Mozambique gained its independence from Portugal in 1975 after a nearly decade long war between FRELIMO, the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Mozambique Liberation Front), which was largely supported by China, the Soviet Union and non-governmental organizations in Western Europe, and colonial forces. Fearing a spread of the independence movement into their neighboring countries, the apartheid governments of Rhodesia and South Africa created the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO or MNR) in 1975, a militant organization that won support from the conservative United States government during the Cold War as it was viewed as an anti-communist group. RENAMO joined with another rebel group, the Revolutionary Party of Mozambique, and together the two groups enacted a brutal campaign directed primarily at civilians in southern Mozambique, a formerly prosperous area of the country, by burning their fertile fields and villages, killing babies with bayonets, raping girls and women, and capturing young men in order to force them to join their campaign of evil.

Lina Magaia left the capital of Maputo to travel to the south of Mozambique, in order to return to her family, and to chronicle the suffering of her people. Reports of atrocities did reach the Western press, particularly The New York Times, but in keeping with today's far right in the United States, extreme conservatives led by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, Patrick Buchanan and the Heritage Foundation dismissed these reports as fake news in the late 1980s, and the Republican led government did not act on those reports.

The term "dumba nengue" refers to a proverb that states that "you have to trust your feet," and those civilians who did so survived, although they returned to devastated homes and decimated crops and livestock, and the area has remained in deep poverty since then.

Dumba Nengue consists of 22 actual accounts of these atrocities, which are difficult to read due to their extreme brutality and Magaia's vivid descriptions, and I could only bear to read a half dozen of them. ( )

Mozambique

Magaia is both a participant in and chronicler of the effects on peasants of struggle in Mozambique. These stories are simply and sparely told yet horrific. Chapter titles include "They Slaughtered Bertana's Husband as if He Were a Goat" and "Pieces of Human Flesh Fell in Belinda's Yard." Magaia describes the brutality of South African-backed guerrilla terrorism, supported apparently to destabilize the region and to drive out successful socialist government. Read with Beah's A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier for the perspective of a forced combatant in Africa's ongoing internal conflicts. ( )