After the war ended, in 1995, Bishop Dom Dinis Sengulane set up a project called Transforming Arms into Tools (TAE). During the civil war, millions of guns and other weapons poured into the country (there are no weapons manufacturers in Mozambique) and most of them remain hidden or buried in the bush. The project was an attempt to eliminate the threat presented by the hidden weapons. Mozambicans were encouraged to hand them over in exchange for items like plows, bicycles and sewing machines. In one case a whole village gave up its weapons in exchange for a tractor.

Four Mozambican artists, Cristovao Canhavato, Hilario Nhatugueja, Fiel dos Santos and Adelino Serafim Maté, were then hired to create what has been called the Tree of Life, a sculpture of a tree made entirely from the decomissioned weapons handed into the TAE project.

Its unclear what effect the TAE, and the Tree of Life, have had on post-war Mozambique. However, one reporter asked some local citizens whether they felt that those who committed atrocities during the war should be punished. He replied, "If you did that, the whole of Mozambique should have been punished." "War is war," another explained. "Everything that happens in war is violent. You can't pick out certain parts of it as worse than the rest."