Mozambique

1 Myth as a “meaning-making” device in post-independence

Mozambique1

According to the French arbiter of morals, Ernest Renan, historical amnesia is an unavoidable, congenital malady of nations and nation–states.2 As John Lonsdale paraphrases Renan’s argument, “Nations have a great deal to forget. Nations must have a history and they must get it wrong.”3 Mozambique is no exception to Renan’s rule. The story I tell in this book concerns the post-independence state’s evolving relationship to rural political authority in Nampula Province during the first two decades of independence. It also concerns the selectivity and vagaries of public and official memory about crucial aspects of this relationship.4

When Frelimo acceded to state power in 1975, the nationalist and increasingly radicalized front immediately proceeded to abolish statutory chieftaincy, the institution that had served as the main pillar of colonial rural administration. Why did Frelimo take such a sweeping action on the morrow of the revolution? One answer is that the Frelimo leadership was motivated primarily by a commendable desire to create a unitary jural and political system.5 A second response is much less charitable: that the overriding objective of Mozambique’s new rulers was to eliminate an independent, potentially oppositional, power base firmly rooted in the country’s overwhelmingly peasant population.6 In all likelihood, Frelimo’s motivations were mixed – much as they were for other radical nationalist regimes.7

In either case, the belief that, on the question of rural leadership, Frelimo triumphed in its bid to wreak wrenching change by decree is both widespread and firmly held. On this account, the new government succeeded in refashioning political institutions in the countryside in the early independence period in the manner it desired. Chieftaincy was replaced by the organs of “popular power” and Portuguese-recognized chiefs, known as régulos, were, in their majority, summarily and unceremoniously supplanted by local, often fresh-faced, party militants, known as “secretaries.”

This founding myth of epochal change came to serve as a baseline against which to measure and interpret subsequent developments. The most notable of these developments was the outbreak of Renamo’s rural insurgency in 1977 and the war’s dramatic spread and intensification in the early 1980s. The South African-backed rebels soon gained no small measure of notoriety

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 33 for widespread atrocities inflicted upon the Mozambican civilian population.8 They also proved to be a formidable fighting force.

Renamo adopted an inverse position to that of Frelimo on the question of tradition – much as it did on most other social, economic and political questions. The rebel army’s contrarian stance was in keeping with the doctrine of counter-revolutionary warfare, one of whose leading tenets is to apply the revolution’s “strategy and principles in reverse.”9 Whereas Frelimo denigrated and, in many localities, proscribed an array of rural-based cultural and religious practices, Renamo pointedly appealed to cultural meaning. Whereas Frelimo sought to emasculate chieftaincy as a political force, Renamo actively cultivated traditional authorities as local political allies. Whereas Frelimo was committed to building a unitary jural and political system, Renamo revived the institutions of indirect rule in many areas where it established some semblance of a wartime administration.

The conventional wisdom has it that, in this respect, Renamo’s strategy of rural mobilization helps account for the guerrilla army’s military gains. The argument runs as follows. Frelimo’s anti-traditionalist stand seriously eroded popular support for the post-independence government. It also handed Renamo the critical mass of rural constituents required to transform itself from an instrument of external aggression into an autonomous, indigenously-rooted, social movement. Peasant adherence to Renamo was motivated by a burning desire for cultural renewal in the face of a culturally oppressive, relentlessly modernizing dictatorship. The insurgency appeared to hold out the promise of just such a renewal. Renamo’s armed intervention, combined with the resurrection of chieftaincy in rebel-administered zones, enabled chiefs in government-held areas to reassert their power and authority. The growing prominence of chiefs on the rural political landscape was both assisted and acclaimed by the general populace. It at once bore testimony to and helped accelerate the revolutionary state’s rollback.10 By the time the war ended, state institutions in much of the countryside were either totally absent or only nominally present. In stark contrast, chiefs were the only de facto authorities operating in large tracts of the national territory. Recognizing and formalizing that reality was the postwar state’s best bet for extending the reach of its enfeebled, highly circumscribed administration beyond Mozambique’s cities and towns and for re-legitimizing its rule. Such a move was called for not only on pragmatic grounds but also as the most politically desirable outcome, one consistent with the interests of Mozambican peasants.11

An alternative, dissenting, view implicitly turns on the premise that the conventional wisdom reverses cause and effect. On this account, Frelimo’s “retreat to tradition”12 constitutes a kind of natural fall-back position on the part of both the peasantry and the state in the face of one or both of the following developments. The first of these was the rural goods famine, “a deliberate Frelimo policy”13 in the early years of independence which helped to underwrite the revolutionary regime’s (disastrous and eventually aborted)

34 Myth as a “meaning-making” device strategy of state-centered accumulation. This strategy deprived smallholders of store-bought commodities upon which they had come to depend, pushing them into sub-subsistence levels of production and consumption. One ideological manifestation of the Frelimo-enforced lowering of rural living standards was the “resurgence of traditional rural culture.”14 The second development had a similar effect. This was the state’s retreat from the countryside in the mid to late 1980s under the twin pressures of an anti-popular war and an equally anti-popular structural adjustment program.15 In this telling, traditional institutions, leadership and practices are residual phenomena that somehow become reanimated when – and only when – official institutions and the market recede on the horizon.16

Both the conventional wisdom and the critique hinge on the often unstated assumption that the post-independence regime succeeded in standing traditional hierarchies on their head. Both additionally assume that this arrangement persisted until the progressive weakening of the state during the war-riven 1980s restored the pre-existing balance of power.17 They thus share the same starting and end points. What sets them at odds is divergent explanations as to the ways in which intervening processes and events converged to produce the same presumed, undisputed outcome.

Much of the narrative that follows is devoted to challenging these shared presuppositions. Claims for the efficacy of Frelimo’s frontal assault on hereditarian principles commit the same error as Frelimo itself: like the ruling party was wont to do in the first years of independence, they confound revolutionary “aspiration with achievement.”18 In the language of political theory, such claims conflate the project of state-building – “a conscious effort at creating an apparatus of control” – with long-term, ongoing and unorchestrated processes of state formation – processes that bear testimony to “conflicts, negotiations and compromises between diverse groups”19 with divergent, often antagonistic, interests and agendas, as well as highly differentiated and fluctuating capacities to pursue these. The findings of numerous case studies cast doubt on the proposition that Frelimo-installed institutions ran roughshod over rural power structures.Rather, they suggest that descent-based hierarchies and incipient or actual class relations insinuated themselves in, and were constitutive of, government-mandated local institutions.20 By all appearances, the new institutions were seized upon by certain sections of the rural population as resources to be used in the pursuit or defense of security, material gain and/or influence.21

If the effects of Frelimo’s actions against chiefs and chieftaincy have been overdrawn, so, too, have those of Renamo’s politico-military intervention on behalf of traditional institutions and their leading representatives. In the near-term, Renamo’s reinstatement of chiefs to positions of authority in areas under its administration may have altered the balance of forces between traditional authorities and local government representatives in zones nominally controlled by Frelimo. But this shift, where and when it occurred, was not as decisive or as dramatic as the received view asserts or

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 35 presumes; nor was it irrevocable. Indeed, what was striking to this observer in 1994, two years after the war’s conclusion, was the variability of local political arrangements in Nampula and the fragility of the power of incumbents of all stripes. Equally noteworthy were the rapidity with which claims on officially-recognized local offices were proliferating and the extent to which this gathering trend was accentuating the political crisis at the grassroots level.

To students and residents of Africa, it should come as no surprise that, in Mozambique, chieftaincy is “a tense political cockpit,”22 much as it is elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. Nor should it constitute earth-shattering news that, in Mozambique, as elsewhere on the continent, the intensity of factionbased power struggles for political supremacy within chieftaincy is (and historically has been) rivaled only by the degree of widespread local antagonism toward the institution of chieftaincy per se. Indeed, this antagonism was a driving force behind mass-based militant nationalism in the post-World War II period.23 However, given the widespread influence of cultural essentialism in scholarly production, political discourse and policy formulation on rural Mozambique, demonstrating the non-exceptionality of the Mozambican experience in these respects is an exercise whose value is more than merely academic. And demonstrating Nampula Province’s nonexceptionality on these same counts carries political and policy implications that are national in scope for reasons which will become apparent presently.

While setting the historical record straight is one of my objectives, it is not the only one. After all, deflating a myth “is not to be done with the matter. On the contrary, myths are socially and cosmologically productive; in this sense, they require to be analyzed, and not just refuted.”24 They are productive because they “[give] form to an understanding of the world, providing a set of categories and premises that continue to shape people’s experiences and interpretations of their lives.”25 This is certainly true of the myth of revolutionary rupture in Mozambique, whose anatomy, derivations, functions and effects are the subject of this book.

Policy, politics and historiography

The policy implications of historical explanations that stress Frelimo’s hostility toward “tradition” as a root cause of rural discontent, dissent and dissidence are easy enough to discern. As critics have been quick to note,such explanations help to justify calls for a return to colonial-derived relations of domination.26 By the early 1990s these calls could be heard within policymaking circles, as well as elsewhere in the state administration. They culminated in the promulgation of legislation, in 1994, providing for a renewed role for traditional authorities in rural governance.The Municipalities Law, as it was known, cast such a policy shift as an integral component of a much broader World Bank- and donor-driven program to decentralize the Mozambican state administration and, in so doing, to make local government more

36 Myth as a “meaning-making” device responsive to popular needs and demands. Local authorities were called upon to “listen to the opinions and suggestions of traditional authorities recognized by the communities as such, so as to coordinate with them the realization of activities aimed at satisfying the specific necessities of the communities in question.”27

While shying away from formalizing chiefly functions and making no provision for chiefly prerogatives or privileges, the law specified areas of potential collaboration between traditional authorities and district governments. These included land management; tax collection; maintenance of social harmony and peace; dissemination and implementation of government decisions; opening and maintenance of access routes; population censustaking; gathering and furnishing of pertinent data; maintenance of health; prevention of epidemics and infectious diseases; prevention of illegal fires, hunting and fishing; protection of the environment; wildlife and natural resource conservation; promotion of productive activity; and preservation of physical and cultural patrimony.28 The envisaged roster visibly strains to juggle “an idealized vision of chiefly authority with a set of duties which might have been drawn from a Portuguese manual on administration.”29

The Municipalities Law was subsequently thrown out on an unrelated technicality. Because subsequent legislation specified that local elections (which have been held in 1998 and 2003) in the initial stages of administrative reform would only take place in thirty-three cities and towns, the question of what form rural governance would take in a decentralized Mozambique was postponed.30 Nonetheless, in the early 1990s, final drafts of the Municipalities Law, most especially the sections relating to the “integration” (enquadramento) of traditional authorities, were seen as providing a blueprint for future rural administration and, thus, as a justification for the state’s open alignment with chiefs in the present.

The practical repercussions of “culturalist” accounts reach beyond the scope of issues bearing directly on the contours of postwar local governance. Representations of Mozambique’s rural populace as strongly attached to traditional values, practices and leaders tend to go hand and hand with images of the peasantry as an undifferentiated mass of subsistence-oriented, small-scale producers only nominally dependent on off-farm income. The policy recommendations which have flowed from such understandings tend to focus single-mindedly on promoting smallholder production as a strategy of rural recovery and to neglect the degree to which rural dwellers throughout Mozambique rely on wage labor and/or non-agricultural selfemployment to sustain themselves and their families.31 Culture-based explanations have also reverberated politically beyond Mozambique. Frelimo’s treatment of chiefs is, for instance, viewed in post-apartheid South Africa as yet another sorry chapter in the cautionary tale told by the Mozambican revolution – a prime “example of what not to do” if theANC-led government is to maintain legitimacy and thereby minimize its own vulnerability to destabilization.32

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 37

Controversy over the effects of Frelimo’s uncompromising stand on the question of rural political authority is just a subset of a broader debate over the reasons Renamo’s rural insurgency succeeded in implanting itself within the social fabric of Mozambique and, in the course of doing so, created its own self-reinforcing, indigenous logic. Early monographs on post-independence Mozambique, as well as more recent scholarship by Frelimo sympathizers, ascribe blame for both the conflict and the tragedy it produced to Frelimo’s foreign enemies, both in the region and further afield. According to this perspective, the low-intensity war waged against Mozambique skillfully fed off of and, in the process, fueled local conflicts. It just as adroitly capitalized on the Frelimo state’s weaknesses and mistakes. However, the conflict never transcended its beginnings as an externally-imposed and -driven destabilization campaign.

These analysts highlight both structural and conjunctural factors which aided and abetted the war’s indigenization: the fragility of Mozambique’s inherited infrastructure and economy, and the ways in which the massive dislocations attendant upon an unforeseen, ill-planned and hastily implemented decolonization had only accentuated this attribute; the paucity of literate, politically-trained state and party cadres, a dearth that become ever more pronounced the closer one got to the grassroots level; the tenuousness of the institutional links between rural communities and the fledgling state and thus the ease with which these links could be disrupted or severed; the downturn in the global economy in the late 1970s and early 1980s which hit Third World raw material-exporting countries especially hard; among others.33

By the late 1980s, an alternative, revisionist view had crystallized and quickly gained currency. The scholars who helped forge this new perspective and brought it to prominence insisted that, irrespective of Renamo’s incontrovertibly dubious origins and ruthless military tactics, the conflict had, fairly early on, become a bona fide civil war and could only be conclusively resolved if this reality was addressed. These writers place the burden of blame for this outcome on Frelimo itself, emphasizing the ruling party’s authoritarianism and militarism,34 the totalizing pretensions of Frelimo’s political project, the leadership’s cultural hubris and its stunning ignorance of the socio-cultural heterogeneity of the country it inherited. On this view, Renamo had merely succeeded in tapping a vein of mounting peasant resentment.35

The revisionists fashion themselves as advancing a long overdue and sorely needed left critique of Frelimo – and, by extension, of what they see as the party’s academic apologists. For them, the crux of the problem was not socialism per se but, rather, Frelimo’s particular brand of ersatz socialism. This was utterly devoid of democratic content, intrinsically coercive in nature, and ultimately self-serving in its aims. Intentions aside, much of the thrust of the revisionist critique is compatible with, and has served to bolster, anti-left positions. By 1991, Joseph Hanlon, a longtime Frelimo

38 Myth as a “meaning-making” device supporter and chronicler of post-independence Mozambican history, felt compelled to insist that

The primary cause of suffering in Mozambique is destabilization and foreign intervention. Without that, the crisis would have been much less severe. No conceivable set of Frelimo errors could have resulted in a million dead and $18 billion in economic losses. To put the primary responsibility on Frelimo or socialism makes nonsense of history; it is blaming the victim.

With evident exasperation, Hanlon went on to note, “Not only are Frelimo and socialism increasingly blamed for the havoc wrought by destabilization, but the attempt is made to erase from memory Frelimo’s successes,” the most celebrated of which are the ruling party’s achievements in the field of social services delivery.36

This book directs attention to, and analyzes, the complicity of Frelimo’s socialist and post-socialist ideological practice in fostering, and even exploiting, the very same kinds of revisionism Hanlon and others deplore and are dedicated to combating. Predictably, in advance of Mozambique’s first multiparty elections, held in October 1994,Frelimo leaders and partisans had little to say about the post-independence state’s political and policy failures. Foremost among these were Frelimo’s strategy of state-centered accumulation, its rural collectivization program, and generalized state authoritarianism and repression. More perplexing but little noted either at the time or since was that the ruling party declined to mount a robust defense of its post-independence accomplishments and the overall political vision that inspired them. Indeed, on these subjects Frelimo militants at all levels of authority had next to nothing to say.37

It is in this global context that post-1990 official discourses concerning Frelimo’s detribalization policy have been both anomalous and revealing. At the level of the national leadership, references to this policy in the run-up to the 1994 vote were fairly elliptical; nonetheless, the implication was clear: at independence, Frelimo had simply overestimated the peasantry’s readiness for socialist revolution and, conversely, it had underestimated the peasantry’s attachment to “tradition.” In contrast, in Nampula, the discourse of civil servants and government officials at various levels of the state administration in Nampula tended to be much more explicit. That testimony was both oral and written. At times it was meant for public consumption; at others it wasintended for internal bureaucratic use. Irrespective of the form it took or of the identity of its target audience, official pronouncements in the province were, in the main, categorical in their insistence that the statutory abolition of chieftaincy, combined with the new system of local government installed by Frelimo, constituted the Achilles heel of the Mozambican revolution. To hear local government employees tell it, Frelimo’s attempt to sideline chiefs politically bore the lion’s share of culpability for a wide range

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 39 of contemporary social, economic and political ills. These included the breakdown of the structure of authority within the family and in the society at large; precipitous declines in smallholder agricultural production and labor productivity; the outbreak of local struggles for power; and the erosion of morals, as evidenced by the rise of a panoply of social pathologies, such as crime, labor indiscipline and social parasitism.

At first blush such claims would appear to be a slap in the face of the central authorities and a vindication of the culturalist position. Weren’t government employees in Nampula simply speaking truth to power? Weren’t they merely voicing what ordinary Mozambicans had known all along but had been unable to say publicly given the stringent strictures on political discourse under a quasi-Stalinist regime? And hadn’t political liberalization in the 1990s paved the way for people, both in and outside of the government’s employ, to finally speak their minds? Scholars, politicians and policy-makers wedded to a culturalist interpretation of Mozambique’s postindependence travails would no doubt answer in the affirmative to all of the above questions.

The present study arrives at a different set of conclusions. Its central thesis is that official “memory” about the purportedly injurious effects of, and political backlash against, Frelimo’s ham-handed attempt to detribalize rural administration has aided and abetted the ruling party’s historical amnesia aboutequally – and usually more – incriminating aspects of its tenure. This book argues further that the obverse side of the leadership’s lapses in memory about less than laudable aspects of its early policies and practices is its apparent inability to recall some of the worthy political goals it had pursued.

None of this is to imply that the culturalist critique has no purchase on reality. Even if the myth of revolutionary rupture was promulgated by Frelimo,it would not have resonated as it has if it had been bereft of any material or social referent.38 The fact of the matter is that, in Nampula, some former régulos, as well as chiefs who had not served under the Portuguese, had entered into dissidence upon Renamo’s arrival in the vicinity. Moreover, these traditional leaders had reportedly taken many of their former colonial subjects with them. This phenomenon came to international attention by way of the research of the late Christian Geffray, an anthropologist, a leading member of the revisionist school and the first scholar of Mozambique to formulate the culturalist position. It is, in fact, as a result of his findings and interpretations that this position first crystallized and gained prominence.

Geffray’s account of the war’s outbreak and evolution in ErátiDistrict was path-breaking. It is also problematic on several counts. I rehearse only a few of them here. First, there is the question of accuracy. What actually happened, when and why? Was the pulling power of chiefs in the region really as comprehensive as Geffray suggests? As Minter has pointed out, no local study to date “is fine-grained enough to trace the complex pattern of voluntary and involuntary relocation as rural people sought to survive,

40 Myth as a “meaning-making” device insurgents attacked and kidnapped villagers [as Renamo did as a matter of course], and government troops recuperated escapees from Renamo,” overran Renamo strongholds, and forcibly resettled civilians in order to isolate the guerrillas from the general populace.39

Second, assuming for the moment that many rural dwellers did follow the lead of chiefs, there is the question of why they did so. Social scientists have long underscored the difficulties and potential dangers of imputing motivations, perspectives or forms of “consciousness” solely on the basis of people’s actions.40 Apparent rural fealty to individual chiefs and to the institution of chieftaincy has proven no exception.41 Under the circumstances, isn’t it possible that, of those people in Eráti who voluntarily sided with Renamo at the war’s outset, that they did so for different reasons?42 If indeed male youth were alienated from the local structure of power, as Geffray himself argues they were, than could it be that all of the people who followed “their” chiefs into dissidence or responded to Renamo’s call to arms supported a return to royal rule? Was Frelimo’s detribalization policy more decisive in generating rural dissidence than, say, the rural goods famine?43 Third, questions arise concerning the wartime motivations and situational calculations of chiefs themselves. The available evidence suggests that many traditional authorities cooperated with Renamo during the war only because the military balance of forces was such in the areas in which they lived (or had fled to) that they felt they had no other reasonable choice.44

Fourth, there is the question of the generalizability of the Eráti case. Did the local political dynamics which Geffray identifies pertain to other locales within or beyond Nampula or even, for that matter, within the area that formerly fell within Eráti’s administrative boundaries? The weight of the available evidence, including my own, suggests that such an extrapolation, even within the confines of Eráti itself, would mislead.45

The persistence of asymmetries of power at the grassroots was well known to government authorities at the sub-district, district and provincial levels. In many instances, these same officials had licensed – or witnessed their colleagues or superiors licensing – the reproduction of late colonial political arrangements. Official awareness of these arrangements periodically crops up in the testimony examined in the present text. It asserts itself, for instance, when government officials and bureaucrats are intent on bolstering the case that chiefs are indeed up to the exigencies of governing in a postcolonial context and, in particular, of diligently and faithfully servingthe Frelimo government. After all, hadn’t chiefs, in the name of the socialist state, assisted in mobilizing the population to enter communal villages, the residential areas which Frelimo saw as the linchpin of rural agricultural development and political empowerment (see Chapter 7)? Similarly, the longstanding, prominent role of royals or their appointees in the institutions of popular power is invoked as the main reason the semi-official return to chiefly rule in the province had not, in the main, sparked major protests from Frelimo secretaries (see Chapter 5).

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 41

The insistent intrusion of official knowledge of continuities in rural power structures within the main narrative on radical rupture and its adverse effects neither modified this narrative’s thrust, nor qualified its conclusions. To understand why such knowledge expressed itself as an aside and only as an aside, and why alternative accounts of rural dissent were suppressed or minimized, one needs to direct one’s attention away from the local evidence that helped give rise to the culturalist critique to the political requirements and ideological dispositions of those at the summit of power.

Geffray’s field research on the war serves as a useful segue into a discussion of these latter considerations. La Cause des Armes, the book which presented his findings, not only roiled the terms of academic discussion; it also made waves in Western diplomatic, donor and NGO circles.46 Frelimo was keenly aware of La Cause’s influence and had, in fact, anticipated it. According to former Minister of Information José Luís Cabaço, the Frelimo leadership’s interest in the manuscript, to which the party had access prior to publication, was largely confined to how they believed it would be received by its foreign benefactors.47 Under the circumstances, it is tempting to conjecture that the ruling party was politically invested in fostering an official discourse that played back to powerful outsiders what it had reason to think they wanted to hear.48

In the early to mid-1990s, Frelimo had good cause to believe that important donors wanted to hear that traditional authority was pivotal to the material, social and spiritual well-being of rural communities and that post-independence developments had illustrated this in a quite dramatic fashion. Another reasonable inference was that Western donors wanted the government to confirm that, under the circumstances, chieftaincy distinguished itself as the most promising rural institution to serve as the local anchor for a future decentralized, slimmed-down state administration. Finally, there was ample reason to believe that donors were seeking reassurance from Mozambicans themselves that a return to some semblance of chiefly rule was compatible with a wide-ranging program of democratization. Such compatibility was a must given that one of the proclaimed goals of decentralization was (and continues to be) to clear the ground for (if not necessarily to guarantee) greater popular participation in, and control over, local government.49 Whatever donors were actually thinking at the time – and no doubt they were not of one mind – one thing is clear: powerful aid agencies, such as the Ford Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), evinced a strong interest in securing some sort of a role for traditional authorities in postwar Mozambique, as a series of donor-sponsored, state-administered studies and officially-hosted forums on the question of contemporary traditional leadership and institutions attests.50

As to why Frelimo leaders were willing to oblige the donors in question on this score, several possible explanations suggest themselves, all of which are compatible with one another. The readiest explanation is that certain

42 Myth as a “meaning-making” device elements within the leadership were primarily motivated by a desire to curry favor with Western benefactors, whose credit and other financial assistance had becomethe lifeline of Mozambique’s wrecked economy. In the early 1990s, “Mozambique was arguably at its weakest and most dependent.”51 The country’s reliance on aid was unmatched, with international assistance averaging some $US1 billion annually between 1989 and 1993. By 1992, the country’s foreign debt, non-existent in 1982, stood at a staggering $US5.5 billion, a sum that represented about five times the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).52

It is important to stress that aid-dependence, however extreme, does not necessarily translate into political servitude.53 The Mozambican case bears this out: in 1994, Frelimo skillfully and defiantly parried intense donor pressure to accept a “government of national unity,” no matter how narrow a margin of victory it might achieve at the ballot box; and after the elections, it just as staunchly and successfully resisted donor demands to give gubernatorial appointments to Renamo in the provinces where the former rebels captured electoral majorities. Frelimo’s leaders probably calculated that echoing donor views on, and interest in, the question of traditional authority was the minimal price to be paid for resisting a power-sharing arrangement at higher levels of authority.54

The reason the price would have been considered minimal brings us to the second, and arguably the most important, explanation: a strategy of compliance dovetailed neatly with, and helped to further, Frelimo’s then ongoing attempt to mend fences with traditional authorities and their constituents. Such an exercise in reconciliation was part of a wider campaign to broaden the party’s social base so as to be able to maintain power in a new, multiparty political dispensation.55 Third, in all likelihood, some highranking officials in the party and government had already arrived at the conclusions donors seemed to want them to reach.56

How were local government employees affected by all of this? There are several reasons to believe that they were as mindful of official strictures on evidence, interpretation and speech as ever.57 Constitutional change had brought numerous new political parties, an independent press, and an expansion of personal freedoms and rights to the domestic scene. It did not, however, have any immediate, discernible effect on the internal organization or decision-making processes of Frelimo itself. Lower rungs of the party hierarchy were still required to carry out decisions taken at higher levels and the formation of political tendencies within the party continued to be proscribed.58 What’s more, contrary to Frelimo claims that the depoliticization of official institutions had reached completion with the advent of multipartyism, in the early 1990s the state bureaucracy remained a Frelimo bastion (see Chapter 5). And the institutions of government remained – and remain – rigidly hierarchical and “top-down” in orientation.59 Not surprisingly, many of the pronouncements by government personnel in Nampula were formulaic irrespective of whether or not the personnel in question were

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 43 party members – although most of them were. Official claims for the uniformity of post-independence rural experience in the face of documented – and implicitly acknowledged – variation are symptomatic of the ongoing pressures and influences exerted by senior state and party representatives on their underlings.

Two higher-up officials bear mention. The first is Irae Baptista Lundin, at the time the “technical coordinator” of the “Traditional Authority/Power” (TA/P) working group for the Ministry of State Administration (MAE), the body that conducted or presided over state-sponsored retrospectives on rural political authority in the post-independence period. An anthropologist by training, Baptista Lundin is a passionate advocate of an extreme variant of the culturalist perspective. This variant has an especially one-sided, romantic, ahistorical view of “African tradition.”60 It is perhaps no surprise that the studies conducted under Baptista Lundin’s tutelage – both during the period under review here and closer to the present, both in Nampula and elsewhere – bear the stamp of this particular perspective.61 The second was the then governor of Nampula. Alfredo Gamito, who was appointed as Minister of the MAE after the 1994 elections,62 was another enthusiastic supporter of chiefly power although, one imagines, more for pragmatic and instrumental, rather than for romantic, reasons.

In highlighting the importance of pressures, constraints and personal influences “from above,” I am not suggesting that the on-the-record discursive practicesofNampulan government personnel were wholly dictated by high-level government and party officials. Africanists have long noted the skill and ingenuity with which local interlocutors of power-wielding outsiders – from European conquerors to state agricultural extensionists; from anthropologists to NGO representatives; from missionaries to armed insurgents of various stripes – “adopt and adapt” the rhetoric of their interrogators themselves, “making the outsiders believe more than ever that the problems they have identified and the solutions they have proposed are genuinely inherent in a given state of affairs.”63 My purpose here is to show the ways in which a similar dynamic asserted itself within the (largely overlapping) hierarchies of the state and party bureaucracies, if not exactly between “insiders” and “outsiders” per se. The primary impetus for adaptation and innovation was the need local officials apparently felt to tackle a complex set of ideological tasks: first, to reconcile crucial aspects of revolutionary discourse with post-revolutionary forms of state legitimation; and, second, to reconcile both with the complex, variegated realities posed by contemporary Nampulan history and the diverse, cross-cutting and at times competing currents within popular memory discourses in the province.

The mnemonic narratives produced by local state representatives that went the furthest in pursuing this ambitious agenda were considerably less formulaic than those fashioned by their superiors either within the MAE or within the political leadership. They were also more likely to contain the makings of a much more trenchant, far-reaching political critique of the

44 Myth as a “meaning-making” device ruling party than that on offer by academic versions of the revisionist perspective. But precisely because they evinced a greater receptivity to the complexities and variability of the early post-independence rural experience, as well as to the diversity of popular retrospectives on this experience, they were encumbered to a greater degree by internal tensions, inconsistencies and contradictions.

Whatever the outcome, the overall purpose of harmonization was to provide a plausible, politically acceptable explanation for the ruling party’s loss of popular support in the countryside and, at the same time, to further –or at least not to be seen as interfering with – the party’s then most pressing political priorities. It is true that local discourse in official circles underwent considerable change as a result of the onset of political liberalization. However, I find that the main impact of reform in this regard was to modify the criteria of selection and the process of harmonization. This is not to deny that state personnel have felt freer to express themselves on matters political in post-socialist Mozambique. But richer understandings of the nature of the Mozambican revolution and the reasons it failed were not incorporated into statist narratives; nor did they work their way into the supply of stock explanations.And, crucially, they did not feature at all in official dealings with the populace.

One additional point bears mention here. It is that the culturalist position, in the particular form it has found its most forceful and influential expression in contemporary Mozambique, tends to sanitize and soften the repressive aspects and harmful impact of Frelimo’s rural interventions even when the narrator in question is less bound by the discursive constraints and taboos that shaped the onstage speech of government employees in Nampula and even when this subverts the narrator’s apparent intent. The writing of Baptista Lundin neatly illustrates this tendency, as we shall see.

All state-sponsored retrospectives on the manifold consequences of Frelimo’s circumvention of chieftaincy, as they played themselves out in the Nampula, recapitulate the myth of revolutionary rupture. Such a recapitulation not only upheld the illusion of state strength, unity of purpose, determination and performance on the morrow of the revolution, images which Frelimo had so assiduously fostered. It was also a precondition for presenting the ruling party’s public embrace of chieftaincy as a radical departure from Frelimo’sprevious institutional practice, as well as from longstanding official policy. And projecting the ruling party’s bow to tradition as a dramatic break with its past modus operandi, in turn, helped supply a plausible rationale for the political rehabilitation of the policy of indirect rule in the 1990s. So, too, did claims for the fateful consequences of the de jure abolition of hereditarian-based rural rule.

The discourse which was so prevalent in official circles in and with respect to Nampula in the early to mid-1990s would, one imagines, have held appeal to the Frelimo leadership on at least three additional counts. First, by foregrounding the allegedly destructive effects of Frelimo’s past

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 45 treatment of chiefs, this discourse had the overall effect of downplaying or eclipsing the iniquitous impact of, and political fall-out from, other aspects of Frelimo’s political project and practice which were at least as blameworthy and much less defensible. First and foremost among these is the ruling party’s strategy of rapid accumulation based on heavy investment in state enterprises, a development path that not only failed on its own terms but seriously undermined smallholder income-earning strategies. The widespread, often severe, hardships that the rural population in Nampula experienced as a result of villagization in the 1980s, as well as the human rights abuses that were perpetrated by the provincial authorities, government army and paramilitary forces in the course of the resettlement process, were also conveniently glossed. These latter lacunae are especially noteworthy given that Geffray’s monograph on the war concluded that villagization was as important a source of peasant discontent and dissent as Frelimo’s attempt to reinvent rural hierarchies. This aspect of Geffray’s findings either conveniently fell by the wayside altogether or the violence and deprivations entailed by rural resettlement were chalked up to rule – or, more precisely, misrule – by secretaries.

The proclivity of official discourses in Nampula to lay blame on Frelimo secretaries for the widening breach between party and people brings us to the second count. This was the closely related and concurrent tendency to reassign many of the most notorious attributes of “the class enemy,” previously cast as the primary nemesis of the revolution on the domestic front, to the person of the local secretary in the outback. Tellingly, the rural secretary’s metamorphosis from a frontline Frelimo militant to a convenient fallguy coincided with the publicly unremarked demise of the class enemy –and of class per se – on the national political scene. The simultaneity of these developments was not, self-evidently, fortuitous: the rapidly fading political relevance of class foes neatly dovetailed with mounting evidence that many Frelimo leaders not only ranked among the country’s “aspirants to the bourgeoisie,” to borrow from Frelimo’s now discarded revolutionary lexicon, but were also well along the road to seeing their aspirations fulfilled.

Third, the explanations for the demise of the Frelimo revolution proffered by these discourses often consign Renamo to a bit part in shaping the course of post-independence history. In particular, they tend to accord Renamo little to no agency in reversing the political fortunes of chiefs or in forcing the incumbent regime to reassess its long-held convictions concerning the nature of the colonial-inherited system of indirect rule. Rather, the rebel army’s wartime strategy of rural mobilization – and indeed the war itself –are depicted as extraneous to the evolution of official–local relations – that is, to the extent that they receive mention at all.

The peculiar treatment of Renamo and the conflict as a whole is striking not only because it is hard to imagine any narrative on postcolonial Mozambique which does not feature the war front and center. It is especially curious because it constitutes the second major departure from the narrative

46 Myth as a “meaning-making” device strategies and interpretative framework of the culturalist variant of the myth of revolutionary rupture which, as we have seen, ascribe to Renamo a leading role in reshaping state–peasant relations. But it is precisely the deviation of these discourses from culturalist interpretations on this score that helps to account for the appeal they would have held for the Frelimo leadership in the run-up to the country’s first multiparty poll, a contest in which the incumbent party and Renamo were the leading contenders. For this particular permutation of the myth of revolutionary rupture underscores Frelimo’s capacity and willingness to revise its political perspective and policy prescriptions of its own accord, apparently independently of external political pressures save for those exerted by rural dwellers themselves. In doing so, it deftly denies the party’s main political adversary any credit, if you will, for having forced such a revision.In summary, one “code of oblivion” or “ellipsis” begot another.64

While the discourses that prevailed in Nampula in the early 1990s appear to have been localized, they had national implications. There are two closely related reasons why this was the case. First, chieftaincy is believed to be more “politically embedded” and “socially powerful” in Mozambique’s three northernmost provinces, Cabo Delgado, Niassa and Nampula, than elsewhere in the country.65 The north’s particularity in this regard has been attributed in good measure to “the fact that the colonial pattern of forced peasant cash cropping which prevailed in [this region] permitted the survival of pre-colonial political institutions to a far greater degree than in the more developed colonial economies of southern and central Mozambique.”66 What’s more, in the case of Nampula, the presumptive strength and legitimacy of chieftaincy, in both relative and absolute terms, have been identified as important reasons why the collision between the Frelimo socialist state and the rural populace in the province was more violent than elsewhere.67 It follows that if the strength and legitimacy of chiefs in Nampula are called into question, then the political pull and social power of chiefly institutions elsewhere would likewise be subject to reassessment.

Second, the available evidence suggests that in the 1991–1994 period, official efforts to return to some semblance of indirect rule in Nampula were significantly more advanced than they were in other provinces.68 It follows that, if continuities between late colonial and early post-independence rural power structures had been publicly acknowledged on the part of the provincial government, and the political implications of these continuities had been considered, then the argument that the statutory abolition of chieftaincy was at the root of peasant alienation and antagonism toward the Frelimo state would have carried much less weight. It also follows that, had cracks in the façade of chiefly power and legitimacy received greater exposure and a modicum of critical scrutiny in official discourses, the whole project of formally “recognizing” chiefs anew would have been subjected to sharper questioning much earlier than it was. In the actual event, it was only in the second half of the 1990s that a more robustinterrogation of this

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 47 project and its presuppositions – undertaken by local-level state officials, among others – began to take place. By then, a heavier administrative reliance on chieftaincy throughout the national territory had been shown to reproduce the abuses and violence associated with colonial-era indirect rule.69

The renewal of the debate regarding the role of chieftaincy in state restructuring and government reform reflected, to a certain degree, the reautonomization of the Mozambican state with respect to its main benefactors in the West. Paradoxically, it was also facilitated by shifts in donor thinking. By the late 1990s, key donors had begun to show signs of losing interest in the project of decentralization, so much in vogue earlier in the decade. Indeed, “Donors have now shifted back to wanting central control of funds ... This, in turn, reinforced the view of those in Frelimo and the government who oppose decentralisation.”70 Changing donor priorities, in turn, appear to have reinforced the political weight of the anti-chieftaincy lobby within ruling circles. Whether or not the new balance of forces will prove long-lasting and whether or not it augurs a diminution of the importance assigned to Frelimo’s detribalization policy in statist memory practices remains to be seen. The myth of revolutionary rupture enjoys a certain degree of autonomy from the political process, for reasons this book seeks toilluminate, and thus may well remain relatively impervious to recent developments.

The state-idea in post-independence Mozambique

This book seeks to show that myths about official–local relations in postindependence Mozambique are an illuminating prism through which to view myths about the Frelimo state itself. For the late sociologist Philip Abrams, the state in advanced capitalist society was nothing but an ideological artifact “which,” in Linzi Manicom’s words, “in its appearance of unity and externality to society and social classes obscures the very relations and practices through which rule is effected.”71 The way forward for Abrams was to abandon the postulate of the state and to focus instead on the ways in which “the idea of the state” provides “an alternative reading of and cover for” a “historically specific process of subjection.”72 This did not mean forgoing analysis of the organization and workings of official institutions, the nucleus of what Abrams (following Ralph Miliband) referred to as “thestate-system”73 – the sense in which the term “the state” is used in the present text. Nor did it mean abandoning analysis of the relationship between these institutions and other forms of power. But it did imply giving up the search for “an entity, agent, function or relation over and above the state-system and the state-idea” (e.g. as a factor of societal cohesion, as an expression of the common will, or as an agent of capital, capitals or capitalism). Such a move was necessary, in Abrams’ view, because the quest for the “state,” in this more abstract sense, had hitherto only served,

48 Myth as a “meaning-making” device and could only serve, to reify politically institutionalized power. And for Abrams (as for Engels) reification inevitably led to deification.74

Unlike the national contexts which commanded Abrams’ attention, Mozambique is a poor country on the periphery of the international economy – one whose rulers were avowedly presiding over a state-led transition to socialism between 1977 and 1989. Although, in the immediate aftermath of independence, Frelimo’s leaders believed that the state (and the party) “could be isolated fromthe rest of society,”75 this conception was short-lived. Starting from 1980, if not before, the officially-propagated idea of the state in Mozambique distinguished itself from that which prevails in the capitalist West in two critical respects. First, the revolutionary Frelimo state was consistently portrayed as exogenous only to those sectors of society stigmatized as “obscurantist.” Second, this state was projected as a homogenous, unified and unifying whole only to the extent that it was implicitly defined as “modern” or, at any rate, as categorically antithetical to obscurantist assertions purportedly rife in the wider society. In other respects, and in marked contrast to its advanced capitalist counterparts, the Mozambican state, to hear Frelimo’s leaders tell it, was riven by social contradictions and political conflict. It is only in the post-socialist period that the state-idea as projected by the leadership began to resemble the one which prevails in countries situated at capitalism’s core. Socialist Frelimo’s representation of the state, in particular its internal social relations andexogenous ties, also differed markedly from that which has been typically projected by other incumbents in postcolonial Africa. In their renderings, “the state considered itself simultaneously as indistinguishable from society” – itself portrayed as “devoid of conflict” – “and as the upholder of the law and keeper of the truth.”76

This book analyzes those aspects of the state-idea that are heavily implicated in the politics of memory and the telling of revisionist history. Specifically, it examines officially-propagated and, in some cases, widely held notions concerning (1) the Frelimo state’s immanence and capacities; (2) the “enemies” seeking to subvert the socialist state both from within and without; and (3) the nature of dissent directed against it. I also chronicle and analyze the evolution of ruling ideas concerning the post-independence state’s spatial and social positioning with respect to various social forces within the Mozambican polity, including vis-à-vis the Frelimo party, “traditional-feudal society” and social classes. Following the lead of scholars who have argued that social arenas (e.g. the state, the economy, the domestic sphere) and the jurisdictional divides that define and delimit them are culturally constituted in the historical process,77 I address the following questions: Under what circumstances were objects of state rule marked as “obscurantist” and thus framed as a social and/or political problem in need of redress? How did the framing of the problem in this manner influence the terms of its resolution and to what effect? What attributes, moral or otherwise, distinguished bearers of obscurantism from the rest of the ruled popu-

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 49 lation, from the social relations encapsulated in the state and from the state’s local representatives? What political meanings were assigned to these distinctions and how did these change over time?

The elaboration of my argument calls for a more detailed understanding of the Frelimo revolution and the war Renamo waged against it than I have had occasion to give thus far. The following two sections provide a brief overview of that history.

The Frelimo revolution

Frelimo was founded in exile in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as a broad nationalist front.78 Its decade-long guerrilla war (1964–1974) against colonial rule helped sap the resolve of the Portuguese armed forces and helped spur the 1974 military coup which toppled the Caetano government in Lisbon. The “revolution of carnations,” as it is known, ended forty-eight years of dictatorship in the metropole and paved the way for the decolonization of Portugal’s claimed African possessions. Mozambique gained independence in June 1975 following a nine-month-long transitional government. The Frelimo leadership which came to power was remarkably united. It was also multiracial in composition, including Asians, whites, mestiços (mestizos) and Africans within its ranks. Frelimo’s “rainbow” complexion constituted as eloquent a statement as any to the movement’s commitment to ending centuries of white supremacy (and racialism per se) in the African sub-continent.

So did the leadership’s decision to honor United Nations-sponsored sanctions against Rhodesia by closing the international border between Mozambique and the neighboring illegal regime of Ian Smith in March 1976. For an economy heavily dependent on transit fees from international trade passing through its ports, the move was not an easy one to make: it ended up costing the fledgling Frelimo government more than US$500 million in revenue.79 The price of abiding by international sanctions was not merely economic. Mozambique had already become the victim of cross-border attacks by the Rhodesian military in retaliation for Frelimo’s support for ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union), one of the nationalist movements fighting to liberate Rhodesia from white minority rule.80 The border closure was certain to heighten bilateral tensions.

Frelimo inherited an economy on the verge of total collapse. The vast majority of the 250,000-strong Portuguese community had left Mozambique in the years immediately preceding and following independence. Many members of the (numerically small) literate and semi-literate African and mestiço population had followed suit.81 The exodus took with it virtually all of the administrative, technical and managerial skills with which colonial Mozambique had been endowed. Key posts in government and the private sector were left vacant. Urban unemployment soared as businesses and entire industries closed. The white-dominated rural marketing network ground to a halt. The collapse of trading circuits in the outback jeopardized the access

50 Myth as a “meaning-making” device of millions of smallholders to foodstuffs, household essentials, seeds and tools. In addition, it meant the loss of a vital outlet for their agricultural surpluses.82 Marketed agricultural output plummeted by 43 percent between 1973 and 1975.83 Settler flight also imperiled food supplies to urban centers. These supplies had previously been produced mainly by white farms, most of which were situated near sizeable trading centers and occupied the country’s most productive land.84 The crisis was compounded by the many acts of economic sabotage perpetrated by departing Portuguese. It was further aggravated in 1976 by Pretoria’s decision to sharply reduce the number of Mozambicans allowed to work in South Africa’s mines. As a result of these cutbacks, unemployment was especially acute in Mozambique’s southern provinces and living standards throughout the region fell. At the same time, the Mozambican government, which had received a portion of migrant laborers’ wages in gold that it could then resell for a substantial profit, lost badly needed revenue.85

Frelimo sought to cope with the multifaceted crisis it faced in a manner consistent with its emerging ideological orientation and long-term strategic goals. Land, rental property, health care and education were nationalized. So were law, the insurance industry, funeral homes and, by the end of 1977, most banks. The government took over the management of, but did not expropriate, abandoned and/or sabotaged firms. Abandoned settler farms were agglomerated to form the nucleus of the state farm and cooperative sectors, both of which were seen as important engines of rural development.86

Dynamizing groups (GDs) were set up to fill in the vacuum of administration during the transitional government and the first years of independence. In the rural areas, GDs replaced régulos, whom Frelimo had deposed shortly after taking power. The GDs consisted of eight to ten people who were chosen by a show of hands in public meetings in city neighborhoods, workplaces and local communities around the country. They performed a wide range of social welfare, juridical, law enforcement, security, managerial and administrative functions. They were also charged with mobilizing the population to carry out orientations and directives issued by the central authorities.87 More broadly, they were counted on to introduce Mozambicans to the political history and policy priorities of the new government. This was particularly important because the majority of the population had hitherto had no direct contact with the nationalist movement, whose guerrilla operations during the war for independence had been confined to parts of Mozambique’s northern and central provinces and whose clandestine activities inside the colony had been severely limited due to Portuguese repression. From 1976, production councils began to take over the work of the GDs in some workplaces.88

At the Third Congress, Frelimo announced its self-transformation from a front into a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party and enunciated its strategy for socialist construction. The congress determined that heavy industry would

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 51 be “the decisive factor” in the country’s development strategy. Frelimo’s prescription for rural Mozambique, where 85 to 90 percent of the population lived, was “the socialization of the countryside.” The idea was that smallholders would eventually abandon “family farming” on dispersed homesteads and would dedicate themselves full-time to collective agriculture. Specifically, they would work for state farms, conceived of as “dominant and determinant” within the agricultural sector, or in cooperatives, designed to “liberate [the] creative initiative” of their members.89 Rural collectivization would also entail the creation of communal villages (aldeias comunais), which would supply their inhabitants and the surrounding areas with inputs and services, such as health care, education, water sources and “people’s shops.” In addition, the aldeias would act as local political forums which would foster the growth of popular power, a term coined during the war for independence to denote both “democracy, as an objective or principle of the struggle” and the “forms of politico-administrative organisation” which grew out of that struggle.90

The Third Congress designated a host of other institutions to extend and consolidate popular (or “people’s”) power in independent Mozambique. Party organs would be installed at the provincial, district and sub-district levels, where they would gradually replace the GDs. Their work would be supplemented by “democratic mass organizations,” charged with representing and mobilizing specific constituencies. The Organization of Mozambican Women (OMM) was formed during the armed struggle. The Organization of Mozambican Youth (OJM), was founded in 1977. The Organization of Mozambican Trade Unions (OTM) was born at the end of 1983 and replaced the production councils.91 In addition, a multi-tiered network of “people’s assemblies” would represent the Mozambican populace at all levels of government. Assembly deputies at the local level were chosen from a list of party nominees by open popular vote at public meetings. At the provincial and national levels, they were chosen through indirect elections.92 Finally, the congress paved the way for the establishment of popular tribunals – later renamed community courts – to adjudicate local conflicts.93

Frelimo envisaged that socialist transformation, as defined by the Third Congress, would occur at breakneck speed. The government’s first ten-year plan, issued in 1981, called for most of Mozambique’s rural population, then some twelve million citizens, to be living in communal villages and practicing collective agriculture by 1990, the year in which “victory over underdevelopment,” would, in theory, be complete. The family sector, which accounted for one-third of all marketed agricultural production and more than two-thirds of total agricultural output, was viewed “only as something to be eliminated.”94 The plan was a pipedream rather than a blueprint for realistic action. It faded into oblivion shortly after it received the stamp of the national parliament’s approval.95

However, the logic which informed plan targets continued to hold sway in ruling circles.96 Frelimo’s wildly ambitious national industrialization drive

52 Myth as a “meaning-making” device hinged on small-scale producers feeding urban populations, provisioning raw materials to domestic industry, generating foreign-exchange earnings through agro-exports and supplying their labor power to state farms. Although critical to the viability of the ruling party’s development strategy, smallholders went largely unrewarded for their pains. They received low producer prices and were starved of state resources. Between 1977 and 1983, state farms consumed more than 90 percent of the agricultural budget and, like other state enterprises, were the primary focus of planning efforts. In sharp contrast, between 1977 and 1982 the cooperative sector received a derisory 2 percent of state agricultural investment and family agriculture got next to nothing.97

Rural dwellers soon found that collective fields did not produce returns that compared favorably to those generated by household plots.98 In the meantime, the steady stream of consumer goods and farm tools on which smallholders depended was reduced to a mere trickle. By 1978, the lack of agricultural implements was felt throughout the country.99 The national manufacture of hoes, a staple of smallholder agriculture, fell to less than half of its pre-independence levels and hoe imports were cut off.100 The goods famine in the countryside blunted smallholder incentive to produce cash crops or to earn wages. One consequence was that state farms experienced chronic shortages of seasonal labor.101 Another was that peasant production for official markets dropped dramatically as rural producers turned to burgeoning black markets for economic succor.102

As production of Mozambique’s two leading export earners, cotton and cashew nuts, fell,103 the high-tech needs of state farms pushed up the country’s import bill and ran up debts.104 In the meantime, the agrarian sector was rocked by a series of natural calamities. Floods beset Mozambique’s central and southern regions in 1977 and 1978; and in the 1983–1984 period the worst drought in half a century afflicted the south. In the 1980s, rising interest rates and declining terms of tradeadded to the country’s economic woes.105

On the political front, Frelimo soon found out that setting up revolutionary political structures was one thing; making them operative was another. Lack of resources and institutional capacity posed serious constraints. Confusion reigned over the precise mandates, jurisdictions and methods of work of post-independence political and juridical institutions.106 More importantly, the institutions of popular power fell casualty to Frelimo’s political commandism, a legacy of the armed struggle.107 Party cells, people’s assemblies and democratic mass organizations were drafted to serve as extensions of the increasingly beleaguered state.108 At their best, they were geared toward detecting popular sentiments and grievances and transmitting these upward so that Frelimo officials could make better informed decisions.109 In this respect, they served to strengthen party effectiveness rather than to act as well-springs of rural empowerment.110

Frelimo’s major achievements were in health care and education. The share of the state budget devoted to health care rose from 3.7 percent at the

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 53 end of the colonial period to almost 12 percent by 1982, the highest proportion in the world. From 1977 to 1984, the number of primary health care centers increased from 708 to 1,371 and, between 1976 and 1984, 6,242 paramedics were trained. A series of national vaccination campaigns and an ambitious latrine-building program were conducted during this period. The results were dramatic. At the end of the colonial period, only about 7 percent of the total population had access to health services, which had been designed, first and foremost, to cater to the needs of the settler population. In contrast, by 1982, more than 50 percent of Mozambicans benefited from preventive medical care and over one-third to some form of curative care. By 1980, the ratio of latrines to Mozambican households (both urban and rural) was higher than the average in Africa. Infant mortality rates dropped from 150 per thousand in 1977 to eighty per thousand in 1982.111 During the first five years of independence 495 primary schools and seventy-one secondary schools were built or expanded and over 6,900 teachers were trained; primary school enrollment more than doubled while secondary school enrollment jumped from 23,980 to 92,815 students. As a result of annual adult literacy campaigns, about 360,000 people had learned how to read and write between 1978 and 1982.112

At its Fourth Party Congress in April 1983, Frelimo subjected its eightyear tenure to sustained critical scrutiny. The party’s commitment to building socialism was affirmed. At issue was how best to arrive there. Frelimo committed itself to invigorating the private sector and to streamlining and decentralizing the state bureaucracy and enterprises. The congress called for the reorientation of industrial policy to provide consumer goods and light producer goods to the rural population. Local small-scale development projects, especially those using local resources to meet local needs, were to be prioritized. In agriculture, the party pledged to redirect state resources and planning efforts to the most efficient producers, most notably to private (e.g. capitalist) farmers and family producers, and to raise producer prices for agricultural commodities.113 State farms, like all other public holdings, were to undergo rationalization. Some state farms were to be broken up into more manageable units with unutilized and under-utilized land being redistributed to family and private sector producers. Agriculturally productive regions were singled out for (rapidly diminishing) government investment.114

In the aftermath of the congress, both the private and family sectors benefited from improved access to more land and more favorable terms of trade. Some smallholders also enjoyed readier access to agricultural tools.115 But state farms remained an important priority, Frelimo continued to take a dim view of the productive potential of the family and cooperative sectors, and the private sector was arguably the principal beneficiary of Fourth Congress reforms.116 Many reforms were never implemented in part because the modalities for doing so were never clearly defined.117 The government had precious little leeway in any case because, by then, counter-revolutionary

54 Myth as a “meaning-making” device guerrillas were waging war in much of the countryside. In the event, all policy initiatives were guided by the overarching imperative to appease Renamo’s backers and to end the fighting.

Renamo and counter-revolution

By the time of the Fourth Congress, the country was engulfed in war. According to government statistics, by 1982, the year the Frelimo leadership had determined that the war was unwinnable by military action alone,118 Renamo had destroyed 840 schools, twelve health clinics, twentyfour maternity clinics, 174 health posts and 900 shops.119 Renamo guerrillas mutilated, decapitated, raped, boiled alive, burned alive, asphyxiated, drowned, shot to death, beat to death, and axed, bayoneted, disemboweled and knifed to death defenseless civilians, including children. They dumped dead bodies or body parts into wells. They crushed severed heads in millet grinders, or placed them on the empty shelves of looted shops. Sometimes they chopped their victims to pieces and cooked the flesh. They kidnapped foreign technicians and aid workers, killing some and holding others captive for publicity purposes. They mined roads and rail lines and attacked traffic; they derailed trains and destroyed buses, shooting at passengers who tried to escape and setting alight the wrecked vehicles with the wounded inside.120

The escalation of the war coincided with the 1983–1984 drought. Relief efforts were severely hampered by systematic Renamo attacks, deepening the country’s food crisis. An estimated 100,000 people died of starvation as a result.121 In targeting the country’s socio-economic infrastructure, Renamo’s objective was five-fold: (1) to disrupt the production and marketing of food; (2) to wipe out Frelimo-sponsored social services and basic amenities in the rural areas, most notably schools, health care facilities, wells and bore-holes; (3) to halt the flow of imports and exports; (4) to destroy the rural economy; and (5) to paralyze all forms of ground transport and energy supply systems (a prime target here were the three major “transport corridors” connecting Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia to the Indian Ocean ports of Nacala, Beira and Maputo).

Renamo’s violence against civilians in the rural areas aimed at eliminating all representatives or allies of the Frelimo state. Foreign technicians, aid workers, teachers, health care practitioners, Frelimo secretaries and all other local state and party officials were marked for assassination. The intent was to sever all connections between local communities and the central authorities, casting the rural populace on to its own devices or leaving it at Renamo’s mercy. Renamo’s brutality was also designed to instill an allconsuming fear in the general population, breaking people’s will to resist.122 Pursuant to that goal, no civilians were spared from rebel terror.

In 1981, Renamo issued a set of formal political “demands” in a “Manifesto and Program.” The document called for a government of national unity, political pluralism, democratic elections and a market economy.123

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 55

Starting in the early 1980s, Renamo leaders were also wont to assert their determination to overturn “communism” in Mozambique. The “Manifesto” and Renamo’s public pronouncements seemed calculated more with an eye toward drumming up support in the West than to mobilizing an antigovernment movement at home.124

However, especially in the post-Nkomati period, when South Africa sought to dissociate itself from Renamo, rebel guerrillas actively sought to attract fresh recruits, supporters and sympathizers by appealing to specific rural grievances. Indirect rule through chiefs in most zones under its control and calls for a return to “tradition” were Renamo’s answers to Frelimo’s statutory assault on descent-based rule, its vilification of traditional leaders and its campaign against rural “obscurantism.” The rebel army also declared its opposition to the “socialization of the countryside” and advocated a return to the dispersed habitat, a “policy” that was often conveyed to the rural populace by its foot soldiers as they set about torching communal villages and their surrounding fields.125 To Frelimo’s uncompromising secularism, which in the early post-independence period resulted in highly strained relations with the local Catholic, Protestant and Islamic hierarchies, Renamo’s response was three-fold. First, the rebel army extolled the virtues of religious belief and worship. Second, it took pains to propitiate the spirits which reigned in any given locale – or some variant thereof.126 Third, it often exhibited “an exaggerated respect” for the artifacts of religious observance: Renamo soldiers were known to tote bibles around in the bush and to leave chapels and mosques the sole buildings standing unscathed in the rubble left by their murderous rampages.127

In some areas, Renamo’s grassroots appeals struck a responsive chord among certain sections of the Mozambican population – at least long enough for Renamo to gain a local foothold. Many régulos and their close allies hankered after their lost privileges and prerogatives. Some of their former subjects sided or sympathized with them because they believed in chiefs’ religious and ritual powers. Others adopted similar positions because they attributed post-independence falls in rural living standards, the occurrence of natural calamities or even the advent of the war itself to Frelimo’s attempt to marginalize chiefs, or because they took the ruling party’s assault on “traditionalism” as a disparagement of rural culture as a whole. Some curandeiros, feiticeiros (sorcerers or magicians) and spirit mediums were as affronted as chiefs and were thus available to Renamo’s local propaganda and recruitment drive.128

In some areas, most notably Nampula, popular disaffection with villagization was one factor which “created a very favourable terrain for Renamo to operate in.”129 There were many reasons for this. In many areas a large portion of the resettled population longed to return to their former homes.130 The aldeias were often poorly sited and ill-equipped to sustain their resident populations. The concentration of the rural population artificially created a situation of land and resource scarcity. To make matters

56 Myth as a “meaning-making” device worse, villagization had often been compulsory, especially in advance of Renamo’s war, and the army, under whose auspices forced relocation had usually taken place, had proved unwilling or unable to defend the new settlements. Under the circumstances, the aldeias soon became relatively unprotected, overcrowded, poorly serviced hotbeds of serious social tensions and discontent.131 As such, they were ripe for Renamo’s armed intervention.

Religious devotees also constituted a potential anti-Frelimo constituency. Of the various institutionalized religions in Mozambique, the Catholic Church was arguably the hardest hit by decolonization and Frelimo’s postindependence policies.132 Under the dictatorship of António Salazar’s New State (Estado Novo) in Portugal, the Catholic Church was seen as an “instrument of civilization and of national influence.”133 The church’s special status was cemented and enhanced by the 1940 Concordat and the 1941 Missionary Accord signed by the Vatican and the Portuguese government. The agreements entrusted the church with responsibility for teaching primary school in the colonies, guaranteed public assistance to all missions and Catholic schools, and committed the state to paying the salaries of bishops and archbishops. In return, the Vatican gave the New State veto power over church nominations for bishops and archbishops in the colonies and over appointments of foreign missionaries. It also agreed to allow the Portuguese government to exercise tight control over the selection and training of all Portuguese religious personnel and over the curricula offered by colonial mission-based primary schools. The church thus had a strong stake in maintaining the colonial order in Mozambique.134

With independence the church lost its power and prestige. The nationalization of health care and education, which entailed the confiscation of valuable church assets and the curtailment of church influence, set the Catholic hierarchy and the ruling party on a collision course. Church–state relations further deteriorated in the late 1970s when Frelimo began to deny party membership to religious observers and to discourage all forms of public religious worship, closing down many churches and chapels in the process.135

The Catholic Church refrained from throwing its support behind Renamo. Frelimo’s efforts, from 1982 onwards, to mend fences with institutionalized religion as a whole helped to ease hostilities between the church and the government.136 However, the Catholic clergy remained a vociferous critic of Frelimo and an early advocate of dialogue between the two warring parties. And “[s]ome Catholic bishops and priests ... show[ed] some sympathy for aspects of Renamo policy,” most notably its professed pro-church stance.137

Frelimo-imposed prohibitions on religious worship, education and activism also alienated many Mozambican Muslims. Renamo not only benefited from the support of Saudi Arabia, Oman, the Comoros and elements within the Muslim community in Portugal. There are also “indications” that the rebels’ military success in northern Mozambique, where the Muslim population is concentrated, was at least in part a function of “religious

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 57 opposition, overt or latent” on the part of Mozambicans who subscribe to Islam.138

In addition, Renamo was able to attract people bent on settling scores with state and party officials who had mistreated them, excluded them from patron–client networks, or were just plain corrupt. Failed aspirants to Frelimo local offices formed another likely source of recruits.139 So did detainees at re-education camps.140 Much the same could be said of male youth looking for alternatives to the drudgeries and kinship obligations of smallholder agriculture and unable to find them within the rest of the economy. The cumulative impact of Renamo’s wartime destruction increasingly rendered family farming itself untenable in more and more regions of the country. Life at Renamo bases was harsh; however, whether they were forcibly or voluntarily conscripted, some Renamo soldiers reportedly enjoyed a marked elevation in social status and an upturn in economic prospects. Plunder provided a steady stream of coveted, formerly inaccessible, manufactured consumer goods. Civilians in Renamocontrolled zones performed the agricultural tasks which these youths had so vehemently disdained. And captive female civilians serviced them sexually without any kinship-related strings attached.141 In general, Renamo seems to have enjoyed the greatest degree of local support in areas which had been disadvantaged by uneven development under colonial rule and whose peripheral status was reinforced by Frelimo’s post-independence economic policies.142

Frelimo’s growing authoritarianism and the progressive militarization of the Mozambican state also enlarged the pool of potential recruits and sympathizers from which Renamo could, in principle, draw. The build-up of the state’s repressive apparatus and the state’s increasing proneness to resort to administrative controls and violence to enforce its writ occurred even as the government initiated economic reforms and began to take steps to widen its shrinking base of domestic support. In 1983, the government expanded the list of crimes warranting capital punishment, in force since 1979, to include black marketeering and armed robbery. The public executions that followed showed the state meant business. That same year flogging, a form of punishment widely used by the Portuguese against the African population, was reintroduced. In 1984, the government announced that citizens who wished to journey outside of their districts of residence would require a guia de marcha, an official travel pass.143

In 1983, the government launched Operation Production, a campaign to expel “unproductive elements” from the country’s cities. The declared aim was to relieve pressure on urban infrastructure and food supply systems; to pull the rug out from flourishing black markets; and to put people back to work on the land. The campaign took place just as Renamo was approaching Mozambique’s principal towns. The timing suggests that another, unstated, goal may have been to rid the cities of a social stratum deemed likely to be susceptible to Renamo’s appeals.144

58 Myth as a “meaning-making” device

Operation Production quickly degenerated into a massive and arbitrary exercise in forced removal. The entire informal sector became vulnerable to abuses of power by lower-level functionaries and the security apparatus. Between July and September, all city residents who were not formally employed or lacked the requisite documentation proving otherwise were summarily deported from the urban areas. They were sent to their home districts or to Niassa, the country’s most remote and sparsely populated province in the far north. There, they were obliged to harvest state farm crops or to farm on their own account. Deportees were not provided with even the minimal conditions for survival, let alone for surplus production. Many people starved in Niassa.145

In general, Renamo was not able to or did not choose to capitalize fully on the growing sources of discontent and/or dissent. The vast majority of Renamo’s army was forcibly conscripted. Many recruits, among whom children figured prominently in some regions, had been forced to commit heinous crimes, such as murdering close relatives, on the occasion of their induction “to bind them to the movement through guilt and fear of retribution.”146 Death or severe punishment (including the execution of family members) were frequently the penalties for trying to escape.147 Renamo conscripts were typically transferred to bases far from their home areas in order to discourage escape attempts and to make them more risky. Fear of retribution by Frelimo soldiers was a further deterrent if abductees did succeed in making their way to government-held areas.148

Renamo’s attempts to exploit mounting popular grievances, even where initially successful, were more often than not quickly undercut by the rebels’ own brutal treatment of the population – including the very people (e.g. chiefs, missionaries, religious believers, relocated communities, etc.) who might have been partial to them and their “cause.” The draconian controls and sanctions Renamo imposed on communities living under its administration, the harsh labor regime and material deprivation to which these communities were subject and Renamo’s manifest lack of a political vision did not work to the guerrilla army’s political advantage either.149 Hence, a full understanding of the war’s dynamics requires an appreciation of “the many ways people sought to limit commitment to, or involvement with, either side.”150

Renamo’s spectacular military expansion, then, apparently contradicts Mao’s dictum that effective guerrillas must be to the people like fish in the water.151 Nonetheless, counter-revolutionary war quickly succeeded in meeting one immediate objective of Renamo’s backers: bringing the Mozambican government to the negotiating table with its apartheid foe. The result was the Nkomati Accord,signed in March 1984. While Frelimo rigorously abided by its peace treaty obligations, South Africa negotiated the accord in bad faith, sending enough men and war matériel across the border to ensure Renamo’s military needs for at least six months.152 After Nkomati, Renamo was obliged to scale back its dependence on external material and logistical

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 59

support. Its soldiers came to rely more on the civilian population to meet their food and porterage needs. They leaned more heavily on arms captured in engagements with government forces and in attacks on their garrisons. They increasingly sought to sustain themselves and to finance their military operations through recourse to plunder, as well as through ivory smuggling and other cross-border trade in neighboring countries.153 And, especially in certain regions, they intensified their search for local allies.

A 1988 report commissioned by the US State Department and authored by Robert Gersony distinguished between two kinds of Renamo-controlled zones: “tax areas” and “control areas.” In the former case, typically found in sparsely populated areas, civilians got off the lightest. Local residents supplied Renamo guerrillas with food from their own fields, porter services, and women for sex. In the main, they were spared brutal treatment as long as they satisfactorily fulfilled rebel demands. In control areas, in contrast, the local population, consisting of both longtime residents and abductees who had been forcibly relocated to the zone in question, was “captive, detained against [its] will, and prohibited from attempting to depart.”154 Here a much more extractive and violent regime, enforced by “police” drawn from the resident population, prevailed. Still other areas, Gersony found, were targeted for wholesale destruction. Civilians in these areas were either killed or marched to “control areas” to form part of the labor force.155

The evidence to date is, in the main, broadly consonant with Gersony’s “three-zone typology.”156 All three patterns of Renamo interaction with civilians could co-exist or occur in (often rapid) succession in any given region. However, “destruction areas” appear to have predominated in the south from where a sizeable portion of the Frelimo leadership hailed, where the government had a strong following, and where the terrain and ecology were ill-suited to establish guerrilla bases. In contrast, “tax” and “control” areas seem to have been more common in Mozambique’s central and northern provinces.157

While the SADF continued to support Renamo throughout the war,158 the post-Nkomati period witnessed the diversification of the rebels’ foreign sponsorship and the partial privatization of its support networks within South Africa itself. Malawi, a conduit for South African supplies, a site of Renamo bases and an outlet for the sale of Renamo booty and ivory from the early 1980s, stepped up its support for the rebels. Kenya, a longtime source of Renamo arms and training, picked up part of the slack left by the South African military’s reduced role. Right-wing groups in the US, Portugal, the Portuguese diaspora, West Germany and Britain, among others, chipped in, too, often bringing to bear competing ambitions and divergent agendas. In South Africa itself, SADF personnel and front companies, private business interests and farmers (including former Portuguese settlers from Mozambique) provided logistical and material assistance.159

Renamo’s progressive indigenization in Mozambican society and the internationalization of its external support dovetailed with the war’s

60 Myth as a “meaning-making” device intensification. By 1987, destabilization had cost the Mozambican economy an estimated US$7 billion; Renamo had either destroyed or forced the closure of 490 health clinics and hospitals, 1,800 schools and 1,500 rural shops; about two million people had lost access to health care services; about 25 percent of all children had been forced out of schools; and an estimated 430,000 people, mostly infants and children, had died from war-related causes. 160 In 1988 Gersony conservatively estimated that Renamo may have murdered as many as 100,000 unarmed civilians.161

In the meantime, defense spending consumed growing proportions of progressively smaller state budgets at the direct expense of social services. Between 1981 and 1986, overall public expenditures dropped in real terms by 58 percent. During this same period, the military’s share of the state budget rose from about 36 percent to about 45 percent, while the share allocated to health and education combined fell from about 31 percent to about 22 percent.162 In summary, Renamo was much more adept at wiping out Frelimo-sponsored post-independence gains than in turning the dark side of the revolution to its own advantage. It was also more adroit at causing mass dislocation than at achieving its presumptive goal of returning rural dwellers to their pre-villagization homes. By 1987, nearly 1.1 million people were displaced inside Mozambique and an additional 750,000 had fled to neighboring countries.163

As the war escalated, Renamo initiated efforts to transform itself into a political party.164 These efforts gained momentum with the beginning of indirect peace talks via senior Protestant and Catholic clergymen in Nairobi in December 1988 and, starting in September 1989, via Presidents Daniel Arap Moi and Robert Mugabe of Kenya and Zimbabwe, respectively.165 It became imperative for Renamo to be able to negotiate effectively with Frelimo, to garner support at home and abroad, to develop the capacity to set up and oversee civilian administrations, and to compete in multiparty elections. Accordingly, the educational training and professional experience of forced conscripts, such as secondary school students, teachers, nurses, provincial-level civil servants and skilled workers, were pressed into the service of Renamo’s attempted self-transformation.

Although the people who came to form the nucleus of Renamo’s political and administrative hierarchies were, in the main, press-ganged into service, they stayed with the movement – and even came to identify with and seek to advance the rebels’ agenda – because doing so seemed to make good sense: it appeared, at the very least, to be the safest option and, at best, the surest way of making a living and even of getting ahead. Like Renamo’s military personnel, members of this new brand of cadre faced execution or severe punishment if they tried to desert; if they succeeded, the suspicion of Frelimo officials in government-held zones and a devastated economy awaited them. Staying put, on the other hand, offered the possibility of perquisites and even upward social mobility within Renamo’s ranks. With the onset of direct negotiations between the two warring belligerents in

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 61 Rome in July 1990, the potential dividends of sticking with the rebel movement increased markedly. Renamo also attracted voluntary recruits from among Mozambican urban professionals at home and abroad, business interests and urban-based secondary school students. It did so by offering various and sundry inducements. It pledged to provide jobs, including high-level government posts, should Renamo mount a successful electoral challenge. It offered opportunities to exploit natural resources in Renamo-controlled zones. And, in the case of students, it promised to hand out foreign scholarships, irrespective of the electoral results – a promise that went unfulfilled. By the war’s end, Renamo represented “a loosely bound, diverse group of people united only by their common opposition to something else. Even their grievances against the common enemy were not uniform.”166

In October 1992, Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano and Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama signed a peace accord. Winner-take-all multiparty elections were held two years later. Fourteen parties contested the legislative election and twelve candidates vied for the presidency. Frelimo won 44 percent of the votes in the legislative contest, while Renamo, its only serious contender, secured nearly 40 percent, prevailing in five provinces in the country’s north and center, including the most populous and agriculturally important ones, Zambézia and Nampula. Chissano fared better than the party he led, winning 53 percent of the vote; however, Dhlakama, made a strong showing, with nearly 34 percent of the electorate endorsing his presidential bid.167 In 1999, Renamo, now heading an eleven-party coalition called the Renamo-Electoral Union (União Electoral, UE), lost again; however, it won majorities in six provinces in the center and north and Chissano edged out Dhlakama by less than five percentage points. Renamo boycotted the first local elections in 1998 and Frelimo won majorities in all of the races for mayor and municipal assembly seats. Renamo-UE contested the second local elections, held in late 2003, but carried only four out of thirty-three cities and towns nationwide. It also won the mayoral race in a fifth town, where Frelimo captured a majority of seats in the municipal assembly.168

Official history, Frelimo ideology and Mozambican studies

By the time the government unveiled a new multiparty constitution in 1990, Frelimo had lost much of the early political luster it had held to the international left. In September 1984, the government, desperate for foreign exchange, joined the IMF. Three years later, it introduced an IMF-approved structural adjustment program. In 1989 the Frelimo Party officially abandoned Marxism-Leninism at its Fifth Party Congress. The congress endorsed peace negotiations with Renamo, an organization Frelimo – and many of its foreign supporters – had hitherto dismissed as the tool of Maputo’s external enemies.169

62 Myth as a “meaning-making” device

Independent observers had found the Mozambican army guilty of atrocities against civilians – although not on anywhere near the same scale or frequency as those committed by Renamo. They had also determined that ill-paid, underfed and poorly disciplined government troops were culpable of press-ganging civilians into their ranks and of looting.170 Official corruption had become widespread. And a number of Frelimo leaders seemed to be the primary beneficiaries of the development of what many observers dubbed a “savage” Mozambican capitalism and the rise of a “neo-colonial” state.171 Well before the 1994 elections, Frelimo had begun to espouse many of Renamo’s notional political demands. Political pluralism, a mixed economy, freedom of religion, political association and the press, and respect for traditional authority, institutions and practices had all become staples of ruling party discourse – much to Renamo’s evident consternation.172 Indeed, there were no significant differences in the political platforms of the two main contenders.

To a longtime Frelimo supporter like John Saul, the ruling party’s postindependence political trajectory and, in particular, its growing likeness to Renamo bore testimony to the success of Renamo’s low-intensity war and Mozambique’s enforced resubordination to the global capitalist economy.173 To Michel Cahen, a leading member of the revisionist school, the sudden, sharp “zigzags” in Frelimo’s policies and politics eclipse crucial underlying continuities of the party’s “social line”: that is, the leadership’s pettybourgeois and/or urban origins or orientation and the preponderance of mestiços and assimilados within its ranks.174 Assimilados were Africans and mestiços who had been granted, or were in principle eligible for, Portuguese citizenship after having demonstrated to the colonial state’s satisfaction that they had broken definitively with their African origins and acquired the culture of the colonizers. In 1950, mestiços represented less than 0.5 percent of the population; assimilados accounted for even less than that. Over a decade later, only 1 percent of all Africans had acquired legal assimilado status.175 Although enjoying juridical parity with whites, assimilados endured de facto racial discrimination and thus constituted a numerically negligible, relatively privileged but socially frustrated stratum of the African population.176 For Cahen, Frelimo’s political and ideological evolution should be read as a strategy of socio-economic advancement on the part of its leadership, itself distinguished by its elite, decidedly unrepresentative character.

As we have already seen, the tensions between these two positions are emblematic of a larger debate about the nature of Frelimo’s political project and of Renamo’s rural insurgency. Much of the literature produced by Frelimo’s sympathizers has been faulted for its tendency to reiterate uncritically official historiography and to assign undue weight to external factors, notably South African destabilization, in explaining the demise of the ruling party’s socialist experiment. Revisionists, such as Cahen, Geffray and Luís de Brito, have cast a jaundiced eye on Frelimo’s self-presentation – especially the ruling party’s commitment to socialist transition – and have concen-

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 63 trated their efforts on decoding forms of official political and ideological legitimation.177 The revisionists stand accused of “ultra-leftist abstractions,” over-simplification, “dubious generalizations” from local case studies, ingenuousness, factual inaccuracy and lax documentation of sources.178 Nevertheless, their influence on the kinds of questions students of the Mozambican revolution and counter-revolution ask and on the types of interpretations placed on the evidence has been substantial.

While the revisionists have aimed to mount a comprehensive left critique of Frelimo’s politics, they have thus far failed to subject Frelimo’s campaigns against rural “obscurantism” to the searching scrutiny that they have directed at other aspects of official discourse. In this respect they have taken Frelimo at its word: the vanguard’s hostility to rural “feudal” traditions straightforwardly denoted its resolute determination to eradicate those social practices and institutions dating from the precolonial period that it deemed to be, at best, antithetical to its radical modernizing agenda and, at worst, direct challenges to its political and ideological hegemony.

On this view, the semi-official reinstatement of chiefs in certain parts of the country in the late 1980s and 1990s represented a sharp reversal in ruling practice as well as in policy. This reversal, in turn is construed as a useful index of the distance the state has had to retreat from its founding principles and initial political program of all-embracing social transformation. On this point, the revisionists agree with their intellectual antagonists. The two groups merely differ as to the precise mix of pressures that forced this retreat. Frelimo sympathizers ascribe explanatory primacy to foreign destabilization and IMF disciplining, while the revisionists give analytic pride of place to Renamo-led rural resistance to the state.

This book queries the presuppositions underpinning this common stance. I show that, on the question of rural political change, the first two decades of Mozambican independence were marked by significant continuities in ruling precepts, official discourses and political practice. The existence of these continuities, in turn, compels a reconsideration of what came to be the strategic function of Frelimo’s anti-traditionalism within ruling relations and ideology. And such a reconsideration helps render intelligible the post-socialist mnemonic practices of state representatives at various levels of authority. Although I highlight the importance of continuities, and although the search for continuity was in part inspired and enabled by the revisionist critique, the present study does not vindicate the revisionist position. Instead, it extends Bridget O’Laughlin’s critique of the theoretical dualisms that underpin both Frelimo’s Third Congress development strategy and culture-based explanations of Mozambique’s post-independence travails in new directions with a view to unpacking the meaning of official memory practices in the post-Marxist period.179

The remainder of this chapter provides an overview of the argument andcontent of the present study. First, I outline Frelimo’s dualist vision of the Mozambican economy and polity, one which derived from

64 Myth as a “meaning-making” device Portuguese-propagated representations of the colony as a culturally pluralist society. My discussion reviews debates in Mozambican studies over this vision’s ideological roots and functions, as well as its policy consequences and political repercussions. Following O’Laughlin, I argue that the revisionist critique, as it developed from the mid-1980s on, derives from, or at least fails to transcend, the terms of reference of Frelimo’s own discourse.

I then lay the analytic foundations for such a transcendence. In doing so, I elaborate and interrelate two hitherto unconnected insights within the general literature. The first is the state’s highly circumscribed administrative, technical and financial capacity to induce or enforce its modernizing vision, limitations that were both exploited and compounded by externallysponsored warfare.180 It has been argued that inherited and imposed constraints moderated or even heavily compromised Frelimo’s antiobscurantism.181 While my own research corroborates this view, it also suggests that it tells only half the story.

Disclosing the other half requires drawing on the second insight, one which is implicit rather than expressly articulated in academic and journalistic writing on Mozambique. This is the tendentiousness that characterized state-leveled charges of obscurantismo, as defined by Frelimo, and the actions and attributes of subject populations which incited them. I develop an analytic framework which draws on and interconnects these two insights. My aim is to identify and understand the specific circumstances in which categories of persons were invoked as bearers of culture and these attributes were projected as a problem compelling state policing, disciplining and/or remedial action. The final sections of this chapter briefly outline why I settled on Nampula as the principal site for my investigation, the scope and organization of Chapters 2 through 8, and the sources upon which my discussion draws.

The dual economy thesis

Frelimo’s development policies bore the imprimatur of the colonial conception of the dual economy.182 According to this perspective, Portuguese colonialism bequeathed two highly differentiated, largely autonomous agrarian sectors. The first, characterized as a capitalist “modern” sector, consisted of plantation and settler farms, many of which were abandoned in the wake of independence and subsequently nationalized. The capitalist component of the economy overlay a precapitalist, “traditional” sector (another name for the family sector) characterized by surplus labor and subsistence production. Only nominally dependent on inputs, services and commodities from the wider economy, this latter sector accounted for the vast majority of the Mozambican peasantry, or some 90 percent of the country’s total population.

The dual economy thesis held that peasant participation in cash cropping and labor markets under colonial rule had been enforced by extra-economic measures, notably compulsory contract labor and crop cultivation. On this

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 65 view, high levels of peasant support for, and active involvement in, the Frelimo-led guerrilla war for independence were wholly motivated by a desire to throw off the yoke of an oppressive and exploitative state. Once this objective had been achieved and colonial coercive measures lifted, the peasantry could be expected to sever its links to the cash nexus, reducing the amount of total work invested in production. The sharp falls in marketed peasant produce and chronic labor shortages experienced by state farms in the early years of independence were adduced as evidence of both the peasantry’s capacity to revert to subsistence production and its marked inclination to do so.

The perceived prevalence of precapitalist conditions of production in the hinterland gave rise to the conviction within official circles that the successful promotion of socialist agriculture would require one or more of the following: high levels of state investment, high levels of political voluntarism or the application of extra-economic pressure. Since the state farm sector was slated to absorb almost all of the government’s agricultural budget, and since the application of political pressure was deemed unacceptable, the cooperative sector’s development was expected to await the consolidation of the state farm sector. In the meantime, small-scale collective agriculture would have to rely almost exclusively on the voluntarism of peasant producers. Given the precapitalist social relations in which they were embedded, this was unlikely to be forthcoming in appreciable quantities.

The subtext and political implications of this line of reasoning were plain to see. African smallholders, the thinking went, had little interest in the benefits collective agriculture was expected to bring, such as raising labor productivity or living standards. Their reliability and potential efficacy as a political partner in the upcoming round of socialist construction were therefore dubious at best. Bereft of any internal dynamism, the family sector would have to be developed by an outside agent if it were ever to “exit its millenial torpor.”183

The ascendancy of the dualist position within ruling circles revealed that, notwithstanding Frelimo’s self-presentation as the vanguard of a revolutionary worker–peasant alliance, the predominant view at the top was that the existence of that alliance’s constituent parts was far more notional than real. What was called for was, as Dan O’Meara put it, a massive state-led exercise in class creation in the rural areas, rather than a vanguard-led class struggle.184 Small-scale producers were left to await their gradual absorption into the rapidly expanding state sector, whose growth and consolidation their own productive labor would enable. In the process, peasants would be converted into rural wage laborers or, much less frequently, cooperative members. In summary, the dualist position effectively disarmed the peasantry as a social and political force in socialist transformation.185

The very logic by which the state arrogated to itself a monopoly on development initiatives vis-à-vis the family sector also served as a pretext for

66 Myth as a “meaning-making” device indefinitely delaying their launch. By equating economic “backwardness” with material self-sufficiency, the dualist perspective conveniently absolved the party and state of channeling inputs or assistance to the overwhelming majority of the population during the 1975–1983 period when the fledgling government arguably enjoyed its greatest degree of maneuver.

The research agenda of the Center for African Studies (CEA) at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo was dedicated to overturning the dichotomous conceptions prevailing in state and party circles. Many of the center’s field studies before the war’s escalation were devoted to elaborating the nature and degree of interdependence between apparently discrete economic sectors and to promoting a global strategy of socialist transition based on transforming the structural linkages among them. The CEA’s investigations showed that the peasantry relied on monetary income both to buy household essentials and to acquire instruments of production (e.g. ploughs, hoes, axes, machetes) necessary to sustain their farming operations. Under the circumstances, shortfalls in peasant marketed output and persistent labor shortages – to say nothing of the sluggish rate of agricultural cooperative formation –testified in good measure to the instability of rural markets and the dearth of commodities on which to spend monetary income in the countryside.

By all appearances, the CEA’s findings and recommendations fell on deaf ears.186 State-centered planning, investment and accumulation quickly eclipsed much of the initially strong popular enthusiasm for the new government, substantially contributing to its already highly pronounced vulnerability to South Africa’s destabilization strategy.187

State and society

By the late 1980s, the failure and political consequences of Frelimo’s development strategy, combined with the spectacular expansion of Renamo’s military activity throughout the national territory, had given rise to the revisionist view that the fundamental political cleavage in independent Mozambique was between the postcolonial state dominated by a petty-bourgeois, cosmopolitan elite and “urban society,” on the one hand, and a thoroughly disempowered rural population, on the other.188 As de Brito has written one of the most forceful, sustained statements of this position, I briefly review his argument.

De Brito’s point of departure, like Cahen’s, is the social, culturaland regional origins of the Frelimo leadership.189 The core of this group consisted of members of the urban salariat (office workers, state functionaries, nurses and teachers) and students. Almost all were from the extreme south of the country (Lourenço Marques and Gaza provinces) with residents of Lourenço Marques, the colony’s capital and bureaucratic center,190 enjoying a disproportionate representation within their ranks. Some were white, some were Asian and still others were mestiço. Most were assimilados. Many were mission-educated. This group would come to be stigmatized as the “south-

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 67 erners”191 by their principal adversaries within the nationalist front during the internal crisis that beset Frelimo in the 1960s. Unlike their internal rivals, whom de Brito characterizes as a mix of “rural elites,” “petty traders,” and powerful chiefs from the north as well as “intellectuals and urbanites from the central region of the country,”192 the “southerners” were born of, and had remained highly dependent on, the colonial state. They were thus thoroughly bereft of popular roots. In the face of their patent lack of representativeness, they resorted to the time-honored ideological strategy of universalizing their self-interest. They did so by proclaiming themselves bearers and guarantors of an imaginary, all-embracing community, the nation.

The dissolution of all other forms of socio-cultural and political belonging was the sine qua non for the “southerners’” conception of the nation to prevail. Underpinning their studied non-recognition of difference was the well-founded fear that even the faintest of gestures to the country’s enormous social heterogeneity would ineluctably prompt intense public scrutiny and interrogation of the extreme degree of their own difference from the broad mass of the population in whose name they professed to speak and to lead.193 Prior to independence, the site of the universalization of this elite’s particular interest was the guerrilla army; latterly, it became the postcolonial state. In both cases the “southerners” were able to marginalize their petty-bourgeois competitors from other regions of the country within and beyond Frelimo’s ranks through their control of strategic loci of legitimation.

For de Brito, the Frelimo leadership was less concerned with class creation than with “nationization,” a process which, in the rural areas, aimed “to liberate [local populations] from their ‘traditional’ attachments to make them national citizens, that is individuals who only recognized themselves socially in their relation to the nation-State.”194 During the armed struggle, the wartime political requirements of massive peasant participation had forced the leadership to recognize, albeit grudgingly, peasant socio-political organization. Following independence no such imperatives obtained and Frelimo could single-mindedly and uncompromisingly pursue its “statist, modernist and developmentalist” agenda.195 From then on, “all that escaped state power and control was seen as a menace to the unity of the people, or as an obstacle to the development effort.”196

Nowhere was this shift in orientation more apparent than with respect to the evolution of Frelimo’s position on the question of traditional authority. During the war for independence, the guerrilla-run administration set up in the liberated zones had operated according to the principle that leaders up to the level of the locality (the lowest administrative division) would be from the area in question. Effectively, if not officially, this provision signified that the role of chiefs was recognized. Even though the leadership identified chiefs with “tribalism,” any attempt to move against them would have risked alienating a portion of the movement’s peasant base, imperiling the security of the guerrillas and jeopardizing the prosecution of the war.197

68 Myth as a “meaning-making” device

The achievement of independence enabled Frelimo to abandon this posture of reluctant accommodation. Peasant political autonomy was regarded as a rival site of power particularly adept at eluding state controls and policy initiatives and thus singled out for repression.198 Accordingly, the Council of Ministers, the Mozambican cabinet, summarily deposed chiefs in its first session in June 1975, shortly thereafter replacing them with Frelimo secretaries. These latter were, in the main,

educated youth, sometimes “outsiders” to the area (the principle from the period of the armed struggle according to which the leaders of the base had to be from the region was no longer applied in independent Mozambique), often arrogant and disrespectful of the “traditions” that they were ... charged with combating.199

This analytic framework has informed the revisionist thesis that Frelimo’s anti-traditionalism, combined with the installation of new, alien institutions, gave rise to a duality of powers at the local level. The overarching rural–urban divide was expressed at the grassroots by a face-off between a tiny minority of culturally deracinated, or otherwise politically illegitimate, individuals representing a relentlessly modernizing state, on the one hand, and officially ostracized, popularly rooted representatives of traditional society, on the other.200 Whereas the CEA had warned against political demobilization and the spread of cynicism,201 this, more recent, perspective holds that Frelimo’s rural policies gave rise, in the words of MAE researcher Baptista Lundin, to a situation of “clandestinity and parallelism of institutions.”202

Perhaps the most notable feature of arguments which turn on rural–urban divides is the striking degree to which they conform to, and are circumscribed by, the terms of Frelimo’s own discourse.203 In particular, they unwittingly lend credence to Frelimo’s boast that its rural institutions represented, by virtue of their very formation, the negation of – or, at the very least, a powerful solvent for – what, in its more triumphalist moments, the ruling party referred to as the “vestiges of traditional-feudal society.”204 This claim, not surprisingly, found echo in the writings of early Frelimo enthusiasts who uncritically depicted communal villages and production cooperatives as magnets for “the most advanced sections of the population,” with chiefs, African capitalist farmers and upholders of “reactionary ideas and values” figuring among their most virulent detractors.205

To the extent that the revisionists depict a ubiquitous, monolithic, ideologically coherent state, they simply mirror an opposite tendency in the academic literature which emphasizes the state’s impotence. According to Marina Ottaway, for instance, the most outstanding feature of the Frelimo state in relation to the peasantry is its stunning irrelevance. While acknowledging Frelimo’s authoritarian tendencies and the adverse effects of its early economic policies on the rural populace, she argues that Frelimo’s post-

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 69 independence failures lay not so much in the leadership’s chosen model of governance but in its manifest inability to install it. Noting that the “socialist sector” of the rural economy (e.g. state farms and agricultural cooperatives) remained small, accounting only for 10 percent of the rural population, she contends, Frelimo “had little effective control over either the economy or the society.” Echoing Goran Hyden’s view of the situation that prevailed in colonial Africa and continues to prevail today,206 she contends that

the peasants remain uncaptured ... The Government has very limited capacity to affect what actually happens. It can draw up plans, make laws, and issue decrees, but it cannot implement them; and it can set up institutions of all sorts, but it cannot make them operational.207

In not too dissimilar fashion, John Saul invokes the “relative autonomy” of the state to explain why Frelimo was unable to achieve its revolutionary goals:

Perhaps if one reads, for “autonomous” such words as “ungrounded,” “suspended,” “free-floating,” it is possible to get a sense, at least metaphorically of the nature of the problem: viz, that the Frelimo state remained suspended above the society whose liberation it sought to facilitate ... and dangerously compromised by the great difficulty it would ultimately have in rooting its project in an active popular base.208

All these conceptions take as given what needs to be explained: how the state presents itself as “suspended,” either ineffectually or menacingly, over rural communities. I return to this question below. Second, they fail to address the crucial question of how rural ruling relations were achieved and sustained. Posing the analysis in terms of a rigid state–rural society opposition misleads in so far as it presupposes a pre-given, unitary entity, “the state,” whose policies then impacted on a uniformly unsuspecting and hapless peasantry. Overarching, reified conceptions of the state occlude the complex processes of post-independence state formation, particularly at the local level.

Rural residents in post-independent Mozambique experienced changes in the structure of authority and conditions of access to labor and resources in terms of shifting relations with one another, rather than simply as the imposition of a central authority or the work of impersonal economic forces.209 Frelimo’s agricultural policies “did not result in an increase in the net sum of disadvantage for everyone”210 even within the putative family sector. Rather, access to resources became more sharply differentiated both within and between rural communities. Acute goods shortages and the consequent development of parallel markets widened pre-existing rural inequalities. The supply of commodities became concentrated in the hands of wealthier

70 Myth as a “meaning-making” device peasants, who disposed of crops to sell. This newfound advantage “gave them leverage over the poorer peasantry.”211 Second, both capitalist farmers and better-off peasants received priority for credit, agricultural inputs and equipment. What’s more, both social strata were consistently favored in land distributions from the early 1980s onwards.212 Thus, early post-independence policies set in train processes of rural differentiation from a very early date – well before Frelimo moved, in the wake of the Fourth Congress in 1983, to give greater play to market incentives.213

One critical reason peasants faced differential access to state resources is because “the state,” in its most proximate incarnation, was deeply imbricated in local access-defining groups. While continuities in patterns of political authority and economic status have been widely noted, there has been no attempt, in light of them, to rethink one salient operative meaning of Frelimo’s anti-obscurantism. The discussion which follows undertakes such a reconsideration. My approach is indirect. More can be gleaned about the strategic function Frelimo’s anti-obscurantism came to assume by looking first at what its object, “traditional-feudal society,” was not in relation to the array of other “reactionary forces” identified as ranged against the revolution and, hence, singled out for elimination by it.214 These were all various incarnations of the capitalist “class enemy.”

State and class

Frelimo’s political analysis departed from the principle that the enemy was class-based and that, given the requisite political work, at any given moment a deep-cutting line in the sand could be drawn between it and the forces of revolution. While Frelimo identified several class enemies and these changed over time, they shared three defining features. First, all sought to rally popular support by appealing either to exclusivist identities, such as racism, regionalism or tribalism, or to what Frelimo considered to be other equally mystifying ideologies, such as liberalism, populism or ultra-leftism. Second, whether they had been formed by “colonial capitalism”215 or by post-independence imperialist design, all owed their genesis and ongoing staying power to externally-generated forces. It followed that the class enemy was not only anti-revolutionary; it was also, by definition, antinational.

Third, all class enemies were distinguished by the facility with which they either coalesced or crystallized in the state apparatus, the subversion and control of which was their ultimate object. The state not only tended to concentrate pre-existing social divisions within the capitalist component of the wider society but also served as the principal conduit for the infiltration of foreign-sponsored enemy agents and their associated ideologies into the Mozambican polity. Thus, even as destabilization pounded it militarily from without, the state provided a fertile breeding ground for the formation and consolidation of an alliance between internal and external foes.216 In what

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 71 follows, I review Frelimo’s notions of the class enemy as these evolved between 1977 and 1983, a period bracketed by the party’s Third and Fourth Congresses, respectively.

The Third Party Congress identified three class enemies, all of which were acknowledged to be weak but nonetheless required close surveillance given their natural affinity with external aggressors: (1) the colonial bourgeoisie, most of whose members had departed at independence; (2) an aspiring national petty bourgeoisie, including an incipient kulak class; and, more dubiously, (3) individuals who “although born of the people, became corrupt and betrayed the people,” a kind of lumpenproletariat consisting of “all lawless, professional criminals, thieves, murderers, drug addicts, prostitutes, gamblers and others,” with wartime collaborators thrown in for good measure.217

Three years later the situation had changed markedly. The shift is well illustrated by a speech Machel gave to mark the launch of the 1980 “Presidential Political and Organizational Offensive,” a campaign designed to curb the growth of privilege and corruption within government institutions. Machel held that the state had been infiltrated by “a minority of reactionaries, of enemy agents who have management and executive tasks” in strategic sectors of the economy. This infiltration had been engineered from abroad:

The head is outside! Here we merely have the body, but the head is outside! The ones here are simply carrying out orders. They are mere tools. They are lackeys cut off from the exterior, abandoned children, bastard children. ... Since the FRELIMO Party’s Third Congress mainly, the enemy has begun to operate at two levels: from abroad, particularly through criminal attacks by the racist Rhodesian regime and by infiltration of armed bandits; internally, through its agents and lackeys, with the aim of sabotaging from within the objectives laid down by the Third Congress ...

Their fundamental target internally is the state apparatus, the structures designed to ensure implementation of the Third Congress decisions. Their mission is to disorganize our party and our people’s state. Their mission is to establish: indiscipline; liberalism; anarchy; corruption; tribalism; regionalism; and racism. Their mission is to encourage: inefficiency and lack of enthusiasm for solving problems; incompetence; negligence; systematic deviation from guidelines; contempt for the people; insensitivity to the people’s problems; parasitism; and bureaucracy.218

By the early 1980s, the progressive bureaucratization of the state was cast in terms of the crystallization of a privileged class. In 1982, the Council of Ministers blamed state functionaries and managers for willfully obstructing the development of peasant cooperative agriculture. It pointed an accusatory

72 Myth as a “meaning-making” device finger at “middle level officials in the state apparatus and in state companies who have a social democratic mentality or a technocratic vision of the process of cooperativization. They spread wrong ideas that oppose the conception and principles of the Party.”219

The following year, in the face of the explosive growth of black markets and the escalation of South Africa’s destabilization war, the Frelimo Central Committee report to the Fourth Party Congress spoke of an “internal bourgeoisie” which, it found, “now has more economic power than it held soon after independence. It has infiltrated the trade circuits and the state apparatus.”220 The Fourth Congress, in its turn, identified an “internal enemy” in the form of black marketeers which it explicitly linked to the “external enemy” as incarnated in its proxies, the “armed bandits.”221

Even analysts sympathetic to Frelimo’s attempt to apply class analysis to Mozambican circumstance observed that there was an uneasy fit between officially-authorized class categories and the empirical social groups to which they purported to correspond.222 First, because colonial rule had constrained as well as engendered accumulation among African smallholders, Frelimo’s fear of the potential danger posed by a rural petty bourgeoisie was misplaced. “Kulaks” were few and far between even in the country’s three southern provinces where social differentiation was widely considered to be at its most advanced. By no means could these individuals be said to constitute a class in their own right. By the same token, the so-called “middle peasantry’s” hold on its status was highly contingent on such variables as household life-cycle, the vagaries of weather and, in the south, access to the South African labor market, notably work in the mines. Neither the achievement nor reproduction of this status typically derived from the exploitation of poorer peasant households.223

The term “internal enemy” was equally problematic. It ignored that the black market had, as the Governor of the Bank of Mozambique publicly acknowledged a month prior to the Fourth Congress, “an economic foundation.”224 Likewise, it “too uncritically lumped together those with the most marginal involvements in illicit marketing ... and others who were much more dangerous large-scale operators.”225 The fact that the first victims of public executions and flogging for “economic crimes” included stevedores and railway workers made a mockery of Frelimo’s classificatory schema.226

At all stages, the inadequacy of this scheme was reflected in the built-in instability of class categories themselves. The very fluidity and indistinctness of class determinations and social strata strongly militated against the establishment of a clear line of demarcation between class-based allies and adversaries. Revealingly, official pictorial and textual representations of the class enemy made little to no reference to the relations of production or exchange. Instead, they tended to highlight less than sterling personal characteristics, such as laziness, ostentation, chauvinism, arrogance, indiscipline and moral depravity, that transcended class lines. Even more problematically, some of these qualities – to wit, indiscipline and laziness – were all-too-typically

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 73 associated with the laboring classes.227 Class has often been invoked by radical nationalists as a proxy for other corporate identities, such as race, ethnicity or nationality, whose public mention are off-limits.228 In revolutionary Mozambique, the term was more elastic still, denoting a kind of free-floating, ever-mutating and ever-metastasizing malignancy.

Finally, as harsher critics have more emphatically and correctly stressed, Frelimo’s analysis passed over in silence the ways in which class formation within state institutions and elsewhere had been a logical culmination of the dogged pursuit of – rather than “systematic deviation[s] from” or breaches of – Third Congress guidelines.229 In the event, the leadership’s often impressive willingness to acknowledge publicly its own culpability in failing to uphold the party line only served to legitimate its unquestioned and non-negotiable role as that line’s architects and leading proponents.230

State and culture

The obverse side of the state’s self-confessed, highly advertised susceptibility to antithetical class interests and their associated ideologies was its seeming impregnability by, and invulnerability to, the nefarious cultural practices and ideologies characteristic of “traditional-feudal society.” Whereas establishing and maintaining a clear line of demarcation between class-based enemies and revolutionary forces resulted from ongoing, intensive political work and vigilance, the frontier between the state and “traditional-feudal society” was pre-given, readily detectable and apparently fixed. Although the inertia of “mentalities” acted as a serious brake on Frelimo’s rural interventions,231 unlike state bureaucrats and executives, obscurantist assertions were apparently incapable of diluting or derailing party directives from within.

The one notable exception to this unstated dictum seems to have been the defense, law enforcement and security forces. In 1981, Machel held that “crimes, abuses and arbitrary actions” committed by these institutions owed in part to the cultural origin of their perpetrators. Rural recruits to the army, security forces and police had brought with them the “cultural universe” of “tribal-feudal society”:

Whipping and tying up prisoners were methods used by chiefs. These young people learned this in the village ... They brought into our defence and security force what they saw the chief and the native policeman do. They are the same ones who practise tribalism and regionalism.232

To the extent that such values were held by people in positions of authority, they represented an “ideological infiltration,” a development which, in turn, created the conditions for a “physical infiltration” of the enemy.233 Nonetheless, in the first instance at least, such crossings had been engendered by a

74 Myth as a “meaning-making” device kind of benign process of osmosis rather than by premeditated subversive action. As such, they were readily rectifiable through conscientization: “all of us have a responsibility in the fight against the old mentality.”234

Notwithstanding Frelimo’s dependence on them, rural hierarchies which formed the institutional core of “traditional-feudal society” were consistently portrayed in ruling discourses as objects, rather than as relations, of state rule. By this I mean the following. First, the leadership not only depicted the Frelimo state as the site par excellence of an ongoing political showdown between the revolutionary vanguard and counter-revolutionary petty bourgeoisie; it also, and at the same time, implicitly affirmed that state as the exclusive preserve of these two antagonistic social forces. Second, both parties to this categorical enmity were, by definition, exogenous to the social relations encapsulated in “traditional-feudal society.” Third and by implication, ruling discursive practices ideologically positioned these latter social relations, presumed to characterize much of rural Mozambique, not only as outside of state institutions but also as developmentally “beneath” them.235

The re-presentation of ruling relations in a manner that resolved the growing tension between the regime’s anti-traditionalist stance and its unrelieved reliance on chiefly authority had its precedent in the armed struggle. In 1968, shortly before his death, Frelimo’s founding president Eduardo Mondlane described the nationalist movement’s relationship to “tribal chiefs” as follows:

What happens in every region where action is taking place is that any chief who is against the liberation struggle is sent away before military action takes place. But as soon as military action begins he either has to run over to the enemy or he is eliminated. Only those chiefs who have become part of FRELIMO, which means becoming chairmen [of local Frelimo branches],236 or secretaries of cells, sections, districts, or provinces ... can remain. And at that point they are one and the same with [sic] any one of us. So the functions they had before had an influence in their selection only because they had prestige and, therefore, they were elected as chairmen, but, once the struggle begins, the whole thing is people [sic] of Mozambique together. And the paramount chief is unimportant as such in that stage.237

In summary, the Frelimo leadership viewed the ongoing political legitimacy and social status of chiefs as deriving exclusively from their identification with the political movement itself, apparently permanently cut adrift from any socio-historical moorings. In doing so, it conveniently equated the simple act of political adherence with ideological conversion and personal transformation.238

De Brito argues that independence day effected a rupture in this regard, bringing an end to the disparity between proclaimed and actual Frelimo achievement and hence obviating the need for semantic obfuscation.

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 75 However, the existing available evidence suggests otherwise. In many rural localities rule by royals in the name of state continued, as did Frelimo’s claims for the revolutionary credentials of the institutions of popular power.

The above analysis suggests that there were at least two overlapping but analytically distinct binarisms in play in ruling representations of the rural population. The first, Frelimo’s dualist conception of the economy, has been amply critiqued. The second has passed virtually unremarked in Mozambican studies but is just as important to dissecting the anatomy of the myth of revolutionary rupture: I refer to the polarity between ruling institutions and the majority of the ruled population: on the one hand, the Frelimo state, implicitly defined by its presumptive capacity to homogenize to positive effect unsavory local particularisms whose bearers were appointed to act in its name; on the other, the highly differentiated but uniformly “obscurantist” rural society over which that state ruled.

Self-evidently, the continual displacement of “traditional-feudal society” to a fixed extra-state address was integral to processes of state self-definition and public presentation as “modern” and “suspended” over rural objects of rule. More than that, Frelimo’s enactment of a reified, categorically nontraditionalist, identity for its state made possible official recognition of a purely indigenous basis of internal opposition to Frelimo’s political project. For the very characteristics which disqualified traditional relations of rule from infiltrating the state or from serving as an organizing principle of Frelimo institutions also conferred on them an autonomy from global capitalism and, thus, a legitimacy resolutely withheld from the domestic class enemy. Categories of persons marked as leading representatives of “feudal society” could collude with, or be manipulated by, an internal bourgeoisie or imperialist aggressors,239 but they owed their origins and their contemporary character to neither. In this sense, the term rural obscurantism occupied an indispensable position within official discourses. It served to explain homegrown rural opposition in a manner that confirmed the validity – indeed, the absolute necessity – of the state’s development actions.240

If the cultural attributes of chiefs and lineage notables holding official leadership positions rapidly faded into insignificance, these same attributes gained salience in instances of perceived or actual rural resistance to government policy directives. The state’s response to the “disaggregation” of communal villages in Cabo Delgado in the early 1980s – that is, the wholesale withdrawal of resettled communities from state-mandated aldeias comunais –provides the most clear-cut, recorded illustration of this tendency.241 All the villages which eventually splintered suffered from similar problems. Families who had had to relocate to form the aldeias were especially disadvantaged, giving rise to serious intra-village social tensions. From 1980 onwards, local antagonisms sparked by land competition were compounded by struggles over access to a sharply contracting local stock of consumer goods. By that time, these difficulties, combined with the non-functionality of local political structures, weak state support to smallholder agriculture

76 Myth as a “meaning-making” device and a series of unmet promises regarding central support for local cooperatives, had engendered widespread “disinterest and cynicism.”242

It was in this context that groups of people, apparently led by clan elders, moved out of state-designated aldeias. Some went back to their old lands and others relocated to new sites in order to form breakaway villages. By 1983 one-third of the province’s rural districts had been affected by the process of disaggregation. Several of these breakaway settlements undertook impressive efforts to gain official recognition as communal villages. In doing so, they aimed to secure state support for the construction of educational and health facilities, as well as a consumer cooperative in order to acquire access to government-rationed goods. While the physical plan and internal organization of the spin-off communities meticulously conformed to state stipulations, official recognition was withheld. Instead, the local administration responded by burning down the homes in the unauthorized settlements, by forcing the people living in them to return to state-recognized villages and by arresting the presumed leaders of the disaggregation movement. Nonetheless, time and again, the breakaway groups returned to their preferred sites of residence.

The populations in question and the local authorities held radically divergent interpretations of the reasons for disaggregation. Peasants cited prohibitive distances to their cultivated plots as the primary cause. For them, the breakaway villages represented an attempt “to resolve their own problems, not resolved by the state, with the means at their disposal.”243 In contrast, in the eyes of provincial and district-level state and party officials, the phenomenon reflected “the resurgence of reactionary tribal political power which was necessary to combat using all means at their disposal.”244

While the breakaway villages were led by a “council of elders” (baraza) instead of an executive council in accordance with official guidelines, CEA researchers found that “power and class relations are not different from the other villages in the district.”245 In many of the official villages the formally constituted executive councils

function like “baraza”; decision-making is conducted in the same manner. Even the values defended and the concept of justice used is the same. But since the party and state are more interested in knowing if the structures comply or not, they don’t analyze the results of the work.246

Government accusations came at a time when differential access to the means of production and severe goods shortages were giving rise to a triple alliance between district-level state and party authorities, the historic “owners of the land” within the communal villages and people who controlled the circuits of distribution of essential goods.247 In sum, in highlighting the presumed cultural attributes and social relations of rural communities living outside of officially-sanctioned institutions, local

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 77 government officials succeeded in neatly deflecting attention away from the culturally-encoded power relations that obtained within them. Other instances of “disaggregation” appear to have been treated in a similar manner.248

Synopsis of argument and a key assumption

The above discussion suggests that it was not just that Frelimo’s antiobscurantism heightened particularist identifications and politicized the cultural, as some scholars have argued.249 Nor is it only that post-independence traditionalist assertions reflected compensatory forms of peasant self-expression in a context “where political activity has been suppressed.”250 Over and above both of these dynamics, expressions of rural indifference, discontent or dissent tended automatically to be branded as obscurantist. What’s more, so were concerted and creative attempts by peasants to renegotiate the terms of their compliance. This tendency within official discourses set the stage for the eventual inflation of the explanatory weight of cultural attachments and rigidities in the failure of Frelimo’s agrarian policies. This inflation was especially marked in Nampula in the early 1990s. But it was also in evidence at the level of national politics, especially in advance of the 1994 elections.

In both instances, the state’s “retreat to tradition” re-enacted the myth that rural obscurantism was at the root of peasant resistance to, and/or noncompliance with, Frelimo interventions. At the same time, the ideological practices which accompanied this retreat appropriated key dimensions of culture-based revisionist accounts. The facility with which this appropriation occurred underscores the degree to which these latter accounts endorse, rather than refute, the underlying assumptions of the object of their critique. By the early 1990s the main lineaments of a new brand of statist historical narrative had emerged and, as a concatenation, arguably reached the height of their political influence. They consist in overstating the following five propositions: (1) the centrality and pulling power of chieftaincy on the eve of independence; (2) the extent to which power relations prevailing in post-independence revolutionary rural structures marked a decisive break with those obtaining at the end colonial rule; (3) the culpability of Frelimo’s attempted circumvention of chieftaincy and its anti-traditionalism in producing civil strife, social anomie, economic decline and political polarization; (4) the degree to which Frelimo’s public embrace of tradition marks a sharp reversal not only of official policy but of ruling institutional practice; and (5) the potential or actual remedial power of rehabilitating chieftaincy and what are deemed to be traditional moral values in the phase of postwar national reconstruction. Whereas proposition two was central to Frelimo’s early Marxist discourse and proposition four flows logically from it, numbers one, three and five are drawn from culturalist accounts of postcolonial developments.

78 Myth as a “meaning-making” device

My argument rests on the premise that, in the early 1990s, the Frelimo leadership was still in the business of cultivating popular legitimacy, even if only for opportunistic reasons. The point bears stressing given the decision taken in the 1990s by African rulers in Sierra Leone, the former Zaire, Liberia and elsewhere to summarily dispense with any pretense of serving a public or collective interest in favor of aggressively and unambiguously pursuing a strategy of warlordism.251 In common with incumbents throughout sub-Saharan Africa, Frelimo’s leaders were contending with a series of dramatic shifts in the conditions and sources of external patronage. These shifts were occasioned by the global ascendancy of neoliberalism, the deregulation of international markets, the end of the Cold War, the dismantling of the apartheid state in South Africa and “the internationalization and growth of organized crime on a probably unprecedented scale.”252 Like many of its counterparts elsewhere on the continent, the Frelimo leadership stood at the helm of a “weak state” which had been further debilitated by the imposition of a structural adjustment program mandated by multilateral lenders, upon whose favor and largesse it was becoming ever more dependent. Like other African rulers, Frelimo’s senior cadres responded to rapidly changing circumstances by intensifying “strategies of extraversion”: that is, by stepping up efforts to tap external resources and alliances with a view to advancing their ongoing struggles for power with their domestic political rivals.253 Most notably, this entailed contracting numerous and important economic functions to “foreign nonstate actors”254 and – in the case of Mozambique –to private local firms, several of the most prominent of which are of colonial provenance.

In Mozambique, as elsewhere, the process of privatization, a key component of the IMF’s reform package, provided political cover for incumbents to reward allies. At the same time (and at least as importantly), it allowed those in power to deny access to valuable political connections and material resources to internal rivals and/or armed insurgents. And, as elsewhere, state divestiture contributed to the growth of official corruption, the plunder of national assets and “the fusion of criminal and political practices.”255 In the case of Mozambique, senior government officials and intelligence officers were reportedly involved in many of the underground operations that, starting in the mid- to late 1990s, became mainstays of the national economy. The most notable and lucrative of these are, or have been, the trafficking of ivory, rhino horn, guns, narcotics and stolen cars.256

But, unlike their warlord opposite numbers, Frelimo leaders did not, and have not, set about destroying state institutions.257 Nor have they subscribed to an expansive definition of privatization, one which includes alienating not only state enterprises, services and assets, but also the means of violence and foreign policy, to their newfound (or, in certain instances, repositioned) private partners.258 Rather, the Mozambican state has remained an important site of clientelist politics, whose networks intersect with informal political channels.259 In contrast to warlord-led states, official institutions remain

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 79 an important (if not the only) foundation for the exercise of political authority and an important (if not the only) mechanism for controlling markets. Lastly, although this book details coercive practices in the productive process, violence as an instrument for managing economic resources was nowhere near on the same scale as in warlord-run states. In summary, if Mozambique in the 1990s was a “smuggling state” – and, by some accounts, a virtually “collapsed state” – it was not yet a “criminal state,” nor one overrun by warlord politics.260 In the event, those in power were seeking some measure of legitimacy for themselves.

Nampula Province and Eráti/Namapa District

The narrative which follows is based primarily on a year of field and archival research in Mozambique from February 1994 through January 1995, during which time I was a research associate at the Center for African Studies. It also draws on a week of follow-up research in Portugal in July 1995. My choice of Nampula Province as a fieldwork site reflects, in the first instance, the province’s centrality to debates about the nature of the interaction between official institutions and the rural populace (most notably smallholders) and the local dynamics of the war. Those debates which are addressed in the present study bear on the timing, causes, political repercussions and official justifications of forced villagization in the 1980s; the use and extent of forced labor in post-independence Mozambique; the nature, scope and significance of traditional power in contemporary rural politics; and the sources, nature and extent of rural alienation, resistance and dissent. Nampula’s prominence in these debates has prompted several commentators to characterize post-independence developments there as representing a “worst case scenario” from Frelimo’s point of view.261

The importance assigned by these scholars and others to the mix of Frelimo’s anti-traditionalism, the power and legitimacy of local chiefs, and chiefly hostility to the ruling party in producing this scenario especially aroused my interest. I settled on Nampula in good measure to see if all of the elements of this mix were indeed present and, in the event that they were, to determine whether the mix itself was as politically explosive as it was claimed to be.

A second draw was closely related to the first: the province’s strategic position within Mozambique’s political economy, past and present. If relations between Frelimo and the Nampulan populace were as bad as they were painted as being, it seemed likely that the province would figure prominently in the ruling party’s strategy of re-legitimization and postwar reconstruction. It also seemed likely that the political stakes involved in explaining why rural alienation and dissent were so rampant in Nampula would be high.

During the colonial period, Nampula was a leading producer of agricultural commodities, second in the value of output only to its southern

80 Myth as a “meaning-making” device neighbor, Zambézia, host to the colony’s highest concentration of large-scale plantations. On the eve of independence Nampula was the chief producer of Mozambique’s foremost export earners, cashew nuts and cotton. Throughout the colonial period, cashew nuts were almost exclusively a smallholder crop and most marketed cashew nuts came from Nampula.262 Up until the rise of settler agriculture in the mid-1960s, the Nampulan peasantry played a comparably pivotal role in cotton production, which, until 1961, African smallholders in designated zones were legally obligated to undertake. Smallholders in Nampula accounted for 38 percent of total colonial cotton output in 1964 – a substantial contribution in its own right and a much heftier one than their counterparts in other provinces.263 The Nampulan family sector’s share of marketed production of other agricultural crops, such as peanuts, sesame and tobacco, was equally impressive.264 As we shall see, after independence Nampula’s family sector regained its former status as a crucial pillar of national marketed agricultural production and, in particular, of export crops. In summary, the performance of Nampula’s smallholder population is central to the fortunes of Mozambique’s commercial agricultural sector.

In the mid-1990s, Nampula was also the most populous province in Mozambique. In mid-1994 Nampula was home to about 3.1 million Mozambicans, or over 19 percent of the estimated 15.9 million-strong national population, and over one-fifth of the voting population.265 In the first elected government, Nampula was accorded fifty-four seats in the 250seat national parliament, five more than its chief demographic rival, Zambézia, and well more than twice as many seats as any of Mozambique’s nine other provinces. Today, it accounts for fifty seats, two more than Zambézia. Not surprisingly, with the adoption of multipartyism and the institutionalization of electoral contests, Nampula has become a favorite whistle-stop for stumping politicians.

Nampula’s strategic importance in Mozambique’s contemporary political landscape dates back to the late colonial period. In the 1960s, colonial planners designated the province a prime site for the growth of white settlement in part because they hoped that an expanded European presence would serve as a bulwark against an anticipated Frelimo military advance from the movement’s sanctuaries in Cabo Delgado.266 The settlement policy was part of a broader counter-insurgency offensive which included widespread political repression, forced removals, an aggressive program to win peasant hearts and minds, and a military build-up. By all appearances, the strategy worked. In the event, Frelimo was forced to shift the focus of its military campaign to Tete Province.267

Portuguese success on the Nampulan front has been adduced as evidence of the liberation movement’s strained relationship with the Makua- (Macua-, Amakhuwa, Makhuwa-) Lomwé, the largest linguistic cluster both in Mozambique and in Nampula, where most members of this cluster reside.268 Scholars have advanced various explanations for the genesis and severity of

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 81 these strains. Thomas Henriksen and Otto Roesch have, for instance, cited the longstanding antagonisms between the predominantly Makonde-speaking peoples in northern Cabo Delgado, who were heavily represented in Frelimo’s guerrilla army, and the Makua-Lomwé. Henriksen has also stressed the colonial state’s dexterity in manipulating this antagonism to its own politico-military advantage.269 Landeg White has conjectured that Frelimo’s failure to make politico-military inroads into predominantly Makua-Lomwé-speaking areas bespoke another, more generalized aspect of regional differentiation within Mozambique: the socio-economic divide between groups that had “the longest experience of selling labor abroad” and those that didn’t. Rural communities in northern Cabo Delgado, Tete and southern Mozambique fell into the first category; inhabitants of Nampula, southern Cabo Delgado and parts of Zambézia fell into the second. Migrant laborers from the first group had been instrumental in articulating nationalist sentiment and in founding Frelimo. White suggests that it is no coincidence that Frelimo found its greatest popular support during the armed struggle from the regions marked by a high incidence of transnational labor migration.270

Irrespective of their source, pre-existing tensions between Makua-Lomwéspeakers and Frelimo became aggravated after independence. The underrepresentation of Makua-Lomwé-speakers in senior positions within the state and party leadership in the post-independence period contributed to this outcome, as did the disproportionate representation of southern Mozambicans and Makonde-speakers in high-ranking government and party positions within Nampula.271 The privileging within post-independence official historiography of ethno-regional groupings (most notably the Makonde, as well as the Nguni-headed, precolonial kingdom of Gaza and their descendants) which purportedly mounted the most concerted, sustained and effective resistance to colonialism implicitly slighted the Makua-Lomwé (among others) and thus didn’t help matters any.272 But the factors identified by scholars as arguably having played the most decisive role during the first decade of independence are Frelimo’s anti-traditionalism and forced villagization.

With the advent of political pluralism, strains between Nampulans and the ruling party have been expressed at the polls. In 1994, Frelimo lost the province to Renamo in both the parliamentary and presidential races. In 1999, it fared slightly better but Renamo, along with its coalition partners, still prevailed. In 2003, Renamo-UE posted victories in three of the five cities and towns which held municipal contests in the province.273

Save for the questions of forced labor and ethnicity,274 all of the academic and political controversies alluded to above were either generated or given fresh focus by Geffray’s pioneering field research in Eráti District in 1983–1985 and, again, in mid-1988, by which time the district had been divided in two.275 I chose Namapa District, formed out of the northern half of Eráti, as the primary site of my own field studies largely for this reason.

82 Myth as a “meaning-making” device

As we have seen, Geffray argued that the combined effects of forced villagization, the formal abolition of chieftaincy and the post-independence regime’s poor treatment of chiefs seriously eroded popular support for the ruling party. They also, he contended, provided Renamo with a social base from which to wage its war of destruction with brutal efficiency. Geffray argued further that the retreat of the Frelimo state in the face of Renamo’s peasant-supported military aggression was evidenced in Eráti by two major developments in the late 1980s: (1) the effective abandonment of the village project and the redispersal of the rural population; and (2) the district government’s delegation of managerial functions over rural production to former régulos. The second development resurrected colonial labor arrangements in which chiefs had acted as overseers of compulsory smallholder crop cultivation in cotton- and rice-producing zones. In practice, the move signaled de facto official tolerance, if not de jure recognition, of chiefs’ political and juridical authority.

Geffray contends that it is no mere happenstance that the state was forced to capitulate on the two questions which had constituted the principal source of tension between it and the rural population and which had impelled certain chieftaincies into dissidence. Further, he persuasively argues that the government climbdown on both counts was at once facilitated and partly occluded by a discursive “double negation.” The return to the dispersed habitat was routinely advertised in official rhetoric as an ad hoc temporary expediency to cope with wartime military pressures rather than as the definitive demise of Frelimo’s rural collectivization policy. At the same time, the district government sought to obfuscate the effective return to chiefly power in areas nominally under its control by misleadingly dubbing state-recognized traditional authorities mere “chiefs of production.”

I have critiqued the logic of Geffray’s argument elsewhere.276 The present study provides an empirical basis for fleshing out my argument. At the same time, I apply and build on those aspects of Geffray’s analysis that I have found to be the most compelling and that have enabled me to probe productively the meaning and significance of continuity and change in ruling ideological practice over a twenty-year span.

A second motivating factor for choosing Eráti/Namapa as the main locus of my research was the existence of a corpus of rich empirical data on the area’s social and economic history. Bequeathed mainly by the CEA, the Mozambican historian Rafael da Conceição, the Portuguese agronomist José Bernardo de Faria Lobo, the British historian Richard Gray and, most especially, Geffray, this body of literature has made Eráti/Namapa one of the best researched regions of the province, providing a solid basis for situating historically and interpreting contemporary developments.277

A third impetus was Eráti/Namapa’s importance as a source of smallholder-generated foreign exchange and of rural votes. During the colonial period, Eráti was a premier site of peasant-produced cotton. Between 1961 and 1965, for instance, the peasantry in the district accounted for nearly 20

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 83 percent of all family sector cotton production in Nampula, the equivalent of 6 percent of the colony’s total cotton output. Over 85 percent of this output came from the region encompassed by present-day Namapa. Namapa’s agricultural productivity is partly explained by its location in one of the two swaths of land in Mozambique that are highly propitious for cotton farming. It also reflects the number of smallholders who inhabit the district. According to UN estimates, the district was host to 281,000 residents in mid-1994, or roughly 9 percent of the provincial population.278 Namapa’s demographic heft has made the district sharply contested political terrain. In 1994, Renamo carried the district in the parliamentary race but only by an extremely narrow margin; Frelimo, in its turn, won the presidential race. In 1999, Frelimo posted victories in both races.279 The two sets of results suggest the contingency and possible ambiguity of popular support for both parties, characteristics that also appear to define relations between the Namapan populace and claimants on officially-recognized local offices.

In summary, Namapa’s strategic importance to Nampula’s political economy is comparable to Nampula’s strategic importance to Mozambique’s political economy as a whole. Both are politically and economically strategic sites in good measure because a populous, cash-cropping peasantry makes them so. In both, popular disenchantment and discontent with the incumbent regime have been substantial. In both, the ongoing vitality of chieftaincy, as well as the extent to which chiefs are responsible for fomenting and directing rural dissent in the post-independence period, have been the object of scholarly contention. And, in both, the institution of chieftaincy has been a prime target of politico-military strategic intervention, as well as of postwar partisan calculation and manipulation. All these factors pointed me in the direction of Nampula and fed into my selection of Namapa as the primary site of my fieldwork investigation.

Overview, scope and sources

Chapter 2 lays out the historical context for Chapters 3 through 7. This history provides evidence showing that the myth of revolutionary rupture exaggerates the centrality and pulling power of chieftaincy at the end of colonial rule (proposition #1). It also sets the stage for understanding processes of local state formation in Eráti, a topic addressed in Chapter 3. Chapter 3 mounts a two-step argument with respect to the 1975–1987 period. First, it takes aim at the proposition (#2) that the power relations prevailing in the institutions of popular power marked a decisive break with those obtaining on the eve of independence. It thus contributes to a growing literature showing that the revolution did not succeed in overturning preexisting hierarchies of advantage and privilege even within the narrow parameters of its own institutions. Second, it argues that Frelimo’s “retreat to tradition” in the form of the provincial government’s use of former régulos as

84 Myth as a “meaning-making” device “chiefs of production” did not represent a wholesale capitulation to Renamo. Rather, the reinstatement of chiefs to their former managerial roles in agricultural production was just one facet of a much broader initiative on the part of officialdom to revive the colonial forced cotton regime. I consider why Nampula was chosen as the site of the most concerted and comprehensive government attempt to revert to Portuguese precedent with respect to rural labor relations.

In addition, I examine the historical antecedents to the “codes of oblivion” that characterized state-sponsored retrospectives, undertaken in the early 1990s, on the post-independence history of rural authority. It is true that, throughout the 1980s, Frelimo “stuck firmly to its public position that RENAMO was a group of bandits financed and organised by South Africa, with no internal support, and that its successes were in no way the result of FRELIMO’s own policies.”280 But Frelimo representatives also discredited Renamo in subtler, and arguably more effective, ways: namely, by steadfastly denying the efficacy of the rebel insurgency in reversing, redirecting or altering the ruling party’s policies or strategic goals, as enunciated at its Third Congress. Geffray showed that this was the case in Nampula with respect to the provincial government’s de facto abandonment of the village project. I show it to be the case even before then – that is, as the policy of rural resettlement as a nation-building exercise quickly degenerated into a counter-insurgency strategy.

Chapter 4 sets out the national and local contexts for Chapters 5 through 8, all of which deal chiefly with the 1987–1994 period. It also provides a brief sketch of more recent national developments. Chapters 5 through 7 examine the ideological and political practices which accompanied the “retraditionalization” of rural administration in Nampula in the early 1990s. Chapters 5 and 6 also address the socio-political repercussions of this semi-official policy shift. Chapter 5 takes aim at the proposition (#4) that the “retreat to tradition” marks a sharp reversal of ruling institutional practice as well as of official policy. It shows that the provisional return to some semblance of indirect rule involved an attempt not only to expand Frelimo’s rural constituency in preparation for an electoral showdown but also to reposition and repackage its old social base. In the process, longtime party militants were recast as members of traditional hierarchies. Contrary to the proposition four would lead us to believe, if the transition from the late colonial period to post-independence revolutionary Mozambique was marked by continuities in rural asymmetries of power, so was the switch from rule through the institutions of popular power back to rule by chiefs. I also examine the ways in which official justifications for the retraditionalization of rural political institutions implicitly rewrote the history of the relationship between the state and the party as hitherto represented in ruling propaganda. Finally, the chapter discloses the temporal distortions enacted by this rewriting – distortions which responded to the ideological imperative of expunging the impact of

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 85 Renamo’s war on official–local relations from statist historical narratives. Chapter 6 details local struggles over labor, tribute and authority attendant upon the displacement of grassroots party–state institutions by chieftaincy. My findings corroborate the contention advanced by other researchers that, contrary to the view often heard in official circles during this period and implied by revisionist writing on the subject, the mere “recognition” of chieftaincy was no panacea for the crisis of state political legitimacy in the rural areas.281 Indeed, I show that, if anything, the specific political, economic and social conditions in which the retraditionalization of rural administration occurred in Nampula in several respects compounded, rather than ameliorated, that crisis.

Chapters 7 and 8 tackle questions aimed at illuminating hitherto unexplored aspects of Frelimo’s ideological practice. Those questions are as follows. Why was the provincial administration in Nampula so politically investedin making it appear as if the revival of a reconstituted chieftaincy was not only a straightforward proposition but also one which had in many locales already produced an instantaneous salutary effect on state–peasant relations? Why were the manifest and ubiquitous struggles detailed in Chapter 6 systematically glossed in official discourses and what was the net effect of their eclipse? More generally, why did ruling discourses, both within and beyond the province, strongly tend to overstate propositions one and four? Why did they excessively indict the culpability of Frelimo’s detribalization policy and its anti-traditionalism in producing the plethora of social, political and economic ills that beset post-independence Mozambique (proposition #3)? And why did they exaggerate the potential and actual remedial power of reversing the ruling party’s early stands (proposition #5)? Both chapters argue that the new official emphasis – both in Nampula and further afield – on the centrality of rural cultural attachments in understanding the domestic basis for post-independence development failures and rural insurgency reiterates the logic of the state’s now abandoned revolutionary discourse. At the same time, I show the ways in which ruling discourses have assimilated key dimensions of popular and academic culturalist critiques of Frelimo’s tenure.

Chapter 7 explores the ways in which, in Nampula, officialdom’s enthusiastic embrace of selected aspects of these critiques enabled the construction of mnemonic narratives that tended to minimize, if not thoroughly efface, the pernicious socio-economic effects and political costs of Frelimo’s strategy of state-centered accumulation, involuntary villagization and government heavy-handedness.This overall effect, I show, was achieved by casting the ruling party’s most egregious errors of omission and commission as natural and, in retrospect at least, predictable consequences of the revolution’s putatively clean break with the principle and practice of descent-based rule. Typically, state representatives in Nampula highlighted the unsuitable social origins, as well as the failings and foibles, of party secretaries at the base. In doing so, they, wittingly or otherwise, de-emphasized Frelimo’s political

86 Myth as a “meaning-making” device and policy failures or, worse still, shifted blame for these on to the shoulders of the party’s most proximate – and politically most vulnerable – purveyors and enforcers. The upshot was that, by the early 1990s, local Frelimo secretaries, previously hailed as the cutting edge of socialist transformation in the outback, were now portrayed as exemplifying the most dubious personal traits, conduct and motivations of the class enemy.

An alternative theory of the roots of rural crisis was also discernible within provincial government circles but only in muted form. Interestingly, in this second version of events, the identity, agenda and actions of local Frelimo secretaries feature hardly at all. Instead, it is Frelimo’s alleged commitment to dispensing with hierarchy altogether that comes in for the heaviest criticism. I show the ways in which this competing explanation, to which many Namapan commoners and royals alike subscribed, was both elided with, and pressed into the service of, the dominant one within official circles. I also consider why this alternative account resonated widely outside of these circles and why it remained partially submerged within them. The myth of revolutionary rupture, I find, derives much of its power and force from its ability to hold both theories of causation in creative tension and, in doing so, to express and sustain conflicting and often paradoxical notions concerning the powers and proclivities of the Frelimo state – notions that percolate throughout the polity. In addition, the chapter examines the ways in which the two main explanations on offer by Nampula-based government representatives compare to those advanced by senior people within the MAE’s TA/P Project.

Chapter 8 argues, first, that the concomitant of the re-ascription of the most unappealing attributes of the class enemy to rural representatives of vanguardist Frelimo was the extinction in post-socialist ruling discourses of the class enemy and of class itself. Second, it contends that Frelimo leadership’s willingness to publicly acknowledge the foolhardiness of the party’s attempt to circumvent chieftaincy, and to signal its intent to make amends for any wrongdoing it committed as a result, is only fully intelligible when placed alongside of the leadership’s steadfast refusal to admit other candidates for expiatory examination in advance of the 1994 elections. The secretary’s stunning metamorphosis in state-sponsored retrospectives on the socialist period in Nampula, the demise of class as an analytic category in Frelimo’s discursive repertoire, and the politics of acknowledgment reflected two overriding and interlocking political imperatives: to compress and contain rural dissatisfaction and dissent in a culturalist discourse and to recast the foremost defenders and detractors of Mozambican sovereignty in resolutely non-class terms. All these ideological moves occurred at a time when class formation had, if anything, accelerated and many members of the Frelimo leadership had proven themselves to be well on their way to joining the ranks of Mozambique’s closest approximation of a newly ascendant “internal bourgeoisie.”282 Both Frelimo’s revolutionary social taxonomy and the revisionist critique, I show, are flat-footed in the face of the slide by a

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 87 reformulated official history into a classless cultural pluralism – indeed, both can be called upon to facilitate and accelerate just such a slide.

While the first step of my argument in Chapter 3 and my discussion in Chapters 5 and 6 focus primarily on developments in Namapa, I also marshal evidence from elsewhere in Nampula to buttress my case. Namapa’s agricultural and demographic importance make the district distinct but by no means singular at least with respect to the issues under review.

Several caveats regarding the scope of the present work are worth entering here. The first of these is that, while recent Nampulan history forms the subject matter of much of the narrative that follows, I do not claim to have written a comprehensive, or even continuous, history of the province or of rural authorities who reside within Nampula’s jurisdiction. My discussion centers on critical and/or controversial turning points in official relations both with the Frelimo state’s grassroots representatives and with people asserting claims to the mantle of precolonial and/or colonial royal titles.

Second, although my discussion illuminates some of the reasons Nampula was a “worst case scenario” in Frelimo–smallholder relations, it does not weigh in on those aspects of debates bearing on this question which emphasize Frelimo’s fraught relationship with the Makua-Lomwé.283 If anything, however, my discussion underscores just how little we, as scholars, know about ethnic and regional forms of consciousness and allegiances in Mozambique and their interplay with race, class, assimilado status and wider political loyalties. It also leaves little doubt as to the importance of filling in this gap in our knowledge if we are to deepen our understanding of contemporary ruling relations, forms of state legitimation and the politics of dissent.284 But that is an altogether different intellectual endeavor than the one represented by the present monograph.285

Third, like Richard Rathbone’s recent monograph on Nkrumah’s relationship to chiefs in postcolonial Ghana, this book makes no “claim to have discovered what chieftaincy either was or is.”286 Its primary emphasis on analyzing the links between the state-idea and forms of mnemonic legitimation implies a departure from that of recent studies on colonial and postcolonial chieftaincy, many of which have sought to historicize and account for the ongoing resilience and political relevance of chieftaincy in the modern era.287

Fourth, because my objective is to chronicle the changing interface between rural political authority and official institutions, the present text does not address the subject of religious and political leaders who operate “below” or alongside of this interface. Sub-chiefs, who in Nampula are called mahumu (sing. humu), feature prominently in this category. During the colonial period, some mahumu doubled as the direct subordinates of régulos within the Portuguese-recognized three-tiered traditional hierarchy, either as chefes de grupo de povoações (the second tier) or as chefes de povoação (the third tier). Following independence, some mahumu also held official posts under Frelimo. In the main, however, the two hierarchies remained distinct from, and autonomous of, one another. Kinship-based institutions and the precise

88 Myth as a “meaning-making” device articulation between them and officially-recognized rural political authorities merit further investigation, as several commentators have recently stressed.288 This book does not, however,undertake such an investigation. Likewise, grassroots Christian and Muslim leaders, as well as of traditional healers and sorcerers, feature only in passing.289

Finally, it bears repetition that the accent here is on ruling ideas about the state and the ways these have been projected and purveyed over time. While such a stress necessarily entails a consideration of the ways in which officialdom draws on, modifies and seeks to manipulate popular representations of politically institutionalized power, I do not claim to provide more than the most superficial treatment of the ways in which ordinary citizens perceive and depict state institutions or, more broadly, modes of domination in contemporary Mozambique. Nor do I claim to have delineated the cultural determinants that have enabled, shaped and sustained what Achille Mbembe calls “the étatisation of society” in the Nampulan context.290

Primary source materials were gathered and/or consulted during the two aforementioned research trips. Between April and mid-November 1994, I conducted 95 structured, open-ended individual and group interviews with a wide range of people in Nampula. My informants included chiefs and other traditional authorities; government, Frelimo Party and Renamo officials at the grassroots, district and provincial level; local members of newly formed political parties; community court judges; missionaries and local religious leaders; male and female smallholders; employees, past and present, of the local cotton company, the Cotton Development Society of Namialo, and its predecessor, the State Cotton Farm of Nampula; local businesspeople; demobilized troops from both sides of the conflict and Naparamas; and NGO personnel. Eighty-four of these interviews are cited and seven others are indirectly referenced in this study. Of this total, seventy-five were conducted in Namapa, including six in Renamo’s zone of control in the southeast portion of the district, where I spent four days. An additional five were with people who had extended direct experience in the district, including two former district administrators. I have also referenced an interview conducted by my research assistant Pedro Cavala with the Naparama major mentioned in the Introduction.

Interviews with NGO representatives were carried out in English. Interviews with district and provincial government officials, Frelimo Party leaders, Renamo provincial-level representatives, missionaries, cotton company employees, local businesspeople and private farmers were conducted in Portuguese. The remaining interviews were conducted with the aid of an interpreter who translated from Makua into Portuguese and vice versa although interviewees often switched back and forth between the two languages.

Over the course of my stay in Nampula, I was afforded the opportunity to serve as a UN international observer during the 1994 elections; to observe electoral preparations and the electoral campaign; to participate in civic edu-

Myth as a “meaning-making” device 89 cation meetings, a human rights seminar and two donor-sponsored conferences on political reform; and to hold informal discussions with Nampulan residents from all walks of life. This text is informed by these experiences and observations.

It also draws on colonial reports deposited in the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique and the documentation center of the CEA, as well as records of the post-independence government at the district and provincial levels. In July 1995, I interviewed and consulted the archives of the late José Bernardo de Faria Lobo, then a retired agronomist who had worked successively for the colonial cotton concessionaire in Namapa, the colonial Cotton Institute and, in the post-independence period, for Provincial Directorate of Agriculture (DPA) and JFS in Nampula. The present study incorporates the findings from this research.