II- Prelude and Epilogue
A tentative summary of the finalised book content:
Promotional Blurb ('book' back-cover)
Mozambique: the heart of lightness, gateway to the ‘welcoming people’ of earlier seafarers, pearl of the Indian Ocean: how could you ever be less than Arcadia? Your cyan seaside stretches, the dawning berth where the mighty Rift Valley and Zambezi river come to rest, the land of landings. Your lasting age and golden shores witnessed transient dwellings dotting seaside dunes, now and then venturing deeper on riversides, but scarcely rooted inland.
Through deep time, chieftains emerged and ebbed away, communities strived and subsided; Until the day mercantile crave for easy wealth disembarked: first on the lookout for slaves, ivory, gold; and a millennium later –with industrial age and the wheels of globalization turning ever faster– for cheap labor and geopolitical power.
Seven decades of colonial exploitation were regimented by the ‘African Partition’ of 1885 until Post-World War modernity demanded self-rule, which the obsolete Portuguese administration postponed until the dawn of 1975. Equally outdated for other reasons, ensuing kleptocracies are still– four decades later– to bring a failed nation into fruition: intensified poverty and inequality, environmental degradation, human insecurity and migration crisis.
Dusk has for long buried the dawning dream: the old nationalists now mutated into the new elite, effectively mastermind a resource extraction patronage scheme beyond ‘foreign aid’ accountability, despising domestic human capital rooted on broad and rich heritage of African, European or Asian minorities. With greed and vanity installed, oblivious to history and its recurrent mistakes, it is no surprise to see widespread civil unrest where ‘freedom fighting’ once started.
Author’s Note
I am a part of the main [1] I learned it by heart, nurturing its pieces. As a young child when exploring the magical world of life on the edge: the leaden mangrove shrubs, intertwined rhizomes and amphibious mudskippers. The stubbornness of a breathing world divided between land and sea, where ephemeral tidal waves tirelessly remake channels and paths, sight, sound and smell. And the overwhelming scale of its aggregate fragments: the throbbing of the mighty Indian Ocean, the seasonal wrath of the Zambezian rivers and deltas, the green wasteland of man-made savanna woodlands and the plenitude of animal creation. Life before the flood.
The Memory Path is inspired by personal recollections from life, landscape and legend. Every account is as faithful as possible to real world circumstances: meaning that, every time reality is uncertain, my recollection of it is as certain as possible. Stories are based on reflections and in dialogue with lasting and late friends, without having their publication as a primary purpose. Narratives go back fifty years to an age of disorder, beginning when collective identity and fate were being swiftly changed as the Portuguese colonial empire was ending. The limelight is Southern Africa and Mozambique, although reminiscence from elsewhere is also included.
The birth of a nation –in itself an unusual event– rarely matches expectations, the grand theories of history, the universal justice that its ‘midnight’s children’ had fostered. Particularly unique was the fact that soon after Mozambican independence in 1975 change was further inflated by internal conflict in the years running up to the collapse of communism and the closure of the cold war in 1989, all with evident consequences for the country and the whole Southern Africa.
In conjuring up memories, values and attitudes, the author —as an insider—celebrates both what has been lost and earned, as well as those with whom he shared a memorable rite of passage. Looking back —as an outsider—those were times of enchanting if not troubling naivety, a chimerical path to individuation: all the same, narrative outcomes before you are certainly biased.
Rephrasing what has been said above, the writer, although able to partake many of the recorded events, might not have lived them first-hand; neither affairs befallen exactly the way they are recollected. It goes without saying that people’s lives are unique and exceptional and can only pertain to themselves; hence I recognize the fact that memories and relationships were often reshaped into creative fiction and that such accounts may only express personal reflections which may neither be entirely factual nor chronological.
A final caveat to the reader: personal and social narratives are hardly objective study documents. They simply reflect threads and patterns and their random interplay with process, opportunity and fate. This novel is therefore inspired on events, names and characters that were revived, reconstructed or reinterpreted from circumstantial affairs.
Prelude
Only the past that you aware of makes the present understandable: Part One of this virtual book is about recovering my own ‘manuscript’ and stop pretending that I cannot read it. With the passing years we awake to the reality that, if a story is hard to tell, our own story will be harder still. Particularly when the voice —as my own—comes from a long way away tongue, terrain and time. I will try though, hoping that something of merit might have survived to be shared with the reader, if only one page, perception or thought. And that would have made all the difference.
My name is Abel d’Antas. As an archaeologist I know that I am as good as gone, a blip in the braided blueprint of life. Let me clarify: I see today’s events both as millennial outcomes as well as single episodes adding up to future significance. I look at both nature and civilization as an endless cycle taking us from collapse to renewal in an expanding universe. Although individual narratives may be insignificant today, collectively, they will be determinant in deep time. But while seizing the day, I am caught between two infinite worlds as a two-headed Janus, briefly standing anywhere at any point in space and time; and such cosmic stinginess governing our brief lives suggest I should have little interest for the parochial. Oneness of humankind, landscape, their related fate and lore are on the contrary fascinating phenomena. In a nutshell: I cherish people, place, process – the diversity of human history in a cosmos that we will never fully understand.
You ask what is in a name? A part of me stands as a poor allusion to the Book of Genesis and the second son of Adam and Eve, the other half suggesting a relation to the author of the Divine Comedy, a book I only discovered in old age. Either way, I’m not keen to link my birth to historical synchronicity or fate, be they Stalin’s death or the Mau-Mau upraise in Kenya; although I am somehow pleased to have my name reminding Dante and his pre-announced modernity seven hundred years back in time. The world is a fascinating riddle: in every name there is the likelihood of being someone else, and the universal voice speaks to us in wordless metaphors: each one of us is perhaps no more than a possibility?
“Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” [2]. After traveling far and wide and often struggling to know origin or end point, I came to the insight that wherever I go I must carry on forward. Path is an endless journey along infinite lines, without a beginning or an end. Hence, musing about my roots and roadway, I now realize that there must be a hidden thread linking today’s wintry nightfall to the tropical sunset of 5th October 1960, when a child (me) sat in a balcony waiting for his mother. It is the unknown, and not the events-in-themselves, that engenders sadness and nostalgia.
I found myself within a forest dark: I left Mozambique three decades ago. I have tried hard to overcome bitter circumstance and loss. To conceal feelings, to move on, or so I thought: but in fleeing forward I’ve also missed seeing the part for the whole, the tree for the forest, the mold for the casting. How could I possibly hide the huge gap between what once had been fantasized and hardly achieved: the privilege of idealists—my generation— to witness the last colonial empire falling to crumbles and a new nation rising from the ashes. What made us believe in exception, the raising phoenix that would thrive forever?
Along with a few rainbow Mozambicans I rushed forward intoxicated with the thought that Africa had once been the cradle of mankind; and it would happen again, this time raising up the ‘new citizen’… dismissing what the diaspora had predicted: “this daydreaming we’ve seen before and it always led to shattered hopes”. But —so we thought— they were spoof opinions, echoes of ancient voices, overlooking their private property pilling-up in containers to be shipped abroad, families ripped apart, houses hollowed and gardens abandoned… Until most of us were forced to start queuing: first for leftovers from the colonial banquet, the basic goods that shortly became scant, and later envying the handful privileged that could afford buying from foreign currency shops for VIPs.
Another arrogant syndrome on hindsight: the conviction that we knew our way as if standing at the apex of a chimerical vision of the uncharted country. We had been blessed to live inevitability: to help a modern nation to discover the golden path from past to future, to unveil the history neglected by tribal and colonial societies alike. Would I, among others, perhaps find new meanings, the cobweb leading tyranny to justice? To help making equity real, wiping out the prejudice of race and creed, to teach the world a lesson? We had a mission, we claimed: we care and believe: illiterate today, enlightened tomorrow. But, alas, recognizing opportunity does not assure outcomes.
Rarely ‘time is a kindly god’ [3]: by 1981 civil war ramped up in Mozambique, fed by internal political conflict and regional ideological dissent. In blindly building the new Babel, revolutionary practice made each brick more valuable than the human hands laying them in place, and the whole narrative lost authenticity. Honest friends, family and innocent citizens were increasingly arrested, deported to concentration camps, many executed in the name of ‘revolutionary justice’, while famine, death and despair escalated in warfare with ‘white’ Rhodesia and South Africa. A cold war proxy exploring internal ethnical and regional sentiments, which had been brewing from earlier days, became fully fledged, and by early 1982 the roads between central and southern provinces became virtually cut off as the bloodshed approached Maputo. On 17th August 1982 –following a threat I had warned authorities about– Professor Ruth First is killed by a South African letter bomb in her office. Particularly from 1983, as the major provincial urban centers become isolated, our archaeological research fieldwork became unfeasible and with it our desire to feed new knowledge into schoolbooks. An unforgettable sunset brought the last stroke to this chapter of my life: my own seclusion became even more real upon receiving a note of farewell from my wife and – by extension – our children.
I stayed behind for some time until departing myself, taking along my old grand-father, the last ones of a three-generation ‘settlers’. For many years I looked forward to seeing the day when ‘home’ –although with all the family property expropriated– would somehow still be there for me. I did come for short visits a couple of times thereafter but never felt again that ‘home’ had survived me. As years went by I saw friends lost in their forlorn battles, their deceptive dreaming tamed or shattered by unanswered hope. I deeply salute their honesty and determination.
Again: my writing will take form as short-story telling. Much will be from recollection and – at times– as doubtful as daydreaming of a bygone age. Hence, I hope the reader to these stories will accept my own bias: when reality is uncertain, our personal memory of reality is certainly needed.
Postscript
If your curiosity is like mine, you will be reading this postscript before reading elsewhere, trying to guess the whole from one of its parts: a senseless attempt, I warn you, since a great deal of its parts is work-in-progress… But I will give you a clue: if I carry on feeling –a strong possibility– that beyond ephemeral changes, Life and Love are foundational, world principles worth protecting; that Humankind must reconnect with the vision of universal creation and emotional identity, rejecting the materialistic and dehumanized world where the most powerful say ‘what we want, we take’; whatever I write will be consistent with my wish to reflect upon, lend a voice and retrace the beauty of being human.
While being certain that the flawed ideology shall pass, in Mozambique and beyond, the last few decades have been increasingly dominated by an expanding urban middle-class and greedy, old party leaders, still controlling a phony democracy of cronyism and kleptocracy. Such tragedy result in subdued citizens of stateless nations, forgotten in rural areas, abandoned by colonial as well as post-colonial masters to their hopeless, destitute, destiny. They are the scum of the earth, refugees in their own land, the silent majority banned from welfare, identity and justice.
Back home the Nordic sun rages through running clouds feeding the harsh autumn rain. The sea bounces back and forward, the shinning face of a far, silvery deep. The majestic oak tree facing my terrace is now being stripped of its mellowing leaves, cruelly bending to the gale force of wind, the times-a-‘changing tune exposing its faltering fur. In striking contrast, the lawn framing the lower part of my horizon stands still, as if shielded by an ephemeral inferiority, all the fading green looking as wet and dull as the grey above.
The long dusk slowly creeps in, uninvited. Ever so little hours of radiance each day, a grizzly, cloudier sky, the sun falling lower down on the horizon; colder wind and rain comes along every other day, slowly erasing the merry memory of summer. Such is the Fall, running ahead of us each year: the rhythmical progression of time partitioned in its seasonal pieces.
We are part a much far-reaching path: while revisiting the tropics of childbirth, the perennial sea-surf, the crashing blaze of thunder and deluge, the sweet-sour smell of lastly sprinkled soil, the sight before me is immersed in a grey, mildly evanescent haze and wind-dashed trees; its when it all comes back to me: the sudden raging Indian Ocean monsoon storm, the knife-edge downfall between life and death, when alone in stormy seas my sailing dinghy capsized, blasting force stripping me off its protective shell. Right there I chose to live. All this so sudden, so long ago, still so close.
Epilogue: ‘A Man’s character is his fate’ [4]
A seed planted at twilight takes longer to sprout; but for every dusk there is a dawning. Joanna’s letter –and I hope she would have known it somehow– was a lasting legacy that helped shaping the outcome of my life, for it inspired me into a journey of critical reflection and soul-searching. I come to recognise how the postcolonial leadership portrayed the myth of the ‘new citizen’ as a self-protect interest, to mask their weakness and ultimately leading to the tragedy of the civil society they said would rescue from the colonial past. History illustrates how dictators drive their lunacy and wickedness beyond a tipping point which will ultimately bring about their own destruction; while the societal fabric involuntary submitted to their power thankfully survive the ordeal.
Ironically, Marx stated that “all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce” [5]. I would add: not necessarily it that order and for long. All things considered –beyond political narratives– it is colective destiny that matters. People and not ‘masses’ are the ones engaged with daily realities and values of the world they live in. Political agents –in the name of collective destiny and social interest particularly making use of weak and ill-informed civil societies– manipulate such ethical values.
After two decades of enquiring I will return back to meet with Hilário. He and a few others saw Joanna’s last moments in life. Through him I may come to know where Joanna’s bones are resting. There is controversy over the date, number and method of those secretly executed. Published reports differ from a tragic day in October 1978 when nine prisoners–including Joanna– were seen being burned alive [6]; and another version stating that at least two known leaders (Reverend Uria Simango and Lázaro Nkavandame), and presumably others, were executed in May 1983 [7]. As recently as in 2005 a prominent Frelimo leader publicly justified such crimes as ‘revolutionary justice’ [8]. Any of these or other similar executions done without judicial process has been officially acknowledged, investigated, or any of those responsible charged. A crime always leaves an open wound, and it will evermore remain so until apologised.
When I first left Mozambique in 1984, despite António’s suicide, I had held on to the two-dimensional, deep-rooted conviction that there was still hope for a ‘new citizen’ and a new country. Many of my generation shared that dream, some even died for it. Arthur Koestler in his biography_ testifies to the fact that ‘every period has its dominant religion and hope, and ‘socialism’ in a vague and undefined sense was the hope of the early twentieth century’ [9].
Since 1994 a couple of decades have gone since Mozambique and I parted away for good. In looking back I now realise that something definitely died as Shango and I waved goodbye; with his subsequent assassination –for revealing that the old order was gone and that corruption was the new norm– whatever remained of it was gone forever. Above all I wish that –in bearing Joanna to her final rest– we would at last be taken from dusk to dawn.
1 No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main (…), John Donne, 1572-1631, Meditation XVII, “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions”.
2 Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / ché la diritta via era smarrita: Opening lines to the Divina Commedia by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Inferno Canto I: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation.
3 D. Grene and R. Lattimore (eds), Sophocles II, Univ. of Chicago Press 2013:148 (in Electra, line 178)
4 Heraclitus (c. 540 BC-480 BC), Fragments.
5 K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852
6 B.Ncomo, Uria Simango: um homem, uma causa. Edições Novafrica, Maputo 2004.
7 Karl Maier et al. Conspicuous Destruction: War, Famine and the Reform Process in Mozambique, An Africa Watch Report, Human Rights Watch, New York 1992.
8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uria_Simango
9 A. Koestler, The Invisible Writing, Vintage Classic, 2005, p. 474