Made a mistake, shouldn't have mentioned my own poem on Mozambique at all, but
it was difficult not to when it was just sitting there on the other side of
the computer. I actually didn't want to post it, Peter, because I wasn't
looking for comment -- it's the overall discussion that I'm concerned about,
how to go about things etc. So now it will stupidly block the discussion if I
keep it out and if it usefully interacts with Keston's bright initiative
rather than competes with it I suppose that's OK. The prose is an essential
part of what follows: using the mixed poetry-prose genre is one of my
solutions to exactly the difficulties that Peter and others are raising, and
the somewhat prosey tone of parts of the poem is intended too: that is a
question of genre, not of whether it is or is not "a poem". And that issue
might be a thing to address:

Mozambique: Socialism's Unlevel Playing Field



Socialism had a far worse history in Mozambique. There, Samora Machel's
Frelimo party set up a unitary party-nation constitution, with a politbureau
and party branches reaching down to provincial, district and subdistrict
levels, carrying the message into factories, institutions, schools, defence
forces and neighbourhoods. Like Tanzania, Mozambique developed communal
villages which displaced people from their natural homes, and the disaffected
broke away to form their own villages.
Photographs show mass meetings with the forest of raised arms, the party
worker advising communal villagers outside the "Dynamising Group" offices, the
peasant woman's face rapt after voting, the people dancing in communal joy.
As usual under too optimistic a socialism, nothing worked properly and the
West became hostile. All went haywire into civil war, economic disaster, and
starvation; Machel was assassinated.
All along, Mozambique had exercised a dual role as a front-line state
battling apartheid and as the key export route for the Copper Belt across
Southern Africa to Maputo (Lourenço Marques). The carrier trade with white
minority-run Rhodesia closed down; South Africa sent only low tariff goods
and diverted high tariff goods elsewhere; Maputo's transit business
collapsed. Rhodesia and South Africa, with covert action from the CIA,
fomented right-wing banditry within Mozambique and South Africa massed troops
on its borders so that scarce resources had to be allocated to meet the threat
of invasion.
The front-line states paid heavily for fighting apartheid when they
themselves were wrestling with disasters, partly caused by Western opposition
to their socialism.

 Mozambique


The soldiers' heelmarks filled with dust, the war
crept on, the shadow of the Portuguese retreating left
the sunny land too dry, revealed the bare treasury,
the bankrupt independence. There's sand still shelving
in Samora Machel's footfall, such a mark he left

on Mozambique, a rigid purity, his heels
resounding on a rostrum, single fist held high
as if in ardour for his heart-winning tongue,
and in ardour for committees, trying to link a people,
largely illiterate, to all that Frelimo fought for.

The Party a tent-pole in a land of huts,
no canvas covering it under Frelimo's sun,
some shirted lecturer among sticks, his fingers
counting out directives, the audience so poor
frayed singlets ran in rivers on their backs.

The Portuguese had trained no-one to run farms,
left no investment capital, South Africa
withdrew its gold, a crisis from the very start,
western hands withdrawing within gold-linked
shirt-cuffs, or proffering ruinous loans.

Immediately, free-traders and the apartheid-mouthed,
the CIA, South Africa, Smith's Rhodesia, the sorry gang,
began their sabotage, they funded rebel rightists and
the Catholic Church, a pro-colonialist enemy, knew
their God hates Marxists; God sent a drought on cue.

New war inside the arid land; outside its borders
lay racism's front-line; a million people were to die.
Party officials went desperate from its Congress,
to hillsides, to breakaway villages; they brought
not goods but party directives, even the sjambok.

Soon the free market powers had fomented anarchy
in a situation already doomed to it. Stood back:
"You see what Marxism has done!" Mozambique prey
to World Bank receivers -- very inconvenient
for trade when Maputo's great port stood idle.

The Northern sky went black with money signatures
sent via computer passwords, becoming shadow entities
flocking like starlings up to satellites from Washington
to the far side of the world; whitening, the bills
flew down to roost in favoured trees, Tokyo, Riyadh, Bonn --

flew far north from these treeless badlands technologised
at night; red cliffs by day going grey under a moon
like a CD rim above a forgotten, leopard-freckled nation;
bony okapis stumbled on the hills, vultures
limped, trailing their scraggy cloaks of greed.

On the Northern side of the world, shadowy men
marshalled us Britons into their army of wealth;
our civil bullets fired south into starving lands
and spoke to those fallen on sand: "You've lost me, Sir,
in your eyes, where I have found your h-he-heart."

They died by Machel's heelmark. Frelimo now distrusted
his purity. Ah, then the West came from the shadows
with fistfuls of loans, fomenting elections where
apostacy-Marxists faced murderous rightists,
with a billion bankers' dollars to stabilise democracy!

In blazer green fields now is another Mozambique,
a woman twin-gunned with crimson watering cans;
beside her, footmarks, a crooked hand planting seeds
into a line of words growing against the hunger.
Plant this, water this, words truly green.




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