6
Labor, tribute and authority
The apparent duplication of state authority in Nampula’s rural areas was but one aspect of a broader tendency: namely, the proliferation of local claims to political authority and, by extension, to access to, and control over, labor, land and tribute. This latter tendency, a defining feature of colonial rule throughout sub-Saharan Africa,1 had hardly been absent during the first seventeen years of Mozambican independence. But it became ever more pronounced as Frelimo took the first tentative steps to implement political reforms in Nampula’s rural districts starting in 1992.2 As a result, local grievances against the state multiplied among grassroots rivals for official recognition and their actual or would-be subjects. To this extent, the retraditionalization of rural administration accentuated the political crisis at the grassroots level. This outcome is only fully intelligible when situated within the framework of national economic and political change and, especially, of the dynamic interplay between the two. The evidence from Nampula sits uneasily alongside of revisionist accounts which contend or presume that the return to chiefly rule, both in Nampula and further afield, was a fait accompli before it was officially sanctioned by provincial- or district-level government authorities. These accounts, both scholarly and otherwise, ascribe the political ascendancy of chiefs qua chiefs over party–state institutions in government-held zones to three factors: (1) Renamo’s resurrection of indirect rule in areas under rebel military control, a political and administrative arrangement that was allegedly both acclaimed and assisted by the populace; (2) the insurgent army’s wartime attacks on Frelimo representatives (which, apparently, did nothing, or nothing much, to compromise Renamo’s initial popularity); and (3) the mutually reinforcing combination of declining state capacity and legitimacy. On this view, the rising stock of chiefs simultaneously contributed to, reflected and enforced a new, more equitable, distribution of power between the Frelimo regime and the rural population. Specifically, the emerging balance of forces compelled an increasingly debilitated and embattled state to bow to peasant interests and needs in matters relating to residential patterns, work arrangements and rhythms, and cultural and religious practices.
