What would you do?

The poor among riches riot for bread
Re-reporting, editing, notes, brief comment by Carolyn Bennett

Bread prices rose 30 percent and Mozambicans rioted. Theirs is one of the poorest countries in the world, a country of 23 million people also suffering from the high cost of imports and unhealed past conflicts.

Demonstrators in the past two days have blocked roads with burned tires, the Guardian and wires report. People looted shops in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo.

Six people, among them children, died when police opened fire on the protesters.

Mozambicans have experienced rising costs of basic needs as wheat prices spiked around the world and the costs of imports from South Africa rose sharply. Already poorer than most people in the world, these rises have hit Mozambicans especially hard.

What would you do?


Sources and notes
Mozambique (Republic of Mozambique, Portuguese República de Moçambique), situated on the southeastern coast of Africa, is bordered to the south and southwest by South Africa and Swaziland, to the west by Zimbabwe, to the northwest by Zambia, Lake Nyasa (Niassa), and Malaŵi, and to the north by Tanzania.


The Mozambique Channel separates the country from Madagascar to the east. Maputo (formerly Lourenço Marques), the country’s capital, is in the nation’s southernmost province.


Mozambique’s extensive coastline (1,563 miles) features some of Africa’s best natural harbors, a fact that contributes to the nation’s important transportation and communication role in the region. The massive Zambezi River dominates the central area and provides sufficient hydroelectric potential to make Mozambique the region’s powerhouse.


Portuguese is the official language of Mozambique but the vast majority of Mozambicans speak languages of the Niger-Congo group — the so-called Bantu languages— which dominate central and southern Africa. [Britannica note]


“Mozambique bread riots spread as police shoot protesters dead — Demonstrators killed in capital Maputo after live rounds used because officers ‘ran out of rubber bullets,’” http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/02/mozambique-bread-riots-looters-dead

“Every anguish passes except the anguish of hunger,” Malalai Joya relates an Afghan saying.


There is a common plight in countries of the South and East. Like other developing countries, Joya writes in A Woman among Warlords, “Afghanistan has been feeling the disastrous outcome of globalization in the years following the U.S. occupation. The reliance on privatization and the unchecked market economy has had a terrible impact on the poorest people, and it has widened the gap between the rich and poor. …

“[With] the worldwide increase in the price of staple foods, it is ‘the poor’ in places like Afghanistan [and Mozambique], who suffer most. Women and children suffer most of all.”

A Woman among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice by Malalai Joya and Derrick O'Keefe, pages 192-193