The Fourth Congress [of Frelimo in 1983] had stressed decentralisation and [Information minister José Luís] Cabaço took this seriously. He argued that the media was heavily concentrated in Maputo, which was more comfortable than provincial capitals, let alone district capitals. Adapting [Samora] Machel’s speech on comfort and corruption, Cabaço, in a meeting in May 1983, asked how many journalists were prepared to leave the capital and work in the provinces. The result may not have been what he expected – many of the volunteers were senior journalists, still fired with the enthusiasm of the Fourth Congress. Among them was almost every senior journalist at AIM [Mozambique News Agency], including Cardoso and [Fernando] Lima. Younger journalists, by and large, did not volunteer. The photographs of the volunteers were placed on a roll of honour. And there the matter died. There was no follow-up, and none of the volunteers were dispatched to the provinces. In retrospect it is easy to see why. The wrong people had volunteered. Cabaço needed people like Cardoso and Lima in Maputo: dispatching them to the provinces would have beheaded AIM. Furthermore, stiffening the media’s presence in the provinces would have meant finding houses for these reporters, and ensuring reasonable communications. It would also have entailed overriding any reservations that provincial governments might have had: in the end the ministry of information was not powerful enough to pull this off.

In any case, within a few weeks the country was plunged into a new crisis, this time entirely of Frelimo’s making. During the congress Machel had, in an apparently throwaway remark, suggested that people without work cards proving that they were in regular employment should be expelled from the cities and sent to the countryside to produce food. At a rally on 21 May he declared, ‘only those who work can stay in the cities’ and threatened ‘the unemployed, the under-employed, the parasites and the marginal elements’ with forced evacuation to the countryside. This won a thoughtless round of applause, since nobody had really thought out what ‘work and ‘unemployment’ meant in a Mozambican city. Was the Frelimo leadership saying that nobody except workers in the formal sector could live in cities? Were they really unaware of the size of the informal sector?

But a month later the government pushed ahead with the grotesquely misnamed ‘Operation Production’, under which ‘the unproductive’ would be moved from a life of supposed idleness in the cities to productive work in the countryside. Interior minister Armando Guebuza was put in charge of the operation. The initial phase was voluntary: the unemployed were asked to register, and thus express willingness to work outside the cities. A fortnight later, in early July, the coercive phase began. ‘Unproductive’ people were rounded up and deported from the cities – usually by air to Niassa. Thus the country’s meagre reserves of jet fuel were used to move the ‘unproductive’ from one end of the country to the other, rather than for anything economically or militarily useful. Nobody has ever provided figures for the enormous costs involved. Who were the ‘unproductive’? Basically anyone who was not carrying any of three documents: an identity card, a resident’s card, or a work card. Safeguards were supposed to be in place to ensure that people who were employed but, for whatever reason, did not possess a work card, were not expelled. But it was a bureaucrat’s paradise and a nightmare for the honest poor. (The dishonest ones could look after themselves without much difficulty.)

Faced with abuse of human rights on this scale, what could reporters do? The dilemma was acute: frontally denouncing a government that was under attack from apartheid was out of the question. Most leading journalists were ideologically committed to Frelimo, and they would do nothing to betray Samora Machel. So the media opted for a strategy of mitigation. It denounced instances where the guidelines were violated, and where people who had every right to be in the cities were under threat of removal. Journalists denounced arrogant policemen who demanded documents that had nothing to do with Operation Production (such as marriage certificates). They looked for, and found, the settling of old scores, or cases where single mothers were accused of prostitution. There were cases when people without documents were rounded up and taken to evacuation centres even though it was obvious they could not be deported – they were too old, or they were pregnant, for instance. Guebuza himself had to intervene in some such cases. Occasionally teenagers were detained, so the government belatedly had to issue instruction that nobody under the age of 16 was covered by Operation Production (legally nobody under that age should work anyway). No doubt this sort of vigilance softened the impact of Operation Production. But the main problem was not isolated abuses – it was that the whole concept, from beginning to end, was one enormous abuse of power. And this the media, under the dominant paradigm for journalism, could not begin to tackle.

Operation Production hit AIM very directly. Fernando Gonçalves had been on a trip to Cape Verde. The day he returned he found that his 19-year-old sister had been detained as an ‘unproductive’ on the orders of the local dynamising group. She was a student, or at least was trying to be one. Because of the shortage of places in secondary schools, she had failed to enrol in eighth grade. The family regarded her as a student, the dynamising group as an ‘unproductive’. Gonçalves went straight to the dynamising group office. He recalls starting to argue rationally with the officials, saying that Operation Production was not intended to round up teenagers who had been unable to enrol in school. When they paid no attention, he lost his temper and told the officials they were acting incompetently. Unknown to Gonçalves , there was a magistrate in the room, who promptly ordered his arrest, charging him with the crime of ‘insulting the magistracy’. He was hauled before a Maputo court the following morning.

Gonçalves’ family informed AIM, and Cardoso and Lima attempted to rescue him. They went to see the judge before the trial, to argue that this was all a misunderstanding. Unfortunately the judge, Albano Maiopuè, was a cold and arrogant figure, full of his own importance and deeply hostile to journalists, even though he was married to one (Margarida Guitunga, who later, ironically enough, went to work at AIM). The meeting was disastrous. When Cardoso extended his hand, Maiopuè declined to shake it. He said that in greeting a magistrate, it is the judge who extends his hand first, not the commoner. He listened impatiently to what the two had to say – and then threatened to have Cardoso arrested for contempt of court. Gonçalves was just one on a list of cases to be dealt with by Maiopuè that day. One by one, petty thieves and vagrants appeared before the judge for trials that were summary in the extreme. None of them had lawyers: they were represented by an ‘official defender’ – a young woman who said virtually nothing the whole morning. Cardoso remarked that she seemed to be there for merely decorative purposes.

Maiopuè passed sentence, mostly short terms of imprisonment, and then when Fernando Gonçalves was brought before him, to our surprise he pleaded guilty. I imagined he had wrongly assumed that a guilty plea would win him a lesser sentence. But he later said he had no idea what he was doing. ‘I wasn’t told I had the right to a lawyer. I never even met the official defender.’ The judge refused to allow Gonçalves to call family members as witnesses, and then launched into a lecture about Operation Production. This was a key policy of the Frelimo government, he declared, and it was incumbent on all citizens to support it. Gonçalves’s guilt was all the greater precisely because he was a journalist, and therefore should known better. The official defender was as useless and mute in Gonçalves’s case as in all her previous ones that morning, making no attempt to indicate mitigating circumstances. To our dismay, Maiopuè proceeded to sentence Gonçalves to 12 months’ imprisonment. Within 48 hours, he was on a plane heading for a re-education camp in Niassa. Gonçalves found the conditions on the plane broke elementary air traffic rules: there were more passengers than seats, and the surplus passengers sat in the aisle.

Cardoso was amazed at Maiopuè’s behaviour: he had not witnessed this sort of trial before. Although the court called itself a ‘people’s tribunal’, it seemed just a shoddy parody of a colonial court. Cardoso described the proceedings as a farce, and set about trying to get Gonçalves released. AIM sent a request to the new justice minister, José Oscar Monteiro. Lima recalls him as being sympathetic but pointing out the difficulty of a minister intervening to overturn a court decision.

Gonçalves was not released until he had served eight months of his sentence.

Operation Production came to an abrupt end in August 1983. Reports of abuses had reached Machel from various sources and he could see that, far from bolstering Frelimo’s support, the bungled evacuations were ruining the party’s prestige. In hindsight, Operation Production can be seen as a disastrous diversion. Government efforts were channelled into dumping planeloads of ‘unproductives’ in Niassa while the military situation deteriorated and the country was on the brink of famine.

A return to reality kicked in when Machel visited Zambezia in August and saw that the war, launched into this province from Malawi, was bringing the Zambezia economy to a standstill. The provincial capital, Quelimane, was virtually cut off from the rest of the province. The country’s largest industrial project, a huge textile factory at Mocuba being built with help from the GDR, was years behind schedule, largely because equipment could not be moved to Mocuba from Quelimane port. Machel could see that the war itself was going very badly. He was angered to find that young officers sent from Maputo several months earlier to head operations and train local soldiers were avoiding combat. At the barracks in Mocuba he asked, ‘How many actions have you participated in since arriving here?’ Several officers replied, ‘None.’ So Machel demoted them, and drafted in eight veterans of the independence war, headed by José Ajape, who had commanded the Mozambican force in Zimbabwe, to launch a counter-offensive against Renamo. The Mozambican army could claim success in one area. Under the dynamic leadership of General Domingos Fondo, the FPLM restored order to much of Inhambane province, driving Renamo out of its main base at Mambuili. But this was the only area where the military situation was markedly improving.

Military success revealed the extent of a hidden crisis. In 1983 the rains failed everywhere south of the Save River; in areas severely affected by Renamo’s insurgency, drought turned into famine. Where Mozambican troops reasserted government control, they found tens of thousands of near-destitute people whose livestock and meagre food reserves had been plundered by Renamo. With the assistance of international NGOs, the government established relief centres. Hungry people flocked there, with many dying en route. Suddenly scenes that conjured up earlier famines in Ethiopia or the Sahel were recorded in southern Mozambique. Cardoso dispatched Anders Nilsson to Inhambane, and he brought back stark images of malnourished children with the matchstick limbs and swollen bellies. ‘I never though I’d see pictures like these from my country’ was Lima’s immediate reaction to the first photos.

Nobody knows how many people died in the 1983-84 famine in Gaza and Inhambane, though a round figure of 100 000 is often given. Droughts are cyclical in southern Mozambique, and this one had begun in 1981. The government appealed to international donors in January 1983; by then it was clear that in the southern provinces the main 1983 harvest would be a near-total write-off. The government appealed again to embassies and NGOs in June. But the famine had given the enemies of the revolution great leverage and, despite Machel’s European tour of October, total foreign aid to Mozambique in 1983 was lower than it had been in 1982. The donors, as Joe Hanlon remarked, had gone on strike. That was the background to the negotiations with South Africa that began in late 1983. The donors had made it clear that they would help Mozambique out of its plight, but only if it reached a deal with South Africa.

Then the rhetoric changed. When Machel announced that Mozambican and South African delegations were meeting in Swaziland on 20 December, he said this was crucial for ‘finding a modus vivendi in the region’. Neighbours were not a matter of choice, said Machel, and ‘we cannot change geography’. The announcement was an example of Machel outflanking his government. The Mozambican and South African governments had decided to keep the Swaziland talks secret. Clearly Machel though this was a bad idea: when the talks opened, he was at a summit in Bissau, and broke the news to reporters there. This was one of the few occasions on which the Mozambican version of events hit the world press before the South African one. No doubt Machel broke the informal agreement with the South Africans because he knew that otherwise Pretoria would leak its own slanted account, painting the talks as a triumph for apartheid. Machel wanted Mozambique to be seen as an actor in the talks, not just as a victim.

Sol de Carvalho was reporting for AIM from the Bissau summit. On the long journey back (Machel called in at Benin and Angola en route), the president repeatedly briefed Carvalho on the plane and Carvalho relayed it all back by telex from Cotonou and Luanda to Cardoso. Machel insisted that the talks signified no change in Mozambique’s position towards apartheid: he stressed that South Africa had been given advance notice that Mozambique was not going to the talks to recognise apartheid or the bantustans, or to destroy the ANC. After further talks in Pretoria and Maputo in January, the outline of a deal was fairly clear: South Africa was to stop destabilising Mozambique in exchange for an end to support for the ANC’s military wing. For most foreign analysts, this was a straight swap: Renamo for the ANC.

Cardoso did not accept this analysis, sticking to the line that there was no comparison, since there were no ANC bases in Mozambique. In a January 1984 editorial he wrote:

"The ANC is not the creation of Mozambique. Long before the first stirrings of Mozambican nationalism, the ANC was leading the struggle of South Africa’s people against racial discrimination. The ANC is in South Africa. Its bases are there. Its militants are there. And that is where the idea of a non-racial South African nation grows day by day.
For Mozambique and the whole of southern Africa, the underlying issue to be discussed is South Africa’s attempt to destabilise its neighbours. For the South African government, the real internal issue is how to keep the people of South Africa from continuing their fight against apartheid. Sooner or later, the Pretoria authorities will have to talk to the real leaders of the South African people.
Those who insist on spurious comparisons between the ANC and the bandits of the MNR, while trying to forget the growing struggle inside South Africa, are in for a short, sharp shock when they find that reality does not match up to their view of the world."

Spurious or not, the comparison was perfectly clear in a joint communiqué issued by the Mozambican and South African negotiators on 16 January, which said the two sides had ‘considered measures to be taken in order that the territory of neither state should serve as a springboard for aggression and violent actions against the other’. Gone was all the defiant ‘Let them come!’ rhetoric. Instead the head of the Mozambican delegation, minister in the presidency Jacinto Veloso, was talking about establishing ‘the principles of our relationship as two sovereign states, equal to equal’ and of developing ‘viable and long-range economic relations’ with South Africa.

Two months later the pact was signed. But a couple of day before, there was an expanded meeting of the Frelimo leadership to which senior journalists, including Cardoso, were invited. Luís Bernardo Honwana recalls Samora Machel vigorously defending the impending Accord he was to sign with PW Botha at Nkomati, on the border. Honwana recalls Machel declaring, ‘We have obliged the enemy to sign,’ but it was clear that many in the room found that hard to believe. Machel tackled that latent tension with the rhetorical question: ‘Is there anyone who doublts that the Nkomati Accord is a triumph for the Mozambican revolution?’ This was met with almost total silence, except that one hand at the back of the room shot up and Cardoso replied, ‘Me, Comrade President.’ Honwana says he knew that plenty of people in the leadership had their doubts about the strategy outlined by Machel, but only Cardoso had the courage to say so. Unfortunately, the meeting just carried on, and Machel did not ask Cardoso to explain his objections.

Certainly Cardoso had no objection to the principle of signing an agreement with Pretoria: indeed, in the media he was the foremost advocate of the agreement. What must have worried him was the triumphalist tone used by Machel: yes, Mozambican diplomacy had scored some points in the negotiations, but this did not mean that apartheid was about to collapse. Honwana says the image of Cardoso querying the president has remained vivid in his mind. Far from leading to any hostile reaction, he thought it increased Machel’s respect for Cardoso.