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Truths revealed, political and personal

Thursday, October 29, 2009

ELECTIONS EVERYWHERE REVEAL truths about a state, inadvertently as well as by design.

Afghanistan’s fraudulent vote in August and next week’s required run-off have brought to the fore President Hamid Karzai’s feckless non-leadership - interwoven with his brother Ahmed Wali Karzai’s cosy and evidently profitable dealings with the CIA, not to mention remunerative dope-dealing, as blasted open by The New York Times yesterday.

 

In Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s stealing of the June elections has exposed the bankruptcy of the post-revolutionary generation that succeeded 1979’s mullahs. The Green movement, silenced by repression though it may be, has gained the look of a genuine popular opposition, however middle class-biased it may be.

 

Ballots are being counted today in a country where we might have hoped for democracy to develop well, after several traumatizing decades of warfare and revolution. Mozambique, one of my favorite spots on earth, held presidential, parliamentary and provincial elections yesterday, which regrettably may turn out to be as disappointing in their own way as Iran’s and Afghanistan’s.

 

True to form, the Western press is paying little attention to this piece of African news, but it’s important – not least because of the way some high hopes for democracy may end up being flouted.  The country is, after all, largely sustained by the West – with half of its national budget coming from overseas development aid. After an 11-year anti-colonial war (against the Portuguese), a takeover by Marxist liberationists, and then a 16-year civil war, you might expect that the place would need a lot of help.

 

But Mozambique is not a basket-case.  Its recovery is inspiring to many – with annual economic growth reaching into double-figure percentages since the turn of this century (and that despite some devastating floods in 2000 and 2001), plus an agricultural sector that is the envy of neighbors.

   

 

ONE MORE OF ITS GREAT assets is energy. My first encounter with the country’s great possibilities came when I filmed the enormous Cabora Bassa hydro-electric dam being constructed in the 1970s, intended then to provide electricity to the Portuguese regime and - in a commonality of survivalist self-interest - to the adjoining white-supremacist states of the time, South Africa and Zimbabwe (then still called Southern Rhodesia).

 

Nowadays that dam’s vast output is a crucial part of SAPP, the Southern African Power Pool that shares energy among Botswana, Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland, Tanzania and Zambia - as well as the now black-ruled client countries originally involved. And on top of that, Mozambique now has the well-endowed natural gas fields of Pande and Temane areas, with new pipelines destined to supply both neighbors and its own domestic market.

 

The country has abandoned its dogmatic Marxism, and even - an odd touch, this - applied successfully to join the Commonwealth of Nations, that band of 53 countries whose main link consists in having once been British colonies. Mozambique is the only non-English speaking member of this international grouping, which proclaims itself “committed to democracy, good governance and human rights” - a commitment that led it to expel Robert Mugabe’s despotically ruled Zimbabwe seven years ago. (Intriguigingly, mainly French-speaking Rwanda is applying for membership, too - and will probably be admitted next month: you heard it first here!)

 

Today’s troublesome news about Mozambican democracy, though, concerns an opposition leader who’s emerged - Daviz Simango (above left) the charismatic Mayor of the port and resort town of Beira. His parents were dissidents under the then still-Marxist liberation movement Frelimo and are said to have been secretly eliminated.

 

Simango's 7 month-old opposition party, the Mozambique Democratic Movement, has been officially excluded from the ballot in most of the polling regions. The supposedly independent National Elections Commission, which made the ruling, appears to be about as independent as Afghanistan’s – since it’s so clearly operating in the ruling Frelimo party’s interests.

 

The country’s elder statesman, Joaquim Chissano (who has done the right thing, like Nelson Mandela in South Africa and Sam Nujoma in Namibia – stepping down from the Presidency in due constitutional fashion) has come out of retirement to insist among international reporters that the electoral commission has acted entirely within Mozambican law. His apparent similarity to Mandela and Nujoma doesn't mean he's some kind of cuddly bear figure.

 

I remember well a decided steeliness to Chissano (above center) that wouldn’t brook any deviation from his and his party’s own vision. In his guerilla army’s exile headquarters in Tanzania he spoke warmly to my team and me of his great hopes for the free Mozambique to come. But he also warned, knowing our assignment took us inside his colonialist enemies’ stockade around the Cabora Bassa dam, that he would be granting no generous dispensations. When I wrote of our meeting in Britain's New Statesman magazine I quoted him saying chillingly: “We are not going to give instructions to our bullets to say this is so-and-so, don’t kill him”.

 

Then and now, it seems, you would step out of Frelimo’s realm of favor at your own peril.

   

 

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A POWERFUL PUBLISHING phenomenon of the past decade or more, we all know, has been the personal memoir. Sadly we recently lost one of the masters in this narrative domain, Frank McCourt of Angela’s Ashes fame – but another leader, one whom I really should call the enduring empress, Mary Karr (above right) is about to command our attention again.

 

Back in 1995 her The Liars' Club struck a haunting, unforgettable chord, recounting a Texas childhood of some heart-rending cruelty and, yes, much rollicking humor. Now, after Cherry (centering on adolescent experiences) intervened in 2000, comes Lit next week.

 

Punning is involved, obviously. The title offers us academic and publishing shorthand for literature (Karr composes scalpel-like poetry as well as memoirs) but it also sits at the more polite end of our language’s vast range of synonyms for “drunk”. It also evokes, maybe surprisingly for her many fans who cherish her self-description as “a black-belt sinner”, the clear illumination that can come with profound religious conversion.

 

Look out for the mainstream media going wild over this vivid slice of an artist’s life – from tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal to Newsweek and USA Today next week.

 

On Tuesday November 3rd New York residents and visitors can see and hear her first public reading of Lit in the Barnes & Noble bookstore at Lincoln Center – the branch of that chain which can claim the most culturally elevated surroundings, keeping company as it does with the Metropolitan Opera House and the Avery Fisher and Alice Tully halls just across the street.

 

Karr's plangent prose can compel the ear and the heart as much as any powerful orchestra.

 

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