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responded to this perceived threat by leaving schoolchildren in the Chilembene camp while
they worked in other locations. Evidently this type of encouragement to move is also
happening elsewhere in the country '
When a second round of research was conducted seven months later, in January 1994,
conditions had changed in both Chilembene and Chaimite. Investigations in Chilembene
revealed that many more displaced farmers had moved back across the river to Chaimite and
to other places south of Chilembene. However, many displaced smallholders still remained
in Chilembene, frequently for the same reasons as noted during the first round of research.
Some women said that they were waiting for their husbands to return from South Africa;
others claimed that they did not have the financial resources to support a move. Still other
individuals feared that the war was not really over and did not want to risk moving at this
time. A final category of individuals simply had no place to go.
In Chaimite several farmers were interviewed who had returned from Chilembene or other
areas in the irrigation scheme. These farmers said that they were now farming on land that
they possessed before the war displaced them. Upon closer examination it became evident that
these farmers had actually been displaced during the villagization program of the late 1970s,
though some had managed to continue farming until the war drove them across the river to
Chilembene. These farmers reported that before the villagization program, they had larger
tracts of land in the area, but some land was taken by the government and redistributed to
other members of the communal village. Although they returned to the land to which they
claimed historical rights, in reality those rights had been superseded by a government-created
village. In fact, their rights were now qualified by the state.
Other farmers were interviewed along the road between Guija and Chaimite. Several
smallholder and small private commercial farmers had recently (re)established themselves
within a 25-kilometer stretch along the highway. A few new houses and homesteads were
built on the north side of the road, clustered on the periphery of Guija and around the
communal villages near Capela. Other newly established homesteads and farms were scattered
between these two points.
Interviews revealed that many of the new farms were being maintained by "week
farmers." These individuals are planting and maintaining their crops during the week and
returning to Chaimite city, Chilembene, or one of the communal villages during the weekend
or at night. They do this to keep their households in areas that they perceive to be relatively
secure. Again, it is unclear if these week farmers have tenure security. It is clear that many
of those returning to the area were given land by the government in 1977, when they were
all displaced from the south side of the road. It is not clear how many of these people had
land in this area before 1977 and how many had their holdings reduced when the government
redistributed land. It is also unclear what the economic costs are for a population to invest
time and resources in maintaining two homesteads.
137. See Mozambique Peace Process Bulletin (1993). A similar phenomenon was reported in Sofala
Province; other unconfirmed cases have been reported by NGOs operating in rural Mozambique.