The sorrows of Mozambique

 StrategyPage has a link to the present troubles of Mozambique, which now has an ISIS related terrorists, many who were Somalis, that sprang up where foreign investors were drilling for oil/natural gas. it could have made the locals rich but corruption happened so some decided that terror was the way to go.

It includes the history of that poor country. Sometimes with most of the terrorism and civil wars being blamed on Islam, one forgets two things: One, many of Africa's massacres and wars are tribal. And two: many, especially in the past, were inspired and funded by communist countries and/or the left, who saw the goal of independence and a socialist state should replace the (very badly run) colonial state.

Mozambique leaders feared that the growing Islamic terrorist violence could lead to another long civil war. Mozambique has been suffering wars or threats of war since the 1960s. Mozambique is a largely coastal country north of South Africa and south of Tanzania. Most of the coastline runs parallel to the large island of Madagascar. The current population of 30 million is a lot larger, and less prosperous, than the six million living there in 1950. For over a thousand years Mozambique has, like many other parts of East Africa, consisted of coastal cities that prospered by serving as a marketplace where people from the interior could obtain all manner of foreign goods. Mozambique was part of a vast trading network that used dependable seasonal winds to allow ships to move goods from East Africa to the Persian Gulf, India and Indonesia. In the 1500s Portugal, using new technologies (cannon and superior sailing ships) created the borders for Mozambique, which explains why the country consists largely of coast and interior areas reachable via rivers. What ended Portuguese rule was an anti-colonial rebellion that lasted from the early 1960s, when other European colonizers were voluntarily departing, until 1975 when Portugal finally officially got rid of its colonies. This meant nearly 300,000 Portuguese settlers and officials left Mozambique, taking with them a major portion of the new nation’s technical personnel and skilled administrators. Newly independent Mozambique elected a government that lasted two years before a fifteen-year long civil war began. This civil war was far more damaging than the shorter, and less successful anti-colonial war. The civil war killed over a million people and drove more than 20 percent of the population from their homes for months or years. Nearly two million of those refugees fled the country.

sigh.

one of my friends, an African nun, went there to teach seminarians theology and English, because the missionaries also were thrown out.  The schools and convents, including the libraries, had been looted so only the building was left: She had to sleep on a mat (hint: Bugs and mice could attack and did). And she had to live at a primitive level with the other African sisters because of lack of funds and lack of access to clean water and food. 

She left after a year because of a stroke from high blood pressure, exacerbated by poor diet and the hot climate (she was from the high veldt and not used to the heat).

Sigh.