Mozambique wins again!

The local South Africans have all been trying to tell me about rugby. There seems to have been some kind of big match recently.

Of course the big topic of conversation for everyone else here this week has been the award of the inaugural Mo Ibrahim Foundation prize for achievement in African leadership to our ex-President Joaquim Chissano. The first thing we should all do in thinking about this is to set aside cynicism for a minute and give his ex-excellency a round of applause for behaving well where many people - including a lot of wealthy, educated and powerful Westerners - would have let him get away with behaving badly. News of the award must have given him a much-needed filip: when Kofi Annan announced it in London, Chissano was in the backblocks of Uganda, waiting for a notorious warlord who failed to turn up for scheduled discussions about a peace process.

I'd better summarise Chissano's claims to such an award, because I have no idea how this is being reported in the Western media, if it's been noticed at all. ("Who? From where? And what the blazes is governance? Nah, show that Mugabe clip - everyone likes thugs.") When I first learned of this I was told he received it just for leaving office gracefully, but after researching the award a little I was relieved to discover it was more for his overall career as President and after: he presided over a largely successful peace process at the end of the War of Destabilisation; he moved Mozambique from a one-party state to multi-party democracy; he abandoned the centrally planned economy in favour of more or less free markets (as a newly converted banker I think this is a virtue, though I accept that some may disagree); and since his polite and bloodless departure from office he has made use of his moral capital in efforts to bring about peace in northern Uganda and southern Sudan.

The upshot of most of the talk round here is that Chissano deserves the accolade, but the millions attached it could be put to better use. A lot of the cynicism I've heard about this award focuses on the notion that the millions are supposed to motivate the present generation of African leaders to behave better. I entirely agree with those critics that the prize isn't enough to tempt those politicians only motivated by money, and those politicians who aren't will act for the greater good whether or not there's a prize waiting for them afterwards. The composition of the panel choosing the recipient - which is heavy on Western bigwigs, such as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton - rouses uncomfortable images of foreigners deciding what's best for Africa and patting the heads of Africans who comply with externally imposed standards. Some might find it embarrassing that African leaders can earn a rich prize by doing what leaders in the rest of world do as a matter of course. There are also reservations about rewarding only the leader when his behaviour depends so much on the behaviour of so many around him.

It occurs to me, though, that the prize makes much more sense when you stop thinking of what it's supposed to do for Africa and consider instead what it's supposed to do outside Africa. I recently read The State Of Africa by Martin Meredith, a history of Africa since the era of independence started in the 1950s. Mozambique hardly gets mentioned - which is to Mozambique's credit, as Meredith focuses on bad news. Mozambican governments have made bad mistakes, but haven't produced crazy dictators, or used ethnic violence to entrench their power, or stripped the country of natural assets to fill Swiss bank accounts (though I'm not saying there are no Swiss bank accounts at all). All these things are African phenomena and have to be studied and explained - and, yes, reported in the media. But they don't get changed without showing examples of how things could happen differently. Part of the problem of corruption in Africa is that Western businesses and other organisations come in with bundles of money and start bestowing patronage. If asked why, they'd answer that it's how you do things in Africa. I suspect that a large component of what Mo Ibrahim is trying to achieve with this prize is to show that it's not necessarily how you do things in Africa; that negative stereotypes are just that; that there are some good things happening. I understand Ibrahim to be a Sudanese businessman living in the UK; the stereotypes must annoy him more than they annoy me, and that's a lot. Even the millions make sense in this context - more likely to get headlines.

Having said that, I'm not very hopeful that it can do much against the barrage of negative images. I still think it's a worthy endeavour, though I hope there's some provision to withhold the award when there are no deserving candidates in any given year. Nor am I sure how it might strengthen Chissano in his work in Uganda, but I hope it does.

Another American escapes

Today - to spare you all further complaints about my workload - a photo from back in August, when I had the pleasure of attending one of life's great weddings. (It has taken me this long to track down the photos.) American Laura married her Australian boyfriend Mark at sunrise on the beach at Chimivane, about four hours' drive north of Maputo (or rather longer if you have to help push broken-down local vehicles out of the road along the way - all part of giving the numerous foreign visitors the authentic Mozambican experience).

Photo by my friend Minati Baro.

A local choir sang Shangana wedding hymns, whales broke the surface of the waves to see what the crowd of two-leggers was up to, and even this bitter confirmed bachelor teared up a little during the ceremony.

The wedding breakfast was an astonishing feat of organisation by Laura, who personally took care of details such as the sixty-plus champagne flutes from Ngwenya Glass in Swaziland. After the nerve-racking job of transporting them, she gave them all away to her guests. I must thank my boss Wesley and his wife Molly, who gave me the flute from the place setting of their three-year-old son Philip, so that I could take home a pair.

At about the same time, there was a discussion on one of my writing-based mailing lists about migration and U.S. isolationism. A Canadian-based U.S. citizen - who had previously lived in Scotland - complained about the unsympathic attitude of her stay-at-home fellow citizens. She quoted the statistic that at the height of the British empire, 15 million British citizens lived outside the British Isles. I don't have a date for that and thus have no way of knowing the British population at the time, but it's about 55 million now. The U.S.A. now has a population of about 400 million, and a mere 3 million of them live outside national borders.

That ties in with reports - well, complaints - I've heard from American friends here about "mission people", that is, American embassy staff. "Mission people" not only close their social events so that even other Americans can't attend, but have a curfew which pretty much prevents them attending outside social events. And it occurred to me that the Americans I know here - with the exception of Wesley and Molly, and with not a single "mission person" among them - are all either married to or living with non-Americans.

I prefer to report my observations rather than make sweeping statements about what this or that group of people are like - but I'm fairly sure that most of my readers are thinking what I'm thinking.