The history of Mozambique has been punctuated by episodes of warfare and natural calamities. This study looks at the history of the civil war that affected Mozambique from 1976 to 1992 beyond the framework of national state and global politics. It attempts to make the voices of villagers who suffered the hardship of war more audible through the exploration of histories of life. It offers a more complex discussion of social relationships and social change during the war by looking at villagers and their environments beyond victimization narratives.
It contends that apart from being the major targets of the war, villagers and their environments had agency in the conflict. It argues that environmental factors influenced the course of war and exacerbated the harmful effects of war on local people and natural resources. It observes that the civil war affected an agrarian society which was particularly dependent on a rich and diverse yet disrupted ecosystem therefore, studying the civil war with focus on the environmental context shows the true cost of warfare, and how it was experienced by rural society.
It shows that humans and wildlife were in times of peace interconnected in symbiotic relationship which included episodes of cooperation and conflict. Elephants, hippos, monkeys, bush pigs, and birds invaded farms in search of food. Humans relied on wild animals and plants to improve their diet and to mitigate the impact of drought and disease. These symbiotic relationships were heavily disturbed by warfare and drought as villagers were displaced from lands about which they had micro-geographical knowledge to mitigate the effects of recurrent droughts.