Colonial Comparison

The year was 1498. The Portuguese explorer, Vasco da Gama, had just anchored his caravella sailing ship in the sheltered waters of the inlet and was making his way in the longboat with a landing party to a rocky island that dominated the bay. Soon, he would meet the sultan of the island, a successful Arab trader by the name of Mussa Al Bique. At the moment they would meet, a new chapter of history would begin—one that would be dominated by Portuguese colonial presence in southeast Africa for several hundred years. Vasco da Gama would initiate that era by naming the island after his host, a name that Portugal would later call its new colony: Mozambique.

Dave Wunsch and I interview US and Brazilian missionaries

For the past several days, Dave Wunsch, VP Operations, and I have been here in the northern part of Mozambique continuing our job of helping MAF take a strategic look at its flight programs. Thanks to the hospitality of three dedicated MAF staff families based in the city of Nampula, we’re enjoying good fellowship, great meals and some amazing Indiana Jones-type Land Rover rides around town on roads that would belong better on a dirt-bike racing track. Our days have been filled with back-to-back interviews conducted with mission and national church leaders. As we ask questions and take copious notes, an interesting picture of this country is emerging.

Having just completed similar interviews in Angola, the other former Portuguese colony of southern Africa, I really expected to find similar conditions in Mozambique.  I couldn't have been more mistaken. Differences in tribal groups, geography and colonial history seem to have produced significant differences in how these two countries function today. Here are just two examples:

·         Because Angolans are deeply grateful for the national peace they've enjoyed since the end

of their civil war ten years ago, there is a unified sense of readiness to embrace progress in economy, technology and even in church collaboration. In contrast, Mozambicans seem stuck in a past paradigm of tribalism that is causing everything from business to church relations to be fragmented and frozen in tradition         .

·         In Angola, we were impressed with the maturity of national church leaders who have not only prioritized the importance of graduate level seminary education but are also actively engaged in church-planting outreach efforts among the remaining unreached people groups of their country. In Mozambique, some churches have produced prolific daughter missions in nearby villages, but we found none that were committed to a true missionary effort among the yet untouched tribal groups along the coast or in the far northwest. Additionally, we were told there were only two pastors who had completed a bachelor-level seminary degree in the entire northern region of the country.

Three little friends from a local orphanage

One thing that both countries share, however, is an incredibly strong influence of animism in their current cultures. It was interesting to find Angolan church leaders who really believed that one particular tribe’s witchcraft empowered them to swim underwater for over an hour without surfacing and ride crocodiles like horses. In Mozambique the power of fetish traditions and ancestor worship is not unlike that of Muslim cultures that prohibit family members from becoming a Christian and may even disown them if they do.

Interviewing one of the two church leaders in Nampula
who have graduated from seminary

 It will be an interesting challenge to see how MAF can best serve the mission and church community here in northern Mozambique. I hope by the time we wrap up this trip, we will have some new and creative ideas about how to answer that question.