MARXISM IN MOZAMBIQUE

...FRELIMO was receptive...

...Mondlane was assassinated in 1969 by a letter bomb mailed by Portuguese agents...

...After a one-year transitional government in Mozambique—during which extreme right-wing whites calling themselves the "Dragons of Death" seized the national radio station and tried to stage a coup— FRELIMO assumed power on June 25...

...it is political, instructive, a form of relaxation, communal, sensual...

...I tell them we've got to deal with the Samora Maehels of the world because there are going to be a whole lot more of them...

...It was a classy Tijuana, where repressed South African Calvinists could indulge in the pornography they banned back home...

...Hay-akawa and Jesse Helms), which managed to blacklist aid to Mozambique for supporting the Zimbabwean guerrillas...

...In Mozambique, there is a chance to make your work count...

...When the Portuguese ruled Mozambique, Maputo was known as Lourenco Marques, or simply "LM" to the South African tourists who flocked there in search of Playboy magazine, bullfights, X-rated movies, black prostitutes, exquisite beaches, and succulent jumbo prawns...

...From its bases in Tanzania, FRELIMO launched its guerrilla war in 1964 and slowly moved south, gaining control of more than one-third of the country by April 1974, when the Portuguese draftees and disillusioned junior officers who had had enough of the colonial wars in Africa staged their own "flower revolution" in Lisbon...

...One member of the cabinet is a woman: Graca Machel, the president's wife, is minister of education...

...This is a serious problem which we must overcome...

...which had been the center of the East African slave trade...

...The new residents now possess the once forbidden luxuries of urban life—hot running water, private bathrooms, electricity—and are learning to cope with the mysteries of kitchen appliances, elevators, and telephones...

...One of the finest is run by FRELIMO party members who don the traditional black tuxedos to wait on the new Mozambican clientele...

...The status of women—a telling gauge of any revolution's progress— has risen in Mozambique since FRELIMO began to challenge Portuguese colonial rule, but equality is still a dream...

...It has been Africanized, although it still retains a cosmopolitan dash of foreigners: Portuguese technicians, Brazilian and Chilean political exiles, Swedish aid specialists, and a recent influx of Cuban, Soviet, East German, and Chinese advisers...

...In addition, Rhodesian raids caused some $50 million in property damage, not to mention the deaths of 1,335 Mozambicans...

...Popular participation is still the watchword...

...It is a colonial monolith designed originally as a preserve for whites, as artificial as the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets in Kenya...

...and that FRELIMO encouraged the formation of the Organization of Mozambican Women (OMM), which has become an active, influential group...

...More important, worker participation in factory production councils and grassroots democracy in villages and neighborhood committees have been encouraged...

...hostility did cause FRELIMO to develop closer ties with the Soviet Union...

...When this happens it creates a great conflict within the household...

...The initiative, resourcefulness, and obvious camaraderie of the women was impressive...

...Nevertheless, President Reagan has now halted all aid to the country...

...The success or failure of Mozambique's socialist experiment hinges on the party's ongoing ability to mobilize and genuinely represent the country's twelve million people...

...With the permission of the Tanza-nian government...

...Mozambique has had two rounds of nationwide voting since independence to elect representatives to village, provincial, and national assemblies...

...Zimbabwe is now a dependable ally...

...food assistance program to Mozambique...

...Male resistance to equality for women is formidable...

...and European films (Padre Padrone, Battle of Algiers...

...Maputo is still an oasis of privilege, an anomaly in a poor, overwhelmingly rural country, but it is no longer a white citadel or resort...

...The discos may be silenced, but Mozambique has the most foot-stomping revolution I've ever come across...

...Despite his appeals to Washington for support of FRELIMO's demand for independence, Mondlane was rebuffed...

...But this is not my impression of what is happening in Mozambique...

...In the meantime, however, Mozambique is in the ambiguous and humiliating position of still allowing its migrant workers to labor in the South African gold mines—although the number has plunged from 180,000 to about 30,000—while quietly supporting South Africa's principal liberation movement, the African National Congress (ANC...

...In March, Mozambique expelled six American diplomats, accusing them of anti-government CIA activities...

...The amount was a token $3 million for the purchase of American farm machinery and fertilizer, but it broke the ice...

...During the anti-colonial war, FRELIMO relied on popular participation to win...

...His diplomatic cables, however, didn't seem to carry much weight in Washington, where Soviet and Cuban intervention in Africa are the primary concerns...

...They are emphasizing preventive care, they want to get medicine into the countryside where most of the people live, they train paraprofes-sionals and midwives instead of relying on doctors, they consider health care a basic human right, and they know that economic development is the answer to most of their basic medical problems...

...Marxism in Mozambique: In the shadow of South Africa, a young country struggles to make revolutionary change Stephen Talbot rlying into Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, is like approaching a mirage...

...In marketplaces I saw workers take mid-morning dance breaks...

...After Portuguese troops committed a My Lai-style massacre of more than 300 villagers at Wiriyamu, Mozambique, in December 1972, Portuguese colonial interests—the Overseas Companies of Portugal—hired Richard Allen as a $60,000-a-year Washington lobbyist to deny the massacre had ever taken place and defend Portuguese rule...

...press, and what did appear was often prejudiced, misinformed, hostile...

...She had prepared the meal, but not eaten with us...

...But the gains have come slowly...

...For' a one-party State, there is a remarkable degree of candid and open debate...

...The Carter Administration—with the exception of former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young and his staff—was also less than enthusiastic about Mozambique's experiment in socialism, its friendship and cooperation treaty with the Soviet Union, and its support for the guerrillas in neighboring Zimbabwe...

...involvement in southern Africa...

...While waging "the war in Vietnam, the Pentagon found time to instruct Portuguese officers in a few tricks of the counter-insurgency trade...

...South African technicians continue to help operate the modern Maputo port...

...For Mozambique, it is almost quixotic to try to develop a socialist society on South Africa's border while Pretoria remains so powerful and hostile...

...I came to Mozambique to film sequences for a documentary on U.S...

...Men still can't accept the possibility that their wives might hold positions that are more important than theirs...

...In 1978 only eighty-three murders were reported in Maputo...

...The rebels pose no serious threat to FRELIMO, but have killed a number of civilians and blown up key bridges in central Mozambique...

...Sure FRELIMO's Marxist," Depree said with exasperation, "but they keep their distance from Moscow...

...It is true that FRELIMO, from its inception, has espoused the advancement of women...

...There is much grumbling but surprisingly little rancor, probably because food prices have remained fairly stable and many people lined up to buy meat would not have been able to afford it prior to independence...

...I did encounter obvious problems, including an infuriating bureaucracy whose lethargy and authoritarianism seemed unfazed by the revolution...

...from Northwestern University) who taught briefly at Syracuse University and married a white American, Janet Rae Johnson, in 1956...

...Machel, now president of Mozambique, had worked as a nurse in Lourenco Marques and was one of the first FRELIMO guerrillas sent to Algeria for training...

...There has been a cultural revival of all forms of Mozambican music and dance...

...Instead, the Portuguese simply played Relations with are ambiguous the role of intermediaries, selling the labor of Mozambicans to the mines and plantations of Rhodesia and South Africa...

...The Carter Administration's cold-shoulder treatment during the first four years of Mozambique's independence was a self-defeating policy compounded by the pro-Rhodesia lobby in Congress (led by Senators S.I...

...vote over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...

...If someone makes it into his forties, he's lucky," Povey says...

...Representatives of the nine black-ruled nations of southern Africa— Angola, Zambia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Botswana, Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe—have begun to develop plans for regional economic cooperation which will eventually allow "frontline" states such as Mozambique to lessen their dependence on South Africa...

...Every meeting or work session which I attended concluded with singing and dancing...

...You know what I keep telling them back at the State Department...

...Mozambique, for instance, was one of the few Third World nations to side with the Soviets on the U.N...

...Peace in Zimbabwe means that Mozambique can begin to shift its scarce resources from emergency defense spending to urgent domestic needs...

...Bullfights have been outlawed and the old arena turned into a marketplace...

...Look, you've got to remember that nearly everyone in this country has malaria and hookworm, malnourish-ment is endemic, and the infant mortality rate is astronomical...

...His column on foreign affairs appears monthly in The Nation...

...The South Africans have been emboldened by the inauguration of Ronald Reagan and by Secretary of State Alexander Haig's call to eradicate "international terrorism...

...During my flight from Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, I had glanced from the plane at several hundred miles of sparsely populated Mozambican countryside: The mist-covered Makonde plateau, forests, and vast empty stretches of reddish-brown soil...

...Six years later they remain, a sobering reminder of the severe constraints on revolutionary change in an underdeveloped country with few mineral resources and little or no industry...

...Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Donald Easum, a liberal, met with FRELIMO leaders to try to develop better relations...

...Letters to the editor printed in the news weekly, Tempo, are lively and frequently critical of the government...

...When Mozambique finally gained independence in June 1975 and the leftist guerrilla movement, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), took power after ten years of fighting in the bush, the barrios did not disappear by decree...

...FRELIMO established its headquarters near the coastal town of Bagamoyo...

...During my first trip to Mozambique in 1977, U.S...

...As in the case of any one-party state, there is the danger that FRELIMO could lose its vision of "popular power," insulate itself from the people, and ossify...

...It would not be the first time that a revolutionary party deteriorated into an authoritarian elite purporting to speak for "the masses" while serving its own narrow interests...

...But the Pretoria regime has replaced Rhodesia's fallen white-minority regime as the silent supporter of anti-FRELIMO rebels in Mozambique who call themselves "the Mozambique National Resistance...

...aid, there is even less reason to deny assistance to Mozambique...

...In Swahili, Bagamoyo means "here I lay down my heart for all is lost now...

...Right now, the organization concentrates on integrating women into the labor force...

...My concern about these problems was only partially tempered by the willingness of FRELIMO officials to discuss them frankly and openly...

...He smiled, disappeared into the kitchen, and emerged, beaming, with his pregnant wife and two small children who clung to their mother's traditional dress...

...No foreign power, including the USSR, is allowed to establish a military base on Mozambican territory...

...She shook hands, shyly, and quickly went back to the kitchen...

...There have been some modest improvements in the barrios, including construction of latrines and sewers...

...Under the direction of FRELIMO-sponsored neighborhood committees, Africans have occupied the high-rise apartments and subdivided villas abandoned by the Portuguese who fled to Lisbon rather than live under a radical, black majority government...

...Maputo residents still lock their bicycles and complain about burglaries, but they agree that the crime rate has plummeted in the past four years, and many women—black and white—told me they felt comfortable walking the streets at night...

...They are very independent, pro-Third World...

...At the time FRELIMO was torn by factionalism as black nationalists and socialists fought for control of the movement...

...For the average black resident of Maputo, restaurants are still a luxury, but independence has meant more food and an improved diet...

...And last January, South African commandos, for the first time since FRELIMO came to power, crossed the border and raided the homes of South African ANC members on the outskirts of Maputo, killing eleven refugees and one Portuguese citizen...

...Before I went to Mozambique in 1977, there was only spotty coverage of the newly independent country in the U.S...

...Traditional sexist practices—bride price, polygamy, forced marriage—are entrenched in many rural areas, where peasant women pound corn, wash clothing, cook, farm, collect water—often carrying an infant strapped to their backs...

...Nevertheless, Mozambique is unmistakably a one-party state...

...Beira, another Mozambican port, served the needs of landlocked Rhodesia...

...The United States, inexcusably, opposed Mozambique's anti-colonial war of independence...

...Perhaps the greatest of these problems is health...

...No one expects peace and stability in southern Africa until the apartheid regime is toppled...

...But in keeping with the undeniably high spirit that can be felt in Mozambique, Povey is staying there despite the obstacles...

...Dancing in Mozambique is ubiquitous...

...But FRELIMO survived the murder of its leader (whose diplomacy and authority had managed to hold the diverse movement together) and Mondlane was eventually succeeded by a young, intense, guer-rillajeader, Samora Machel, who represented FRELIMO's left wing...

...The two principal obstacles to the development of an indigenous socialism in Mozambique are the young nation's historic economic dependence on South Africa and the military threat posed by the neighboring apartheid regime...

...Allen, of course, is now Reagan's National Security Adviser...

...Their leaders were kept under surveillance, jailed, and executed by the Portuguese secret police—the PIDE— which originally had been trained by the Gestapo in the 1930s and never tired of the old school tactics—storm trooper raids, arrest without charge, interrogation under torture...

...George Povey, an American doctor working in Mozambique, is particularly outspoken about the staggering health problems and the inadequacies he sees in the new system...

...The OMM also runs its own farm outside Maputo, where members grow crops and raise small animals to sell to collect funds for the organization...

...Within FRELIMO, there is a strong emphasis on self-criticism and a remarkable willingness to admit mistakes...

...The United Nations' Food and Agricultural Organization reports that Mozambique is in urgent need of 173,000 tons of food...

...When FRELIMO closed its border with Rhodesia in March 1976, it greatly helped the Zimbabwean Patriotic Front guerrilla forces, but that act of solidarity cost Mozambique at least $550 million in lost trade, tourism, transport revenues, and jobs on the railroad and in Beira, which became almost a ghost town during the last few years of the war...

...FRELIMO murals, posters, and graffiti are replacing the Coca-Cola and Shell Oil ads...

...It rises Suddenly out of the low-lying African savannah—a dazzling, modern, sundrenched city on the edge of the Indian Ocean...

...Lourenco Marques (Maputo) was really South Africa's harbor...

...The Nixon and Ford Administrations remained implacably opposed to FRELIMO, and Congress barred aid to the "Marxist menace...

...The reporter, based in South Africa, had not visited Mozambique...

...Mozambique has always been a second-class country in a region ruled by the white settler states: Rhodesia and South Africa...

...Wages, although still low by Western standards—$90 to $400 a month— have doubled, even quadrupled, since FRELIMO came to power, allowing Mozambicans to purchase more food...

...There is no opposition press, and no parties other than FRELIMO, though FRELIMO is undeniably popular...

...That may sound unbelievable to Americans, but in my experience it is true...

...This use of food as a political weapon is particularly odious because some 1.5 million Mozambicans are currently suffering from the effects of a prolonged drought...

...After eating a delicious lunch at the home of a twenty-seven-year-old FRELIMO district official and having a stimulating discussion with him, I asked if he had a family...

...Portugal, the poorest country in Western Europe, lacked the capital to develop its own colony...

...Rents in the nationalized housing are reasonable: $29 to $81 a month for a two-bedroom apartment, depending on the family's income...

...But the most dramatic change in housing has been the relocation of more than 100,000 blacks from the barrios into the white "cement city...

...The Front articulated and defended the interests of the vast majority of Mozambicans...

...that women, after they insisted, were allowed to become guerrillas and even officers...

...This record of economic pragmatism may have been responsible for Congress's decision to extend bilateral aid to Mozambique in 1979 for the first time since independence...

...The principal obstacle to the emancipation of women is men themselves," Samora Machel told an interviewer recently...

...FRELIMO has always been militantly anti-racist, and today Mozambique, though torn< by racial hostility under Portuguese rule, enjoys easy-going race relations...

...South Africa, and sells its main exports^—cashews, shrimp, timber, cotton, and sugar—to the United States...

...Moreover, FRELIMO has maintained a policy of economic pragmatism since 1977, when the precipitous economic decline after the revolution was halted...

...However, during a speech last year denouncing bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption, President Samora Machel received his biggest applause when he announced that no one, not even the military, was to have priority in the lines...

...Most African countries are a dumping ground for Kung Fu movies, spaghetti westerns, and prissy romantic musicals from India, but the Mozambique Film Institute has mercifully cancelled the worst of these imports and begun supplementing the B-movie fare with first-rate features by innovative African filmmakers (Senegal's Ousmane Sem-bene), documentaries (Harlan County, U.S.A...

...Unfortunately, the economic realities and class distinctions in Mozambique are not so easily dispensed with: The The use of food as a political weapon is especially odious nationalized restaurants are no longer segregated and serve relatively inexpensive food, but their customers are usually the new urban upper strata (Mozambican officials, civil servants, well-paid workers) and foreign technicians and visitors, like myself, who can afford to go out for a meal...

...The Sunday morning I visited the farm, a contingent of Cuban women had volunteered to help build a barn...

...Mozambique continues to trade with its arch enemy...

...Meat— especially chicken, goat, and rabbit—is more available, and the government has introduced a blend of white and whole-wheat bread (jokingly referred ¦ to as "semi-integrated") to try to wean the city population from the less nutritious (and more expensive to refine) white bread which the Portuguese popularized...

...In short, Mozambique was dominated by and dependent on its neighbors...

...Radio Maputo plays an eclectic array of traditional African music, jazz, FRELIMO songs, Stevie Wonder, and even some country and western tunes...

...It seems unreal...

...Although I generally discounted such second-hand reports, I steeled myself for the worst when I arrived...

...The U.S.-Mozambique connection has an unusual twist: The founder of FRELIMO, Eduardo Mondlane, was an American-educated anthropologist (M.A...

...In colonial days it was a wide-open, brawling port city with a reputation as one of the toughest towns in East Africa, averaging 1,500 homicides a year...

...For an American accustomed to racially tense, sullen, and frequently violent cities, Maputo is unexpectedly relaxed and free of crime...

...The border is open once more and trade is resuming...

...But one of the annoying results of the sudden increase in consumer power— and simultaneous decline in agricultural production and breakdown in the transport system—is the emergence of lines...

...Despite nationalization of banking, insurance, coal mining (after unsafe conditions caused a mine disaster), and oil refining, Mozambique has never shunned foreign investment and has a particularly satisfactory relationship with General Tire and Rubber Company, which operates a successful, 80 per cent government-owned tire factory in Maputo...

...Power from the huge Ca-bora Bassa dam in northwestern Mozambique—built during the last years of Portuguese rule with South African and Western money—still flows to South Africa...

...Marijuana is illegal in Mozambique and beer is usually the only alcohol readily available...

...Now that the guerrillas backed by Mozambique—Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union—are in power in Salisbury and are themselves receiving U.S...

...Mozambique has exorcised many of its demons," reported a correspondent for Le Monde after a recent visit...

...It is one of the few countries in the world where the principles are correct...

...Most gourmet restaurants have been nationalized...

...Ninety per cent of Mozambique's twelve million people are illiterate, and since the populace is divided into forty-two ethnic groups, each with its own language or.dialect, music is a vital way to communicate and to develop a national identity and culture...

...The Africans were cordoned off from the segregated city by colonial troops...

...But this streak of revolutionary self-denial has not extended to African dancing, movies, or music...

...Socialism in Mozambique is still an experiment in the early stages...

...A host of officially ordered, more superficial changes have, nevertheless, altered Maputo's aura: Streets once named for conquering Portuguese generals or christened "Our Lady of Fatima" now commemorate FRELIMO martyrs or honor such African leaders as Tanzania's President Julius Nyerere or such international revolutionaries as Ho Chi Minh...

...South Africa has a two-faced policy toward Mozambique...

...FRELIMO has deliberately diversified its sources of aid and advisers—the Scandinavian countries, China, and Portugal balance Eastern Europe, Cuba, and the Soviet Union...

...They are immensely popular...

...After that expanse, Maputo comes as a shock...

...The end of Zimbabwean war and the landslide election victory last year of Robert Mugabe is a tremendous boost for Mozambique, politically and economically...

...Trade and commerce are uninterrupted...

...The United States, meanwhile, rewarded the anti-communism of Portugal's dictators, Salazar and Caetano, with planes, helicopters, napalm, and defoliants, while pretending to ignore Portugal's use of these weapons in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique...

...Quixotic, perhaps, but in tandem with a transformed Zimbabwe, maybe not impossible...

...Top officials have been reprimanded from below for corruption, inefficiency, and arrogance—and have been replaced...

...the contrast with the rest of the country is stark and immediate...

...On the outskirts of this Stephen Talbot, a producer and reporter for public television in San Francisco, is making a film on United States policy toward southern Africa...

...A typical Los Angeles Times article in 1976 described Mozambique as a "police state" under "Kalashnikov law"—a reference to the Soviet-made automatic rifle carried by FRELIMO soldiers...

...There was an admirable national vaccination campaign against smallpox, tuberculosis, and measles, but the follow-up drive was bogged Male resistance to women's rights is formidable down because of the terrible transportation problems and lack of planning...

...But Mozambique is no Soviet satellite...

...LM was also a major port used by the South Africans, and they spent their gold to help the Portuguese settlers construct a beautiful city of broad, tree-lined avenues, sidewalk cafes, European-style parks draped with bougainvillaea, and spacious, ornately tiled villas...

...1975...

...Instead, he turned increasingly to communist countries for the financial support and arms that FRELIMO desperately needed...

...But forty-eight hours after Easum returned to Washington, Henry Kissinger fired him and chose as his replacement Nathaniel Davis, ambassador to Chile while the CIA was destabilizing the Al-lende government...

...Now with the Reagan Administration tilting strongly toward South Africa, U.S.-Mozambican relations have deteriorated to a post-independence nadir...

...Family planning (the Mozambicans prefer to call it "child spacing") has become a national priority—with the goals of prolonging women's lives and making it possible for women to work in factories...

...Mobile cinema units have also been created to bring Charlie Chaplin films and Mo-zambican documentaries to the countryside where few people had ever seen a film before...

...Although all the candidates are proposed by FRELIMO (they need not be party members), they can be rejected by citizens at public forums—and a great many are...

...It lacked a viable economy of its own...

...About $5 million in sales of wheat and rice were halted, and a shipment of 27,000 tons of corn was cancelled...

...the next stop for the captured slaves was the auction block on the Arab-controlled island of Zanzibar...

...The Carter Administration compounded that original policy mistake by cold-shouldering the leftist FRELIMO government, despite continued overtures to the West by Mozambique...

...I was told later that some men objected to their wives' doing this kind of work on their day off and that the divorce rate among OMM activists is high...

...Ambassador Willard Depree, a harried liberal, toid me...

...The prostitutes who once thronged "Sin Street"—LM's red light district—have found other jobs, been packed off to remote "reeducation" centers guarded by FRELIMO women's brigades, or regrouped across the border in neighboring Swaziland where they must compete with the local women...

...Moreover, men have not been able to accept the idea that women are their intellectual equals...

...Long lines form in the predawn hours in the cities for meat, fish, and bread...

...Africans call Maputo the "cement city" as opposed to their own straw-and-mud-hut villages...

...Soulful socialism...

...The OMM is the cutting edge of the women's movement...

...Only last year has FRELIMO mounted an "offensive" against bureaucracy...

...and Ph.D...

...white enclave was the African city: the barrios where tens of thousands of blacks endured rats, mosquitoes, raw sewage, overcrowding, and ghetto violence...

...Sociologists called them "the marginalized"—the poor and hungry camped on the edge of wealth...

...A New York Times reporter touring Mozambique after FRELIMO took power spotted a group of men and women carrying buckets of water on their heads, and he wrote that he had never seen such a thing anywhere in Africa—lugging water was strictly women's work...

...Racism is imperceptible...

...In retaliation, the Reagan State Department cut off the modest U.S...