Pensativities: Selected Essays

The Planet Of Frayed Socks

Over the last few days, I had been struggling against time in order to assemble this speech, until a colleague, noticing my difficulties, made the following suggestion: “You’ve already given an address called ‘The Seven Dirty Shoes.’ Why don’t you write another one now called ‘The Seven Frayed Socks’?”

It wasn’t more than a passing joke, but when I got home, I came across an extraordinary photo of the President of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz. In it the man is shoeless, at the entrance to a mosque in Turkey, and clearly visible are his toes peeping out from his frayed socks. The photo was flashed around the world and, who knows, given its subject, the showy uniform may well become de rigueur among the financiers and bankers of our planet.

Whatever the case, there was an uncanny coincidence between my colleague’s joke and the photo in the magazine, and I ended up calling this text “The Planet of Frayed Socks.” The magazine which featured the photo wanted to portray the absurd side of Wolfowitz’s situation. As far as I was concerned, however, being caught like that merely made one of the most powerful men in the world a more familiar, more human creature.

What I mean is that the shoe may be very different, but the big toe poking through the banker’s sock is very similar to the toe of the poorest Mozambican. Just like any of us, the President of the World Bank conceals blemishes beneath his composed appearance.

I was told that the theme of this lecture was free, but at the same time, it was suggested that I should talk about the Human Person. Socks in need of darning can, suddenly, show us up to be more human, and make us ever more like those who appear distant.

So I shall start by telling you of an episode that I have never recounted before and whose revelation here may prove costly to me. Who knows: having shared this secret with you, I may find my accounts frozen or that I’ve been permanently designated a persona non grata in the world of Mozambican finance.

It happened right after Independence. I was about to set off on an overseas trip, and at that time, there weren’t the facilities we enjoy nowadays. The most a traveller could have at his disposal was a so-called traveller’s cheque. To get traveller’s cheques was a fearfully complicated process, and it was almost necessary to direct one’s request to the President of the Republic. I was travelling for urgent health reasons and two hours before boarding the plane, I was still in the bank, desperately trying to get my wretched cheques. At that moment, a lethargic bank teller informed me somewhat tragically that the cheques would, in fact, require two signatures, mine and my wife’s. Now, my wife was at work and there was no time to get the cheques to her. In the depths of my despair, there was only one thing for it. I was going to have to lie. I told the bank teller that my wife was outside in the car, and that I would bring him everything duly signed in less than a minute.

I took the cheques outside and hurriedly forged my partner’s signature. I did this under a considerable amount of nervous pressure, and without her original to copy from. The signature looked awful, smudged, and patently false. I rushed back inside, gave him back the papers and stood there waiting. The man retreated into an office, took his time, and then re-emerged with a solemn expression to tell me: “I’m sorry but there’s a signature here that doesn’t match.” I was expecting this, but even so, I crumbled under the weight of my shame. “I’d better tell him the truth,” I thought to myself. And I’d already begun to speak, “The problem is, comrade, that my wife. .,” when he interrupted to make this alarming declaration: “Your wife’s signature is fine, but your signature doesn’t match!”

As you can imagine, I was speechless and spent the next few moments practising my own signature in front of the suspicious gaze of the bank teller. The harder I tried, the less I was able to imitate my own handwriting. During those endless minutes, I thought to myself: “I’m going to be arrested not for having forged someone else’s signature. I’m going to be arrested for forging my own.”

I tell this story because the theme suggested for my address is the human person. At that time, as I stood in front of those ill-fated traveller’s cheques, I underwent the strange experience of someone caught red-handed being himself.

The truth is that we are never just one, but various people, and it should be the norm that our signature never quite matches. We all live alongside various selves; a variety of people all claim our identity. The secret is to disallow those choices life imposes, which kill our inner diversity. The best thing in life is to be able to choose, but the saddest thing is actually having to choose.

My dear friends,

Words dwell so deep within us that we forget they have a history. It’s worth asking ourselves about the word “person,” and that is what I shall do as simply and straightforwardly as possible. The word “person” comes from the Latin persona. This term is associated with masks and theatre. Persona was the space between the mask and the face, the space where the voice gained tone and vibrancy. In its origin, the word “person” referred to an empty space filled with imitations, just as I, in the episode of the traveller’s cheques, was imitating someone else. Today we are not so far removed from its original meaning, in which we don masks in the performance of the narrative that we call “our life.”

In the languages of southern Africa, the word “person” is in a particularly interesting category. A German linguist noted in the nineteenth century that many languages of Sub-Saharan Africa used the same word for “person”: muntu in the singular, and bantu in the plural. He called these languages “Bantu” and, by extension, the people became “Bantu people.” This is strange because he seemed to be saying, quite literally, that this group was called “the people people.” I remember an mbira player, a Cameroonian called Francis Bebey, whom I met in Denmark. I asked him if he played Bantu music and he laughed at me and replied: “My friend, the Chinese are as Bantu as we Africans.”

In any case, the idea of a person has a different origin in Africa, and has evolved differently from the European concept, which is now global. In African philosophy, each person exists because he or she is all the others, and this collective identity is arrived at through the family.

We are like a Makonde sculpture of the extended family; we are a branch of that huge tree that gives us body as well as shade. In contrast to the norm nowadays in Europe, we view modern society as a network of extended family relations. As we shall see, this vision has two sides to it: a positive side that makes us accepting and leads us towards that which is universal, and a parochial side that confines us to our home village. The idea of a world in which we are all relatives of one another is very poetic, but it is often not practicable.

We all know the attitude of the average Mozambican: the government is our father, and we are the children of those who are powerful. This family-based vision of the world can be dangerous, for it invites us to accept the social order as natural and immutable. Modernity is whispering something very different in our ear, which is forcing us to make a radical break with our own tradition. Unlike our parents, whom we can’t choose, we can choose our leaders. The company or the institution don’t consist of a group of cousins, uncles or brothers-in-law. The logic they follow in order to function is impersonal and is subject to criteria of efficiency and economic yield that have no time for ties of kinship. We can wear shoes with or without frayed socks. But it’s hard to put one’s socks on after one’s shoes.

We have to think of ourselves as living in a world of rapid transformations. The speed of change in modern society has the effect of making some professions obsolete quickly. In Brazil, for example, computerization in the banking sector has reduced the number of jobs by 40 percent in the last seven years. This implies dramatic changes with serious impacts on society. We are on the crest of a wave of changes that are not limited to technology. Cellphones, for example, have stopped being merely utilitarian. Cellphones have become part of us, so much so that when we forget to take them with us, we feel empty, unarmed, as if we had left at home a limb we didn’t know we had.

This subtle occupation extends beyond our private lives. Organized crime, for example, is now directed from inside prisons. News reports following the trial of those responsible for killing the journalist Carlos Cardoso shows us what others already knew: a prisoner isn’t the one behind bars, a prisoner is the one who doesn’t have a cellphone.

Even distance is no longer measured in terms of kilometres. We want to know whether there is cell reception where we are going. The end of the world is where one’s phone stops working.

It’s true that the new technologies don’t stitch holes in our underwear, but they do alter the social networks with which we make our lives. In many African languages, the word for “poor” is the same as for “orphan.” Being poor is losing one’s family networks and web of social alliances. The person who has lost the support of the family lives in poverty. In the very near future, the true orphan will be the person who doesn’t have a computer, a cellphone, or a credit card.

We live in a society that glorifies the individual but denies the person. It seems like a contradiction, but it isn’t. There is, after all, some distance between these two terms: an individual and a person. An individual is an anonymous, faceless being, without any existential contours. The history of each one of us is that of an individual on a journey towards personhood. What makes us into people isn’t our identity card; what makes us into people is that which doesn’t fit on identity cards, is the way we think, the way we dream, the way we are others. So we are talking here about citizenship, about the possibility of being unique and singular, about our ability to be happy.

One of the problems of our age is that we have lost the capacity to ask important questions. School taught us just to give answers, and life advises us to keep quiet. A question that may be important is this one: what hinders our transition from individuals to people? What do we need in order to be fully integrated persons?

I won’t assume that my answers are the right ones. But I get the feeling that one of the main problems, one of the biggest holes in our sock is thinking that success isn’t the fruit of work. For us, success, in whatever field, comes as a result of what we call “good luck.” It comes from having good patrons. Success comes from who one knows rather than what one knows.

This week one of the editions of the newspaper Notícias opened with an item on Monte Tumbine, in the province of Zambezia. In 1998, about one hundred people died there as a result of a landslip. There was a landslide because the forest on its slopes had been cut down, and the rains caused the earth to slip. Reports were written and their recommendations were very clear. The reports vanished. The forest went on being cut down and people once again settled in dangerous areas. What remains in Monte Tumbine are the voices, which have another explanation. These voices insist on the following version of events: there’s a dragon that lives in Milange, on Monte Tumbine, and it awakens every five years to go and lay its eggs out at sea. In order not to be seen, the dragon creates chaos and darkness while it crosses the skies unnoticed. This mythological animal is called Napolo in the north, while here in the south, it goes by the name of Wamulambo.

This interpretation of geological phenomena contains a powerful, poetic force. But poetry and spirit ceremonies are not enough to guarantee that another tragedy won’t be repeated.

My question is this: We here in this meeting, are we so removed from such beliefs? The fact that we live in cities, surrounded by computers and broadband internet connections, does all this exempt us from having one foot in a magical explanation of the world?

All we have to do is take a look at our newspapers to get an answer. Next to the international exchange rates, we find the advertisement of a so-called traditional doctor, that generous character who offers to solve all the basic problems in our lives. If you look down the list of services offered by traditional doctors, you will see that they include the following (I shall omit the miracle cures they produce):

making you get on in life;

helping you gain promotion in your job;

making you pass your exams;

helping you get your husband or wife back.

Parodying the jargon used in reports nowadays, I would say that this is a fair “job description” for our magnificent traditional doctor. This purveyor of fortune invokes, through his magic, all those things that can only be achieved through sweat, effort, and hard work.

Once again, we must question the words that we ourselves create and use. “Traditional doctors” is a doubly false term. Firstly, they are not doctors. Medicine is a very specific domain within the field of scientific knowledge. There are no traditional doctors, just as there are no traditional engineers or traditional airline pilots.

It’s not a question of denying the value of local wisdom, nor of devaluing the importance of rural logic. But these self-advertisers aren’t doctors and they are not even “traditional.” The practices of witchcraft are profoundly modern: they are being born and refashioned right now in our urban centres. A good example of this ability to incorporate the modern is that of an advertisement I kept from a newspaper, in which one of these quack healers described his services textually as follows: “We cure asthma, diabetes and pimples; we provide treatment for sexual diseases and headaches; we eliminate misfortune and. . we make photocopies.”

For a long time, real doctors were not permitted to publicize their services in the press. And yet these other so-called traditional ones are still allowed to advertise. What is the reason for such complacency? Because, deep down, we are predisposed to believe them. We belong to this universe even as we simultaneously imagine the world in other ways. It’s not just the poor, the less educated who share these two worlds. There are university educated officials, political leaders who seek their blessing in order to get promoted or to be successful in their careers.

I don’t believe it is enough to condemn such practices; but we must admit them more openly. Returning to the title of this talk, we must accept that within the shoe, our feet require a very special form of ventilation. It’s of little use to say these things are typically African. My friends, these things exist throughout the world. They are not part of the so-called exotic nature of Africans. They belong to human nature.

We can say, however, that these beliefs still have a decisive influence, and this influence contradicts some of the exigencies of modern life. Belief in so-called “good luck” makes us shun our individual and collective responsibility: such a vision of the world attributes our failures to a supposedly hidden hand. If we fail, it’s because someone turned the evil eye on us. We don’t assume the role of active, responsible citizens. We don’t produce our own destiny: we beg from powerful forces that are beyond us. We wait for a blessing or a stroke of good fortune. This is a central problem in our development.

The belief in “luck” is one facet of a more all-embracing and sophisticated conspiracy theory; we explain everything via plots hatched behind our backs. It is the fear of witchcraft brought into the sphere of political analysis. The recent case of timber is a good example of the application of this conspiracy theory. A group of our countrymen denounced acrtions it thought were going to lead to the imminent destruction of our forest patrimony. It was a serious warning: we could lose not only part of our natural environment, but one of the main weapons to fight against poverty. The reaction against this protest wasn’t long in coming: various articles all asserted that this concern for our forests came from a well-intentioned group of people, who were manipulated by Western forces busy mobilizing against the Chinese presence in Africa. Here is the dark hand that commands everything.

As in the logic of witchcraft, the identification of the wrongdoer immediately solves the problem. Once the smokescreen has been created and the finger pointed in accusation, the matter of the forests will lose its visibility. The question here is simple: wouldn’t it be easier to create a scientific commission to record the current state of our forest resources and to assess the real implications of timber extraction? It is too important a matter, my friends, for us to pretend we have dealt with the protester’s concerns merely because we raise the suspicion of an international conspiracy. The truth is that if we lose our forest, we lose one of the greatest reserves of our wealth, and the biggest living resource in the whole of our country.

Dear friends,

Our belief in good or bad luck is something that stifles our ability to show enterprise, something that consolidates within us a spirit of victimhood. To improve our world, we are constantly invited to think our only options involve begging, lamenting, or complaining. I shall let you into another secret. The firm I work for placed an advertisement for young people to carry out surveys in different parts of Maputo. Hundreds of young people applied and it seemed certain that the two dozen candidates whose applications were successful would cling to their jobs tooth and nail.

However, on the first day, half a dozen of them presented complaints: they couldn’t work in the sun, the work was very tiring and they needed more breaks, they needed a subsidy in order to buy hats and sunshades. . This, my friends, is the spirit of a nation that’s sick. A country in which young people put in their requests before they’ve even given anything, is a country that may have mortgaged its future.

The point I wish to make is that, along with a limitless capacity for self-denial, we still suffer from the delusion that we deserve more than others because we suffered in the past. “History is in debt to us,” this is what we think. But History is in debt to everyone and doesn’t pay anyone back. All peoples have suffered terrible mistreatment and damage at some point. Whole nations have been reduced to rubble and have been re-born through the efforts and toil of generations. Our own country was able to escape the conflagration of war. Invoking the past in order that people may pity us, and then awaiting compensation, invited only illusion.

This positioning of ourselves as victims to whom the world must pay a debt occurs at both the national level and that of individual citizens. As we have survived personally on favours, we ask the world to concede us privileges and special dispensations. The plain truth is this: we shall never be accorded such privileges. Either we conquer them for ourselves or we shall never get them. The value of Lurdes Mutola derives from the fact that she overcame a whole background of difficulties. Let us imagine that Lurdes Mutola, instead of training hard, were to insist on being able to start the race a few metres ahead of her rivals, arguing that she was poor and came from a country that had suffered hardship. Even if she won, her victory would have no value. The example might seem ridiculous but it highlights the kind of self-pity that we have displayed countless times. The solution for the underprivileged isn’t to ask for favours. It is to fight harder than others, and above all to fight for a world in which favours are no longer needed.

Another hole in our socks (this hole is as big as the sock itself) is our tendency to blame others for our own mistakes. If we lose our job, it’s not because we haven’t turned up for work repeatedly without any justification. If we lose our girlfriend (or boyfriend), it’s not because we’ve loved them little and badly. We fail an exam, but it’s never because we’ve failed to prepare adequately for it. We explain these slip-ups by evoking demons, the existence of which we find deeply comforting. The fabrication of devils is, after all, a long-term investment: our conscience can sleep easily, sheltered by such illusions.

This isn’t an illness that is exclusive to us. Nowadays, we witness dramatic examples of this tendency to fabricate ghosts: every day, in Iraq, innocent civilians are killed in the name of God, in the name of the struggle against the devil, incarnated in others, of other beliefs. It was José Saramago who said, “Killing in the name of God makes that God an assassin.”

And now let us return to the matter of human beings. Throughout history, aggression against others always begins, curiously, by depersonalizing them. The first US operation against Vietnam was not of a military character. It was psychological in character and consisted in dehumanizing the Vietnamese. They were no longer humans: they were “yellow,” they were beings of another type, upon whom one could drop bombs, Agent Orange and napalm without ethical problem.

The genocide in Rwanda occurred not so far from here and not that long ago. Communities that lived in harmony were manipulated by criminal elites to the point of committing the biggest massacre in contemporary history. If we asked a Tutsi or a Hutu before 1994 if they believed such a thing could happen in their country, they would have answered that it was impossible to imagine. But it happened. And it happened because the capacity for creating demons in our countries is still considerable. The poorer a country is, the greater its capacity for self-destruction.

Beginning in April 1994 and for the next one hundred days, more than 800,000 Tutsis were murdered by their Hutu fellow countrymen. Axes and knives were used to butcher 10,000 people every day, which works out at an average of ten people every minute. Never before in human history had so many been killed in such a short time. All this violence was made possible because once again, efforts had been made to prove that the others were not human beings. The term used by Hutu propaganda to describe the Tutsis was “cockroaches.” The massacre was thus exempt from any moral objection: it was insects being killed, not people, and certainly not compatriots speaking the same language and living the same culture.

In neighbouring Zimbabwe, the discourse of unity that characterized the beginnings of a multiracial society was suddenly altered to take on a markedly racist and aggressive tone. The vice-president of Zimbabwe, at a political rally in Bulawayo, stated openly that “whites aren’t human beings.” He was merely repeating what Robert Mugabe had proclaimed. And at this point, let me cite Mugabe: “What we hate about whites isn’t their skin but the devil that emanates from them.” The leaders of ZANU had distinguished themselves only a few years before as defenders of a multiracial nation. What had changed? It was the forces at play. Ambition for power provokes surprising changes in people and political parties.

In Mozambique, such dark clouds, we know, are remote and unlikely to ever happen here. This is reason for pride and faith in the future. But this certainty requires us to remember the lessons of a history that is ours as well.

Dear friends,

I was asked to talk about people. This subject is a vast, limitless universe in which no one can claim to be a specialist. I was forced to choose just a tiny corner of this boundless canvas. I spoke of the evil that is our abdication from responsibilities, our abandonment of our capabilities. I spoke of our dependency on a way of life in which everything is obtained through favours, through contacts and handouts. I spoke about all this because the banking system is profoundly vulnerable and permeable to these situations.

The real question that we have to face as a nation concerns our ability to produce more wealth, but we mustn’t confuse wealth with easy money. I once gave an address on our obsession with getting rich quickly no matter how. I was the target of demagogic claims that I didn’t want to see rich Mozambicans. I shall finish today by reiterating that which I have always defended:

My desire is not only to see rich Mozambicans in the true meaning of the word “rich.” My desire is to see all Mozambicans sharing this same wealth. Only this will make us more human, more worthy of being called people.

Opening address to the

International Bank of Mozambique Millennium Conference, Maputo, 2008.