Reading histories of colonial Mozambique, a country post-liberation I know well and have always loved. Women as slaves, peasants, workers, assimilados, activists, revolutionaries. The jungles, the fierce swift-flowing rivers, the red soil, the landmines, the floods, the spectre of famine always there. The fevers and poetry, the memoirs of imprisonment, the people I still see in dreams: the white cotton shifts of workers that were inferior to the cotton clothes worn by white Portuguese settlers. The straw hats of the tropics, the plantations and haciendas, the blue-black body markings of black women in southern Mozambique. The folk Catholicism. The raw and vital animism. Heartbreaking African fado. So many ways of co-existing and all marked with oppression or difference.
When I was a child, a foreigner, in Beira so long ago I wanted to stay there. At the age of 12 I dreamed of marrying a tall Portuguese army officer and living with him in a blue-tiled apartment overlooking streets clouded by beach sand, a bay undulating with sandbanks, the brown ocean silted by the river mouth. Myself a childbride in a tower, folding bedlinen and towels, ironing his uniform. His mother would care for and protect me because he was an angry man, but vulnerable under the hauteur and uniform. Each day he would bring me gifts and bouquets of scarlet and yellow flowers, tropical blossoms heavy with fragrance. I would put up my face for a kiss.
A daydream that chills me now. That illusion of lasting erotic power very young women have in puberty. And around me, Portuguese settler girs were marrying at the age of 12 or 13, just as the menses started, wedding men much older than themselves. Deflowered and rendered worthless by 14, turned to brood mares in the public eye. As Helene Cixous says of French Algeria where she grew up, ‘it was unlivable’.
But as I think back on that daydream, the desire to become a woman, enter into the veiled bedroom, to be married and made adult, knowing, sexual — I realise I am talking about the lifelong desire to be Other, to escape the known. And when I was a child in Beira all those years ago, I was sunburned from walking around the beaches all day so I would not have to be alone with my father, who sat drinking in the hotel room, sly and incoherent. I already knew too much and in the daydream I was recreating entrapment but on my own terms. As the women passing me in the colonial avenues dreamed of the harem, the brothel, the nunnery. Ways of managing sexual oppression and violation on our terms.
And even as the young conscripted Portuguese soldiers marched through the garrison towns of Mozambique wolf-whistling at young women, waving to small black children whose parents they had come to kill, those 300 years of colonial nightmare were ending. Frelimo was taking up the fight for liberation, boys and men were going into exile to be trained for revolution. Portuguese East Africa on the brink of war and transformation. Again I would watch and listen from a neighbouring country, learning what was possible and at what price. Jorges Rebelo was one of those young fighters writing in 1965:
Letter from a Freedom Fighter
Mother, it is beautiful to fight for freedom!
In every bullet I shoot there is a message of justice,
and old dreams wake like birds.
In the hours of combat, in the battle front
your image comes close to me.
It is for you too that I fight, Mother.
That you should not have tears
in your eyes.
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