Pensativities: Selected Essays

The Seven Dirty Shoes

I shall begin by confessing to a certain uneasiness. While it is a pleasure and an honour for me to accept this invitation to be with you, at the same time, I don’t know how to do justice to such a pompous title: “learned address.” I have deliberately chosen a theme about which I have a certain amount of ill-contained ignorance. Every day, we are confronted by the rousing exhortation to fight poverty. And all of us, in response to our most generous, patriotic spirit, yearn to join this battle. There are, however, various types of poverty. And among all of these, there is one that escapes all manner of statistical and numerical indicators: this is the impoverishment of our ability to reflect upon ourselves. I speak of our difficulty in thinking of ourselves as the subject of history, as a place of departure from and destination for a dream.

I shall use the occasion in my capacity as a writer, having chosen the terrain of our inner being, a field in which we are all amateurs. In this domain, no one has a degree, nor can anyone be audacious enough to give “learned addresses.” Our only secret — our only wisdom — is to be true to ourselves, and unafraid of publicly sharing our most vulnerable feelings. That is what I have come here to do: to share with you some of my concerns, my solitary musings.

On my eleventh birthday, 5th July 1966, Kenneth Kaunda stood in front of the microphones of Radio Lusaka to announce that an essential pillar of his people’s happiness had just been built. Kaunda thanked the Zambian people for their involvement in the creation of the country’s first university. Some months before, Kaunda had launched an appeal for each Zambian to make a contribution to the construction of the university. The response was moving: tens of thousands of people answered the appeal. Peasants gave corn, fishermen donated fish, civil servants gave money. A country of illiterates drew together to create what they imagined would constitute a new page in their history. The message from the country folk at the university’s official opening read as follows: We gave because we believe that by so doing, our grandchildren will no longer feel hunger.

Forty years on, the grandchildren of Zambian peasants still suffer from hunger. In fact, Zambians today are worse off than they were at that time. In the 1960s, Zambia benefited from a Gross National Product comparable to Singapore and Malaysia. Nowadays, there is no possible comparison between our neighbour and those two Asian countries.

Some African nations can justify their ongoing poverty because they went through wars. But Zambia never had a war. Some countries can argue that they don’t possess any natural resources. But Zambia is a nation with considerable mineral resources. Where does the fault lie for these frustrated expectations? Who failed? Was it the university? Was it society? Was it the whole world that failed? And why did Singapore and Malaysia progress while Zambia regressed?

I spoke at random of Zambia as an African country. Sadly, there is no shortage of other examples. Our continent is full of identical cases, of failed targets and frustrated aspirations. We suffer from a general lack of belief in our ability to change the destiny of our continent. It’s worth asking ourselves: what is happening? What needs to change both within and outside Africa?

These are serious questions. We cannot delude ourselves in our answers, nor continue to create a smokescreen in order to conceal responsibilities. We cannot accept that responsibility is merely the concern of governments.

Fortunately, our situation in Mozambique is unique and clearly distinct; we must acknowledge and be proud of the fact that our trajectory has been very different. One of these differences has only recently emerged. Ever since 1957, only 6 out of 153 African heads of state have abandoned power of their own volition. Joaquim Chissano is the seventh of these presidents. This may seem like a detail, but it is indicative that the political process in Mozambique has been guided by a different line of thinking.

Nevertheless, the conquests of freedom and democracy we enjoy today will only become definitive when they are transformed into culture within each one of us. And this will take generations to achieve. In the meantime, Mozambique lives under the same threats that are common to the whole continent. Hunger, poverty, disease, all this we share with the rest of Africa. The statistics are frightening: ninety million Africans will die from AIDS in the next twenty years. Mozambique’s contribution to this tragic figure will be about three million dead. Most of those who are doomed are young and represent precisely the lever with which we could remove the weight of poverty. What I mean is that Africa isn’t just losing its present, but it is losing the cornerstone upon which another future might be built.

It costs a lot of money to have a future. But it is far more expensive if all you have is a past. Before Independence, there was no future for the Zambian peasants. Now, the only time that exists for them is the future of others.

Are the challenges greater than our hopes? Our only course of action is to be optimists and do what the Brazilians call getting up, shaking the dust off, and starting again. Pessimism is a luxury reserved for the rich.

Ladies and gentlemen:

The crucial question is this: What is it that stands between us and the future we all want? Some believe that we lack more experts, more schools, more hospitals. Others believe we need more investors, more economic projects. All of this is necessary, all of this is vital. But for me, there is something else that is even more important. This thing has a name: it’s called a new attitude. If we don’t change our attitude, we won’t gain a better quality of life. We can have more technicians, more hospitals, and more schools, but we won’t be the builders of our own future.

I speak of a new attitude, but the word should really be uttered in the plural, because it contains a vast array of postures, beliefs, ideas and prejudices. For a long time now, I have defended the notion that the biggest factor in Mozambique’s backwardness isn’t found in its economy, but in our inability to generate a way of thinking that is productive, audacious and innovative. Thinking that doesn’t come from the repetition of clichés, of formulas, or of prescriptions that have been invented by others.

I sometimes ask myself: why do we find it so difficult to think of ourselves as the subjects of History? It comes, above all, from having always inherited from others the contours of our own identity. At first, Africans were invalidated. Their territory was one of absence, their time outside History. Later, Africans were studied as if they constituted some clinical case. Now, they are helped to survive in the backyard of History.

We are all at the beginning of an internal struggle to overcome our ghosts of old. We cannot enter modernity with the burden of prejudices that we currently bear; we need to shed our footwear at the door of modernity. I have counted seven dirty shoes that we need to leave at the threshold of this new era. There are many more. But I had to choose and seven is a magical number.

The First Shoe: The Idea that the Guilty Are Always Others and that We Are Always the Victims

We are already familiar with this type of discourse. Blame has been attributed to the war, colonialism, imperialism, apartheid: in a word, to everything. Except ourselves. This washing of our hands has been encouraged by some African elites who seek to remain immune from liability. The guilty are pinpointed right from the start: they are the others, people of a different ethnic group, a different race, or from some other geographical area. It is true that others have had their share of responsibility in our suffering. But some of that responsibility was always homegrown.

Some time ago, I was struck by a book entitled Capitalist Nigger: The Road to Success, by a Nigerian called Chika A. Onyeani. In one of our newspapers, I reproduced a text by this economist, which is an impassioned appeal for Africans to regard themselves in a new way. Allow me to read you an excerpt from the text.

Dear Brothers:

I am utterly tired of people who only think of one thing: to complain and lament as part of a ritual in which we present ourselves psychologically as victims. We weep and moan, we moan and weep. We complain ad nauseam about what others have done and continue to do to us. And we think the world owes us something. I am sorry to have to tell you that this is no more than an illusion. No one owes us anything. No one is disposed to abdicate from what they have, with the justification that we also want the same thing. If we want something then we must learn how to get it. We cannot go on begging, my brothers and sisters.

Forty years after Independence we still blame the colonial masters for everything that happens in Africa today. Our leaders are not always honest enough to accept responsibility for the poverty of our peoples. We accuse the Europeans of stealing and pillaging Africa’s natural resources. But I ask you this: who is inviting the Europeans to behave in this way? Is it not we?

We want others to treat us with dignity and without condescension. But at the same time, we continue to treat ourselves with a kind of benevolent complacency: we are experts in the creation of a discourse that absolves us from any guilt. And so we say:

someone steals, poor soul, because he is impoverished (forgetting that there are thousands of other impoverished people who don’t steal);

officials and the police are corrupt because, poor things, their wages aren’t enough (forgetting that no one in this world has enough wages);

politicians abuse their power because, poor things, these practices are anthropologically legitimate in so-called traditional Africa.

Abdication from any responsibility is one of the most serious stigmas that weighs upon us Africans, from North to South. There are those who claim that it is an inheritance of slavery, of that time when we were not masters of our fate. The boss, often far away and invisible, was responsible for our destiny. Or for our absence of any destiny.

Today, we haven’t even killed off the boss of former times symbolically. One of the modes of address that has emerged most rapidly over the last ten years is the word “boss.” It was as if he had never really died, as if he were waiting surreptitiously for a historic opportunity to reappear in our daily lives. Can we blame anyone for this re-emergence? No. But we are creating a society that produces inequalities and that reproduces power relationships we believed were dead and buried.

The Second Shoe:

The Idea that Success Is Not Born from Work

Only today I woke up to the news of an African president who is going to have his three-hundred-room palace exorcized because he hears “strange” noises during the night. The palace is so out of proportion to the wealth of the country that it took twenty years to complete. It’s possible president’s sleepless nights are not so much the product of evil spirits but the product of a guilty conscience.

Either way, this episode merely illustrates the way we still explain, by and large, positive and negative phenomena. That which explains misfortune sits side by side with that which justifies being blessed. The sports team wins, the work of art is awarded a prize, the company is in profit, the official got promotion? To what is all this due? The first answer, my friends, is one we are all familiar with. Success is due to good luck. And the term “good luck” means two things: we are protected by our dead ancestors, and we are protected by our living godfathers.

Success is never, or almost never, seen as the result of effort, or of work as a long-term investment. Our experiences (good or bad) are attributed to invisible forces that command our destiny. For some, this causal view is seen as so intrinsically “African” that we would forfeit our “identity” if we abdicated from it. Debates about “authentic” identities are always treacherous; what we should be debating is whether we can create a stronger, more productive vision that encourages a stronger, more active, and more participatory approach to History.

Sadly, we see ourselves more as consumers than producers. The thought that Africa might produce art, science and ideas is alien even to many Africans. So far, the continent has produced natural resources and a labour force. It has produced footballers, dancers, craftsmen. All this is acceptable because it belongs to the realm of what people understand as “nature.” But few will accept that Africans can be producers of ideas, of ethical positions, of modernity. It isn’t necessary for others to repudiate this possibility. We ourselves assume the burden of such repudiation.

According to a proverb, “the goat eats wherever he’s tethered.” All of us are familiar with the sorry use of this saying and how it governs the actions of people who take advantage of situations and of places. It’s sad enough that we compare ourselves to a goat. But it’s also symptomatic that, in these proverbs of convenience, we never identify ourselves as animals that are producers, such as, for example, the ant. Let us imagine that the saying has changed and became the following: “A goat produces wherever he’s tethered.” I’ll bet that in this event, no one would want to be a goat.

The Third Shoe: The Prejudiced

View That Whoever Criticizes Is an Enemy

Many people believe that with the end of the one-party state, intolerance towards those who thought differently would come to an end. But intolerance isn’t just the fruit of political regimes. It is the product of cultures and religions, it is the result of History. We have inherited a notion of loyalty from rural society that is too parochial. This failure to encourage a critical spirit is still more serious when it concerns our youth. The rural world is based on the authority of age. The young man, who has not married and produced children, has no rights at all, no voice and no visibility. The same process of marginalization oppresses women as well.

This whole legacy doesn’t help create a culture of honest, open debate. Personal aggression is therefore largely substituted for the discussion of ideas. It’s enough to demonize everyone who has a different opinion. There is a whole range of demons at people’s disposal: political colouring, spiritual colour, skin colour, social origin or religion.

In discussing this matter, there is a historical component that we must consider: Mozambique was born out of a guerrilla struggle. This legacy imbued us with an epic sense of History and a deep sense of pride in the manner in which independence was won. But, through inertia, the armed struggle for national liberation also gave way to the idea that the people were a kind of army which could be commanded through military discipline. In the years following independence, we were all militants, we all had only one cause, our entire souls kowtowed in the presence of our leaders. And there were so many leaders. This legacy didn’t encourage the capacity for positive insubordination.

At this point, I’m going to let you into a secret: in the early 1980s, I was one of a group of writers and musicians who were given the responsibility of producing a new national anthem and a new party anthem for FRELIMO. The way in which this task was received is indicative of our military discipline: we were given our mission, we were requisitioned from our jobs, and at the orders of the president, Samora Machel, we were shut away in a house in Matola, having been told that we would only be allowed to leave when we had completed the anthems. This relationship between power and the artists only makes sense within a given historical moment. The truth was that we accepted the responsibility with dignity, the task was presented to us as an honour and a patriotic duty. And in fact, once there, we more or less behaved ourselves. It was a time of great privation. . and the temptations were many. In the house out in Matola, there was food, there were servants, a swimming pool, at a time when the city was suffering all kinds of shortages. During the first few days, I have to confess, we were fascinated by such privileged treatment and we allowed ourselves to while away the hours in idleness. This adolescent feeling of disobedience was our way of reaping small-scale revenge on regimental discipline.

The words of one of the hymns reflected this militaristic attitude, this metaphorical approximation that I have been referring to:

We are soldiers of the people

Marching forward

All this has to be seen in its context, without any rancour. In the end, this was how Beloved Fatherland saw the light of day: an anthem which sings of us as one people, united by a common dream.

The Fourth Shoe:

The Idea that by Changing the Words, Reality Changes

One of our countrymen was once giving a presentation on our economic situation in New York, and at a certain point he spoke of the black market. It was as if the end of the world had arrived. Angry voices were raised in protest, and my poor friend had to stop, without really understanding what was happening. The following day, we received a small dictionary of terms that were deemed politically incorrect. Terms such as blind, deaf, fat, thin, and so on, were banished from the language.

We have been pulled along by these cosmetic preoccupations. We are reproducing a discourse that privileges the superficial and suggests that by changing the icing, the cake becomes edible. Nowadays, for example, we hear people hesitating over whether we should say “negro” or “black.” As if the problem lay in the words themselves. The strange thing is that, while we amuse ourselves discussing this choice of words, we still go on using terms that are openly derogatory, such as “mulatto” and monhê (although the etymology of this latter word isn’t immediately insulting).

There is a whole generation that is learning a language — the language of workshops. It is a simple code, a kind of creole half way between English and Portuguese. In fact, it’s not a language but a vocabulary package. It’s enough to know how to manipulate one or two fashionable terms in order to talk to others (that is, to not say anything at all.) I strongly recommend some of these terms, such as for example:

sustainable development;

awareness or accountability;

good governance;

capacity building;

local communities.

These terms should preferably be used in a PowerPoint presentation. Another secret to cut a good figure in workshops is to be able to use abbreviations, for a “workshopper” who is worth his salt knows these codes inside out. Let me cite a possible sentence from a hypothetical report: the MGDs from UNDP equated themselves with NEPAD from the AU and with PARPA from the GoM. For those in the know, half an acronym is more than enough.

I’m from a time when our worth was measured by what we did. Today, what we are is measured by the spectacle we make of ourselves, by the manner in which we place ourselves in the shop window. The resumé, the business card (full of titles and flourishes), the list of publications that almost no one has read, all this seems to suggest one thing: appearances now have greater value than our capacity for action.

Many of the institutions that ought to be producing ideas are now producing reports, which clutter up shelves and are doomed to a useless archive. Instead of solutions, problems are found. Instead of action, new studies are recommended.

The Fifth Shoe:

The Shame of Being Poor and the Cult of Appearances

The hurry to show one isn’t poor is, itself, proof of poverty. Our poverty cannot be a reason for hiding it. The one who should be ashamed isn’t the poor person but the person who creates poverty.

Nowadays, we experience an obsessive concern with exhibiting false signs of wealth. The idea has been born that the status of a citizen derives from the signs that distinguish someone from those who are the poorest.

I remember that I once decided to buy a new car in Maputo. When the salesman saw the car I had chosen, he almost had a fit. “That one, Mr Couto? Surely, sir, you need a vehicle that is compatible.” It is a curious term: “compatible.” Compatible with what? I ask you.

Our lives are a stage performance: a vehicle is no longer an object with a function. It is a passport to a status of importance, the source of vanity. The car has become a reason for idolatry, a kind of temple, a true obsession in our self-promotion.

This illness, this religion that one might call “cardolatry,” has afflicted everyone, from government leaders to street kids. Boys who can’t read may well know the makes and details of all manner of cars. It’s sad that their horizon of ambitions should be so empty and limited.

Our schools urgently need to exalt humility and simplicity as positive values. Arrogance and exhibitionism are not, as some would have it, expressions of some inherent African power culture. They are the expressions of those who accept packaging over contents.

The Sixth Shoe: Passivity in the Face of Injustice

We are predisposed to denounce injustice when it is committed against ourselves, our group, or those of the same ethnicity or religion as ourselves. We are less willing when the injustice is directed against the “others,” or furthermore, when perpetrated within silent zones of injustice, these areas in Mozambique where crime remains invisible. I refer in particular to the following:

domestic violence (40 percent of crimes are the result of domestic aggression towards women);

violence against widows;

violence against or maltreatment of workers

violence against or maltreatment of children.

We were deeply shocked by the recent advertisement which stated that white candidates were preferred for jobs. Immediate measures were taken and this was absolutely correct. However, there are opportunities for discrimination that are just as serious or even more so, and that we accept as natural and beyond question.

Let us take that advertisement in a newspaper and imagine that it was worded correctly instead of racially. Would everything have been all right? I don’t know whether you are all aware of the print run of the Notícias newspaper. It has a print run of 13,000. Even if we assume that each copy is read by five people, we have to accept that the number of readers amounts to fewer than the residents of a district of Maputo. It is within this world that sales discounts and access to opportunities are shared. I mentioned the print run but left aside the problem are shared. Why are the messages of our newspapers restricted in their geographical circulation? How much of Mozambique is left outside?

It’s true that this discrimination isn’t comparable to the racist advertisement because it’s not the result of an explicit, self-conscious act. But the effects of discrimination and exclusion from these social practices must be a cause for reflection and cannot be classified as normal. This “district” of 65,000 people who have access to information is today a nation within a nation, a nation that gets pride of place, that exchanges favours among its members, that lives in Portuguese, and sleeps with its head on the pillow of the printed word.

Another example. We are administering antiretroviral drugs to around thirty thousand patients with AIDS. This number may rise over the coming years to fifty thousand. This means that about 1,450,000 patients are excluded from treatment. This decision has terrible ethical implications. How are decisions made and who makes such decisions? Is it acceptable, I ask, that the lives of one-and-a-half million citizens should lie in the hands of a tiny group of medical scientists?

The Seventh Shoe: The Idea that in

Order to Be Modern We Need to Imitate Others

Every day, we receive strange visitors in our home. They enter via the magic box called television. They create a relationship of virtual familiarity with us. Gradually, it’s we who begin to believe we’re living outside, dancing in the arms of Janet Jackson. Videos and the television industry not only tell us to buy, but they issue a whole other invitation: “be like us.” This appeal to imitation falls upon us like a gift from heaven: the shame we feel at being ourselves becomes a springboard, an excuse for us to don this other mask.

Our cultural production has begun to parrot the culture of others. The future of our music may be a kind of tropical hip-hop; the fate of our cuisine may be McDonald’s.

We talk of soil erosion and deforestation, but the erosion of our culture is even more worrying. The low esteem given to Mozambican languages (including even the Portuguese language) as well as the insistence that our identity is based in folklore, are both ways of whispering the following message in our ear: we’ll only be modern if we become American.

Our society’s history is similar to that of an individual. Both are marked by rituals of transition: birth, the end of adolescence, marriage, the end of life. I look at our urban society and ask myself: do we really want to be different? For I see Mozambique’s rites of passage are faithfully reproducing colonial society. We are doing a waltz, in formal dress, at a graduates’ ball that is identical to those of my youth. We are copying the end-of-course rituals based on models from medieval England. We get married in veils and garlands and we dump, far from the Avenida Julius Nyerere, anything that might suggest a ceremony more rooted in our land or in Mozambican tradition.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I spoke of the burden from which we must free ourselves in order to enter modernity in both mind and body. But modernity isn’t just a door made by others. We are also carpenters in its construction, and we should only be interested in participating in a modernity that we are also helping to build.

My message is a simple one: more than a technically skilled generation, what we need is a generation that is able to question technical matters. Youths that are capable of thinking anew about our country and the world. More than people prepared to give answers, what we need is an ability to ask questions. Mozambique doesn’t just need to move forward. It needs to discover its own way forward in a fog-shrouded time and in a world that has no direction. Other people’s compasses are of no use to us, other people’s maps are of no help. We need to invent our own compass points. What we require is a past that isn’t crippled with prejudice; what we need is a future that doesn’t come to us disguised as financial prescription.

The university should be a centre for debate, a factory for active citizenship, a forge for fashioning social concerns and constructive rebellion. We cannot train young professionals to be successful in an ocean of misery. The university cannot agree to reproduce injustice and inequality. We are dealing with young people and with what should be youthful, fertile and productive thought. Such thought cannot be ordered, it isn’t born out of nothing. It is born out of debate, innovative research, and an information system that is open and sensitive to what might best come out of Africa and the world.

The question is this: we talk a lot about young people. We don’t talk much with young people. Or rather, we talk with them when they become a problem. Youth experiences this ambiguous situation, dancing between a romantic vision of themselves (as the life blood of the Nation) and a malign condition, a nest of dangers and concerns (AIDS, drugs, unemployment).

Ladies and Gentlemen:

It wasn’t just Zambia that saw in education what a shipwrecked sailor sees in a lifeboat. We also deposited all our dreams in this need.

In a public meeting held last year in Maputo, an elderly nationalist said, with candour and courage, what many of us already knew. He confessed that he, along with many others who, in the 1960s, fled to FRELIMO, weren’t just motivated by their dedication to the cause of independence. They risked their lives and crossed the frontier of their own fears in order to be able to study. The fascination with education, and a notion that education provides a passport to a better life, was present even in a world where almost no one could study. Restrictions were common throughout Africa. Up until 1940, the number of Africans attending secondary school was less than eleven thousand. Today, the situation has improved and this number has multiplied a thousandfold. The continent has invested in the creation of new skills. And this investment has undoubtedly produced important results.

However, it has gradually become obvious that more skilled technicians don’t in themselves solve the problem of poverty in a nation. If a country doesn’t possess strategies to produce solutions at the deepest level, then all this investment won’t produce the desired effect. If the abilities of a nation are directed towards the enrichment of a tiny elite, then yet more skilled technicians will be of little value.

School is a means for us to aspire to what we don’t have. Later, life teaches us to have what we don’t want. Between school and life, what we need is to be honest and confess to those who are younger than us the things we don’t know; that we, as teachers and parents are also seeking answers.

With the new government, the fight for self-esteem has re-emerged as a priority. This is correct and opportune. We must like ourselves, we must believe in our capabilities. But this appeal to personal pride cannot be based on empty vanity, on a kind of baseless futile narcissism. Some believe that we shall regain our pride by visiting the past. It’s true that we need to feel we have roots and that these roots honour us. But self-esteem cannot be constructed merely out of materials from the past.

In fact, there’s only one way to give ourselves due value: that is through our endeavours, through the work we are capable of carrying out. We need to know how to accept our condition without shame or complexes: we are poor. Or rather, we have been impoverished by History. But we were part of this History, and we were also impoverished by ourselves. The causes of our current and future failures also lie within us.

But the strength to overcome our historical condition also dwells within us. We shall know, just as we knew before, how to reconquer the certainty that we are producers of our own destiny. We shall have ever-greater pride in being who we are: Mozambicans constructing a time and a place where we are born every single day.

This is why it is worth agreeing to shed not only the seven shoes, but all the shoes that delay our collective march forward. For there is only one truth: it’s better to advance barefoot than it is to stumble along in the shoes of others.

Address to the Higher Institute for Science

and Technology (ISCTEM), Maputo, 2006.