8
Roots, routes and rootlessness Ruling political practice and Mozambican studies
The demise of political vanguardism destabilized the hitherto close association between difference and anti-patriotism. As Jorge Rebelo, then chief of Frelimo propaganda, put it in 1990, “Today we cannot pretend that everyone is with Frelimo.”1 The advent of multiparty politics indicated that legitimate difference, both between the party and the polity and within the polity itself, would gain recognition. It remained to be seen, however, what kinds of differences would be recognized and how they would be cast in official discursive and political practice; which social bases of dissent would be legitimized and by what rationale; and whether Frelimo’s classificatory schema, as described in Chapter 1, could accommodate these changes and how. This chapter addresses these issues.2 I argue that the built-in instability of Frelimo’s original social taxonomy provided just enough versatility not only to endure but to seek to capitalize on fairly sweeping political change. In particular, it enabled the ruling party to assimilate and turn to its advantage key elements of the revisionist critique. The facility with which this assimilation occurred discloses the extent to which Frelimo’s sociology and that of its revisionist critics move in a common conceptual universe. As already noted, instrumentalization carried risks. It also exacted an immediate price, as I show below. Moreover, there is little reason to suppose that it produced a hegemonic outcome, even in the short term. It’s also worth reiterating that the ability of the ruling regime to manipulate the myth of revolutionary rupture was a product of the specific historical circumstances laid out in previous chapters: most notably the availability of the founding moment to which this myth refers to multiple, contrasting, interpretations – an attribute that was either inherent to that moment itself or externally-conferred or, as I have suggested, some combination of the two. In addition, donor credulity with respect to the revisionist critique no doubt lent a hand to Frelimo’s efforts to mold the past to suit its contemporary political needs.
The enemies of the people revisited I suggested in Chapter 7 that, by the early 1990s, post-independence rule by non-royals had come to figure as either a foil or a fetish for the totality of
