International Women’s Day

     – a retrospective from 1990….

 

     On a free afternoon, I walk along the once famous tourist beaches

     of Maputo, watching the breakers rolling in from the Indian Ocean,
     and looking for shells. There are none. Only broken and crushed
     fragments of crustacean life - piled up in mounds that make the
     shore-line. And as I walk I am thinking of the people I have been
     meeting in the village churches round about: they are mainly women
     and children, with a few old men. Many of the menfolk are away,
     either fighting, or working in South Africa, or are never to
     return. And the women are the unsung heroines of Africa. Holding
     whole families together, making a home out of sticks and reeds,
     plastic and rusting iron, struggling even to survive - and yet they
     laugh, and dance and sing, and even worship. And so these "women of
     war" become the cornerstones of the new world that is being born.
 

     WOMEN OF WAR

     Shattered in the storms

     Of war not theirs
     To own or understand, and trembling
     Shadows of the world they left behind,
     Coral-rich and deep and still

     Mothers of Pearl now

     Broken shells washed up
     Upon the shore, the flotsam
     Of the nation's dream,
     The homeless hungry poor.

     Who but the broken shells

     Glinting in shafts of sunlight flecked
     With courage in the wind-whipped spray,
     Who but they, bonded
     Together in dunes of solidarity
     Hold back the raging sea?

                            Maputo, July 90.