Roots, routes and rootlessness: ruling political practice

8 Introduction

Afterten days of interviewing, we returned to Namapa with more questions about the Namapa Naparamas than answers. The day after we got back, we stopped at a local café. There we encountered a functionary of the district administration having a drink with a young man whom the functionary introduced as a Naparama “major” from Lalaua. We fell into conversation. The two men informed us that the Naparamas in Alua had thrown up a roadblock and had raided the grain warehouse of World Vision, a Christian evangelist non-governmental organization (NGO). The police had eventually intervened but, on last notice, the roadblock was still standing. The major went on to explain that he had been sent by the provincial government to recover some of the looted goods. More interestingly, he had been tasked with “undoing” the parama vaccine as a means of dispensing with the troublesome Namapa Naparamas once and for all.

As we subsequently learned, the major, escorted by the Namapa police, was eventually able to recover some sewing machines,cloth, articles of clothing and cassettes, among other stolen goods. He did so by beating Naparamas believed to have participated in the Namapa and Alua riots and by pronouncing his victims “ordinary people” who henceforth possessed no supernatural powers or special immunities. Those Naparamas who were not suspect were simply sprinkled with a liquid “medicine” as a means of dispelling the parama vaccine’s effects.27

By morning the roadblock had been lifted and we drove back to Nampula City, the provincial capital, without incident. One of my first stops back in town was the local office of the Maputo-based daily newspaper Notícias. It was there I picked up two weeks’ worth of newspapers held for me while I was in the outback. I rummaged through the stack, curious as to whether the Naparama riot in Namapa had made national news and, if so, how it had been reported. The story had indeed received coverage. The most striking feature of the write-up was the manner in which an unidentified government source characterized the protesters. According to Notícias, the source maintained that “the area of Namapa doesn’t have the original ‘Naparamas’, ‘the real Naparamas’ in Nampula are in Ribáuè, Mecubúri, Chalaua, up to Moma ...,’” districts to Namapa’s west and south.28

By discrediting the Namapa Naparamas’ claims to state assistance in this manner, the government representative, it seemed to me, was obliquely acknowledging the state’s own hand in the expanded reproduction of the Naparama movement and, by extension, in the production of what officialdom, in retrospect at least, saw as fraudulent Naparamas. For the functionary in question didn’t seem to be charging Zinco with quackery – many of the Naparamas of Mecubúri had also been vaccinated by Zinco and they seemed to pass the authenticity litmus test.29 Nor did it appear as though officialdom subscribed to the view that Zinco’s men in Namapa were imposters – otherwise, the provincial government would not have sent in the Naparama major to neutralize the vaccine’s reputed effects. If the Namapa Naparamas were fakes, they were apparently thoroughly unaware

Introduction 9

that they were. It seemed likely, then, that if, in the government’s estimation, the Namapa Naparamas were not the real McCoy, it was by virtue of the state’s own enabling – but also adulterating – intervention in their formation.

Other observers of the Mozambican scene will, no doubt, have their own readings of the above occurrences.30 For me, the history of the government’s relationship to the Naparamas in Namapa came to stand for, and to help render intelligible, a whole concatenation of ruling ideological practice dating from independence in 1975. This history neatly illustrates two constants in this practice whose consequences have yet to be adequately plumbed. First, the Naparama experience in Namapa points up the manner in which Frelimo’s discourse has studiously disavowed the state’s own complicity in shoring up and renewing the very “traditional” leadership, institutions and practices it was publicly committed to extinguishing. Second, it discloses the ways in which officialdom has sought to derive maximum political advantage from the consequences of its unacknowledged and/or covert actions. Certainly this was the case of the evolution of the government’s interactions with chieftaincy in Nampula and beyond, as the present study is dedicated to demonstrating.

As this book also aims to show, the ideological practices referenced above enabled and structured ruling mnemonic narratives and performance both prior to, and following, Frelimo’s abandonment of official Marxism in 1989 and the promulgation of a multiparty constitution the following year. However, their meaning and overall effects were fundamentally altered by the end of single-party rule and the jettisoning of socialist pretensions. Up until the transition to political pluralism, these practices served to bolster a triumphalist discourse and to legitimate the modernizing, revolutionary state. Thereafter, they became theorganizing principle ofstate-sponsored retrospectives on why socialism had failed and, especially, why it had failed so abysmally in the outback. In this latter-day incarnation, they formed part of “a set of complex mnemonic readjustments” typical of post-conflict regimes seeking to depoliticize a highly controversial, divisive past and thereby garner the requisite measure of legitimacy for the emergent postconflict political order.31 One means of accomplishing this objective, as Richard Wilson notes, is to “expunge the ideological motivations for the conflict.” This may be a particularly attractive option in “complicated contexts of political compromise, where neither opposing side in a civil war had won an outright military victory.”32

Mozambique was one of these contexts. The peace accord was a product of the military stalemate that prevailed starting in the late 1980s. Predictably, it bore all the hallmarks of a two-way political deal, with significant concessions by both sides. In entering in direct peace talks with Renamo, Frelimo had had to abandon its longstanding stance that the rebels were mere apartheid proxies and, as such, were unworthy negotiating partners. Renamo, for its part, had been compelled to renounce its commitment to

10 Introduction

overthrowing the Frelimo government and to recognize the legitimacy of the Mozambican state.

Neither the electoral results nor political arrangements over the past decade have unambiguously vindicated either side. The 1994 elections forever buried the notion that Frelimo, as a self-styled “vanguard,” represented all of “the people”: Renamo won over 33 percent of the presidential vote and captured majorities in five of Mozambique’s eleven provinces, all of which are situated in the country’s long mid-section. The poll showed unambiguously that Mozambique was deeply divided and that regional disparities in economic and educational opportunities, living standards, income and life expectancy were one major source of political division. However, despite Renamo’s unexpectedly strong finish and despite substantial international pressure on Frelimo to follow the example set by the ANC in South Africa and form a “government of national unity,” Renamo found itself excluded from the halls of executive power in the first elected government. This scenario was repeated after Mozambique held its second general elections in 1999 when Renamo, now leading a coalition of opposition parties, significantly narrowed Frelimo’s margin of victory, winning 48 percent of the presidential vote. In the event, Renamo has had to settle for playing the loyal opposition in the national parliament and the not insignificant perquisites that come with it.33

Postwar Mozambique approximates the general scenario portrayed by Wilson in another respect: namely, political conditions have been ripe for the production of a revisionist history that eliminates ideological considerations from its frame. The peace accord was not followed by a Mozambican equivalent of the Nuremberg trials; no truth commission was set up; thus far, no attempt has been made, by either the Mozambican government or private citizen groups, to prosecute apartheid-era generals or operatives; the postwar period has been marked by a dearth of calls, either from the government or the various political parties, for mounting a nationwide reckoning with the past; and demands along these lines that have been voiced by the public have not given rise to a concerted campaign, let alone a social movement.34 The one official inquiry that could have potentially shed light on (and attracted significant international press coverage of) the apartheid regime’s responsibility for producing the Mozambican tragedy, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), was hamstrung to a great extent in its investigations of South Africa’s border wars by the paucity of amnesty applications submitted by current and former SADF personnel.35

In addition, even before peace gained a foothold, there was little separating Frelimo and Renamo ideologically. Both parties are formally committed to creating a liberal democratic order and establishing the rule of law. Both endorse policies aimed at alleviating poverty, restoring social services and reconstructing the national infrastructure. Both are for spurring economic growth through market reforms. And both favor strong foreign investment and the formation of a national bourgeoisie.

Introduction 11

Frelimo’s ideological reorientation helps explain its uneasy relation to its recent past. The ruling party has evinced little appetite for defending its socialist interlude, the early years of which witnessed the consolidation of an authoritarian regime whose politics were exclusionary, commandist and often coercive, whose policies were totalizing in design, and whose rural interventions prejudiced the livelihoods of most smallholders. Of late, some high-ranking members have gone so far as to openly rue and even disavow the party’s former radicalism.36 Renamo, for its part, has been even less inclined to dwell on the details of its history: most notably the circumstances of its genesis, the identity of its handlers and its combat tactics. Indeed, Renamo’s leaders have sometimes seen fit to complement their strategy of avoidance with one of blanket denial.37 Political developments over the past decade have no doubt heightened the two sides’ mutual, if divergent, interest in glossing a violent and traumatizing past. While Frelimo continues to dominate Mozambican politics, the emerging political dispensation also exhibits some of the defining characteristics of “an elite powersharing regime,” with Renamo as Frelimo’s power-sharing partner.38 The entrenchment of such patterns of political interaction could have only strengthened the tendency toward erasure.39

However, purging the conflict of ideological content was not the primary purpose of mnemonic revisions that took place in the 1990s. Rather, it was to minimize the government’s own responsibility for engendering and aggravating the national trauma of dictatorship and war by shoehorning that responsibility into a single source: Frelimo’s initial hostility to tradition and especially its animus toward chiefly rule. At the national level, memory practices designed to promote this version of events were conjoined with attempts to redefine the conflict’s protagonists in ideologically anodyne terms – terms more suitable to the post-Cold War global order. In the early stages of destabilization, party propagandists portrayed armed hostilities as a showdown between the forces of global socialist revolution and those of counter-revolution. In contrast, by the 1990s, Frelimo politicians tended to depict the confrontation as pitting defenders of Mozambican sovereignty against those implacably opposed to national independence and black rule, along with a handful of locals who had long ago sold out to them. At this stage, one found a rather different ensemble of story lines in Nampula. There, state-sponsored inquiries into the crisis of state legitimacy in the rural areas took a curious twist: more often than not they deleted Renamo, and by extension foreign destabilization, from the picture altogether. This maneuver effectively eliminated not only the ideological impetuses for the war but also the fact of the war’s occurrence. The rather perplexing upshot was that the government and a supposedly tradition-bound population became the sole protagonists of post-independence conflict. This book examines the genealogy of official and standardizing mnemonic practices, counter-intuitive or otherwise, and chronicles these practices’ varied combinations and significations.

12 Introduction

Mozambique as a bellwether

One of the primary objectives of the Frelimo revolution was to eliminate rural-based social practices and institutions that the ruling party deemed to be embarrassing holdovers from an oppressive, “feudal” precolonial past.In Frelimo’s estimate, some of the legacies of feudalism had been rendered even more degenerate, corrupt and “obscurantist” after the 500-year-long colonial encounter. Chieftaincy, the cornerstone of Portuguese indirect rule, ranked foremost among them. Accordingly, chiefly rule was statutorily abolished and chiefs who had served the colonial administration were initially barred from holding public office.

In abrogating chiefly privileges and prerogatives, Frelimo was following in the tradition of the late Julius Nyerere, the first president of independent Tanzania. Nyerere was instrumental in the founding of Frelimo in 1962,one year after his own country gained independence. He also facilitated Frelimo’s armed struggle by offering Tanzanian territory as a safe rear base from which to launch and prosecute guerrilla operations. Prior to that, on the eve of decolonization in most of British- and French-ruled Africa, Nyerere distinguished himself among African nationalists as the foremost champion of “a single, unified citizenship, both deracialized and deethnicized,” in a postcolonial political dispensation.40 Deracialization meant extinguishing the invidious, race-based legal distinction between citizen and subject that, across the continent, differentiated between “natives,” on the one hand, and white settler populations and “assimilated” or “evolved” Africans, on the other. “Deethnicization” (or “detribalization”) meant dissolving ethnic-based distinctions that had defined and divided colonial subjects ruled by the “Native Authority” under the auspices of supposedly “tribal” chiefs. In calling for deracialization, Nyerere’s voice formed part of a continent-wide chorus. The Tanzanian leader’s insistence on wedding deracialization to deethnicization, however, resonated much less widely. The consequences of African nationalisms’ differential response to the question of detribalization were soon to become apparent:

Deracialization signified the general achievement [of post-independence reform]; it was a tendency characteristic of all postindependence states, conservative and radical. The outer limit of postindependence reform was marked by detribalization, a tendency characteristic of only the radical states.41

Frelimo arguably pushed the envelope the furthest in establishing that outer limit. It not only dismantled the dualist juridical system inherited from the colonial regime, dispensing with the “customary” as a separate, residual body of law. It also established a network of newly created people’s tribunals which were presided over by locally elected judges. The brief of these tribunals was to nurture the positive aspects of customary law and suppress the

Introduction 13

negative ones in accordance with constitutionally-enshrined revolutionary principles.42

Frelimo’s uncompromising stand on the question of rural political and juridical authority, and its dim view of many rural-based cultural practices, gave rise to numerous excesses and abuses. In the first years of independence lobola (bridewealth), polygyny, initiation rites, rainmaking ceremonies, divination, witchcraft accusations and exorcism were subjected to repeated official denunciation and, in many localities, to government proscription. Many chiefs, irrespective of their personal and political histories, were ridiculed and politically repressed. When Renamo arrived on the scene, traditional authorities were often viewed by Frelimo officials with suspicion or were automatically branded as collaborators. Some were killed.

The dark side of detribalization did not come to the attention of an international audience until the late 1980s, the eve of the Naparamas’ formation. The extent to which Frelimo representatives, at various levels of authority, struck early compromises with chiefly hierarchies, or tolerated or actively encouraged such arrangements, also remained below the radar screen of many viewers. Rather, the stories that circulated were those that the leadership wanted the outside world to hear – stories that fit and furthered the epic, heroic narrative the ruling party was busy propagating. These emphasized that the most politically conscious element within the population had gained local leadership posts.43 Such stories also highlighted the determination of rural inhabitants to “out” party-nominated candidates for local representative bodies who, unbeknownst to the Frelimo authorities, had collaborated with the colonial regime. Chiefs and other traditional authorities reportedly ranked high among those who were exposed and rejected by newly enfranchised voters.44 The propaganda worked. Leftists and progressives worldwide lionized Frelimo’s tangible commitment to transcending the legacy of indirect rule. They trumpeted its apparent ability to act on this commitment in a manner that seemed designed to foster democratic practice at the grassroots. And they applauded the rural population’s favorable response to the new government’s objectives on this front.

Frelimo’s position on chieftaincy and “custom” was not the only one that earned the party international acclaim. The ruling party’s political project was part of a “second wave” of socialism that swept over the continent.45 Like their co-religionists, Frelimo leaders were as critical of the ideology of “African socialism,” as espoused by the likes of Nyerere, Leopold Senghor of Senegal and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, as they were of the “false decolonization” embraced by conservative postcolonial regimes, such as the Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Kenya. Like other devotees of “scientific socialism” on the continent, Frelimo leaders were highly skeptical of the African socialist claim that, prior to colonial conquest, a communitarian ethos had held sway from the Cape to Cairo. To the extent that such an ethos had existed, party intellectuals argued, it had all too often served as a cover for the relations of domination that had characterized a feudal society. They were dismissive of

14 Introduction

the notion that genuinely egalitarian communal traditions had not been seriously impaired by the momentous socio-economic changes wrought by colonial occupation and capitalist development. Foremost among these were processes of class formation, a historical development African socialists strongly tended to downplay or completely overlook. As a direct consequence of these changes, Frelimo leaders reasoned, there was little prospect that, once liberated from the yoke of colonial oppression and exploitation, the continent would evince a natural proclivity to evolve in a socialist direction, as the African socialism’s proponents liked to think. Rather, a truly socialist society could only emerge as a consequence of a vanguard-led, peasant- and worker-driven class struggle against entrenched domestic interests that would actively oppose such a denouement. Whereas proponents of “first-wave” socialism defined the continent’s main nemesis as externally based, emanating as it did from the metropolitan countries, Frelimo, like other professedly Marxist parties, insisted that Western imperialist interests worked with and through locally-rooted clients, who constituted the “internal enemy.”46

With respect to the specific case of post-independence Mozambique, Frelimo figured as follows. Since most of the 250,000-strong settler community had bolted in the years leading up to, and in the immediate aftermath of, independence, the internal enemy consisted of whatever remnants of the colonial bourgeoisie had stayed put plus elements within the African petty bourgeoisie that were not willing to “commit suicide as a class.”47 Both groups were constitutionally antagonistic to socialist politics. Although Frelimo’s accession to power had left them politically weakened and off balance, there was the ever-present danger that they could regroup with a view to subverting the revolution. Under the circumstances, nothing less than a knock-out blow would do.

Frelimo’s application of class analysis to Mozambique’s domestic landscape received high marks from political progressives of various stripes. By the time Frelimo’s Marxism began to crystallize in the late 1960s, the ideology of African socialism was on the wane.48 The reasons for this were multiple. First, the weight of the evidence produced both by historical research and contemporary social scientific analysis belied the assertion that Africa, either in the past or present, was classless. Second, some of the governments most closely associated with a non-Marxist socialist pathway were registering less than impressive economic results. Moreover, certain of their number had shown themselves to be no less prone to political malaise and instability than their “neo-colonial” neighbors. Accordingly, many observers had come to the conclusion that African socialist ideology was simply “devoid of genuinely transformative strategies.”49

Frelimo’s unsentimental appraisal of the social relations that had characterized precolonial Africa, its much more sharp-eyed view of the fundamental transformations engendered by colonial and capitalist penetration and its embrace of the universal corpus of socialist thought were three factors that

Introduction 15

conspired to make post-independence Mozambique “a bellwether for the future of socialism in Africa.”50 There were others, most notably Frelimo’s record as a national liberation movement between 1962 and 1974, when a coup staged by the armed forces in Lisbon paved the way for the independence of Portugal’s African colonies.

The official story of this period runs as follows.51 In guerrilla-captured territory, or “liberated zones,” there emerged a synergistic, mutually transformative dynamic between the nationalist guerrillas and the local peasant population. Force of circumstance played no small part here. The guerrillas needed to secure the active cooperation of rural residents to advance militarily and to consolidate their territorial gains. They relied on the locals for food, intelligence, ferrying supplies to and from Tanzania, fresh recruits and personnel for popular militia. The locals, in their turn, depended on the guerrillas to protect them from Portuguese reprisals. They likewise depended on Frelimo to help them reorganize their lives and livelihoods in the radically altered circumstances of a rural insurgency.

Getting rural assistance and allegiance required political work both prior to the infiltration of Frelimo fighters to areas under Portuguese control and following the capture of new territory. But the process of politicization was not a one-way street. In the course of moving and living amongst the peasantry, the guerrillas learned about local needs, grievances, experiences and aspirations. As a result, they acquired a deeper understanding of the struggle they were prosecuting, as well as of the form and direction that struggle should take. The upshot was that the guerrillas radicalized the peasants and the peasants further radicalized the guerrillas. This self-reinforcing dynamic found tangible expression in the spread of collective forms of agricultural production in the liberated zones. Indeed, Frelimo would later claim that, by the early 1970s, a proto-socialist agriculture had, by and large, displaced household farming in these areas.52

The emerging peasant–guerrilla alliance was a key determinant in the outcome of power struggles at the summit of the movement. Internal political tensions, which dated from Frelimo’s inception, erupted into an escalating confrontation after the advent of the armed struggle in 1964. At issue were differences regarding strategy and tactics, as well as concerning how to administer the liberated zones in Cabo Delgado and Niassa. The long brewing internal crisis came to a head with the assassination of Eduardo Mondlane, Frelimo’s first president, in 1969.

According to official history, these internal feuds pitted “reactionary” (or “liberal-reactionary”) nationalists against their “revolutionary” counterparts. In the former camp stood black racists, aspirant capitalists and elitists. Secessionists and tribalists also figured prominently within its ranks. In the case of the latter group, ethnic exclusivism was inextricably bound up with its members’ vested interest in perpetrating patriarchal social relations. The “reactionaries” tended to oppose mounting a protracted people’s war that would, in their view, unduly politicize the populace. To their

16 Introduction

mind, national liberation boiled down to deracialization and nothing more. This camp thus strenuously opposed transforming social relations in the liberated zones or in a future independent Mozambique. The counterrevolutionary faction also tended to favor maintaining a strict separation between the political and military arms of the movement and a command structure in which the guerrilla army would be subordinate to a civilian leadership.

The opposing camp consisted of anti-tribalists and anti-racists who championed women’s rights and a transethnic, territory-wide nationalism. This group, the revolutionary wing, equated decolonization with sweeping socioeconomic transformation and believed that social relations in the liberated zones should herald the future postcolonial social order. The radicals also insisted that the relationship between combatants and non-combatants should be one of absolute parity and that all cadres should undergo both political and military training. The reason the revolutionary wing wound up carrying the day and succeeded in expelling its political adversaries from the movement was because it had been bolstered politically by the decisive support of the ever more robust and ever more radicalized alliance between Frelimo guerrillas and the peasantry in the newly liberated zones.

Even some of Frelimo’s early supporters were willing to concede that the line-ups in Frelimo’s internal battles were not as fixed as official history later made them out to be and that factors other than purely ideological ones were in play.53 Frelimo’s critics and non-partisan scholars have gone further, interpreting the power struggles that racked the movement and their eventual resolution in a wholly different light. In their majority, they have tended to portray the conflicts as, first and foremost, a product of ethnic, ethno-regional or regionally- and sociologically-distinct “creole” elites. (Some analysts have also added personal rivalries to the mix.54)

According to one influential account,55 the revolutionary faction prevailed because its leaders commanded the loyalty of the guerrillas. On this reading, the alliance that powered the radical wing to victory was not that between the guerrillas and the peasantry. Rather, it was between an assimilated elite, the preponderance of whose members hailed from Mozambique’s south, and a guerrilla army, whose ranks were filled disproportionately by Makondespeakers who formed the bulk of the population of northern Cabo Delgado, where the armed struggle was launched. By the same token, the merging of the front’s political and military wings in 1966 and the subsequent ascendancy of the “revolutionary line” were signs of the movement’s progressive militarization rather than of its leftward tilt and the radicalization of its peasant base. Army commander Samora Machel’s accession to the presidency of Frelimo in 1970 unambiguously exemplified this trend.

This counter-narrative insists that, at the very least, Frelimo hyped its accomplishments within the liberated zones. Farming operations in these areas remained predominantly a family affair. Collective agriculture, to the extent that it was practiced at all, was always subordinate to, and dictated

Introduction 17

by, the strategic imperatives of the armed struggle. Communal undertakings were merely one way of guaranteeing the subsistence of the guerrillas, who also continued to rely on produce harvested from household fields. Following the triumph of the revolutionary faction, Frelimo’s Defense Department assumed sole responsibility for the organization and control of collective production, a development that prefigured both Frelimo’s militarization and the statization of post-independence Mozambique. Social relations in the liberated zones could be accurately described as socialist only to the extent that a historically-contingent and evanescent “war socialism” emerged, a state of affairs “in which everything must be shared: objectives, resources, sacrifices, aspirations and fears.”56

The historical record vindicates many aspects of the above account, the main lineaments of which have been outlined by scholars belonging to what I call the “revisionist” school. The evidence shows that Frelimo exaggerated its accomplishments within the liberated zones, the amount of territory it seized and the number of people living under its pre-independence administration. Historical research also bolsters the thesis that Frelimo gravitated toward statist, highly centralized and commandist solutions to the challenges posed by development prior to independence – a finding that seriously undercuts arguments that assign a large measure of blame for this orientation to the baneful influence exercised by the legion of Soviet and East European advisers who arrived on the Mozambican scene after 1975.57 At the same time, post-independence developments have greatly strengthened the case that the armed struggle left a debilitating legacy of militarism. In addition, these developments leave little doubt that official history and pro-Frelimo scholarship gave short shrift to non-ideological factors in their renderings of Frelimo’s formative years.

That said, the armed struggle achieved considerable “nationalist success,”58 as measured by Frelimo’s demonstrated ability to achieve the following: (1) build and maintain nationalist unity; (2) mobilize rural dwellers politically; (3) defend the civilian population in the liberated zones from colonial military reprisals; (4) work diplomatic circuits to its political advantage; and (5) sustain its commitment to the primacy of politics in pursuing the goal of decolonization on the terms of its choosing: namely, the immediate transfer of full sovereignty to Frelimo itself without any conditions attached – including the condition of an electoral mandate of any kind.59 On the basis of these criteria, the efficacy of Frelimo’s armed struggle was, in the context of Africa in the 1970s, second only to that of the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde), the nationalist movement that fought a contemporaneous guerrilla war to liberate Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde from Portuguese rule.

It is also widely accepted thatthe years of nationalist armed struggle produced a leadership that was remarkably unified, disciplined, politically astute and diplomatically adroit; at independence, Frelimo was forwardlooking; and it was bent on pursuing a program of radical reform in the

18 Introduction

name of socialist construction. Most close observers would also agree that Machel, the first president of independent Mozambique,

was a politician very similar to the first generation of African nationalist leaders for whom the ideals of anti-colonial struggle and of non-tribal, non-racial nationalism were a real motivating force, in marked contrast to the military dictators and corrupt politicians who were soon to succeed them and who were protected by the superpowers during the Cold War.60

If in the mid-1970s three former Portuguese colonies, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Angola, were seen as “the last great hope of Third World ‘socialism’,”61 by 1980, the burden of that hope was shouldered by Mozambique alone. In Guinea-Bissau, the PAIGC had, by that stage, opted against assuming the mantle of a vanguard after independence, settling instead on “a policy of national unity.” The Leninist model of revolution, the PAIGC concluded at its 1977 congress, was precluded by the absence of “a proletariat in the sense of a class conscious of its interests and prepared to assume its historical responsibilities.” While the congress didn’t say so, national demographics no doubt also figured in the equation: out of a total population that was then well shy of one million, the industrial labor force was a mere 1,800-strong and only some 24,000 people enjoyed the benefit of regular employment.62 By 1980, “the PAIGC’s nationalist legitimacy had largely dissipated” and longstanding internal divisions erupted in a coup that year which splintered the movement.63

In Angola, the MPLA had managed, with the aid of Cuban troops and Soviet armament, to repulse a combined and coordinated assault mounted by South Africa and two rival independence movements, Unita and the USbacked FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola), on Angola’s capital, Luanda, on the eve of independence in November 1975. With the assistance of its foreign allies, the MPLA had even forced the SADF to withdraw its armored columns from Angolan territory altogether in March 1976. Victory over the South Africans did not, however, spell a halt to the security challenges faced by Luanda. The new government remained distracted by small-scale but destabilizing guerrilla attacks launched from Zairean territory by remnants of the FNLA and by FLEC (Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda), a secessionist movement seeking independence for the oil-rich province of Cabinda in the north. In May 1977, the government sustained an abortive but bloody coup attempt, in which several MPLA cabinet members were killed. The putsch greatly heightened the MPLA’s sense of siege and contributed to the Angolan state’s authoritarian and repressive tendencies. And, on the heels of Zimbabwean independence, South African military incursions into southern Angola recommenced, along with renewed attacks by Unita, which, following the virtual collapse of the FNLA, stood poised to become a US, as well as a South African, client.64

Introduction 19

As William Minter notes, “While Angola was facing this new conventional assault, Mozambique was celebrating the independence of Zimbabwe and chalking up military victories against the remnants of the MNR.” In 1980, Renamo “attacks were still small-scale, and largely limited to remote areas of Manica and Sofala provinces.”65 It was not until the following year that rebel military activity gradually began to pick up and “low-level harassment” gradually deepened into a “massive sustained assault.”66 At the top of the decade, then, it was reasonable to conjecture, as Crawford Young did, that

An ultimate verdict on the Afro-Marxist pathway will probably hinge on the political evolution and economic performance of Mozambique in the 1980s ... Only in Mozambique are all the elements of the exemplary experience assembled: a sophisticated and united leadership; a relatively clear-cut ideological identity; a coherent political underpinning in FRELIMO. The 1980s will be a critical decade for this interesting experiment in political economy.67

Post-socialist Mozambique, recent historiographical debate and contemporary forms of mnemonic legitimation

The 1980s did indeed prove decisive but not in the way Frelimo’s champions had hoped. The decade witnessed the rapid unraveling of the Mozambican revolution and the onset of a large-scale humanitarian catastrophe. Once considered a virtually peerless pioneer in forging a socialist pathway in Africa, Mozambique now enjoys an equally exceptional, if diametrically opposed, status: today the country is, in the eyes of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, a flagship of neoliberal principles on an otherwise growth-challenged, hopelessly neopatrimonial continent. The de facto two-party system that has evolved since 1992 enjoys a further distinction: it is considered by international diplomats as a paragon of UN-sponsored “pacification,” national reconciliation and democratization.

These self-congratulatory images soft-pedal or ignore several disconcerting realities. By the time the peace accord was signed, Mozambique was one of the poorest and most aid-dependent countries in the world; the economy and infrastructure had been devastated; two-thirds of the population had been reduced to extreme poverty, a condition from which they, in their majority, have yet to exit; disparities in living standards both between and within regions were widening, a trend that continues to the present day (and is widely believed to have fed the war); and official corruption, which had been inconsequential up until the mid-1980s, had become endemic. In addition, Mozambique stood on the cusp of “effectively becom[ing] a free-trade area,” where all manner of smuggling operations (primarily to and from

20 Introduction

South Africa) flourished; and the underground networks involved in these operations would, in short order, generate powerful crime syndicates, whose sway over state institutions has become notorious.68

Mozambique’s breathtakingly speedy transformation from a Cold War, Third World battleground to a model of post-conflict, capitalist development has, it bears emphasis, occurred on Frelimo’s watch. Predictably, many leading government and party officials rank among the primary beneficiaries of the new political and economic dispensation. Those who enthusiastically promised that Mozambique would be turned into a graveyard of capitalism are now leading advocates of, and avid accumulators in, capitalism’s recent, full-blown resurrection.

The big surprise has been Renamo’s remarkable transformation from a military proxy at its inception into a postwar political party that, since 1994, has dominated oppositional politics both within and beyond the halls of the national parliament. And, despite severe organizational defects, a long history of fractiousness and a weak political program, the former rebel army has, until recently, posed an unexpectedly strong challenge to the ruling party at the ballot box.69

The demise of Frelimo’s socialist experiment, combined with Renamo’s stunning metamorphosis, the apparent ease of Frelimo’s conversion to neoliberal doctrine and the ruling party’s ability to maintain its grip on power, have raised many questions – concerning the nature, merits and demerits of the Mozambican revolution; the various factors, both structural and conjunctural, that contributed to the revolution’s defeat; the character and causes of rural dissent; and the main determinants in Renamo’s evolution and postwar staying power. Here we confine ourselves to those questions relating to Frelimo’s politics, policies and practice.

To what extent did Frelimo’s version of state socialism and its often heavy-handed tactics enhance Mozambique’s inherited vulnerability to external aggression and facilitate Renamo’s wartime military success? To the extent that mounting rural alienation with the Frelimo state played into Renamo’s hands, how much of this can be chalked up to widespread indifference to both parties to the conflict and how much to rural people’s alignment with and/or active support for the rebels? To what extent was broad-based opposition to the regime, especially in the rural areas, a reaction to the specifically socialist content of state interventions? A backlash against government counter-insurgency measures? A response to the government’s failure to deliver on its pledges and/or to defend the civilian population from rebel atrocities and predations?

Mozambique’s rather singular post-independence trajectory has also prompted discussion and debate as to the meaning and the authenticity of Frelimo’s commitment to socialism. There is general agreement that Frelimo’s embrace of the socialist option is only intelligible within the specific geopolitical circumstances arising from the Cold War. During the armed struggle, members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization

Introduction 21

(NATO) spurned Mondlane’s appeals for military assistance and aligned themselves unambiguously with Portugal. This was hardly surprising given that Portugal was itself a NATO member and, in the era of superpower confrontation, NATO was unwilling to jeopardize its access to strategicallysituated military bases in the Azores. In the event, Frelimo was compelled to seek aid and assistance elsewhere. In the early stages of the war for independence, it got military hardware and training primarily from non-aligned countries, such as Egypt, Algeria, Zambia and Tanzania. Subsequently, China and the Soviet Union supplied the lion’s share of money, arms and diplomatic support.70

There is also scholarly consensus that the prevailing international climate, however critical, only provides a partial explanation for Frelimo’s radicalization. The leadership’s ideological dispositions were no mere opportunistic bid for superpower resources in a bipolar world. Had that been the case, Frelimo would not have joined the non-aligned movement; nor would it have refused the Soviet Union’s request, following independence, to host a Russian naval base; nor would it have resisted pressure to take up sides in the Sino-Soviet dispute (a stance that made it one of the lone hold-outs among liberation movements throughout the continent); nor, in all likelihood, would it have retained its socialist identity following Moscow’s rejection of Mozambique’s application to join the Council for Mutual Economic Aid (Comecon) in 1981 – by which point China had sharply receded from the picture.71

In view of this history, most political analysts have sought to identify domestic political and sociological factors that contributed to this outcome. Frelimo sympathizers have tended to adopt Frelimo’s explanation for its ideological trajectory as their own. They cite the radicalizing effect of Lisbon’s obstinate refusal to decolonize, of the brutal nature of Portuguese colonialism and of the extremely repressive conditions in which popular struggles within and against this system of domination and exploitation were waged.72 In response, the revisionists have raised a series of pointed questions. Was the language of Marxism and vanguard-led revolution merely an ideological patina on what was, at bottom, a straightforwardly nationalist project? To what extent did Frelimo’s radical oratory serve merely to lend legitimacy to the core of the leadership, most of whose members hailed from a numerically insignificant, cosmopolitan, subaltern elite – one drawn to the cause of “armed nationalism”73 primarily because its upward mobility within the colonial order had been frustrated by institutionalized racism and white racial prejudice? If ruling political rhetoric chiefly served a legitimating function, to what degree was the leadership convinced of its own propaganda? And in what ways, if at all, did its rhetoric shape, rather than merely legitimate, policy choices?

Many of the debates that swirl around the foregoing lines of inquiry bear intimately on questions relating to historical change and continuity. To what extent did the revolutionary Frelimo state mark a radical break from

22 Introduction

its colonial predecessor? In what respects does the post-socialist Frelimo state represent a departure from the self-styled revolutionary regime that preceded it? Which features of the emerging postwar political economy unravel the changes (whether understood as gains or otherwise) enacted by Frelimo in its socialist incarnation and which are constants dating back to the colonial period?

Such questions inform M. Anne Pitcher’s criticisms of the argument that market reforms have produced patterns of economic ownership and production relations that hark back to the period of Portuguese occupation. She maintains that the “recolonization” thesis, a staple of many radical critiques of post-socialist Mozambique, misleads insofar as it understates the degree of continuity that characterized the transition to independence and, by and large, is blinkered to the enduring legacy of the command economy.74 According to Pitcher, what the recolonization thesis fails to appreciate is the path-dependency of the country’s historical development. This failure unduly complicates the task of distinguishing adequately between “interrupted continuities,” as manifested, say, by the re-emergence in the 1990s of a colonial-style cotton concessionary system (described in Chapter 2), and long-term, unbroken continuities, such as the history of state intervention in the economy.75

Where does the Naparama phenomenon fit into all of this? The conventional wisdom is that the Naparama story starkly revealed that Frelimo’s longstanding offensive against rural obscurantism had quietly fallen by the wayside. Writers such as R.M.A. Gonçalves and Malyn Newitt have emphasized the ways in which the government’s alignment with António’s warriors unambiguously signaled a sea change in the government’s stance on things “traditional.”76 The improbable military partnership that ensued showed as much as anything that Frelimo had completely forsaken its project of remaking the rural populace in its own image – that is, as assimilated, universalizing cosmopolitans. Indeed, Frelimo’s enlistment of the Naparamas in its counter-insurgency strategy demonstrated that the ruling party had bowed to the pressure of popular culture to ensure its own survival. That pressure, others have argued, likewise resulted in the realignment of official and chiefly authority in the late 1980s, effectively, if not officially, reversing Frelimo’s detribalization policy.

But, as I have already suggested, the Naparama experience in Namapa recounts a rather different tale, one which conveys hitherto underappreciated continuities, whose implications have yet to be fully understood: namely, the proclivity of state and party representatives to conveniently overlook the role of official institutions in reproducing obscurantist practices – and even, as in this case, facilitating their geographic spread – while, at one and the same time, capitalizing on the consequences of these past actions to further ruling political interests in the present. This aspect of Naparama story is one manifestation of a recurring syndrome whose origins lie in theoften overlookedreality that Frelimo’s detribalization policy was severely compro-

Introduction 23

mised from the outset. The cumulative weight of three closely related factors ensured this outcome: (1) the limited capacity of state institutions; (2) the refractoriness of rural social relations; and (3) what political scientist JeanFrançois Bayart would call “the reciprocal assimilation of elites”77 – in this case, between former Portuguese-recognized chiefs, their relatives and underlings, on the one hand, and local government and party officials, charged with executing Frelimo directives in the rural areas, on the other. To the extent that Frelimo’s detribalization policy was undermined by these factors, semi-formal moves toward the retraditionalization of rural administration in the 1990s represented the alignment of state policy with longstanding ruling practice. In Pitcher’s terms – and as Pitcher herself points out – these moves represented a long-term, or uninterrupted, continuity.

The question then becomes why so many discourses (e.g. popular, academic, policy, partisan, donor) pertaining to contemporary Mozambique privilege the notion of rupture and portray the post-independence state’s relationship to chiefs as one of a clean break followed by total reversal – that is, as an instance of interrupted continuity? This book limits its sights to one aspect of that question: why does post-socialist Frelimo itself remain invested in the discourse of rupture with respect to its early relations with chiefs and why is this discourse such a prominent feature of official mnemonic practice in the present? More broadly, the present monograph explores the kinds of memory work a postcolonial, post-socialist and postconflict regime of long standing undertakes in the African context. And it asks: if, as is now generally accepted, “remembering and forgetting are contingent and linked practices,”78 what are the specific modes and sites of this dialectic in such a setting?

Again,the story of the Namapa Naparamas is pertinent. For it is symptomatic of a pervasiveamnesia within ruling circles and state institutions concerning first, the limits of Frelimo’s writ; second, the limits and proclivities of state power; and third, attempts on the part of state and party representatives at various levels of authority and operating from diverse institutional sites to come to terms with, compensate for and/or make the most of prevailing realities. This complicated state of affairs and its suppression – both at the time and in retrospect – are pivotal to understanding forms of state legitimation in the postcolonial period. Whereas in the heyday of the revolution what I call the “myth of revolutionary rupture” served to bolster the discourse of Frelimo resolve, capacity and triumph, after 1990 this myth became Exhibit A in official explanations as to why the revolution engendered social turmoil, economic distress, civil strife and anti-Frelimo sentiment in the rural areas.

In its latter-day incarnation, the myth of revolutionary rupture acted as a screen in two senses of the word. In the first sense, it functioned to obscure from view the disruptions and trauma experienced by rural dwellers as a result of subsequent state policies and interventions.79 In the second, it provided a canvas onto which these later disruptions and traumas were

24 Introduction

retrospectively projected.80 In this latter capacity, it has paradoxically also served as a portal through which memory traces produced by subsequent traumatic events can be accessed. Demonstrating that this is the case, and seeking to provide a historically-rooted explanation of how it came to be so, constitute the main preoccupations of this book.

The Frelimo regime’s reshaping of its memory practices occurred in the geo-political context of the end of the Cold War, the global ascendancy of neoliberal doctrine and the demise of apartheid. On the domestic front, the context was one of a manifold transition: from war to peace, from a command to a market economy and from single-party rule to democratic constitutionalism. It was also one of extreme dependence on external patrons. The dimensions and modalities of this dependence are discussed elsewhere in this text. Here I examine other factors, both national and global, that combined to make the 1990s the beginning of a mnemonic watershed.

First, issues relating to the inter-generational transmission of memory have come to the fore. The Mozambican population is “overwhelmingly young.” In 1997, about 45 percent of the population was less than fifteen years old and thus was born well after independence.81 A high proportion of this section of the population was born in the midst of Mozambique’s postindependence war. Whatever their particular circumstances, all members of this age category would,at most, have only heard about Frelimo’s major accomplishments in the fields of preventive medicine, public health and education, almost all of which were wiped out by destabilization. In all likelihood, they would not have any firsthand memories of Machel, who was killed in a plane crash in 1986 and who, arguably more than anyone, personified the spirit, values and attributes of the Frelimo revolution: its martial and commandist character, its centralizing tendencies and its political certitude, on the one hand; its ramrod moral integrity, can-do attitude, relative responsiveness to public criticism and capacity for self-critique, on the other.82

It was with national demographic realities such as these in mind that the late president’s family and friends recently launched the “Samora Machel Documentation Centre” in Maputo to preserve his legacy.83 At the same time, many within the party leadership have found it in their interest to overlook the more “inconvenient” aspects of Machel’s legacy – that is, those aspects which would highlight how far Frelimo as a whole and many members of the leadership in particular have drifted from the revolution’s more virtuous or admirable attributes.84 The opposing approaches to the memory of Mozambique’s first president, an icon of the African revolution, are but one indication that the Frelimo elite is contending with the challenge of judging which aspects of its past qualify for conversion from “primary” memory – the memory “of a person who has lived through events and remembers them in a certain manner” – to “vicarious” memory – what we do when “we evoke our shared myth” of a given historical experience.85

Introduction 25

Second, in the postwar period, Frelimo has also had to confront more squarely than it hitherto had the question of generational replacement and renewal within its own ranks.86 Efforts to draw younger party cadres into the leadership date from the 1980s. However, the question of inter-generational succession within Frelimo has been both complicated and slowed by the ongoing importance of participation in the armed struggle as the chief badge of party loyalty, as proof positive of one’s nationalist bona fides and as a key credential for high-ranking posts. The year 1995 marks the first important milestone in the protracted and fitful process of retiring the “historic generation” – party militants “whose ideas and identities had been forged in the liberation struggle.”87 It was then that the party secretariat unexpectedly resigned en bloc and the Central Committee proceeded to elect a wholly new secretariat, only one of whose members had joined Frelimo prior to independence.

More recent events illustrate how progress on this front has been anything but linear. When, in 2001, Joaquim Chissano, Machel’s successor, announced his intention to step down upon completing his second elected term in office, he strongly hinted that the time was ripe for the party to choose a member of the upcoming generation as its candidate in the 2004 presidential election.88 Apparently, however, the Central Committee was of a different mind: it voted overwhelmingly for Armando Guebuza, a member of the top leadership since 1968.89

Generational change within the highest echelons of the executive branch of the government has been even slower: it was not until 2004 that Luisa Diogo, who, at forty-five, had been too young to serve in the armed struggle, was appointed prime minister. Upon her appointment Diogo assumed the highest office ever attained by someone who was not a veteran of the independence war.90 In summary, the period under review here was marked by the tension between the looming imperative of intra-party generational replacement, on the one hand, and resistance within Frelimo’s upper echelons to acceding to this imperative’s inexorable logic,on the other.

Third, turning to the world stage, recent and ongoing epochal changes to memory itself merit special attention. According to Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, the twentieth century saw political leaders not only opportunistically “massage” but ruthlessly “massacre” memory.91 The century’s final decades, however, witnessed the acceleration of memory discourses and a proliferation of “memory sites”92 (e.g. museums, memorials, commemorative events, re-enactments, celebrations, emblems) in Europe and the United States. This escalation, which continues unabated to the present day, was “energized by the broadening debate about the Holocaust ... and by media attention paid to the fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries of events in the history of the Third Reich.”93 Especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it both spurred, and was spurred by, “the increase of redress claims, the rise of identity politics, a politics of victimization and regret, and an increased willingness of governments to redress wrongdoing.”94

26 Introduction

While the memory boom and the politics closely allied with it have been variously read,95 social critics have warned that the current unprecedented obsession with the past and with securing the future of memory leaves us exceptionally susceptible to forgetting to remember the future itself. Such warnings, however, appear to apply only to the “North Atlantic societies” where these “mnemonic convulsions” originated and where memory itself has undergone commodification.96 As Andreas Huyssen has observed, the global spread of these convulsions has given rise to a rather different dynamic in other parts of the world:

What here appears by now largely as an increasingly successful marketing of memory by the Western culture industry ... takes a more explicitly political inflection in other parts of the world ... raising fundamental questions about human rights violations, justice, and collective responsibility.

And, as he goes on to emphasize, to the extent that memory discourses have been globalized, this has occurred through their localization in different national settings.97

The case of contemporary Mozambique bears out Huyssen’s remarks. To be sure, the globalization of memory discourses has left its mark on the country: for instance, what Huyssen calls “the universal trope for historical trauma,”98 the Holocaust, has been applied to Mozambique’s postindependence war.99 And it may well be the case that the crystallization of “a global atoning community” in the late twentieth century, and the political cachet conferred on this fast-expanding community’s members,100 facilitated the birth of a Frelimo-specific politics of acknowledgment that has become a signature feature of the ruling party’s post-Marxist ideological liturgy. However, it is also true that Frelimo’s tradition of self-criticism has a long, well-established pedigree and, as will become apparent in these pages, officialdom’s contemporary memory practices are most fruitfully seen in light of this history.

More importantly for our purposes is that Frelimo’s post-socialist mnemonic practices provide confirmation of the proposition that “If we want to understand the configuration of a discourse on the past, we have to take into account the fact that that discourse was constructed from the beginning of the event, that it is rooted there.”101 In this case, the “event” in question is the period bracketed by Mozambican independence, on the one hand, and the transition to political pluralism, on the other. I define the “beginning” of the event rather expansively to encompass the early years of the revolution, roughly 1975–1979/80. This was an especially fluid period politically,102 one which saw the crystallization of a discursive configuration that survived the transition to multipartyism and Frelimo’s embrace of neoliberal doctrine. I show the ways in which this configuration has undergone modifications to accommodate these changes in a manner that pre-

Introduction 27

serves the centrality of the myth of revolutionary rupture while investing it with new meaning and significance.

The social, cultural and political categories that constituted, and continue to constitute, the core of Frelimo’s discursive repertoire are, I demonstrate, constitutionally relational and, in many cases, contrastive or binary. The changing meaning of one may prompt compensatory adjustments in the meaning of others and their consequent rearticulation. By the same token, the withering away of a founding category may register in the increased ideological or explanatory freight carried by another. Which categories came into play at any given time and how they did so depended on the politicalinstitutional context, among other things. Two such contexts are examined here: that of Nampula and of the summit of state power. My findings corroborate that “statist narratives are constructed within the context of specific challenges to state power”103 and problematize how these challenges are met at different levels of social agency within official hierarchies.

Discursive configurations are not, of course, self-referential. What, then, of the relations between memory and history? As Dominick LaCapra has observed, these “have still to be sorted out, and exceptionally vexed is their import for aesthetic, ethical, and political issues.”104 With an eye to such complexities, Elizabeth Jelin has recently identified three ways in which to think about these relations:

first, there is memory as a resource for research – as part of the process of obtaining and constructing “data” about the past; second, there is the role that historiographic research can play in the “correction” of false or equivocal memories; and finally, there is memory as an object of research itself.105

Elements of all three approaches can be found, to a greater or lesser degree, in this book. I say something about the oral sources I have used in the last section of the introduction. As for the second approach, the accent here is arguably less on “correcting” faulty memories than on two other emphases: first, showing that the Mozambican case instantiates the general proposition that the “real can be mythologized just as the mythic can engender strong reality effects”;106 and second, examining the ways in which social memories that rest on empirically shaky ground may nonetheless convey something important about the object of mnemonic narratives that an unyieldingly positivistic approach would, in all likelihood, overlook.107

As the foregoing discussion suggests, the third approach is the dominant one employed here. Recent writing in this vein has sought to navigate between two extremes: that of presentism, “which claims that the past is continually modified at the service of the interests of the present,” and “taxidermism,” which emphasizes the refractoriness of the past and thus its resistance to undue manipulation.108 The present text draws on the insights of these strategies of mediation. It confirms the contention that memory

28 Introduction

discourses, like development trajectories, are path-dependent, “that later versions depend not just on immediate circumstances but also on the history of earlier formulations.”109 And it shows that, in the Mozambican case, which earlier formulations are invoked by officialdom, how, with what apparent intent and to what effect were site-specific.

This book further examines how the divergent pathways under review coexisted – albeit not always easily – within the same newly emerging “legitimation profile,”110 whose crystallization was occasioned by the abandonment of Marxism-Leninism as official ideology, the transition to a pluralist political system, the move to a post-command economy and the looming prospect of peace. And it suggests that the more disposed statist reformulations of official history in the post-socialist period were to register divergent, at times conflicting, currents within popular mnemonic narratives, the greater the likelihood that they also reproduced the tensions, ambiguities and antinomies that inhered in Frelimo’s Marxist discourse. Finally, I explore the reasons why the myth of revolutionary rupture, conceived of as a fateful founding moment, lends itself to resignification and instrumentalization by the ruling party in the post-socialist period.

As with any attempt to situate memory in a mutually interrogative relation with historical events, especially extremely traumatic ones such as Mozambique’s post-independence war, I have courted the risk of becoming “a prisoner of the syndrome I am describing.”111 In view of such a dynamic, several questions arise. To what extent does this book repeat what it accuses the myth of revolutionary rupture of doing – namely, of muting or mitigating Mozambique’s wartime trauma? More specifically, to what degree does the present text’s principal focus on Frelimo’s excesses and abuses and its subsequent efforts at damage control provide fresh fodder, even if inadvertently, for interpretative frameworks that tend to blur or obliterate the differences between Frelimo and its wartime adversaries?112 Alternatively and at least as problematically, to what extent does this focus give added impetus to the tendency to “blame the victim,” where “the victim” is understood as being the Mozambican government?113

I’m aware that this text in no way does justice to the severity of the trauma or the extent of the losses Mozambicans experienced during, and as a result of, the war. Nor is that its intent, which is to examine the discursive and performative mechanisms by which officials in the party and state have sought to displace the source of trauma and loss on to Frelimo’s detribalization policy. Turning to the second and third questions, my response is twofold. First, I am of the view that the excesses perpetrated by Frelimo’s apartheid-cum-imperialist enemies and their surrogates should not be adduced to somehow mitigate (let alone exculpate) those committed by Frelimo itself – not least because by no means were all of these excesses derivative of the struggle against apartheid. It may well be that “[w]hatever its mistakes, FRELIMO stood for the brightest of hopes; Renamo for the depths of human savagery.”114 And it is no doubt the case that “[a]s in any

Introduction 29

conflict, there is more than enough blame for every party involved. But while there may be no innocents, some should bear a heavier responsibility than others.”115 However, modes of historical specification, differentiation and contextualization are one thing; a “conception of solidarity which involves at least the muting of criticism”116 is another. If we have learned anything, it is that such a conception is not always bad politics; it is also a serious impediment to historical understanding.

Second, one of the principal arguments of this book is that the myth of revolutionary rupture, as enunciated by Frelimo representatives in the postsocialist period, not only strongly tends to diminish the historical liability of the ruling regime for human rights infringements committed on its watch and for the enactment of policies that were prejudicial to the livelihoods of the majority of Mozambicans; at one and the same time, it also enables memory discourses that tend, even if only incidentally and unintentionally, to unburden Renamo of the full measure of its guilt and responsibility for its terrorist past.

As anyone who has written on Mozambique’s post-independence war knows, the tendency toward transference, especially with respect to extremely traumatic events, “arises even on the basic level of terminology, for no terms are innocent.” It is generally accepted that, as Carrie Manning has put it, “The war in Mozambique began as an effort by external forces to destabilize the new government and ended up a very different animal.”117 Starting in the mid-1980s, Renamo was forced by South Africa to root itself more firmly in the Mozambican countryside. This campaign of selfentrenchment achieved a considerable measure of success, although the effort exerted by Renamo and the results it achieved varied from region to region and even from locale to locale. In many areas, the rebels managed to exploit and fuel an ever-shifting palimpsest of regional and grassroots tensions and conflicts. Arguably more often than not, pre-existing and emergent antagonisms and frictions were aggravated by the rapidly deteriorating economy and the unraveling of the social fabric, both of which were, in no small degree, direct consequences of the war itself. It is at this stage that many observers of the Mozambican scene contend that the conflict acquired an indigenous dynamic, distinct from, and autonomous of, foreign agendas. It was at this stage, if not before, that, these observers maintain, what had started out as a war of external intervention devolved into a “civil war.”

I have no objection to the “civil war” label when it is applied to the conflict’s latter stages as long as its use is framed in a manner that recognizes three realities. First, Renamo’s war effort remained heavily dependent on external sponsorship throughout. South African support continued although much of it was privatized. Other governments and right-wing private groups pitched in.118 (Frelimo, it bears noting, also relied on foreign sources, primarily the Soviet Union, for its war matériel. The difference is that, in principle at least, it was obliged to pay for them.119) Second, as the fighting

30 Introduction

ground on, a growing number of Mozambicans came increasingly to view the conflict as “a war between two armies, with neither of them ‘representing’ the people.”120

Third, the war remained a destabilization campaign from start to finish. Prior to Nkomati, this was primarily because “forming a RENAMO government was not part of the agenda of the South African military”121 – and it was not part of the agenda in large measure because the SADF was well aware that, given Renamo’s many limitations, forming such a government would have been a taller order than South Africa was willing to seriously contemplate filling. Under the circumstances, Pretoria’s main strategic objective was to discipline Frelimo and force it to make the policy changes favorable to the apartheid state. Following Nkomati, after which point Renamo set about building up the political and administrative wings of the movement, it was because South Africa’s agenda remained unchanged and because the rebel leadership

never serious [sic] entertained the belief that it could challenge FRELIMO’s historical place in contemporary Mozambique. Indeed, politically RENAMO always defined itself in relation to, as a mirror image of, FRELIMO. Its future acceptance as a legitimate political [opposition] organisation depended entirely on its eventual recognition by the FRELIMO state.122

In view of this history, the present text uses the term “destabilization” to cover all stages of the war. This terminological preference is reinforced by my belief that Minter’s position on the war’s genesis and evolution is closer to the mark than not. Minter has argued that post-independence Mozambique under Frelimo would have been marked by a high degree of political dissatisfaction and “perhaps even ... some measure of violent conflict” irrespective of the regional or global political climate; however, in the absence of foreign intervention, this state of affairs, in all probability, would not have led to the outbreak of war.123 He has also made the case that, even after the conflict acquired an unmistakably local texture and dynamic, transnational factors remained decisive in sustaining and shaping it, as well as in winding it down:

the wars of the 1980s [in Angola, as well as in Mozambique] attained their deadly height as a result of external forces which raised destruction to levels far beyond the capacity of the societies to resist. It was, above all, the intertwined pacing of apartheid’s death struggle and the end-game of the Cold War that determined their rhythm and intensity.124

While I find Minter’s argument on the whole persuasive,125 I have nonetheless chosen, on occasion, to allude to Mozambique’s “civil war” in passages

Introduction 31

devoted to the conflict as it developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. My attempt to mix it up terminologically reflects my agreement with LaCapra that, in certain circumstances – such as the ones presented by the Mozambican case – “the best option may be to use various terms with an awareness of their problematic nature and not to become riveted on one or another of them.”126