Right to survive
Mozambique is under attack. Vanessa Baird explains why.

Trauma
Orlanda Mendes reports on the nightmare world of child bandits.

Destabilization Manual
A guide to South African aggression.

Dumba nengue
Felisbella Gaspar tells her escape story.

What is Renamo?

Political puzzles
East or West? Marxism or capitalism? Where is Frelimo heading? A jig-saw of opinion. Frelimo's Jose Luis Cabaçao puts the first piece in place.

MOZAMBIQUE - THE FACTS

Positive fire
Artist Malangatana talks about life, art and politics.

Freedom's front runners
Peasant women take the lead. Teresa Lima reports from the Green Zones.

Simply... a history

The new missionaries
Joseph Hanlon looks at the tricky world of emergency aid.

A radical realignment
How can Mozambique and its neighbours break South Africa's economic domination? Carlos Cardosa explains.

ACTION and Worth reading...

'Ours is a rich and beautiful country,' a woman remarked to me shortly after I had landed in Mozambique's capital. Really? That certainly wasn't the impression I'd been getting back home. Doormat, newspapers and television screen covered with famine appeals and reports of Mozambican children dying at the rate of one every four minutes.

Nor later, when I got to Mozambique's war-tom provinces did 'rich' seem an appropriate word. Provincial hospitals filled with pitifully under-nourished children - the lucky ones who had been caught in time. Emaciated people coming out of Renamo-held areas, dressed in tree bark and reduced to eating poisonous berries that had to be cooked six times.

Rich? What could the woman mean? It took some time for her statement to start making sense and for me to begin to perceive that fundamentally Mozambique is a rich and beautiful country - brought to its current state of misery by South Africa's secret war against it.

I hope that this issue of the magazine - apart from telling you about this war - will also give you a sense of the richer Mozambique, the Mozambique that is more than conflict and famine. For this month's NI we have worked largely with Mozambican journalists, photographers and illustrators, and recorded interviews with ordinary (and extraordinary) Mozambicans. We found, of course, that there are many, many 'stories' - and not all of them negative.

With the help of the Ford Foundation, I was able to go to Mozambique to compile this magazine there. This was only made possible however with the co-operation of local journalists who took the time and trouble to discuss themes, articles, and potential contributors - as well, of course, as agreeing to write. Thanks must go to the staff at AIM (the official Mozambican news agency) - especially Fernando Lima who read the articles as they came in and gave useful advice. Also the journalists at Radio Moçambique and the weekly magazine Tempo who offered friendship and conversation as well as professional co-operation.

Because of South-African backed terrorism most of Mozambique is only approachable by air. With the help of Oxfam and the Save the Children Fund I was able to get out to the rural provinces of Niassa and Zambesia to interview the people most directly affected by war. Their friendliness, openness and resilience in face of the worst kind of adversity made a deep and lasting impression.

To squeeze all this into one issue of the NI is an impossible task. I flew back from Maputo with a briefcase bulging with good material - enough to fill about three issues of the NI. As a result the editor's knife has been hyper-active this month. Hacking about our contributors' thoughtful and cherished prose is not something that we approach with unqualified glee. It can at times be a painful and conflictive task. Worse still is having to reject perfectly reasonable articles for want of space. We normally commission more material than we use because there will always be one or two dud articles, or contributors who drop out at the last minute or produce their work too late to be used. But none of the Mozambican contributors were guilty of these things; we simply ran out of pages.

Editing always requires interpretation and can produce distortion. But there is more danger of distortion than usual this month. This is because many of the articles had to be translated from Portuguese (or worse still, from one of the sixteen Mozambican languages through Portuguese). Then there are distortions of style that come from the need to make the articles easily accessible to an international audience.

But I hope that this magazine nonetheless goes some way towards providing a realistic picture of the experience and resilience of Mozambique.

Letters
Letter from China
Update
Briefly
Endpiece: by Eva Fleg Lambert
Reviews: including Colin Turnbull classic
Country profile: Macau

COVER PHOTO: Keith Bernstein
ONLINE MAG MAINTAINED BY SIMON LOFFLER