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Myth as a “meaning-making” device in post-independence Mozambique1
According to the French arbiter of morals, Ernest Renan, historical amnesia is an unavoidable, congenital malady of nations and nation–states.2 As John Lonsdale paraphrases Renan’s argument, “Nations have a great deal to forget. Nations must have a history and they must get it wrong.”3 Mozambique is no exception to Renan’s rule. The story I tell in this book concerns the post-independence state’s evolving relationship to rural political authority in Nampula Province during the first two decades of independence. It also concerns the selectivity and vagaries of public and official memory about crucial aspects of this relationship.4 When Frelimo acceded to state power in 1975, the nationalist and increasingly radicalized front immediately proceeded to abolish statutory chieftaincy, the institution that had served as the main pillar of colonial rural administration. Why did Frelimo take such a sweeping action on the morrow of the revolution? One answer is that the Frelimo leadership was motivated primarily by a commendable desire to create a unitary jural and political system.5 A second response is much less charitable: that the overriding objective of Mozambique’s new rulers was to eliminate an independent, potentially oppositional, power base firmly rooted in the country’s overwhelmingly peasant population.6 In all likelihood, Frelimo’s motivations were mixed – much as they were for other radical nationalist regimes.7 In either case, the belief that, on the question of rural leadership, Frelimo triumphed in its bid to wreak wrenching change by decree is both widespread and firmly held. On this account, the new government succeeded in refashioning political institutions in the countryside in the early independence period in the manner it desired. Chieftaincy was replaced by the organs of “popular power” and Portuguese-recognized chiefs, known as régulos, were, in their majority, summarily and unceremoniously supplanted by local, often fresh-faced, party militants, known as “secretaries.” This founding myth of epochal change came to serve as a baseline against which to measure and interpret subsequent developments. The most notable of these developments was the outbreak of Renamo’s rural insurgency in 1977 and the war’s dramatic spread and intensification in the early 1980s. The South African-backed rebels soon gained no small measure of notoriety
