Mozambique Dependent on S. Africa : Getting Along With Public Enemy No. 1

The U.S. Embassy is on Avenida Friedrich Engels and the British one on Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

The British ambassador lives on Mao Tse-tung. Avenida Kim Il Sung connects with Mao Tse-tung 13 blocks southeast of the capital’s second biggest street, Avenida Karl Marx.

The street map of Mozambique’s capital is a canon of socialist saints.

Foreign diplomats are currently taking bets on which thoroughfare in one of Africa’s most beautiful capitals will be renamed Avenida Samora Machel for the president who was killed two months ago in a plane crash. The choice is difficult.

Slogans Abound

Most of the more impressive, sunbaked and tree-lined boulevard’s of Maputo already are loaded with socialist names that, like the revolutionary slogans that cover every available wall, are the public face Mozambique’s worker-peasant paradise.

There are 38 accredited Soviet diplomats in Maputo, compared to only five for the United States. But the realities of government are considerably more balanced.

South Africa, according to the wall paintings, is public enemy No. 1. All over town are murals of South African spies being kicked about by beefy, vigilant Mozambicans.

A favorite downtown is a caricature of a South African soldier being vanquished by two Mozambican workers. One is a factory hand hammering a two-foot spike through the soldier’s helmet. His partner is a farmer-peasant who smiles with approval over a hoe. Both hoe and hammer figure on the colorful national flag, along with an AK-47 assault rifle and a book.

Hate for South Africa

Most unpleasant things in genuinely multiracial Mozambique just now are officially the “fault” of South Africa. And indeed many are.

Yet, South African diplomats in thin disguise as “trade officials” operate openly in Maputo. They are not, of course, listed.

Appropriately, only a few blocks away from the unlabled South African Trade Mission is a huge diplomatic shop, in practice open to almost anybody with hard currency--U.S. dollars and rand from South Africa, which the newspapers always call the “racist republic.”

Inside is an Ali Baba’s cave of what cannot be bought in Maputo’s empty “ordinary” stores: South African Castle lager, fresh meat from Swaziland, Koo brand canned fruit and vegetables from South Africa and Cape oranges.

Basic Currency

So basic is South African currency that even a sidewalk newspaper seller has been known to give change in rand if he cannot oblige in unconvertible local meticais.

In a desperate bid to claw in all the hard currency it can, the Mozambican government has set an official exchange rate of 40 to the dollar. The black market rate is 40 times that.

The government does what it can to protect Mozambicans against its own system, rationing basic items at reasonable prices. But supplies are always inadequate and the network breaks down.

Slogans apart, in practice Mozambique’s essential economic dependence on things foreign and especially South African is recognized by the nominally Marxist government, struggling with an economic crisis left by colonialism, civil war, home-grown mismanagement and the confrontation with Pretoria.

A Matter of Color

But in this curious, symbiotic relationship, South African Airways still jets in a couple of times a week. The midget South Africa-based Metavia airline hops regularly across the border to connect with shuttles to Johannesburg.

As the planes fly low over the twin South African border fences, complete with no-man’s-land and barbed wire, there is suddenly plenty.

There are cars with gasoline running on serviced roads, electricity pylons, telephone wires, irrigation schemes, fields of neat crops, black and white cows--all the things lacking on the undeveloped Mozambican side.