administration and the apparent duplication of state authority: the case of Nampula Province

5 Multipartyism, the retraditionalization of local administration and the apparent duplication of state authority

The case of Nampula Province

In the early 1990s, the Ministry of State Administration (MAE) launched the “Traditional Authority/Power” project (TA/P) to investigate the history of chieftaincy in Mozambique from the precolonial period to the present.1 At the same time, the provincial government in Nampula authorized district administrations to work openly with chiefs qua chiefs as grassroots representatives of the state. This chapter examines the manner in which government authorities in Nampula justified the return to chiefly rule to rural inhabitants. It shows that the retraditionalization of local administrationwas cast as the logical corollary of the state’s growing autonomy from the party and, more broadly, its disavowal of politics per se. The official explanation, in turn, implicitly turned on a revisionist critique of the historical relationship between the state and the party as hitherto represented in Frelimo discourse. To demonstrate this, I review the evolution of ruling representations in this respect from 1976 to the mid-1980s. I then proceed to an analysis of the genesis and development of revisionist interpretations that crystallized upon the demise of single-party rule. Despite their differences, both versions of party–state relations, I show, presuppose a false dichotomy between the two principals and, in doing so, neatly deflect blame for the erosion of Frelimo’s popularity and legitimacy from one on to the other. The transposition of the state and the party in ruling representations helped set the stage for fingering Frelimo-installed rural institutions and leaders as the root cause of post-independence travails. It also paved the way for editing out of the official script virtually all mention of Renamo’s strategy of rural mobilization and the effect of this strategy on local ruling relations. Both topics are addressed in Chapter 7. Below I identify the temporal displacements upon which such redactions were premised. This chapter also explores rural perspectives on, and modes of responding to, the differentiation of local power and its relation to wider socio-political transformation. Finally, it considers the antinomies of the new discourse and the reasons for the continued overlap and interdependence of the state and the party.

172 Multipartyism and retraditionalization

The secretary as interloper

I begin with a review of a two-part report, authored by two state functionaries in 1988, on the relationship between popular power and traditional authority.2 The report, which was written in response to a 1987 solicitation from DPAC, is of special interest because it sets out the conceptual foundations for positing a causal link between multipartyism and a return to chiefly rule. The authors draw on research undertaken in Nacarôa District, where Renamo had won popular support and collaboration in Intete Administrative Post by appealing to former régulos and other traditional authorities. As they tell the story:

Disallowing the exercise of [traditional] Power ... in some regions brought major problems. Example: In the region of Intete, today an administrative post. It was an area led by the régulo Mahia of the Mulima nihimo, who up until independence was the absolute seigneur, owner of the region ...

With the proclamation of Independence and the beginning of the construction of communal villages, Martins Baptista Loquiha, who in terms of nihimo or clan was considered Mahia’s slave, was designated Secretary of the village. Shocked by the nomination of his slave as responsável [leader, officeholder, person in charge] of his area, Mahia ... opt[ed] to leave the area and settle[d] in closed forest together with his people, thus avoiding Martins Baptista Loquiha’s leadership, which for him constituted an insult and the end of his status [personalidade] as leader of the area.

In the middle of 1983, when armed banditry affected the area, Mahia and his people received the armed bandits, convinced that he would return to the exercise of his Traditional Power ... The inclusion of Mahia and his population in armed banditry had grave consequences for the area of Intete. The area remained and is until today almost [sic] under the bandits’ control ... The collaboration of the population with their old régulo can be considered the most important cause of the intense enemy situation in the area of Intete Administrative Post.3

In the face of these events, the authors are clearly keen to impress upon their superiors the severity of the damage wrought by the statutory abolition of chieftaincy and to urge its restoration. They also clearly sense that their superiors are becoming more open to new perspectives on traditional power as manifested by the nature of their present assignment. Nonetheless, they are just as acutely aware of the then prevailing conditions of intellectual production. The report was written when the party’s role as revolutionary vanguard was still constitutionally-enshrined, as was the definition of traditional power as a “structure of oppression and exploitation.” Their text, then, is shaped and constrained at least as much by what cannot as by what can be said.

Multipartyism and retraditionalization 173

The authors appeal to a range of justifications for reinstituting chieftaincy, ever-mindful of the necessity to avoid contravening constitutional norms and party precepts. They downplay the incompatibility between chieftaincy and popular power and thus point to the possibility of assimilating the former into the latter, namely by “obeying local tradition in terms of clan hierarchy” when choosing secretaries.4 To this end, they draw a sharp distinction between colonial-recognized traditional authorities, on the one hand, and chiefs and sub-chiefs that did not directly serve the Portuguese administration, on the other. The distinction derives from the habit of many Makua chiefs to designate close relatives or even epotha to serve as régulos. The stratagem met two objectives, often simultaneously. It provided the chiefs in question with a means of evading the violence and indignities of direct subordination to the colonial state and, at the same time, it allowed them to avoid being typecast as collaborators by their subjects.5 Thus, the authors of the Nacarôa report contend, “The Muenes [the equivalent of mpéwé] maintain their privileges, because they are considered among those who didn’t repress the people in the colonial period. It was the régulos’ and cabos’ loss of such ... privileges that made many of them join the banditry.”6 No sooner, however, is this distinction drawn than it is eroded by virtue of the latter’s close kinship ties with the former and by the admission that “In some cases, it is the old régulos themselves that are Muenes.”7

The authors maintain that the adherence of chiefs to Renamo was “a mere hunt for lost privileges.” They nonetheless suggest that such motivations derive from false consciousness and that the chiefs in question would now, if duly encouraged, defect to government-controlled areas.8 More resignedly, they stress the impossibility of eliminating traditional power given its longevity and rootedness in local culture:

The existence and exercise of traditional power ... is a very old and socially very strong phenomenon, whose elimination will not be possible in Our Era. Development itself of our society will bring about the end of traditional power. The current level of the development of Macua society doesn’t succeed in eliminating that phenomenon.9

They emphasize the vast and unparalleled accumulated experience and knowledge of chiefs of all stripes:

Those who exercise traditional power have valuable experience in the Leadership of Society, although there are certain particularities that need to be eliminated. They have effective forms of mobilization, they know how to convince people to recognize the authorities. They know the families with more lazy people, prostitutes, thieves, feiticeiros, as well as those who always work more and best.

The best informant that we must contact when we want to [understand] a concrete reality must be without question the old Muene, the old régulo, the old chefe da povoação. 10

174 Multipartyism and retraditionalization

Arguments in defense of chieftaincy are complemented by a carefully couched critique of existing base-level official structures. This critique is both more creative and consequential than the rest of their case as outlined above. In the first installment, the report limits itself to a sole, passing allusion: “[Traditional power’s] abrupt abolition brought difficulties in governance after independence because the structures put in place by us were purely political and not governmental.”11 The second installment elaborates:

In the Second Provincial Meeting of the district directors of Assistance and Control, the Provincial Director, Dr. Carlos Manuel, had asked if, at the base, below the locality, there weren’t people without a government. That question is pertinent to the reality at that level. If one analyzes superficially, one can arrive at the illusion that [it is] the secretary of the dynamizing group that guarantees [state] power there but, if we did an in-depth analysis, we will conclude [sic] that [state] power as such doesn’t exist, but rather political and not state [e.g. administrative] action as is desired. The secretary is a political man who, day after day, complies with and carries out the political line of the Frelimo Party. His political work is to be praised but, unfortunately, his [exercise of] state authority still does not merit praise. In certain Villages, when the secretary tries to exercise power in its totality, he is compared to the colonialist. In a session of the District Assembly, the judge of the district popular tribunal denounced some secretaries as violating the law because they were rendering judgments in their respective areas of jurisdiction. But ... the judicial network in the District doesn’t reach the base, below the locality, because the courts themselves weren’t created there and, because they haven’t been, it is the secretary who is resolving the population’s problems.12

They propose that “the secretaries know beforehand their rights and duties, that is, that competencies be well defined and made official.” They also recommend that the state realign itself with chiefs and cast such a realignment as a means of filling in the institutional vacuum that has hitherto prevailed at the grassroots:

In accordance with Article 4 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of Mozambique, the RPM has as one of its objectives the elimination of colonial and traditional structures of oppression and exploitation and the mentality that underlies them.

Without wanting to contradict that which is established in our principal law and without wanting to defend the crimes, repression, humiliation, exploitation and other evils that traditional structures committed, I [sic] am of the opinion that forms of creating new traditional structures at the state level be studied. There is no doubt that practice itself has already demonstrated to us that we need ... representatives of the

Multipartyism and retraditionalization 175 State Administration to help us govern at the base, below the level of the locality ...

There is no doubt that we need to know our people in order to lead better. Our governance will reach all of the people if we have representatives at all echelons.13

The obvious implication here is that high levels of popular antagonism so much in evidence in Intete are not so much directed at the state per se but rather as it has been mediated historically by “political” – that is, party –intervention. Specifically, the party’s longstanding monopoly on local-level institutions had substantially contributed to, if not caused, the widening gulf between the state and the people.

In transposing the relationship between traditional and popular power to that between the state and the party, the report skillfully shifts the primary emphasis away from the question of the legitimacy of local leadership, of whatever ilk, in the eyes of the governed to the question of this leadership’s accountability to state institutions. The argument turns on a three-step logic. It posits: (1) the existence of a strict separation of the state from the party and, by extension, from the political; (2) the existence of an equally strict separation of traditional hierarchies from Frelimo-mandated institutions and thus from the political; and following on these presuppositions (3) the alignment of the state and traditional power by virtue of their mutual distance from the political field.

While the state is taken to task, it is not for maladministration or authoritarian rule. Rather, it is for its non-interventionist stance vis-à-vis the rural populace: that is, for having ceded too much of its authority to local leaders whose principal loyalties were known to lie elsewhere. The authors leave open the question whether this surrender of authority at the base was due to mere oversight, to the state’s misplaced confidence in the governing capacity of local party leaders, or to its involuntary subordination to the party at all levels of social agency.

In similar fashion, they provide a plausible alibi for the secretary’s dictatorial propensities and lackluster work performance, without impugning his person, disputing his bona fides as a “political man” or implicating the organization he represents. The crisis of authority began when the secretary was either forced or allowed to assume responsibilities that overstepped the bounds of his mandate and job training and fatefully proceeded to apply work methods and styles of conduct perfectly befitting his true vocation to the business of daily governance.

In sum, the Nacarôa report manages to be radical without being heretical. It offers a credible explanation for popular disaffection with rural ruling relations while largely exonerating all prime suspects. It serves up to the state a powerful pretext to disencumber itself of, and seek to circumvent, discredited local official structures without challenging their ongoing validity or unduly estranging the cadres who staffed them. It likewise provides

176 Multipartyism and retraditionalization the state with an acceptable justification for aligning itself with chieftaincy, all the while neatly sidestepping the thorny question of traditional power’s fundamental incompatibility with the supreme law of the land.

In postulating an absolute divide between the institutions of popular and traditional power, the Nacarôa report was in keeping with early revolutionary discourse and ideology. However, in insisting on the hegemony of the party at the local level and on the detrimental effects of this hegemony on the efficacious functioning of the state at the base, the report marked the beginnings of a sea change in official conceptions of the historical and contemporary relationship between the state and the party. It is to a review of these conceptions as they evolved from independence that I now turn.

The state as Leviathan?

A year after independence, a consensus had emerged within the leadership that Frelimo had not so much taken over the state apparatus as had been taken over by it. As Oscar Monteiro, then Minister in the Presidency, expressed it in October 1976:

We can now see that instead of impressing upon the state apparatus throughout Mozambique the popular and revolutionary character [people’s or popular power] had assumed in the liberated areas, we were swamped by the administrative machinery left by colonialism. Instead of giving directions, we were controlled and directed.

14

For Monteiro, as for other senior Frelimo leaders, the failure to establish and uphold a clear institutional separation between the state and the party had come at the expense of the latter’s organizational integrity and, by extension, the interests of the Mozambican people it claimed to represent. Accordingly, one of the primary aims of Frelimo’s self-transformation from a front to a vanguard at the Third Congress in 1977 was to sharpen the distinction between the political movement and the state and to assert the authority of the former over the latter. The Central Committee’s report to the congress affirmed that

The Party and the State are two distinct entities. The Party is the highest form of political organisation of the labouring classes. The Popular State which we are building is the main instrument for putting the Party’s policy into practice. The Party leads and gives direction to all State activities. The Party is not a substitute for the State.

Guaranteeing the vanguard’s leading role in transforming the state along revolutionary lines required the party’s colonization of, and activism in, the innermost recesses of the Portuguese-bequeathed administrative apparatus. The Central Committee report mandated that the party should take steps

Multipartyism and retraditionalization 177 “to guarantee that positions of responsibility in the State are occupied by Party cadres, dedicated to the revolutionary cause.” It was also the task of the party to create “conditions for local organisations to be set up in all State structures to carry out its political line.”15

The “Campaign for Structuring the Party,” launched in 1978, was designed to carry out Third Congress directives. At the base, this entailed replacing the dynamizing groups. The GDs were now deemed to have outlived their purpose, blurring as they did the very jurisdictional boundaries between the party and the population, on the one hand, and the state and the party, on the other, that the leadership now sought to institutionalize.16 The period after the Third Congress, however, witnessed a replay of many of the dynamics that had hitherto prevailed. Senior party leaders became caught up in the exigencies of daily administration of the ministries that they headed as a matter of course. The Frelimo Central Committee served more as a stepping stone to high-level government or military office rather than as an independent check on public officeholders, civilian or otherwise.17

At the local level the confusion of authority was at least as great. In a mid-1979 visit to Mozambique, David and Marina Ottaway found that “very often an official present in a given locality appeared to be doing all jobs irrespective of whether he was formally a party and state representative.”18 Below the level of the locality, institutional boundaries between the state, the party and the people were even more ill-defined. Nascent party structures stagnated for want of the requisite organizational support and political training that might have enabled them to assert their autonomy from the state, let alone impress a popular character on state institutions and their interventions.19 In the absence of such assistance, party cells often failed to distinguish themselves appreciably from the GDs they were intended to supplant, not least because of the carryover in membership and leadership during the conversion process.20 In many rural areas, the party featured primarily by its absence.21 And at all levels the lack of skilled party workers militated against institutional differentiation between political movement and state.22

By the turn of the decade, the palpable eclipse in popular enthusiasm for the ruling regime, the increasing power of the state bureaucracy and the deepening economic crisis had forced a reassessment of revolutionary strategy. The growing gulf between leadership and people was found to be symptomatic of the party’s over-entanglement with, and subordination to, the state. As Frelimo’s mouthpiece Boletim da Célula expressed it: “In practice, we/the party/ allowed the ministerial council and the state organs to be those which determined many of the options of the country, the party remaining with the role of subsequent verification, ratification and correction.”23

Machel responded by launching the Political and Organizational Offensive in 1980 and the Legality Offensive the following year. Both campaigns aimed to root out corruption, to expose and penalize abuses of power, and to check the growth of privilege within state ministries and enterprises. Hopes

178 Multipartyism and retraditionalization for a positive resolution over the long haul were pinned to what John Saul has described as the “repoliticization of the development process.” This, in turn, required (re)asserting the primacy of the party vis-à-vis the state.24 Accordingly, two leading party theoreticians were relieved of their ministerial portfolios in order to devote themselves full-time to party work. This reshuffling at the top was coupled with concerted efforts to strengthen and extend the party’s base, particularly in the rural areas.

The second push to renew the party and to broaden its sphere of influence was offset by the simultaneous institution of a brand of central economic planning that dictated the pace and direction of local development in a decidedly top-down manner. Predictably, local party agents were drawn into the unenviable position of defending and enforcing development targets set in Maputo in the face of growing local skepticism and/or opposition. Just as predictably, centralized decision-making left grassroots secretaries with scant opportunity to press their constituents’ demands or to express their (mounting) grievances.25 In the leadership’s own eyes this campaign had only limited success in bringing the state to heel. In 1982 the Council of Ministers accused the intermediate stratum of the state of self-consciously and systematically subverting party principles and directives.26 The charge was reiterated by the Frelimo Central Committee in its lengthy report to the Fourth Party Congress the following year.27

The 1982–1983 period witnessed a concerted attempt to “revitalize” moribund or poorly functioning party cells in the run-up to Frelimo’s Fourth Party Congress. The effort entailed fostering political debate about the country’s development strategy to date, as well as its future direction. Such exchanges were encouraged both among cell members and in public meetings across Mozambique. The revitalization campaign also brought purges and the injection of fresh blood into party membership and leadership. The expanded representation of workers, peasants, ex-combatants and other social groups in the enlarged Central Committee that was approved by the congress fed hopes that the dichotomy between the state and the party was finally being achieved.28

The reality was altogether other. Power resided in the Politbureau and Council of Ministers rather than in the Central Committee.29 In the post1983 period, just as before it, the head of government at any given level of state authority was also the first party secretary at that level. The individual in question was also the president of both the corresponding elected people’s assembly and the executive council.30 GDs continued to be at least as common as party cells and both operated in the service of the state to the extent that they operated at all. In Nampula, the two forms of organization came to be seen as fully interchangeable functional equivalents.31

The patent unaffordability of a clear institutional separation between thestate and the party prompted Bertil Egerö to question the wisdom of maintaining any “pretence of separate organisational identities” at all.32 It seems likely that upholding this pretense served primarily ideological ends,

Multipartyism and retraditionalization 179 constituting the state as a convenient “other” onto which the Frelimo leadership could, when the perceived need arose, project the internal contradictions of its own political project.33 Whatever the reason for it, the lack of differentiation between the state and the party continued, as did official insistence that, of the two principals, it was the party that, time and again, came up the definitive loser.

It is against this history that the full implications of the 1988 Nacarôa report become intelligible. The report effects nothing less than a complete role reversal between the state and the party. And it projects this reversal back into the past, to the early days of independence. Whereas previously the state had dangerously widened, if not necessarily precipitated, a breach between the party and the people, now the party had interposed itself between the state and the wider society. Whereas previously the goal had been to assert party paramountcy over the state, it was now to achieve state autonomy from the party. Whereas previously putting politics in command had been identified as the necessary antidote for the progressive bureaucratization of the revolution and increasingly pronounced technocratic bias of those at its helm, now precisely the opposite was being claimed: the (partydictated) excessive politicization of the development process was pinpointed as being at the root of the problem and the state’s repudiation of politics, in the form of bypassing the party, was billed as a surefire means of reuniting the government with the populace.

In the post-1990 period, public calls for the state to extend its reach even further into rural society fell silently by the wayside at least when Frelimo leaders were playing to a non-domestic audience. The metaphor of state descent, after all, clashed discordantly with IMF and donor-sponsored policies aimed at rolling back official institutions. As then Provincial Governor Alfredo Gamito expressed it to me on my arrival in Nampula:

There has been a debate about whether the state should descend below the level of the locality. After studying the question, I have decided this isn’t necessary. Whatever is put in place below this level needs to come up from the people.34

If the language of administrative expansion was quietly jettisoned, the basic considerations and logic informing it were not. Most notably, the argument that the state should make common cause with chieftaincy on the basis of the principals’ shared imperviousness to partisan politics acquired new significance and force after the transition to multipartyism. It is to a discussion of this transition that I now turn.

The state, the party and chieftaincy, 1990–1994

In September 1992, MAE officials overseeing the Ministry’s TA/P project justified “valorizing” chieftaincy on the grounds that royal rule would

180 Multipartyism and retraditionalization provide a vital, stable institutional referent in the midst of the uncertainties, confusion and stress generated by inter-party competition.35 By that time, provincial government officials closer to events on the ground had long busied themselves with the practicalities of political reform, if not with collective psychological welfare per se. By May 1991, many of the findings and recommendations of the Nacarôa report had found their way into a “Reflection on traditional authority” authored by the DPAC.36

Three significant developments had occurred in the previous six months which intensified the search for an alternative institutional link between the lowest rung of state administration and the rural population. First, in November 1990 the new multiparty constitution had entered into force. Second, three new political parties announced their formation at press conferences in Maputo in the opening months of the new year, converting multipartyism from an abstract principle to a living reality, however contained and contrived.37

Third, the Mozambican government and Renamo signed a partial ceasefire on December 1, 1990, capping off the third round of direct negotiations, begun the previous July, between the two warring sides. The Mozambican government undertook to confine Zimbabwean troops to the two rail corridors linking Zimbabwe to the ports of Beira and Maputo. In return, Renamo pledged to halt all military action against the two routes. An international team was set up to monitor implementation of the accord. Despite the ceasefire’s limited scope, and what would prove to be its fragility in the face of repeated violations of the accord’s terms by both sides, the pact was widely viewed as the first step towards a comprehensive settlement.38 The completion of the DPAC’s proposals itself coincided with the sixth round of peace talks whose agenda included discussing new legislation pertaining to the formation of political parties, a draft electoral law, a timetable for Mozambique’s first multiparty elections, and the possible role of an international monitoring team during the vote.39

The DPAC called for reinstituting chiefly political and religious power as a form of indirect rule, “obeying as much as possible local customs without contravening constitutional norms.” It elaborated:

This signifies remounting this structure just as it was in the period of Portuguese colonization, excepting some designations like, for example, that of cabo de grupode povoações and, naturally, reviewing their functions. The structure would be erected in the following manner: 1) Régulo; 2) Head of the Village or Bairro; 3) Head of the Zone.

The régulo would govern at the level of the locality. In tacit recognition of the multiple challenges and perils on the road ahead, the report warns that the delimitation of these territories “must be clearly defined in order that, in fact, traditional power be valorized and there not be inter-clan conflicts.”

Multipartyism and retraditionalization 181 Further potential stumbling blocks are hinted at in a section entitled “Forms of ascension to power”:

ascension to power must utilize the process of democratic elections. The candidates would be between elements considered the most prestigious and respected of the villages that constitute the regedorias, for example a maternal uncle and his nephew from the clan that is considered dominant or with strong connections with the ancestors of the region could be matched off. Still it would be necessary to create a certain flexibility with the aim of taking heed of specific regional circumstances [situações], departing from the principle that traditional power is not, by nature, democratic.

Chiefs, the DPAC envisaged, would discharge the following duties:

mobilization of tax payment; mobilization of the population for agricultural campaigns; opening and cleaning of picadas; control of the movement of people to and from regedorias; resolution of social problems of the population in accordance with customary law; other social and economic tasks that arise at any given time

including those “that arise from the necessity to implement the decisions of superior state organs.”

Installing a modernized version of colonial precedent would, in turn, require “valorizing” traditional power by conferring “prestige symbols” on chiefs, such “a house for the Régulo, where the national flag would also be hoisted, special clothing that distinguishes him from other elements of the population.” Such amenities would be supplemented by monetary “stimuli” in the form of a semi-annual subsidy. This allowance would, if merited, be topped off with bonuses “for the best work during the year or during a work campaign, which could be agricultural, the opening of picadas, tax collection or any other type.” Securing and guaranteeing public respect for chiefs would also entail enabling them to acquire a monopoly on local communication with the state:

It bears emphasis that, in order to confer prestige, confidence and pride in the heart of the population, the figure of the régulo would be the most appropriate to represent, in all of its aspects, all of the inhabitants of the Locality, including heads of the Villages and Bairros and heads of the zones.

The DPAC then turned to the vexing question of how chiefs would relate to the various political forces with which they would potentially come into contact. The directorate’s reflection recognized what the MAE technical team apparently could not: that in order for traditional hierarchies to serve

182 Multipartyism and retraditionalization as a credible non-partisan anchor for state administration, they would somehow have to be safeguarded against corrupting political influences:

The functions of traditional authorities naturally must be in consonance with the constitution in force. This means that within the perspective of national unity the traditional authorities would not be linked to the politics of any party. They would function in accord with the laws and decisions of the state.

In certain areas, chiefs had already been fulfilling some of the functions enumerated by the DPAC. But the official attempt to define and delimit an area of social life for chiefs as chiefs distinct from, and as a crucial counterpoint to, the structures of popular power awaited the Sixth Congress of the Frelimo Party held in August 1991.40

The congress’ major objective was “to adapt the party to the challenges of the new constitution and the prospect of multiparty elections in the near future.”41 Accordingly, references to Frelimo as the leading force in Mozambican society were duly excised from party statutes. Chissano explained that pluralism implied a “more rigorous separation” between the party and the state. He stressed that the party and its activities were subordinate to the supreme law of the land, which applied “with equal force to all citizens and all parties.”42 The party’s internal structure was reorganized with an eye to gearing up for the prospect of an electoral showdown. Responsibility for the day-to-day running of the party bureaucracy was transferred from the Politbureau (renamed the Political Committee) to the party secretariat with a view to freeing the former “to concentrate on the major political questions of the day and on the party’s electoral strategy.”43

While the peace talks remained largely stalled throughout 1991, the year’s close brought a minor breakthrough. During the ninth round, the two sides held a preliminary discussion on future multiparty elections. They agreed that elections should be held within one year of the signing of a general peace agreement (a stipulation that, as it turns out, was not met), that presidential and parliamentary elections should be held simultaneously, and that the UN and the Organization of African Unity should be involved in supervising the process.44

By the beginning of 1992, district administrations in Nampula were explaining the need to differentiate power at the local level in meetings with chiefs, Frelimo party secretaries and, subsequently, with the general population. The immediate trigger for these meetings was a provincial orientation calling for the integration of chiefs into “socio-economic life.”45 Self-evidently, the new orientation lent itself to confusion, as well as multiple interpretations and applications, reflecting the government’s own uncertainty and equivocation on the question of local authority.46 Several, if not most, administrators simply took these instructions as a straightforward cue to “proceed with the act of investiture of the old tribal chiefs,” as one

Multipartyism and retraditionalization 183 provincial government communiqué subsequently put it.47 However district officials chose to proceed, they invariably cast the local differentiation of power as a natural outgrowth of the advent of multipartyism.

Explaining political change

The new orientation authorized the introduction of the double distinction between secretaries/chiefs and party/state and the privileging of the latter two terms over the former. A summary of the proceedings of the Angoche district administration’s first meeting with various tiers of traditional authority in February 1992 is illustrative:

[I]n his address, the Highest Leader of the District recommended to the régulos to be spokesmen for the enormous tasks with which they are entrusted, emphasizing that with the arrival of the adoption of multipartyism, one sees the necessity of reorganizing these structures, incorporating them into administrative tasks.

However, the dynamizing groups, Party cells, secretaries, continue to work with the Party, the régulos having to fulfill important tasks in the areas of Education, Agriculture, Health and Culture without entering into contradiction with the tasks of the Party.48

In Namapa, the district administration’s communiqué on the implementation of provincial instructions was more economical with words and arguably more revealing: “On April 1, the Administrator held a meeting with the ex-régulos, secretaries of the bairros in the district seat with the aim of clarifying tasks that the régulos would realize as traditional authorities.”49 Similar meetings were held in the administrative posts later that month, as was a public meeting in the bairros of the town of Namapa to explain the new configuration.

The Frelimo First Party Secretary of Namapa District described the explanation given for the fact that, as he put it, “the secretaries can no longer function at the base” as follows:

The explanation and the practice is the following: at this time, power is being separated. There exists administrative power and political power. And, what is the task of the politician – that is, the secretary – there at the base? First, to register citizens as members of his organization. What is the second task? It is to educate ... the populations so as not to hope that clothing will come from another place to be received; it’s necessary to work. This is the task of the party at this time ... And, as the state [como estado], the régulos have the principal task of dynamizing the agricultural campaigns ... collecting taxes and cleaning the primary and secondary roads ... these are the principal tasks of the régulos. This, then, is the representation of power at the level of the base.

184 Multipartyism and retraditionalization The secretary can no longer have those privileges, those benefits [that he previously had] ... When he resolved a problem [settled local disputes], he derived some benefit. Now we put forward at this time, the régulos ... will resolve social problems. Because if it were us, secretaries, there will no longer be [any] understanding. If one sees a secretary of

MONAMO, UNAMO, PADEMO [all newly registered political parties], of – this will also exist right here. Now who will rule? Who will be in charge? It has to be the government. Those representing the government are the régulos ... [Estes do governo sao osrégulos ...].50

Public response

In the vast majority of cases, the distinction seemed to be lost on the principal actors themselves. In Namapa, confusion over the substance and limits of local authority reigned despite the fact that numerous meetings had been held over a two-year period to drive the distinction home.51 As one party secretary put it in a meeting with local Frelimo representatives in Odinepa Locality, “There is no difference. Because all the work the secretaries do, the cabo and régulo also do. They work together.” Another elaborated that the two sets of leaders had separate chains of command but identical functions:

There is no division. They work together. The secretary knows that when he works, he is working in the name of the Frelimo Party. And the cabo and régulo know that they work in the name of the government. Each answers to his respective sector.52

Chief Taibo of Namapa Center was more concise: “Each one receives his own orders.”53

Others limited themselves simply to repeating the local administration’s explanations, while implying that all local leaders were potential draftees to government service. As Chief Muhula put it:

The government said that the secretary’s work is for the party while the traditional authority receives orientations from the government and will transmit them to the population along with the secretaries. And, sometimes, we have come to receive [government] orientations together with the secretaries.54

In areas where, historically, local Frelimo representatives were members of dominant lineages, secretaries welcomed the differentiation of local power as a means of facilitating bilateral communication with relatives now conveniently situated just over in the state sector. As one secretary in Namirôa put it, “They do the same thing. What I don’t succeed in getting done, I consult my uncle, who is a humu, about.”55 Others saw the reinstatement ofchiefs simply as an expression of Frelimo’s newfound commitment to

Multipartyism and retraditionalization 185 preserve local tradition, a shift in policy that did not infringe at all on their own political power or social standing.56

Sometimes secretaries insisted on parity even when their own descriptions unwittingly conceded an implicit imbalance. Joaquim Licença of Nahopa, the area of Chief Namiquela, described the new arrangement thus: “There is only one job. There is no difference. If there is an order from the régulo, we do it. If we have a job, we ask authorization from the régulo to do this job and he authorizes.”57 Elsewhere, responses from secretaries showed that the separation of the state from the party bore a clearly intended, if as yet to be achieved, division of labor. Moreover, the division itself implied an unequivocally unequal share-out of duties and prerogatives. As one secretary in Nantoge (Nanthoge, Nantoje, Nantodge, Nantoxe) earnestly, if somewhat wistfully, explained, “They are equal but there is a difference. For the secretaries, our task is only to meet with the members of the party. While the mapéwé’s task is to check the machambas and to lead all of the land.”58 After the meeting, the local chief, Muipita, proudly introduced the speaker to me as his nephew. The relation helps make sense of Muipita’s own description of the new division of labor: “The jobs are the same. They understand one another.”

The state and the party in practice

Widespread confusion over the distinction between the state and the party at the grassroots says less about rural intellectual capacities to cope with the vocabulary and conceptual baggage of multipartyism than it does about the socio-political realities that people were daily confronting and seeking to negotiate. First, in practice, chiefs and secretaries in Namapa and elsewhere, performed similar, if not identical, duties.59 In all likelihood, the coincidence of assignments reflected the provincial government’s attempt to draw on both sources of authority during a period when it was seeking to reestablish its own authority in many previously inaccessible or only intermittently accessible rural areas. It is reasonable to assume that, in addition, the provincial administration was studiously seeking to avoid alienating either constituency in the politically sensitive period in the run-up to the elections. In the case of Namapa, the local administration’s continuing reliance on Frelimo party secretaries in the execution of “administrative” tasks in all probability also bespoke what district officials viewed as the disappointing work performance of chiefs, as well as the clear limits to the authority of both sets of leaders.

Second, the same factors that had hitherto inhibited establishing a clear institutional division between the state and the party still obtained, notably a lack of material resources and of skilled, trusted cadres at the local level. To the outside observer, ongoing material interdependence was most visible with respect to vehicles. The District Elections Commission (CDE) did not, during the first several months of its activity, have its own transport. During

186 Multipartyism and retraditionalization the preparatory phase for voter registration, the District Director of STAE regularly caught lifts with the Frelimo First Secretary of the District in his brand new Mitsubishi pick-up recently furnished by the party for the express purpose of facilitating the electoral campaign.60 The STAE director admitted that his dependence on Frelimo in this regard had drawn criticism from other political parties in the district. He was, he explained, waiting for the CNE to supply him with his own vehicle or sufficient funds to arrange a neutral form of transport.61 The CDE did not receive its own lorry until August. The district administrator, who normally drove a badly ailing vehicle belonging to JFS, also frequently availed himself of the party pickup for long-distance driving or four-wheel-drive roads.

The dearth of tried and true, politically astute cadres at the local level was brought to the fore when the Frelimo First Party Secretary of the District was sidelined from action for several months as a result of serious injuries sustained in a car accident (which wrecked the new Mitsubishi). The Party Provincial Committee asked the district administrator to step in as his substitute. As a result, the administrator presided over Frelimo’s electoral campaign in Namapa, at the same time as he continued to discharge his usual duties. Not surprisingly, the decision fueled local confusion and called into question the sincerity of Frelimo’s commitment to disentangling the state and the party.

The confusion between the state and the party was compounded by the fact that several district administrators in the province, as well as many other state functionaries, ran as Frelimo candidates in the legislative races, actively campaigning in the rural areas. The administrator of neighboring Nacarôa District, for instance, campaigned in Namapa. In addition, a substantial number of civil servants who were not running for office acted as party monitors for Frelimo during the poll. Visits to provincial government offices throughout the month of October met with a resounding silence.62

At the provincial level, the overlap between the state and the party was much in evidence in the person of General Eduardo Nihia, former commander of the government army in Nampula. As we have seen, the practice of having the head of government at any given level of authority simultaneously serve as the party chief at that same level had ended with the adoption of the new constitution; thereupon, the two functions came to be vested in two different people. However, the new arrangement did not preclude senior members of the central government from serving as party chiefs at lower-levels of authority. Until the formation of the new government in December 1994, Nihia served both as Second Vice Minister of Defense and Frelimo First Party Secretary of Nampula.63

A third factor complicating people’s understandings of political change was the dearth of political parties other than Frelimo and Renamo in the rural areas. The only party with more than a token organized presence in Namapa at the time of field research was the Mozambique National Union (UNAMO). UNAMO’s influence appeared to be confined to the immediate

Multipartyism and retraditionalization 187 environs of the district capital and Alua, both of which are situated on a major transport artery and are thus readily accessible.64 Much the same situation prevailed in Rapale, the administrative seat of Nampula District. Even though the town is situated only some twenty kilometers from Nampula City, the activity of what was known as the “unarmed opposition” or “emergent parties” was, according to the district administrator, “nil.”65

The failure of the unarmed opposition to make significant inroads was reflected in the local election results. In Nampula, as elsewhere, the Democratic Union (UD), a coalition of three small political parties, was the only electoral contender besides Frelimo and Renamo to secure parliamentary representation – it won two out of the province’s fifty-four parliamentary seats. The UD was widely believed to have ridden Frelimo’s coattails throughout the country in the parliamentary race, having been fortuitously placed in the same position as Chissano’s on the presidential ballot: conveniently, last. The surprising rural success in the presidential race of Wehia Ripua, who headed the ticket of the Mozambique Democratic Party (PADEMO) and who placed third with 2.9 percent of the vote, was also chalked up to a fluke: his physical likeness to Dhlakama, a resemblance which appears to account for his relatively stronger showing in areas considered to be Renamo strongholds in Nampula and elsewhere.66

The difficulty experienced by the unarmed opposition in gaining even a toehold in the province was starkly illustrated by evidence that the parties in question had had to resort to hiring non-party members or sympathizers to monitor the poll on their behalf. This explains why some parties failed to register even a single vote in polling stations where they had posted party monitors – even though the monitors cast their own ballots at these selfsame polling stations.67 It also helps to make sense of the equanimity with which the scrutineers in question accepted the verdict of the electoral officers regarding potentially contestable ballots.68

The prospect of anything even remotely approximating sustained exposure to parties other than Frelimo and Renamo receded sharply even in the provincial capital immediately following the elections. Legally registered political formations that had failed to win 5 percent of the national vote necessary to secure parliamentary representation were rendered ineligible for public financing. Up until the vote, they had been bankrolled mainly by a UN trust fund established to assist their electoral bid, a source that dried up at the end of the campaign. With the sole exception of the UD, none of the unarmed opposition broke the 5 percent barrier.69

Attempts to contact provincial headquarters of several parties in the immediate post-elections period were frustrated by shuttered offices and disconnected telephone lines. The financial plight of the unarmed opposition won them little sympathy from either the electorate or the press. Rather, many of the parties in question quickly fell into disrepute as a result of their failure to evince even lukewarm interest in generating domestic sources ofrevenue. Their marked proneness to fissure and/or to fall casualty to

188 Multipartyism and retraditionalization debilitating internal power struggles over the use of party assets and UN trust fund money had also done little to enhance their budding reputations. Indeed, their very raison d’être was widely believed to be no more than an illdisguised “hunt,” as one interlocutor in the port city of Nacala put it, for government and international funds.70

A fourth factor influencing popular notions about the meaning of multipartyism was the proclivity of Renamo leaders to refer to the zones that fell under their organization’s administration as areas that came under the purview of the Renamo “government.”71 Such characterizations went against the spirit, if not the letter, of the AGP, which stipulated that Mozambican laws and institutions held sway throughout the country.72 Under the circumstances, it would not have been unreasonable for local residents to conclude that all political parties, by definition, came equipped with their own “government.”

Fifth, the very imperatives that spurred Frelimo to depict the state as having undergone a thoroughgoing process of depoliticization simultaneously impelled the further politicization of chieftaincy. Frelimo’s drive to recruit chiefs coincided with a campaign dating from the Fifth Party Congress to boost party membership. The congress had relaxed eligibility requirements for candidacy to the party, opening the doors to religious believers and property owners. The Sixth Congress, which implicitly sanctioned open government collaboration with chiefs, further simplified admission procedures. All nationals became eligible for party membership provided that they were at least eighteen years old and accepted the party’s program and statutes “regardless of their social position or philosophical beliefs.”73 Administrators in Nampula dated stepped up recruitment of chiefs to one of these two congresses.74

Representatives of the leading political formations in Namapa thought they knew or could make informed guesses about the political affiliations or sympathies of most chiefs in the district. Party affiliation and political allegiance were not viewed as necessarily synonymous. All the chiefs in Renamo’s area were regarded as sure votes for Renamo although the real political allegiances of at least two of them were believed to lie elsewhere. By the same token, not all chiefs who carried Frelimo cards ranked among the party faithful. One such chief made clear in no uncertain terms that the ruling party would not be getting his vote.75 Chiefly non-alignment, in turn, was viewed as fairly rare and rapidly disappearing both in Namapa and in the province as a whole. Elsewhere in Nampula, rivalries for chiefly offices, either between or within families, often took the form of a face-off between Frelimo and Renamo.76 As one Nampulan resident put it, “In every region there are two régulos, one belonging to Frelimo, the other belonging to Renamo. That’s why, up until now, the people can’t relax.”77

Indeed, according to one UNAMO representative, it was precisely the historically produced, and by now highly refined, willingness of chiefs to serve faithfully any and all more powerful rulers, combined with their newly

Multipartyism and retraditionalization 189 tapped proclivity to join political organizations, which demonstrated the overall compatibility of democratic process with the regulado system. The two were readily reconcilable, he reasoned, “because the régulos are members of different political parties and they rule according to the regime in power.”78 Ironically, it was characteristics such as these which also explained why chiefs had been considered prime suspects both by the Portuguese during the Frelimo-led liberation struggle and by Frelimo during Renamo’s counter-insurgency. As another representative expressed it: “This happens because the régulos accept all types of government. When there appears one type of government, they receive. When there appears another, they also receive. That’s why any government suspects the régulos. It’s enough to have opposition.” They added that, in Renamo-controlled zones, chiefs were likewise perennially suspect, this time of being closet Frelimo loyalists.79

Further complicating matters was the fact that official explanations for the separation of the state from the party, and the corresponding identification of chiefs with the former entity, were often given in the same breath as invitations to chiefs to join the Frelimo Party.80 A memo from the Frelimo Provincial Committee briefing the provincial governor on Nihia’s recent tour of Nampula’s westernmost districts, for instance, reported as follows:

Between July 27 and August 4, 1992, the First Party Secretary made a working visit to Malema and Ribáuè Districts. During the visit he met with members and non-members of the Frelimo Party, Traditional Personalities, Religious Believers and Economic Agents that operate in those Districts. During these meetings, in addition to other subjects, the Comrade First Secretary clarified the separation of functions between the leaders of the state and the party, the process of incorporating régulos and traditional chiefs, emphasizing that it was not a question of newly installing them in office, but rather incorporating them into socioeconomic activities, thus preparing for some of them, in accordance with their abilities, to represent administrative power at the base in the future. As such, he invited them to join the Frelimo Party voluntarily according to our statutes.81

The competing pressures on chiefs were well illustrated during the electoral process itself. In the words of the Namapa STAE director, the CDE used “the régulos as a prolongation of the administrative structure.” Chiefs helped select voter registration sites and mobilized the population to feed the CNE brigades deployed to register rural voters. They also had overseen the construction of polling stations, as well as of the nearby latrines and helicopter landing sites to service them.82 At the same time, during the elections staterecognized chiefs were spied urging registered voters to cast their ballots. As one reporter noted, voter mobilization by chiefs often exceeded the bounds of civic duty, taking on a decidedly “political character.”83 In sum, the contradictory imperatives posed by multipartyism – the need to find a

190 Multipartyism and retraditionalization putatively non-partisan power base and the rush to drum up votes – generated cross-cutting dynamics. By far and away the dominant tendency was the further politicization of chieftaincy.

A space-clearing gesture

A final factor which added yet another layer of complexity to the dynamics of rural political change merits greater elaboration than those discussed above. This was the all-too-transparent reality that, in certain localities, the retraditionalization of rural administration entailed a reordering and redefinition of the pre-existing configuration of power rather than a transfer of power per se. Since 1992, rural leaders have variously, as local circumstances and/or personal preferences dictated or allowed, reverted to old identities or embraced wholly novel ones, sometimes discarding, sometimes retaining Frelimo-issued hats in the process.

For Bernardo Mussa, the nephew of the late Chief Nametaramo (Nametarramo) and the first cousin of his successor, the new political dispensation involved blithely crossing the aisle from the “political” structures he had long inhabited back into the traditionalist fold. In his late thirties in 1994, Mussa had been too young to serve the colonial administration. In 1975, he had become the Secretary of Jacotho Bairro Comunal, Odinepa Locality. He held this post until 1993 when, at a public meeting, he was elected to take on the roles of cabo and the chief’s deputy. On this occasion, he stepped down as secretary, because, he explained, “the populations said I should not occupy three offices.” Asked to describe his reaction to these developments, he replied, “I felt no emotion. I only complied with the decisions of the majority.”84

Mussa’s apparent lack of job preference may well have been a function of his growing indifference to both sets of offices. Just a month before our encounter, he had decided to leave public service altogether in order to devote himself to expanding his farming operations. In doing so, he became eligible for credit SODAN had promised to extend for the 1994–1995 agricultural campaign. It was clear that, in Mussa’s view, the move from secretary to cabo/deputy had neither enhanced nor impaired his social status. As he put it, the two positions “are identical because they [the régulo and the secretaries] work together.”

Socio-political transformation had also brought a change in personal circumstance for José Tubruto, a nephew of Chief Tubruto. A former capataz of the colonial administration, Tubruto became a member of the GD in the district seat in 1974. In 1992, he became a cabo, a position he had never held under the Portuguese, all the while retaining party office.85 Given the degree of overlap between traditional and official authority that had obtained since independence, the career arcs of people like Mussa must not have been uncommon.86

As I show in Chapter 7, the blood ties that bound chiefs to secretaries did not receive serious consideration in officially-sponsored post-mortems on

Multipartyism and retraditionalization 191 post-independence rural institutions; nor were they cited in public forums considering the future role of chiefs in local governance. Interestingly, however, some government officials invoked such ties to bolster their contention that the restructuring of rural administration had not unleashed much of a backlash from those at the short end of the stick. As a former administrator of Namapa put it, the growing prominence of chiefs in public life during his tenure in the district in the late 1980s did not meet with generalized resistance on the part of secretaries “because some secretaries are relatives, nephews of the régulo. So there couldn’t be a reaction.” Asked how many secretaries fit this classification, he replied, “It was the majority ... Perhaps 90 percent of the secretaries were relatives of the régulos. The strongest contradictions occurred where the secretaries were not the relatives of the régulos.”87

In all likelihood, the 90 percent figure is an exaggeration. But the claim that the overlap was considerable was echoed by the administrator of Murrupula with respect to his own jurisdiction, in which, as it happens, he grew up. As he put it:

I think that in Murrupula there weren’t very serious problems ... because in many places the régulo always collaborated with the secretary of the bairro, of the cell, even ever since independence ... Because the person who came to be secretary of the bairro in his regulado was also a well-known person, son of the land, and many times, even of the same family of the régulo himself.88

It is, however, the trajectories traced by Mussa and Tubruto, also suppressed within official discourses but, at the local level, equally plain for all to see, that say more about the nature and mechanics of post-1990 socio-political change, as well as the legitimating practices that have accompanied this change. For it is work histories such as theirs that disclose the extent to which the retraditionalization of rural administration entailed the redifferentiation of power rather than simply the supersession of an incumbent power by an opposing and previously marginalized one.

Clearly, processes of differentiation reveal the extent to which traditional hierarchies were embedded in the institutions of popular power from the outset. They just as clearly reveal the considerable results achieved by government efforts to cultivate chiefs politically, as well as to instrumentalize them – strategies that were pursued with ever-growing urgency and vigor from the mid-1980s onwards. Official discourses in Nampula strongly tended to obfuscate both of these realities when addressing the implications of multiparty politics for the restructuring of rural administration. In the first instance, state and party leaders in the province re-enacted the myth of revolutionary rupture. In the second, they presented the 1975–1992 period as a monolithic block and, in doing so, glossed over upwards of a decade’s worth of significant rural political change.89

192 Multipartyism and retraditionalization

The net effect was to set up a stark contrast between the first seventeen years of independence and the period inaugurated by the semi-official return to chiefly rule. The mystification of the recent past was the sine qua non for justifying the reversion to Portuguese precedent. Both the justification and the strategy of mystification on which it was predicated bore the imprint of Frelimo’s revolutionary triumphalism. Both maneuvers were shaped by the political need to present the state as having been purified of all political influence. Both bore testimony to the longstanding ideological imperative to deny any causal connection between the politico-military pressures brought to bear by Renamo and modifications to Frelimo’s rural practice: to hear Frelimo representatives tell it, neither Renamo’s strategic appeals to “tradition,” nor the military pounding sustained by official institutions during the course of the war, had left their mark on the state’s dealings with claimants on rural authority. If the primary impulse was to deny Renamo legitimacy, the manner in which the ruling party chose to meet this imperative helped to generate a general ambience of “mnemonic accommodationism”90 with Renamo, one in which the history of the pounding itself was at least partially eclipsed. For the ruling party, the resulting state of affairs was doubleedged. The enclosure of the 1975–1992 period into a parentheses carried the benefit of harking back to the moment of independence, when Frelimo enjoyed enormous popularity for having brought an end to colonial rule. The drawback was that, in obscuring much of what had transpired since then, even affirmative aspects of Frelimo’s socialist legacy were often passed over in silence, as we shall see in Chapter 8.

Notwithstanding the general tendency toward obfuscation and denial, the fact that the return to chiefly rule compelled a “space-clearing gesture”91 and the reinflection of local identities in a traditionalist direction to inhabit this space was, on occasion, backhandedly acknowledged by government officials. As the district administrator of Namapa on the eve of this last round of transformations put it, “There had to be a separation, an area for the régulo but in coordination with the secretaries.”92