Invisible things and research: the making of "The Origins of War in Mozambique: a history of unity and division"

I wonder why. But ?I cannot stop thinking and talking about the importance of trying to see the "invisible." I have always thought of the relationship between "visibles" and "invisibles" like the one between the sun and the moon.

The sun and the moon -- This image is what I always have in mind when I look at, think about, analyze, or describe something... No, I meant the moon and the sun.

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To analyze what is visible is to analyze what has become invisible by the "visibles." Only by analyzing both can we reach some tentative conclusions. Thus, I felt it absolutely essential to imagine not only something that has been said/written and even remembered but also something that has not been. This includes those who are/were forced to be absent at the locale of pronunciations/discussions including the dead.

If you study wars and violence, and of course, or/and choose a historical approach, this is an essential attitude because the dead cannot talk anymore, and the victims/survivors tend to be forced to be/remain silent.

In trying to listen to the voices of these invisible/invisualized people, I realized how important it was for them to tell their stories in their own ways. When research is positioned not as an individual researcher's personal goal, but rather as a collective contribution to overcoming past failures (including our own) and opening the possibilities of society and the world as a whole, it reveals an unexpected future path.

The most difficult is the voices of the dead. If the person in question is dead, we can only imagine through what she or he left behind: something they spoke, wrote, made, and used; and their children, relatives, neighbors, colleagues. However, I need to quickly add this: these may look as if they are representing the voices of the dead, but in fact, they are not.

Since the late 1990s, "justice," "truth-seeking," "healing," and "reconciliation" have become important themes in practices/research/studies related to post-war and post-genocide peacebuilding. There have been times and situations where "healing and reconciliation" have received more attention than others. I have been raising an alarm over this. We need to remind ourselves that when others talk about "healing and reconciliation," it is quite likely to be perceived as an imposition by the victims/survivors, and they may end up committing another sort of violence. It is also important not to forget, no matter how much the killers/perpetrators reconcile with the family members of the victims, they will never be able to reconcile with the dead.

If the dead had the mouth to speak, what would they have wanted to say? Whether in Mozambique, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Germany, Okinawa, Hiroshima, or Rwanda, at the site of executions, at the scene of killings, in public graves, or on the grasslands where the dead still lie buried unknown, this is what I have always thought about. And the dead can also be the perpetrators and responsible for his/her own violence.

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It is also important to place the voices of the dead in a wider perspective. It is not enough to imagine the voice of an individual. In order to understand the dead, we are obliged to imagine going beyond the individual life; e.g. her/his family, community, and natural environment that once existed. Yes, we need to gaze at their lives, their struggles, and their dreams as if they were currently living, in relationships with/under those environments.

It is in no way an easy task. Especially if you consider yourself a self-proclaimed/wannabe scientific researcher. Dealing with "unvisibles" does not sound scientific or empirical at all. And yet, if you take up this challenge, there are some of the things you need to answer:

• With whom and how did the dead use to live? How were the houses lined up, were they close to each other, why? Where and how did people gather? Was everyone invited, who were excluded? Who sat in the best seat, who in the worst? What kind of environment were they living in? Was there a forest/what kind of forest, how did they live with /use the forest? What was the climate like? How often did it rain, how often did they suffer from drought, what did people do when it rained/they experienced drought?
• What kind of value systems (culture, customs, morals, and religion) did they possess/formulate/lose (to what)? To what extent and to whom did they affect the mind of the dead and the people around her/him and actual daily/seasonal/mid-long-term events?
• What were the relationships they created between the people they lived with, and between those who did not live with them? How often/on what occasions did they visit each other? What about the relationships between men and women that existed within and outside of formal marriages? How did this affect the group and future generations?
• How did these environments function in relation to the broader outside world, from a global perspective... We don't have to wait for the western Age of Exploration to see this, because there had always been human migration and regional networks connected at/to the global level.

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The same is true for analyzing administrative documents, imagining not only what was written, but also what was not dared to be written. Whether they are internal or not, what is not written is often more important.

Then, the struggle with memory awaits.

The human brain is such a creative yet manipulative thus unreliable thing. Even if you ask the same person about the same question, you will be amazed to hear something different every time. This is the reason why we need to record their/our voices (although we cannot escape from the manipulation of the brain) while counter-checking them with other sources. In fact, my experience tells me that counter-checking takes more effort yet is crucial. Many researchers tend to ignore it.

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In my attempt to do all the above, I chose one particular locale (Northern Mozambique, Niassa Province, Maua District). I felt it indispensable to dig one point deeper to go wider.

My research question was: will there be another war in Mozambique? If so, why? (*This will be explained in another article.)

I chose Maua because it was in Niassa Province, the symbolic province for the liberation struggle, and was considered a stronghold of Frelimo (which was originally a liberation movement that led the nation to independence and has been in power since 1975), while RENAMO, the anti-Frelimo rebel force, had successfully penetrated and occupied the district after the independence. It was also one of the districts where the largest ethnic group, the Macua-speaking people, live. Both Niassa (so as the neighboring Cabo Delgado) and the Macua people had been least studied by both domestic and international scholars, and as Southern Niassa was under my jurisdiction during my UN peacekeeping mission (1994), I felt somehow destined.

When I was working for the UN and after, until around 2000, the inhabitants of Maúa district were divided and lived in two communities: the district capital and locality centers, which the government forces controlled, and the rest of the area controlled by RENAMO. The contradictory and conflicting realities of "unity/solidarity" and "division", whether they were Frelimo periodicals, Portuguese army/secret police/administrative documents, Portuguese soldiers, government officials, church priests, Frelimo liberation fighters, Renamo guerrillas, or their victims, became the subject of my groping research, from my late twenties to mid-thirties.

I put special emphasis on researching the invisibles. I tried to figure out what was made invisualized, chase after their traces, and bring them under sunlight. It was not a pleasant kind of work to do, rather depressing, and it made the already challenging period of my domestic and public life more difficult and painful.

It was the voices of the dead who lost their voices that continued to lighten and encourage my path. And yet, they were another product of my imagination, thus a violation of their lives and real voices. No matter how much effort I put into gathering multifaceted information and how many more years I spent on its deep analysis, it was a never achievable thing to do.

But if we give up because it is "after all" impossible, what is the point to do research? So, I put a lot more pressure on myself to do this beyond my capacity, by stretching it every time a higher wall appeared.

In order to understand what happened in Maúa from the 1970s to the 1990s after Mozambique's independence, I tried to understand the Islamization process of the coast in the tenth century, the slave trade, the great migration of the Macua people, and the changes in social relations that these events brought. And went on a journey of seeking anything written on Maúa and the related things not only to Mozambique, Portugal, and Tanzania but also to the United States, Britain, and Italy. I carried out interviews with over 350 people, often repeatedly, sometimes selecting those who would speak of conflicting memories of others for counter-checking. Most of these people I interviewed are long gone. They, too, became the part of the dead, invisibles.

And yet, even the "outcome" of this cannot escape being a product of my imagination and creation.

I was always aware of this fact. However, I became aware of this again when I left the university, abandoned most of the academic circles, and lived in nature in a story where reality and fiction intertwines.

Such is the morning I am spending now.

*Note: If you are interested, you can download the entire book for free from the following link:

The Origins of War in Mozambique: A history of unity and division, by Sayaka Funada Classen, Cape Town: The African Minds, 2013.

https://www.africanminds.co.za/the-origins-of-war-in-mozambique-a-history-of-unity-and-division/