World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples - Mozambique

Environment

Mozambique lies along a vast stretch of the Indian Ocean in south-eastern Africa. It shares borders in the north with Tanzania, Malawi and Zambia, and in the west and south with Zimbabwe and South Africa. Much of the country, especially southern and coastal areas, lies at low altitude and is susceptible to severe flooding, as happened with devastating effect in 2000. Droughts also periodically threaten food security. The country does not have significant mineral resources.

History

Ngoni Bantu peoples displaced the original Khoisan hunter-gatherer population in today's Mozambique, and as early as the tenth century engaged with Arabs in trade of gold and slaves from the interior. Intermarriage between Ngoni peoples and Arabs led to Swahili culture throughout the port cities of East Africa. Portuguese explorers arrived in 1498 and, exploiting the slave and gold trade, soon initiated nearly five centuries of colonial rule.

Mozambique's land and labour remained at the disposal of outsiders, and in 1951 Mozambique became a formal province of Portugal. Through uneven processes of underdevelopment, northerners suffered greater disadvantage. More schools were established in the south, and systems of waged labour developed there from an earlier date. Nationalist leadership emerged in the 1950s in the south, mainly from Shangaan-speaking (Tsonga- speaking) areas in Gaza province, as well from as urban mestiço and Asian (Goan) strata. New social strata developed and technological change spread faster and wider in the south than in central and northern Mozambique, where health and nutrition indices and public infrastructure remained poorer. Northerners thus emerged as a numerical majority with the effective status of a minority.

Portugal maintained control of Mozambique until 1975, following the fall of the fascist government in Lisbon. Independent Mozamique's interior minister, and today's president, Armando Guebuza, ordered the expulsion of all Portuguese citizens.

Civil war

Prior to independence, beginning in 1962, anti-colonial militants called the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) took up arms against their oppressors, and received backing from the Soviet Union and China. At independence, FRELIMO established a one-party state, and its Soviet backing raised the ire of the United States. FRELIMO's support to liberation movements struggling against white supremacy in neighbouring Southern Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) and South Africa, led those racist regimes to support the formation of the Resistencia Nacional Moçambicana (RENAMO), which had its stronghold in the country's north. Beyond ongoing support to RENAMO throughout the war, South African and Rhodesian forces launched occasional attacks on black liberation guerrilla camps in Mozambique.

Over fifteen years, war between FRELIMO and RENAMO, fuelled by the Cold War, killed one in fifteen and displaced one in three Mozambicans. It left the countryside littered with landmines, and rendered many Mozambicans amputees. In a cumulative spiral of violence and impoverishment, it also teased out and inflamed regional and ethnic antagonisms.

Northern peoples had long been subject to coercion by powerful outsiders, though not without resistance. The mid-nineteenth- century history of violent conquest (by Ngoni armies based in southern Gaza) served to intensify northern resentment towards the southern elites, especially in the central provinces of present-day Manica and Sofala. Assessing any post-independence governmental bias against northerners is made more difficult by wider biases against small rural producers and 'traditionalists' in all parts of the country. Moreover, the economic geography of much of the south provided alternative sources of livelihood; the more purely agrarian economy of the north did not. Thus the impact of those biases, and the manner of state intervention (villagization at the point of a gun) was harsher in the north, and the compensatory benefits fewer. Moreover the war cut off the government and the private sector from large parts of central and northern regions. The armed opposition was thus able to gain adherents by playing on anti-southern and anti-state resentment. Ethnic antagonism, if not the foremost factor, played a part in the RENAMO army campaign against the southern-dominated state class of FRELIMO. Both factions committed horrific atrocities.

In 1986 the first FRELIMO president, Samora Machel, died in an airplane crash and was succeeded by Joaquim Chissano. With expiration of the Cold War, Chissano accelerated talks with RENAMO, and in 1990 oversaw passage of a new constitution that ushered in a multi-party system. The war officially ended in 1992. UN peacekeepers deployed to Mozambique and the subsequent peace process between the government and former rebels has come to be widely regarded by conflict experts as a model of success in disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration. Within the next three years, over one and a half million Mozambican refugees and four million internally displaced persons whom the war had dispersed throughout Mozambique and southern African, flooded back to their homes. The influx created new challenges for the post-war government, including adequate provision for much greater numbers of schoolchildren.

Peoples

Main languages: Macua, Sena, Lómuè, Shona (Ndau), XiTsua, Chuabo, Tsonga (XiShangana), Ronga, Marendje, Nianja, Swahili, Portuguese (official)

Main religions: indigenous beliefs, Christianity, Islam, Zionist Christians

Minority groups include Macua 5.5 million (26.1%), Lómuè 1.6 million (7.6%), Sena 1.4 million (6.8%), Chuabo 785,000 (3.8%), Marendje, 75,000 (0.4%), Nyanja 500,000 (2.4%) and Ndau 1.9 million (9%).

[Note: Figures for Macua, Lomue and Sena are taken from the CIA World Factbook, 2007. Figures for Chuabo, Marendje, and Nyanja come from the 1997 census. The figure for Ndau comes from Ethnologue, 2000. Where percentages were available, these have been converted to numbers, and vice-versa for other groups, using the CIA estimate of total population 20.9 million.]

Macua build the largest ethnic group in the north, Sena and Shona (Ndau) in the populous north-central province of Zambezia, and the Tsonga (XiShangana) in the south. Mozambique had a sizeable Portuguese population of around 250,000 in colonial times, but with independence in 1975, most Portuguese left the country following a government order. Small populations of South Asians, Arabs and Chinese remain.

Minority issues are not sharply drawn in the usual sense in Mozambique. However, the effects of uneven colonial development and post-colonial policies led many northerners to resent a southern-dominated political class. About two-thirds of Mozambique's population inhabits the seven provinces north of the River Save. The country's largest ethno-linguistic clusters are here: Macua and related Lómuè (the foremost group in the northern provinces of Nampula, Zambezia, Cabo Delgado and Niassa), Sena (foremost in Sofala province), Chuabo and Marendje (important in Zambezia), Nyanja (foremost in Tete), and the Shona-speaking Ndau people (dominant in Manica and important in Sofala).

Portuguese colonial rulers paid little attention to ethnicity apart from limited categorization of some groups as 'loyal' and others as 'warriors'. Rather, the accent rested on ethno-cultural hierarchy, with whites on top, mestiços (people of mixed race) and assimilados (Africans certified as Westernized) in subordinate positions, and the undifferentiated mass of the indígenas at the bottom - a system formally rejected by the post-colonial FRELIMO government.

Governance

From 1975 FRELIMO set about building, from the top down, a Marxist, secular nation, attempting to promote national consciousness through such slogans as 'Only One People, Only One Nation'.

Already saddled by limited human and physical resources, the new regime also faced military aggression sponsored by the United States, South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. But the new government made things worse through state policies that disadvantaged most rural people - in a country of predominantly rural people - and through its blindness towards local cultures. More perhaps through inadvertence than design, national policies and programmes had little regard for minority group interests. Despite a constitution attaching importance to local cultures, the post- colonial leadership in practice suppressed cultural difference in the name of modernization. Portuguese, for example, was the official language of instruction at all levels of schooling, although after the mass exodus of most Portuguese at independence, it was the first language of less than two per cent of the population and remained unknown to most Mozambicans.

President Joaquim Chissano steered Mozambique toward economic reform and entered into a peace agreement with RENAMO to end the war in 1992. He also ushered in a new constitution in 1990 that set the framework for a truly multi-party system in which human rights would be respected.

RENAMO gained substantial majorities in all but two of the northern provinces in the October 1994 elections. In the south RENAMO won hardly any seats, ending with 45 per cent of the overall national vote. The results revealed considerable alienation from the country's ruling party in the north and centre of Mozambique. Notably, former RENAMO rebels accepted their new role as a loyal political opposition.

Chissano stepped down in 2004 and fellow FRELIMO party member Armando Guebuza won elections in December of that year. RENAMO complained that the vote was rigged, including through use of state resources for the FRELIMO campaign. International observers agreed that the elections were flawed, but not to an extent that likely changed the outcome.

In the mid-1990s Mozambicans were attempting to reconstruct a country ravaged by civil war. The new constitution in 1990 had paved the way for a market-based economic system, and donors provided further impetus through structural adjustment policies. One goal of the reforms was redress of rural-urban imbalances in favour of the smallholder heartlands in the north and centre. But this approach brought with it a shift in assets - especially land - into the hands of private individuals and companies, which aggravated some old disparities and created some new inequalities. Nevertheless, more northerners were in positions of influence than before and the succeeding years have seen consistently high growth rates in GDP and the taming of inflation rates. Such exports as aluminium, cash crops, and seafood have increased along with food production for the local market. Many challenges remain, with the country's agricultural sector still characterized by weak infrastructure. Severe flooding in 2000 set back infrastructure development, and drought in 2002 offered another blow. Over 50 per cent of Mozambicans remain impoverished and living on less than one dollar per day. The FRELIMO government has faced persistent allegations of widespread corruption.

Minorities

None listed.

Resources

Minority based and advocacy organisations

Associacao Dos Direitos Humanos e Desenvolvimento (DHD)
Tel. +258-1-300-116
Email: [email protected]

Conselho Cristao de Mocambique (CCM)
Tel: +258-72-21-733, 72 20-818
Email: [email protected]

Liga Moçambicana dos Direitos Humanos
Tel: +258-1-405941
Email: [email protected]
Website: www.salan.org

Network of Activists and Researchers on Integrated Human Rights in Africa (NARIHRA)
Tel: +258-1-416-848

Sources and further reading

Finnegan, W., A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1992.

Geffray, C., La cause des armes: anthropologie de la guerre contemporaine au Mozambique, Paris, Karthala, 1990.

Hanlon, J., Mozambique: Who Calls the Shots?, London, James Currey, 1991. Hanlon, J., Peace without Profit, Oxford, James Currey, 1996.

Minter, W., Apartheid's Contras: An Inquiry into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique, London, Zed Press, 1994.

Trindade, Joas Carlos and Meneses, Maria Paula (eds.), Law and Justice in a Multicultural Society: The Case of Mozambique, Council for the Development of Social Science Research, 2006.