–
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 theirsTo 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 upUpon the shore, the flotsam
Of the nation's dream,
The homeless hungry poor.
Who but the broken shells
Glinting in shafts of sunlight fleckedWith courage in the wind-whipped spray,
Who but they, bonded
Together in dunes of solidarity
Hold back the raging sea?
Maputo, July 90.