By Stephen Williams

Mozambique and the great floods of 2000

By Frances Christie and Joseph Hanlon Museum Press

ISBN 0-85255-857-0

Although Mozambique is highly vulnerable to climatic disasters - experiencing frequent droughts, floods and cyclones - when the worst floods in living memory hit much of the south

£16.99 Britishern African region in late February and March 2000, no country was greater affected than Mozambique.

As Emmanuel Dierckx de Casterle, the UN Resident Coordinator in Mozambique commented, the global response to the disaster reflected a general sentiment that fate had been particularly unfair on Mozambique, a country emerging from decades of conflict to become the fastest-growing economy in Africa.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the disaster, and how international solidarity broke new ground in preventing it from turning into a catastrophe. It also serves to explode many of the myths that grew out of the rescue and relief operations.

A progressive natural disaster

Heavy rains had started in the region in October 1999. Late in December, unprecedented rainfall of a kind never before recorded, caused serious damage to Maputo. Heavy rains continued in January 2000. Early in February further record heavy rainfall in Maputo and southern Mozambique, brought by Cyclone Connie, caused the Umbeluzi and Incomati rivers to reach levels not seen since 1937, and caused the Limpopo River to reach levels never previously recorded, completely flooding the town of Chokwe and parts of Xai-Xai.

On February 22, the country was hit by Cyclone Eline that devastated, in particular, the provinces of Inhambane, Sofala and Manica. Usually cyclones which have developed in the southern Indian Ocean travel up the eastern seaboard of Africa, but both Cyclone Connie and Eline moved inland dumping huge amounts of rain on Zimbabwe, SA, Swaziland and Botswana.

These countries were forced to open the sluice gates of dams and release waters that flooded into Mozambique, further raising the water levels of the rivers that flow into Mozambique.

The Limpopo, Save and Buzi river basins suffered the most extensive floods in 50 years. In early March, Cyclone Gloria arrives bringing more rain and new flooding on Buzi, Save, Incomati and Limpopo Rivers.

According to the World Bank assessment prepared for Mozambique’s Post-Emergency Reconstruction Programme, Mozambique suffered $273m of lost assets, $247m in lost production, $48m in lost exports, and faced a $3m bill to cover additional imports.

The Mozambican government estimated that about 27% of Mozambique’s population, or 4.5m people, were directly affected by the flood disasters. At least 700 people are known to have perished, some 550,000 people were displaced in more than 200 locations, 10% of Mozambique’s land under cultivation was completely destroyed and over 20,000 head of cattle lost. Water and energy supply systems sustained serious damage - as did road networks, railways and telecommunications - while countless public buildings, schools, clinics, hospitals and homes were destroyed.

Resources overwhelmed

In early April, the coastal areas of Nampula and Zambezia were also hit by another tropical depression, Cyclone Hudah. Consequent flooding was not included in the World Bank appraisal nor the Mozambican estimates above.

The international community’s response to the year 2000 floods followed appeals by the Mozambican government who signaled that its resources were completely overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster. The Mozambican Foreign Minister, Leonardo Simao, appealed for $2.7m for 100 boats, tents, tarpaulins, generators, pumps and other relief goods. $500,000 was contributed by the OAU while various Western governments pledged some $3.5m.

However, while Mozambique’s resources may have been limited, the authors take great pains to point out that the Mozambican military, the Fire Service, the Mozambican Red Cross and private individuals played the major role in the rescue operations. Of the total rescued, at least 45,000 people, over half that number owed their lives to fellow Mozambicans.

Exploding myths

While it served to alert the world to the unfolding disaster and encouraged unprecedented public donations to an African disaster, extensive TV coverage in the West tended to focus on the role of the foreign helicopter crews winching people to safety. Indeed, one of the abiding images was of Rosita - the baby born in a tree - and her mother being rescued by the crew of a South African Defence Force helicopter.

Another myth dealt with by authors Christie and Hanlon are that the flooding was caused by inappropriate release of dam waters in neighbouring countries - not so, the pair assert. Those charged with the water management responsibilities really had no other options. They also deal with claims by external agencies that they co-ordinated the reunion of thousands of children with their parents and carers - in fact, the Mozambicans themselves proved much more efficient in this task than the specialist agencies.

?Talking up’ problems

On the question of land-mines, the terrible legacy of years of civil war, being ?washed up’ by the flood waters and proving a particular hazard, Joseph Hanlon, speaking to a special conference at the Royal Commonwealth Society in London, disagreed. He pointed out the habit of various organisations with specific agendas, be they missing children or landmines, ?talking up’ problems.

Manuel de Araujo, Chairman of the Mozambican Association, who had recently returned from a fact finding mission on this subject said that, in general, Mozambican people know where landmines are located locally and that the problem was less about washed-up landmines than about displaced people, unfamiliar with the terrain they had moved to, wandering into areas with landmines.

At the same conference, Joseph Hanlon also drew attention to the slow release of the $450m pledged by the international community at the Rome Conference in May 2000. By January 2001, only $117m of these pledged funds had been made available, resulting in essential repairs not being carried out before the 2000/2001 rainy season began.

Mozambique is again suffering from floods this year. At the end of last March, the UN was reporting that more than 200,000 - mainly from the Zambezi Valley in central Mozambique - were displaced in 70 accommodation centres.

Unwanted Aid

Authors Christie and Hanlon are particularly scathing over some of the donations that reached Mozambique. They recall the unannounced and unexplained donation of hot bread literally shovelled from an aircraft onto Maputo airport’s runway. Tonnes of bottled water also arrived when there were no means to transport it to distribution centres, and when what was really required was chlorine to treat water. Similarly, a shipload of 730 tonnes of maize arrived from West Africa when a maize surplus in northern Mozambique and Malawi meant local maize was available quite cheaply.

Additionally, at least half the donated medicines that arrived during this period were either useless, out-of-date (or nearly so), and were being dumped on Mozambique which would have to spend money to dispose of them safely. Of the 403 medicines donated, 273 were not even in Mozambique’s formulary, meaning doctors outside the main hospitals would have no clear idea how they should be used.

Having said that, this book does present some lessons in the way that the international community can respond to emergencies, and the authors applaud many aspects of the rescue and relief operations.

For example, two developments they welcome are the way the UN system (UNICEF, WFP et al) was coordinated so successfully with Mozambique’s national disaster management system, and how a Joint Logistics Operation Centre (JLOC) was used for the first time in a non-military operation.

During the year 2000 floods, Mozambique saw the largest number of military aircraft ever used in a co-ordinated way in a natural disaster. Remarkably, the United States and other military forces allowed their planes and personnel to be given tasks by the JLOC central co-ordinating system.

A Primate’s Memoir

Love, Death and Baboons in East Africa

By Robert M. Sapolsky

£17.99 Jonathon Cape

ISBN 0-224-06121-6


When a friend suggested this book, a quick phone call to the publishers saw a review copy land on my desk a couple of days later. Looking at the dust jacket’s by-line, I gave an inward sigh. It reads: ? I had never planned to become a Savannah baboon when I grew up; I assumed I would become a mountain gorilla.? Anthropomorphic fairy-tales have not featured as my favourite reading, at least not since childhood recitations of Aesop’s Fables. I should not have worried. Within a few pages I discovered a moving yet highly entertaining book, penned by one of the world’s leading primatologists. It relates over two decades of experience studying a troop of baboons in Kenya, and numerous other African episodes.

Robert Sapolsky is an expert in the study of stress-related disease amongst primates, a field with obvious relevance to human health studies. He arrived in East Africa, his first travel outside the US, shortly after completing studies at Harvard and Stanford. Almost inevitably, he receives a muzungu initiation at the hands of a con-man in Nairobi who strikes up a conversation on the street and subsequently relieves him of a tidy sum of dollars with a heart rending tale of being a Ugandan refugee.

Quick learner

Robert Sapolsky is a quick learner. To survive until his wildlife conservation group hosts organises travel to the field study site, he recalls stretching the few dollars he has left by sleeping in Nairobi’s central park, making use of the city’s tourist hotels’ washroom facilities, and outwitting market traders and the ?parallel’ money changers.

Finally, he gets to his base camp and immerses himself in his work - daily observations and documentation of baboon’s social behaviour, social ranking, and whatever stress-related diseases may affect them. He has to learn how to anaesthetise his subjects to take blood samples which will indicate hormonal stress levels, but in such a way as the process does not distort the results.

He takes to the task like a duck to water. Indeed, the blow-dart technique becomes almost second nature, and even when he returns to the US for a short visit, he catches himself weighing up a cinema usherette. As she walks by, he quickly calculates her body weight, the amount of anaesthetic required and the possibility of a mate somewhere in the darkness that might retaliate.

It is probably not text-book best scientific practice, but the author begins to relate to his baboon troop in a less than dispassionate way. He gives all of them names, drawn from Biblical Old Testament characters, and begins to favour some and dislike others. Very unscientific, but he does not let these sentiments divert him from his work.

Crash course in inter-personal relations

He’s also getting a crash course in inter-personal relations with the local people, some of whom come to work with him at the site, others work at nearby tourist safari camps. He strikes up friendships with the villagers and has various altercations with the Masai and Park Rangers. None of them can quite fathom out what this crazy white man - with wild hair and shaggy beard, who smells bad, and spends all day with baboons and his mysterious scientific instruments - is really up to.

From time to time he takes time out from his studies to travel further afield. He makes a trip to Uganda at exactly the wrong time, as Tanzanian troops are entering Kampala, and finds himself kissing a concrete pavement with a gun trained at the back of his head until a Kenyan friend manages to persuade the soldiers that he is not one of the fleeing white mercenaries who had joined Amin’s army.

His innate sense of timing also finds him back in Nairobi just as the failed Air Force coup plot is unravelling. Deciding to high-tail it out of town, he falls victim to one of the many army road blocks where he receives a beating and is relieved of his wrist watch.

There is a trip to Juba in southern Sudan - which features a hellish river trip up the Nile, followed by a truck ride back in the company of four psychopathic Somalis - and a journey to Rwanda where he visits the mountain gorillas.

Meeting with Dian Fossey

His Rwanda journey was made just six months after the murder of Dian Fossey, the world famous mountain gorilla primatologist. He recalls meeting her after attending one of the many lectures she gave in the US, and having his hopes dashed by this mercurial figure. It seems that she very reluctantly went on these overseas lecture tours, undertaking them just to raise funding.

Reaching the gorillas required daunting treks, the final leg with a ranger whom he takes a growing dislike to, perhaps due to the young man’s habit of throwing stones at grazing forest bucks. This dislike turns to pure terror as, ascending the near 5,000mt summit of Mt Karisimbi, he speculates whether he is in the company of one of Fossey’s murderers, .

But an even greater terror is soon to visit him. A neighbouring troop of baboons had begun foraging at the rubbish dump of a nearby safari camp - and they contract bovine TB from infected offal discarded there.

But even with this terrible plague running riot, and the seeming inevitability of his own troop contracting the diease, Sapolsky continues his science. And he learns just how attached he has grown to the baboons as he tenderly buries each of them under a chosen tree.

All these episodes are told with unrelenting good humour in a laconic, gentle, self-deprecating style, the author saving his anger only for corrupt and incompetent bureaucrats - and there are no shortage of them.

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