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Helge Rønning
Language is one of the keys to socio-cultural identity in Mozambique, as the following article reveals. It relates directly to questions of nationhood, politics, literacy and development and the problems are even more profound when matters of self-expression, unity and community are taken into consideration. A certain amount of compromise may be necessary if Mozambique is to establish and retain its own identity in the changing scenario of Southern Africa.
Two day after the founding session of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP)1 which took place in Lisbon, 17 July 1996, the leading independent weekly Savana2 carried an article with the headline 'Uma comunidade sem nada em comun'.3 It brought interviews with public figures in Mozambican society and raised the question whether the idea behind the community did little more than further the interests of the two dominant of the seven Portuguese speaking countries - Portugal and Brazil. The Portuguese interests in the community were especially seen with suspicion. The well known journalist Carlos Cardoso4 said among others that it was necessary to free Portugal from its colonial dependency, and that the creation of the community revealed how slow the decolonising process was in Portugal. The article ended with his statement:
Portugal quer ter a sua zonasinha de influência e nâo se importa de gastar uns dinheiros para pôr os seis a bater palmas. 5
In this context it is paramount to be aware of one question in particular in addition to the wish of Brazil and Portugal for greater international influence, and that is the role of the Portuguese language. In his opening speech at the summit the Portuguese president Jorge Sampaio emphasised that there was no common strategy to defend the Portuguese language. A comment in the daily English 'newscast' of the Mozambican news agency AIM remarked that:
Portuguese leaders are obsessed with their language, an issue regarded in the African CPLP countries as secondary, or even irrelevant.6
The debate in Portugal about the creation of the community has shown that the idea of a special Lusophone identity and its relationship to a concept of latinidade has played an important role in the development of the ideological background to CPLP.7 These ideas and the project to create um espaço lusófono caused considerable reaction among Mozambican intellectuals who questioned first and foremost the question of 'lusophony', and also why an African country with African cultures should be linked to an idea of 'Latinity'. There was even a debate on television in Mozambique about whether it was a relevant concept in the cultural framework of that country. In this context the question of the Portuguese language and its role and history in Mozambique is very interesting. Carlos Cardoso commented:
Outrora éramos portugueses. Agora somos lusófonos. Moçambique, com mais de 50 línguas8 e não sei quantos dialectos, não tem como ser lusófono. É o mesmo que chamar bantu a um francês. Portugal não entende isto porque é um pais mono linguístico.9
How to interpret the history, role and characteristics of the Portuguese language in Mozambique also concerns the question of national and other identities in the country. A few weeks after the CPLP summit a Mozambican linguist published a small book, which created quite some discussion, in which she maintained that no such thing as a separate Mozambican form of Portuguese yet existed.10 The official language of the country was Portuguese as in Portugal, but with concepts and forms that had developed in Mozambique, partly derived from Bantu languages. The Portuguese used in the country might be interpreted as being in the process of developing characteristics of a separate form of Portuguese, but as yet it does not exist.
Of Mozambique's 17 million inhabitants more than 95% have a Bantu language as their mother tongue. Only the minority (25%) who have been to school speak Portuguese, which is the official language, and probably far fewer can write it. Furthermore, the language mainly exists in the urban centres where 17% of the population live. The minority are privileged in regard to education, access to better paid jobs, and also the possibility of relating to the political and social processes of the country. The elite masters speak Portuguese; the majority who live in the rural areas do not.
The question of the role of the Portuguese language is clearly also related to the problem of literacy and the development of a reading community. In December 1996 the Portuguese Language Book Fund (Fundo Bibliográfico de Língua Portuguesa (FBLP)) which is an organisation of the five Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa (Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe) decided to cooperate closely with Portugal to further a reading culture in Portuguese in Africa. These five countries are among the poorest in Africa and are the ones that read least, and produce and buy fewest books on the continent. The chairman of the foundation, the Mozambican academic Lourenço do Rosario, also emphasised that Portugal is the former colonial power which produces fewest books with an African content. This again raises the question of how to preserve Portuguese as the dominant non-African language in a country like Mozambique, particularly in relation to regional integration in Southern Africa, and the increasingly dominant role of English in South Africa.
According to Perpétua Gonçalves, it was not till after the First World War that one could regard Portuguese as having any substantial influence linguistically in Mozambique, in spite of the fact that Vasco da Gama first came to the country in 1492. It was only after 1918 and the so-called military pacification campaigns that it is possible to regard anything but some coastal strongholds as a true Portuguese cultural presence in Mozambique.
It was in the period between 1918 and 1939 that Portuguese became the language of administration and learning, and that the embryo of a literary culture and a Portuguese press evolved. The intensive period of colonisation was from 1945 until the liberation of the country in 1975, which coincided with the revolution in Portugal. In this period large numbers of settlers came from Portugal and the European population grew from approximately 32,000 in 1945 to 100,000 in the early 60s, to reach 200,000 by independence in 197511 when the vast majority of them left.12 The educational policy in the colonial period was mainly intended to enable the African population to acquire enough Portuguese to perform menial jobs: '...in 1964 it is estimated that only one African in 12,500 received academic secondary education'.13 And:
There had always been a concern at the 'denationalising' influence of migrant labour and foreign missionary activity, and early legislation had tried to ensure that education in Mozambique would be Portuguese education...14
In this perspective the language policy adopted by Frelimo at independence is both interesting and a little surprising:
At every stage Frelimo stressed the existence of a single Mozambican nation. Portuguese was adopted as the national language. Ironically, greater efforts were made to widen the knowledge of it and to make people literate in the language of Camões and Caetano than the Portuguese themselves had ever made.15
Portuguese thus became the language of the ruling party. It was used on all occasions. At meetings and rallies when people did not speak Portuguese they were addressed through interpreters. As in colonial times it was the only language used for written communication and after the introduction of television it was the language of that medium. The only space for the mediated use of other languages was radio, but even then Portuguese was dominant and transmissions in local languages were to a large degree translations of programmes previously transmitted in Portuguese.
In 1981 President Samora Machel coined the slogan 'Enriquecer a Língua' ('Enrich the Language'), one of his many optimistic pronouncements. By this he hoped to see the influences on Portuguese of other Mozambican languages, which would develop the Mozambican variety into a new and richer type of Portuguese. There existed, and still exists, an attitude in political circles of equating the development of African languages with tribalism, and that raising the question of a different language policy is tantamount to questioning the project of national unity.16
The problem, however, is that the majority of Mozambicans have their own languages in which they express their emotions and thoughts far better than in Portuguese. And the question of which form of Portuguese - the European or the Brazilian - is still valid, since Portuguese constitutes a medium of communication and an expression of identity for only a minority and when used for communicating with the international Portuguese-speaking community. This community is not the political and economic entity to which the country relates most closely. It is also a question of whether the linguistic realities of Mozambique's geographic, cultural and media relations really are those of the 'comunidade lusófona'.
In this context it is relevant to bear in mind that both the unity and community of Mozambique are fragile. The infrastructures were weak during colonial times, at independence and remain so. The administrative organs and institutions of both the state and civil society are underdeveloped. The economy, markets and industries first suffered from the massive withdrawal and destruction of the Portuguese settlers at independence, then from an authoritarian version of socialism inspired by Eastern Europe, which in the words of Basil Davidson was:
...the product of socio-economic systems of an extreme centralism and commandism, systems that were at the opposite pole from the devolutions of participation. Crudely put, one may say that the Soviet bloc saw salvation for Angola and Mozambique in the rapid development of urban-based industry financed by the 'peasant surplus' - in its essence, the same policy that Stalinism had carried to ruinous extremes in the Soviet Union. This proved fatal. Clearly, a policy of gradual industrialization was desirable, supposing always that its extraction of peasant surplus was never carried to the point of provoking peasant rejection. Unhappily, it was well beyond that point. The externally created banditries that followed would feed on consequent peasant rejection.17
This again created the conditions which, because of active support first by the Rhodesians and then by the South Africans, bred the destructive rebel movement Renamo and the subsequent war. It lasted until a peace agreement was signed in 1992 and general elections held in 1994 in which Frelimo became the largest party and whose candidate, the incumbent president Joaquim Chissano, won the presidential election, and the former rebel movement Renamo became the largest opposition party.
The war was extremely destructive. It uprooted a large portion of the population, severely weakened an already feeble infrastructure, and destroyed buildings and installations of all kinds.19 In 1987 the Mozambican government embarked on an economic structural adjustment programme in co-operation with the World Bank and the IMF. In some sectors at least this programme has created additional problems,20 and living conditions for ordinary people are very difficult. There exists a certain sense of social anomie in the country, increasing crime, corruption, and general insecurity.
In such a situation the conditions for maintaining stability and social cohesion are extremely demanding. It is easy for people to fall back on their primary identities and groups, and to search for new communities that may create a semblance of stability. As in other Southern African countries new churches - many of an apostolic kind - are growing, and Islam, which has always had a strong presence in Mozambique, is also gaining in importance. Both these trends are very much against the policies that Frelimo pursued. These were anti-religious, directed against traditional beliefs, discouraging all forms of ethnicity. They confiscated church property, replaced traditional rulers and broke up the old social structures. In addition the party laid the ground for social discontent especially among the peasantry.
Against this background the adoption of Portuguese as the national language, and the language of the modern elite, is explainable. It is a language that cuts across ethnicity and cultural particulars. It is the mode of communication of the social group that at least initially identified with the new state and its modernising efforts. But it was, and still is, a different linguistic agenda from a mythical recourse to lusophony, which seems to be at least part of the framework of CPLP.
English challenges Portuguese
This is the background to the concern for the role of the Portuguese language in Mozambique. But the linguistic and cultural complexity of the country and the region does not stop here. Several of the major Mozambican languages are also spoken in the neighbouring countries of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Tanzania. Their written forms may vary across the borders, depending on which European language was the mother tongue of the missionaries who normalised the language. Cultural and linguistic links do not stop at frontiers, and the identity in the border regions is much more linked to a primary community of tradition and language than to an abstract idea associated with a language that the vast majority of these people do not speak.
In 1995 Mozambique applied for and was accepted as a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, although English is not its official language. It is, however, the language of all neighbouring countries that are members of the Commonwealth, and it is a language which is used more and more among educated Mozambicans in their international and regional dealings. Many educated Mozambicans see English as a future language on a par with, if not superseding, Portuguese. Mozambican membership of the Commonwealth created quite some consternation in Portugal, and may be one of the impetuses behind the formation of CPLP. Furthermore, this created dismay among French interests. On several occasions the French ambassador to Mozambique has emphasised the importance of the close relationships between the 'Latin' language communities in Africa, and in December 1966 President Chissano attended the 19th summit meeting of Francophone African countries in Burkina Faso.
In Mozambique English is also becoming the language of international modern culture. RTK, the private TV channel in Maputo, transmits English language films and series undubbed and without subtitles. Popular music in English, both of international and southern African origin, is starting to penetrate the small, prosperous, young, urban environment.
Furthermore, the influence of South Africa on the southern part of the country especially has been substantial throughout the century:
By 1973 South Africa and not Portugal was the major trading partner and source of investment capital for Mozambique, and in the early 1970s, 89% of all new capital invested in Mozambique came from South Africa. 21
The relationship was at a low after independence and up to the demise of apartheid. But the South African connection is now growing quickly and getting steadily stronger. The most pronounced economic expression of this is the development of the so-called Maputo corridor from Gauteng to Maputo.
South African popular culture and media to a certain degree reach the southern part of Mozambique. Even if there is no heavy penetration by South African television, more and more members of the economic elite gain access to SABC's three channels and to M-net by installing satellite dishes. The media situation in relation to questions of language, forms of cultural expression and political debate is connected on the one hand to Mozambique's position in relation to linguistic and historical links with the Portuguese speaking world, and on the other with its currently increasing integration into the English-language region of southern Africa.22
Even if television is still a minority medium,23 its importance is far greater than the number of viewers since it is a medium that communicates with the economically and culturally influential groups in society. It is estimated that there are some 60-80,000 TV receivers in the country. By means of satellite and terrestrial transmitters in the three major cities - Maputo, Beira and Nampula - it is now possible to receive both the public Mozambican channel (TVM)24 and the international Portuguese channel RTP. In Maputo there is also RTK, a commercial Mozambican channel.
Programmes on TVM are mainly in Portuguese. Occasionally some are shown in local languages and in English, mainly in the form of subtitled films and series. The most popular prime time programme is the daily Brazilian telenovela, and there are also a number of other programmes originating from Portugal and Brazil. The local programmes are news, current affairs, discussions, music, and quiz shows. In many ways, what TVM produces is impressive on its limited budget financed by commercials and by the state.
The introduction to a recent book on Broadcasting in Africa begins as follows:
Radio is still the most effective mass medium in Africa. Poverty and illiteracy make the alternatives, such as television and newspapers, inaccessible to most Africans. The press is generally published in the capital city and hardly distributed outside the main urban centres.25
The potential of radio is obvious. It is relatively cheap after the initial investment has been made both with regard to programme production and reception. Distribution does not depend on roads and mains electricity. It reaches literate and illiterate alike. It can be used in ways that activate its audience and it can be heard by listeners while they carry out other tasks. It carries news, information, education and entertainment. It is fast, in that news and information can be broadcast almost as soon as it happens. It is a medium well suited to decentralised, local and community communications.
Despite these factors, radio in Mozambique is facing many serious problems. There are only 42 radios per 1,000 inhabitants. The coverage of Radio Mozambique (RM), a public station, is limited to between 40% and 60% of the country and reception is often patchy. Programming has improved considerably after both the change in its structure and the abolition of the Ministry of Information. Reports say that its newscasts are professional, relatively unbiased and that its information, current affairs and entertainment programmes probably make it the best communication medium in the country. It is, however, biased in favour of the urban centres and the Portuguese-speaking population. There also exist private radio stations run mainly by the Catholic church and Renamo in Maputo, Beira and Nampula.
The press which can be divided into what may be called the public or official press and the independent press. The official press comprises the country's two dailies and one Sunday paper with a total circulation of approximately 30-40,000 for the Maputo papers Noticias and Domingo, and a little under 10,000 for the Beira paper Diario de Moçambique. The independent press consists of a number of weeklies and bi-weeklies, the most important being Savana. The circulations vary between a few thousand and a little under 20,000.
The tendency is for the independent press to do far more investigative journalism and also to have more opinion columns than the rather dour official press. Before the change to multipartyism and the elections, Noticias was clearly the mouthpiece of Frelimo. However they now give considerable space also to the viewpoints of the opposition. One of the most interesting features of the media scene in Mozambique is the existence of independent fax newspapers, which give background information, opinions and carry investigative journalism into abuses of power of all sorts. They reach a limited audience - ministries, companies, embassies, international organisations, but they are copied substantially and their influence is considerable.
The press is clearly an urban phenomenon and reaches only a little way outside Maputo, Beira and Nampula. It is also totally a Portuguese language phenomenon. This means that because of poor radio reception there are large communities in the country which in reality do not have access to any media at all on a regular basis, except the very, very few who have satellite dishes. An example of this may be the city of Nacala and its surroundings - the third most important harbour in the country, a relatively well developed city with a little over 200,000 inhabitants.
Thus the media - including radio, but to a much lesser degree than the press and television - are for the Portuguese speaking minority in the main urban centres, and first and foremost in Maputo. It is this group's tastes and interests that are being catered for, whose experiences are being related, and whose identities are being expressed.
The media in Mozambique can be interpreted as a central institution of a minority public sphere that may contain the embryo of a wider democratic society. In this sphere the more general and universal rights of enlightenment such as freedom of expression, political and citizens' rights are being propagated. It is here that the boundaries between society and the state are being discussed. That this takes place in a country where in the first period after independence a policy ruled that was based on a vision of that the state was synonymous with society, makes the debate even more interesting. This public sphere furthermore relates to a set of cultural bearings and identities that pertain to the situation of the Mozambican economic, cultural and political elite in relation to history, language and contemporary regional economic and political developments. These contain elements of both myth and Realpolitik. The myth and parts of the country's cultural and linguistic past and its contemporary choices link it to its former colonial mother country and to a wider Portuguese speaking space in the world. The Realpolitik places it in the culture of a Southern African economic, political and cultural context. The question is whether it is possible for the national elite of Mozambique to develop and retain both these identities.
Notes
1 Comunidade dos Países de Lingua Portuguesa.
2 Savana. 19.7.96
3 'A community with nothing in common.'
4 Carlos Cardoso is the editor of Mozambique's first 'fax newspaper', Mediafax, and a founding member of the journalists' cooperative Mediacoop, which among others publishes Savana.
5 'Portugal wishes to have her little zone of influence and does not mind spending money in order to make the six clap their hands.' Savana. op. cit.
6 Telinforma english. No 981. Year iv. Friday 19/07/1996.
7 See e.g. the Portuguese biweekly JL - Jornal de Letras, Artes e Ideias. Ano XVI. No. 672, De 17 de Julho a 30 de Julho, and 673, De 31 de Julho a 13 de Agosto de 1996.
8 Cardoso is a little too generous as regards the number of Mozambican languages, but his point is nevertheless valid enough. According to Núcleo de Estudos das Linguas Moçambicanas there are 24 languages in the country, not counting Portuguese.
9 'Before we were Portuguese. Now we are Lusophones. Mozambique with more than 50 languages and I do not know how many dialects, does not have anything which is Lusofone. It is the same as calling Bantu French. Portugal does not understand this because it is a monolingual country.' Savana op. cit.
10 Perpétua Gonçalves: Português de Moçambique. Uma variedade em formaçao. Universidade Eduardo Mondlane. Maputo 1996. Many of my points regarding the Portuguese language in Mozambique have been taken from her very interesting arguments.
11 Information from Malyn Newitt: A History of Mozambique. London 1995.
12 'It is estimated that over 185,000 of the total 200,000 Portuguese in the country had returned to Portugal or sought refuge in South Africa when independence came.' Hans Abrahamsson & Anders Nilsson: London 1995. p. 27.
13 Newitt op. cit. p. 480.
14 Newitt op. cit. p. 480-481.
15 Newitt op. cit. p. 547.
16 See Marcelino Liphola: 'Utilizaçãao das linguas moçambicanas no processo eleitoral' in Brazão Mazula: Moçambique. Eleições, democracia e desinvolvimento. Maputo 1995.
17 Basil Davidson: The Black Man's Burden. Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State. London 1992. p. 304.
18 Chissano got 53.3% and the leader of Renamo, Alfonso Dhlakama, 33.7 %. In the parliamentary elections Frelimo 44.3% and Renamo 37.7 %.
19 'Large parts of the physical, social and commercial infrastructure of the rural areas have been destroyed by the war. According to calculations made by the UN, the value of the destruction corresponds to 250 years of export revenues and is fifty times greater than the annual aid to the country.' Abrahamson & Nilsson op. cit. p. 2.
20 'Structural adjustments have been implemented in an international situation characterised by different trade restrictions, protectionism and low demand for Mozambique's traditional export goods. There is a strong possibility that the single-minded concentration on increased export production will not succeed in the short-term in creating macro-economic balance, with a resulting permanent dependency on aid.' Abrahamson & Nilsson. op. cit. p. 231. Currently it is estimated that approximately 75% of Mozambique's gross national product consists of foreign aid.
21 Hewitt op. cit. p 537.
22 Of the 12 countries in SADC (Southern African Development Community) only two do not have English as their or one of their official languages - Angola and Mozambique with Portuguese. However, in Mauritius French Creole is spoken much more widely than English, and in many countries there exist one or two dominant and/or official national languages together with English e.g. Kiswahili in Tanzania, Siswati in Swaziland, Setswana in Botswana, Sesotho in Lesotho, Shona and Ndebele in Zimbabwe, Chichewa in Malawi.
23 For a comprehensive overview of the development of media in Mozambiaque after independence see Juarez Ferraz de Maia: Moçambique. 1975-1995. Vinte anos de comunicação social caminhos percorridos. UNESCO-PNUD. Maputo, Septembro 1995.
24 TV, which in its current organisational structure was set up in 1993 as a public company, is the third organisational form of TV since the first transmission in Mozambique in 1979.
25 From the introduction by Frances D'Souza and Ursula Owen, to Who Rules the Airwaves. Broadcasting in Africa. Article 19 and Index on Censorship. February 1995. London.
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