Conference:
Abstract: Excerpts from the text:
"Bawa is a beautiful village at the junction of the Luangwa and the Zambezi, just about where it flows into the Cahora Bassa dam. We have abundant natural resources, and we have a new way of owning and managing them called 'iTchuma Tchatoi' (our wealth).
"...Our country, and especially our province, was at war for thirty years. We only got peace in 1992."
"...For nearly two years after peace we remained in doubt that we had a home, that we had land of our own in Bawa. Many of us stayed in exile, and those who did come home did not build good houses. Why should we? They were just place for the family to stay whilst men searched up and down for some way to get money. And since everybody was using resosrce any how most of us who stayed around Bawa also did the same. Our spirit mediums were powerless to control all the hunting, although the ancestors did stop the safari hunters killing buffalo until they came to apologize for ignoring the medium and made a contribution. But fine words from the company about doing some developments in Bawa always came to nothing.
"Things changed in Bawa in 1994 when we started to be visited by some of the people you see here with us today asking us if we were satisfied with having a safari company and all this hunting going on. They asked us if we wanted to do something like CAMPFIRE which they have in Zimbabwe. To tell you the truth we did not really believe they would change anything for us in Mozambique, but we knew a lot about CAMPFIRE and similar things in Zambia like ADMADE because of our time in those countries. Anyway we told them how angry we were that outsiders were hunting our wealth, iTchuma Tchatoi, without paying anything to us, or treating us like the owners of the land."