CABO DELGADO, Mozambique—Anita sits on a woven mat, her legs straight out on the ground before her. She speaks in a quiet but urgent voice over the sounds of rumbling traffic and a cockerel crowing, as she recounts how the attacks on her village in Cabo Delgado—the northernmost province in Mozambique—unfold.
“When the insurgents come, they block all the ways out from the sea and from the road so no one can leave,” she told World Politics Review in March. “If they like, they can kidnap you. They can rape you.”
Anita, who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of being identified amid the ongoing conflict, speaks as if describing horrors experienced by someone else.