Dumba Nengue/Run for Your Life: Peasant Tales of Tragedy in Mozambique (English and Portuguese Edition) by Lina Magaia

Dumba Nengue/Run for Your Life: Peasant Tales of Tragedy in Mozambique (English and Portuguese Edition) Reviews

• 
  Alisa

  Before reading this book I knew literally nothing about Mozambique besides that they speak Portuguese so I assumed (correctly) they were colonized by Portugal. When I looked at photos of the capital, Maputo, I thought it looked like a Brazilian city; you can see the how they are cousins in colonization.
  
  Dumba Nengue is collection of accounts of atrocities and war crimes that were committed by RENAMO/MNR terrorists in the 1980s. The introduction to the English edition gives an explanation of the political situation at the time. Magaia wrote to record the stories of peasants "without microphones," not to inform about the political side of things. So some geopolitical backstory was absolutely necessary.
  
  Called a civil war in the foreign press, and RENAMO terrorists were labeled "freedom fighters" by such groups as The Heritage Foundation and Pat Buchanan. Magaia challenges those ideas with questions like: Do these armed bandits have a country? If they are bringing freedom and liberation, then why are peasants fleeing their fields? A civil war is between two armed groups, so what do you call this when one group is armed by outside forces and the other group is unarmed?
  
  In reality, RENAMO fighters were funded and trained by Rhodesian mercenaries (Rhodesia was under UN sanctions at the time), South Africa (apartheid dictatorship), and Portuguese ex-colonists & secret police (still bitter about the country's independence). Some "freedom fighters" indeed. Their purpose was to destabilize independent nations in southern Africa and force economic dependence on South Africa -- if landlocked countries deemed Mozambique's ports too dangerous, they would be forced to go through South Africa instead. Fields and orchards that were completely ravaged forced farmers from financial independence into working in the mines of South Africa. It's a tragedy, on an individual level with girls who were gang-raped and boys press-ganged to commit war crimes against their own families, to the national level with millions of refugees and the loss and destruction of ancestral farmlands and infrastructure.
  
  I am glad I read this book because we so often move from hearing about one tragedy to the next without thinking about how the people affected by it will go the rest of their lives picking up the pieces. These stories, multiplied by millions, begin to approach the scale of the compassion we need to show to others.
• 
  Marina

  If you are not familiar with the story of how bloody fascist apartheid South Africa used to sabotage and military destabilize its neighboring countries, you might miss the raison d'être of this collection. Yes there's death on almost every pages, blood keep spilling and you might even think the murderers to be Mozambican citizens. That is if you haven't read "Edouardo Mondlane" and the story behind the Cahora Bassa Hydropower Plant in Mozambique. What Lina Magaia offers us through these tales of everyday life in 80's Mozambique is the result of how greedy capitalist European countries (backed up by OTAN) kept destroying peace in sovereign african countries while claiming everywhere how hard they were working to bring peace on the continent. I'd suggest you read Lilia Momple's Neighbor, the story of a murder prior to reading this one, things might get clearer to you as a reader.
  I enjoyed the fact that despite the very heavy political aspects of this collection, Lina manages to allow us see the condition of women in the country through the cherished traditions. I highly recommend this one. Keep reading, even the very short ones will teach you something.
• 
  Dave

  Upsetting stories from the "civil war" in Mozambique in the 80s. Each piece is pretty short and brutal. Unfortunately I don't know much about this episode in African history and without the context in which to place these accounts it just read like a collection of really unpleasant stories.
• 
  Al

  The most tragic text I have yet to encounter.