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36 Chapter 2 The Road to Mucessua Radical hope first drew me to Mozambique. In 1989, I was active in the anti-apartheid movement in Los Angeles, California, where I worked with a local branch of a national grassroots organization, the Mozambique Support Network. Its objectives were community outreach and education about Mozambique and the externally funded civil war there that began soon after Mozambican Independence in 1975. Our group’s messages focused on U.S. involvement in that war of destabilization and exposed the effects of South Africa’s apartheid policies on the frontline states—Mozambique, Angola, Swaziland, Lesotho, and Namibia—which share part or all of their borders with South Africa. We always brought the message back home by comparing South African apartheid with institutional and interpersonal racism and state violence against people of color in the United States, a message reinforced by the 1992 Rodney King police abuse case not-guilty verdicts and the ensuing mass uprisings. We publicized Mozambique’s forward-­ looking constitution, a blueprint for a society free of race, class, and gender bias. For all these reasons, Mozambique’s history and struggle resonated with me. In his opening speech at the 1973 founding conference of the Organiza- ção das Mulheres Moçambicanas (OMM), the Organization of Mozambican Women, Samora Machel, the first president of Independent Mozambique, spoke of the commitment of the socialist government of the Frente de Libera ção de Moçambique (FRELIMO) to women’s participation in the new nation state:1 The emancipation of women is not an act of charity, the result of a humanitarian or compassionate attitude. The liberation of women is a fundamental necessity for the revolution, the guarantee of its continuity and the precondition for its victory. The main objective of the revolution is to destroy the system of exploitation and build a new society which releases the potential of human beings, reconciling them with labour and with nature. This is the context within which the question of women’s emancipation arises. The Road to Mucessua 37 Indeed, FRELIMO had begun to put these words into action even prior to Independence. Many women had joined the party during the opposition movement as political mobilizers, some holding positions of leadership. Many more women took up arms and fought in the women’s military detachment . In 1973, FRELIMO helped organize OMM, a democratic popular organization mobilized to address the issues of women’s integration in the anticolonial movement; women worked side by side with men in seizing freedom for Mozambique from the Portuguese in 1975 (Isaacman and Isaacman 1983: 91; 1984). The long-term goals were to articulate and implement social changes necessary for women’s emancipation as a critical aspect of the broader struggle for human liberation. This vision for im­ proving women’s lives eventually propelled me across the globe to Mozambique. A View from o Ceu (the Sky) Looking down from the airplane window between the national capital, Maputo , and Beira, the capital of Sofala Province, the landscape is parched and grayish with the exception of a few orange-red dirt roads. All the fields look drab and sparse, like hair on a malnourished child. I am surprised by all the neat rows of houses and neighborhoods so far away from any city or town. I wonder what the different patterns of cultivation of the land mean, orderly and measured in some places and crazy-quilt in others. I can see where a river once snaked, a ribbon of lush green growth curving and then ending. We have gained altitude quickly, and the land below fades even further behind what looks like smoke. Through a layer of yellowish haze high above the land we climb up and up to a strip of blue sky, my ears popping and stomach unsettled. Below are fewer patches and more large shapes—former lakes? A town sparkles briefly through the cloud smog as we skim over, along a new horizon of the smoke against a light blue sky. Now rivers and careful, well-defined fields in different shades and shapes, scattered houses, then just stretches of grasslands. Only recently can you arrive in the center of Mozambique by commercial plane and land in the Beira airport on the coast. The glare of the sun on the tarmac as you disembark momentarily blinds you and the dense heat blurs your senses. It is useful to locate yourself by map as you drive away from the aqua sea to Manica Province. Manica...

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