Moçambique: Violência, Tribalismo e a Luta por Unidade

When we gathered a few days ago at the funeral of Bishop Dom Osório in Quelimane, a phrase uttered at the burial echoed like an extremely serious warning to our collective conscience: "We, the Macua, are leaving." This painful statement forces us to confront a truth we often avoid: the progressive erosion of Mozambican identity – that dream of a shared destiny envisioned by Eduardo Mondlane and which served as a relentless lesson during Samora Machel's government. Far from being a given, our national unity risks collapsing, giving way to dangerous ethnic, tribal, and regional divisions. In this lecture, I focus on the multiple facets of violence that plague the country. Not only the conflict in Cabo Delgado, which has devastated the North for nine years, but also the moral violence of everyday life: the suffering on public transport, the degraded roads, the precariousness of housing, and, above all, the scourge of hunger that condemns more than 70% of our young people. When a state's institutions fail to guarantee the essentials for survival, society fragments into a "every man for himself" mentality (the "pandar," the "nhonga," the "desenrascar"), opening the doors to political regionalism and the fratricidal tensions that have devastated nations like Nigeria (in Biafra) or Rwanda. Mozambique's survival does not lie in the military cleansing of its borders, but in the urgent restoration of a moral order and visible corrective actions for the redistribution of rights and goods. If we are unable to rebuild this community of destiny where every Mozambican feels that their effort produces real fruits in their own land, we will remain vulnerable to foreign forces that take advantage of our weakness to plunder our scarce resources.