By Mercedes Sayagues
MAPUTO, Nov 14 1995 (IPS)

Nightmares haunted Santo Castigo Mabote, known as “Santinho”, in the first months back with his family in Khongolote, on the outskirts of Mozambique’s capital.

Santinho has a lot in his past to keep him awake at night. He was eight-years old, a normal kid living a normal urban life with his parents in an apartment on a tree-lined avenue in Maputo, until he and his younger brother were kidnapped in a raid by the rebel Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) while visiting their grandmother in Khongolote.

Along with a group of neighbours, the boys were forced to carry away the goods looted by Renamo. After walking for a day, they arrived at a military base, where civilians had to grow food, fetch firewood and water, cook, clean, and act as porters for Renamo’s fighters.

His brother died soon after, in circumstances Santinho prefers not to talk about, and he became an AK-47 toting soldier — at the age of ten.

When asked about his duties, he says shyly: “Fetching food in other people’s homes,” meaning raids on peasant homesteads. He has been in combat, and tells of running for cover when government helicopters bombed his base, of watching a man have both legs blown off by a landmine, and has seen people killed and has killed himself. It is a heavy load for a kid barely fourteen.

Santinho was returned to his family in late 1994, two years after a Peace Agreement that put an end to 17-years of civil war between the government and Renamo, resulting in the demobilization of both armies — including child soldiers, like Santinho, that Renamo was fond of press-ganging.

Renamo’s recruits from the southern provinces were the youngest, often pre-teens. In one district, the average age of boy soldiers was 11.5 years. In the central and northern provinces, the average age was 15, against 13 in the south.

What helped Santinho overcome the trauma was joining the local Christian fundamentalist church, where the community welcomed him back as a member. Collective praying and a three-hour long Sunday service of song, dance and trance keep the nightmares away.

For child soldiers throughout Mozambique, psychological recovery and successful reintegration into civilian life passes through religious practices and traditional cleansing rituals.

“Traditional leaders accepted the boys on the condition that they undergo purification ceremonies,” confirms Gloria Kodzwa, a public health specialist with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). “Traditional rites are key because they set out the main values for these kids.”

Acknowledging the value of traditional practices, the Mozambican Red Cross and UNICEF have developed a project called “Healing by Playing”, where community activists are trained to help war-affected children recover, using both traditional practices and notions of modern psychology.

“Official support through established programmes may represent 20 percent of the healing process but the bulk depends on the communities,” says Jean Claude Legrand, head of emergencies at UNICEF.

A booklet, based on a study of community healing practices in Tete and Gaza province, shows “how psychological knowledge and local culture can work together, as allies, to achieve a shared objective.”

Listing problems, such as nightmares, headaches, crying, fright, incontinence, aggression and isolation, the booklet presents the solutions as prescribed by both traditional practices and modern psychology, and suggests how both can be used jointly. For example, herbal teas and charms can help, but fasting or diuretics can harm a malnourished or sick child.

At the Red Cross centre in Chimoio, in Manica province, community volunteers are trained to provide long-term support to war-affected people. Its director, Argentine psychologist Enrique Querol, says that, given the country’s size and scant resources, reintegration has to rely on community workers and “kuturera”, as cleansing rites are called in Manica.

Often the traditional healers will tell the boy soldier not to talk about the past. This goes against the conventional wisdom of Western psychology, where trauma victims are supposed to bring it all out into the open, where catharsis depends on communication.

“I’ve had to unlearn most of what I learned of Western psychology at university,” says Querol. “Every now and then I go through my books and give away a lot, because they are just not relevant to Mozambique.”

Not all Western-trained professionals are able to do that. A Norwegian psychologist brought by the United Nations to evaluate the reintegration of boy soldiers found that many were reluctant to talk about their experiences and concluded they were still severely traumatized.

“One could speak of resistance to understand and accept local culture,” says Dr. Kodzwa.

In this context, silence does not necessarily mean repression. Because many of these rites include a component of rejection of so- called “modern” or Western values, perceived as alien and an enemy of traditional culture, local people are not willing to talk about the past with foreigners.

Another misconception when assessing boy soldiers is to see them only as victims, or to expect them to return to child roles.

“Our psychological profiles show that most of these boy soldiers have strong egos and are capable of articulating their needs,” says Legrand. “They suffered a violent process of integration into an army but it was into an elite group, that of soldiers, into an adult role.”

Having had the electrifying power to command people by virtue of the guns they carried, it is not easy to fall back into the powerless role of a teenager, who has to show respect to his parents and village elders and can’t even vote.

“Suddenly, these soldiers became young, powerless, unqualified, uneducated and unemployed,” says Legrand. About two- thirds were illiterate, and to top it, drought in the central and southern provinces has added to their post-war hardship.

Because the Geneva Convention prohibits the use of children under 15 in combat roles, the United Nations could not treat Renamo boy soldiers as regular troops, entitled to two-years demobilization pay and other benefits.

That caused bitterness and, in some cases, open conflicts, as in Nhanale base, where boy soldiers refused to leave before discussing their demands with high-ranking Renamo officers.

“We, the young ones, got only two blankets, food and clothes, but no money like the grown-ups,” Santinho says bitterly.

However, the prospect of family reunification enticed the boy soldiers, especially when they were shown Polaroid pictures of former colleagues with parents and siblings. At the end, family ties were worth more than demobilisation pay.

“The best thing, and most families perceive it, is to insert the youth in social and productive activities, becoming useful to the family and developing an alternative self-esteem model,” says Agostinho Mamad, of Save the Children Fund.

That is easier said than done. The shortfall in classrooms and teachers is huge. Tens of thousands of adults have come into the labour market, mostly demobilized soldiers and migrant workers deported from South Africa. Jobs are scarce.

“To help in the reconstruction of family and village life has a deep and positive impact on these kids, while the cleansing rituals help them re-acquire local values and rules,” says Mamad.

Renamo was particularly vicious, forcing boy soldiers to commit atrocities on their families or villages as a way of cutting all ties with the past. “The training process was violent, cruel and inhuman,” says Mamad. “To force a boy into such violence denies all that his family and community have taught him, destroying part of his essence and nature.”

Santinho cannot recall any positive memories of the five years spent with Renamo. “It was lost time,” he says. He now goes to school, back in second grade where he was at the time of his kidnapping, with kids half his age.

The nightmares may be gone and the cleansing ritual may have worked on his psyche, but Mozambique, one of the world’s three poorest countries, can offer little to Santinho in terms of jobs and education that will make a screwdriver or a hoe more attractive than an AK-47.

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