Pensativities: Selected Essays

The Fly or the Spider?

What can a writer say on a theme such as the one proposed: “The Globalization of Computer Technology”? A number of things occurred to me as I thought about the subject. I was preparing this address in the silence of an old room, when I happened to see a spider’s web in a corner of the ceiling. This little creature hadn’t planned and built a house to live in, but a trap to hunt its prey. The English call this weaving together of threads a web. A web can mean a network, but it can also be a trap. This ambiguity triggered an old concern of mine. I would like to share my disquiet with you.

I am worried by the way we are being tempted to view technology as the global antidote to our multiple evils. Many of us believe that technological advance is going to rescue us from poverty. This belief leaves us vulnerable to a few sellers of magical products. The future may not just be better — as the slogan tells us — but easier, as easy as pressing a key. For us to be like them, the developed world, it will be enough for us to fulfill certain indicators within the criteria presented by our advisers, and hey presto, we’ll join the club.

We know this isn’t true. I don’t know why we want so much to be like “them,” and not ourselves, following our own routes to destinations that we have invented on our own. What separates us from wealth involves, above all, questions of nature rather than technology. It involves attitudes, wishes, political determination and a stance with respect to the question of culture. Digitalization won’t convert us into modern beings. Putting our ear to a cellphone isn’t going to turn us into producers of anything at all. If we don’t exercise any independence in acts that are, at heart, acts of culture, we shall enter the universe of what we call the digital society, but we shall do it as a minor player, a secondary partner, from the periphery.

But this is a dance one joins without warning and without invitation. We’re already there, dazzled by the lights and the sound of the orchestra. But we’re not dancing to our own music, nor are we swaying to a rhythm that belongs to the body of our History.

We have all entered the dance hall: if we were supposed to pay for a ticket, then someone else has paid for us. Tomorrow, we’ll have to pay off the debt with interest. And we shall discover the bitter taste of a hangover (or, as we call it here, a babalaze).

I don’t intend to make excuses for anything. After all, it’s inevitable that we should embrace the lustre of all these digital innovations. But I would just like to be sure that we are thinking about our place in this world, we who are a nation profoundly influenced by orality. And that we are working out how we may stand to gain if we develop our own project, capable of introducing changes and innovations into the projects of others. I would like to know whether we are sufficiently aware of how much we shall lose from this network of relationships to which we belong in the public space of our everyday lives. Rumours about unofficial markets, gossip concerning unofficial bus services: aren’t these the invaluable web pages of the Mozambican Internet?

I’m not an advocate of traditionalist solutions, but I worry about the easy availability of magic wands, fantastic solutions that we arrive at as if they were downloaded. Technical and scientific discoveries are presented to us in a messianic way in the pages of magazines: the genome is a new Christ able to save us from all illnesses, cloning is a passport to eternity. The idea hasn’t changed since the green revolution was first heralded in the 1970s as a way to salvage agriculture in poor countries. The green revolution has faded in colour, but other magical packages in countless other hues are still being exported to the Third World.

Until a few years ago, the frontier between the civilized and indigenous was to be abolished by the latter’s integration into European culture. Now, a new frontier may be emerging: on the one hand are the digitalized, and on the other, the ex-indigenous, destined to become the indigent and indigitalized. A new plan for citizenship is being drawn up. And, once again, we shall dwell on the periphery.

And so the Web is a network but also a spiderweb; this web that we have joined of our own accord, we shall be the spider as long as we develop a strategy. We shall be the fly if we persist in thinking with the mind of others.

An Episode Evoked

I am going to tell you an episode that really happened, and which may illustrate what I have been talking about. We were in the middle of the floods, the great inundations of the year 2000, when we were discovered by the international television channels (it’s incredible how only disaster turns the poor into a story). At that point, the Polana Hotel suddenly became a global telecommunications hub, an operational base for the BBC, CNN and other stations vying with each other over the tragedy. I’m not saying this was a bad thing. If it wasn’t for this intervention, then the drama of the floods wouldn’t have gained any visibility, and we would have received far less support. These latest floods were, in fact, an example of how the negative tendency of scratching around for disasters can sometimes work in our favour, to benefit those who are the eternal victims.

During those days, we were the centre of the universe. Many people in this world, which aspires to be a global village, were seeing the name and face of Mozambique for the first time. It wasn’t just Rosita who was born in unusual circumstances (in the canopy of a tree). For a large swathe of global television viewers, the image of ourselves as a country was being born.

We were in the middle of all this uproar when I got a nerve-wracking telephone call from London requesting a live television interview. Worse still, it would have to be in English. I was nervous. To speak live on the BBC and in English is to be catapulted into a terrain that is doubly unfamiliar and foreign.

We arranged for it to be at 10:30 at night and for me to go to the Polana Hotel. On the agreed night, I arrived and they told me to get into a “chapa” (which, as you know, is an unofficial vehicle for transporting passengers), and along with a team of journalists I set off on a nightmarish journey through the suburbs of Maputo. The journalists were all kitted out in uniform — khaki suits that were part military, part neo-ecological. I don’t know whether journalists assigned to work in the tropics always invest in this mythical attire. But those accompanying me in the old chapa had assumed the posture and the behaviour of newminted and semi-debonair Rambos, garbed at a branch of the Safari Store.

I’d already seen this when I was a journalist myself. The journalist credits himself with a mission, and this mission bears a remarkable similarity to a military operation: there is a need to conquer an audience, and bombard it with news in a premium timespan that is calculated down to the very second. The journalist is on top of what is happening as if the event were a precise target. The event is the prey of that spider who is the reporter, in this web of news that envelops the planet.

We drove for about half an hour and when we stopped, I found myself in the middle of the Polana Caniço area, on the edge of a huge hole. It was the biggest hole I’d ever seen — not that I’m a specialist in holes, but Mozambicans have a credible level of expertise when it comes to cratered roads.

The side of a hill in the so-called Maputo “barreiras,” or cliffs, had collapsed during the cyclone, opening up a crater of some fifteen metres in depth and wider than the eye could see. I later learned that more than 27,000 cubic metres of sand had been lost as a result of the hillside’s collapse. I was therefore on the edge of an abyss, as if the earth had been swallowed up by the earth itself. My fear was indescribable: I’d just published The Last Flight of the Flamingo and, in that story, an entire country disappeared, swallowed up by the earth. Just like one of the book’s characters, I was on the brink of an abyss that devoured entire nations.

On the edge of the crater, as if under the volcano of so-called “news,” the technicians from the BBC had set up an even more surrealist scene. They had closed off an area of some thirty square metres with a yellow tape on which were written the words “NO ENTRY.” In the middle of the darkness, they had opened up an illuminated space like a stage bathed in an intense light, in a world in which only that which can be turned into a spectacle is visible.

On one side, there was a whole panoply of machines, generators, flashlights, transmission hubs, satellite phones, hundreds of cables and wires. It was like a football stadium, with the floodlights directed at an empty centre. Around this floodlit terrain, hundreds of spectators drawn there by curiosity were seated, in a state of animated excitement. Suddenly, an area where nothing ever happened seemed to have become the centre of the technological world.

As I drew near and advanced through the crowd, I noticed there was a discussion taking place. Different opinions jostled with one another:

“Is this a cinema, are they making a film?”

“No,” others said, “it’s an operation to fill the hole.”

“Wow! The government’s doing a good job, the hole was only opened up yesterday, and the engineers are already here with their machines.”

When I crossed the yellow tape, it was as if I suddenly became someone from another world. All eyes were focussed on me, and a deep silence descended. I had breached the forbidden line and penetrated an illuminated world. Suddenly, a youngster jumped up and pointed to me, shouting:

“Hey, folks! Didn’t I say this was a cinema? That guy over there is Chuck Norris!”

This gave rise to an immediate lively ruckus. Chuck Norris — a kind of 007 for the underdeveloped world — was right there in the middle of Polana Caniço? At first, some remained skeptical. But then, there was general clamour. And the crowd shouted at me, waving their arms, showing me their children. Some more daring youngsters weaved vigorous karate blows, freeing themselves from invisible enemies, showing me that my martial art skills didn’t just figure on the cinema screen.

The interview was about to begin and technicians were attaching wires, microphones and earphones to me, when the program’s producer realized it would be impossible to record anything in the middle of such an uproar. In a panic, they asked me to address the crowd and ask them to be quiet. I walked over to the people and asked them not to make a noise. Their reaction was immediate:

“Wow! The fellow speaks Portuguese! Hey, Chuck Norris pal, ask those guys to fill in this hole!”

Then, there was a flood of requests. The road needed repairing, they needed a health centre, a school, houses. I should put an end to all the robberies round here, I could do that in the twinkling of an eye. Everything needed to be done urgently. I couldn’t undo the illusion. I left any explanations for later. For the time being, we urgently needed silence. And this was obtained thanks to a surprising misunderstanding that conferred upon Norris a level of respect not shown to mere mortals. I went back into the circle of light and they loaded me down out again with all the technology. Once again, there were the wires, the earphone, the lights, the camera test. We were already connected to London and I was having a preparatory chat with the interviewer when, in the middle of the crowd, a young man with a bottle of beer in his hand, got up and shouted:

“Hey, brothers! That guy there isn’t Chuck Norris. I know that dude: it’s Mia Couto.”

In an instant, the chaos resumed. Everyone debated my true identity at the tops of their voices. Yet again, the British freed me from my wires and begged me to ask for silence. Over to the edge of the lit area I went, and like a preacher, uttered my appeal. But it was an almost impossible mission. Someone asked me:

“Mia Couto, why were you pretending to be Chuck Norris?”

At this point, a tall boy carrying a backpack, emerged from the mass of human beings and waving some sheets of paper, challenged me:

“Mister Writer, do you want me to make sure everyone’s quiet? Leave it to me. But you’ll owe me a favour afterwards.”

There was nothing else for it but to accept. But I needed to know what I was agreeing to. When I asked him, the young fellow explained:

“The favour I want is for you to correct this book I’ve written.”

Our agreement was signed and sealed immediately. The lad must have had some influence over all the others because everyone stopped talking when he waved his arms. Then, he stepped forward with great care so as not to tread on anyone and handed me a sheaf of handwritten papers. On the cover was written: The Panel Beater’s Manual!

I tucked the papers under my arm and went back to the spot where I was going to be interviewed. The journalists were in a state of panic, and there was no time for rehearsals, instructions, preliminaries, anything. It was a question of hitching me up to the wires and starting. It must have been the worst interview I’d given in my life. Surrounded by a cloud of crickets that had been attracted by the lights, hugging the future Panel Beater’s Manual, and still glimpsing one or two youngsters waving to me or practising kung-fu, I wasn’t even aware of whether I was really speaking English.

Today, as I recall this episode, I think about that place, in the middle of the suburban shanties, about that frontier between light and darkness, and how it symbolized the dividing line between two worlds — the real world and that other, digitalized world. And there I was hopping across this dividing line like a smuggler. But only I and one or two Mozambican technicians were able to cross it. The others were prisoners within this frame of invisibility and silence. The same lights that illuminated me within that virtual space, cast the surrounding world into darkness, obscuring that place where the deep heart of Mozambique pulsates.

Lecture to the Conference of the Mozambican

Telecommunications Company (TDM) on the Globalization

of Technology in a Computerized World, Maputo, April, 2001.