7 In the name of the state

We were simply and purely forgetting that we are in Africa, where sociocultural reality has specific characteristics. (Provincial Director of Assistance and Control, Nampula, 18 May 1991)1

The remainder of this book is largely devoted to analyzing memory practices in Mozambique in the late 1980s and early 1990s. My discussion draws on the insights of recent historical studies which show that “even at the social level, memory is a structuring of forgetfulness.”2 Like these studies and others dedicated to deconstructing the discourses of power in colonial and national settings,3 it delineates the performative effects of silences that punctuate and encode statist narratives – in this case, silences produced by repressed, buried or unacknowledged social memories. Both chapters also call attention to the ways in which forms of state legitimation, at both the local and national level, performed a species of “anti-memory” work in the early 1990s. In applying the anti-memory label, I expand the definition accorded to it by the anthropologist Richard Werbner. Werbner coined the term to denote ideological practices that call on political subjects “to remember as forgotten things they have actually never known in the past” –and thus that they could hardly be expected to be able to recollect.4 In the context considered here, participation in the exercise of feigning “delayed collective recall”5 was confined to Frelimo representatives, who were obliged to “remember” something it is doubtful that they had ever lost sight of –namely, “that we are in Africa, where socio-cultural reality has specific characteristics,” as the Director of the DPAC in Nampula put it.

This chapter explores the political and ideological effects produced by “codes of oblivion” in state-sponsored retrospectives on the Frelimo revolution as it unfolded at the grassroots in Nampula and other predominantly Makua-Lomwé-speaking areas. It examines the ways in which such retrospectives, as they were formulated by local state authorities and more senior people affiliated with MAE’s “Traditional Authority/Power” (TA/P) project, highlight the fateful consequences of Frelimo’s early decision to remake rural political institutions and leadership. The essence of the ruling party’s

220 In the name of the state alternative to indirect rule is encapsulated in these accounts in a fairly unflattering profile of the prototypical secretary: grassroots Frelimo representatives are variously depicted as slaves, as misfits, as villains, as layabouts, as ignoramuses, as self-serving power-seekers or as some combination of all of the above. Revealingly, higher-level party authorities typicallyremain exempt from stigmatization of this or any other kind.

Such one-sided historical representations tend to obscure factors that prompted or fueled rural political discontent and dissent that had little or nothing to do with the identity of officially-appointed leadership or the organizing principles and operating procedures of the institutions of popular power. Typically, this occlusion is achieved by smuggling the adverse effects of Frelimo’s other controversial and contested development and political interventions into the already cumbrous bundle of liabilities reputedly entailed by rule by secretaries. The upshot is that post-independence developments are reduced to a face-off between indigenously-rooted and politically legitimate traditional structures, on the one hand, and deracinated, often disreputable, individuals representing culturally alien, unwelcome and imposed institutions, on the other.

Ruling policies and practices are not the only lacunae worthy of note. In the majority of cases, the impact of the war and, in particular, of Renamo’s strategy of rural mobilization are also either pointedly absent or only faintly present. Apart from the specific state interventions that gave rise to the confrontation between Frelimo appointees and traditional hierarchies, translocal forces and influences are, with few exceptions, either factored out of the picture or figure only tangentially in it. The ideological effect is two-fold. First, the outcome of the conflict between local secretaries and chiefs appears inevitable rather than historically contingent. Second, Frelimo’s rapprochement with traditional authorities, where it is depicted as having already occurred, is presented as the outcome of a mid-course correction undertaken by the ruling party of its own free will, apparently without regard to the manifold stresses produced by externally-applied politico-military pressures.

None of this is to imply thatthe mnemonic narratives examined here are of a piece. Predictably,those formulated prior to the promulgation of the 1990 constitution take a fundamentally different approach to the question of rural leadership and institutions than those articulated afterwards. In addition, the retrospectives produced by two high-level representatives of the MAE distinguish themselves from those provided by district- and provincial-level state functionaries in two basic respects. First, the evidence adduced by the latter set of interventions is much more likely to belie the historical interpretations that are laid on them. Second, those interpretations are beset by greater ambiguity and tension than the ones proffered by higher-ups.

One could attribute these points of contrast to the more advanced educational level attained by senior MAE officials and associates, who, as a result, were more skilled in the art of sustaining a coherent and convincing

In the name of the state 221 argument, in smoothing over its rough edges and in screening out or downplaying data that point to different conclusions. Whatever the merits of this line of reasoning, difference #1 reveals the much greater propensity of locals drafted into the service of MAE’s TA/P Project to register, if not necessarily to grapple with, the variability and complexity of post-independence political arrangements that characterized rural Nampula even at the height of revolutionary commandism. The widespread impulse to cite instances of early official collaboration and compromises with chiefly hierarchies met two objectives. It enabled local state officials and civil servants to illustrate the ways in which traditional authorities had already served the Frelimo state honorably, as we will see below. And it fulfilled the need that these employees felt to affirm aspects of Frelimo’s socialist development strategy that had nothing to do with the socio-political identity of rural leaders.

In referencing the willingness of chiefs to oversee villagization, for instance, Nampula-based government personnel were subtly legitimizing the early policy of “socializing” the countryside – a policy that had been abandoned but not officially repudiated. The urge to validate past positions reflected the fact that the messages local state agents received from higherlevel authorities during this period were often mixed, muddled and/or inconsistent and were transmitted in an overall political environment characterized by substantial flux, uncertainty and apprehension – a climate in which the ideology of state socialism had collapsed and in which a struggle for a new, still ill-defined, legitimation profile was underway. Under the circumstances, it should come as no surprise that local state employees hedged their bets by justifying new policy stances in terms of old strategic goals to the full extent possible.

As for difference #2, the argument here is that it is, first and foremost, symptomatic of the extent to which the ideological tasks that certain lowerlevel functionaries felt compelled to tackle were of a higher order of complexity than those taken on by their superiors. The interventions of senior MAE representatives took their primary cue from the revisionist perspective as advanced by Geffray. This is especially apparent in the case of Irae Baptista Lundin’s work, which uses Geffray’s research findings in Eráti District as a template for her own and which, on the basis of these findings, makes generalizations about “Makua society” at large. Baptista Lundin, the technical coordinator of the MAE TA/P Project, was, certainly at this stage, an ardent advocate of a return to chiefly rule. Her field research lent support to this overall project. I can only speculate about the motivations of the second MAE representative whose work is examined here. Januario Mutaquiha, a native of Nampula Province who, in the early 1990s, worked as an outside consultant to the TA/P Project, may have shared Baptista Lundin’s views. Alternatively, or in addition, he may have believed that a return to indirect rule was inevitable in view of: (1) what he and/or others adjudged to be the balance of power in rural Nampula; and/or (2) the prevailing political climate in which the pro-chieftaincy lobby within the state and party,

222 In the name of the state backed by key donors, seemed to be in the ascendant or on the verge of becoming so.

In contrast to both Baptista Lundin and Mutaquiha, Nampula-based government employees, whatever their private views on the subject of rural leadership, were guided by a more complicated set of situational calculations. Many of their interventions are manifestly concerned to attempt to reconcile important axioms of Frelimo’s revolutionary idiom with key elements of revisionist critiques. Consciously or not, they were helping to manage the state’s legitimation crisis – or, at the very least, they were taking pains not to say or write anything that might detract from this effort and thus jeopardize their jobs. Some of them may also have been attempting to help set the stage for Frelimo’s re-legitimization in the face of constitutionally-protected political competition and opposition. To the extent that their efforts compelled them to venture onto uncharted ideological terrain, local state employees acted as “memory entrepreneurs.” In all likelihood, the aim of their entrepreneurial activity was not to gain “social recognition and political legitimacy of one (their own) interpretation or narrative of the past.”6 Rather, it was to cope with, if not necessarily to resolve, the crosscutting pressures to which they were subject by virtue of their occupations and partisan affiliations, as well as of their primary and vicarious memories.

The analytic difficulties that they encountered along the way seem to have stemmed at least in part from the diverse currents of thought that pulsed through the wider society. The dominant line in the early 1990s both within the MAE and within the Nampulan state administration – that the roots of the post-independence state’s crisis of legitimacy in the hinterland lay, to a large degree, in Frelimo’s allegedly successful bid to reinvent rural hierarchies of power and privilege – struck a chord with many Nampulans. However, this reading co-existed, at times uneasily, with the view, commonly expressed in Namapa, that the crisis at hand was the direct result of the ruling party’s determination to stamp out any and all hierarchical structures per se. Local state personnel strove to harmonize both narrative lines with the party’s past rhetoric in a manner that promised to accommodate Frelimo’s present political needs and to preserve their own jobs and careers.

The task of narrative harmonization was at once eased and subverted by contradictions, inconsistencies and tensions that marked forms of legitimation and self-criticism deployed by the ruling party during the early postindependence period. On the one hand, the view that Frelimo’s abaixo policy had proved to be a catastrophic success could be readily accommodated by resignifying the myth of revolutionary rupture – that is, by lifting it from the heroic narrative in which it had been previously embedded and inserting it into a cautionary tale which rehearses the brand of anti-memory work described above. The relative facility with which the goal of resignification was accomplished bore testimony to the “meaningful multivalence” of the historical moment to which the myth in question refers.7 On the other hand,

In the name of the state 223 the notion that Frelimo had leveled grassroots hierarchies in the outback called for a rather different mnemonic adjustment, prompting local state employees to look elsewhere in the ruling party’s variegated political tradition for a solution. They availed themselves of an explanation for the mounting troubles of the revolution that gained prominence within the Frelimo leadership in the late 1970s and early 1980s: namely, that the setbacks and stalled momentum of Frelimo’s political project were due in large measure to the general erosion of authority that followed from the ruling party’s reluctance to operate all the levers of power.

Attempts to knit together these various, often competing, “streams of discourse”8 within and beyond the ambit of state institutions gave rise to retrospectives that reproduced the ambiguities, tensions, dissonances and divisions that marked either socialist-era forms of legitimation or contemporary popular discourses of memory, or both. The dominant narrative of inversion was at once facilitated and disrupted by a partially submerged discursive stream that highlighted Frelimo’s hostility not so much toward chieftaincy as to all forms of hierarchical organization. This subsidiary, largely subterranean, narrative produced effects that were broadly similar to its dominantcomplement/contender: other equally controversial and arguably more politically consequential state interventions are bypassed or, as in the case of communal villages, figure as benign, almost natural, features of the countryside. More generally, local developments and struggles are decontextualized from wider historical processes that shaped their contours and content in fundamental ways. As I show below, this second theory of causation carries a greater subversive potential than the first, if unintentionally and even in spite of itself. It is the points of intersection, symbiosis and slippage between these two narrative lines that may in good measure account for why the unresolved tensions between them seem to have escaped all notice and why, as a result, the dominant line echoed to the extent that it did both within and beyond the corridors of official power.

The central thrust of my argument is three-fold. First, the myth of revolutionary rupture accommodates and yokes together both narrative lines in a manner that concentrates and distills contrasting, often self-contradictory, notions regarding the capacities and predilections of the postcolonial state. Second, it acquired these features as the result of specific historical processes, which I detail below. Third, these features, combined with the processes that produced them and bound them together, go a fair distance in helping to account for the potency of the image of rupture as a metaphor for Frelimo’s rule. Like other metaphors, the image “telescopes [the] complexity [of human experience] without simplifying it.” And like other powerful metaphors, it is “open to different interpretations by various parties who nonetheless [perceive] their respective interpretations to be widely shared, without ever realizing, as [JoAnne] Brown puts it, ‘that the consensus is created by the vagueness of the metaphor itself’.”9 Both the myth’s telescoping and consensus-generating capacities may well explain why Frelimo’s

224 In the name of the state abaixo policy can credibly serve as a screen in the dual sense outlined in the Introduction: on the one hand, blocking out and/or filtering subsequent historical events and, on the other, acting as a backdrop onto which these events and the memories produced by them can be retrospectively projected.

I do not claim that the historical accounts under review here were hegemonic.10 Given “the fragility and shallowness,” as well as the evanescence, “of successive state legitimations” in Africa from the precolonial period through to the present,11 it would have been surprising if they had been. My point, rather, is three-fold. First, they appeared to enjoy ideological ascendancy within official Nampulan circles during the period in question. Second, they were caught up in and formed part of a “hegemonic process” –that is, “a set of nested, continuous processes through which power and meaning are contested, legitimated, and redefined at all levels of society.”12 Specifically, as already noted, they were symptomatic of a process of struggle for a new legitimation profile (if not a new hegemony), whose general contours and content had yet to crystallize. Third, in the case of the retrospectives produced by Nampula-based government employees, they followed time-honored patterns of discourse formation that historically have produced “hegemonic outcomes” – that is, the point at which leaders have managed to “partially deliver on their promises and control the terms of political discourse through incorporation as well as repression.”13 Such an outcome, itself unstable and subject to contestation, is achieved when a ruling group or historic bloc is able to press elements of popular or counter-hegemonic ideologies into the service of its own political project by “impos[ing] upon them its own principles of organization.”14

Researching rural political authority

The discussion which follows draws on state-sponsored written and verbal interventions concerning the history of the relationships among rural constituencies, local political authority and the state in Nampula Province and in Makua-speaking areas in southern Cabo Delgado.15 The first reports of this kind on record were solicited by the provincial government in 1987 and were conducted under the auspices of the DPAC (see Chapter 5). Further contributions on the subject were requested in May 1988, November 1990 and March 1992.16 The 1992 solicitation came at the same time as a verbal recommendation by the Minister of State Administration during a meeting with district administrators in the province to conduct a “survey on Traditional power, its organization, functioning and its local impact on state power.”17 It is unclear if there was a higher authorizing entity for earlier studies or if the provincial government was acting on its own initiative.

Another set of reports was prompted by the MAE’s Ford Foundationfunded pilot project on “Traditional Authority/Power” launched in early 1992. By mid-year, the project was seeking provincial government cooperation and participation. The immediate goal was to prepare for a

In the name of the state 225 ministry-sponsored conference on the topic the following year.18 The longerterm aim was to generate a corpus of rural field research that would provide an empirical foundation for elaborating a national policy for postwar reconstruction of local government. The fruit of these efforts was the aforementioned Municipalities Law, which devolved a wide range of responsibilities and powers to local jurisdictions (see Chapter 1).

The MAE asked provincial directorates of assistance and control to lend logistical and organizational support, as well as informational assistance, to members of the project’s working group during the course of their field investigations in the provinces. They were also asked to oversee district-level inquiries into traditional power. Topics specified as in need of address included the structure of traditional power, chieftaincy’s spatial and temporal reach, its “current situation,” its bases of legitimacy, and its forms of legitimation.19

Twelve interventions take the form of research reports. Eight of these are case studies undertaken at district level by functionaries of the state administration and covering six out of the province’s eighteen rural districts.20 In most cases, these functionaries were stationed in the district under study at the time of the investigation. In at least three cases, they were also born and raised in the district in question.21 Four research reports are of a more general nature. One was penned by a former interpreter of the colonial administration from Gurué, Zambézia, who, after independence, served initially as a chefe do posto in that same district.22 In the mid-1980s he worked as a substitute administrator for a year in Nacala-a-Velha. He subsequently landed a position at the DPAC, Nampula. At the time of my investigation, he was the longest-serving member of the DPAC’s Department of Assistants, the office which directly liaises with district administrations.23 The second report of this kind, already cited extensively in Chapter 5, was authored by the Director of DPAC. It synthesizes the findings of his own directorate’s investigations, as of mid-1991, and makes recommendations on the basis of them.24

Two other reports that fall into this category wereauthored by two representatives of MAE’s TA/P working group. One of the members, Mutaquiha, was at the time a Maputo-based UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) representative and, as already noted, was hired by MAE as an outside consultant. His report is based on interviews he conducted with district and provincial government officials, as well as with “people from different social strata,” representing various regions of the province over a sixday period in Nampula City in late 1992. His informants had either been recommended to him by the provincial government or were people with whom he was already acquainted.25 The second report was written by Baptista Lundin.26 It is based on fieldwork conducted in July 1992 in Makua-speaking southern Cabo Delgado as a consultant for ARO, a Swedish NGO.

The reports are typically divided into sections on the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial periods, with attention concentrated on the latter two

226 In the name of the state historical periods. While a few discuss the phenomenon of curandeirismo, chieftaincy is the main focus of attention.27 Only three address the question of Renamo’s wartime strategy of rural mobilization.28 Lengthier contributions are wide-ranging in their discussion, addressing topics as diverse as the origins of traditional power, local “uses and customs,” religious beliefs, matrimonial institutions and inter- and intra-clan hierarchies.29 Discussions of this sort invariably consist of normative descriptions, detached from the three historical epochs that otherwise structure the analysis.

Four additional sources of information consist of minutes or transcripts of meetings. One document recaps the highlights of a seminar on reforming the “local organs” of government convened by the Director of DPAC for chefes do posto from Moma, Mogovolas and Angoche.30 The gathering, which was held in Angoche City in December 1991, came on the heels of a ministerial-level seminar of the same title. It was at this earlier meeting that the link between traditional power and local government reform was first extensively discussed.31

The second set of minutes records the Angoche administration’s first formal meeting with “traditional structures” in February 1992. Some 217 people attended, including “Régulos, Chefes das Povoações and Kings,” in addition to chefes do posto, the presidents of locality-level executive councils, members of the district executive council and representatives of various churches. The meeting’s agenda included the following points: “Reflection on traditional power in the past; Collapse of traditional power; Political reforms underway in the Country; Reflection on the reintegration of traditional structures; The role of traditional power at this time and in the future; [and] Prospects.”32

The third set of minutes covers a “mini-seminar” convened by the Angoche district executive council entitled, “Reflection on Traditional Authority/Power.” The meeting was held in November 1992 in response to the MAE’s request a few months earlier for input from the districts on this subject. Eighty people, selected on the basis of “their age, influence in their environment and nature of their activities,” attended the event. Participants included “Curandeiros, Muenes, Régulos, the eldest teachers and nurses,” as well as representatives from the local Islamic community, the Catholic Church and “other religious sects.”33 The fourth source of this kind is a transcript of a meeting of district administrators from Nampula and Cabo Delgado with the general coordinator of MAE’s TA/P project in August 1992. The transcript contains interventions by at least nine Nampulan administrators on the relationship between local political authority and the state in the colonial and post-independence periods.34

Representing chieftaincy

In the written and oral accounts surveyed here, the precolonial period is dealt with in a fairly perfunctory manner, if at all. The purpose of such

In the name of the state 227 discussions, where they occur, is two-fold. In the first instance, it is to establish that chieftaincy was not a colonial invention.35 The precolonial credentials of chieftaincy, once established, provide the basis for meeting the second objective, which is to strengthen the case for continuity. The sheer longevity of chiefly institutions is adduced as irrefutable evidence of their invincibility (if not necessarily their legitimacy) and, hence, the futility of efforts undertaken by the state, colonial or otherwise, to eradicate them. In the words of the district administrator of Moma:

In the same way that colonialism throughout its existence didn’t manage to destroy the culture, the tradition of each village and that, on the contrary, it took some benefit from this force to perpetrate [its] presence in the National territory, there was no way our government could eliminate this force in less than two decades.36

Discussions of the colonial period are largely devoted to showing the numerous and varied ways the Portuguese “took some benefit from this force.” Chieftaincy is cast as a faithful servant and brutally effective instrument of colonial rule. The authors of the Nacarôa report, for instance, find that:

If it weren’t for traditional power, the colonialist wouldn’t have totally exercised his power over all of the natives. Thanks to traditional power, no one escaped the oppression, humiliations and exploitation of Portuguese colonialism. By way of example, there exist regions in our country where the white colonialist wasn’t seen, but there his power was exercised through traditional authorities.37

The Meconta administrator, in his turn, held that “every person who entered the village was controlled, every animal that entered the village was controlled, the person who was born, who grew up, was controlled.”38 MAE consultant Mutaquiha made similar claims.39 The only indication that the régulos’ power might have been less than absolute is the fact, alluded to in several reports, that harsh penalties were incurred when cracks in the edifice of monolithic power came to the attention of Portuguese authority.40 While the interventions in question adopt divergent positions as to whether colonialism destroyed, adulterated, intensified or otherwise transformed traditional power, they are unanimous that chieftaincy retained its hegemony at the time of decolonization. This hegemony is ascribed either to the consent of the dominated or to the chiefs’ shrewd manipulation of “diabolical norms” designed to keep the population in their thrall.41

Almost all the commentary which addresses the relationship between traditional and popular power depicts a born and abiding antagonism – even when the evidence cited frequently indicates otherwise. It is claimed that this antagonism, in turn, gave rise to a sometimes violent confrontation in which chiefs easily carried the day, an outcome that, in each and every

228 In the name of the state instance, met with universal acclaim at the base. The single exception is the report completed by the veteran cadre of DPAC prior to the promulgation of the new constitution in November 1990. It maintained that “[c]urrently, [traditional political] power” – by which the author meant traditional authority that directly liaises with the state – “no longer exists.” What did exist were “[c]ontradictions ... between an individual of deposed power and the Secretary of the Dynamizing Group democratically elected by the population.” Such contradictions were not particularly worrisome since the disgruntled individuals in question were on a lone, and ultimately futile, crusade:

It is not all of the family of old power that reveals itself to be against the new power or its representative. One is dealing with some ambitious politicians who often don’t know what they are saying, nor what they want. These manifestations of struggles for power are well-known to the district structures and the Administrative Post which, together with the populations, immediately dismantle them [resolve the conflicts].42

In the post-1990 period, the picture painted by government officials and functionaries inverted this image. Representatives of traditional power were now touted as the true embodiments of the collective will and their Frelimobacked rivals dismissed as either universally despised local despots or simply the odd men out.43 At the same time, district administrators rhapsodized about the impressive results achieved by the state’s semi-official realignment with chiefs in the early 1990s. To hear them tell it, agricultural output and revenue performance had experienced a marked upturn. Local defense and security had registered near instantaneous improvements. Vigilance against run-away slash-and-burn fires had been enhanced. Spirited and highly effective campaigns had been mounted to maintain roads and cashew tree plantations. In short, overall levels of popular compliance with state directives had jumped. Even rainfall patterns had been regularized. Glowing appraisals such as these frequently made a point of stressing the pivotal importance of chiefs as vote-getters.44

Several district reports, as well as interventions by local government officials, forthrightly come out in favor of the formal reinstatement of chiefs. Chiefs, it was proposed, would receive some form of “stimulus” and other material inducements (including the return of their former colonial residences)45 in order “to increase their recognition in the community.”46 Education and training courses would provide the means to overcome illiteracy among traditional leaders47 and ensure that the “form and methodology of functioning” of chieftaincy are “totally different from that of the time of the Portuguese-fascist colonial period.”48 Elections for traditional offices would be based on a universal franchise with candidates drawn exclusively from royal lineages.49

In the name of the state 229

The only indication that trouble may already have been afoot or looming on the horizon is the pro forma insistence in a few of the proposals that chiefly rule be rendered compatible with freshly embraced democratic principles.50 Whatever the potential drawbacks of the retraditionalization of rural administration, these were small beer compared to the costs of breaking with hereditarian principles. It is to an assessment of these costs, as portrayed by both local officials and MAE representatives, that I now turn.

The secretary as fall-guy

I begin with quotations from the person who, on the basis of the corpus of testimony at my disposal, appeared to be one of the most articulate, prolific and forceful advocates within the state administration of Nampula of a return to chiefly rule: the lead writer of the 1988 Nacarôa report and deputy administrator of Malema District. As we have seen, in the pre-1990 period, this individual found that the secretary’s track record as local party agent had been a creditable one; it was only the quality of the secretary’s performance as a local representative of the state that had been called into question. In contrast, following the formal subordination of the party to the state, the same author now gives to understand that the secretary had been sorely wanting on both counts all along. Indeed, he goes so far as to present the secretary’s inadequacies as the Achilles’ heel of the ruling party’s prestige and credibility.

Like many of his colleagues and fellow researchers, the deputy administrator finds that, if colonialism had pernicious economic and political effects, culturally it was fairly benign:

In a slight manner, traditional power underwent alteration in its organization when the regulados were introduced ... When the Portuguese dominated our land and began to administrate it, they respected traditional power, but in a manner which corrupted it in the service of colonization. But they never were interested in destroying our way of life, that is, they respected our customs. I don’t want to defend the sufferings based on torture, racial discrimination, exploitation and other evils [to] which we were subjected. They studied us and took advantage of a lot of what we are. Under colonization, our being as Africans and as people who possess a culture was maintained. The assimilation of Portuguese culture was done in a manner which did not affect our culture. Some of us were assimilated into Portuguese culture [aportuguezados], but an insignificant number.51

The new government, he suggests, overreached itself and the capacities of the country with respect to social, economic and political goals, thus placing at serious risk the hitherto preserved Africanness of the general populace:

230 In the name of the state

In the first years of independence, in our Country we lived through a time of great Marxist-revolutionary undertakings, carried out on the basis of exaggerated populism, that to a certain extent were destroying our being as an African people and our less industrialized Nation, poor in agricultural, commercial, intellectual development and experience in governance ... Ignoring our age, we went to lift a baggage that weighed more than we ourselves did. Those who advised us to follow them, also fell. One of the principal targets that we tried to affect in that historic process was without a doubt traditional power.52

The effects attributed to the new republic’s boldly stated commitment to eliminate “traditional structures of oppression and exploitation” are contradictory. On the one hand, rural political practices that had been slated for eradication continued much as they had in the past:

The position taken by the new government of Mozambique in 1975 slightly limited the exercise of traditional power in the countryside. We say that it was a slight limitation because despite the abolition of traditional power having been declared officially, it [continued to be] exercised since people recognized and recognize their traditional authority.53

On the other hand, the statutory abolition of chieftaincy set the stage for the outbreak of local-level feuding and violence:

When, in 1975, true Mozambican power was born (Independence), in the rural areas there arose contradictions in the exercise of power which could not be felt at the central and provincial level. There existed three types of power in contradiction: colonial Power, that tried to resist, recently born power (called popular power) and the very ancient traditional power ...

The colonial power overthrown, 2 Mozambican powers were left in conflict (popular power and traditional power). The leaders of popular power didn’t want to hear [or] know anything about traditional power, which constituted the first ... serious error committed by the new authorities instituted after independence, one which cost Mozambicans a lot of blood, independently of their ideological, political and ethnic allegiances [opções].

When the offices of traditional power were abolished, Dynamizing Groups were created in their place, oriented in their organization and functioning by Marxist-Leninist methods (Soviet-Cuban style). In the process of creating Dynamizing Groups, all of the elements of the lineage of traditional political power were impeded from occupying any office in the new organs, which means the dynamizing groups, in their majority if not all, were composed of elements which traditionally are considered historic servants of the owners of the land. They didn’t have

In the name of the state 231 any recognition as chiefs of the population but rather a thing imposed on it by the government, this was aggravated by the disrespect and defamation that the traditional chiefs were victim [to] on the part of the secretaries of the dynamizing groups and some public functionaries like administrators of the Localities and Districts. Thus, traditional leaders began to do everything within their reach to impede the success of the dynamizing groups, concretely demobilization.54

At one point the author allows that widespread popular disaffection with the upending of social relations may well have been a consequence rather than a cause of the failure of Frelimo’s rural development initiatives: “Initially traditional leaders had many difficulties in managing to demobilize people because all of the people believed in the dynamizing groups, particularly youth, but when things began to go badly, the old leadership was opted for.”55 But the thrust of his argument leaves the reader to conclude that such a denouement was a foregone conclusion from the start:

The introduction of dynamizing Groups, election of People’s Assemblies and a new territorial division from the Province to the Locality in substitution for the Muenes, regulados, chefados and other traditional offices created a vacuum unknown centrally [i.e. to the central authorities] even today. Society remained practically without leadership at the level of the base ... ... This vacuum created by the new leadership that arose in 1975 ... made the rural areas almost ungovernable, characterized by disorganization, struggle for power, indiscipline, insubordination, violation of the Constitution, weak production and in some cases violation of the fundamental rights of man (militiamen), universally condemned by the lovers of human life.56 It is urgent to change. The Party in power still has time because up until now it enjoys popularity in the countryside as the one who expelled the white who ate my uncle’s land. ... The secretary of the Dynamizing group is the servant of the Muene. The Muene doesn’t accept his land being governed by his old slave. It is here where the major difficulty of our secretary in being able to administer the Aldeia is born.57

A report written by a functionary of the Monapo administration likewise stresses the destructive consequences of Frelimo’s attempt to reconstruct rural hierarchies:

Following the process of the creation of the bases for the birth of power of the Mozambican State and with the aim of guaranteeing the bases and influence of Frelimo in all the National territory, dynamizing groups were created in all of the collectivities [communities]. From there began the abrupt destruction of traditional social organization,

232 In the name of the state without respecting the principles of diverse collectivities, principally filiation and worship. The people who made up the leadership of the dynamizing groups were elements that didn’t belong to the prestigious group of the society ... Thus, credibility and obedience was [sic] weak because these were not considered legitimate holders of power and were strangers in the areas where they exercise power. Therefore it was a stranger to the area exercising the power of the king over the “King”.58

Drawing on the findings of his directorate’s early investigations on the relationship of local authority and the state, the then director of DPAC maintained that Frelimo’s abolition of the regedoria system, and the inversion of power relations that purportedly ensued, resulted in “lack of control, liberalism ... disrespect, marginality, disorder and, above all, disobedience and passive insubordination of the population, and a generalized anarchy in the midst of traditional or clan society.”59 MAE consultant Mutaquiha arrived at similar findings. Frelimo’s posture toward chiefs, he found, had polarized state and rural society:

Frelimo assumed the régulos and with them the Mwene(s) [muene(s)] themselves were an instrument of oppression and exploitation of the people in the service of colonialism. For this reason, the Régulos and Mwene(s) were not only held in contempt but were even hated, persecuted and arrested. In their stead were created the Secretaries of the Communal Villages and the Dynamizing Groups. In addition to the introduction of a new typology of functions and a new nomenclature, Frelimo equally ignored tradition with respect to the origin and legitimacy of power. Thus, the Secretaries created and placed in different regions were only those individuals that affirmed themselves to be committed and loyal to the political line of Frelimo. According to some interviewees, many of those Secretaries were from or were descendants of inferior clans (Milimos) that traditionally had served as suppliers of cheap labor and slaves. The new social order imposed by Frelimo imposed, thus, the subordination of the old leaders to the old subordinates. The master became the servant and the servant, the master. It was an inversion not only of people but also of values. The embryo of discontentment and of disorder from social frictions and conflicts was born.

Traditional power had not only survived but thrived under Frelimo’s assaults. Officially in the shadow of, but in practice towering over, impotent and discredited Frelimo-installed rural institutions stood fully intact local governments-in-waiting, if anything reinvigorated by post-independence trials and tribulations:

Thus the interviewees concluded that the action of Traditional Power, represented above all by the Mwene, not only continued to exist despite

In the name of the state 233 Frelimo’s persecution but even to be fortified and to acquire new dimensions ... Many of the interviewees confided that in some regions, the mwenes function today as the only authority to which the population listens and obeys their orders [sic] even though no official measure has been taken in that sense by the State ...

The governor disclosed the information that, although not officially, the Provincial government was letting the phenomenon emerge naturally as effectively has been happening in some regions of the province. And it was observed that, in these regions, life has been going on without disturbances while, for example, tax collection was perfectly assured by the Régulos who had re-assumed their power.

The Governor expressed concern about the slowness of the Project [e.g. MAE’s TA/P Project] in the face of the urgency of the situation. This sentiment was shared by many members of the government.60

In one interview, Mutaquiha’s interlocutor(s) reportedly had even wondered aloud why so much time was being wasted on a project whose results were a foregone conclusion.61 Baptista Lundin’s findings were broadly similar.62

An ancillary but no less telling theme is that less than stringent vetting procedures compounded the crisis of authority in the rural areas. The administrator of Ribáuè maintained that the credulity of the ruling party had enabled the accession to power of morally suspect individuals:

In principle, the “Secretary” was the one who knew how to talk a lot, who would say a lot of “vivas” and, above all, who sang very well, evoking the names of our heroes. It didn’t matter if he was an alcoholic, without a house or a machamba. This resulted in the discontentment of the kings and queens, of the chefes da povoação and cabos de terra, giving rise to the failure of the secretary’s work. So our government began to appear in the eyes of the population as the enemy. And it was starting from then ... that Renamo entered the District of Ribáuè [from Zambézia], using those chiefs as fundamental instruments for their penetration.63

The report from Monapo District toughened the charges against the secretary still further, contending that people who had earned local reputations as “outlaws” enjoyed disproportionate representation in Frelimo’s grassroots ranks.64

In summary, the state had been ill-served not only by the unsuitable social origins of its rural representatives but also by their personal character defects. To the extent that it had been hoodwinked by rogue elements of various stripes, central authority had not so much been represented at the base as it had been misrepresented. At least some of the above commentary, however, also tacitly suggests that Frelimo inadvertently created the

234 In the name of the state conditions in which illegitimate elements could seize hold of local power. Specifically, the implication was that, in respect of rural authority, the Frelimo leadership, and apparently by extension everyone charged with executing its decisions, had somehow temporarily forgotten in which continent they were attempting to root the revolution.

The local and its limits

In terms of both the object of their analysis and their methodology, the state-sponsored chronicles of crisis under review here mark the completion of a full swing of the pendulum in postcolonial Mozambican studies. During the first decade of independence, rural research, most of which was conducted under the auspices of the CEA, tended to focus on macro-economic policies and trends, class formation and market-based transactions.65 By the mid-1980s, social scientists began to investigate more fully the articulation of state agrarian policies with rural socio-political dynamics.66 The resulting studies placed questions relating to local communities, legitimacy and accountability squarely on the research agenda. A common theme of these studies was that the contours of these variables were contingent on external forces and interventions, such as changing rural terms of trade; the availability and quality of consumer goods, agricultural inputs, land and social services; conditions of access to resources, services and labor; state-dictated mechanisms of political inclusion and exclusion; and generalized warfare pitting the state against a rural-based guerrilla army. This scholarship stressed the irreducibility of local agendas and agency, as well as the contingency of the interactions between grassroots dynamics andwider geopolitical and economic forces.67

Revisionist historiography took a very different approach to the relation between the local and the translocal from the outset. Luís de Brito and Geffray in his later writing tended to cast rural conflicts, which they saw as pitting Frelimo secretaries against lineage-based communities, as pint-sized versions of the much larger confrontation between the Frelimo leadership and “urban society,” on the one hand, and rural Mozambique as a whole, on the other.68 Importantly, Geffray assigned villagization co-equal status as a source of rural dissent and dissidence. For his part, de Brito located rural power struggles alongside of – if not necessarily within the context of –Frelimo’s socialist-inspired development program, which privileged industry and large-scale commercial agriculture over smallholder livelihoods.69

In marked contrast, local factors and, most notably, local identity loom so large instate-sponsored retrospectives on Nampula’s recent past as to obscure national political and economic realities. Rural identities, as well as rural conceptions of political legitimacy and authority, therefore appear as universally held, immutable and hence impervious to non-local influences and forces.70 The cumulative effect is to relieve the state of responsibility for ill-conceived, even disastrous, rural development policies and for repressive

In the name of the state 235 political practices save for those policies and practices directly and exclusively aimed at transforming the nature of local political authority. Renamo often drops out of the picture altogether.

Wildly overstating the explanatory weight of the secretary’s agenda, actions and agency is one way in which the injurious effects of central policies are de-emphasized and the war is erased from the historical record. The following passage from the Monapo administration’s report on the relationship between traditional and popular power stands as a case in point:

The communal villages appeared after the creation of dynamizing groups and these were the leaders, at the base, of that creation. In this [creation], it was attempted to impose measures for the combat of tribalism, regionalism and so many other negative isms [ismos], thus cutting the direct relations that existed between components of these communities.

Even so, traditional power continued, but [was] exercised through ... apparently small things, but with great significance in the community.

This provoked a contradiction between the power of the State and traditional power, seeing as it was attempted to inculcate new values without communities being prepared for such.

The prohibition of genuinely traditional things had a negative impact on socio-economic development. Gradually, morals were being destroyed, which preoccupied the traditional authorities very much and made the practice of initiation rites, for example, continue in a secret manner.

This contradiction manifested itself in its most vivid form in the fact that the “royal Families” didn’t agree to submit to the power of the dynamizing groups. In order to maintain order, the dynamizing groups had to defeat traditional power and in order to do this, the communities were divided in several communal villages. In these collectivities, youth in particular felt itself free of the power of their elders and each one could do everything that he pleased. Thus, traditional power fell by the wayside, taking with it order and ... the discipline to produce consumer goods [i.e. crops].

No one respected the secretary of the dynamizing group like [he did] his uncle or the head of his community. It is because of this that in many places, if not all, production fell because no one was willing to go work on the collective machamba on the order of the secretary as if he were working on the machamba of an elder on the order of his lineage chief. ... One observes this dissatisfaction of the population in relation to their leaders at this time in all of the population agglomerations. If you enter into a communal village, you see that a group of people construct their houses taking into consideration and as the center the house of their lineage chief or elder, giving him all of the help and respect that is his due.

236 In the name of the state The order of this lineage Chief or elder, régulo, cabo or chefe da povoação is more respected within the village ... than the order of the secretary or any other structure that is in power because of the destruction of traditional power.71

To be sure, settlement patterns within communal villages often tended to reproduce “pre-existing lineage and ward-based residence, even when a Frelimo cadre explicitly attempted to oppose this.”72 That said, perhaps the most striking feature of this passage is what is strenuously suppressed within it. With the spotlight steadfastly shining on the calculated, selfinterested manner in which the dynamizing group divided and distributed the leaders of dominant lineages among the communal villages under its stewardship, the narrative glosses over the forced relocation of the vast majority of the population, the violence with which this relocation was effected, and the heavy economic losses it entailed in terms of food reserves, unharvested crops, livestock, household belongings and labor time – all of which occurred at the behest of the superiors of grassroots secretaries within the state and party. It also fails to reference the wartime climate in which large-scale state-sponsored violence and abuse occurred.

The second notable feature of the text is its explanation for catastrophic declines in agricultural production which followed villagization in the early 1980s. This occurred not because rural collectivization and forced resettlement gave rise to a thoroughly irrational allocation of land and labor. Rather, agricultural crisis resulted from – and seemingly only from – the political measures the dynamizing group was forced to take in order to defeat the most serious challenges to its tenuous rule. Villagization figures in this outcome only to the extent that it provided an enabling environment for the GD’s divide-and-rule strategy to take place. In sum, it weighs into the equation only as a backdrop – and a fairly distant one at that – rather than as an important contributor to deepening economic crisis. Once again, the war doesn’t appear at all – although, in this instance, such an omission is understandable given that the onset of agricultural crisis predated the outbreak of the war in the province.

The explanation proffered for rural indifference and resistance to Frelimodefined socialist forms of production also merits comment. On this account, the collective machamba failed to elicit more than a lukewarm response from the population, first and foremost, because labor expended on it was “on the order of the secretary.” That such an order could have possibly produced the levels of compliance and performance which obtained when social juniors were exhorted to work “on the machamba of an elder on the order of his lineage chief” is considered to be laughable.

In posing the problem in this way, the author of the report studiously shies away from the much thornier question of whether the will of any given lineage chief would have been abided by had he ordered his social subordinates to work on a collective machamba. Such an evasion is made possible by

In the name of the state 237 Frelimo’s own analytic framework which insists that the structures of popular power, by definition, represented the antithesis of traditional authority in all of its manifestations. On this logic, the very possibility of a lineage chief qua chief presiding over state-mandated collective forms of production constitutes an oxymoron. The author is thus able to convey the impression that low levels of compliance to Frelimo-mandated forms of production resulted from who, locally, was doing the ordering. Accordingly, the fact that collective machambas and producer cooperatives were often seen by smallholders as an onerous obligation, one which diverted already scarce labor from household plots and yielded few, if any, benefits in return, fades from view altogether.73

The near exclusive focus on the inappropriateness of Frelimo-imposed rural leadership also accords the “socialization of the countryside” kid-glove treatment in the report penned by the deputy administrator of Malema. Once again, the uninformed reader would be excused for coming away with the distinct impression that the state’s stance on the question of local authority, which he refers to as “the first and serious error committed by the new authorities instituted after independence,” was in fact the only one. This stance was, after all, ultimately responsible for “disorganization, struggle[s] for power, indiscipline, insubordination, violation of the Constitution, weak production and, in some cases, violation of the fundamental rights of man,” especially by village-based militia.74 While the role of “public functionaries like administrators of the Localities and Districts” in provoking the ire of chiefs receives passing mention, in the main they, like all other higher authorities, are consigned to walk-on parts in the unfolding drama in which the two leading protagonists are masters and servants at the grassroots.

The most glaring defect of the communal villages, in the deputy administrator’s estimation, had been, and continued to be, the lack of leadership within them: “It is urgent to change things in the rural villages. Between the head of the Administrative Post and the Communal Village, there is no one who rules. The vacuum must be filled by traditional power.”75 Given this definition of the problem, the author’s overriding concern is “to change things in the rural Villages” rather than to query their raison d’être. Such formulations reveal that while the question of local authority had become a subject for state-sponsored public reflection and debate, post-independence settlement schemes had not. Communal villages remained a non-negotiable and apparently uncontroversial fixture of the rural socio-political landscape.

Not only had discussion of relative merits and demerits of the aldeias as living arrangements remained off limits; so, too, had the atrocities and abuses that occurred in their formation. Thus, the violence perpetrated by state-sponsored militia is attributed in the above account to the vacuum of power which characterized rule by secretaries. There is nary a mention of the fact that these militia first gained public notoriety for actions undertaken under direct army orders to villagize the population as part of the state’s

238 In the name of the state counter-insurgency program. Any such mention would leave little doubt that their brutality and crimes, which paralleled those committed by government troops themselves, bespeak the exercise, rather than the absence, of state power.76

As a senior official within the MAE, Baptista Lundin could presumably afford to be more openly critical of the ruling party’s agrarian policies and the coercive means that were often used to implement them. Whether she could afford to or not, criticize she did. To her credit, she used her position as a platform for pushing for revised policies which she believed would better the lot of rural dwellers and be more attuned to local cultural sensitivities. However, her writing on Makua-Lomwé-speaking areas vividly illustrates that, when taken to its extreme,the culturalist position strongly tends to eclipse some of the most repressive aspects and detrimental effects of Frelimo’s rural interventions even when the overall effect of sanitization runs directly counter to the interpreter’s apparent intent.

Baptista Lundin’s assessment of the impact of Frelimo rural development policies on “Makua society” makes no bones that “the process of forced villagization began in the colonial period and continued after independence.”77 In a similar vein, she explains that she has seen fit to deploy the past imperfect tense in her discussion of Makua land use and management “because the rules of the current State don’t allow the practices of local African society with respect to land use and control.”78 The thrust of Baptista Lundin’s argument, however, softens the sting of these formulations. She attributes sharp falls in smallholder agricultural production to generalized “apathy” which set in as a result of the withdrawal of “all the mechanism [sic] of control ... for this [i.e. production] to function.” Such social control mechanisms had been “the specific and primordial task of the Mwene.” With the Frelimo-pronounced demise of chieftaincy alone in the dock, villagization, to say nothing of the state’s failure to provision smallholders with technical assistance, agricultural inputs, consumer goods, farming tools, and adequate marketing outlets, is unwittingly acquitted of blame.

Baptista Lundin’s insistence on the centrality of the n’tthetthe (mutthetthe) to the cosmology of Makua-speakers also blunts the force of her critique of state coercion. Uprooted from this critical referent, “Makua man,” she maintains, not only lost important guarantees to land access but, much more fundamentally, “he doesn’t recognize himself and doesn’t find his social being.”79 As she expresses it elsewhere, “The entire concept of human being is linked to the N’tthetthe and it is there that he positions himself in order to see and to live life.”80 This conception of self was profoundly destabilized by relocation to foreign mitthetthe.

Baptista Lundin’s near-exclusive focus on extra-mitthetthe displacements misleads in two critical respects. First, it implies that mandatory resettlement within the n’tthetthe would have been significantly less reprehensible, if not altogether beyond reproach. Her contention that those families who have never experienced displacement from their own n’tthetthe “feel good”

In the name of the state 239 would seem to add corroborating evidence to such an interpretation.81 The historical facts, however, indicate otherwise. At least this is so with reference to Eráti, the case study on which Baptista Lundin’s own analytic framework heavily draws. As we have already seen, the formation of the “cotton concentrations” in the district during the 1950s and 1960s was accomplished only by recourse to coercion even though, according to Geffray and Pedersen, the new settlement pattern did not, in the main, violate inter-mitthetthe boundaries.82 The gradual crumbling of the picadas in the late 1960s and through much of the 1970s throughout the province would seem to indicate that not everyone felt “good” about Portuguese-enforced resettlement, irrespective of where the new settlements were located. Second, insofar as Baptista Lundin focuses her critique on the cultural inappropriateness of the site of resettlement, she deflects attention from the act of forced removal. Had the Makua had a less intimate, all-embracing relationship with the land in their n’tthetthe, she seems to suggest, the same act would have constituted a lesser offense.

Baptista Lundin’s account is fully compatible with, and lends academic credence to, the argument that, to the extent that Frelimo’s project foundered as result of domestic factors, it was in good measure because the society in which it sought to implant that project was too traditional. As we shall see in Chapter 8, this is precisely the view which was subtly being promoted by the ruling party in the run-up to, and in the immediate aftermath of, the country’s first multiparty elections. The crucial difference between the conventional wisdom of yore and that of the 1990s is the weight accorded to rural culture in the balance of forces between the forces of revolution and those of reaction. In the early days of proclaimed socialist transition, traditionalism was cast as a largely residual phenomenon, a minor, if highly irritating, source of friction on forward revolutionary movement. In contrast, forms of Frelimo legitimation in the early to mid-1990s tended to imply that vestigial power miraculously managed to hold sway, constituting the primary domestic cause of revolutionary defeat.

Thus far, the following arguments have been made in this chapter. First, in the early 1990s official reckonings of post-independence travails often tended to scapegoat rural-based Frelimo secretaries, who were variously portrayed as incompetent, lacking in gravitas, power-hungry, devious and deviant, and who were invariably depicted as questionable characters of nonroyal origin. These portrayals, it bears recall, stand in stark contrast to those characteristics ascribed to local secretaries in the early post-independence period. Then, the formation of GDs and party cells was adduced as evidence of the availability of local constituents ready and able to advance Frelimo’s socialist agenda. By the 1990s revisions to official thinking had produced the view that the ruling party had chosen grassroots agents who were neither particularly committed to, nor able to implement, any political or development program, socialist or otherwise. Glaring deficits in legitimacy

240 In the name of the state at the local level in large measure accounted for the rootlessness of the Frelimo state.

Second, in assigning historical causality to Frelimo’s choice of local agents, explanations such as these downplay or screen out other excesses and abuses committed in the name of socialist revolution. They also effectively expunge all trace of translocal forces from the recent past, thus dissociating grassroots divisions and conflicts from their historical context and lending a mythic, timeless quality to local developments.

Evidence of early negotiations and compromise

While the consensus in official circles in Nampula Province in the early 1990s was that the Frelimo state succeeded in effecting a decisive, acrossthe-board and calamitous rupture with chieftaincy, the evidence from which this consensus was forged invites a quite different reconstruction of local processes of state formation in the early post-independence period. Ironically, attempts by lower-level officialdom to vouch for the amenability of chiefs to serving the Frelimo state and their capacity to do so brought to light hitherto publicly suppressed instances of early government collaboration with officially ostracized chiefs.

The report from Murrupula is typical in this respect. In it, the district administrator endorses the predominant view that the official demise of the regedoria system precipitated “great contradictions in the heart of the population, especially where the Secretary of the Dynamizing Group didn’t belong to any family of Traditional Power or Tribe of that area.” The “concrete example” marshaled to substantiate this claim, however, shows the lengths to which official authorities went to nip such “contradictions” in the bud when and where they arose: “A case which occurred in the Locality of Namitotelane in the Party Cell, a secretary was rejected by the population ... a Brigade from the District Committee of the Frelimo-Party went there and the population asked them to elect a nephew of the Cabo da Povoação.” Presumably the request was granted since the next sentence reads as follows: “There are reports that life ran normally.” Furthermore, the next – and only other – example cited reveals that “[e]qually, in the Communal Village of Umuato where, by coincidence, it is directed [sic] by a Secretary, ex-Régulo Umpuata’s nephew, everything ran well, all of the sectors.”83

To the north, in Mecubúri District, similar dynamics were clearly in play. According to a functionary of the local administration who hails from the district, a defining feature of the area

is that the people who hold traditional power are people held in great admiration by the population, some for being rich, others [for being] curandeiros, others for good conduct and other qualities superior to the level of the life of the population, all contributing to [their] be[ing] respected.84

In the name of the state 241 In their early attempts to found communal villages, local state and party officials would be impressed by the salience of this local particularity and would waste no time making their peace with it:

We have the case of numerous Villages [in] which there arose great mysteries in their phase of implementation that the mobilizers didn’t succeed [in solving] and no one was willing to construct [the village] without the family of the dominant tribe intervening with respect to the ceremonies of the deceased; this [occurred] in Mutapua, Micolene, [where] a rock that symbolized the urn of the king and régulo Canhaua II had to be transported from the Mountains bordering Ribáuè to the area where the works were planned; this tribal desire fulfilled, the population agreed and built that which was sought by the state.

He continues:

Another impact of traditional action in our area of jurisdiction was evident ... in the Communal Village of Tivira in Muite where the Party and State Structures with all [of the] legislation had immense obstacles in implanting the village in question and electing a permanent and effective responsável.

The inhabitants refused several times ... to recognize [the established] authority, seeking out the son of the deceased régulo Mahano of the name Raúl Braz, who assured the mobilization, construction and consequent leadership (responsabilização) of the village, a task that he carried out for 8 years, resigning voluntarily and being succeeded by about 4 of his kin in the leadership of that Village. ... This indicates to us that the power under study still has a lot of influence and the tendency toward [its] powerful resurgence with contemporary manifestations persists.85

Villagization in Nampula’s southernmost district appears to have been accomplished in like manner. A government official who was working in the Moma administration in the early 1980s disclosed that

when we were creating the communal villages in Moma, the District of Moma was the second district to conclude that program. We met with all of the Mwenes, Régulos and Queens to study the way to do it. They organized the families, the populations and chose the best places to create communal villages. In less than three weeks the District of Moma already had raised some communal villages.86

It bears recall that the first district in the province to achieve full villagization, that of Ribáuè,87 owed its success to identical tactics.88

Other testimony reveals that early prohibitions against traditional

242 In the name of the state authorities and their close relatives holding office were only loosely enforced. The administrator of Mogovolas, for instance, recalled, “During the first general elections often the choice fell to members of those structures [e.g. traditional hierarchies]. And some representatives of these ... [have been] deputies since the first elections.”89 The administrator of Angoche, in his turn, allowed that “some” of the secretaries of the dynamizing groups had been “sons or descendants of the régulos and chefes das povoações, seeing as these possessed work experience.”90

Testimony from Nampula reveals that such patterns of political accommodation and ties were not limited to the district level. Traditional power would receive a further fillip from “high officeholders in the Government or the companies” with little to no firsthand, professional contact with the grassroots but no less sons of Nampulan soil for all that. This was because “traditional power forms part of Makua man’s being” – government and company higher-ups not excepted.91 With widening cracks in the edifice of Frelimo power, these officials lost no time in demonstrating, at least in their private capacities, where their true loyalties lay:

When they exercise important offices in the government they don’t demonstrate what they are traditionally, for fear of losing their positions. Many of them had now renounced their religions of origin, opting for Marxist-Leninist civilization and culture, Soviet-Cuban style. Lately, when they go to the countryside to enjoy their holidays, they hold traditional ceremonies asking their ancestors for better fortune, health and strengthening of their position, including using the best and most expensive curandeiros in the Village ... No one wants to show that he now accepts who he is for fear of being demoted.92

“Clandestine” cultural practices, it appears, stretched well up into the state apparatus itself.

I close this section with a brief review of the manner in which Mutaquiha and Baptista Lundin handled the problem of counter-factual evidence. In Mutaquiha’s report, there is no explicit reference to such evidence; however, the existence of data of this sort nonetheless suggests itself through formulations such as those cited in the passages above – to wit, “According to some interviewees, many of those Secretaries were from or were descendants of inferior clans (Milimos) that traditionally had served as suppliers of cheap labor and slaves.”93 In contrast, Baptista Lundin is candid that “today we have information ... that there was a certain co-habitation between the formal structure of the state and the formal structure of traditional society in many areas of the Country.” She nonetheless finds that such arrangements were in the minority, that inversionsof power were common and, seemingly in every instance, illegitimate, and that other departures from inherited, descent-based hierarchies were equally poorly received.94 Rather than testifying to longstanding and/or emergent social tensions and divisions within

In the name of the state 243 “Makua society,” these latteroutcomes, she implies, can be wholly attributed to the ruthlessly effective exercise of apparently unfettered state power.

The roots of rural “anarchy” reconsidered

It is perhaps testimony to the extent of collaboration between official and traditional authority – to say nothing of the homage paid by the former to the latter – that the vast majority of people I interviewed in Namapa regarding the crisis of leadership gave at most cursory consideration to the person and actions of the secretary. This was the case even when they insisted on the adverse effects of Frelimo’s abaixo policy, as they typically did. Instead, many rural dwellers laid stress on an emphasis present in the above-cited retrospectives but partly drowned out by the dominant one: Frelimo deliberately fostered the degradation of the very concept of authority with equally negative repercussions for all claimants on local power and prestige. This alternative view impinged upon the dominant discourse in official circles inways that both dovetailed with, and created dissonance within, what had by then become a fairly standardized statist narrative. If the Namapan case was anything to go by, the standardizing potential of government mnemonic practices beyond the confines of state bureaucracy was, at this stage, largely a function of the extent to which these practices managed toadopt and domesticate the popular discourse of Frelimo-enforced sociopolitical leveling.

While, as we have seen, the deputy administrator of Malema found that rule by commoners-cum-slaves bore primary responsibility for rendering “the rural areas almost ungovernable,” this was not, in his view, the sole factor contributing to this outcome. The multiplication of local institutions had also engendered widespread confusion and disorder:

There is no one who rules and who should be ruled. If someone rules, to whom do they answer?

Even today it is not known who is the head chief, for example, of a determinate Communal Village. Is it the Secretary of the dynamizing group? Is it the secretary of the Cell of the Frelimo-Party? Is it the secretary of OJM? Is it the secretary of OMM? Is it the Deputy? Is it the Commander of the militias? Through whom does the Administrator inform himself about the state of affairs in the Village? ... [It’s] [n]ot because the rural populations became disobedient when independence was proclaimed on June 25, 1975. The major problem was the abolition of traditional power and to have put in its place a thing without any weight or norms [to] regulate its organization and functioning (dynamizing Group). No Minister or Governor of the Province is prepared to say what the rights and duties of a Deputy secretary of the dynamizing group in an aldeia are for example. In order for power to function better, it is necessary to organize it.95

244 In the name of the state The Mecubúri district administration advanced a similar argument, holding that “proliferation of structures of the base without decisons [sic: without decision-making powers?]” after independence had “devaloriz[ed]” local official representatives. “And,” making matters worse, “they didn’t have definition of [sic] visible areas of operation.”96

More importantly, purges and reshufflings, no matter how frequent or thoroughgoing, were a poor substitute for the kinds of disciplining mechanisms to which local rural authorities had been regularly subject under the Portuguese. This at least was the case made by a former deputy régulo who, after independence, became an assembly deputy in his locality, as paraphrased – and seconded – by the two state functionaries who interviewed him:

Traditional authorities facilitated everything colonialist. They had the administrative and judicial power and were subjected to a heavy penalty [responsabilização]. In the event of any anomaly, they paid dearly, punishment could go as far as the beating of the régulo, cabo or chefe de povoação himself. According to the opinion of Lourenço Hanle, the old deputy [of] régulo Penhavate and deputy of the Assembly of the Locality of Muaphili, he was frank and open in affirming that these days no one respects the ... orders of the government, starting with the secretaries themselves through to the population. According to him, this happens because there is no one who answers dearly in the event of the failure of activities, while in the colonial period, who suffered in the first place was the régulo himself and he, in his turn, would settle accounts with his people. He gave the concrete example of there not being measures against those that don’t pay tax [under] the current Government, it is not known who rules and who should be ruled, people do what they want, [there is] no obligation for people to work for their own wellbeing. That old authority, in speaking about agricultural production today, affirmed that today agricultural production is weak because all of the people want to rule and no one wants to work. In our time there was no hunger, because we were forced to work and it had ... become a tradition for people to work and lately we don’t chase behind people, he emphasized. In the words of that old deputy régulo, the administration knew everything that happened through the régulos: taxes were collected on time and all of the people paid, people had to work in agriculture, all of the vagrants, prostitutes, marginals, lazy ones, feiticeiros and drug users were known to the administration. Any type of crime, right away its author was known and, in the event of his not being known, the régulo had the obligation of finding him.97

On this view, the principal drawback of post-independence rural governance was less the illegitimacy and unaccountability of the secretary vis-à-vis the population than his lack of identification with, and answerability to, the state.

A historical antecedent

In the name of the state 245

The view that no one was duty-bound after independence harks back to, and borrows liberally from, Frelimo’s discourse at the height of revolutionary fervor. Most notably, the notion that “it is not known who rules or should be ruled” evokes the oratory of Samora Machel as economic crisis loomed, bureaucratic corruption and foot-dragging became increasingly evident, and worker enthusiasm for the production line waned. Machel’s response is best exemplified in an address to health service personnel in Maputo hospital in December 1979. According to Dan O’Meara, “the hospital speech,” as it is commonly known, marked the close of Frelimo’s “triumphalist” phase (c.1975–1980) and set the tone for the increasingly open and unapologetic authoritarian political practice that came to prevail in subsequent years.98 The speech, precipitated by the late president’s discernment of a host of “breaches of the political and organizational principles of the FRELIMO party” at several of the country’s hospitals,99 “was a severe, and at the time shocking, attack on a strong culture of egalitarianism” and paved the way for the reimposition of “direct, hierarchical labour discipline on all sectors of the economy.”100

Machel remonstrated at length about Maputo hospital’s failure to meet even minimal standards of hygiene or to provide decent health care service. The lack of professionalism was exemplified by the liberal dress code and lack of protocol which prevailed among hospital staff. Both characteristics sorely challenged the hospital visitor to identify the key actors in the institution: “when workers introduce themselves, they are all in a bunch, in a jumble of categories and hierarchies that are difficult to make out ... There are no grades, no ladder, no pyramid, no hierarchy.” Furthermore, “[t]he doctor is no longer respected as the most qualified professional in the hospital. The doctor has the same status as a technician handing out pills or preventive medicines.” The upshot was that “no one gives orders in the hospital. Or rather everyone gives orders, everyone is ‘chief’, which means there is no chief at all!”101

The generalized use of the term comrade as a substitute for status-bearing job titles both epitomized and accelerated the erosion of workplace distinctions and hierarchy. The absence of categories, authority and hierarchy reflected the “dispersal of power in the hospitals.” This, in turn, “provoke[d] a dilution of responsibility, and thus created “an environment of generalized irresponsibility.” At the heart of the problem was “a confusion between populism and people’s power.” The former ideology was the instrument of “petty-bourgeois radicalism” which “waves the revolutionary banner in order to destroy it” and which manifests itself through “liberalism, demagogy, ultra-democracy and the principle of absolute egalitarianism.”102

Reconcentrating power in the hands of management and reinstituting managerial privileges were two of the antidotes Machel prescribed. Restricting the use of revolutionary salutations to certified revolutionaries – that is,

246 In the name of the state party militants (and then only when acting specifically in that capacity) –was another. Machel defended these moves in the name of popular power, not as a necessary counterpoint to it. He was able to mount such a defense because the problem at hand, as he saw it, was not how best to manage “the ongoing tension between centralized managerial authority on the one hand and popular power on the other”103 but rather how to ensure that popular power – of which centralized managerial authority was a critical component – definitively triumphed over populism, the thin edge of the wedge of petty bourgeois-led counter-revolution.

Retrospectives on the Frelimo revolution as seen by Nampulan officials in the early 1990s share Machel’s appreciation for the value of strict hierarchical discipline, his antipathy to populism in all of its guises and his conviction that this ideology lurked behind a host of serious deviations from the party line. However, they advance a radically different explanation of that ideology’s genesis and spread. Now we discover that it was the local secretary, rather than the petty bourgeoisie, that was the principal propagator, if not necessarily an apostle, of populist political practice.104 On this logic, rule by secretaries was the functional, if not necessarily the moral, equivalent of petty-bourgeois hegemony. In carefully confining its critique to Frelimo’s original methods as described by the country’s first president, the new discourse of officialdom presents itself as an affirmation, rather than a repudiation, of revolutionary values and goals. In the process – and not incidentally – the principal target of criticism shifts away from aspirants to the bourgeoisie to rural dwellers whose forebears were subaltern subjects of precolonial chieftaincies.

In Namapa, the view that no one was accountable to the state, and that this lack of accountability was a root cause of Mozambique’s multifaceted post-independence crisis, was widely held. On the face of it, this shared standpoint corroborates Achille Mbembe’s claim that, in postcolonial Africa, “officialdom and the people” hold in common “a certain conception of the aesthetics and stylistics of power and the way it operates and expands”105 –or, perhaps more to the point in the present context, the way it deflates, contracts or implodes. But the Namapan case also serves to illustrate that a common frame of reference may not provide sufficient epistemic ground for a “logic of ‘conviviality’” between rulers and ruled to assert itself.106 For while there was a rough consensus among many members of the ruling party and a substantial number of Namapans that Frelimo had conspicuously failed to exercise power (effectively or ineffectively),107 there was a lack of unanimity as to why this was the case. To Machel, this unfortunate state of affairs in good measure testified to the insidious effects of counter-revolutionary populism, particularly as these were felt within official structures. It was also a direct outgrowth of Frelimo’s ambivalence towards power. To local officials in Nampula in the 1990s, it testified to the new state’s inexperience, indecision, misguided methods and, not least, its political gullibility. In sharp contrast to both of these views, many rural residents in Namapa

In the name of the state 247 commonly attributed this state of affairs to tightly-held Frelimo political principle. In the next section, I turn to what appears to be the popular roots of the aforementioned less audible discursive stream within standardized and standardizing statist narratives.

“Where does all this ‘camaraderie’ come from?”108 Asked why, in his opinion, the district administration had solicited him, in his capacity as chief, to serve as a “chief of production” in the mid-1980s, Chief Taibo, an open Renamo supporter, made clear that, in his view, this shift in policy had little to do with the rebel movement’s wartime strategy of rural mobilization: “Because at that time, people were spending all their time going around insulting one another ... without producing.” This sorry state of affairs had, in turn, arisen “because of freedom. People would say that they were free.”109

If Taibo was less than specific about the provenance of such notions and at whose expense they had been propagated, three apuiamuene in Namapa Center left little doubt about where they stood on both counts. In their minds, generalized disregard for authority, and the no less generalized irresponsibility attendant upon it, stemmed from the oft-repeated Frelimo precept that

“All of us are comrades.” “Comrades” means that we are equal. So, the children, even when they met an elderly man, an elderly woman, would say, “Good morning, comrade,” extending their hand. It’s from the word comrade that we think the lack of respect came from in our children.110

Here, as elsewhere, social seniors located the roots of rural unruliness in the flattening, rather than the inversion, of hierarchy. Disadvantage had redounded not to royals in relation to former “slave” lineages but rather to senior age classes, irrespective of their social stations, in relation to social juniors – not least their own kin.111

Female elders and an apuiamuene in Namirôa Center were of a similar mind.112 They explained that the younger generation’s nonchalance toward gerontocratic authority had expressed itself in the attenuation of channels of access to male youth labor and the monetization of kinship relations. Elders, they held, could no longer count on familial assistance in agricultural work in part because many youth, mainly young men, were now working in Nacala and Nampula. Local labor bottlenecks were compounded by the price tag those youth who had remained in the district now attached to their work services: “Those that are here say, ‘If you want to be helped, you have to pay me money.’” The bargaining power of young men had begun to make itself felt when they “began to work and to receive money ... they began to be ruined starting from the time they began to earn money.” Youthful dependence on, and appetite for, cash earnings, in turn, dated from the time

248 In the name of the state when chiefs were made to stand up in public meetings “and it was said, ‘this one has no work.’”

The effects of the unraveling of authority on institutions of male labor appropriation were also at the forefront of Chief Tubruto’s preoccupations.113 Asked to elaborate the causes of rural emigration, Tubruto was adamant that “Frelimo is the one who did this.” As if to prove the point, he observed that Frelimo itself had recently owned up to past wrongdoing on this score:

Frelimo ... held a meeting and said, “What Frelimo said, prohibiting mpéwés, humus to work, was an error; to not educate children was an error. To put an end to a lot of freedom of youth, mpéwés and humus must continue to work to educate them.”

The Maravi leader’s subsequent testimony reveals that the marginalization of traditional authorities was only one factor contributing to the excessive freedom and itinerancy of young people. Equally, if not more, important were Frelimo’s early advocacy of freedom of residence, its initial commitment to stamping out colonial forced labor practices and its antipathy to all other forms of labor control.

To illustrate, Tubruto directed his attention to the period immediately following independence but prior to the first steps to implement Frelimo’s policy to “socialize the countryside” in 1977. During these years, as we have seen, the decomposition of the picada system, a process that predated independence, proceeded apace. The advantages of this system, as Tubruto catalogued them, were both numerous and self-evident. Access to transport had been greatly eased, enabling the ill to reach the hospital in Namapa in record speed. Land conflicts, which had been frequent when people “lived one by one,” had become history: “Here on the road, each one weeded within his area and it was not possible to tread on to the terrain of another person.” Field rotation was systematized. New picadas could be opened up for new machambas when the soil of the old ones was exhausted.

By far and away the main advantage was that “the machambas were together.” Geographic proximity had facilitated the delivery of insecticide (“remédio”) to smallholders, the marketing of cashew nuts and the supervision of machambas by chiefs, capatazes and company higher-ups. In sum, living along the picadas “relieved us of a lot of work.” Although the population had resisted resettling along the roads and had only moved to them when forced to, living along the picadas turned out to be “a good form of organization”: “An order is an order. In the beginning we didn’t know if it was good or not. We only began to see the things that helped us, cars passing everywhere, that’s when we saw that this order is good.”

That not everyone had been likewise convinced became apparent shortly after independence. Given the green light by the new government, “Each one began to look for a machamba where he wanted,” much to Tubruto’s own consternation:

In the name of the state 249 after the flag ... Frelimo said, “Now we are independent. Each one must live where he wants. Even the schedule of the machambas, each one knows how to cultivate.” ... Starting from the time when Frelimo said you can leave the roads, each one working according to his will, the work of cleaning the road didn’t go well. Because when we lived on the roads, it was easy to clean ... because each one cleaned his terrain. Now, as people live separately, there exist places in the road [that are] clean and others not because of the lack of connection. ... And, at that time, they said, “mapéwé abaixo. Even the children are free. You mustn’t have a lot of control over the children. If you see a boy with a girl coming from school, you mustn’t ask why they are together; each one can do what he wants.” And from then on, things began to be ruined because no one controlled the other. Even cultivating the machambas, in the past we cultivated until 12 o’clock, from six to 12 o’clock and from mid-day until five o’clock. When Frelimo said that each one must weed according to his ability, no one needs to have the schedule of anyone else ... so, at that time, some people, most especially youth, stopped working. Some of them can be found in Nacala, in the companies, at work.

Others, he went on to say, took to a life of petty crime to get by. And those who were gainfully employed, he emphasized, were not in the habit of “offer[ing] something” to, and heeding the advice of, their uncles, as migrant laborers had done in the past.

Several aspects of this testimony merit comment. First, Tubruto firmly linked his own authority not only to the colonial model of administration but, much more specifically, to socio-spatial patterns and production relations that predominated in the late colonial period. In particular, the picadas – the very settlement pattern whose consolidation seems to have accelerated the erosion of chiefly authority in the 1960s114 – provided the foundations for the entire social order as he had known it and thought it should forever remain.

Second, it had been the Frelimo-fostered reversion to the pre-picada situation, rather than any subsequent state-led attempt to will into being “higher relations of production,” which had delivered the first and, by all appearances, most resounding, blow to these foundations. Third, it had been the state’s principled (if thoroughly bemusing) abstention from exercising power, combined with its repeated injunctions for everyone else to follow suit, that had induced this reversion. On this account, the much remarked power vacuum was not the unintended consequence of the state’s determination to reinvent rural hierarchies but rather the realization of the ruling party’s original, declared intent to dispense with hierarchy altogether.

Finally and tellingly, the period singled out by Tubruto as best exemplifying the Frelimo-enforced descent into social disarray was one in which, by his own description, it had been not only possible for the nephews of chiefs in

250 In the name of the state his own area to serve as party secretaries but nothing short of “policy” for them to do so (see Chapter 3).115 That is, the period marking the steepest slope of this descending curve was one in which rule by royals, if not by chiefs, continued to hold sway, co-existing, however improbably, with abaixo incantations.

These are just a few of a wide range of contemporary social ills whose genesis interviewees ascribed to Frelimo’s accession to power and its policy towards chieftaincy. Two apuiamuene and an heir apparent in Renamo’s zone bemoaned the growth of unauthorized marriages among youth, alarming rises in the rate of divorce – recalled as having been rare in the colonial period – and increased sexual promiscuity to “the arrival of Samora.”116 In Odinepa a group of women representing a cross-section of ages reiterated this litany of laments, adding the increasing incidence of premature marriage and the dissolution of bilateral matrimonial alliances to the list.117 They blamed these social trends on “the politics” prevailing “since 1975,” consisting of “‘we are all equal’, and if you were caught beating your son, you were tied up.”

What of the views of the allegedly errant age classes themselves? Unfortunately, I did not interview enough members of this group to be able to say. It is, however, worth noting that the sentiments voiced by the women in Odinepa were echoed by a group of demobilized soldiers from both sides of the conflict. When pressed, several ex-combatants agreed that, as one put it, the only way to stem rural–urban migratory flows among their age class and to curb “marginality” in Namapa would be to “bring a company here to our zone so we can work for that company and make money right here ... so they [their elders] won’t say youth like to do nothing but pass the time.”118

I am not suggesting that there was anything approaching uniformity of opinion in Namapa on the subject of Frelimo-mandated social camaraderie or on the roots of crime, “marginality,” out-migration, changing sexual mores, the increasing brittleness of marriage or, for that matter, on anything else. My point is that the perception that Frelimo’s tenure and, more specifically, the statutory abrogation of chieftaincy had induced a profound, unwelcome and inimical shift in the balance of forces between age classes enjoyed a currency that cut across a range of social distinctions and was far more extensive than that enjoyed by explanations which impugned the social background, competence and/or personal integrity of the secretary.

Even people who had originally applauded Frelimo’s attempt to effect a definitive break with the colonial legacy of indirect rule now looked back on their initial enthusiasm as a mark of false consciousness. This at least was the conclusion reached by a local UNAMO representative:

In my opinion, although they [the régulos] beat us, when they were not recognized by Frelimo’s government, many things were ruined. For example, in the colonial period, it was easy to apprehend a thief because each régulo knew his people. There could be many people but the régulo

In the name of the state 251 knew. When the colonialists left and Frelimo said that the régulos and cabos can’t work, we, with little insight, thought that it was good because they beat us – while who had beaten us had already gone away ... We were left without régulos. That’s when we entered into confusion and there was a lot of disorder; there were many thieves, even now. And who knows the thieves is the régulo. 119

A group of elderly, male smallholders in Odinepa Locality also evinced a certain nostalgia, albeit a highly qualified one, for chiefly rule.120 Like the UNAMO secretary, they appreciated the utter untenability of the structural position chiefs had occupied under the Portuguese: “They were afraid. That’s why they, too, instilled fear.” Unlike him, the smallholders persisted in their longstanding belief that chiefs had lost whatever legitimacy they may once have had, and deservedly so, for collaborating with the Portuguese. Even so, they allowed, “when traditional authorities lost power, all control over youth was lost.”121

A former colonial interpreter shared Chief Tubruto’s conviction that the abolition of the regedoria system was symptomatic of Frelimo over-permissiveness.122 Endemic uncivility in public life was the result. The ruling party’s hands-off policy likewise extended to crime: “The government, Frelimo,” he confided, “never punished thieves.” Nor, he went on to explain, would it allow anyone else to either: “No one can be tortured any old way ... If someone steals your goat, it’s prohibited to beat the thief.” All of this went to show that “Instead of freedom, we have liberalism [Em vez de liberdade, temos liberalismo].”

Clearly the postulate of socio-political leveling is as problematic as explanations predicated on the myth of socio-political inversion. But why, one might ask, did the latter interpretation strongly tend to crowd out the former in state-sponsored local retrospectives? There were two possible reasons for this. The first is that, while the language of leveling called for the reconstitution of some kind of officially-recognized political hierarchy at the base, it did not go so far as to prescribe what exact form that hierarchy should take. In failing to address this question, it carried the potential of undermining the argument that the reconstitution of chiefly authority was the state’s best (and even only) recourse. And, in all likelihood, local functionaries would have felt compelled to try to neutralize such a potential at a time when the pro-chieftaincy lobby within the provincial administration, the MAE and even the national Frelimo leadership appeared to hold, or seemed poised to seize, the upper-hand politically.

A second possibility is the well-justified fear among ruling party politicians that interpretive frameworks, sympathetic to Frelimo or otherwise, that dwell on the leadership’s early, fierce commitment to achieving social and economic justice would point up (1) just how far the ruling party has moved away from its revolutionary nationalist goals, as formulated in the 1970s; and (2) the extent to which many prominent members of the leader-

252 In the name of the state ship have personally benefited from the material rewards to be reaped as a consequence of this backsliding.

A second question follows on the first: given the political risks that inhered in airing the leveling thesis, why did local officials chance referencing it at all? If the Namapan case was anything to go by, the reason Frelimo’s radical egalitarianism received any play to speak of, and as much play as it did, is because the discourse of leveling was so widespread in the population at large in the early 1990s. As such, it could hardly be completely ignored. In addition, the tendency both within and beyond official circles to elide the two explanations militated against drawing a sharp distinction between them and attracting unwanted attention to the one that posed the greatest political hazards. If anything, tendencies toward elision seemed to bolster the explanation favored by the provincial government and the ruling party at the time.

Two other points merit mention here. The first is that, if the primary criterion for judging the social value of these two explanatory frameworks was their conduciveness to fostering local reconciliation, the leveling thesis would emerge as the hands-down winner. This is because, in contrast to modes of explanation that malign the person and social status of the secretary, it deftly absolves all grassroots social categories and actors from blame. It thus adheres to the injunction that, as Ali Mazrui put it, “yesterday’s heroes” – in this case, local secretaries as they were cast in Frelimo’s socialist discourse – “should not become today’s villains.”123

Another one of Mazrui’s comments concisely makes the second point: “The real danger posed by state socialism in a society with fragile institutions is not a danger of making government too strong but the risk of making it more conspicuously ineffectual.”124 In the eyes of many Namapan residents, however, Frelimo deliberately, recklessly and ultimately selfdefeatingly sacrificed state power and competence on the altar of revolutionary camaraderie.

Post-independence “populism”: a Frelimo success story?

That view performs two displacements whose combined effect is to assign undue influence to Frelimo’s post-independence policies and pronouncements. First, the genesis of longstanding social trends, such as rising divorce rates, premature marriage, unauthorized marriages and the dissolution of bilateral matrimonial alliances, is pushed forward to independence day. Not only did such trends predate 1975; they had also gathered considerable momentum by that time. The first displacement enables the second. The revised sequence of events allows blame for the destabilization of familial and kinship institutions to be palmed off on to the incoming regime, whose accession to power coincided with major mutations in that destabilization’s form.

As we saw in Chapter 2, matrimonial institutions had come under severe strain by the early to mid-1960s. The generalization of cashew tree groves

In the name of the state 253 throughout Eráti in the 1950s and early 1960s, along with the decentralization of usufructory rights it had engendered, had loosened the dependence of young men on bride service for access to land. At the same time, substantial rises in rural incomes during the 1960s, combined with the expansion of the marketing network, had decentralized male access to cash and commodities. The cumulative result had been the demise of the mahumu’s monopoly control over matrimonial arrangements. Armed with the requisite socioeconomic means, male social juniors began to exercise greater freedom in choosing and discarding marriage partners, and thus greater leverage in setting the terms of conjugal relations. Skyrocketing divorce rates as early as the 1960s and the decrease in the average age of male marriage from twentyfive to fifteen during the 1950s and 1960s provide ample evidence of the attenuation of inter-lineage matrimonial alliances and of channels of access to male labor that had once helped to cement these alliances.

The argument that large-scale male out-migration was Frelimo-induced exemplifies the second displacement. Unlike permutations of matrimonial patterns, heavy rural–urban migratory flows in Nampula are a singularly postcolonial phenomenon. The Frelimo government is thus more vulnerable to the charge of having triggered them. Nonetheless, there is more than enough reason to believe that accounts which exclusively fault Frelimo’s declared intent to revolutionize rural social relations for this outcome are in need of serious qualification.

Once again, timing matters.125 At the national level, stepped up rural emigration to the cities and towns dates from the transitional government between September 1974 and June 1975. By February 1975, four months prior to independence, the phenomenon had reached such proportions as to have already become an abiding preoccupation of the Frelimo leadership. At that time, the National Meeting of District Committees urged adopting “political and administrative measures” to resolve the problem.126

It is unclear whether the advent of dramatically higher rates of migration to urban areas in Nampula predated independence day or not. According to Geffray and Pedersen, the exodus from Eráti District began on the heels of independence and, prior to the major population displacements attendant upon the local outbreak of war, reached its peak within the next couple of years.127 The late 1970s, in contrast, witnessed the ebb, followed by the reversal, of rural–urban population flows.128 That is, out-migration of male youth had already substantially leveled off by the time Frelimo moved to implement its abaixo policy with greater rigor starting from 1976–1977, tightening eligibility requirements and running more meticulous background checks on candidates to local office in the process.

As we have also seen, during the first two years of independence, when the human efflux from the district reached its pre-war peak, continued rule by royals was fairly commonplace. This was the case either because candidates for office were successful in their efforts to conceal their identities from the authorities or because the authorities themselves sanctioned, tacitly or

254 In the name of the state otherwise, the continued dominance of chiefly families. In contrast, the period in which abaixo denunciations and humiliations seem to have peaked coincided with a reduction of emigration from the district and the steady return of youth to the rural milieu. Thus, the footlooseness of youth cannot reasonably be ascribed to the social disruptions produced by overturned or overrun hierarchies.

Geffray and Pedersen provide a much more plausible explanation for outmigration during this period: decolonization prompted the dissipation of administrative controls that had hitherto prevented it. Out-migration was simply the consequence, under radically, abruptly and unexpectedly altered circumstances, of social transformations that had long been underway. According to Geffray and Pedersen, colonial controls and compulsions were applied with extra rigor in Eráti, presumably because of the district’s importance as an abundant source of smallholder-produced cotton. It follows that the effects of their collapse would have been all the more striking.

Neither the centrality of these controls nor the effects of their sudden, wholesale withdrawal received even passing mention by any of my informants. In the face of this resounding silence, one can only surmise the following. In the lived experience of many rural residents, the direct pressures exerted by the colonial state administrative and repressive apparatus inhibiting and penalizing the free movement of African labor were indistinguishable from the policing and disciplining powers of chiefs, lineage notables and elders which they supported. In light of this, the effects of the former were often attributed – in whole or part – to those of the latter. The colonial-era respect of young male contract workers for tributary relations, recalled by Chief Tubruto above, exemplifies this tendency: such deference was as much a function of colonial state’s labor-recruiting policies, which ensured the prompt return of African labor to its point of origin, as it was testimony to the continued draw of chieftaincy as a free-standing institution.

In sum, the consequences of the removal of state controls at the time of decolonization were either seriously underestimated or entirely overlooked. People were thus obliged to look elsewhere in order to explain the hemorrhaging of male labor. Frelimo’s soon-to-be-announced agenda of allembracing social transformation meant that they didn’t have to look very long or very far.

The redolence of the first years of independence still requires explanation, as do the enduring effects often accorded to them. Frelimo’s radical egalitarianism was, after all, short-lived, giving way by the beginning of the 1980s to more commandist tendencies with which that commitment had long co-existed. The mass decampment of youth was soon followed by their return to the rural areas and their resubordination to their social seniors, a state of affairs that persisted until the outbreak of Renamo’s war.

One reason that this period looms large in people’s memories is that, inretrospect at least, the mass exodus of male youth at the dawn of

In the name of the state 255 independence is seen as a portent of other, comparably momentous, shifts in inter-generational and age-class relations induced by the war itself: in particular, those brought on by the two belligerents’ heavy reliance on pressganging able-bodied males to fill their ranks, by the widespread distribution of small arms, and by the rising incidence of freelance banditry and crime as Mozambique’s social fabric unraveled.129

That the first years of independence stand to the fore of local social memories may also be a consequence of the postcolonial state’s failure to render labor productive rather than of its alleged success in converting egalitarian principles into political practice.130 The fact that many people, most notably social seniors, viewed Frelimo’s failure on this score as one of its more notable, if dubious, achievements, seems to reflect the generalized perception among certain sectors of the populace that the post-independent state possessed, and continues to possess, the same powers and capacities as its predecessor. By this logic, the Frelimo state’s failure to control the disposition, activity and productivity of labor is popularly construed as a function of its obstinate and ongoing refusal to do so.

Throughout sub-Saharan Africa,

the power of the post-colonial state [at independence] appeared awesome, almost limitless ... It was not just that the post-colonial state possessed all the formal powers and attributes of the colonial state, it was also that it was not subject to the constraints of colonial political accountability [e.g. to the metropolitan state]. Until new principles of accountability were established, the post-colonial state was in effect largely unrestrained.131

Or so it seemed. Such misperceptions would have been all the stronger with respect to newly sovereign countries whose independence had been achieved through force of arms and in instances in which the new government had been able to dictate unilaterally many of the terms of decolonization, as was the case in Mozambique. It would also be reasonable to expect that such erroneous views would prove particularly intractable in a context, such as the Mozambican one, in which the incumbent regime, however debilitated, had managed to survive one of the continent’s most vicious regional conflicts of the 1980s – a conflict in which it was a leading target.132

That the power of the Frelimo state continues to be overstated by many Mozambicans and sinister motivations ascribed to that state’s interventions has been perhaps most starkly and poignantly laid bare by a spate of panicsowing rumors that have gripped various parts of the country in recent years. One recurring rumor, which first broke out in 1998, had it that the government’s anti-cholera campaign was a cover for a Frelimo plot to spread the disease, especially among the poor. In Nampula, where this rumor was particularly virulent and where it erupted anew in late 2001, children were at one stage said to feature high on the government’s list of quarry.133

256 In the name of the state According to sociologist Carlos Serra, rumors of this ilk are simply the most dramatic expression of the longstanding view, especially prevalent in the country’s northern provinces, that the post-independence state has drained ordinary citizens of their life force.134 A second rumor, also in circulation in the late 1990s, arose in response to newly passed legislation reinstating mandatory military service. Word had it that the resumption of conscription signaled the government’s plan to embark on a foreign military adventure –in all probability to Angola, where a brutal civil war then showed no signs of abating.135

It should come as no surprise that these rumors express, among other things, deep-seated, generation-related anxieties. They, and others like them, may have been exploited and fostered by Renamo.136 But the former rebel army’s mantra that Frelimo, at independence, “nationalised children” and that it now “wants to sell your children” finds fertile ground among certain sectors of the population because it articulates firmly-held popular sentiments.137 The major rural–urban migratory wave of male youth that came directly on the heels of independence appears to constitute both a formative memory that has conditioned popular perceptions and memories of subsequent post-independence developments, especially those that bear on issues pertaining to generational hierarchies, and a retrospectively portentous one.138

Conclusion

The tendency to exaggerate the postcolonial state’s responsibility for engendering widespread social (if not epidemiological) pathologies was underscored by President Chissano in an address in Maputo Province in July 1994.139 He observed that the life-span of criminal activity in Maputo and its environs far outstretched Frelimo’s tenure. By way of illustration, Chissano reminded his audience that the word “tsotsi [criminal elements]” had already worked its way into the local lexicon a full decade or two before independence, emphasizing that “In 1974, there was marginality and prostitution.” The state’s eventual response had been Operation Production, a campaign which, the Mozambican president pointedly recalled, had initially met with popular acclaim. In his opinion, nothing short of a similar exercise would succeed in quickly cleaning up the streets in the present (and not simply the reinstatement of chiefs as claimed by MAE consultant Mutaquiha). But recent political reforms had foreclosed this option. Very recently, the head of state recounted, a priest had approached him and asked why he didn’t order a new Operation Production. Chissano reported that he had replied, “You [e.g. the churches] say that this is a violation of human rights.”140

If, in this instance, the president strove to dispel popular illusions about the recent past and the Frelimo state’s hand in shaping it, the same cannot be said of other, more or less contemporaneous, ruling ideological practices,

In the name of the state 257 including the president’s own. But that is the subject of the next chapter. The foregoing discussion has explored the ways in which MAE representatives and Nampula-based state authorities, drawing on a wide range of cultural and historical referents from the precolonial period through to the present, reinscribed the myth of revolutionary rupture into a chronicle of cultural destabilization, economic decline and social strife. This chapter has also highlighted the ways in which the mnemonic narratives produced by local government employees borrowed and reinflected elements of popularlygrounded revisionist critiques so as to accord them with, and affirm, certain bedrock principles of Frelimo’s socialism. The ensuing discourse sought to explain the ruling party’s legitimation crisis in rural Nampula in terms that mobilized both the rhetoric of revolutionary triumphalism, of which the founding myth of radical rupture was a salient component, and the once much vaunted tradition of socialist self-criticism that, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, was directed toward tempering that rhetoric.

The revised myth both benefited from and reproduced longstanding tensions and ambiguities in Frelimo’s own discursive and political practice. It also drew on the ruling party’s longtime penchant for denying the impact of Renamo’s politico-military strategy on its own policies and actions. Districtand provincial-level officials thus managed to cast the political crisis at hand in an idiom that was at once intelligible, credible and acceptable to the state and party leadership and that carried a politically palatable, seemingly politically viable prescription for Frelimo’s re-legitimization in the face of the unprecedented challenges posed by the new constitutional dispensation.

I have identified two major currents within official memory discourses concerning the subject of post-independence rural political authority. Both were path-dependent, articulating as they did with pre-existing discourses. Both were marked by a strong tendency to suppress the effects of translocal factors on grassroots developments and/or to ascribe these effects to the imposition of the organs of popular power. The dominant current zeroed in on the secretary as the revolution’s soft underbelly. The second one played up the allegedly adverse local consequences of Frelimo’s initially strong commitment to the principle of social and economic justice. The latter emphasis, which in Namapa at least appeared to be endorsed by a greater number of citizens representing a broader spectrum of constituencies, both complemented and conflicted with the former. But the tendency of people both within and beyond the state bureaucracy to conflate and apparently unconsciously slide back and forth between the two lends itself to the view that, in actual practice, the second discursive stream gave added resonance to the first.

The preceding discussion suggests that the robustness and salience of the myth of revolutionary rupture within contemporary memory discourses derives from its “semiotic flexibility” and, especially, its availability to competing political agendas and critiques.141 However, it does not necessarily follow that the versatility of this myth owes to the “intrinsic meaning” of

258 In the name of the state the remembered past if the past is understood narrowly as the statutory abolition of chieftaincy.142 Rather than being an inborn trait, the multivalence of this founding moment was, at the very least, amplified by virtue of its close historical association with, and frequent elision with, the large-scale out-migration of male youth in the first years of independence. The fixity of the past in contemporary memory practices derived from what appears to be a synergistic relationship between these two historic “events,” each of which animated the other with meaning.

The resulting dynamic harnessed contrasting, often opposing and often paradoxical notions concerning the powers, inclinations and disinclinations of the Frelimo state. In doing so, it gave the myth of revolutionary rupture much of its driving force. The hypothesis I am advancing here is that it is this myth’s capacity to bundle the sum of these notions in a manner that generates a productive tension among them which enables it to discharge its double, paradoxical function as a memory screen: as an obstruction and/or filtering device, on the one hand, and as a canvas, on the other.143 The net result both constrained and opened up possibilities for inventive mnemonic performance.