Peace clubs help heal formerly war-torn Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique

As first appeared in Integrity Magazine, in Mozambique, here. Written by Omardine Omar.

March 23 2023

The Gorongosa Project provides community benefits for people living around the park, building human-wildlife coexistence

The Gorongosa Restoration Project developed six programmes, among them the peace clubs which in total bring together 525 members from two districts.

Image by Deborrah Varrie.

Everything falls within the scope of the Gorongosa Restoration Project, inserted within the activities of the Gorongosa National Park, a monumental place, but which decades ago had been devastated by the men who found the place to feed themselves, acquire resources to sustain the war, to camp and to fight. Today Gorongosa is a space that people can already dream of, believing that living in community anything is possible.

Hence, after the definitive peace agreements, signed between the Mozambican government and the RENAMO party, there was a need to create peace clubs, to restore hope to the daughters and sons of those demobilised and reintegrated into local communities, and how “education it is the only weapon to transform a new man, freed from ignorance”, as Nelson Mandela and Samora Machel would say in general terms. Behold, the Gorongosa Restoration Project outlined six programmes, among them the peace clubs which in total bring together 525 members from two districts, namely Gorongosa and Cheringoma, in Sofala province.

Although, as we found out, the project mentors were somewhat misunderstood by the Directorate of the National Administration of Conservation Areas (ANAC) that the peace club benefited RENAMO more than the target communities, the fact is that in On the ground, “Integrity” understood that the project is ultimately benefiting all Mozambicans residing in the regions covered, regardless of their colours or political motivations.

According to the field work carried out by our report in recent days, we found that the peace clubs are linked to the literacy centres that already exist, curiously, a program developed by the Mozambican Government and partners that aim to give back to all Mozambicans who do not they had the opportunity to study, a new opportunity to reinvent themselves and redirect their lives.

The idea, according to the project’s operators, is that “people can look forward and live without stigma or persecution, since there is already a definitive peace agreement that encompasses all parties that some time ago were fighting.”

It should be noted that in terms of the implementation of the DDR, along with the other bases, so far only one, located in the forests of Gorongosa, did not carry out the process monitored by the United Nations and other national and international organisations, all because they were not the pensions of former RENAMO guerrillas to be honoured, a fact that led the government to approve a new decree that defines lifelong pensions for demobilised and reintegrated soldiers, which forced PR Filipe Nyusi to go to the Administrative Court to demand speed in the process of authorization of the visa for subsequent payments of pensions to remaining RENAMO men as a way of definitively ending the DDR process that covers more than five thousand former RENAMO guerrillas.

This article is reproduced here as part of the African Conservation Journalism Programme, funded in Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe by USAID’s VukaNow: Activity. Implemented by the international conservation organisation Space for Giants, it aims to expand the reach of conservation and environmental journalism in Africa, and bring more African voices into the international conservation debate. Written articles from the Mozambican and Angolan cohorts are translated from Portuguese. Broadcast stories remain in the original language.