Pencils scratch as students in year eight feverishly work through an exam paper. At the back of the classroom, Clara Edna Chevambo, 37, a minute figure in hand-me-down clothes, finishes first and hands her paper to the teacher. As she leaves, her 11-year-old daughter is arriving for afternoon class. A vegetable farmer who supported, clothed and fed five children, her mother and her grandmother, Chevambo is now living in a borrowed tent in a camp, one of the ones with something to do to fill a few hours.
“I’m in school every day, and I don’t want to miss class. I send my daughter to school every day.”
Where she lived and farmed in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique’s northernmost region, bordering Tanzania, is too dangerous a place to be now war has engulfed the region. An estimated 800,000 people have been displaced by an Islamist insurgency that has killed 3,000 people since 2017. Known as al-Shabaab, although not linked to Somalia’s group of the same name, it has declared itself affiliated to Islamic State.
“Once the militants came, we didn’t stay. In Cabo Delgado, when we saw militants with uniforms we knew they weren’t military; they were terrorists” says Chevambo.
“We saw people from neighbouring districts leaving with kids and baggage,” Chevambo says. “My dad called and said, ‘Let’s go with the kids’.”
Since late July small military detachments from other African countries have been arriving in the Cabo Delgado region after an agreement among the Southern African Development Community (SADC) marked by delay and tensions.
Tanzania, Botswana and Lesotho are sending soldiers, Zimbabwe is sending military training personnel and Angola is providing aircraft, while off the coast of the province’s capital city of Pemba sits the Warrior-class navy patrol ship SAS Makhanda of South Africa and there have been reports of sightings of armoured vehicles crossing the border between the two nations.
Last week it was a Rwandan-led operation that saw the port town of Mocímboa da Praia, the centre of Mozambique’s war, reclaimed from al-Shabaab. But most of Mozambique’s neighbours have problems of their own, and there are political tensions with South Africa. Mozambique’s president Filipe Nyusi is currently the head of SADC, and his response to the recent civil unrest in South Africa disappointed some.
International concerns focused on the conflict in March this year, when al-Shabaab, having seized Mocímboa the previous August, moved 80km north and attacked the coastal town of Palma.
This led to the shelving of a major liquefied natural gas project of French company Total nearby, which Mozambique’s government had hoped would be a lucrative programme.
That siege lasted four days, left dozens of locals and international contractors dead, and trapped tens of thousands of people without food or water for weeks.
Although religious extremism, government marginalisation, and greed for the region’s abundant natural resources have all been blamed, al-Shabaab’s motives remain opaque. The US government designated the insurgents as an international terrorist organisation – Isis-Mozambique – in March, although there is little known about the strength of the connections between the insurgents and the wider Isis group, which has claimed credit for its activities.
Chevambo’s family drove south. She had heard that the government was providing documentation to displaced people so they could resettle. “Because of what I saw on TV about what was going on, I got my documents, signed the order, and I went to Dondo.”
She is now in a camp in Savane, a one- to two-hour drive from the town of Dondo, in the province of Sofala, and nearly 1,300km south of her home. Collapsing tents, woven sleeping mats and yellow jerry cans of water dot the landscape. While most of the displaced are encamped within Cabo Delgado province, some, like Chevambo, have travelled much further in search of an enduring safety.
Most of the people in the Savane camp are from Sofala, displaced by cyclones in 2019-20. Chevambo and her children are among strangers whose language they don’t speak, and are squatting in a tent owned by another family.
“I’m suffering a lot because nothing grows here on the farms,” she says. “I can’t manage to grow anything. But because I have my kids, I’m crying to get a tent and do everything possible to stay here.”
The emergence of a terror group in Cabo Degado in 2017 was not a surprise. Decades of being marginalised by the central government 2,700km away in Maputo had caused resentment to fester and Imams had been warning for years about fundamentalists from Kenya, Tanzania and the Middle East radicalising the region’s disaffected youth. But the government did little to address concerns until the Mocímboa da Praia attack. As violence escalated, the group moving from village to village, burning down towns and beheading men, women, and children, the government cracked down, closing seven mosques and detaining more than 300 people without charge, including religious leaders and foreigners.
In May 2018, a photograph of six militants posing in front of the Isis flag began circulating on the encrypted messenger app Telegram. Its caption reportedly stated that the group had pledged allegiance to the now-defunct Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In June 2019, Isis claimed credit for its first attack in Mozambique.
Last year, Isis circulated a message on its al-Naba news bulletin in which it gloated over the failure of western and African nations to put down the insurgency and accused them of having only financial interests in Mozambique.
“There is nothing in it that interests the Crusaders besides its huge reserves of different natural resources and in which American, French and South African companies jointly invest,” the message read. “And Russian and Chinese companies are ambitious to find for themselves a foothold in them as well.”
The conflict illustrates how Cabo Delgado’s vast natural resources have become a flashpoint in the area.
In 2010–11, a group of multinationals, including Italian company Eni and US firm Anadarko, discovered one of Africa’s largest natural gas fields off Cabo Delgado’s northern coast. Foreign investors arrived, keen to capitalise, and worked with the government to establish projects there.
In 2019, Total announced its $20bn (£15bn) investment plan to begin delivering liquefied natural gas by 2024.
To make room for the projects, people in Palma and the surrounding areas needed to be relocated. Total’s website describes plans to resettle 557 households in a newly built settlement, and to provide livelihood re-establishment and development for those affected.
But civil society organisations and locals claim their was insufficient compensation for land and that promises for job creation and re-skilling were not met.
A spokesperson for Total told the Guardian that people were compensated “as per government-approved compensation rates and in line with national legislation and [the International Finance Corporation’s] Performance Standard 5”, which “is widely recognised as the international best practice standard for private sector projects involving land acquisition and resettlement”.
The company maintained its commitment to employing and training locals, it said.
But after the March attack, Total indefinitely suspended its operations in the region. “Some of the benefits for the local population in terms of job creation have however been postponed as a consequence of the force majeure situation and the suspension of project activities in April 2021,” said the company spokesperson.
Sumail Ansumane, an elderly man, sits in the shade next to a pile of luggage. His frail body is hunched, exhausted from his journey. Ansumane and his family escaped from Mocímboa da Praia and travelled north to Palma, thinking they would be safe there. But, like so many others from Cabo Delgado, they were travelling in the wrong direction. The war followed them to Palma, and they were caught up in the March attack.
Ansumane heard the shooting start. He and his wife gathered as many of his family as they could find and ran into the forest to hide. In the chaos their daughter Sifa went missing and as soon as the fighting slowed, the couple returned home to look for her.
Ansumane remembers the screams of his wife when she saw Sifa’s body. The insurgents had laid her out for her family to find, her head cut off and placed on her stomach.
“They beheaded her, and they cut her arms and legs off. And then they left.
“That’s why I ran away and came here,” says Ansumane. “My heart felt like it was broken.”
Sifa’s son, who was not yet a year old, died of an unknown illness soon after.
Ansumane has brought his remaining family south to Ntele, a host community 20 minutes from the city of Montepuez that is rapidly expanding as crowds of people arrive from the north. They sit in groups and wait for food, water and shelter. Two nuns weave among the rows of sitting people.
“This place is not good,” says one, who requested anonymity. “Why do these people have to stay here for a long time? It is not human.”
She points to the sitting people, some holding bowls of maize porridge covered in flies and dirt, and says: “We’re really worried about this situation. That situation can cause…
