Pensativities: Selected Essays

Citizenship in Search of its City

Defining the Terms

The theme of this seminar is “The Construction of Citizenship in Mozambique.” It’s important for us to begin by sketching out a set of generally agreed markers and by initiating dialogues based on the same definitions, with a common understanding of words and concepts.

Words and concepts are alive, they wriggle away from us like fish between the hands of thought. And like fish, they swim the length of the river of History. There are those who think they can fish for and freeze concepts. Such people are, at the very least, collectors of dead ideas.

The Mobility of our Identity

The example I want to bring to your attention here is a re-working of that admirable book by Amin Maalouf, entitled In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong. I experienced an episode which is very close to the one recounted in that excellent work. During the 1980s, I was a journalist. Let us imagine the following possible scenario: at that time, I might have met a journalist who, upon introducing himself, proudly proclaimed, “I am Yugoslavian.” The journalist (who is mirrored almost exactly in Maalouf’s essay) was on the board of directors of the newspaper of the party in power. Later, during the same conversation, he let it be understood that he was Islamic in origin, born in the Federated Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

We kept in touch and, during the nineties, at the height of the war in the Balkans, the same man told me with the same fervour: “Don’t forget that, before anything else, I’m a Muslim.” Later, a mutual friend of ours, working in Mozambique, showed me a photo of the journalist. He was unrecognizable, with a bushy beard that covered his whole face. On the back was written: “Here is the portrait of a true Bosnian.”

In fact, I ran into the journalist this year in Paris. He lives as an immigrant in France. And he confessed to me as I left him: “Today I know that, above all else, I’m a European.”

We could ask: when did this journalist truly identify himself? Probably always. His identity was drawn and redrawn by his own life experiences. That man never ceased to be waylaid by History.

We, in Mozambique, have not undergone such dramatic changes. But History has occasionally ambushed us as well. Those who, like me, are forty or fifty years old have already lived through very different historical realities. They have belonged to many Mozambiques. At first, they belonged to colonial Mozambique. To a Mozambique that wasn’t yet Mozambique. At that time, they spent their money in a bar belonging to a Portuguese who, sometimes, got the local language right but always gave them back the wrong change. They didn’t spend much because money was scarce. Then came Independence, and the bar owner packed up his life in a hurriedly filled barrel. The bar owner left the country and Mozambique embarked on socialism. So now we spent our money in the People’s Store. (Spent is a euphemism, because there was nothing to spend our money on.) Then came what, for want of a better term, we call the civil war and the ex-bar became the ex-People’s Store. Everything went up in flames and even the bar owner’s nostalgia was burnt up in some far corner of Portugal. Finally, capitalist Mozambique arrived and the bar reopened with an owner who occasionally gets the language right, but still gives us the wrong change.

But it wasn’t only the country that underwent change. We changed. Our own notion of who we are was modified. During the seventies and eighties, our identity was straightforward and homogeneous: we were Mozambicans. And that was it. It was unthinkable, at that moment in time, to conceive of ourselves as Makua, Makonde, black, mulatto, white.

Generally speaking, the main feature of our identity, as far as we are all concerned, is still the fact of being Mozambican. But nowadays, other forms of belonging are beginning to take shape. For many of us, other primary forms of identity are emerging. They may be racial, or tribal, or religious identities. This sense of belonging may collide with what we call “Mozambicanness.” To think that I may ally myself with someone because we are of the same race isn’t just mistaken but it is historically unproductive.

Today some of the possible questions may be: am I a white Mozambican or a Mozambican white? Am I an Indian African or an African Indian? Am I a Muslim Mozambican or vice versa? These terms may look the same but they aren’t always so. We may be different things. The mistake is made when we only want to be one thing. The mistake is made when we want to deny that we are various things at the same time. As Simone de Beauvoir would have said: We aren’t born white or black, we sometimes become white or black.

I’m going to tell you a true story. The managers of my company are Muslims. Quite by chance, I happened to be sitting at the desk of one of them when the phone rang. It was a new client who thought he was speaking to a colleague of mine called Amade, and he immediately introduced himself in the following way:

“Assalaam aleikum, bey?”

Then, in the face of my reticence, he realized that the person at the end of the line wasn’t the person he thought it was. It was someone else. With some hesitation, he asked to speak to Sr. Amade. At that point, my colleague appeared, they both spoke, and quickly reached an understanding.

It wasn’t about any particular request, any unmentionable favour. But the man clearly felt more at ease speaking with his brother in religion. This may reveal complicities that should be avoided, but in itself, it is not a mortal sin. A woman often feels more at ease talking to another woman. And there’s no attitude of exclusion in this case.

What happens is that we have created a system that causes difficulties, even over the most trivial matters. Difficulty creates an opportunity for gaining advantage, for various types of opportunism. This system isn’t exclusive to Mozambique. It is common throughout the world. But this system makes us feel alienated, insignificant and dislocated. It’s the policeman, the teacher, the nurse, the tax man, the official, it’s a whole conspiracy of people who earn their living by complicating our lives. In this sea of complicating factors, it’s good to hear someone at the other end of the phone line whom we recognize as being one of “ours,” someone from our region, our ethnic group, our sex, our religion.

On the surface, it’s not wrong for someone to make use of one of their multiple identities to navigate these murky waters. What certainly is wrong is to attempt to create hierarchies: those who are more Mozambican, those who are less Mozambican. What can be dangerous is to create “fortress identities,” identities born from negating the identities of others.

The truth is that no one is “pure.” This human species of ours is made from mixtures. We’ve been crossing, exchanging genes, trading values for millions of years. We’ve been able to survive because of this diversity. There’s no one in this room who doesn’t have a multifaceted, plural identity. Identities, my friends, are like the fingers of a hand. From time to time, one of these fingers swells up and conceals the other fingers. Each one of us, at a certain point in our lives, has felt this swelling in our soul. There were days when we belonged to more than one ethnic group, one religion, one club. But our hand is still composed of multiple fingers.

On one occasion, someone asked a famous American musician, Ben Harper, this question:

“We’ve heard you now have a new drummer in your band. Tell me something: is he black?”

And Harper replied:

“I don’t know, I’ve never asked him.”

The Taste for Debate

Many of the debates that cut across our public space nowadays are strange. Sometimes, they descend into aggression. We stop discussing ideas in order to attack people. The need to be right, to win at all costs, destroys our civic duty, which is one of our reasons for being here. Debates should be used to arrive collectively at productive concepts, to create ideas that may help build a better Mozambique. We already have to contend with too many destructive and divisive factors.

Just recently, for example, an Internet forum was created to debate the nationality of Eusébio. Young folk ask whether Eusébio is Mozambican or not, to what extent he should feel or can possibly be Portuguese, whether he can be Portuguese and Mozambican.

We have to be careful. We should be wary of the ease with which we invade the souls of others. Who can authorize us to talk so lightly about other people? No citizenship can give me the right to speak in public about the intimate feelings of anyone, no matter whom. We can discuss general instances, principles, ideas, but we have no right to bring into the arena of the press matters relating to the soul and heart of Eusébio, or any other citizen.

On the other hand, it is understandable that we should want Eusébio to be ours, given that he is one of the greatest footballers of all time. Eusébio was the flag that identified Portugal. In the eighties, many in the world still recognized Portugal through its two emblems: Eusébio and Amália Rodrigues. It’s therefore natural that we should want Eusébio to be a source of our pride. But there are things that can only be obtained by means of seduction. The heart of a man or a woman doesn’t obey the dictates of conscience. No one loves out of duty.

Eusébio’s case may be revealing of other illusions. The question is this: why can’t black Africans transform themselves into some other “thing”? If there are whites who are African, if there are blacks who are American, why can’t black Africans be European? Nowadays, there are hundreds of thousands of blacks who were born in Europe. They have studied, grown up, and absorbed values there. They have become citizens of the countries where they were born. The vast majority will live their whole lives in those countries. They will have European children and grandchildren. And they mustn’t fall into the trap of claiming a ghetto for themselves, a kind of second-class citizenship going by the name of “Afro-European.” They are European in their own absolute right, they are European not through favour or condescension. They participate in the same process of identity exchange as any other European citizen.Two years ago in France, I fell prey to this stereotyped view of the world. Wherever I went, I saw huge posters of a beautiful black woman. So I asked:

“Is that woman a singer?”

“No, she’s Christiane Taubira, and she’s running for President of the Republic.”

All this, all these stories, are to tell you this: a man isn’t a shore, merely existing on one side or the other. A man is a bridge linking various shores. Eusébio can in fact be various things at the same time. Only he can assess to what extent this is true.

Fears and Prejudices

We react with some misgivings to an open discussion about certain questions. One of the topics that scares us is that of nation and ethnicity. Is there such a thing as a Makua nation, a Shona nation, a Zulu nation? Or are they merely ethnic groups? But then what exactly is the difference between these categories? Are we merely debating the meaning of words?

The truth is that, for many of us, these words, these categories, are important points of reference. There isn’t a South African Zulu who, from time to time, doesn’t feel the urge to reclaim his ethnic identity as being his first nation. Just like the rest of us who, at certain moments, are drawn to wield this or that absolute identity. Nation and ethnic identity can coexist without conflict, as has happened in any number of historical moments. But they are also an opportunity for demagogues and the ambitious to promote their personal or group interests.

The debate about dual nationality in Mozambique has always been contaminated by the assumption that it is about taking up Portuguese nationality alongside Mozambican. The truth, however, is that the issue is much wider than this. We cannot forget the ambivalent and arbitrary history of our frontiers. How many Mozambicans have their history divided between being Mozambicans and Zimbabweans, South Africans, Malawians, Tanzanians, Zambians, Swazis? And there’s more to it than that: if we consider that ethnicities were in fact historically defined nations, then it is perfectly natural that a Mozambican citizen may feel he belongs both to the modern Mozambican nation and to the Shona nation. He will always feel “divided” loyalties. This doesn’t mean that he is less Mozambican or that he should feel less Mozambican than any other citizen.

I used the term “divided” on purpose. It is an intentional error. I recall the poet José Craveirinha’s lesson when referring to his mestizo origin: “I am a shared man, I am not a divided man.” This is how we all represent ourselves here, shared and not divided. None of us is a citizen of only one nation. We share ourselves among various worlds. We are citizens of orality, but also of the written word. We are urban and rural. We belong to the nation of tradition and to that of modernity. We sit down in an office chair at a computer and on a floor mat, without feeling out of place with either form of seating. And this is how it must surely be: sharing different worlds without any one of these worlds gaining hegemony over the others.

Mozambique is a nation made up of many nations. It is a supranational nation. And this should sit comfortably within the territorial space of Mozambique, as we have defined it, just as it should sit comfortably within each one of us. We shall, of course, have to be on our guard against certain politicians who will try to turn our differences into levers with which to create division. Let us beware, then, of those who propose crusades in search of purity and authenticity.

Citizenship Without a City?

The origin of the word citizenship is easy to identify: it comes from city. In the same way, “civic spirit” is an expression that comes from civis, that which is urban.

In Mozambique, we shall have different and diverse citizenships. But modern citizenship, that which will make us more part of the world, is born in the city. Herein lies a problem, however: to what extent are our cities already urban, both in the cultural sense, and in the sene that their way of life is based on civic responsibility?

Let us take the case of our capital, the city that might serve as a kind of model. For most of its citizens, Maputo is still Xilunguini. What does Xilunguini mean? It’s the place where Portuguese is spoken, or in a more generic sense, where people live like whites. When did Maputo turn into a place that is mentally represented as ours, reshaped in accordance with our ways?

The perception Mozambicans have of the cities of southern Mozambique was invented outside Mozambique. It was born from the contact between our miners and country folk and South African cities. The term doropa comes from dorp, the word that designates a “small town” in Afrikaans.

The history of the city is linked to human processes that we inhabitants of Maputo are unaware of. But it is important to know the history of each one of our cities. That is where the feeling of citizenship begins: one only loves what one knows. And we cannot love our cities if they are seen as legacies left by outsiders.

We have an idea that Mozambique is a rural country, and this is true, but we are rapidly changing from being a rural country to an urban one. Soon (in less than ten years), most of Mozambique’s population will live in cities. This will have decisive consequences for our social, economic and environmental policies.

In 1994, around five million Mozambicans lived in cities; in 2025, this population will amount to more than twenty-one million. In other words, in 2025, 61 percent of Mozambicans will live in cities. At that point, the country dwellers will be in the minority. Once again, Mozambique will become something else. Once again, we shall be ambushed by History.

Our Other Poverties

We were taught to attribute fault to others, to find explanations for adversity in foreign enemies. The guilty are those from the South, the North, whites, blacks, Christians, Muslims. We easily embark on a discourse that casts stones and promises to purify the world, repudiating those who are different from ourselves. We need a symbol for the nation that includes those who don’t speak the official language well, that doesn’t marginalize the illiterate and poorest members of society, and that doesn’t privilege or exclude anyone on the basis of race, colour, faith or origin.

We are talking about training in citizenship, and we are thinking about our situation as the inhabitants of a country, but our principal citizenship is that of a nation that lies within each one of us. We often lack the courage to seek out our demons within ourselves. We need to learn to tame our ghosts and overcome our inner fears. I, who am addressing you here, have my own fears, my own anguish. I have brought some of these to your attention, in the form of doubts and aspirations.

My hope, my greatest hope, is that amid so many workshops we may learn to know, to recognize, and to resist the demagogy of those who are after votes. There are some things that are resolved by governments, but there are things that no government can resolve. It is we who will resolve them in the time accorded to us, through our developing sense of citizenship.

Mozambique has become the champion for conferences and workshops. There’s nothing bad about so much “workshopping.” But it is dangerous to assume that talking is action. My hope is that, with so many seminars, we may bring ourselves closer to one another in spite of all our differences. And that we may know and acknowledge each other as citizens of a common nation.

As a writer, the Nation that interests me is the human soul. I wrote a book which I called Every Man is a Race. I can tell you now: each person is a nation. We here are a kind of assembly of nations. And I feel honoured for having had this opportunity to talk with so many nations, with so many diverse worlds that have come together in the same hope, and knowing that this hope is called the Mozambican nation.

Address to the Tambor Seminar,

Pemba, Mozambique, July, 2004.