Reflections on Reporting

A week after the accident and my thoughts and emotions are still jumbled.  Writing a story about it helped me to calmly relay most of the details, the retelling a part of a healing process.  It also allowed me to offer a glimpse of life in Mozambique, told through the eyes of a foreigner.  To say it is difficult to understand life here, let alone explain it, is like saying it is difficult to split an atom.  And, I think that understanding different cultures and the significance of doing so is as important as splitting an atom.

It’s a tricky thing, inviting oneself to document and story-tell about a place and people.  My account is my own, filtered through my own prejudices, fears, beliefs, imagination and experiences.  Yet, I feel compelled to share this place and these experiences.  I do it as much for me, to define my own world, as I do to offer others the opportunity to visit these places with me.  And, if the reader so chooses, to consider themes that impact and shape our days, if not our lives.

So, in trying to put last week’s accident into story form, I committed a mistake.  I wrote the scene without providing the backdrop.  It was bound to happen.  As I become habituated to this place, ever so slowly and slightly, the unusual transforms to  the usual, the uncommon to the common.  The milieu seems a given and I assume the reader and I are beginning from the same place.  Well, we all know what they say about assumptions.

My story about the accident elicited some strong responses.  Truly, it was a horrific and tragic event.  And, while I am not defending the responses of the hit and run driver, or the vigilante crowd, it is important to understand the context.  And, I think it also important to accept that the culture here is simply different.  And, with a deep exhale, remove the judgement which leads to blame.  Better or worse?  Sure there are aspects of life here that could be improved.  And, certainly agencies, organizations, and people are trying.  Do I believe in and appreciate democracy and the benefits of our progressive society?  You betcha.  And I also respect that it took our country a couple of hundred years to get it established.  And, we still don’t have it quite right as seen with the recent events in St. Louis.  But it is a slippery slope to decide for others what is best.  And it is even trickier to do it for others.  Good intentions can result in terribly complex results.

The remnants of colonial and tribal life are easy to see and feel here.  A couple of hundred years of colonial oppression and conditioning doesn’t just melt away.  And, thousands of years of tribal life is in the very earth itself and part of the fabric of the people.  What is left is a strange mix, it seems to me.  It is like an unsolvable equation; the posit of the colonialists met with the solution of the tribe.  Or maybe it is the other way around.

The tribes here in Africa were self-contained units.  People shared territory, language and customs.  Members didn’t have identity issues; they knew who they were, where they belonged, what their roles were and how to act.  They also clearly knew the consequences of their actions.  The colonialists came in, and to oversimplify, applied their own rules.  The game changed and while the rules might not have always been clear for the native inhabitants, what was clear is that they were often at the brunt end of it all.  It wasn’t a system that worked in their favor.

Now, colonialism is formally gone and the country and people are redefining themselves, having been at war with each other for over twenty years.   The country often fumbles with confusion and unknowing as the nation learns to govern and grow itself.  Colonialist descendants still remain, clearly separated from the native Mozambicans.  And, for those living in the hinterlands, life has, in some regards, reverted, (and in some cases, remained), with the tribal system; the system they know best, with all its clarity and simplicity, for better or for worse.

Where there isn’t infrastructure and secure and trusted systems, such as courts of law and policing, the tribes take justice into their own hands.  And, while it may seem uncivilized, to do nothing, or to turn to the nothingness of law enforcement that does not exist, this is truly uncivilized. 

I wish there had been opportunity to provide care, or at least respect for the body, the man in the accident.  I wish that the driver had the opportunity for a fair review by his peers.  I wish that the people in the van saw themselves as vital participants in their society, and acted accordingly.  But in a place where so few have so much and so little is left for so many, life becomes a recipe for harsh living.  There isn’t the luxury of shades of gray.  Black and white seems the attire here.  At least for now.