7
In the name of the state
We were simply and purely forgetting that we are in Africa, where sociocultural reality has specific characteristics. (Provincial Director of Assistance and Control, Nampula, 18 May 1991)1
The remainder of this book is largely devoted to analyzing memory practices in Mozambique in the late 1980s and early 1990s. My discussion draws on the insights of recent historical studies which show that “even at the social level, memory is a structuring of forgetfulness.”2 Like these studies and others dedicated to deconstructing the discourses of power in colonial and national settings,3 it delineates the performative effects of silences that punctuate and encode statist narratives – in this case, silences produced by repressed, buried or unacknowledged social memories. Both chapters also call attention to the ways in which forms of state legitimation, at both the local and national level, performed a species of “anti-memory” work in the early 1990s. In applying the anti-memory label, I expand the definition accorded to it by the anthropologist Richard Werbner. Werbner coined the term to denote ideological practices that call on political subjects “to remember as forgotten things they have actually never known in the past” – and thus that they could hardly be expected to be able to recollect.4 In the context considered here, participation in the exercise of feigning “delayed collective recall”5 was confined to Frelimo representatives, who were obliged to “remember” something it is doubtful that they had ever lost sight of – namely, “that we are in Africa, where socio-cultural reality has specific characteristics,” as the Director of the DPAC in Nampula put it. This chapter explores the political and ideological effects produced by “codes of oblivion” in state-sponsored retrospectives on the Frelimo revolution as it unfolded at the grassroots in Nampula and other predominantly Makua-Lomwé-speaking areas. It examines the ways in which such retrospectives, as they were formulated by local state authorities and more senior people affiliated with MAE’s “Traditional Authority/Power” (TA/P) project, highlight the fateful consequences of Frelimo’s early decision to remake rural political institutions and leadership. The essence of the ruling party’s
