Why are Mozambican elites crude and rude?

Josué Bila (uhurubila@gmail.com)

All societies have political elites who are responsible for national policies at all levels, which is why a society or state is also a product and mirror of the decisions of its elites or people invested with power. In this text, I argue that our elites are a reproduction of the Portuguese colonial system and, unfortunately, they haven't let go of the memories of colonial violence and the resulting inequalities. Colonial policy created segregations between society, where the Portuguese were first class citizens; followed by the so-called assimilated group (they could read and write Portuguese and reproduced European culture and citizenship and, in many cases, despised African traditions) and the indigenous, who had not been integrated into European culture and citizenship and, consequently, preserved African culture. Thus, since Independence in 1975, the ruling party elites have continued to reproduce the structure of social inequalities, where only a minority has access to rights, resources and opportunities. The grossness of our political elites lies precisely in this inability to create public policies and materialise the human rights of the people.

A little bit of history

The African continent, as a result of slavery, colonisation and, more recently, independence, which resulted in ‘sovereign’ states, has been introduced to Western global modernity, even though it retains part of its cosmologies and worldviews, what those without conceptual sagacity usually call traditions.

The colonisers, because they came from different and unequal worldviews, political philosophies and economic patterns, imposed certain values on the colonised societies, which is why, without going into ethnographic details, the behaviour of Mozambicans and Zimbabweans, for example, shows some differences, just like that of the colonising empires. In general, the elites and even the middle classes in English-speaking countries have sophisticated and higher incomes than those in Portuguese-speaking countries. Even in the American continent, the mentalities of the American and Brazilian elites show substantial differences in social, political and economic organisation. What saves Brazil from the ‘Portuguese curse’, compared to the former Portuguese colonies in Africa, is perhaps because its elites have symbolically distanced themselves from Portugal, and even in the well-popularised local jokes, ‘the Portuguese are dumb’. The Mozambican elite, with its consecrated ‘Lusophone Bible’, popularly known as José Maria Relvas, would never dare so adjectivize its assimilationist owner, not only because it would incur racist insults against a European population group, but because its greatest ‘modern civilisational ladder’ comes from the Iberian waves. In fact, Brazil washes away the ‘Portuguese curse’ by associating with North Americans and other Europeans from Italy, France and the North.

Because Mozambique was colonised by Iberian elites, it has certain social and economic characteristics which, even if it doesn't explore them properly, mobilise certain behaviours in politics and society. There is one aspect that many intellectuals and academics shy away from exploring, and that is the religion of the colonisers. The Iberian elites brought with them Catholicism and all its religious perversities, such as the introduction of a multifaceted set of pantheons to whom one must prostrate oneself, depending on the affliction of the supplicants. Let's remember that Catholicism was the first institution to induce perversities in primitive and simple Christianity, by introducing political privileges and other perks into the lives of religious leaders.

Catholic perversity also unfolds in the fact that Catholicism presupposes the crushing of the millennia-old monotheism that characterised the Judeo-Christian worldview, which was rescued by the Reformation of the Church, seconded by the development of democratic institutions, capitalist and educational institutions - the societies that were overwhelmed by Protestantism eradicated illiteracy and universalised education as a public policy, while in the majority of Catholic societies, education was focused on the elites and middle classes, the reproducers of the status quo.

While other British colonies and settlements were gaining their independence, with black elites educated in quality education systems, Portugal in Mozambique from the 1950s to the 1960s had only a third of (white) Portuguese who could read and write, according to Joseph Hanlon and Teresa Smart (There are more bicycles - but is there development?), with an underdeveloped Catholic religion and an economic mentality of cronyism and the hoe. In addition to these factors, Portugal sent to its African colonies the worst of its babaquaras, from rural areas, who mastered the use of hoes rather than machines or the techniques of the industrial revolution. The settlement of Lionde, in Chokwe, in the Mozambican province of Gaza, received this example of colonisers who were mongrels and coarse, of low human breeding, sertanejos and toothless, provincials and sarrafaçais, suckers and assholes, as can be seen in an RTP documentary entitled ‘Racial segregation in Portugal's former African colonies’. In fact, Albano Silva, a Portuguese descendant and lawyer, reveals in the same documentary that, given the stratification and the weight of social hierarchies, the majority of Lusitanians were ‘third class’, to the point that his own mother, who lived in Lionde, would be in the carriage rather than in the seat next to the Portuguese drivers. In the same documentary, a Portuguese man with a babaquara worldview pointed out that he was happy because he was finally going to get the ‘tits of the black women’. Sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos (in his book Pela mão de Alice) writes that travellers and scholars from northern Europe called the Portuguese ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’, because of their low ethical and civilisational standards.

On a state-political level, Portugal was battered and overwhelmed by the dictatorship of Antonio Salazar, who persecuted political thinkers and reformers who were fighting for the ideology of liberal democracy. In those many works by Dr Adriano Moreira, we read that the Portuguese administration persecuted civic institutions, political parties, protest groups and prevented the development of a free press, which was also the case in Francisco Franco's Iberian neighbour.

Reproduction of portuguese colonization

When I observe Mozambican elites, I always think of these facts from the history of Portuguese colonisation in the country. Our elites, from a structural point of view, are crude and rude and even their educational base, to this day, reflects a backward Portugal in all aspects of Western glories and modernities. How could they be different from their source? A black elite whose colonisers and inspirers were satisfied because they got to suck on the ‘black women's teats...’

Furthermore, the difficulties our elites have in ritualising democratic discourses, which are already inscribed in the soul of our Constitution, and in producing and implementing public policies in response to our state's republican obligations, necessarily involves understanding the brainwashing and trauma our elites suffered in colonial times. The democratic and republican project is not ingrained in their mentalities and, consequently, in their political relations with citizens. For our elites, ordinary Mozambicans are symbolically a perpetuation of the ‘indigenous’ and ‘primitive’, while they (the elites) are the representation of the Portuguese and the assimilated. Another factor linked to this is their forced cooperation with violent and dictatorial communisms, before and after the National Liberation struggle, where the operationalisation of the rituals of liberal democracies and constitutional republics was null - and remains null.

When we see young people who have access to palaces and work with government (and equally economic) elites showing off expensive drinks and luxurious homes on social media, in a country where millions are in the misery of misery, we need the mirror of history to understand the foundations on which these worldviews of our social curse are based: we were colonised by rude and crude Portuguese, and we have this heritage ingrained in our social relations, as can be understood from the texts of sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, in his book Alice's Hand. In this way, our assimilated and neo-assimilated people, however much they want to display some civility, were brought up by the worst Portuguese strain, brutes and primitives in the eyes of the Anglo-Saxon Europeans and others whose aspects of industrial development, republican ethics and democracy were and are sophisticated. All these factors, which I have listed in order to understand our national slobbering, don't explain everything, but I doubt very much that an in-depth study couldn't take them into account academically, so that the text would be explanatory and comprehensible, revealing what makes our elites rude and crude. In fact, our elites are rude and crude.