and Mozambican studies

8 Roots, routes and rootlessness

Ruling political practice and Mozambican studies

The demise of political vanguardism destabilized the hitherto close association between difference and anti-patriotism. As Jorge Rebelo, then chief of Frelimo propaganda, put it in 1990, “Today we cannot pretend that everyone is with Frelimo.”1 The advent of multiparty politics indicated that legitimate difference, both between the party and the polity and within the polity itself, would gain recognition. It remained to be seen, however, what kinds of differences would be recognized and how they would be cast in official discursive and political practice; which social bases of dissent would be legitimized and by what rationale; and whether Frelimo’s classificatory schema, as described in Chapter 1, could accommodate these changes and how.

This chapter addresses these issues.2 I argue that the built-in instability of Frelimo’s original social taxonomy provided just enough versatility not only to endure but to seek to capitalize on fairly sweeping political change. In particular, it enabled the ruling party to assimilate and turn to its advantage key elements of the revisionist critique. The facility with which this assimilation occurred discloses the extent to which Frelimo’s sociology and that of its revisionist critics move in a common conceptual universe. As already noted, instrumentalization carried risks. It also exacted an immediate price, as I show below. Moreover, there is little reason to suppose that it produced a hegemonic outcome, even in the short term. It’s also worth reiterating that the ability of the ruling regime to manipulate the myth of revolutionary rupture was a product of the specific historical circumstances laid out in previous chapters: most notably the availability of the founding moment to which this myth refers to multiple, contrasting, interpretations – an attribute that was either inherent to that moment itself or externally-conferred or, as I have suggested, some combination of the two. In addition, donor credulity with respect to the revisionist critique no doubt lent a hand to Frelimo’s efforts to mold the past to suit its contemporary political needs.

The enemies of the people revisited

I suggested in Chapter 7 that, by the early 1990s, post-independence rule by non-royals had come to figure as either a foil or a fetish for the totality of

260 Roots, routes and rootlessness Frelimo political and development failures in the outback in many statesponsored retrospectives on the Nampulan and Makua experiences. Here it bears noting that, just as the allegedly commoner/slave-run institutions of popular power came to perform this function, grassroots secretaries themselves tended to take on many of the most salient personal traits, behavioral patterns and, in some cases, even the ulterior motivations of “the class enemy,” as described in detail in Chapter 1. The secretary’s metamorphosis coincided with the publicly unremarked extinction of the class enemy on the national scene. Indeed, it was as if the class enemy had never lived. The upshot was that, in retrospect and in Makua-speaking areas at least, the secretary was revealed not as the co-conspirator of upwardly mobile pettybourgeois elites but as a lone agent in inhibiting inter-communication and communion between the party and the people. Both outcomes were enabled by Frelimo’s subjectivist approach to social class and the mutability and opacity of its criteria for determining class membership. Under the circumstances, the prototypical profile of the class enemy was as elusive as the class enemy itself would prove to be. The simultaneity of the above developments was not, self-evidently, fortuitous: the rapidly fading political relevance of class foes neatly coincided with mounting evidence that the majority of the Frelimo leadership not only numbered among the country’s “aspirants to the bourgeoisie” but was well along the road to seeing its aspirations fulfilled.3

The logic of Frelimo’s sociological analysis was such that, with the belated “discovery” that the class enemy had never lived, Mozambique became an essentially classless society. As we have seen, the colonial bourgeoisie had decamped en masse at independence, leaving behind no readymade African counterpart to fill its shoes. The progressive wing of the petty bourgeoisie had long ago forfeited its privileged class status, throwing in its lot with the laboring classes. But the laboring classes were, in Frelimo’s view, more notional than real: the proletariat was tiny, highly fragmented, and had yet to exhibit, in the leadership’s estimation, an adequate level of worker consciousness; the peasantry, deeply ensconced as it was in a feudal mode of production, passively awaited excavation and emancipation by an external agent. The full emergence and consolidation of both classes required the state’s development action. This side of that eventuality, class struggle could only resemble a kind of morality play between (revolutionary) virtue and (counter-revolutionary) vice. Thus, the dissolution of the class enemy conveniently spelled the demise of class per se.

The sounding of the death knell for social classes in Mozambique did not, however, signal the extinction of “the enemies of the people.” Once drained of its moral and psychological content, the essence of these enemies – their foreign origins and ongoing sources of sustenance – was laid bare.4 That this was the case will become apparent in my discussion of Frelimo’s election campaign rhetoric below. First, however, we return to the Nampulan context with a view to situating the post-1990 ideological practices deployed by local government authorities with respect to the question of

Roots, routes and rootlessness 261 rural authority within a wider frame of reference. Specifically, how did these practices compare with those aimed at managing the political fall-out caused by other ruling party interventions in the countryside?

The politics of acknowledgment, 1989–1994

One possible objection to the argument advanced in Chapter 7 is that I have read too much into the single-minded focus which characterizes the oral and written accounts reviewed there. After all, local government officials were asked to research and to share their own reflections on the history of traditional power in what is present-day Nampula Province from the precolonial period to the present. That is what the subject of investigation was about. It was not about settlement patterns, past or present; nor about the experience of cooperativization; nor about popular perspectives on the government’s counter-insurgency strategy or police conduct. Given the narrowness of the assigned brief, the interventions in question could not reasonably have been expected to have addressed other sources of rural dissatisfaction and dissent. Under the circumstances, some allowance should be made for the tendency to overstate the effects of Frelimo’s official abolition of chieftaincy and even to displace the negative repercussions of other aspects of its rural policy and political practice on to them. Moreover, Frelimo’s policy of “socializing” the countryside has been subject to numerous officially-sponsored appraisals and reappraisals – exercises that derived substantial benefit from extensive public input. The numerous public meetings and national conferences that were instrumental in drafting Mozambique’s new land law stand as a case in point.

My response is that in no other case has a policy shift been accompanied by as unqualified, as full-throated and as publicized an admission of error as was Frelimo’s initial stance on rural political institutions. The singularity of Frelimo’s management of the political damage caused by its socialist-era policy towards chiefs can be seen by reviewing the Nampulan case in the 1989–1994 period. Below I compare the manner in which the ruling party handled that damage to the way it dealt with the political costs incurred by its rural collectivization policy.

As was suggested by Chief Tubruto’s testimony in Chapter 7, at the time chiefs were summoned by the district administration to resume their colonial functions, government officials went to some lengths to admit that “prohibiting mpéwés, humus to work was an error.” In addition, they offered an analysis of why this was the case and, along with it, a rationale for the reversal in policy: the abolition of the regedoria system was blamed for the loss of control over social juniors; accordingly, the declared aim of reinstating chiefs was “To put an end to a lot of freedom of youth.” Similar explanations were proffered in meetings throughout the district.

Several points deserve mention here. First, as we have already had occasion to observe, this kind of explanation refrains from invoking the war as a catalyst for changes in the balance of power between generations; it also

262 Roots, routes and rootlessness resolutely denies Renamo any role in bringing about a change of heart on the part of the ruling regime toward traditional authority. Second, if provincial officialdom was aware – as I have suggested Chissano seemed to be –that there was a strong tendency among the populace to confound the turbulent effects of decolonization with those produced by Frelimo’s attempt to revolutionize rural social relations, it gave no indication of this. Third, there was no attempt on the part of the provincial administration to reduce the charges against it by marshaling evidence showing that state and party officials had shown a much greater flexibility on the question of rural political authority than one might infer judging from the uncompromising militancy of their abaixo rhetoric alone. Officialdom’s silence on this score is especially significant because, as Chapters 3 and 7 show, ample evidence exists that government and party officials at all levels knew not only that such compromises had occurred but that they were, in fact, fairly commonplace.

It was as if all due care was taken not to dilute the argument that (1) the rupture at independence with late colonial rural power relations had been cataclysmic; (2) the consequences of this rupture had been catastrophic; and (3) the loss of Frelimo’s political legitimacy in the rural areas followed chiefly, if not exclusively, from the combination of (1) and (2). In sum, the corollary of the provincial government’s willingness to admit error on the question of rural leadership was its seemingly noble refusal to cite mitigating circumstances that might limit its political liability. One can only conclude that, in the ruling party’s estimation, the political gains to be made by admitting and advertising such compromises were outweighed by the risks such admissions would entail. For to call public attention to the prominent positions chiefs and their close relatives held early on in the institutions of popular power would not only point up the Frelimo leadership’s inability to exert its will even within the narrow parameters of its own institutions. It would also encourage a search for other causes of rural discontent. It would even raise the possibility that it was Frelimo’s failure to stand social relations on their head, rather than its alleged success in doing so, that fueled the erosion of popular support for the post-independence regime.

The government’s public relations gambit surrounding the failure of its rural collectivization policy was much more constrained and circumspect. The occasion for what would be the final appraisal of this policy was the Fifth Session of the Provincial Coordinating Commission for the Socialization of the Countryside (CCPSC), held just one month ahead of the Frelimo’s Fifth Congress in July 1989. Interestingly, official documentation of the commission’s proceedings fails to provide the slightest hint that a major political reorientation – namely, the formal abandonment of Marxism-Leninism as official ideology – was in the offing. On the contrary, the session’s point of departure was that the country was in the midst of a socialist transition. Not surprisingly, participants “were unanimous in emphasizing the importance and viability of the policy of the Socialization of the Countryside conceived and oriented by the Frelimo Party.”5

Roots, routes and rootlessness 263

Nonetheless, that policy was found seriously wanting on several counts. In his opening address, the then governor, Jacob Nyambir, frankly acknowledged that “there existed errors in both the conception and execution of the programs of the Socialization of the Countryside.”6 Some of the commission’s findings effectively reiterated the pronouncements of the Fourth Party Congress in 1983. Other disclosures were new. Most notably, the commission acknowledged that coercion had been used in the formation of communal villages. It also found that cultural factors had exerted an influence on village life in ways that had not been foreseen. In particular, “agglomerating people with different habits led to disagreements among neighbors and thus the displeasure of some.” The commission observed that the fact that places of worship were, on average, situated about fifteen kilometers from residential sites had seriously undermined the appeal of communal living. In addition, session participants noted that, in the process of mobilizing the population to enter into the aldeias, unrealistic promises had been made and that “demoralization” had set in when these promises had not been kept.7

What was required, the commission concluded, was greater rigor in the implementation of party orientations, as well as clarification (presumably to the public at large) “that the errors committed in the process of the socialization of the countryside, fundamentally in the creation of communal villages, are technical errors and not of a political nature.” In that spirit, the session’s final resolution recommended that socio-cultural and economic studies be undertaken to facilitate the incorporation of the population into communal villages and agricultural cooperatives, urging that future collectivization efforts try to avoid situations which foster “competition in agriculture among the inhabitants.” The resolution also disavowed the use of force and pledged “[t]o create new communal villages and agricultural cooperatives on the principle of free association.”8

In short, Frelimo’s rural collectivization policy was never as openly and roundly repudiated as was its attempt to end rule by royals. Indeed, the commission unambiguously affirmed the essential correctness of this policy. Moreover, the commission’s acknowledgment of past wrongdoing was not broadcast in rural localities and administrative posts the way that the message that “Frelimo had made a mistake” when it had substituted secretaries for chiefs would be in the early 1990s. While district administrators, district directors of agriculture and “some” agricultural cooperators from the green zones of Nampula City had attended the Fifth Session of CCPSC,9 there is no evidence that the commission’s findings and recommendations reached a wider audience. Tellingly, despite the provincial government’s admission that rural residents had all too often been forced into villages and its vow to ensure that villagization henceforth would be a purely voluntary exercise, official permission for peasants to leave the aldeias in Namapa was not forthcoming until the onset of peace three years later – even though the majority of the population had long ago abandoned the aldeias.

264 Roots, routes and rootlessness

Even after the signing of the general peace accord, there were indications that government officials were unwilling to forsake the former aldeias as an effective means of social control. In the run-up to the elections, at least one district administrator in the province had allegedly tried to corral people back into the old aldeias on the pretext that “at the end of the month [e.g. October] the country would be in flames.”10 Official resistance to abandoning the communal village scheme was not confined to Nampula. In Cabo Delgado, for instance, villagers who wanted to return to their former domiciles were encountering Frelimo obstructionism as late as mid-1995.11 At that stage, too, the aldeias showed no sign of losing their status as “a central reference point for Frelimo cadres” in the province “when talking about the future of rural development.”12

Finally, unlike its shift in stance on chiefly rule, the provincial government proffered no explanation at the grassroots level for its reversal on the question of rural settlement patterns. Nor did it express any regrets about (let alone apologize for) the violence committed and economic losses sustained in the course of villagization, or for the material deprivations and social injustices the vast majority of peasants had experienced once villagized.13 In short, Frelimo’s early position on rule by royals was the sole aspect of its revolutionary program for rural transformation that was singled out for official atonement. Furthermore, the provisional, semi-official reinstatement of chiefs was the only policy reversal that was expressly billed in rural localities both as a reversal and as a fence-mending exercise.

A similar, if much less stark, pattern of emphasis and de-emphasis was discernible in Chissano’s campaign rhetoric in the 1994 presidential race, as will become apparent below. An examination of this rhetoric also lays bare post-1990 revisions to Frelimo’s conception of the internal and external enemy. I begin with a brief discussion of Dhlakama’s own rhetorical strategies in order to help put those deployed by Chissano into perspective.14

The electoral campaign

The country’s first multiparty elections were marked by a dearth of serious discussion of the history and legacy of two decades of independence or of possible future policy directions to resolve its postwar predicament.15 As several analysts have observed, the PRE/PRES left precious little scope for meaningful public debate about the future of the Mozambican economy at least in the near term.16 However, if structural adjustment severely circumscribed the country’s economic choices, it could not, in and of itself, explain the utter vacuity of the campaign. As South African journalist Eddie Koch has suggested, other country-specific dynamics were in play. Students of regional politics, he noted, would find no

replay of South Africa in April.17 No reconstruction and development program. No truth commission. No debates about widespread

Roots, routes and rootlessness 265 corruption that has paralyzed the economy. No talk about correcting the wrongs of the past. It is as though a moral amnesia has beset the country and its people.18

The conspicuous failure of the country’s two grandees to address issues of substance, let alone own up to, and seek expiation for, past wrongdoing, prompted indignant cries that both sides were equally guilty of a fairly flagrant and thoroughly unwarranted arrogance.19

Dhlakama’s campaign

According to certain political analysts, Renamo had determined “early on that it could only survive” if it entered the political arena. It had also ascertained that this meant reaching some sort of political accommodation with Frelimo, rather than defeating its longtime military adversary either on the battlefield or at the ballot box. 20 Accordingly, the rebel army set its sights on gaining what it considered to be its fair “share of the spoils” either by hammering out a power-sharing solution with Frelimo or by assuming its role as the “official” opposition party in a post-conflict, post-elections political dispensation.21 Nonetheless, Dhlakama’s ominous reminders, provoked by stone-throwers at a few of his rallies, that he still retained the capacity to “paralyze” the country at the drop of a hat contributed to the prevailing atmosphere of uncertainty, tension and fear in the run-up to the vote. So did the Renamo’s leader’s vow to reject the election results as fraudulent if they failed to match his expectations.22 Dhlakama’s attempt to rally voters on the basis of ethnic and regional sentiment, particularly among Makua-Lomwé speakers who had been under-represented in both government and Frelimo party structures, had a similar effect.23

The Renamo leader sought to discount the political relevance of his movement’s foreign origins and sponsorship. Frelimo’s war effort, he maintained, had been as reliant on arms, advice and resources supplied by other governments as Renamo’s had been: “Each one had his friends.”24 In much the same manner, he argued that his soldiers’ methods had been no more violent or brutal than the government army’s, asking crowds, “Who didn’t kill? Does Frelimo know how many people were killed by Tanzanians, Zimbabweans, Cubans?” As for the devastation Renamo had left in its wake, Dhlakama had this to say: “Wars have always caused destruction, above all when they involve deposing a dictatorship.” It was precisely for this reason that “we don’t want more war.”25

According to Dhlakama, it was years of Frelimo mismanagement, corruption and inertia, rather than the war, which explained both the country’s failure to develop and its current economic straits.26 The ruling party, in his view, “did nothing” as incumbent even though it had “promised everything.”27 Rather than making good on his party’s commitments, Chissano had “robbed the people, the taxes of the workers.”28 It was precisely because

266 Roots, routes and rootlessness it had benefited from ill-gotten gains, he insisted, that Frelimo now had the means to buy votes by distributing free T-shirts and other paraphernalia at its rallies. At one point, Dhlakama quipped, “Take the T-shirts and use them. They’re yours. It’s money from your taxes.” He contrasted his own modest campaign, which, he complained, had been seriously compromised by lack of access to funds and resources, to Chissano’s, which, he implied, had dipped deep into the public purse.29

Building on this contrast, Dhlakama strove to project himself as a man of the people and Renamo as the party of the poor.30 At one rally, for instance, he assured the crowd, “Dhlakama is not the president of dollars, of the office, of the palace, of the Mercedes, he is the president of the people that you need, he is capable of sitting on the floor and eating mealie meal with his hands.”31 As the true representatives of the downtrodden and disenfranchised, he and his army-turned-party were the bearers of Mozambican democracy, Dhlakama alleged. Indeed, precisely because Renamo had brought political pluralism to Mozambique, Renamo had “already” won its struggle.32

He promised to restore traditional leaders, respect local customs, uphold “family authority,” guarantee freedom of religious worship, decentralize power, appoint local people to local administrative posts and ensure regional representation at the political center.33 In addition to democracy, justice and freedom, these were goals Renamo had held dear since 1976 “when we decided to go to the bush to fight,” he maintained.34 A Renamo electoral victory was the country’s best hope against the apparently ever-present and undiminished threat of “communism.” In Nampula, for instance, Dhlakama warned that “Frelimo was, is and will always be communist and MarxistLeninist.”35 Should it triumph at the polls, the Renamo leader predicted that “the first speech of Chissano’s will be that the Mozambican people want communal villages, guias de marcha, collective machambas, because those are its principles.”36

Chissano’s campaign

In both the presidential and legislative races, Frelimo ran a “campaign of ostentation, of the affirmation of wealth ... of new elites.”37 Its rallies were more like public spectacles than political gatherings, studded as they were by pop-star performances, parachute jumps and give-aways, such as capulanas, T-shirts, caps and plastic bags. Its aim was not so much to buy votes as to show who was “boss.”38 Party propagandists exhibited little awareness that such colossal displays of affluence and frivolity might constitute a blatant affront to the vast majority of the electorate who live in dire poverty. Nor did Frelimo operatives or leaders show any outward signs of concern that these extravaganzas might lend credibility to Dhlakama’s claims that ruling party wealth and largesse had been achieved at the people’s own expense. Frelimo’s high-impact strategy did not always produce the desired

Roots, routes and rootlessness 267 results. Several rallies were poorly attended and, on more than one occasion, crowds consisted, in the main, of children and teenagers of below voting age, drawn more by the promise of free entertainment and hand-outs than by a sense of party allegiance or political interest.39

Chissano concentrated his efforts on exposing the casuistry that underpinned Dhlakama’s boast that his rebel force had “brought democracy” to Mozambique. In Tete, the Frelimo leader maintained, “Those who fight for democracy don’t burn down huts, they don’t destroy peasants’ fields, they don’t kill their own parents.”40 In Nampula Province, he warned voters to be on guard for those who, “disguising themselves as defenders of democracy, carried out the orders of the enemies of the people, causing the deaths of over one million people, and destruction estimated at over twenty billion dollars.”41

A recurring theme in Chissano’s campaign was that Renamo had yet to wean itself from its lifelong foreign dependence. If, in Nampula, Chissano charged Renamo with having acted at the behest of “the enemies of the people,” in subsequent speeches he was more specific, characterizing the guerrilla army’s handlers as “colonialists, fascists and oppressors.”42 Their aim was “to see the country divided, ruled by someone receiving orders from abroad, against the interests of our people.”43 Hence, the president’s exhortation to voters “to prevent greedy people from selling our country to the old colonialists and the oppressors of the Mozambican people.”44

Remarks such as these neatly illustrate the kinds of modifications Frelimo’s social taxonomy has undergone as a result of the advent of political pluralism and official sanctification of private accumulation. First, the domestically-based junior partner of “the enemies of the people” no longer consisted of petty-bourgeois nationals in hot pursuit of self-conscious, classbased strategies either within or beyond the ambit of state institutions. It was now comprised of “greedy” individuals who, given half a chance, would simply put the country up for sale in the global marketplace and, having struck a deal, proceed to serve the new owners. Second, the political imperative to dispense with all class-based referents largely explains the kinds of foreigners most closely identified with the political project of eroding Mozambican sovereignty. In all cases, external aggressors present themselves as a decidedly outmoded lot. The main enemies of the people were “the old colonialists” and “fascists” – that is, unapologetic, unreconstructed defenders of the overturned colonial regime.45

Such characterizations studiously avoided any allusion, however oblique, to multilateral lending institutions identified in radical critiques as spearheading processes of “recolonization” from the late 1980s onwards.46 The calculation clearly was that such allusions were all too likely to prompt questions about exactly who, locally, was both facilitating and profiting from neoliberal reforms. Faced with the need to forestall the pursuit of this line of inquiry, Chissano reduced the enemy, whose hallmark had hitherto been its profit-driven internal dynamism, to a foreign entity – and a con-

268 Roots, routes and rootlessness spicuously static and even anachronistic one at that. The president’s failure to invoke the responsibility of economic restructuring for the soaring cost of living, a theme which voters repeatedly forced on to the agenda in rally after rally, was dictated by similar considerations. In virtually every instance, Chissano pinned blame for both continuous declines in real earnings and ongoing retrenchments in the public and private sectors on Renamo’s wartime destruction of economic infrastructure.47

During the campaign, the only indication Chissano gave that he, as the head of state, was under foreign pressure – pressure which he was determinedly resisting – was over the question as to whether or not the two former belligerents should form a government of national unity after the elections, irrespective of the results.48 Past capitulations to outside prodding, and the socio-economic consequences of these, did not figure in the picture.

It was only after the formation of a new government, and then only while addressing a press conference in Johannesburg, that Chissano made the claim that corruption had been imported into his country by “the West” –more specifically, by “those who for a very long time have had a culture of bribery, and of diverting public money for private interests in the industrialized world.”49 The accuracy of this claim is, of course, arguable: a much stronger case could be made that the PRE/PRES had fueled rather than “introduced” corruption to the Mozambican polity. My point is to underscore structural adjustment’s curious immunity to such charges – or to any commentary at all – in the run-up to the poll.50 This immunity bespoke the political necessity for Frelimo to heap blame on Renamo for the country’s economic plight and to continue to trumpet Mozambique’s structural adjustment program as its own.51 Over and above these considerations, it testified to the strategic imperative to recast the struggle between the foremost defenders and detractors of Mozambican sovereignty, both on the national and global scene, in resolutely non-class terms.

Other silences were equally symptomatic. Chissano expended much more effort attacking Renamo’s record than in defending his party’s own. It is true that Frelimo “sought to emphasize its historic role in bringing first independence, and then peace and democracy to Mozambique.”52 But it is also the case that even references to the liberation war, the wellspring of Frelimo’s nationalist legitimacy, were surprisingly infrequent and fainthearted.53 Most striking was Chissano’s failure to exploit to greater effect the most tangible and incontrovertible benefits of Frelimo’s socialist-inspired development program, notably the impressive strides the country had registered in health care and education.54

Mozambican journalist Machado da Graça has suggested that Frelimo’s attempt to dissociate itself from even the most exemplary aspects of its early tenure discloses the leadership’s well-founded hunch that invocations of its past achievements would only serve to highlight just how poorly, in certain notable respects, its own members and the party as a whole measure up to their former selves.55 In da Graça’s view, the country’s rulers were acting on

Roots, routes and rootlessness 269 this assumption when they let the twentieth anniversary of independence pass by without a single reference, however perfunctory, to independent Mozambique’s first president. For much the same reasons, commemorations of Heroes’ Day in 1996, the year which marked the tenth anniversary of the plane crash in which Machel and many of his close colleagues died, slipped by in like manner. This official silence, da Graça noted, contrasted sharply to the volubility of Machel’s detractors, who were showing no sign of fatigue when it came to maligning the late president’s person and deeds. At the same time, the proliferation of pirated cassettes of Machel’s speeches strongly suggested that others were no less riveted by his memory but were inclined to recall it in a more favorable light. In the face of Machel’s ongoing hold on the public imagination, da Graça deduced that Samora’s is “[a]n inconvenient memory” for those who continue “to use the same party to do things so different. So opposite in many cases.”

For da Graça, “the time of Samora” was one in which the country’s leaders boldly sponsored a preventive health care program that won worldwide admiration. It was also a time in which instances of corruption in public service were relatively rare; resource constraints, no matter how numerous and formidable, were never invoked as a pretext for government paralysis (although, as we have seen, they were frequently cited to explain policy setbacks and failures); widespread confidence existed that Mozambicans could tackle their own problems; and people began to experience pride in being nationals of a country “facing its difficulties with its head held high.”56 He observed that a new generation was growing up largely oblivious to the fact that the country had passed through such a period – even though a sizeable fraction of its members owed their very existence to it – and suggested that Machel’s successors were quietly complicit in this.

The fact that the leadership’s “moral amnesia” extended to its own past and its (by then largely obliterated) accomplishments merits closer consideration than it has thus far received in academic writing on the transition to multipartyism. So does the fact that, of all of its rural interventions, Frelimo had considerably less trouble recalling its attempt to break with ascribed authority in the rural areas and went out of its way to show that it was now thoroughly disabused of the notion that such a break would be either possible or desirable.

Chissano did not accord traditionalism as high a priority in his first electoral bid as Dhlakama did. He also stopped short of following to the letter the advice of Frelimo’s Brazilian public relations consultant to cry “mea culpa” for its past hostility to, and persecution of, traditional chiefs.57 Nonetheless, the Frelimo leader publicly professed he believed in the traditional base of Mozambican society, promised to strengthen traditional power and, according to the weekly newspaper Domingo, even went so far as to give his assurance that, “he would restore the régulos.”58

While Chissano’s bows to traditionalism on the campaign trail can be seen as a straightforward bid to win the vote of chiefs and their (sometime)

270 Roots, routes and rootlessness followers, in at least one instance it was clear that something more was at stake. Publicly courting this constituency was just one aspect of a much larger effort on the part of the party and state to forge a public consensus as to why the revolution had failed and, in particular, why it had failed so abysmally in the rural outback. Speaking in Nampula City, the president conveyed the distinct impression that many of the more regrettable aspects of the Frelimo’s years in power could have been avoided had the party simply not overestimated the people’s capacity and/or willingness to change – or, more precisely, to be transformed. Elaborating on the Frelimo campaign theme that it, and it alone, was the party of hard-earned experience, Chissano claimed that “We are the only party that knows at what speed the people must march ... Frelimo now knows, it has experience, it can comply with its program.”59 The clear implication was that the main problem had not been Frelimo’s development strategy per se but rather the over-ambitious pace at which that strategy had been implemented.60 On this logic, Frelimo had erred not because it had considered rural society obscurantist but because it had failed to appreciate just how obscurantist that society was.

It is important to stress that the ideological maneuvers in evidence during the president’s electoral campaign or in Nampula in the 1989–1994 period were by no means exclusive to these two contexts. Chissano’s campaign-trail silences on the subject of market liberalization and its effects were loudly echoed in Frelimo’s Central Committee’s report to the Seventh Congress, held in 1997. In the event, a government-owned news source felt compelled to characterize “the near total lack of reference to the structural adjustment programmes that Mozambique has been obliged to implement” as the “most remarkable aspect of the economic parts of the report.”61 The final statement produced by Frelimo’s national cadres’ meeting in mid-1999 was marked by a similar lacuna.62 If international financial institutions routinely receive a pass in official discourses, the “enemies of Mozambican independence” and their local lackeys, best exemplified by the Renamo leadership, are regularly impugned by leading Frelimo figures.63

The ruling party now openly admits that Frelimo’s “mistakes” provided an opening for such malevolent forces to try to destroy the country’s hardwon sovereignty; typically, however, it fails to specify just what those fateful mistakes were.64 There has been one important and very revealing exception: the Central Committee’s report to Frelimo’s Sixth Congress in 1991. The views expressed in the report are nearly identical to the conclusion, implicit in Chissano’s speech in Nampula City, that Mozambican society was simply not ready for Frelimo-style socialism and that Frelimo’s misperception that it was ready largely accounted for the erosion of the party’s legitimacy:

Today we can say that the essential errors we committed were linked to an overestimation of the degree of collective consciousness of the popular masses and to the conviction that a strong will [to change] could succeed in transforming society in a short period of time.65

Roots, routes and rootlessness 271 By the same token, the government’s willingness (1) to admit error on the question of rural authority; (2) to go out of its way to emphasize that it now appreciated the gravity of this error; and (3) to express its commitment to change its policies accordingly could be witnessed in the aftermath of the elections in settings other than Nampula. A meeting of MAE representatives with members of local population in Tete Province over a year after Mozambique’s first multiparty poll stands as a case in point. The gathering was one of a series of workshops organized around the country between September 1995 and October 1996 under the auspices of the MAE’s “Democratic Development in Mozambique” project. The workshops “were intended to facilitate discussion on how ‘traditional authorities’ could be clearly identified both within their communities and by government officials, on what functions they might serve, and on how their mandate could be made more certain.”66 However, the meetings, which were attended by “‘traditional authorities’, local officials and representatives of ‘civil society’,” proved to be less of an exploratory nature and more of an opportunity to stage “rallies on behalf of former régulos.”67 At the workshop in Tete, the National Director of the MAE’s Administrative Development Center let it be known that “the Mozambican government committed a grave error when it abolished traditional authority right after independence and today, recognizing this error, is disposed to the return of traditional power.”68 No such “confessions” were forthcoming inpublic forums staged in front of and/or for the benefit of rural audiences about other aspects of Frelimo’s program for agrarian transformation during this, or any other, period.

This is not to imply that the government was putting forth a single coherent message on the question of rural authority during this period. Just two months prior to the pronouncement by the MAE official cited above, Chissano told a group of former régulos in Maputo Province that “they could no longer expect privileges based on hereditary principles.” However, even his comments maintained the strategic ambiguity I have examined in previous chapters: “[W]e in the government,” he went on, “do not yet know how regulos will be appointed, and what their activities will be.”69 What these messages seem to indicate is that admitting misjudgment on the question of rural leadership was a higher political priority than pledging to remedy the situation by reverting to the late colonial status quo.70

In summary, the post-socialist period bore witness to the crystallization of a new concatenation of ideological practices which drew on, reworked and rearranged selected bits and pieces of revolutionary dogma and revisionist critique. As a concatenation, such practices set the stage for Frelimo to claim that it had learned the requisite lessons, apparently on its own accord, to retain power and that it was still Mozambicans’ best insurance policy against the country’s ever-present, ever-dangerous and apparently immutable enemies.

272 Roots, routes and rootlessness

The petty bourgeoisie unbound

One of the central arguments of this book has been that the state’s “retreat to tradition” involves not only rendering transparent what was hitherto opaque but publicly displaying longstanding practices as freshly minted. Both dimensions were neatly captured in a 1995 article in the independent weekly, Savana, covering a ceremony held to mark the official closure of the Frelimo electoral office in Xai Xai, the capital of Gaza Province. The local correspondent reported that the attention lavished on the contemporary incarnation of Mungói, a famous spirit medium from Gaza who succeeded in keeping Renamo at bay in large swaths of the province, came as a surprise to many: “what astonished many citizens, who as invited guests were also present at the ceremony, was the kowtowing prominent parliamentarians of the ruling party indulged in granting the ‘superstitious’ figure of Mungói.”71

For Savana’s correspondent, however, the significance and import of the gathering lay elsewhere. He noted that, as recently as 1989, a journalist had been imprisoned for ninety days by the secret police, charged with reporting that the then Frelimo first secretary and governor of Gaza

had received the figure of Mungói in his office to discuss defense strategies aimed at protecting the populations in the event of a Renamo attack ... At that time to say that someone in government and a prominent member of Frelimo had any type of contact with curandeiros or feiticeiros was considered a highly penalizable calumny.

Observing that local businessman and “many prominent figures in the corridors of power” had long depended on Mungói’s ritual authority to secure the profitability of their private ventures, he contended, “although [Frelimo] always tried to deny it, the truth is that, in Gaza, its leaders always maintained close and constant contacts with the figure of Mungói.”72 He concluded with a query:

Hence our question: are we witnessing a situation involving an aboutface and recognition of the existence of espiritismo [spirit worship] in our culture, or are we merely dealing with a case of exposing that which was formerly maintained in airtight containers?

In short, the most noteworthy feature of the ceremony was leadership’s conscious attempt to ascribe a degree of novelty to the encounter that it did not in fact possess – as if the country’s rulers were clapping eyes on a living embodiment of “superstition” for the first time. The parallels with official discursive and performative practice in Nampula Province are obvious. In both cases, strategies of political crisis management and/or re-legitimation during this period were based on vigorously denying the Frelimo regime’s previous compromises with “traditional-feudal society.” In both cases, the

Roots, routes and rootlessness 273 upshot was to inflate that society’s importance in first frustrating and ultimately derailing Frelimo’s Third Congress political project. In both cases, statist narratives and performance took recourse in the kind of anti-memory work described in Chapter 7: in the context of post-socialist Mozambique, this entailed Frelimo cadres pretending, en masse, to belatedly recall that they were in Africa and to signal their commitment henceforth to act accordingly. If narrating the nation has historically involved chronicling “different stages and moments of coming to self-awareness” on the part of its members,73 the Mozambican case suggests that unelected incumbents of young postcolonial states who find themselves compelled to submit to a popular mandate may try a slightly different tack: namely, projecting themselves as experiencing an epiphany concerning the true identity of the newly enfranchised electorate whose members they have taken upon themselves to turn into nationals. This approach, one imagines, would carry an especially strong appeal to incumbents who had been forced by political circumstance to launch the struggle for independence from exile, as Frelimo had.

The encounter staged in Xai Xai appears to have had additional narrativizing functions. The scene seems to have been painstakingly choreographed not only to exaggerate the gesture of capitulation by an assimilated African political elite to a leading representative of traditionalism but also to dramatize as fully as possible the cultural difference and social distance separating the two parties. Needless to say, spectacles of this ilk are a rarity in the context of postcolonial Africa. In particular, they stand in stark contrast to the performative practice of African politicians who subscribe to nativist philosophies. Such leaders are known for striving to dissolve the marks of their social, cultural and economic distinction by invoking their common roots with subaltern majorities in ostensibly undifferentiated societies that allegedly existed in the precolonial past. Invocations such as these form part of a broader strategy of political legitimation predicated on the appropriation of a supposedly authentic indigenous culture by incumbents or their domestic political rivals and, in the case of incumbents, the denial of any distinction of consequence between state and society.74 In Xai Xai, Frelimo leaders decisively spurned the “roots’ route,” opting instead to play up the degree of their estrangement from the indigenous culture which produced a Mungói and his latter-day incarnations – even though he and his successors were from the same province which also produced Frelimo’s first three presidents. Unlike the performative inclinations of the cultural nativists, their actions seemed deliberately designed to pave over their connection to, rather than to discount their difference from, authenticity in all of its manifold forms.

At first sight what I will call “the rootlessness route” would seem to be counter-intuitive in the circumstances of present-day Mozambique. After all, in calling public attention to the contrast between its own hybridity and the culture of supposedly traditionalist rural constituencies, wouldn’t the leadership risk alienating the very constituencies it needs to appeal to if it is

274 Roots, routes and rootlessness to retain power in an electoral democracy? And wouldn’t it draw the electorate’s gaze to other horizontal divides in society?

Margaret Hall and Tom Young have rightly noted that Frelimo’s disavowal of Marxism-Leninism spelled the “abandonment of an ideological cohesion that, whatever its difficulties, gave the ruling group a certain coherence.”75 In what follows I highlight the ways in which the revisionist critique has enhanced both the viability and the allure of the rootlessness route should the leadership decide to go down that road. Specifically, I show that such a strategy could easily derive political advantage from the room for maneuver opened up by three distinct but overlapping equivocations in this critique.

The first of these concerns the question as to whether the attribute of “southernness” carries with it any vertical linkages and, if so, what the nature and scope of these linkages might be. Michel Cahen’s writing best exemplifies the revisionist vacillation on this score. Because his work spans the greatest number of years, it also usefully registers shifts in categories and modes of analysis which have been attendant upon scholarly attempts, dating from the mid-1980s, to define and delimit the social base of domestically-rooted, anti-Frelimo political forces.

Cahen’s point of departure is that the social roots of post-independence insurgency reside in the genesis and evolution of Frelimo itself.76 The defining moment in Frelimo’s pre-independence political trajectory in Cahen’s analysis, as in Frelimo official history, is the 1968–1969 crisis which beset the movement’s leadership over how to prosecute the armed struggle and how to administer the liberated zones. This crisis is depicted in Frelimo official history as a showdown between a bourgeois line and a proletarian line, from which the latter emerged as victor. The political triumph of the leadership’s radical wing, the story goes, owed in no small measure to the strong backing it received from the newly liberated peasant populations, themselves increasingly radicalized by the experience of armed struggle.

Against this scenario, Cahen’s argues that the conflict pitted two distinct fractions of the racially subaltern petty bourgeoisie. On one side stood ruralbased, African commercial and entrepreneurial elites from the country’s central and northern regions. These elites were organically enmeshed in lineage and ethnic social relations – relations which underwrote their strategies of accumulation and personal aggrandizement. On the other side were congregated representatives of the urban salariat employed in the tertiary sector of the country’s southern regions, where the political center of the country was located: “the ‘nurses’ and ‘office employees’ turned soldiers.”77 Drawn from the mission-educated “assimilated and mestiço milieux,” this group represented “an ultra-minority fraction of the population.”78

The southerners were distinguished from their northern rivals by their pronounced disconnectedness from ethnic and lineage relations, their isolation from the sphere of production and exchange, and, as if by way of compensation, by a marked dependence on the colonial state for their ongoing

Roots, routes and rootlessness 275 social reproduction as a class fraction. It was precisely the detachment of “the bureaucratic fractions”79 from African particularisms, as well as from production and market relations in which these particularisms are embedded and reproduced, that provides the key to understanding their deep-seated aversion to sectional politics and their natural tilt towards territory-wide nationalism, universalistic ideologies and state-centric politics.

Cahen explains this wing’s eventual embrace of a “profoundly Stalinized, post-Leninist Marxism”80 as the expression of these inherent predispositions in the overarching context of both Portuguese intransigence and Cold War geo-politics. The political ascendancy of the southerners represented, in his view, “the victory of the town over the countryside” and the point at which “anti-tribalism became not only the struggle against colonialist maneuvers, but also the negation of the existence of ethnic groups and lineage social relations in the heart of the peasantry, replaced wholesale by the struggle, factor of national unity.”81 Thereafter, Frelimo’s anti-tribalism and antiracism possessed “a double dimension: against discrimination but also against the very existence of different cultural communities.”82

In his more recent writing, Cahen attempts to extend Geffray’s thesis on the micro-politics of the conflict in the rural areas to the global antagonisms among various fractions of the African and mestiço petty bourgeoisie. Geffray argued that, in the hinterland, Renamo had succeeded in winning over, however temporarily, lineages and/or chieftaincies which had been marginalized first by the colonial state and, subsequently, by its postindependence successor. Significantly, these social groupings had lost out not only in absolute terms but also relative to their precolonial rivals, who had enjoyed state-conferred privileges and opportunities under colonial rule.

In the course of pursuing this new research agenda, Cahen winds up redescribing the antagonists themselves. The defeated trading and farming fractions of the petty bourgeoisie now appear as the progeny of precolonial “Creole elites.” Cahen never lends any precision to the term “Creole” but it is a characteristic he accords to all fractions of the African and mestiço petty bourgeoisie and seems to designate cultural dispositions produced by prolonged and intensive exposure to foreign (e.g. European, Arabic and Asian) influences.83 The northern and central creole elites, Cahen argues, shared the common historical experience of being marginalized by two major twentieth-century developments. The first was colonial conquest and subjugation. The second was the soon-to-follow reorientation of the territory’s political economy away from the northern regions, through which had run the old ivory and slave trading routes, to the south, which became the geographic hub for servicing the “British hinterland” (e.g. Nyasaland, the Rhodesias and South Africa).84 The relocation of the country’s political center from Ilha de Moçambique to Lourenço Marques in 1902 epitomized and contributed to the fading fortunes of these previously powerful communities.85

276 Roots, routes and rootlessness

The creole elite from which the radical wing of the nationalist movement was drawn was born of the new political economy. Its defining features were the recency of its origins and thus its latecomer status in relation to its precolonial counterparts; the enormity of its indebtedness to the colonial state for both its birth and its ongoing social reproduction; and its genesis and development in new urban centers “created out of nothing” in the colony’s southern and central regions.86 This singularity was not lost on the older creole communities for which the very existence of their younger, more cosmopolitan competitor quickly came to symbolize the erosion of their own power and prestige in the twentieth century. Their antagonism to the “bureaucratic fractions” of the petty bourgeoisie was a natural extension of their already longstanding hostility toward the colonial state, whose formation and consolidation proved their own undoing. If, during the national liberation struggle, this hostility would find expression in the 1968–1969 political crisis, in the wake of independence it manifested itself in the indigenization of Renamo’s war and, in the post-vanguard period, in the formation of new political parties.

Given Cahen’s insistence upon the rootlessness of the southern creole community and the centrality he assigns this attribute in understanding Frelimo’s eventual embrace of Stalinist socialism, it comes as something of a surprise to find repeated, if rather oblique, allusions to this group’s downward social referents, notably ethnic ones, throughout his work. In a typical aside, he argues that the southerners’ political ascendancy within Frelimo “also favored the Shangaan ethnicity of the south, where the capital and the core of the state apparatus are situated, but this is another story.”87 It is a story Cahen never gets around to telling and the reader is left in the dark as to whether the preferential treatment accorded to the Shangaans was merely situational, the unintended consequence of historical and geographical happenstance, or whether it was the outcome of a self-conscious strategy on the part of an ethnically-sighted, if not necessarily ethnically-identified, state executive.

In another text, Cahen intimates that it was the latter and, furthermore, that Frelimo’s turn to ethnic politics, and the politics of clientelism in general, might have occurred even before the movement seized hold of the state apparatus.88 In any case, we are told that, certainly by the mid-1980s, the leadership had become acutely aware that differential access to the state apparatus had become a source of widespread grievance on the part of excluded or less privileged ethnic groups. By then, Cahen finds, Marxist discourse and Frelimo’s anti-tribalist diatribes had come to serve as a feint to distract attention from “Shangaan over-representation at all levels of State.”89 In yet another aside, Cahen speaks of “growing murmurs about the overwhelming predominance of ethnicities from the South in the State apparatus.”90 It is thus that we learn that the Shangaans were not the sole ethnic group to benefit from state-centered patron–client relations. In his later work, he declares his belief that ethnic tensions gave rise to much more than insistent and increasingly audible “murmurs”:

Roots, routes and rootlessness 277 the ethnic negation ... was in my view an extremely important cause of the Mozambican civil war. But it would be completely false to say that the war was inter-ethnic ... If Dhlakama hates the Frelimo state it is not only because he is Ndau and this state Shangaan or Chope, it is more because he is part of a small nuclei of elite from the center of the country that were always marginalized by the colonial state and afterwards by the independent state and hates the modern creolité (crioulidade) of Maputo.91

Here, as elsewhere, it is unclear whether post-independence ethnic assertions are to be understood as a response to Frelimo’s universalism or its pseudouniversalism – to its “violently anti-tribalist”92 ideal and its rigorous commitment to non-discriminatory policies and political practice or to its covert tribalism cunningly parading as anti-tribalism.93 How could a leadership which was determined to fashion, forcibly if necessary, the nation in its own “universalistic” image, which doggedly sought to impose a “uniformising oppression,” which enthusiastically embraced the Portuguese language “as a unifying force and destroyer of ethnic identity,”94 which had its own origins in the “old detribalized strata created by the colonizer”95 come to privilege the members of the ethnic groups which its own leading cadres were so thoroughly detribalized from, and to which they were, in Cahen’s retelling, only tenuously connected, if at all?

Cahen’s narrative begs for questions such as this to be posed but only inadvertently and even in spite of itself. While his analysis makes allowance for Mozambicans to straddle or negotiate their way through ethnic boundaries,96 the line of demarcation between ethnicity and creolité appears to be much more rigid and seems to foreclose all possibility of movement from the latter identity back to the former.97

The reason Cahen is forced to relegate ethnic considerations to the status of a riveting but digressive subplot is that any serious attempt to integrate such considerations into his main story line would fundamentally alter the story itself, as well as the point of telling it. Specifically, it would, at the very least, substantially qualify his claims for a solid sociological basis for Frelimo’s allegedly strong affinity for Stalinist Marxism. For the tacit acknowledgment that the southern petty bourgeoisie was both attuned to ethnic politics and could artfully engage in them itself confers upon this class fraction a greater degree of connectedness, however circuitous, to the non-creole African majority and, in keeping with Cahen’s own logic, to the relations of production and exchange than his argument otherwise allows.

And a weakened case for the southerners’ isolation and independence from the rest of the colonized population and, by extension, for their singularity in relation to other, rival “Creole elites” would, in turn, undercut Cahen’s central contention that Frelimo’s rootlessness was at the root of its inherent tendency to gravitate towards state socialism. In sum, the full integration of the ethnic story line into the revisionist analytic framework

278 Roots, routes and rootlessness would compel a search for alternative explanations for this outcome. One would either have to find a different sociological basis for the “southerners’” turn to a “post-Leninist Marxism,” or to assign greater explanatory weight to structural and/or conjunctural factors, or to build a case for the primacy of politics.

Cahen’s commitment to the exceptionality of the Frelimo leadership’s social character is maintained only at the expense of other analytic distortions. In particular, it is sustained by a highly truncated conception of class, one which is bereft of any sense of relationality between the “bureaucratic fractions” of the petty bourgeoisie and subaltern social groups in the country’s south.98 Noticeably absent is any appreciation that, as Lonsdale has pithily put it, “it is only within communities for whom some common history may be claimed that class formation can occur.”99 Cahen maintains that the southern elite was “a Creole formation of the 20th century entirely subordinated by the dynamics of modern Portuguese colonialism” and, moreover, that it was “totally constructed in the molds of the Portuguese bureaucratic State.”100 Nowhere, however, does he consider the stuff out of which this elite was molded – or the historical agency of the colonized populations in determining the contours of the mold itself. On the contrary, it is as though the colonial state blithely succeeded in executing the very exercise in unilateral class creation – to return to O’Meara’s formulation referred to in Chapter 1 – that the Frelimo state so wrongheadedly and fatefully imagined itself omnipotent enough to undertake. How else could it be that “the urban African elite had nothing on which to depend, no tradition”?101 Or that the “old detribalized strata” were “created,” seemingly single-handedly, “by the colonizer”?102

The tendency to reify class in Mozambique is reinforced by Cahen’s proclivity to depict the peasantry as encapsulated in an apparently unperturbed “domestic mode of production,”103 consisting of a series of contiguous, selfenclosed lineages, whose internal organization is designed to maximize the probability of ensuring their own social reproduction. It is perhaps with a view to sustaining this image that Cahen winds up misrepresenting Geffray’s work on the interaction of Frelimo’s agrarian policies with the internal dynamics of rural communities. He claims, for instance, that it was the newly dominant lineage’s monopoly of the local machinery of the party and consumer cooperative which provided an important impetus to less fortunate lineages to try “to break out of the orbit of the modern state.”104 As we have seen, it was not the dominant lineage itself which other lineages saw “clinging to the party”105 but rather the predominant element within it. While subaltern subjects within the “dominant lineage” were spared the trauma of displacement and, hence, retained their rights to land access, the worsening goods famine and Frelimo-mandated mechanisms of commodity distribution intensified their subordination and subjectification to the families of local notables in much the same manner as it did to members of newly subjugated lineages.

Roots, routes and rootlessness 279

It is important to emphasize that Cahen has written extensively and cogently on the history of working-class struggles.106 And he has carefully documented Frelimo’s attempt either to repress or coopt autonomous forms of labor organization in the first years of independence.107 Nonetheless, Cahen’s reliance on modes of production theory militates against an understanding of where the working class, as well as the petty bourgeoisie, sprang from.108

The second equivocation is over the precise nature and source of Frelimo’s much-remarked “insensitivity” to rural culture.109 The main argument in the revisionist literature is that the leadership, having no organic social connections to rural realities itself, was, quite simply, blind to them.110 However, one can also find within this literature, as well as in the work of authors who draw liberally on it, the working assumption that Frelimo chose to ignore, or was openly contemptuous of, these realities.111 In the first case, the leadership suffered from a kind of mental impairment which prevented it from understanding the varied social relations in which the vast majority of the population lived. In the second, no such handicap obtained. Rather, the country’s rulers, in full possession of their mental and physical faculties, chose to avert their gaze from the hinterland or to eliminate (by force, if necessary) from that gaze those features of the hinterland it deemed most objectionable and shameful.

The third equivocation is a subset of the second. It is found in texts, or portions thereof, which take Frelimo’s blindness as given but which register a marked indecision as to the precise causes and nature of this condition. At stake here is whether the nationalist leaders bear some measure of responsibility for consciously inducing or cultivating their own inability to see. The overriding emphasis in the revisionist literature is that, both in its inception and in its formative stages, the leadership’s blindness was born of an honest and, under the circumstances, perfectly understandable, error. The liberated zones were the site of a “profound misunderstanding between the leaders and the rural populations that they had succeeded in mobilizing under their banner.”112 Specifically, the radical wing of the Frelimo leadership mistook peasant support and enthusiasm for the armed struggle, as well as its willing participation in collective forms of production in the liberated zones, as an incontrovertible sign of the peasantry’s will to socialist revolution. As a result of this fateful mistake, Frelimo began to fancy itself the vanguard of a revolutionary class alliance.

The truth of the matter, the revisionists insist, was that peasant cooperation and collaboration during the liberation war were thoroughly bereft of an anti-capitalist, let alone a pro-socialist, impulse. Much like advocates of the dual economy thesis before them, the revisionists contend that the overriding priority of rural denizens was to throw off the yoke of colonial oppression while at the same time maintaining their own forms of social organization.113 And for the duration of the war, maintain their social organization they did, at least to a much greater degree than official history allows.

280 Roots, routes and rootlessness

The widespread euphoria which greeted Frelimo’s accession to power, combined with initial popular receptivity to its early appeals for rural collectivization, did nothing to dispel and, in fact, everything to reinforce Frelimo’s misinterpretation of peasant motivations and aspirations. Mozambique’s new rulers were fully convinced that, in cheerfully endorsing their authority, the rural populace was throwing its full weight behind their then rapidly crystallizing program for socialist transformation:

After all, didn’t certain peasants engage in the construction of villages, carried by the great élan of confidence and popularity from which Frelimo benefited on the morrow of its victory? In town, many interpreted this remarkable popular receptivity to Frelimo’s discourse, this almost unanimous recognition of the integrity and authority of Machel and his party, as a conscious adherence of the peasantry to the content of its discourse, as a massive engagement of the rural populations on the road of a revolutionary transformation of social relations. This illusion, this mistaking of the motivations and the meaning of peasant recognition of Frelimo authority ... confirmed for a while the credibility of a discourse on the “worker–peasant class alliance” in the name of which [state] power wasconvinced to be speaking.114

In short, in the immediate wake of independence the people’s “revolutionary essence was not called in question”115 and the illusory identity relation between leadership and mass was apparently confirmed.

Elsewhere, however, there are broad hints in the revisionist literature that this presumed “essence” was not taken for granted even at the outset and that there was more than a touch of intentionality in Frelimo’s comprehensive erasure of the peasantry’s social existence. At one point, for instance, Geffray characterizes Frelimo’s stunning ignorance of rural social life as “self-willed.”116 In another text, Geffray accurately observes that the leadership didn’t try to promote the free expression of peasant “forms of social existence ... not even to know the forces and interests in play – preferring to negate everything wholesale.”117

The clear implication here is that Frelimo was sufficiently cognizant of peasant social realities to be able to weigh carefully the potential risks and benefits of allowing these realities some scope, however contained and controlled, to find self-expression. In its own estimation, the risks outweighed the benefits, even when factoring in purely instrumentalist considerations. Hence, its collective preference for refraining from establishing any institutional arenas for such realities to assert themselves unfettered by official proscriptions and penalties, irrespective of the likely, known, attendant costs. All of this reinforces the impression that the leadership’s “ideological blindness”118 was in no small measure deliberately contrived and assiduously cultivated.

The political possibilities opened up by the revisionist critique should, by now, be apparent. The second equivocation enables the Frelimo leadership to

Roots, routes and rootlessness 281 plausibly claim that its “insensitivity” to rural realities in the postindependence period flowed from its blindness to, rather than its contemptuous dismissal of, these realities. This, in effect, was the message conveyed by the above-referenced Central Committee Report to the Sixth Congress. The reason, the report found, that Frelimo had overestimated “the degree of collective consciousness of the popular masses” was because, after independence, the ruling party

sought to generalize to the entire country the experiences and sentiments of the populations in the liberated zones, without taking into due account the economic and social complexity of the nation, the types of social relations, the dominant form of property relations, and the structural consequences of the colonial order.119

This admission repeats the revisionist claim that a “profound misunderstanding” regarding the revolutionary potential of the Mozambican peasantry was born in the liberated zones; however, it offers a very different interpretation of the kind of misunderstanding that occurred.

If, according to the revisionists, Frelimo mistakenly read the cooperation of the rural populace in Cabo Delgado and Niassa as symptomatic of a general will, both in the affected areas and elsewhere, to socialist transformation, in the Central Committee’s retelling the problem lay in Frelimo’s erroneous assumption that the political inclinations of the peasants it encountered in the north were typical of the rural population as a whole. This version of events concedes that Frelimo overlooked regional variations that mark the smallholder population and, by extension, the possible political implications that flow from this.120 However, it does so in a manner that takes pains to preserve one of the central mythologies of the armed struggle. The third equivocation, in turn, allows the leadership to claim, with equal plausibility, that its blindness was involuntary and that, until c.1990, it was thoroughly clueless about the existence of its own condition. It could hardly be held accountable for an affliction not of its choosing and which, by its very nature, eluded early detection and treatment.

Deriving maximum advantage from both equivocations, the leadership could “confess” that it had wrongly assumed that the peasantry was available for class-based politics and revolution but had now come to the realization that smallholders sorely lacked the requisite class status to engage in either activity. With the benefit of hindsight, it could claim to have arrived at the understanding that its counterpart in West Africa, the PAIGC, had reached way back in 1977: namely, that no political movement could plausibly claim to be a vanguard of a worker–peasant alliance, revolutionary or otherwise, because objective conditions in contemporary Mozambique, as in Guinea-Bissau two decades ago, ruled out the possibility of forming such an alliance in the first place – at least in the near term.

282 Roots, routes and rootlessness

The irony here is obvious. The revisionist critique allows the leadership to behave as though it had (mistakenly) seen classes in the rural areas when, as we have seen, the dual economy thesis which informed agrarian policy during the 1977–1983 period presupposed that the peasantry as a class did not, in fact, exist and, hence, could retreat at will into the splendid isolation of precapitalist, subsistenceproduction. In short, the leadership could feign that it had been disabused of its former illusions when its belated “discovery” that the hinterland consists, not of classes, but of a series of discrete lineages and chieftaincies amounts to an affirmation of its original position.

The first equivocation enables Frelimo’s leaders to “admit,” without risking excessive political fall-out, that its blindness was born of cultural alienation and even to go so far as to acknowledge candidly that this alienation, in turn, was born of social privilege. In doing so, it would neatly sidestep charges of tribally-rooted ethnic self-interestedness and/or favoritism. Moreover, this vacillation provides the leadership scope to boldly confess to the political pertinence of its own assimilated, petty-bourgeois status without fear of calling unwanted public attention to other horizontal social divides, most notably those associated with the relations of exploitation. That is because, in the revisionists’ scheme of things, the bureaucratic petty bourgeoisie, in its capacity as a class, or as a fraction of one, quite simply had no relationship, exploitative or otherwise, to the laboring classes to speak of.

It is difficult to see how, starting from a position of near total blindness and lacking the requisite social ties to overcome this disability, the leadership could have come to establish and profit from regional and/or ethnic political identifications so rapidly in the post-independence period. Thus, while a central contention of the revisionists is that, through its control of the state apparatus, the party executive has managed to transform itself from a bureaucratic elite “entirely cut off from the means of production and exchange” into enterprising (if non-productive) accumulators,121 they notably fail to spell out when and how the leadership acquired the requisite sightedness to establish the necessary social relationships to power this transformation. A much more likely scenario has recently been proposed by Patrick Chabal – that Frelimo was “committed to supra-ethnic, non-racial politics” but “had clearly demarcated constituencies ... which mattered more. In that sense, [it] faced the difficulty of balancing competing, or even conflicting, interests.”122

In a society otherwise vertically fractured along ethnic, cultural and/or regional lines, it would not take too much ingenuity or inventiveness to market a rootless creolité as an indispensable political asset. Such a promotional campaign could capitalize on the demonstrated failure of rival creole elites to transcend their own, more rooted, particularisms.123 It could derive additional political mileage from the fact that, as Cahen has astutely observed, the logic of structural adjustment has, certainly in the short run, sharply reduced the chances these elites have of transcending these particularisms anytime soon. If anything, austerity has forced Frelimo’s political

Roots, routes and rootlessness 283 challengers back onto local, sectional identities, which, under the circumstances, are the only politically serviceable resource readily at their disposal.124

Under the circumstances, it would fall well within the bounds of the possible for the Frelimo leadership to proclaim its unrivaled political legitimacy on the basis of its rigorously absolute non-representativeness.125 It could credibly claim itself to be the most suitable agent (now that it had somehow recovered its capacity to see) to build bridges – relations of “inter-culturality” as the former Minister of Culture, Luís Bernardo Honwana, has put it126 –among mutually rivalrous, often antagonistic, indigenous cultures which, history has amply shown, have proven to be a “centrifugal force,”127 exhibiting a pronounced proclivity, left to their own devices, to clash and collide. The slide into a classless cultural pluralism is facilitated by the fact that, in both Frelimo’s revolutionary classificatory schema and the revisionist critique, the petty bourgeoisie, or fractions thereof, is/are abstracted from the culturally-imbued, often ethnically-tinged, social relations which define the rest of the society and whose historical agency in its/their own formation and social reproduction is studiously denied.

The judgment rendered by Frelimo sympathizers was, certainly in this respect, much harsher and effectively ruled out such maneuverings in advance. Marc Wuyts, for instance, maintained that Third Congress directives showed that “in actual practice the attitude towards the peasantry is at best ambiguous.”128 And John Saul concluded that Frelimo’s embrace of the dualist position signaled that the leadership was having “second thoughts about the revolutionary vocation of the peasantry.”129 In their eyes, the “myth of the self-sufficient peasant,” as William Finnegan described it,130 was a deliberate contrivance in the service of a national development strategy predicated on “primitive socialist accumulation,” rather than a symptom of the leadership’s cultural estrangement.

Conclusion

This book has examined the genealogy of the myth of revolutionary rupture with a view to illuminating the mnemonic readjustments that have accompanied, sought to negotiate and contributed to the complicated political terrain that characterizes post-socialist Mozambique. To this end, it has probed the dissonance between the evolution of the central state’s relationship with rural political authority and various official and revisionist representations of that evolution, taking Nampula as its primary reference point.

The inauguration of the institutions of popular power in Nampula during the first years of independence was not the seismic event the ruling regime made it out to be. Official proclamations trumpeting revolutionary triumph in transforming ruling relations in the outback presupposed that people who acted in the name of the Frelimo state had repudiated the “traditional-feudal

284 Roots, routes and rootlessness society” from which they came and whose duty it was theirs to transform. Such pronouncements were part of a much broader effort in the first years of independence to establish the state as a juggernaut and, especially, as a revolutionizing one.131 They created the illusion that the greatest resistance to the Frelimo state’s interventions came from the people most attached to rural “obscurantism.” They also helped give rise to the extant perception that “the very thoroughness of FRELIMO’s centralising political reforms was to contribute directly to its rapid undoing”132 and that the social composition of state-sanctioned political institutions in the rural areas illustrated this.

The recognition of chiefs qua chiefs in several districts in Nampula came in 1986 (in Eráti it came earlier). The state’s enlistment of former régulos to serve as “chiefs of production” wasone element of a multi-pronged attempt on the part of the provincial government to reconstitute late colonial labor relations and settlement patterns and, in so doing, to forestall economic collapse. Officialdom’s refusal to acknowledge the role of wartime villagization in agricultural decline apparently confirmed one of the central tenets of the dual economy thesis: that, in the absence of force, smallholders could and would retreat from the market. It thus helped to justify the application of coercive measures to extract agricultural surpluses from small-scale producers, who were conveniently portrayed, with few exceptions, as subsistenceoriented agriculturalists. The appointment of former régulos as overseers of smallholder agricultural production bore testimony to the apparent vindication of the dualist position at least as much as it testified to the success of Renamo’s strategy of rural mobilization and Frelimo’s capitulation to Renamo on the question of traditional authority.

The return to chiefly rule in Nampula came in the early 1990s. It was part and parcel of the ruling party’s attempt to meet a number of strategic objectives. These were to expand Frelimo’s social base in advance of the 1994 multiparty elections, to extend the state’s reach in preparation for postwar reconstruction, to cope with the dilemmas posed by the transition to political pluralism and to demonstrate to donors the sincerity of the leadership’s commitment to devolving power to local communities. The retraditionalization of local administration coincided with, and was justified in terms of, the advent of multipartyism. The move did not resolve longstanding conflicts over access to, and control over, labor, land and tribute. In many cases these conflicts were exacerbated as claims to title and territory proliferated. As a consequence, the crisis of state political legitimacy was not redressed.

Although at least some chiefs had already resumed their colonial-era functions in the domain of agricultural production and although, from the mid-1980s, many had gained increasing prominence in the institutions of popular power, the return to indirect rule was portrayed in local official discourses as a volte face not only in state policy but in ruling institutional practice. This portrayal formed part of a general trend in state-based discourses

Roots, routes and rootlessness 285 toward excessively incriminating the ruling party’s detribalization policy –one of the hallmarks of the Mozambican revolution – for inducing the collapse of Frelimo’s socialist experiment and, more broadly, the unraveling of the country’s social fabric.

The tendency to single out this “error” and to magnify its social, political and economic costs was especially pronounced in statist mnemonic practices concerning Nampula, where Renamo’s appeals to chiefs and chieftaincy are widely believed to have fallen on exceptionally fertile ground. But it also manifested itself in subtle ways with respect to the rural experience in socialist-era Mozambique as a whole. The cumulative effect was to package the political fall-out from the ruling party’s early agrarian policies and human rights infringements into a less damning form. In official discourses concerning Nampula, this strategy of containment frequently resulted in local Frelimo secretaries, the most politically vulnerable members of the party hierarchy, bearing the burden of blame for the totality of socioeconomic calamities and political crises that followed on state interventions in the rural areas.

Statist mnemonic narratives and performance derived sustenance from the ruling party’s triumphalist claim in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Frelimo-installed rural institutions represented the negation of chieftaincy. Post-1990 official discourses and dramaturgy also took a page from revisionist critiques which foreground the ruling party’s hostility towards rural traditionalism in explaining the crisis of state legitimacy and the indigenization of Renamo’s war.

If the revisionists have exaggerated the political effects of Renamo’s appeals to traditional institutions and values on the government’s own policies and practices, it is also the case that Nampula-based functionaries and officials in the early 1990s strongly tended to bend the stick too far in the other direction: their retrospectives frequently blotted out any trace of Renamo’s influence on state strategies of legitimization and control. Similar treatment was accorded Renamo in official pronouncements about, and documentation of, the trajectory of villagization in the province. In both instances, local state employees took their cue from the national leadership’s longstanding practice of “denying Renamo any legitimacy.”133 This meant, on the one hand, refusing to acknowledge that Renamo’s “successes” resulted from Frelimo’s own policies.134 On the other, it meant denying any connection whatsoever between these “successes” and shifts in official policy, practice or political orientation. The need to meet both objectives helps to explain the ruling party’s marked preference for portraying such shifts, as well as the political overhaul that began in the early 1990s, as the product of “a logical development of Frelimo’s self-critical and adaptive methodology.”135

The case of post-socialist Mozambique confirms the general proposition that memory discourses are path-dependent. It also demonstrates that, even within official circles, the paths forged may diverge in at least potentially

286 Roots, routes and rootlessness discordant ways. This is the case even when the routes taken feed off one another and fall within the same broad legitimation profile. The national leadership tended to reduce the conflict with Renamo to its ideological essence and to disconnect it from the encounter/confrontation between Frelimo and the countryside it sought to transform. In the case of Nampula in the early 1990s, the attempt on the part of local state personnel to chronicle the province’s post-independence history, to contend with the history of earlier pronouncements by the state and party leadership and to respond to the exigencies of the present yielded an unexpected, counter-intuitive combination of “genre memories,”136 in which Renamo was often completely removed from the frame. In both cases, the overall result was at least partial depoliticization.

Revisionist scholarship is intellectually disarmed in the face of Frelimo’s strategy of political re-legitimization because Cahen, Geffray and de Brito have, in spite of themselves and much like their intellectual antagonists, uncritically adopted officialdom’s own definition and delimitation of objects and relations of state rule. On the one hand, they have accepted at face value the presupposition that the Frelimo state and the “obscurantist” society it sought to eliminate were two mutually exclusive, antipathetic entities. Such a presupposition obfuscates the complexities of state formation in postindependence Mozambique and is at odds with the some of the pivotal findings of the revisionist school. On the other hand, revisionist scholars, like the Frelimo leadership, have tended to portray the postcolonial state as the exclusive stomping ground of a petty bourgeoisie/aspirant bourgeoisie that “lives out there in space,” as Machel once put it,137 divorced from the social relations that characterize the rest of society. The upshot has been to project an image of the state, whether conceived of as a “weak Leviathan” or as its much more menacing opposite, as suspended above the Mozambican polity.138

To deepen our understanding of the import and significance of the state’s “retreat to tradition,” I have proposed, as a first approach, viewing Frelimo’s early anti-obscurantism through the lens of its relationship to ruling party representations of “the class enemy.” “Traditional-feudal society” and its more sophisticated and much more elusive partner-in-crime were binary and contrastive social categories. Like the analytic categories of African socialist ideology that Frelimo’s Marxism had reputedly spurned, they were predicated on notions of indigeneity and foreignness.139 By extension, they expressed ruling ideas regarding forms of legitimate and illegitimate dissent. They were also tropes for visibility and invisibility and, as such, signaled varying degrees of danger to Frelimo’s revolutionary project and to that project’s midwife, the state. By the same token, the full ideological and political implications of the de-stigmatization of rural traditionalism and the return to rule by royals as royals in the 1990s can be plumbed more fruitfully when these developments are situated in juxtaposition to the rise and fall of the counter-revolutionary petty bourgeoisie – and, along with it, of class per se – in ruling discourse and political practice.

Roots, routes and rootlessness 287

Any analysis that seeks to explain Frelimo’s disinclination to meaningfully engage with its past by focusing single-mindedly on the dark side of the revolution will tell only part of the story. Ruling mnemonic practices in the post-socialist period have been governed to a significant – and maybe even equal – degree by the thoroughly justified anxiety apparently felt by senior Frelimo officials that exercises in public remembrance inherently pose the danger of highlighting the “pastness” of some of the most creditable aspects of the party’s track record and previous commitments.140 Frelimo’s fraught relationship to its record in power also testifies to the constraints imposed by the temporal displacements discussed in Chapter 5 – distortions which reduce the 1975–1992 period into an ellipsis. As a result, forms of mnemonic legitimation have been forced to lean even more heavily than they previously had on Frelimo’s pre-independence history – that is, the history of the armed struggle and the liberated zones – just as the party has been compelled to face head-on the challenge of inter-generational succession. Herein lie the aforementioned costs and complications of instrumentalization.

Post-1990 forms of mnemonic legitimation, like the revolutionary-era charge of obscurantism that they refer back to, draw liberally from colonial discourses and neo-Weberian theories of modernization. In each of these cases, the logic at work is that, “since peasants are imprisoned by ‘the omnipotence of custom’ and incapable of conceiving of change, their social movements [or rural resistance, in general] ... must in essence be reactionary, their goal the defence of traditional ways of life.”141 Post-socialist legitimation practices are also fully in keeping with, and have no doubt been informed by, “the growing cultural trend of performative guilt,” one which is international in scope. In opting to join this trend, government officials have signaled that “the egalitarianism of imperfection” extends to their corner of southeast Africa.142

Government admissions of guilt have been as truncated as they have been contestable. Revealingly, none of them has risen to the threshold of an apology. Nonetheless, on a continent whose postcolonial rulers have evinced a marked predilection for blaming the detrimental effects of their own flawed policies on external factors,143 the ritualization of public confession in the political arena is notable – even for a ruling party long renowned for using strategically-timed critical self-appraisals as a powerful legitimating device.

This book has sought to shed light on the historically-grounded, locallyspecific dynamics that made the pursuit of a strategy of self-blame a viable option open to the leadership in the first place. It has also emphasized the importance of these internal dynamics in shaping the distinct form that strategy took. I have argued that the politics of acknowledgment were both enabled and molded by two conjoined beliefs that are widespread within and beyond ruling institutions in Mozambique: the belief that the powers of the Frelimo state rival, or even exceed, those of its predecessor; and the

288 Roots, routes and rootlessness conviction that it was Frelimo’s refusal to leverage these powers, at least as much as its misuse and abuse of them, that helped precipitate the postcolonial crisis of authority. Both beliefs grossly overstate the potency of the postindependence state and, in many instances, erroneously presume that some of the major dislocations and stresses stemming from the collapse of the colonial administration constitute evidence of Frelimo’s might.

Both beliefs, I have endeavored to show, turn on a paradox: namely, that the historical events that marked the first years of independence are, at one and the same time, indicative of Frelimo’s fierce determination to invert inherited hierarchies and of its equally unwavering anti-hierarchical orientation. Over the past two decades, the myth of revolutionary rupture has served as a powerful vehicle for expressing and sustaining the paradox that resides at the core of this particularly resonant “state-idea” in Mozambique. As long as it continues to serve in this manner, one imagines that Frelimo’s detribalization policy will retain its salience in mnemonic narratives and performance – for both those in and out of power – for some time to come.