unitex@rubbs.fidonet.org (unitex) (09/16/89)
Maputo's Facade Hides Cost Of War
Posting Date: 09/14/89 Source: UNITEX Network, Hoboken, NJ, USA
(Financial Times, August 16, 740 words, BYLINE: Nicholas
Woodsworth)
For the teenagers of Polana Cimento, a suburb high over the water
of Maputo Bay, life might as well be lived not in Africa but in
a sunny capital of southern Europe.
Outside the Escola Josina Machel, gum-chewing girls in jeans idle
the motors of shiny pink Vespas as they talk to their boyfriends
after classes. Others sit on the curb-side hugging textbooks
and smoking cigarettes.
They chat breezily of rendez-vous at the Cafe Continental, tennis
at the Hotel Polana, or Sunday at the beach. The quick and
perfunctory latin kisses they bestow on the cheeks of their
school-friends on departing are as typical of the continent they
inhabit as the ornate, red-tiled villas and high-rise apartment
blocks in which they live.
As holiday-makers from the more sedate English colonies that
surrounded Mozambique discovered decades ago, Lorenzo Marques,
as it was then called, was a place to escape Africa.
A gracious city of wide, shady boulevards where 200,000
Portuguese had imported their relaxed, continental way of life
intact, it offered Rhodesian and South African tourists
palm-fringed beaches, sophisticated restaurants, and opulent
hotels.
Maputo is still a city of escape today, but for entirely
different reasons. The exotic latin atmosphere and the tourist
hotels remain, but the tourists have stopped coming since
Mozambique's independence from Portugal in 1975.
Maputo is now one of the few secure places in the country, and
those who come here arrive not to seek pleasure but safety from
the rebels of the Mozambican National Resistance. Polano
Cimento, or "Cement Polana" - the home of Maputo's established
middle class - shares its name with another much larger area
closer to the edge of the city.
This is Polana Canico - one of the constantly growing number of
sites where refugees from the Mozambican countryside have
swollen the already considerable numbers of Maputo's urban
poor.
While jobs are difficult to find and labourer's wages are less
than 60 US cents a day, the area's inhabitants are grateful for
protection from the widespread pillage and murder. Maputo is to
all purposes a city state. Sitting at the extreme southern end
of a narrow country more than 2,000 km long, it was built as a
port for exports from South Africa's eastern Transvaal. In a
colony where all lines of communication were built from west to
east to facilitate the exploitation of a vast hinterland,
Lorenzo Marques was already an isolated capital; in an
independent state where 13 years of war have destroyed most road
and rail lines and made the remaining ones dangerous, the city
is now almost wholly cut off from the country it nominally
rules.
There are no fronts in the left-wing Frelimo government's war
against its shadowy MNR enemy. The only safe method of travel
out of Maputo is by air, and areas less than 20 kms from the
city centre are subject to rebel attack.
Maputo's isolation from the rest of Mozambique is underlined by
its apparent prosperity. In many parts of the countryside,
Mozambicans have made a forced return to the stone age,
scrabbling about in bark clothing to gather wild food. The war
has killed 600,000 people, more than half of them children.
Fully half of the country's 14 m population is faced with severe
food shortages and kept alive by Western-funded emergency
programmes that in 1988-89 will total Dollars 382 m (242 m
Pounds (pds)).
Central Maputo, by contrast, has well-stocked shops, elegantly
dressed inhabitants, and traffic jams of new cars and
4-wheel-drive vehicles.
Maputo's present consumption boom, however, is artificial and
not bolstered by corresponding levels of productive activity.
Because the war has prevented exploitation its considerably
agricultural, mining, and industrial potential, Mozambique has
developed what might be termed a cocktail party economy - more
than two thirds of its Dollars 100 m annual foreign exchange
earnings come through the sale of prawns and cashew nuts.
The remainder of Mozambique's foreign exchange needs - last year
it imported Dollars 765 m worth of foreign goods - is financed
through international donations and loans, without which it
could not survive. Thus Maputo wears the face of prosperity.
It is not, however, an act the city can keep up forever. Only an
end to the war and fresh economic links between Maputo and the
productive hinterland can bring real prosperity back to the
charming but isolated city.
* Origin: UNITEX --> Toward a United Species (1:107/501)
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