The Seventh Shoe: The Idea that in
Order to Be Modern We Need to Imitate Others
Every day, we receive strange visitors in our home. They enter via the magic box called television. They create a relationship of virtual familiarity with us. Gradually, it’s we who begin to believe we’re living outside, dancing in the arms of Janet Jackson. Videos and the television industry not only tell us to buy, but they issue a whole other invitation: “be like us.” This appeal to imitation falls upon us like a gift from heaven: the shame we feel at being ourselves becomes a springboard, an excuse for us to don this other mask.
Our cultural production has begun to parrot the culture of others. The future of our music may be a kind of tropical hip-hop; the fate of our cuisine may be McDonald’s.
We talk of soil erosion and deforestation, but the erosion of our culture is even more worrying. The low esteem given to Mozambican languages (including even the Portuguese language) as well as the insistence that our identity is based in folklore, are both ways of whispering the following message in our ear: we’ll only be modern if we become American.
Our society’s history is similar to that of an individual. Both are marked by rituals of transition: birth, the end of adolescence, marriage, the end of life. I look at our urban society and ask myself: do we really want to be different? For I see Mozambique’s rites of passage are faithfully reproducing colonial society. We are doing a waltz, in formal dress, at a graduates’ ball that is identical to those of my youth. We are copying the end-of-course rituals based on models from medieval England. We get married in veils and garlands and we dump, far from the Avenida Julius Nyerere, anything that might suggest a ceremony more rooted in our land or in Mozambican tradition.
Ladies and Gentlemen:
I spoke of the burden from which we must free ourselves in order to enter modernity in both mind and body. But modernity isn’t just a door made by others. We are also carpenters in its construction, and we should only be interested in participating in a modernity that we are also helping to build.
My message is a simple one: more than a technically skilled generation, what we need is a generation that is able to question technical matters. Youths that are capable of thinking anew about our country and the world. More than people prepared to give answers, what we need is an ability to ask questions. Mozambique doesn’t just need to move forward. It needs to discover its own way forward in a fog-shrouded time and in a world that has no direction. Other people’s compasses are of no use to us, other people’s maps are of no help. We need to invent our own compass points. What we require is a past that isn’t crippled with prejudice; what we need is a future that doesn’t come to us disguised as financial prescription.
The university should be a centre for debate, a factory for active citizenship, a forge for fashioning social concerns and constructive rebellion. We cannot train young professionals to be successful in an ocean of misery. The university cannot agree to reproduce injustice and inequality. We are dealing with young people and with what should be youthful, fertile and productive thought. Such thought cannot be ordered, it isn’t born out of nothing. It is born out of debate, innovative research, and an information system that is open and sensitive to what might best come out of Africa and the world.
The question is this: we talk a lot about young people. We don’t talk much with young people. Or rather, we talk with them when they become a problem. Youth experiences this ambiguous situation, dancing between a romantic vision of themselves (as the life blood of the Nation) and a malign condition, a nest of dangers and concerns (AIDS, drugs, unemployment).
Ladies and Gentlemen:
It wasn’t just Zambia that saw in education what a shipwrecked sailor sees in a lifeboat. We also deposited all our dreams in this need.
In a public meeting held last year in Maputo, an elderly nationalist said, with candour and courage, what many of us already knew. He confessed that he, along with many others who, in the 1960s, fled to FRELIMO, weren’t just motivated by their dedication to the cause of independence. They risked their lives and crossed the frontier of their own fears in order to be able to study. The fascination with education, and a notion that education provides a passport to a better life, was present even in a world where almost no one could study. Restrictions were common throughout Africa. Up until 1940, the number of Africans attending secondary school was less than eleven thousand. Today, the situation has improved and this number has multiplied a thousandfold. The continent has invested in the creation of new skills. And this investment has undoubtedly produced important results.
However, it has gradually become obvious that more skilled technicians don’t in themselves solve the problem of poverty in a nation. If a country doesn’t possess strategies to produce solutions at the deepest level, then all this investment won’t produce the desired effect. If the abilities of a nation are directed towards the enrichment of a tiny elite, then yet more skilled technicians will be of little value.
School is a means for us to aspire to what we don’t have. Later, life teaches us to have what we don’t want. Between school and life, what we need is to be honest and confess to those who are younger than us the things we don’t know; that we, as teachers and parents are also seeking answers.
With the new government, the fight for self-esteem has re-emerged as a priority. This is correct and opportune. We must like ourselves, we must believe in our capabilities. But this appeal to personal pride cannot be based on empty vanity, on a kind of baseless futile narcissism. Some believe that we shall regain our pride by visiting the past. It’s true that we need to feel we have roots and that these roots honour us. But self-esteem cannot be constructed merely out of materials from the past.
In fact, there’s only one way to give ourselves due value: that is through our endeavours, through the work we are capable of carrying out. We need to know how to accept our condition without shame or complexes: we are poor. Or rather, we have been impoverished by History. But we were part of this History, and we were also impoverished by ourselves. The causes of our current and future failures also lie within us.
But the strength to overcome our historical condition also dwells within us. We shall know, just as we knew before, how to reconquer the certainty that we are producers of our own destiny. We shall have ever-greater pride in being who we are: Mozambicans constructing a time and a place where we are born every single day.
This is why it is worth agreeing to shed not only the seven shoes, but all the shoes that delay our collective march forward. For there is only one truth: it’s better to advance barefoot than it is to stumble along in the shoes of others.
Address to the Higher Institute for Science
and Technology (ISCTEM), Maputo, 2006.
Dreaming of Home
I come from afar and I bring you what I believe is a shared message from my writer colleagues in Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé & Príncipe. The message is the following: among us, Jorge Amado wasn’t just the most widely read of foreign writers. He was the writer who had the greatest influence upon the birth of literature in those African countries where Portuguese is spoken.
Our literary debt to Brazil goes back centuries, to the time when Gregório de Matos and Tomáz Gonzaga helped create the first literary nuclei in Angola and Mozambique. But these levels of influence were restricted and bear no comparison with the deep and lasting impressions left by the author from Bahia.