I remember that at a conference on literature in Durban, a South African writer criticized one of his country’s young poets. He said: “You wrote a verse about an African woman riding a bike in the country. But a Bantu woman would never do that.” I had just come from a journey through Sofala and Zambezia and happened to have with me various photographs of women riding around on bicycles. I showed this proof of the crime, and the critic muttered bitterly: “Yes, but these aren’t Zulu women.” The world of the Bantus had suddenly and drastically been reduced to that of the Zulus. And it’s quite likely that there were many Zulu women pedalling along the roads of South Africa without our friend being aware of it. But that’s not the point. Even if no women from a given community use bicycles, literature is free to invent whatever it wants, and to place a female body — or that of a gender yet to be invented — in the saddle.
I think that the South African writer’s reaction, born out of insecurity, reflects a male position that invokes supposed interdictions in the name of a hypothetical “female essence.” It is the product of fear. We men do not know the women with whom we share our lives and the world. We fear what they are thinking, we feel threatened by what they feel. We view the future as if it were a bicycle being ridden by a woman. And so it was this profound, primal fear that came to the surface when the dockers had to shout the slogan proposed by Sebastião Mabote. Women may suffer the same challenge when being the Other and travelling through the souls of men, but something tells me they don’t have the same fer of a male-dominated future: in fact they experience this now. The present is a pirate bus and a man is at the wheel.
It is against the deep-seated fear of otherness that Ibsen and all great writers worked. They were ahead of their times, constructing worlds beyond reality, and they enabled others to imagine because they had imagined themselves beyond the limits of their bodies and of what were generally accepted as their identities.
A hundred years later, we are celebrating the work of a man who represents a country, a language and a culture that are apparently so far removed from us. But we all become closer to each other in the struggle for humanity. Ibsen was a writer and a fighter. In the notes to his play, The Doll’s House, he wrote: “A woman cannot be herself in this society that has been constructed as masculine, with laws drawn up by men and male judges who evaluate society on the basis of masculine criteria.” And we Mozambicans view Mozambique as a male entity.
Our society is in a state of permanent and generalized violence towards women. This violence is silent (I would prefer to think of it as silenced) because of an extensive network of male kinship. Levels of domestic violence are huge, cases of rape are unacceptable, violence against widows has already been reported on in a book, and there is violence against elderly women who are accused of being witches and who are therefore punished and stigmatized. And there’s more if we wish to illustrate the silent and systematic aggression against women: over 21 percent of women marry before they reach the age of fifteen (in some provinces, this number rises to nearly 60 percent). There are young girls who never get to be women. The cycle reproduces in such a way that a young girl who should still be a daughter is already the mother of a girl who, in turn will be impeded from exercising her femininity. Fifty-five percent of births by these young girls occur without the support of a qualified midwife. For all these reasons and many others, women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four are twice as likely to be contaminated by AIDS as boys of the same age. These statistics suggest a process of silent mutilation in the country, a permanent state of war against ourselves.
This is the only conclusion we can draw: a country in which women can only be half themselves is condemned to live only half of its future.
Speech delivered at the commemoration
for the writer Henrik Ibsen, Maputo, 2007.
Baring One’s Voice
Two weeks ago, in this very place, Gilberto Mendes lamented the lack of culture among our elite. Gilberto complained about the politically media-conscious who only leave home to be present at gala performances of the National Song and Dance Company. They don’t go to the theatre, they don’t read books, they don’t frequent cultural or artistic venues.
This systematic abstinence is sad, but I have to say that such absences don’t only occur in our country. It’s not a matter of the failure of any given government. We are facing an organized plan to fabricate “tradition” as the only genuine and truthful representation of national culture. By choosing “tradition” as the only yardstick of our identity, we are doing exactly what this event is supposed to be warning us against: we are killing culture. All culture thrives on its own diversity. Culture should always be spoken of in the plural.
People often talk of Mozambique as being a multicultural mosaic, but, deep down, they keep reminding us that the root of our Mozambican identity is this business of tradition. But this same tradition is very curious: on the one hand, no one seems able to define it exactly. On the other, it is in constant flux, and some things now seen as traditional were, in days gone by, acts of irreverence and audacity. The first women to wear capulanas in our country must have been viewed as provocative and disrespectful of traditional customs and morality. The same thing occurred with the marrabenta. And yet today, the capulana and the marrabenta have been incorporated as traditional emblems.
A young Mozambican sociologist by the name of Patrício Langa, wrote the following: “No one is more or less Mozambican because of the instrument he plays. We can all become Mozambican through what we do, and we can make what we do Mozambican. Music is no exception. No one could bear to live in a country where one only listened to the music of José Mucavele, no matter how Mozambican his music, or how morally and politically correct, how educated and ethnomusical, it is. I have a real phobia about the intentions behind those who present things as genuine or authentic. It was intentions like these that created Nazi ideologies, as well as people like Mobutu and his ideas of African authenticity. We don’t want any more producers of murderous identities.”
In fact, those in power find it very convenient to construct their official culture on the basis of tradition and folklore. In the name of this tradition, they can suddenly discover that democracy is not, after all, typically African. In the name of tradition, blind obedience can be justified and the distinction blurred between that which is the public patrimony and the private property of chiefs.
Young Mozambican city dwellers have a decisive role to play in shaking off this inertia, and furthermore in the production of new ideas and new forms of representation. What Patrício Langa is doing in sociology is something we hope other young people will do in their own fields. Many young people have done so, often with great courage, and while facing the type of harsh criticism and parochial envy that will resort to anything in order to stifle change.
Nowadays, we talk of globalization, and Mozambican hip hop (of which Dama do Bling is a well-known representative) is a good example of this phenomenon. In Mozambique, these currents began imitatively, but then took on Mozambican characteristics. People say this process is called globalization, but I must ask the assembly to excuse me from using the word, because it has become such a tired term that I have reached a state of irreversible saturation with regard to it. Globalization, sustainable development and other terms that it would be politically incorrect to name are expressions that have been uttered so often that they no longer mean anything at all.