stories

Displaced of Cabo Delgado

Exhibition Alfredo Zuniga

Since I arrived in Mozambique a couple of years ago, the embrace received by the Indian Ocean has been impressive. Villages and sandbanks on roads stretched thousands of kilometers. "Chapas" is full of people, bicycles at a slow pace, women with elongated bodies holding heavy barrels on their heads, and sellers of chestnuts and handicrafts from where they show their wounds, their loves, and their pains.

Every gutter, street, and village has a constant parade defining this incredible continent.

Displaced

An internally displaced person is one or a group of people forced to leave their homes due to different problems or internal factors.

The most frequent causes for this phenomenon to occur are:

Widespread violence: Poverty-Hunger
Natural disasters
Armed conflicts
Human rights violations.

Thousands of people are on the move daily, fleeing from different villages in the province of Cabo Delgado and Nampula in northeastern Mozambique. People escape from the bullets, the kidnappings, and the murders of armed groups that attack their towns and cities, killing and destroying everything.

These groups of armed people, of whom it is not known with certainty who they are or how they are financed, have unleashed a violent campaign in the northern provinces, rich in gas and multiple natural resources. Since 2017 they have murdered thousands of people and forced more than 1,000,000 to displace, according to United Nations data.

This exhibition collects portraits of women, adolescent men, and children who are victims of all the violence that poverty and displacement can generate, giving them a face and a record of what is happening in the country.