A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique. - book reviews

In 1975, Portugal granted independence to the colony of Mozambique, in Southern Africa on the Indian Ocean. The transition was a hasty, bitter one, following a decade of armed conflict between the Portuguese and the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, or Frelimo, whose military leader, Samora Machel, became the new nation's first president. A Marxist-Leninist organization allied with the Soviet Union and Cuba, Frelimo inherited an impoverished land twice the size of California, with no industrial base and an illiteracy rate of over 90 percent. Its difficulties running the country echo the sad story of many of Africa's young and desperate nations: an ambitious, ill-planned rush to industrialization; nationalization of industries and subsequent capital flight; dangerous over-reliance on exports, like coffee, subject to wild price fluctuations; agriculture schemes that forced collectivization and relocation on unwilling peasants; then the mid-seventies' shock of oil prices, a high birthrate and spiraling unemployment, mounting external debt, deterioration of currency and infrastructure, the post-cold war withdrawal of superpower patronage, and a seemingly terminal reliance on international donor aid.

In Mozambique, the situation has been aggravated by the cruel caprices both of nature--a drought in the early eighties killed an estimated 100,000, and another now threatens a fifth of the population of 16 million with starvation--and of the National Resistance of Mozambique, or Renamo, a guerrilla group which for the past fifteen years has waged a disorganized but crippling war against the Frelimo government. This war and the "annihilative frenzy" it has visited upon the country are the subject of William Finnegan's book, A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique.

A Complicated War has the form of an African travelogue, and features some of the subgenre's standard elements: the difficulty of getting from place to place; the pervasiveness of the supernatural in the form of fetishists, healers, and a widespread belief in the immortality of one's enemies; the seductive beauty of the landscape; the eccentric expats and horrid hotels. Finnegan, a staff writer for the New Yorker (where large parts of this book originally appeared) and the author of two previous books about Southern Africa, is very good at all of this. He knows how to use the right detail to make his calm and stately prose vibrate with pity, irony, or terror, as the case requires. Here he is, for instance, describing his hotel in Beira, a city on the coast where week-long power failures were the norm:

The Hotel Dom Carlos had its own

generator, but that failed sometimes,

too. In the elevator, the thick glass panels

on the doors had been smashed

from the inside at every floor by desperate

passengers trapped by power

failures. When I mentioned this eerie

sight to a Beiran, he said I was crazy

to get in an elevator anywhere in the

city. Even aging asthmatics who

worked on the tenth floor of downtown

high rises that still had a working

elevator used the stairs.

The picture Finnegan paints of Mozambique is one of extreme poverty and isolation. He learns to distinguish between children who are merely hungry, children who are malnourished, and children who are starving. He visits towns that have been cut off by war, reachable only by air, for five years, and interviews refugees, or deslocados, whose answers reveal startling gaps in the kind of factual knowledge any citizen of a Western society takes absolutely for granted. Among the things some of his interviewees have never heard of are America, South Africa, apartheid, or Joaquim Chissano, the president of their own country--though one man, "given four names to choose from, chose the right one."

It's a little surreal, the prospect of the eager American traipsing across the savannah, giving bewildered refugees multiple choice quizzes on their own government. The point, one takes it, is to show how the new, modem nation-states of Africa, drawn up by Europeans in ignorance of local ethnic allegiances, have failed to etch themselves into the loyalties and even the consciousnesses of many of their citizens.

A second, related point is the total irrelevance of the guerrilla war in Mozambique to anything its victims care about, other than survival. While wars like the one currently raging in the Balkans arise from centuries of conflict among antagonistic neighbors, where "culture" often turns out to be a crowded agenda of unforgotten evils and murderous grudges, Finnegan's African interviewees, infinitely less "tribalistic" than the tribes of the Balkans, appear as mere sufferers in a pointless power struggle between a guerrilla group they can't see and a government whose president they can't name. Renamo, Frelimo: even the words sound interchangeable. Who were those men with guns standing by that burning vehicle? No one is sure; it doesn't really matter. A war like this is "complicated," paradoxically, because it is so simple.

There's no doubt where the author's own sympathies lie. Finnegan assesses Frelimo's stewardship of Mozambique with extreme generosity and a notable enthusiasm for the rhetoric of revolution. (The Frelimo leadership, he writes, is "remarkably self-critical," "powerfully disciplined, unusually mature," "deeply committed," and so on.) It would be hard to concoct a blander apology for Marxism than Finnegan's assertion that confrontations in the late 1960s with antiwhite, ultra-Africanist factions "compelled [the racially mixed Frelimo leadership] to declare the primacy of a class analysis."

Finnegan is right to acknowledge the vastness of the problems a young nation like Mozambique inherited from its colonial masters, and one would surely rather have his sympathetic account than the type of commentary about Africa one encounters in American newsmagazines these days, with its basso ostinato of complacent superiority. But he doesn't help his credibility any by prefacing a brief description of Frelimo's notorious re-education camps with the reminder that "democratic constraint on the arbitrary use of power is a hard-won (and never-complete, and never secure) condition in any society," or by informing us--apparently without irony--that the Frelimo politburo, in a soccer game against a local professional team, showed admiring citizens how "the country's leaders had retained the precision passing skills developed in the luta armada." It makes him seem like a rearguard PR man for Frelimo and for third-world Marxism generally: the traveler as fellow traveler.

Of Renamo, there seems to be little good to say. Organized in the late 1970s, the author details, out of former Portuguese soldiers, disgruntled Frelimo deserters, and common thieves, masterminded by Rhodsian intelligence, Renamo has been funded both by South Africa and wealthy Portuguese, and functions in part, according to Finnegan, as a "blunt instrument of South African policy." (Its repeated attacks on rail lines in Mozambique, for instance, have forced neighboring countries to ship exports through South African ports.)

The group's international reputation has been bleak, a fact evidenced by its failure, despite apparent similarities to the Nicaraguan contras or the Unita rebels in Angola, to procure funding from Washington, even during the boom years of the Reagan administration. Finnegan relates how attempts were made, by Jesse Helms in Congress and by players in the Ollie North sideshow, but broke up on the shoals of Renamo's abominable human rights record. The writer Michael Dorris has reported children being forced at gunpoint to execute their parents; Finnegan tells in ghastly detail the story of a mutilado peasant named Galave, an accused spy whom Renamo guerrillas tortured by hacking off his nose, lips, hand, and ear, the last of which they forced him to chew and swallow. "The cruelty of Renamo," the author writes, "mesmerized everyone in Mozambique."

Admittedly mesmerized himself, Finnegan tells of becoming "obsessed with developing an accurate picture of life with Renamo." One of the disappointments of A Complicated War is that this picture never develops. Finnegan never succeeds in making direct contact with Renamo guerrillas; he's forced to go all the way back to Washington to interview a vain and frivolous Howard University professor who functions as Renamo's American representative. Thus while we get sympathetic, well-drawn portraits of Frelimo activists, Renamo remains the mysterious bandito armadas, by turns murderous and bumbling. Is Renamo solely an arm of South African policy? No. Is it merely a tool of the exiled Portuguese elite? No. Does it to any extent serve the coherent interests of some kind of ideological dissent? Not likely. By the end of A Complicated War, we have some idea what Renamo isn't, but not much idea what it is.

Ultimately, Finnegan lumps Renamo in with what the East African scholar Ali Mazrui calls an emergent "lumpen militariat" in Africa, nonideological militias intent on feeding themselves--literally--by controlling the means of destruction. "The commonest reason for joining Renamo," he writes, "was hunger: with a gun in hand, one's chances of eating in rural Mozambique were clearly better than they were without it." This makes sense, and one is tempted to leave A Complicated War with the lesson that hunger and the scarcity of resources are the ultimate forces behind Renamo and the endless war.

But what, then, about the mutilado with no lips and nose, and what about the men who tortured him? Where does this seemingly gratuitous violence come from, what does it mean? Finnegan's closing chapter (his end notes, by the way, are detailed and helpful throughout) lengthily engages the ideas of Hobsbawm and others concerning social banditry, but by no means does his discussion attain the level of horror raised by the mere telling of the mutilado's story. One's thoughts keep returning also to the deslocados who don't know their own ages, or the name of the town they lived in for two years, or the president of their country. Journalism can establish that such people exist; but it has a much tougher time bringing us imaginatively any closer to understanding how.

In V.S. Naipaul's novel A Bend in the River--another book about mysterious rebels and a complicated postcolonial war--we repeatedly encounter Africans whose sense of self and place in the world has been severely damaged by the rude shocks of colonialism and of war. We encounter them, however, not only as collections of deficits, but as agents, as people with a world view, however distorted or deranged or brutal, and the ability to assert themselves, usually erratically, into relations with others. Naipaul's frightening inquiry suggests that the violence of postcolonial society represents both a furious inner nihilism and a kind of belated historical revenge, a rage against the "memory of the intruder." This may or may not be--the theses are open to doubt--and yet what's wholly persuasive is the way a reader experiences the idea enacted in the minds and actions of Naipaul's characters. One sees the horror from the inside, as it were, and travels through the novel increasingly (and anxiously) expectant of depredation. One leaves Finnegan's book, on the other hand, thinking about the lipless man and asking, "How could they have done that to him?" And thus the vague feeling that A Complicated War does not quite rise to the task it has taken on, that the author's travels have raised more questions than he can account for.

It's the difference, perhaps, between interviewing people and creating them. Busy with interviews, concerned with relevant scholarship, constrained (as a conscientious journalist) by the facts, Finnegan is finally not quite able to create a moral and psychological atmosphere in which the lipless man and the deslocados are at home. Finally, of course, it's not fair to complain that Finnegan hasn't written a novel, and readers interested in third-world politics will appreciate his book for the resourceful work of political journalism that it is. A Complicated War takes us pan way down an exceedingly bleak and wretched road; should we wish to go further, we need a novelist, a Coetzee or a Gordimer or a Naipaul, to take us even further into the shadows.

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