how many cows are you worth?
i was hanging out and talking with my colleague in swaziland the other day about the best tactics for negotiating bride prices. he is his family’s lead negotiator in this manner and claims to be quite good at it. we were discussing strategy as this weekend he is going to negotiate for his brother’s new wife. he is planning at starting the bidding off at 2 cows, as really, one can not go below 2 cows as it is given that the bride’s mother gets one cow and the bride herself gets one cow. the family will usually start with an outrageous offer of 30 cows. outrageous! (it helps in the negotiation to be outraged). He will start off with his 2 cows and work his way up to his upper limit, 17 cows.
in case you are ever in this situation, here are some good lines to get the number of cows down:
1. “but she is a third-born daughter! it is not like she is the first born!”
2. “but i only paid 12 cows for my second wife!”
3. “but if i give you 9 cows, how will i have enough to provide for your daughter?”
oh, and another tip: always park your car far away when going to negotiate bride prices as these things have a tendency to get violent and you wouldn’t want your car window smashed in, now would you?
i was in swaziland, sitting around the office chatting with colleagues, as i came to visit one of my clients there. although i am based in mozambique, i also cover swaziland and the swazi clients are actually the closest client site to maputo (the rest of the clients are in northern mozambique and did i mention that mozambique is rather big?). so my alarm clock had gone off at 6am that morning, even though it is only a theoretical 3 hour drive and my meeting did not start until noon. i kept reminding myself that this is africa and a 2 hour fudge time is good as i struggled with the shower nozzles.
after the driver and i circled the streets of maputo looking for an open gas station, my fudge time was down to 45 minutes before we even cleared the city limits. but we finally got gas and headed southwest out of maputo towards swaziland.
border crossings in this part of the world are interesting. they don't have the american "drive-through" mentality down, most likely because the vast majority of folks are walking, carrying huge sacs of onions or potatoes or other stuff on their head (how do they balance all that stuff?) we had to drive in, park, get out and go get the leaving mozambique passport stamp, drive to the next station, park, get out and get the entering swaziland passport stamp, drive to the next station, park, get out and go stand in a box with disinfectant to kill any tse tse flies on our shoes. interestingly, at the final station as we exited the border, no one asked to see the passport stamps so i could have just sat in the car the entire time. some people in the passport stamp line handed the passport stamper folks 7 passports, which they stamped. i guess their 6 friends preferred to stand outside in the heat than come inside and get their passport stamped themselves, eh?
there is a vast difference that one notices immediately when one pulls out of the border station and into swazi...and its not just the swazi love affair with speed bumps. according to development junkies, swaziland is categorized as a developing country whereas mozambique is an LDC or least developed country (basically, the bottom 40 get this distinction). some of the difference can be attributed to 15 years of civil war on the mozambique side (just a couple of weeks ago, after 15 years or so of post-conflict mine clearing work, people are considering declaring mozambique now land mine-free. woohoo!)
swaziland, can also be known as the switzerland of africa from here on out. both swaziland and switzerland have beautiful mountains, lovely people, and everything shuts up tighter than a drum by 7pm. this is quite a contrast to mozambique where the nightclubs don’t even start to gear up until midnight and most nights there is live music and dancing somewhere in town.
after a hard days work in swazi, i hopped on a plane back to maputo. i recently discovered that swazi air flies between mbabane (the capital of swaziland) and maputo on every tuesday and thursday for, hold onto your seats now, $35 a person. the flight takes 30 minutes, is in a 10 seater plane, but there are two pilots, a stewardess, and refreshments are served. my guess is that swazi air has lost money on the flight before the plane has even cleared the end of the runway.
question: how do you know when you are checking in for a small flight?
answer: when you walk up to the counter and say, “hi. i am here for the flight to maputo” and they respond, “yes janet, welcome.”
when mozambique gained its independence, it immediately launched into civil war. in fact, mozambique’s flag has a gun and some other mean knife looking thing on it. on the one side of the
Saturday, February 3, 2007
war was the official government of mozambique, a group of soviet-backed communist fighters who had overthrown the portuguese colonists. on the other side was RENAMO, a guerilla force backed mostly by south africa. south africa almost entirely funded and trained them as they a) didn’t like that the government of mozambique supported the ANC, b) wanted to increase economic dependence on south africa and didn’t like mozambique’s long coastline with many ports that could serve as
alternative routes. (by 1984, RENAMO had destroyed 3 out of the 4 rail lines running from mozambique’s coast to landlocked zimbabwe, botswana, zambia, and malawi and c) wanted to weaken any black run country as one of the tenants of apartheid was that black rule would be a disaster.
the US flip-flopped between which side they supported. at first, during the frenzy of the cold war, they sided with RENAMO as the government of mozambique was communist. then when news about how brutal and terror inducing RENAMO really was (most of its attacks were against civilians and infrastructure and really quite gruesome) started to get out, all the western governments moved to distance themselves. at one point under reagan, there were two bills simultaneously under consideration by the US congress - one to give money to RENAMO (supported by bob dole and a coalition of the right) and one to give money to the mozambiquan government (supported by reagan in a significant deviation to the “reagan doctrine.”) neither passed.
although i think the sudanese saying “when the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled,” applies here, mozambique also has some responsibility for 15 years of blood-curling violence too. for example, the communists came into power with a great spirit of egalitarianism and declared the traditional chieftan system abolished. a lot of small chiefs who saw their power get wiped out with independence joined RENAMO. or, as some say, if you have a cat, beat it, starve it, and kick it and then dump it out into the backyard, are you surprised when it comes back and bites you?
