making you pass your exams;
helping you get your husband or wife back.
Parodying the jargon used in reports nowadays, I would say that this is a fair “job description” for our magnificent traditional doctor. This purveyor of fortune invokes, through his magic, all those things that can only be achieved through sweat, effort, and hard work.
Once again, we must question the words that we ourselves create and use. “Traditional doctors” is a doubly false term. Firstly, they are not doctors. Medicine is a very specific domain within the field of scientific knowledge. There are no traditional doctors, just as there are no traditional engineers or traditional airline pilots.
It’s not a question of denying the value of local wisdom, nor of devaluing the importance of rural logic. But these self-advertisers aren’t doctors and they are not even “traditional.” The practices of witchcraft are profoundly modern: they are being born and refashioned right now in our urban centres. A good example of this ability to incorporate the modern is that of an advertisement I kept from a newspaper, in which one of these quack healers described his services textually as follows: “We cure asthma, diabetes and pimples; we provide treatment for sexual diseases and headaches; we eliminate misfortune and. . we make photocopies.”
For a long time, real doctors were not permitted to publicize their services in the press. And yet these other so-called traditional ones are still allowed to advertise. What is the reason for such complacency? Because, deep down, we are predisposed to believe them. We belong to this universe even as we simultaneously imagine the world in other ways. It’s not just the poor, the less educated who share these two worlds. There are university educated officials, political leaders who seek their blessing in order to get promoted or to be successful in their careers.
I don’t believe it is enough to condemn such practices; but we must admit them more openly. Returning to the title of this talk, we must accept that within the shoe, our feet require a very special form of ventilation. It’s of little use to say these things are typically African. My friends, these things exist throughout the world. They are not part of the so-called exotic nature of Africans. They belong to human nature.
We can say, however, that these beliefs still have a decisive influence, and this influence contradicts some of the exigencies of modern life. Belief in so-called “good luck” makes us shun our individual and collective responsibility: such a vision of the world attributes our failures to a supposedly hidden hand. If we fail, it’s because someone turned the evil eye on us. We don’t assume the role of active, responsible citizens. We don’t produce our own destiny: we beg from powerful forces that are beyond us. We wait for a blessing or a stroke of good fortune. This is a central problem in our development.
The belief in “luck” is one facet of a more all-embracing and sophisticated conspiracy theory; we explain everything via plots hatched behind our backs. It is the fear of witchcraft brought into the sphere of political analysis. The recent case of timber is a good example of the application of this conspiracy theory. A group of our countrymen denounced acrtions it thought were going to lead to the imminent destruction of our forest patrimony. It was a serious warning: we could lose not only part of our natural environment, but one of the main weapons to fight against poverty. The reaction against this protest wasn’t long in coming: various articles all asserted that this concern for our forests came from a well-intentioned group of people, who were manipulated by Western forces busy mobilizing against the Chinese presence in Africa. Here is the dark hand that commands everything.
As in the logic of witchcraft, the identification of the wrongdoer immediately solves the problem. Once the smokescreen has been created and the finger pointed in accusation, the matter of the forests will lose its visibility. The question here is simple: wouldn’t it be easier to create a scientific commission to record the current state of our forest resources and to assess the real implications of timber extraction? It is too important a matter, my friends, for us to pretend we have dealt with the protester’s concerns merely because we raise the suspicion of an international conspiracy. The truth is that if we lose our forest, we lose one of the greatest reserves of our wealth, and the biggest living resource in the whole of our country.
Dear friends,
Our belief in good or bad luck is something that stifles our ability to show enterprise, something that consolidates within us a spirit of victimhood. To improve our world, we are constantly invited to think our only options involve begging, lamenting, or complaining. I shall let you into another secret. The firm I work for placed an advertisement for young people to carry out surveys in different parts of Maputo. Hundreds of young people applied and it seemed certain that the two dozen candidates whose applications were successful would cling to their jobs tooth and nail.
However, on the first day, half a dozen of them presented complaints: they couldn’t work in the sun, the work was very tiring and they needed more breaks, they needed a subsidy in order to buy hats and sunshades. . This, my friends, is the spirit of a nation that’s sick. A country in which young people put in their requests before they’ve even given anything, is a country that may have mortgaged its future.
The point I wish to make is that, along with a limitless capacity for self-denial, we still suffer from the delusion that we deserve more than others because we suffered in the past. “History is in debt to us,” this is what we think. But History is in debt to everyone and doesn’t pay anyone back. All peoples have suffered terrible mistreatment and damage at some point. Whole nations have been reduced to rubble and have been re-born through the efforts and toil of generations. Our own country was able to escape the conflagration of war. Invoking the past in order that people may pity us, and then awaiting compensation, invited only illusion.
This positioning of ourselves as victims to whom the world must pay a debt occurs at both the national level and that of individual citizens. As we have survived personally on favours, we ask the world to concede us privileges and special dispensations. The plain truth is this: we shall never be accorded such privileges. Either we conquer them for ourselves or we shall never get them. The value of Lurdes Mutola derives from the fact that she overcame a whole background of difficulties. Let us imagine that Lurdes Mutola, instead of training hard, were to insist on being able to start the race a few metres ahead of her rivals, arguing that she was poor and came from a country that had suffered hardship. Even if she won, her victory would have no value. The example might seem ridiculous but it highlights the kind of self-pity that we have displayed countless times. The solution for the underprivileged isn’t to ask for favours. It is to fight harder than others, and above all to fight for a world in which favours are no longer needed.
Another hole in our socks (this hole is as big as the sock itself) is our tendency to blame others for our own mistakes. If we lose our job, it’s not because we haven’t turned up for work repeatedly without any justification. If we lose our girlfriend (or boyfriend), it’s not because we’ve loved them little and badly. We fail an exam, but it’s never because we’ve failed to prepare adequately for it. We explain these slip-ups by evoking demons, the existence of which we find deeply comforting. The fabrication of devils is, after all, a long-term investment: our conscience can sleep easily, sheltered by such illusions.
This isn’t an illness that is exclusive to us. Nowadays, we witness dramatic examples of this tendency to fabricate ghosts: every day, in Iraq, innocent civilians are killed in the name of God, in the name of the struggle against the devil, incarnated in others, of other beliefs. It was José Saramago who said, “Killing in the name of God makes that God an assassin.”