"I am now well over midway upon the journey of my life struggling to know how to find the straightforward pathway back to the past and what I saw" (opening words of Dante’s 700-year-old ‘Divine Comedy’)
Mozambique –where I was born– offers a kaleidoscope of unique ingredients: African, Asian, and European brought together in a magical world midway land and sea, of tidal waves perpetually remaking channels, paths, and shores: Fragments of cultural and natural creation, where multiple languages, colour and creed blend with the seasonal moods of the Zambezian deltas and the mighty Indian Ocean, where mixed communities coexist since immemorial times in vast man-made savannas. Life before the flood.
To live alongside a playground of mangrove forest is to have access to everlasting adventure. Curiosity often led me there, a wonderland made up of mudskippers, birdlife and scattered pottery shards lying next to abandoned huts. Such an ever-changing universe of washed away tides define what was to come next: a life divided between Beira, Maputo, Lisbon, Oxford, Uppsala, Stockholm… and a career I decided to pursue (archaeology) despite other family plans (law).
The country’s independence in 1975 under a totalitarian regime led to increasing social exclusion, persecution, and the nationalisation of all family property, resulting in their compulsory departure. Being myself a younger, third generation of ‘white Mozambicans’, I decided to stay on, hoping for the best, motivated by the intoxicating sense of a new world of social atonement.
Holding on to the dream of building a new nation ignorant of its past, I enthusiastically embraced archaeological research after graduation in History. And in the absence of scientific infrastructure, I headed from 1976 a new Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at Eduardo Mondlane University promoting a national ‘Archaeological Survey Programme’ funded through Swedish scientific collaboration.
A short interlude: gradually disenchanted by a despotic, irresponsible regime, stirring a devastating civil war, ruining expectations, and making archaeological fieldwork unfeasible, I left the country in 1984. The first and last of kin, my eighty-year-old grandfather and me: the older and younger generations sharing the same flight out into the unknown. As a father at twenty-three, and a wife that had left the country the previous year, divorce expected me in Lisbon. Unable to cope with rejection, with two children entrusted to the custody of their mother, I went abroad soon thereafter: an impulsive desire to start over somewhere. Days of uncertainty, hard work, and solitude.
Taken by the flow of unexpected events, previous collaborative work led me to Sweden, where I spent two years (1985-1987) as guest researcher at the Department of Cultural Anthropology, Uppsala University. This opportunity allowed me to finalise writing-up my thesis and to return to Oxford in order to complete a doctoral degree in African Archaeology I had started while resident in 1979-1980. Still unable to see a future in war-ridden Mozambique, I settled in Lisbon between 1987 and 1995, working as principal researcher (Tropical Research Institute) and professor (Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias).
Increasingly attracted by scientific questions of a more holistic, interdisciplinary, nature, I went back to Sweden in 1995, following an appointment as deputy director (social sciences) at the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), based at The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. This career change proved to be the right choice: the most fulfilling and creative seventeen years of my professional life, engaging with the scientific excellence of a vast network of global environmental change scholars and research organizations worldwide. Seeing that the secretariat was approaching closure and having achieved what I had in mind, I spent the last few years of my professional life as Senior Research Adviser at the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (2012-2016).
What have I learned? I believe that the dawn of a healthier governance, science, and public understanding will ultimately bring along a new collective vision, moral responsibility, and wisdom. We dearly need to make headway to discredit misconceptions upholding, rather nonsensically, that the world is random and chaotic: if we may ever survive as a species, we must respect and live in a creative relationship with the World we are a part of.
On a final, personal note: I am married to Anki and father to Sofia, Miguel, Daniel, and Klara. My pastimes include writing, reading, photography and motorcycle travel.
[Photo: The Baltic Sea at Stockholm, viewed from the ‘Moderna Museet]