There are no tales of battlefield heroics in Carolyn Nordstrom's newly published account of the civil war which wracked Mozambique from 1980 to 1992. It is, as the title suggests, A Different Kind of War Story. The associate professor of anthropology at Notre Dame offers not a soldier's view of combat but war through the eyes of the civilians caught in the crossfire. What makes the story different, surprising and, most importantly, hopeful is it shows a war-torn society creating a culture of nonviolence that ended the hostilities and sustains the peace.
The Mozambique war was particularly vicious. Only 60,000 soldiers fought in the conflict, yet they created 1 million casualties in a country of 12 million people. One-fourth of the population lost their homes and one-third of all educational and medical institutions were destroyed. Troops from either side terrorized the people, taking whatever they wanted, from supplies to women.
Nordstrom visited Mozambique, the former Portuguese colony on Africa's east coast, four times from 1989 to 1996 while researching the book. Armed with only notebooks and pens, she hitched rides on cargo planes to the front lines where she collected war stories from the people. Listening to the tales of survival, the anthropologist made some surprising discoveries.
While the 17th century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes had argued that people revert to a dog-eat-dog, "war of all against all" in the absence of a restraining government, Nordstrom found Mozambicans actively cooperating in grassroots efforts to restore order and normalcy to their lives. With no help from the government, they established services to find the lost and kidnaped, found homes for orphans and set up food exchange programs. They established "dispute resolution committees" within their communities to maintain order, and the practitioners of traditional African medicine held healing ceremonies to "take the violence" out of the people.
The Mozambicans understood that violence begets violence that left unchecked reverberates through generations. Unlike the Western view which sees violence as a thing unto itself, Nordstrom found that the Mozambicans see it as "something made by those seeking to control others." The longer the war dragged on, the stronger became their belief that the war itself was the enemy. Villagers went so far as kidnaping soldiers,, holding special ceremonies "to take the fight out of them."
Ultimately the antiwar sentiment grew so strong and universal that the leaders could not continue the conflict. When the rebel leader called for a boycott of the national election and resumption of the fighting, no one listened. Nordstrom reports one rebel official summing up national sentiments, "Dhalakama [the rebel leader] can go back out in the bush and fight for himself if he wants war so bad."
Despite Mozambique's unique cultural characteristics, Nordstrom hopes that the way in which people redefined violence as acts of resistance and peace building can become models for others trapped in war. "If dirty war tactics can be forged internationally," she says, "so too can resistance to oppressive violence."
