My Visit to Hell

"My Visit to Hell" is an essay first published in Parade magazine on January 7, 1990 about a trip Vonnegut took to Mozambique in the midst of its long-running civil war. It was later reprinted in Fates Worse Than Death in 1991.

Summary

Mozambican victim of land mines set up during the war

While flying from Johannesburg, South Africa to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, Vonnegut asked John Yale, a worker for the evangelical Christian charity organization World Vision, who were "the good guys" and "bad guys" in the civil war. As an organization bringing food, clothing, and other essentials to the more than one million refugees in a country of 15 million—fewer than Mexico City—Yale said that his only job was to help people, not take sides. With many ports along one of the longest shorelines in Africa, Mozambique is "as beautiful and habitable as California", although with its roads destroyed, farms abandoned, and rural population driven into starving cities. The country has been trapped in "a manmade hell" since the civil war began in 1976 after the end of Portuguese colonialism.

The National Resistance of Mozambique, or RENAMO, has been armed by the white South Africans and Rhodesians, as well as possibly the United States, since it is fighting an avowedly Marxist government supported by the Soviet Union. Although Yale attempted neutrality, Vonnegut sensed that RENAMO, which "had been raping and murdering and pillaging" for over a decade, was more accurately thought of as an out of control disease of self-interested bandits. From 1987-1989, RENAMO was estimated to have killed more than 100,000 Mozambicans, including 8,000 children under the age of five. By now almost everyone, including the United States and the Soviet Union, have begun to focus on providing for the "non-Marxist, noncapitalist, nearly naked, and utterly pitiful refugees".

At Maputo, Vonnegut and others reporting for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, CNN, and so forth, transferred to an eight-seat twin engine Cessna. This was necessity, not luxury, since all road traffic is subject to ambushes and mines, and even the planes are often shot at. Before landing, the pilot had to visually confirm that people were out in the open, since otherwise an attack was likely underway. Hopping to various refugee centers, the scene would have been familiar to anyone who has seen photographs of "liberated Nazi death camps or Biafra", victims of which Vonnegut witnessed in person. In addition to starvation, many survivors had been deliberately mutilated by having noses or ears cut off. The relief organization CARE hoped that such reporting would inform ordinary Americans of the situation. David P. Neff, a 43 year old originally from New Athena, Illinois, works for CARE, managing shipping and accounting of relief supplies, having previously done so in Liberia, the Gaza Strip, the Philippines, and Somalia. He noted that if RENAMO actually gained control of the government, it would have no plan about how to replace the infrastructure it had destroyed. The refugees who greeted the relief plane when it landed often wore clothing brought by previous missions, such as shirts with flags of American yacht clubs or one whose large S in a triangle identified the wearer as Superman.

See Also

• "Slaughter in Mozambique", a New York Times opinion piece on Mozambique printed two months earlier