gets pride of place, that exchanges favours among its members, that lives in Portuguese, and sleeps with its head on the pillow of the printed word.
Another example. We are administering antiretroviral drugs to around thirty thousand patients with AIDS. This number may rise over the coming years to fifty thousand. This means that about 1,450,000 patients are excluded from treatment. This decision has terrible ethical implications. How are decisions made and who makes such decisions? Is it acceptable, I ask, that the lives of one-and-a-half million citizens should lie in the hands of a tiny group of medical scientists?