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Mozambique Our second national programme was in Mozambique. At first, its development was my responsibility, and I had high hopes for it. Arriving in Mozambique on the first of three missions in the fall of 1993, I found that UN peacekeeping operations were in full swing one year after the Rome Peace Accords had been signed. Soldiers from the two opposing armies of FRELIMO and RENAMO were being demobilized in makeshift camps around the country in a vast operation that was chaotic but with relatively little violence or bitterness. This was especially remarkable since the civil war had been especially destructive. RENAMO had destroyed practically every road, bridge, telephone line, school and medical clinic in the countryside. They were backed by the Apartheid regime of South Africa because the revolutionary FRELIMO government of Mozambique had helped Zimbabwe get its independence and by the United States CIA because FRELIMO had received assistance from the Soviet Union and China after winning their freedom from Portuguese colonialism. The hopes for the programme in Mozambique were inspired especially by two Mozambicans, Graça Machel and Noel Chicuecue. Although it is not the case in all countries, the UNESCO National Commission in Mozambique is truly inspiring. Graça Machel was the Commission President, former Minister of Education, widow of the leader of the country's revolution (Samora Machel), and founder and leader of the women's movement of Mozambique. She is one of the few people I have met who have achieved world historic consciousness. This is a quality that I have described in my study Psychology for Peace Activists - the quality of a person who has developed through all of the other stages of the consciousness development of peace activists (values, anger, action, affiliation, personal integration) and arrived at a point where her life exemplified the hopes, dreams and efforts of her people for peace and justice. She is perhaps best known outside of her country for the study that she organized for the United Nations on children and war and for her marriage to President Nelson Mandela of South Africa. When I arrived on mission from UNESCO in 1993 and met with Graça Machel, she said simply that the people of Mozambique - tired of war - had already begun creating a culture of peace in their own way and that one should go to the countryside and learn from them. Noel Chicuecue, at the time working under Ms Machel's leadership as the education officer for the National Commission, was the person I was to work with. Noel had been born on the day before Christmas (hence his name) in the border region between Tete Province of Mozambique and Zimbabwe. He was in his late teens when the Samora Machel led the Mozambique Revolution.. Along with two other Mozambicans his age, one of Portuguese ancestry and the other (Zuber Ahmed) of East Indian ancestry he volunteered to serve as a teacher in the newly revolutionary countryside. Later he became Education Director of Nampula Province, and when Graça Machel moved from the Ministry of Education to the UNESCO National Commission he came there as education officer. Noel is one of those rare people who cannot walk more than a block in Mozambique without being stopped by someone who knows and loves him from some distant place or past event somewhere in Mozambique. He is what one might call "a people-person". |