2 Aspects of precolonial and colonial Nampula

Precolonial Nampula

Nampula’s integration into international circuits of exchange dates from the end of the sixteenth century and coincided with the advent of the ivory trade in Mozambique.1 The Maravi conquest of the region at that time created a trading zone stretching from the Shire Valley in present-day Malawi through Nampula to Mozambique Island (Ilha de Moçambique). Some fifty years earlier Ilha de Moçambique had gained recognition as the first capital of Lisbon’s claimed possessions in south-east Africa.2 At the time – and until the late nineteenth century – the Portuguese presence throughout what today constitutes Mozambique was primarily limited to the littoral and to trading stations and military garrisons along the Zambézia river.3 Over the course of the next century, much of the ivory traded with the Portuguese originated from Nampula and had been paid to the Maravi states to the east as tribute.

With the decline of Maravi power at the end of the seventeenth century, Yao traders based at Lake Niassa began to redirect their commercial operations from Kilwa to Mossuril and Cabaceiras, establishing a caravan route through northern Nampula. From that time onwards, Nampula was situated at the crossroads of two major trade arteries from the interior. During the second half of the eighteenth century, when the trafficking in human beings came to dwarf all other forms of exchange, Makua chiefs in the interior established themselves as traders in slaves as well as other commodities.

Nampula was one of the two main sources of slaves in Mozambique (the other was the Zambézia valley) and Makua chiefs were the main suppliers. In the first phase, slave trafficking was dominated by the French (initially in contravention of Portuguese law), who shipped their cargo to the sugar and coffee plantations in France’s colonial possessions in the Mascarene islands. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the traffic was directed primarily to South America, most notably Brazil.4

Starting in the 1830s, Portugal made sporadic, less than wholehearted and largely abortive attempts to abolish the slave trade. The colonial administration’s own heavy dependence on customs remittances generated by slave dealing militated against enforcing abolitionist decrees. So did the fact that

Precolonial and colonial Nampula 91 the Portuguese did not control the source of supply or many of the trafficking routes. In Nampula, slave dealers responded by rerouting their merchandise away from Ilha de Moçambique to the numerous bays and swamps along the coast and there is no evidence that there was any let-up in the tempo of their business.5 Throughout the nineteenth century, the MakuaLomwé were the principal casualties of this traffic in Mozambique.6 In the meantime, the engagé system was sanctified by an accord between the French and the Portuguese in 1854, enabling slaves to be exported from Mozambique in the guise of free labor. This new form of labor mobilization paralleled clandestine slave dealing and, after abolition in 1878, allowed slave-owners to dispose of now illegal slave populations in an above-board and highly lucrative manner.7 Even after the emancipation proclamation was issued, the illicit export of slaves from Nampula continued until at least the first decade of the twentieth century.8 Slaveholding in Mozambique continued illicitly until the inauguration of the First Republic in 1910.9

J.F. Mbwiliza argues that the process of transition from slave trading to “legitimate” commerce in the Nampulan hinterland was facilitated by the availability of alternative forms of trade in rubber, gum copal, peanuts, bees wax, ivory, oil seeds, copra and ginger, as well as by opportunities for agricultural production.10 Other scholars have contended that chieftaincies in the interior were, like the coastal potentates, structurally dependent on both slave trading and slaveholding, and that their armed resistance to imperialist incursions was mounted with a view to forestalling not only Portuguese occupation but also the enforcement of abolitionist decrees.11

As we shall see, much political discourse in Nampula in the 1990s placed a good deal of emphasis on the alleged preponderance of epotha – or “slaves” – in Frelimo institutions and the negative social, political and economic consequences that flowed from this. Accordingly, the genesis of this phenomenon and the social functions of epotha and epotha lineages in the precolonial period merit special consideration.

Social transformation

According to Mbwiliza, large-scale population displacements prompted by both the Maravi conquest and the slave trade caused many lineages to lose contact with – or to avail themselves of the opportunity to break away from – their clan heads. In some cases, junior lineage leaders founded their own clans and arrogated ritual and religious authority to themselves. In others, they found a spiritual alternative in Islam or in an admixture of Makua religious beliefs and institutions and Koranic teachings.12

But if the Maravi conquest and the slave trade set in motion processes of social fragmentation and dispersal, they also gave rise to strong tendencies toward political centralization, social stratification and regional differentiation. The supersession of clan by lineage as the basic form of social organization paved the way for the rise of powerful chieftaincies in the eighteenth

92 Precolonial and colonial Nampula and nineteenth centuries.13 With the growing importance of long-distance trade, Makua chiefs began to exercise greater control over production and marketing. In the interior, the imperatives of organizing caravans for transport, and of guaranteeing their safe passage over long distances to the coast, further reinforced chiefly power. Communities that were unable to mount an effective defense against slave raids sought political protection from militarily more powerful ones. The escalation of the slave trade, combined with the “Ngoni” passage and attacks in the nineteenth century, heightened the ambience of insecurity and violence, and fueled tendencies toward political centralization.14

The institutionalization of “domestic slavery” was one manifestation of far-reaching social transformation.15 As elsewhere on the continent, slaveholding was a decidedly gendered social institution. Male captives were usually seized in raids on passing caravans or in open warfare. From the time of their capture until their final sale on the coast, they were typically circulated among dominant lineage chiefs. The slave trade also enabled lineage chiefs, of varying social status, to rid themselves of “male undesirables” –including their own upstart nephews – in a profitable manner. The commodification of abduction thus enhanced the power of political authorities at all levels. Women, adolescents and children were captured either in battle or in isolated ambushes on non-allied chieftaincies, or acquired through purchase. Thereupon, they were usually integrated into the dominant lineage, either through marriage or “adoption.” All captives, regardless of their sex, the manner in which they were acquired, or their fates, were called epotha. 16

Female epotha were the most coveted of captives. Women and girls were variously integrated as wives, sisters or nieces. Irrespective of the method of incorporation, female captives and their descendants constituted a “dependent and manipulable social group,” whose social identity was invented and, if need be, reinvented in accordance with the needs of their new masters: thus, wives could be converted into sisters; sisters could be turned into nieces; and nieces could, on command, be transformed into wives.

As nieces or sisters, female epotha could generate a reserve of direct matrilineal descendants. As wives, they enabled men from the abducting or purchasing lineage to subvert prevailing Makua principles of matrilineality and matrilocality, and to circumvent the onerous bride-service obligations that matrimonial unions with free allied lineages entailed. Conjugal unions with epotha thus introduced tendencies toward patrilineality and virilocality into the heart of lineage social relations. The main draw of such unions was that, as wives, epotha produced descendants, also known as epotha, whose social status was equally manipulable. Successor generations of epotha thus formed a reserve of politically subordinate allies with whom members of the abducting or purchasing lineage could marry on terms as advantageous as they could tothe women from whom an epotha line issued.

According to Geffray, the “relations of exploitation” forged between masters and slaves were transitory, persisting only until the embryonic

Precolonial and colonial Nampula 93 lineage issued from an epotha reached “socio-demographic” maturity: that is, until it comprised enough generations to boast its own elders and notables. At this point, a “slave” lineage could undergo a process of segmentation or “political autonomization.” Thereupon, its members could nominate their own lineage chief, move on to their own land and forge their own matrimonial alliances. Not least, they would be socio-politically positioned to acquire epotha of their own either through purchase or via raids on other, politically non-allied chieftaincies.17

“Effective occupation”

Following the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference, Lisbon came under intense pressure to demonstrate to the satisfaction of its European imperialist rivals that it had established “effective occupation” over the territory it was claiming for itself as a colony and that it had stamped out slavery there. At the time, the Portuguese presence in Mozambique was confined almost exclusively to the littoral and many Portuguese settlers and functionaries continued to have a vested interest in slave dealing and ownership.

Portugal was only able to focus its military efforts on northern Mozambique in the wake of its army’s defeat of Ngungunhana’s Gazan state in the south in 1895.18 In 1917, Portugal had yet to establish its uncontested military dominance over the present-day districts of Malema, Namapa and Nacarôa.19 And it was only in 1921 that the Portuguese felt sufficiently secure in their military triumph to extinguish the military posts and commands that had, since 1885, formed the basis of administration in the region and to create civil circumscriptions in their stead.20 This was four full years after the military defeat of the Makonde on the Mueda plateau in northern Cabo Delgado, after which “pacification” was considered complete.21 With the abolition of slavery, a sizeable portion of the epotha population seized the opportunity to quit the chieftaincies into which they or their forebears had been forcibly inducted and to search for their own lineages.22

Colonial chieftaincy

Colonial Mozambique was divided into districts. After 1954, there were nine of these. Each district was headed by a governor, who answered to the Governor-General of the colony. Districts, in turn, consisted of a combination of circumscriptions and councils, both of which were headed by administrators. Councils were situated in urban areas that either hosted relatively high concentrations of people who enjoyed “non-native” (não-indígena) or “civilized” status, or were centers of industrial and/or commercial activity. In principle, não-indígenas, a social category that included Europeans, Asians and a smattering of assimilados, enjoyed unfettered Portuguese citizenship. In practice, assimilados endured both white prejudice and institutional discrimination throughout the colonial period. Circumscriptions were, in the

94 Precolonial and colonial Nampula main, situated in the rural areas and were populated chiefly by Africans who, with few exceptions, were classified as “natives” (indígenas), a label that denoted subject status: indígenas were denied civil and political rights, and able-bodied, adult male indígenas (variously defined during the colonial period) were potentially liable to perform forced labor assignments. Circumscriptions were, in turn, divided into two to six administrative posts, each of which was presided over by a head of post (chefe do posto).23 In keeping with the administrative designations that were adopted in the post-independence period, I hereafter refer to colonial districts as provinces and to circumscriptions and councils as districts.

In rural districts, traditional hierarchies, as recognized by the colonial administration, served as intermediaries between the chefe do posto and the indígena population, conveying and enforcing state decrees and directives. At the summit of these hierarchies stood the régulo or regedor, who headed a regedoria or regulado. Two tiers of traditional authority were recognized below the régulo: chefes de grupo de povoações (chiefs of a group of settlements, or cabos), charged with overseeing several African settlements, and, below them, chefes de povoação (chiefs of a settlement, or capitães), who headed a single settlement. In 1933, this hierarchy was enshrined in law by the Overseas Administrative Reform.24

In principle, the regedoria was the post-conquest incarnation of precolonial “tribes” and régulos, cabos and capitães were the legatees of precolonial chieftaincy. The reality was altogether other. Precolonial chiefs who had spearheaded armed African resistance to Portuguese occupation had fled, had been killed or were pushed aside. They had been replaced by Africans who were, or appeared to be, more amenable to collaborating with the conquerors: more pliant royals, cipaios (African policemen who had served in the Portuguese army), other former soldiers, “native plebeians” and, not infrequently, “mercenary elements” from this social stratum, among others, were nominated to fill vacancies.25 At the same time, larger, more formidable chieftaincies were broken up into smaller units in order to render them harmless, a process which brought lesser chiefs or non-royals to the position of paramount. The cumulative result was that, before too long, regedorias came to be highly variable in terms of the size of the territories and populations they encompassed, and régulos, as one influential colonial inspector put it, had been “transformed into something carnivalesque.”26

The remedy, in the view of those who had arrived at this conclusion, lay not only in granting a wide array of perquisites to state-recognized chiefs, but also in instating the “authentic régulos” who had been so summarily and so counterproductively dethroned in the aftermath of conquest.27 Accordingly, starting in the 1940s, steps were taken to “valorize” chieftaincy. The number of regedorias was reduced and their sizes, both in terms of territorial reach and numbers of inhabitants, were standardized. Chiefs were granted salaries and issued uniforms. For the first time, their duties were clearly defined. The state embarked on a program of building improved houses for

Precolonial and colonial Nampula 95 those regulos who avidly collaborated in state campaigns to promote smallholder cotton production. The earning power of traditional authorities was enhanced in a number of other ways. Local administrators were directed to select régulos from among the historically dominant lineages in so far as this was both feasible and politically expedient – although it is unclear to what extent the officials in question sought to comply with this directive.28

What is clear is that, by the 1940s, Salazar’s New State was moving decisively to develop Lisbon’s colonies in the service of Portuguese capitalism and a concerted attempt was made to fashion chieftaincy to suit that purpose. In Mozambique, foreign (i.e. non-Portuguese) capital had predominated and, in certain provinces, foreign companies had even been vested with administrative and police powers. Lisbon passed a series of laws in the early 1930s which extinguished “any administrative or quasi-sovereign rights” exercised by private companies and brought the colony under a single unitary administration.29 These enactments were followed a decade later by legislation, promulgated in 1943, which mandated that strategic enterprises in the colony had to be at least 60 percent owned by Portuguese capital.30 The economic agenda of the New State required extracting raw materials from the colonies to meet the needs of metropolitan industry. In the 1940s and the 1950s compulsory smallholder crop production was institutionalized and the system of forced labor recruitment was streamlined. Chiefs were drafted to serve as intermediaries in the emergent labor regime.

Official efforts to confer prestige on chiefs continued in the 1950s. A school was set up to cater to régulos and their sons, and chiefs were permitted, in certain circumstances, to retain a portion of the labor recruitment tax on African males who were contracted to work outside their regedorias. Chiefs, along with other state “auxiliaries” (e.g. cipaios, interpreters), were able to benefit from state agricultural extension services. They were the primary recipients of state-distributed goods, such as livestock and fruit trees. They were also charged with distributing these and other goods to their wards, an arrangement which enabled them to cultivate patron–client relationships.31

At the same time, the regedoria system enabled the state to farm out certain unsavory functions that either its own cadres or agents of local capital had hitherto performed, often illicitly, such as levying contingents of forced African labor to satisfy the expanding labor demands of colonial plantations, settler farms and public works projects. By delegating this function to chiefs, the colonial administration was able to distance itself from longstanding practices which were the focus of renewed international criticism after World War II, just when Portugal was trying to curry favor with the war’s victors and to strengthen its bid to gain membership of the United Nations.32 In summary, in the postwar period the search was on not so much for “authentic” traditional authorities but for “collaborators among the African population who could be made the agents of a less visible compulsion.”33

96 Precolonial and colonial Nampula

Indígena status and all forced labor laws were revoked in 1961. However, although there was talk of doing away with indirect rule,34 the regedoria system persisted up until independence.

The colonial cotton regime

Lisbon decreed cotton a compulsory crop in 1926 immediately following the military coup that brought down the sixteen-year-old Republican government. However, the first colony-wide forced cotton campaign did not get underway in Mozambique until the 1933–1934 agricultural season and it was not until 1938 that the Salazar’s New State sought to institutionalize compulsory crop production in Portugal’s African colonies.35 The cotton regime was the central plank in Salazar’s program, codified in the 1930 Colonial Act, to make the colonies produce raw materials to sell to the “motherland” in exchange for manufactured goods.36 The aim was to ease the country’s debilitating balance of payments deficit and to reduce the heavy reliance of national manufacturers on foreign markets for primary commodities. The New State ambitiously strove to eliminate the dependence of Portugal’s textile industry, which purchased 99 percent of its ginned cotton abroad in 1931, on foreign supplies by having colonial cotton yields wholly satisfy industry needs.37 In 1941, rice also became a compulsory crop in certain regions of the colony.38

The cotton scheme emulated a similar labor regime in the Belgian Congo. It was designed to maximize the number of producers, the amount of land under cultivation, and the number of hours producers invested in cultivating the crop. At the same time, it aimed to minimize capital investment and risk. The colonial government granted exclusive buying rights to peasant-produced cotton, grown compulsorily, at fixed low prices to concessionaires. The concessionaires, in turn, mandatorily exported the fiber to the metropole. By the early 1940s, twelve companies had signed contracts with the Colonial Cotton Export Board (JEAC), set up in 1938 to oversee cotton development throughout Mozambique, and were operating in well over half of the colony. Within these concession zones, African smallholders were subjected to a highly regimented work routine, consisting of set dates by which they had to plant, reseed, weed and harvest their cotton crop and minimum surface areas that they were obligated to cultivate. As the regime progressively tightened in the ensuing years, peasants contended with a battery of new strictures. These included fixed times when they were required to work only on their cotton fields (machambas) and proscriptions against intercropping cotton with either basic staples or other cash crops.39

State and capital joined forces in supervising cotton production and in penalizing peasants who failed to fulfill their legally-stipulated crop obligations. The concessionaires relied on field agents and overseers (capatazes) to accomplish these tasks. Local administrators, cipaios and state-recognized traditional authorities represented the state. All these local agents were

Precolonial and colonial Nampula 97 deeply enmeshed in the inherent, and often intense, violence of the regime. Threats, physical intimidation, beatings, whippings and sexual assaults were part and parcel of daily life. Short of fleeing, paying extortion (e.g. in chicken, meat, grain or cash) to local enforcers was one of the few ways to be spared from corporal punishment, rape and public humiliation.40

Régulos and their underlings soon came to shoulder the burden of supervising smallholder cotton production and enforcement. There are several reasons why this came to pass. The concession zones were vast, the distances between far-flung peasant machambas were great, transportation was minimal, and the colonial state and the cotton companies were grossly shorthanded. To make matters worse, roads were few and far between and were, in any case, typically impassable during the rainy season.41 Under the circumstances, it was only a matter of time before many state-recognized traditional authorities, irrespective of their pedigree, began to incur the deep-seated resentment and wrath of rural populations.

In the event, the colonial administration and cotton companies went to special lengths to coopt chiefs in designated cotton-growing areas. While material inducements varied from region to region, régulos variously received bicycles, radios, clothing, agricultural implements and production bonuses as perquisites from the local concessionaire or the district administration. The Cotton Board awarded chiefs whose regulados produced large volumes of highgrade cotton funds to build European-style (e.g. cement) homes. It also took steps to convince chiefs of the material and social gains to be garnered by seriously pursuing cotton production themselves. At the cotton markets, chiefs received payments in excess of statutory price ceilings for their harvest. In addition, the quality of their cotton was routinely overvalued in order to boost their earnings. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the JEAC made sure that régulos received higher quality seeds, premium land, storage bins and even water pumps. From the outset, régulos enjoyed official sanction to draft the (often involuntary and often unremunerated) labor services of their charges to work on their own fields. Not surprisingly, chiefs ranked among the principal African beneficiaries of the cotton regime.42 However, precisely because of their pivotal position in local production relations, chiefs also faced significant risks. If cotton yields in their regedorias fell below expectations, they could be subject to beatings by cipaios, company representatives or government officials, a punishment which was often meted out in front of their wards. What’s more, chiefs often faced popular antagonism and even reprisals.

Forced crop cultivation yielded impressive results. Between 1937 and 1944 the number of peasants in Mozambique engaged in coerced household cotton production skyrocketed from 80,000 to approximately 791,000, or about 30 percent of the economically active population.43 In 1943, colonial cotton, most of which came from Mozambique, covered 94 percent of Portugal’s national requirements, compared with 37 percent in 1938.44

From the vantage point of most smallholders, these results were less than salutary. Compulsory cotton production severely threatened household and

98 Precolonial and colonial Nampula community food security. This was because it intensified the labor process and, at the same time, diverted already scarce labor time to the cultivation of a non-edible cash crop at the peak of the production cycle for foodstuffs. Moreover, cotton required virtually year-round attention. Other productive activities – such as fishing, hunting, foraging, and peanut and sesame production, which had hitherto provided sources of either cash or nutrients or both – were either completely forsaken or sharply curtailed.45

For the vast majority of producers cotton earnings hardly provided financial relief, let alone rewards. Productivity was extremely low.46 And real producer prices declined by almost 40 percent between 1939 and 1946.47 Relative to the income that could be earned from other cash crops, cotton simply didn’t rate. In 1951, the year that real producer prices for cotton finally surpassed those that prevailed in 1939, the fiber was still the least remunerative cash crop grown by Mozambican peasants.48 In many regions of the colony, the income obtained from cotton was insufficient to cover smallholders’ fiscal obligations, let alone to buy basic consumer goods or foodstuffs.49

Under the circumstances, the cotton harvest was hardly cause for celebration. On the contrary, it brought yet another set of challenges, perils and woes. Producers were responsible for getting their yields to government-run markets, an undertaking that entailed packing heavy head loads over long distances along bush paths and rocky, gutted and/or sandy roads. The trip could take up to two or three days and, not infrequently, had to be made more than once. En route, the cotton was often soiled due to exposure to humidity, dust or sweat, and thus lost some of its monetary value. Once the trek was completed, peasants had to endure extended waits – sometimes up to two or three days – in long queues with little to no food before their cotton was weighed and classified. Market transactions were rife with questionable and fraudulent practices. Scales were often rigged and cotton quality was downgraded. It was not uncommon for companies to run short of cash – or to feign to have done so. In either case, peasants were forced to accept deferred payment, payment in kind (e.g. in salt, hoes, cigarettes), or “vouchers” that could only be redeemed at company stores.50 Last but not least, if cotton growers were paid in cash, they ended up handing over most, if not all, of their earnings in taxes to government officials who were often stationed at the markets for precisely this purpose.51

The imposition of forced crop cultivation precipitated a succession of food shortages and famines in rural Mozambique which lasted throughout the 1940s. At the same time, the cotton regime induced a radical reorganization of the distribution of rural labor in order to accommodate the new, more stringent, production regime. In many areas, overstretched smallholders progressively substituted cassava, a less labor-intensive but also less nutritious tuber, for sorghum as their main food staple. They also turned to maize, whose production cycle is more compatible with that of cotton but which is also less drought-resistant and less nutritious than sorghum.52

Precolonial and colonial Nampula 99

Despite the dramatic increases in production, the cotton regime was ridden with economic vulnerabilities, social tensions and political liabilities. Within a decade of its introduction, it was clear that it was not sustainable even in the short term. Most immediately, the labor practices that had been put into place threatened the survival of the workforce on which it depended. Predictably, the cotton regime met with rural resistance and precipitated peasant flight out of designated cotton zones.

Colonial cotton policy, as initially formulated, was harmful to longerterm Portuguese interests, at home and in Mozambique, in several other respects. First, it caused widespread land exhaustion and deforestation. Second, it engendered labor shortages in the plantation sector of the Mozambican economy. This was particularly the case during World War II when labor demand was intensifying in response to the rising price of tea, copra, sugar and sisal on the international market. Third, and especially in the postwar period, forced crop cultivation, like other forms of coerced labor, earned Portugal international opprobrium.53

Fourth, as metropolitan textile manufacturers were already discovering towards the end of the war, cheap colonial cotton did not necessarily make for high-quality fiber. Nor did it always flow northwards in sufficient quantities. For the sector of the textile industry bent on modernizing its operations in order to compete successfully in European markets, upgrading the quality of supplies and stabilizing their quantity became leading preoccupations in the postwar period. Securing a stable supply of higher quality colonial cotton, in turn, required stemming the flow of African migration out of cotton concession areas, limiting competing claims to labor in these areas, and eliminating sources of African discontent and resistance.54

Reforms and administrative controls

The first problem to draw a decisive response from the colonial state was inter-capitalist competition over African labor. In the early 1940s, the Governor-General of Mozambique took steps to tighten administrative controls on the work and movement of the African population. In 1942, he issued a circular mandating that, henceforth, every able-bodied African male between eighteen and fifty-five years old have in hand, and to show to the authorities on demand, an identity card (caderneta) on which was recorded his means of earning a living. African men who couldn’t prove that they did not support themselves and that they worked for wages at least six months out of the year were automatically branded as “vagrants” (vadios). As such, they were liable to be drafted as forced laborers on public works, colonial plantations or other enterprises. Among those exempted were cash croppers who cultivated a minimum surface area, an amount determined by the colony’s provincial governors.55

In the postwar period, the colonial state pursued a two-track strategy aimed at increasing the profitability of cotton production and diminishing

100 Precolonial and colonial Nampula state and company reliance on coerced labor. On the one hand, it sought to beef up the supervisory and enforcement capacity of local administrations and the cotton companies. On the other, it introduced a range of material incentives designed to enhance the appeal of cotton cultivation to at least a sector of the rural population. Several initiatives encompassed both objectives.

In the immediate wake of World War II, the production of household food crops became mandatory, as did smallholder crop rotation. The JEAC ordered the cotton companies to hold markets closer to peasant machambas.

56 And it conducted a territory-wide ecological survey to locate the most appropriate soils for cotton cultivation and to adjust the boundaries of the concession areas accordingly.57

In the late 1940s, the Cotton Board embarked on an ambitious exercise in social engineering geared to create a stratum of peasant producers who were committed to modern farming methods and who would be willing and able to specialize in cotton production to secure their livelihoods. Among other measures, this exercise involved the construction of new rural settlements, known as “cotton concentrations” (concentrações algodoeiras). The settlements were designed to agglomerate the rural population hitherto resident in dispersed homesteads along back country roads (picadas). The aim was fourfold: (1) to facilitate the provisioning of agricultural inputs, technical assistance, social services and access to water sources; (2) to promote crop rotation and scientific farming; (3) to ease the task of supervision; and (4) to reduce the distances to the cotton markets. Both in the 1940s and 1950s, fresh material and technical incentives were extended to Africans to take up cotton production as a means of social advancement and as a ticket to earning an exemption from forced labor requirements. In the 1950s, the colonial administration also initiated price reforms and established the Cotton Fund to finance the development of rural infrastructure.58

State-led cotton reforms in the 1940s and 1950s fell far short of their intended objectives. Force remained a salient and ubiquitous feature of cotton production.59 Rural food shortages, malnutrition and localized famines continued throughout the 1950s.60 Land and labor productivity rose but not at the rates necessary for Portugal’s expanding textile industry to achieve self-sufficiency in cotton and well below the colonial state’s own targets.61 By the end of the 1950s, only a paltry 15 percent of registered cotton growers were actually resident in the concentrações, and metropolitan textile mills continued to associate colonial cotton with erratic supplies of low quality.62

For producers, many reforms were double-edged. A greater portion of their working day and their crops came under government and company surveillance. They found themselves saddled with the task of building the concentrações and the access routes to them, work for which they received no pay. Peasants were often forced to leave their land to relocate to the concentrations. Many concentrações were built far from water sources or were other-

Precolonial and colonial Nampula 101

wise inappropriately sited. While some concentrações were endowed with schools and health facilities, such promised social benefits never materialized in the vast majority. Price increases for raw cotton and productivity gains often barely kept up with, or failed to keep pace with, cost of living rises, tax hikes and new tax demands imposed to sustain the Cotton Fund, which was primarily peasant-financed.63 In view of these drawbacks, the signal achievement of the cotton reforms of the 1940s and 1950s was arguably the exemption from forced crop cultivation they bestowed on the upwards of 200,000 smallholders as a result of adjustments to the boundaries of the concessionary zones.64

Nevertheless, the partial liberalization of the cotton regime was by no means inconsequential. Reforms set in motion two complementary trends, both of which grew progressively more accentuated throughout the postwar colonial period. The number of African cotton producers substantially declined; at the same time, some producers began to evince a tangible commitment to the crop, energetically taking advantage of the new, albeit limited, moral and material incentives on offer. If productivity gains failed to meet official expectations, they were not derisory. Moreover, the 1950s did not witness the huge fluctuations in hectarage and numbers of producers that had characterized the 1940s and, at the decade’s close, output per hectare was on par with the rest of Africa.65

The selective relaxation of administrative and police controls in the cotton sector did not, however, imply a global move away from coercion as a means of labor recruitment and retention. Indeed, the postwar period witnessed an intensification of forced labor in certain other sectors of the colonial economy, a trend that was in part a response to the efficacy of the cotton reforms themselves. For to the extent that these reforms succeeded in increasing the attractiveness of cotton production to African smallholders or simply involved them in cotton development projects, they cut into the supplies of labor available to European plantations and private farmers. The sisal industry in northern Mozambique was especially hard hit. Other developments accentuated regional and sector-specific labor shortages in the aftermath of World War II. Lisbon’s post-1945 white settlement policy raised demand for African labor on Portuguese farms. The initiation of major public works projects in Niassa, Cabo Delgado and Nampula at the same time had a similar effect. So did urban growth and the expansion of cashew production by northern peasant households in response to higher prices on offer by Asian traders. By the beginning of the 1950s, the convergence of all of these factors had precipitated a serious labor crisis in Mozambique’s three northern provinces.66

The colonial state responded by moving to consolidate and streamline the system of forced labor recruitment. Census-taking procedures were refined. In northern Mozambique régulos were enjoined to identify and bring to book “vadios,” “ociosos” (idlers) and deserters. They were also ordered to assist in elaborating a file on all able-bodied men within their jurisdiction. These

102 Precolonial and colonial Nampula measures demonstrably enhanced the government’s capacity to mobilize forced labor and helped it to slash desertion rates.67

Colonial cotton production after 1961

Two impetuses for change in the 1960s carried over from the immediate postwar period: the twin imperatives of muting international criticism of Portugal’s forced labor policies and of satisfying the increasingly exacting qualitative and quantitative demands of metropolitan textile mills competing in export markets.68 With the founding of Frelimo in 1962 and the advent of armed struggle two years later, cotton policy also came to be heavily influenced by the need to forestall the spread of nationalist sentiment and to check the liberation movement’s advance.69

The colonial state once again adopted a two-pronged strategy. It continued to encourage the formation of a class of African commodity producers specializing in cotton. At the same time, it began to foster the growth of settler agriculture. To a certain degree, the campaign to draw white farmers into cotton production was achieved at the direct expense of African cotton growers, including a smattering of newly emergent Mozambican capitalist farmers. Thus, the latter tactic partially undermined the former. The expansion of settler agriculture also resulted in the expropriation of African land and the transformation of evicted peasants into landless wage laborers on white farms.70

Despite the obvious tensions between the colonial state’s two objectives, its cotton policies registered some notable successes. Forced labor was officially abolished in 1961 although, in practice, compulsory crop cultivation remained a prominent feature of the rural landscape for about another decade.71 In order to keep producers and buyers in the cotton business, price increases were granted to both cotton growers and the concessionaires in 1961 and again two years later.72 With the official end of forced labor, JEAC ceased operations and the Cotton Institute (IAM) was formed in its stead. IAM was charged with supervising, assisting, regulating and developing the cotton sector in all of its aspects.73

Under the concession scheme, corporate profitability had depended on the availability of an effectively captive labor force within the concessions’ respective zones of operation. As soon as African labor was no longer legally bound to produce cotton, the companies’ ties to fixed zones of operation quickly turned into a severe economic liability. The colonial state decreed the abolition of the concession scheme in 1963 and proceeded to dismantle it over the course of the next three years. For the first time, labor, property and commodity markets in cotton-related economic activity became free of direct state and company control.74

The demise of the concession system cleared the way for the growth of Portuguese cotton farming. This was because settlers, either individually or organized in marketing cooperatives, could now gin and export their cotton

Precolonial and colonial Nampula 103 themselves, bypassing the companies’ operations entirely. The rise in world market prices in the early 1970s precipitated an influx of Portuguese immigrants into cotton production. Whereas settler farms accounted for a mere 1 percent of total cotton production in 1961, their share of global output rose steadily so that, by the 1970–1971 campaign, it had surpassed family sector output. By the end of the colonial period, the capitalist farming sector could claim credit for over 67 percent of total production.75

Reforms in the 1960s reinforced pre-existing trends in the family sector. The number of African cotton growers steadily fell throughout the decade, a decline which continued into the early 1970s. This drop was concurrent with the emergence of a tiny stratum of fully commercialized peasant cotton producers – an estimated 3 percent of registered growers – who hired tractors and applied insecticides on a regular basis and were beginning to register high levels of productivity.76

The cotton regime in northern Mozambique

From the outset, the Portuguese designated the north as the geographic hub of the cotton regime. Their rationale seems to have been three-fold. First, in the late 1930s the region was only nominally integrated into the emerging colonial economy. Second, precisely for this reason, the imposition of forced cotton production would not divert labor from other capitalist concerns as it would have elsewhere.77 The colony’s three southern provinces had already been transformed into a labor reserve for the white farms, sugar plantations and mining industry in South Africa. Large-scale plantations (sisal, sugar, tea, copra) and their labor requirements dominated the economy of the central provinces. Plantation owners and local administrators in this region struggled to stem migratory flows to the farms and mines of Southern Rhodesia and the plantations of Nyasaland. The aim was to bolster local labor supplies and to feed seasonal agricultural work forces with locally-produced peasant cash crops.78 In northern Mozambique, only the sisal plantations on the coast competed with the cotton concessionaries for African labor and these had gone into decline by the late 1930s. Third, the weather patterns and warm climate which prevailed in much of the north seemed to augur well for the intensive cultivation of the cotton.79

By the early 1940s, four companies had been granted huge concessions for peasant-grown cotton in the region. The largest cotton concessionary was the Mozambique Cotton Company (CAM) which was awarded twenty-three northern cotton zones, consisting of 100,000 hectares, and owned twelve ginning factories. By 1940, almost 350,000 northern producers, or almost 37 percent of the eligible population, had been inscribed into the system. In the 1949–1950 campaign, cotton growers in Nampula, Cabo Delgado and Niassa cultivated about 60 percent of the land devoted to cotton farming and produced 65 percent of Mozambique’s total cotton output.80

104 Precolonial and colonial Nampula

Husbands and wives in these provinces worked conjugal cotton plots together, a region-specific labor arrangement that was mandated by the colonial state. The tools smallholders used were rudimentary, consisting of axes, hoes, knives, machetes and shovels. The prevalence of tsetse fly strongly militated against the use of animal traction. Those who could mobilize extra-familial labor, such as traditional authorities, fared relatively well. Those who had to rely on their own labor and did not have access to off-farm income suffered most. Labor-deficient households, most notably those headed by women, figured prominently in this latter category.81

The dramatic expansion of labor demands in the north in the postWorld War II period had two divergent effects on patterns of smallholder production. To the extent that African men were forcibly removed from household agricultural production, the 1945–1961 period witnessed the progressive “feminization” of cotton production, a tendency which heightened peasant food insecurity and contributed to rural poverty.82 The decision of many men to migrate to Tanganyika in order to avoid forced labor and to take advantage of better employment conditions and producer prices had a similar effect.83 At the same time, given the dearth of more lucrative and/or more appealing local income-earning opportunities, a substantial number of African men decided to commit themselves to becoming state-recognized – and thus state-assisted – cotton producers in the (often misplaced) hope that in this manner they would enjoy full legal protection from forced labor. By the late 1950s, over 60 percent of the eligible male population in both Cabo Delgado and Nampula had opted for this status (agricultordo algodão), a figure which stands in marked contrast to the labor-exporting south where only 20 percent of eligible males chose to take this route.84

Nampula and the cotton regime

CAM enjoyed a virtual monopoly over peasant-produced cotton in Nampula. Only the littoral, where JFS, a smaller, family-run firm founded in Mozambique in 1897, enjoyed cotton concessionary rights, fell outside CAM’s vast dominion.85 Nampula quickly established itself as the leading zone of peasant cotton production. In the 1938–1939 campaign, growers in Nampula produced 7,433 tons of cotton, just over 50 percent of total colonial output. In 1960, Nampula’s family sector harvested 37,772 tons of cotton, or 27 percent of total production, a decade later. Its closest competitor was the Zambézian peasantry which produced 20 percent of total colonial cotton output that year.86 Mean productivity rates in the Nampulan family sector in the 1950s soared above those in the colony as a whole –although they failed to meet government targets.87

By the late 1940s, several regions of the province, particularly those with high population densities, were showing unmistakable signs of advanced cotton-induced soil erosion and degradation. Nampula’s paramountcy in the

Precolonial and colonial Nampula 105 cotton economy has also been directly implicated in the prevalence of food shortages and malnutrition in the province, as well as the frequency with which the region was afflicted by famine.88

Post-1961 trends towards capitalist cotton farming were especially pronounced in Nampula. The marked expansion of settler agriculture testified to the favorable climatic conditions in the region, as well as the ready availability of cheap African labor to provide a seasonal workforce. It also spoke to the colonial state’s growing security concerns. The Portuguese administration banked on a larger settler presence in rural Nampula to help stymie Frelimo’s military advance from Cabo Delgado.89

While all the cotton companies struggled to retain their profitability following the revocation of their monopsonistic status, CAM’s financial difficulties seem to have been particularly acute. The rise of settler agriculture in Nampula laid the basis for the development of an independent, whitedominated marketing network. Most Portuguese farmers had settled in the most productive cotton-growing areas and owned holdings that enjoyed ready access to transport and ginning facilities. They were thus well positioned to market not only their own yields directly to exporters but those produced by African smallholders as well.90

Peasant cotton production expanded during the early 1960s – in part in response to the increases in producer prices – and reached its zenith during the 1963–1964 campaign. At the end of that campaign smallholders in Nampula hauled 45,750 tons of cotton to market, or 38 percent of total colonial output. Thereafter, family sector cotton production in the province fell in both relative and absolute terms, a downward slide which became especially marked after 1970, just as whites were taking up cotton farming in the province on a large scale. During the last decade of colonial rule, the Nampulan family sector’s share fell from 37 percent of global cotton yields to just over 14 percent.91 Marketed family sector food production also declined.92

After 1962, the system of picadas and cotton concentrations gradually began to crumble.93 The process of disintegration accelerated at the end of the decade when the colonial state began to relax the regime of forced crop production. Among other things, the loosening of coercive controls aimed to free up African labor to service the expanding white farming sector.94 Many smallholders continued to produce cotton but on a smaller scale and often within the framework of unsupervised shifting agriculture. Others abandoned cotton cultivation entirely either out of lack of interest or because they were pushed off prime cotton land by encroaching white farmers. This period also witnessed a growing involvement of Africans, men in particular, in voluntary wage employment and, along with it, a movement away from the concentrations and picadas. 95 A significant portion of small-scale agricultural producers, however, remained clustered in or near the concentrations and picadas in order to protect their assets there – most notably their cashew trees, an important source of cash income.96

106 Precolonial and colonial Nampula

If the concentrations and picadas entered into decline as a base for smallholder agricultural production, they took on new importance as a counterinsurgency device during the war for independence. Whereas in Cabo Delgado, Niassa, Tete, Beira and Vila Pery (present-day Chimoio), the colonial state resorted to agglomerating peasants into fortified villages (aldeamentos),97 in Nampula, peasants who hitherto held out against relocating to the picadas during the 1950s, were now, in certain areas, forced to do so in order to enhance the state’s surveillance powers and to forestall guerrilla contact with the rural populace.98

As IAM increasingly turned its attention to developing the capitalist cotton farming sector, extension services to many rural areas were cut back; at the same time, however, levels of technical assistance were raised to certain growers with impressive records of cotton production. Consequently, this period witnessed the emergence of a small group of prosperous Mozambican capitalist farmers. Régulos, cabos and cipaios enjoyed strong representation in this group, as did African artisans and traders. These growers cultivated five or more hectares of cotton, owned or hired tractors, applied insecticides, employed seasonal labor, and enjoyed access to bank credit.99 While productivity in the smallholder cotton sector as a whole declined during the 1960s, land and labor productivity for certain sectors of the African population reached record highs.

Eráti District, c.1830–1974

Early settlement

Geffray conjectures that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the area which would come to constitute Eráti District was unpopulated. He postulates the existence at that time of “a vast political formation” in the Nampulan hinterland from which many of the chieftaincies that later inhabited the district would spring. This formation, which was located somewhere between the present-day towns of Alua and Monapo, consisted of hierarchically-arranged lineages whose social reproduction was founded on the integration of female captives as epotha and the production of epotha lineages-in-formation. The dominant clan was the Lapone and the dominant lineage was that of Muatuca.100

During the first half of the nineteenth century, probably sometime between 1830 and 1840, Muatuca’s polity was torn asunder by a barrage of Ngoni raids. The various lineage segments took flight, eventually regrouping along a series of more or less parallel west–east bands. These were situated along Yao caravan routes to coastal markets, most notably Pemba, Mecúfi, Memba and Mossuril.101 Geffray identifies two distinct types of social formation in Eráti that issued from the splintering of the Muatucadominated chieftaincy: (1) small, relatively decentralized chieftaincies of the southern part of the district, deriving from junior segments of Muatuca’s

Precolonial and colonial Nampula 107 lineage and probably certain of their former epotha; and (2) highly centralized, populous chieftaincies, among which that of Comala (Komala, Khomala) would eventually distinguish itself as the most powerful political grouping in the district. The members of Comala’s chieftaincy, also led by a junior segment of Muatuca’s lineage, would become known as the Errate after the Eráti mountains, in the western end of present-day Namapa, at the foot of which they originally settled.102

The precise provenance of another major political grouping in Eráti, the Chaka, is unknown.103 The Chaka seem to have settled in Eráti before Comala’s segment arrived, congregating near the southern banks of the Lúrio river at the foot of Chaka mountain from whence they derived their name. The Maravi, in their turn, arrived in the western part of Eráti shortly after Comala took up residence at the foot of the Eráti mountains. According to Tubruto, the leading Maravi chief in Namapa District in 1994, his forebears, led by Macherika, (Maxerica, Majirica, Majerica, Magerica), had begun their trek from the east bank of Lake Niassa at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in response to Ngoni attacks.104

At the time of Portuguese conquest during the first two decades of the twentieth century, these three groups appear to have settled in the areas which they currently occupy. By that stage, the Errate had relocated to the area east of the present-day town of Alua. The Maravi had settled in the area bounded by the present-day circles of 25 de Junho and Mucarara (Mukarara, Mukharara) near the town of Namirôa.105 And Chaka communities were still living at the foot of the Chaka mountains in and around the area of presentday Mirrote.106

A fourth cluster of people is dominated by the Mulima clan and led by Chief Namissier (Namissiere, Namicier). This group settled in the far northeast corner of present-day Namapa having arrived from Ancuabe, Cabo Delgado, after groups of Meto (Metto, Ametto, Medo) from the Montepuez, Balama and Namuno areas to the west migrated to Ancuabe.107 Present-day Namapa also hosts Meto communities which are currently concentrated in the western part of the district, mainly in Muanona Locality. It is not clear exactly when or why these communities settled there.108

If the Ngoni passage catalyzed the formation of some of the major chieftaincies in Eráti, and brought others to the district, the slave trade conditioned their subsequent development. Eráti was a major thoroughfare to slave markets on the coast. One caravan route traversed its southern end, passing through present-day Nacarôa District. Two others originated in Eráti.109

The chieftaincies in Eráti that were vanquished by the Portuguese, then, were less than a century old and, like other polities in Nampula, were heavily dependent on slave raiding, slaveholding and slave trading for their social reproduction. The Portuguese army established the first military posts in Eráti in 1906. In 1912 it founded military administrative divisions (commandos) in Namapa and Mirrote.110 The larger chieftaincies seem to have

108 Precolonial and colonial Nampula mounted the fiercest and most effective resistance to colonial occupation.111 Final defeat only came when the Portuguese, with British assistance, drove invading German troops out of the district, which they had briefly occupied during World War I, and back across the (then disputed) Tanganyika–Mozambique border. In the war’s aftermath the Portuguese charged that local chiefs had actively and willingly collaborated with German forces. Such allegations provided the pretext for unleashing a campaign of widespread and intense repression against the population of the area in retaliation.112

After conquest

In the 1920s, the colonial administration designated Eráti a “native reserve.” It appears that the administration’s main aim was to avert the unregulated alienation of African land to white colonos, as had already occurred in some areas closer to the Nampula littoral, such as Mossuril.113 Eráti appears to have retained this status until after the legal abolition of the forced labor regime in 1961.114 The 1918–1929 period witnessed “permanent recourse to forced labor” as men and women were press-ganged into constructing roads in the interior of the newly formed district.115 In the ensuing decades Eráti, as one of Nampula’s most densely populated districts, remained an important source of contract labor for colonial enterprises within and beyond the district’s borders.116 However, after the imposition of forced crop cultivation, the district’s primary distinction was its reputation as one of the colony’s leading sources of peasant-produced cotton.

By the early 1930s, the Société Colonial Luso-Luxembourgeoise (or GRANDUCOL), a company founded by Belgian and Luxemburgian capital in 1929, had begun to supervise an “experimental field” near the Lúrio river. The plot was situated just outside of Namapa Center, where GRANDUCOL was granted concessionary rights to build a cotton ginning facility in 1930.117 At the same time, the company began to enforce smallholder cotton cultivation.118

GRANDUCOL was under-capitalized and under-equipped. To make matters worse, its staff was both under-qualified and too thin on the ground. The company predicated its production strategy almost exclusively on the control and disciplining of labor. In the event, it rapidly acquired a reputation for brutality and myopic agronomic practices. GRANDUCOL also quickly racked up a large debt, as a result of which, by the late 1930s, it had become easy prey to takeover bids by Salazarian nationalists. These bids received an unexpected boost when the Nazi occupation of Luxemburg during World War II raised the specter that GRANDUCOL would be expropriated by local German interests. It was against this backdrop that CAM, an eminently Portuguese company, absorbed GRANDUCOL in 1942.119

Eráti remained under CAM’s zone of influence until the dismantlement of the concessionary scheme in the 1960s. After that, the concessionary giant

Precolonial and colonial Nampula 109 retained ownership of the cotton ginnery in Namapa Center and remained a leading purchaser of peasant cotton until it was nationalized by the Frelimo government after independence. CAM suffered from many of the same technical deficiencies, logistical difficulties and personnel constraints that had bedeviled GRANDUCOL, and its labor practices were no different from those of its predecessor.120

In the early 1940s, Eráti quickly established itself as a prime source of smallholder-produced cotton. With Mogovolas, it accounted for about 19 percent of total cotton output in Mozambique at this time. Both districts were densely populated, both benefited from reasonable communications and transport, and both were situated in one of the two swaths of land in the colony that were highly propitious for cotton farming.121 Some twenty years later, Eráti smallholders still accounted for nearly 20 percent of all family sector cotton production in Nampula, the equivalent of 6 percent of the colony’s total cotton output.122

Peasant cotton earnings in the district were higher than average. Eráti was one of the few administrative divisions in cotton concessionary zones where, in 1941, cotton money exceeded smallholder fiscal obligations. After having paid their taxes, peasant households still retained a good 47 percent of the cash earned through cotton sales.123 Nevertheless, Eráti was hardly a picture of peasant prosperity or even well-being. As in other densely populated regions within cotton zones, the district witnessed a run of cottoninduced food shortages and famines in the 1940s.124 By the 1950s, Eráti was the site of advanced soil exhaustion and pest infestation. Correspondingly, land productivity fell precipitously. Tendencies toward land degradation continued, seemingly unabated, well into the 1960s.125

As elsewhere in the colony, the colonial administration’s campaign to regroup smallholders along the picadas and concentrações ran up against both serious financial constraints and peasant resistance. In many areas the picadas were built but smallholders continued to reside in their dispersed homesteads. Natural calamity gave an unexpected boost to the local implementation of state resettlement policies. In 1956, a powerful cyclone hit the eastern part of the district, causing serious crop and property damage. Local company and government personnel saw in the heightened vulnerability of many smallholders a prime opportunity to advance their campaign to force the transition from shifting cultivation to sedentary agriculture. Foodstuffs and cassava plants were distributed to the affected population on the condition that they reconstruct their huts along the picadas. Relief operations occasioned the first of two massive cashew tree planting campaigns, both of which were undertaken with a view to introducing fixed assets and private property rights.126

The spread of cashew trees, a much less labor-demanding and more lucrative source of income than cotton, engendered far-reaching socio-economic transformation in the district. By the 1960s, cashew nuts sales had begun to raise rural household earnings substantially. On the eve of independence, by which

110 Precolonial and colonial Nampula time the cashew trees had reached maturity, receipts from such sales exceeded those from cotton and accounted for nearly 50 percent of rural incomes.127

Other developments boosted rural incomes and expanded economic opportunities during the last two decades of colonial rule. The rural marketing network expanded significantly in the 1950s and early 1960s.128 The 1960s witnessed price rises for agricultural commodities, including cotton and peanuts, which outpaced tax hikes.129 In addition, a provincial government initiative, dating from the 1950s, to expand small livestock breeding by Africans began to bear fruit in the 1960s, creating new incomegenerating opportunities and bases for rural accumulation.130

The development and spread of rural trading activity were closely associated with the growth of the settler population.131 As elsewhere in Africa, Portuguese nationals who took up residence in Eráti gravitated toward trade and, by the mid-1960s, most shops were Portuguese-owned.132 The few white land holdings, where they existed, were large, and European settlement entailed the eviction of Africans from their homes.133

Forced removals of smallholders were also occasioned by stepped-up guerrilla activity in Cabo Delgado. Many rural dwellers who had hitherto remained in their dispersed homesteads were compelled by the colonial state to relocate to the district’s network of picadas, often to areas that were far from water sources or where arable land was in short supply or both.134 In addition, starting from the mid-1960s many state-recognized traditional leaders – imposed or otherwise – were detained, accused of contacting and/or aiding Frelimo guerrillas.135 Some died in prison; others never returned and were believed by local residents to have been tortured and killed, as was the case with many imprisoned chiefs throughout the colony.136 Local Islamic leaders were treated in a not dissimilar manner.137 As a district that borders Cabo Delgado, Eráti also hosted two army compounds, which were set up in the towns of Namapa and Nacarôa, respectively.138

It is unclear what contact, if any, Frelimo had with the residents of Eráti. My own interviews did not yield any evidence that local denizens either communicated or collaborated with the nationalist movement. The vast majority of my informants claimed that while they knew there was fighting going on in Cabo Delgado and while they were bombarded with antiFrelimo Portuguese propaganda, until independence they remained in the dark about Frelimo’s motivations or political objectives.139 Oral testimony suggests that Portugal’s “psycho-social action” programs were by no means ineffective: apparently in response to official propaganda, locals just to the west of the town of Namapa reportedly captured and tortured a couple of Frelimo guerrillas who had crossed the Lúrio.140

Smallholders and agrarian change

Geffray’s research on colonial Eráti analyzes the effects of agrarian change on “family” institutions in the district. His findings highlight the internal ten-

Precolonial and colonial Nampula 111 sions and structural instability of lineage social relations on the eve of independence and the ways in which both of these characteristics helped shape and constrain local processes of state formation in the postindependence period. They provide an important backdrop to the analysis I undertake in subsequent chapters. In what follows, I recapitulate the main lineaments of Geffray’s argument as they bear on my own.141

Before the peasant food economy had been subordinated to cotton production, marriage had been the privileged institution in a complex of mutual social dependencies and reciprocal claims characterizing the predominantly matrilineal peasantry. Several lineage segments, each filiated with different clans, inhabited a common matrimonial area, or mutthetthe (pl. mitthetthe), which encompassed about 2,500 hectares and was home to between 500 to 1,000 inhabitants. People married outside of their clan and their own lineage segment but within the confines of their mutthetthe.

Clearly demarcated by well-known natural boundaries, each mutthetthe was headed by a humu-chefe de terra, chief of the lineage segment considered the first to arrive in the area. Within the mutthetthe, each lineage segment, also headed by a humu-chefe de terra (hereafter referred to as humu; pl. mahumu), maintained several bilateral matrimonial ties with other lineage segments occupying territory contiguous to its own. Lineage segments were, in turn, divided into smaller groupings, or sub-segments, which fell under the political authority of mi-jeio (sing. n’jeio) and apwya (apia), representing the oldest males and females of their generation within their respective subsegments. In principle, sub-segments maintained a single bilateral matrimonial alliance with a counterpart in a neighboring segment.

A young man gained access to land and granaries via matrilocal marriage typically negotiated between his own humu and that of the allied group. Sealing a marriage deal required, among other things, the young man’s satisfactory performance of agricultural and domestic tasks in the service of his classificatory “in-laws” – that is, the ensemble of senior members of the allied segment. Economic dependence and labor obligations of male dependants persisted until their mid-40s, by which time their own daughters had reached marrying age. Access to money and commodities, in turn, was controlled and administered by the young man’s humu. The production of cash crops (sesame, groundnuts, peanuts) was overseen by the n’jeio of the male dependant and most of the work was done on the land of the n’jeio’s household. During the off-peak agricultural period in July and August, a caravan transported these crops, along with forest products such as wax, honey and wild rubber, to coastal trading posts where they were sold for iron hand tools, cloth and some money. These purchases were then transported back to the lineage territory and stored at the residence of the humu. The humu proceeded to preside over the transfer of cloth through the intermediary of young male dependants to the women of the allied lineage who these men had married. Thus, whereas men were dependent on women for access to granaries, women were dependent on men for access to commodities, most notably cloth.

112 Precolonial and colonial Nampula

The institutionalization of the forced cotton regime in the 1940s precipitated tendencies toward economic individuation, especially among male youth, and thus posed a serious challenge to the integrity of the prevailing structure of authority. First and foremost, the forced cotton regime modified channels of access to land and cash. In principle, eighteen was the minimum age at which men were obligated to grow cotton. In practice, boys as young as fifteen years old were given a parcel of land for cotton production. They thus began their productive lives six to seven years earlier than had their fathers and uncles. The forced lowering of the productive age of male social juniors presented an unprecedented challenge to the hitherto exclusive authority of lineage notables as land allocators. Moreover, individual remuneration to producers for crop sales at the cotton markets paved the way for decentralized channels of access to the market.

Nonetheless, the emancipatory potential for young men of the new conditions of production and resource access remained largely unexploited. Up until the 1950s, the meagerness of cotton earnings, combined with exacting tax obligations and the remoteness of markets, tended to perpetuate the centralized management and expenditure of cash in the hands of the mahumu. With a view to bolstering this tendency and thus frustrating attempts by male youth to reduce their material dependence on kin and “in-laws,” elders and notables lowered the average age of male initiation rites and marriage. Their aim was to ensure that cotton-related economic activity would coincide with the institutional framework where, historically, claims on male youth labor were at their strongest. That the machambas of the mi-jeio generated the highest cotton yields testifies to the strategy’s success.

The apparent structural stability of lineage power, however, proved to be short-lived. The generalization of cashew tree stands throughout the district, the expansion of the rural marketing network, the development of small livestock breeding and rising rural incomes in the 1950s and 1960s decentralized male access to land, money and commodities. Revived tendencies toward economic individuation among young men heralded the demise of marriage as the guarantor of lineage authority and control. In particular, the uncoupling of access to land from conjugal relationships paved the way for men to withhold labor services from “in-laws.”

The social consequences of changing conditions of access were manifold and far-reaching. The 1960s brought the dissolution of bilateral matrimonial alliances and, thus, the structural instability of marriage. While mi-jeio continued to marry in conformity with already established alliance patterns, their male dependants did not necessarily follow suit. And, if they did, they were more likely to opt out of marriages that subjected them to what were increasingly perceived as the unreasonable labor demands and dictatorial impulses of their wives’ kin. At the same time, aggrieved wives and their relatives were just as likely to send labor-boycotting or otherwise errant “sons-in-law” packing. Divorce became widespread.

Precolonial and colonial Nampula 113

This period also witnessed an increased incidence of patrilineal inheritance patterns and of virilocal and polygynous marriages, prerogatives hitherto enjoyed almost exclusively by chiefs and the husbands in “slave” marriages. The assertion of patriliny and patrilineal polygyny was most pronounced among better-off rural dwellers such as cipaios, local cotton foremen, wage workers at the cotton ginnery in the district capital, itinerant traders and artisans.

In order to offset labor shortfalls attendant upon the enfeeblement of bride service, social seniors leaned more heavily on adolescent marriage as a source of docile, exploitable labor, further lowering the age at which this would occur. Nevertheless, many rural households, particularly those at either end of the age spectrum, came up shorthanded. Labor-deficient households sought recourse in o’lola, a longstanding local practice involving the exchange of labor for food. Whereas in the past such exchanges had occurred only in the wake of poor harvests, they now became an annual occurrence, a development which marked the “destruction of domestic organization and fuel[ed] a process of social differentiation.”142

Despite the erosion of the material basis of the mutthetthe and the resultant upheavals in its internal social relations, Geffray maintains in his subsequent work, undertaken in collaboration with Mögens Pedersen, that this territorial unit persisted as a matrimonial area and as a unifying principle of rural sociopolitical organization.143 The researchers argue that, as a rule, people in Eráti remained within their respective matrimonial areas even after they were relocated to the picadas in the 1950s and 1960s – although this wasn’t always the case elsewhere.144 Geffray and Pedersen also insist on the centrality of the mutthetthe and its leading representative, the humu, to processes of rural differentiation and political polarization during the first decade of independence. Villagization, and the political and resource competition it engendered, would pit matrimonial groupings against one another and give rise to new, much more binding, structures of dominance among them.

However, even if young people continued, in the main, to marry within their own matrimonial area, one can’t help but wonder if this tendency says less about the ongoing internal coherence of the mutthetthe than it does about the pressures of the colonial state’s political and administrative controls bearing down on it. In particular, tight restrictions on migration out of the district seem to have lent to lineage organization the outward appearance of political and territorial integrity which, in fact, it had long ago ceased to possess. As elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, “apparent continuities in formal institutions disguised significant shifts in the content of the relation of social age”145 – a relation that, according to Geffray and Pedersen, stood at the heart of chiefly and lineage authority. Evidence of such shifts in Eráti calls into question the extent to which “the colonial pattern of forced peasant cash cropping in Nampula, and elsewhere in the north of the country,” helped to preserve the legitimacy of precolonial-derived political institutions, such as chieftaincy, especially in the late colonial period.146

114 Precolonial and colonial Nampula

Decolonization starkly illuminated the sharp incongruity between the form and content of lineage organization. The instant evaporation of colonial-imposed restrictions on population movement on the morrow of independence sparked a dramatic out-migration of male youth from the rural areas of Eráti to provincial urban centers in search of job opportunities, social mobility and adventure. In this respect, Eráti’s experience was typical of that of the province as a whole.

3 From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production,” 1975–1987

This chapter chronicles the evolution of the relationship between official and traditional authority in Nampula Province between independence and the 1986–1987 agricultural campaign. It opens with the new government’s withdrawal of chiefs’ statutory privileges and prerogatives. It closes with the minting of former régulos as “chiefs of production” in various districts, a designation that signaled that the chiefs in question had resumed their colonial-era functions as overseers of rural production. My discussion is divided into three parts. Part one describes key elements of the context in which the new government attempted to effect a clean and decisive break with the legacy of indirect rule. Focusing on Eráti, it details the disruptions precipitated by decolonization, the effects of the rural goods famine and the experience of collective agriculture prior to the outbreak of war in the district. It concludes with a brief discussion of the war’s influence on one of the most controversial aspects of Frelimo’s strategy for rural transformation: the communal village program.

Part two examines local processes of state formation and socio-political change in Eráti. It documents instances of continuity between late colonial rural power structures and those that prevailed at the height of Frelimo’s efforts to revolutionize social relations in the hinterland. My aim is to provide a counterpoint to accounts which turn on the often unstated presumption that the post-independence regime, at least at the outset, succeeded in standing traditional hierarchies on their head.

As we saw in Chapter 1, this presumption was shared by Frelimo’s sympathizers and the revisionists. At one end of the spectrum, Geffray has argued that the growing visibility and importance of chiefs on the rural political landscape from the mid-1980s onwards bore testimony to a popular backlash against Frelimo’s ill-conceived attempt to circumvent chieftaincy. Geffray found that, in the case of Eráti, this backlash was spearheaded by those chieftaincies with the loosest of historical ties to state institutions and the cash nexus and thus, he implies, the most steeped in tradition. According to Geffray, the most “marginalized” chieftaincies in the district targeted not only the Frelimo state and its grassroots representatives. They also vented their rage at their better-off neighbors: chieftaincies that had derived

116 From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” more advantages from colonial rule and that were thus strategically positioned to extract greater benefits from the independent state. The political effects of this rural backlash were dramatically amplified by Renamo’s politico-military action.1

At the other end of the spectrum, Saul and Otto Roesch have suggested the “retreat to tradition,” discernible from the late 1980s, constituted a logical response on the part of both the peasantry and the state in the face of deepening adversity. The early collapse of rural markets initiated this retreat on the part of smallholders, whose access to the modernizing influence of commodities was increasingly restricted. Two externally-driven assaults on the Frelimo state in the 1980s accelerated the tendency to revert to the late colonial status quo: (1) Renamo’s foreign-backed, anti-popular war; and (2) an IMF-imposed structural adjustment program. The combined impact of these assaults was to radically reduce the government’s profile in the rural areas and thus to deprive smallholders of contact with modern institutions.2 Both Geffray’s perspective and the perspective put forth by Roesch and Saul falsely presuppose an inverse relationship between the relative resilience of traditional allegiances and practices, on the one hand, and the degree of market involvement and/or geographic and social proximity to state power, on the other.

The one sustained, in-depth study on the subject discloses a markedly different dynamic and therefore its findings are rehearsed here.3 It is coauthored by one of the leading protagonists of the above-mentioned debate. On the basis of their field research in Eráti, Geffray and Pedersen show that the reassertion of lineage power, the social and political foundation of chieftaincies, was already underway by the time the district became engulfed in war and well before the combined impact of destabilization and IMF strictures had taken their toll, rolling back state institutions and programs. The fruit of a complex and unorchestrated interaction of economic, social and political factors, this outcome provided the basis for a political alliance between the local administration and some former régulos, as my own field research shows.

In highlighting continuities in rural asymmetries of power, I am not calling into question the veracity of accounts that detail instances in which colonial régulos and members of their inner circles were hectored and humiliated by former subjects who secured appointments as local Frelimo party secretaries or by higher-level state and party authorities. Such incidents did indeed occur – although, as others have argued and as Geffray’s earlier work suggests, this was often the case because the Frelimo slogan “down with [abaixo] mpéwé [paramount chiefs; sing. mapéwé]” resonated, at least initially, with significant portions of the population.4 But even as such incidents were occurring, there were instances in which the official policy of abaixo coexisted with royal rule by other means. The latter half of part two shows that this is the case.

Indeed, so prevalent was the latter arrangement, both in Eráti and elsewhere, as to prompt one to question a central assertion made by some advo-

From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” 117 cates of some sort of return to chiefly rule: namely, that the majority of Frelimo secretaries were epotha, the descendants of slaves in precolonial chieftaincies, and, as such, were bent on using their newfound power to settle longstanding personal scores with their former masters. The evidence of continuity in structures of authority and power provides the empirical basis for querying the extent to which the “retreat to tradition” in the late 1980s and the early 1990s marked a radical departure from previous state practice. It also serves as a starting point for interrogating why changes in official dealings with rural political authority were depicted by state and party representatives, both in Nampula and further afield, as if they represented a veritable volte face in ruling practice and, as such, as a sure-fire antidote to the progressive erosion of Frelimo’s authority and legitimacy.

In part three, the focus of investigation shifts to ruling discourses and practices at the provincial level. I contextualize and, in doing so, interweave two contemporaneous, apparently discrete developments, both of which came to scholarly attention by way of the revisionist school: on the one hand, the most comprehensive, concerted and unabashed attempt on the part of a provincial government to recreate the most salient aspects of the colonial labor regime; on the other, the provincial government’s enlistment of former régulos as rural foremen.5 In the course of discussion, I explore the structural and conjunctural factors that made Nampula the site of these particular initiatives.

Both Cahen and Geffray have cogently argued that the provincial governor’s call, in 1986, to rural dwellers to take their leave of the communal villages and to repopulate the network of picadas was tantamount to official recognition that the aldeias constituted one of the leading impediments to bringing a collapsing economy back from the abyss – one which, unlike the war itself, the government could easily remove by taking unilateral action. While Geffray has emphasized the emancipatory dimension of the governor’s action, Cahen has rightly insisted that any such assessment must be tempered by a recognition that the government’s intent was not wholly benign: like their Portuguese predecessors, the Nampulan authorities’ principal objective was to squeeze agricultural surpluses, notably export crops, out of rural producers with greater efficiency and by force if need be. In directing rural dwellers to the picadas, the government was promoting a settlement pattern which, like the aldeias, was predicated on coercion and violence.

Cahen’s analysis provides the indispensable backdrop to the appearance of chiefs of production on the Nampulan scene, one that is absent from Geffray’s account on the subject. Geffray argues that the term was a facesaving euphemism opportunistically coined by officialdom to eclipse the de facto return to chiefly rule. This reversion, he contends, was forced by – and shamefacedly mimicked – Renamo’s own successful and widely acclaimed cultivation of traditional leaders as local allies. There is no question that Renamo’s strategy of rural mobilization exerted considerable influence over

118 From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” state decision-making and practice during this period. It is, however, far from clear that rebel appeals and alliances were the only, or the decisive, determinant in the government’s embrace of former régulos as intermediaries in outgrower production schemes. Chiefs of production were, I show, just one feature of the general movement to revive Portuguese labor practice and their appearance is therefore only fully intelligible when squarely situated within this larger framework. The revival of Portuguese labor arrangements bore testimony to the provincial government’s attempt to intervene in and shape wartime rural social relations in response to the imperatives posed by economic crisis and military destabilization. Furthermore, the state’s capacity for intervention and innovation at this stage, while admittedly limited, was by no means inconsequential. At least this was the case when and where government authorities worked in conjunction with private capital and especially where this joint effort was bolstered by a timely influx of international assistance.

Geffray’s critique of ruling representations of the communal village program is, however, crucial to understanding the ideological practices that helped enable and justify the return to Portuguese precedent. Geffray has argued that the aldeias were an essential plank in Frelimo’s program to remake the rural populace in its own urban, cosmopolitan image. On this logic, the leadership could publicly acknowledge the failure of the village project only at the risk of calling into question the suitability of that image as a model for rural development and, along with it, the legitimacy of its own stewardship. Consequently, the village project, and the political principles underpinning it, not only enjoyed full immunity from officially-sponsored public criticism but continued to be vigorously extolled long after communal villages themselves had been abandoned as sites of development interventions and even, as the war dragged on, as instruments of rural control. Behind Frelimo’s refusal to admit out loud that it had forsaken its vision of rural collectivity lurked a second unspoken motive: the political need felt by the ruling party to deny the efficacy of Renamo’s destabilization campaign.

Two points bear mention here. First, one need not subscribe wholesale to Geffray’s explanation of the reasons for vanguardist taboos to note that the village project remained exempt from open criticism long after that project had effectively been aborted. One consequence of this immunity, I show, was that the extent to which the government-imposed habitat had idled rural producers by removing them from productive resources – notably land and trees crops – was conveniently glossed. Officialdom’s studied refusal to acknowledge the disabling economic effects of villagization apparently confirmed the validity of the dual economy thesis. As we have seen, this thesis held that, in the absence of major technological advance, appreciable quantities of agricultural surpluses could only be extracted from the family sector on a regular basis through the application of force. The apparent confirmation of the dualist position helped to justify and legitimate the explicit sanctioning of coercive labor practices in the mid-1980s by leading government officials.

From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” 119

The second point concerns the way in which state and party officials in Nampula opted to portray the impact of Renamo’s politico-military strategy on ruling practice. My findings corroborate Geffray’s contention that official discourses in the province strongly tended to discount and/or distort the rebels’ influence on the state’s rural resettlement policy. This was the case with respect to the government’s abandonment of state-sanctioned aldeias as a global counter-insurgency device in the 1986–1987 period, as Geffray has shown. It was equally true of the manner in which Frelimo officials depicted the purpose and pace of wartime villagization in the mid-1980s. In this respect, the evidence examined below contradicts the argument that, with the onset of defensive villagization, there ceased to exist “any pretense of social and political transformation.”6 On the contrary, it shows that, in Nampula at least, government authorities justified the concentration of the population in state-controlled settlements in the name of socialist transition both in its public utterances directed at the rural population and in internal documentation for bureaucratic consumption. Such ideological practices no doubt contributed to the gathering crisis of state legitimacy.7 They also helped to enable the production of “codes of oblivion” that were so prominent a feature of statist historical narratives in the 1990s, the subject of subsequent chapters.

The context

Settler flight during the first years of independence spelled the breakdown of the urban–rural trading network that had linked smallholders in far-flung and often remote settlements to wider regional and national markets. In outlying areas, such as Eráti, abandoned settler lands often formed the site of experiments in collective agricultural production. Elsewhere in the province, as in the rest of the country, Portuguese farms that were congregated near urban markets, commercial centers or ginning factories were incorporated into the state farm sector.8 In both cases, the land claims of African smallholders who had been forcibly relocated in order to make way for white settlement during the colonial period were, more often than not, disregarded.9

The disruptions engendered by decolonization were especially acute in the cotton sector. Virtually all the Portuguese technicians and administrators who had occupied high-ranking posts in IAM at both national and provincial level took their leave, “either destroying records or taking information with them.” Settler farmers abandoned the country without paying off the debts they owed to IAM, further enfeebling the institute. Both the cotton companies and IAM had contracted settler farmers, traders and truckers for transport services and the abrupt halt of these services left cotton field operations high and dry.10

IAM was disbanded shortly after independence and its functions and facilities were initially taken over by a state-owned firm. Formed as an emergency measure to cope with the crisis in rural marketing, the company was

120 From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” largely comprised of personnel who were seriously under-qualified for the positions they staffed. Neither it nor its various successor bodies were equal to the task of tackling the organizational, logistical and technical challenges they confronted.11

The upshot was that family sector cotton producers faced a series of headaches, which, taken together, constituted a strong disincentive to producing cotton. This was the case even though, in some quarters, the crop continued to carry appeal as a reliable source of income with (theoretically, at least) a guaranteed market. As often as not, seed was distributed late, and at times was either sterile or infected. Tractors and pesticides failed to arrive at the designated time, further throwing off production schedules and lowering the quantity and quality of yields. Delays in marketing meant that harvests, which are stored in open-air bins, were exposed to damage from rain. At times, transport never arrived and harvests simply went unsold. Cotton producers who were fortunate enough to sell their crops were often left waiting days on end for payment.12

CAM was nationalized in 1977. The company had been losing money ever since the early 1960s. Corporate losses were in part the result of steadily rising producer prices. They also reflected the competition CAM had begun to encounter from capitalist farmers and independent traders in the marketing and ginning of cotton within the company’s traditional zones of influence.13 In 1980, several of CAM’s direct production and ginning facilities, along with its family sector operations, were regrouped to form the State Cotton Farm of Nampula (EEAN). Like other state agro-enterprises, EEAN was beset by serious managerial problems and soon proved to be a costly, highly unprofitable enterprise.14

From the outset, EEAN’s direct production units, like those of its counterparts, were hamstrung by chronic shortages of seasonal farmhand labor. These shortages, whose severity increased in the first half of the 1980s, in part reflected the demise of forced contract labor. They were also due to general inefficiency, low pay, poor living conditions and the dearth of goods at company stores to spend wages on. In 1986 the Mozambican government delegated many of the company’s managerial responsibilities, including those related to its family sector operations in Namapa, to JFS, which had survived the early wave of post-independence nationalizations.15 The government’s decision was prompted by EEAN’s dismal track record. It was also in keeping with Fourth Congress decisions to decentralize and streamline staterun enterprises.

Independence brought the final dissolution of colonial political and administrative controls which had become progressively more attenuated since the formal abolition of forced labor in 1961. Many smallholders in Eráti, as throughout Mozambique, celebrated the demise of institutionalized compulsory labor by abandoning cotton production.16 National family sector cotton production fell from about 125,089 tons in 1967 to about 23,736 tons in 1976.17 During the same period, this sector’s total output in

From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” 121 Nampula Province dropped from about 42,481 tons to about 5,409 tons. While figures for Eráti are not available for this period, in one locality, Alua, total output was a mere 265 tons in 1976, less than 8 percent of 1967 yields.18 According to Marc Wuyts, at the national level subsistence production rose by 12 percent in 1975, an increase which reflected both the collapse of rural trade and the redirection of smallholder energies from cash crop production to building up food reserves.19

For most Nampulan smallholders, respite from the crop most intimately associated with the colonial labor regime proved to be short-lived. The second half of the 1970s witnessed the slow, if unsteady and uneven, expansion of family sector cotton production as rural dwellers became increasingly hard-pressed for cash to meet basic needs. By the early 1980s, rekindled peasant commitment to cotton would be dimmed by general sectoral disarray, worsening shortages of goods and stepped up villagization, which seriously jeopardized rural livelihoods and survival strategies.

Initially, shortages of goods had been engendered by the collapse of the rural trading network. By the end of the decade, however, the burden of blame for the rural goods famine lay squarely on Frelimo’s investment priorities.20 Smallholders at this point had precious little to produce for (e.g. material incentives) or with (e.g. agricultural tools in decent condition). Increasingly, they also had next to nothing to produce in and this, too, was having an adverse effect on household farming. By the end of the 1970s, articles of clothing had become so scarce that women in Eráti were sharing capulanas, cloths that often serve as wrap-around skirts, in order to leave their homes.21 In 1983, the district administration reported that the existence of many “people that don’t leave their houses because they don’t possess clothing, not even ... a sack” was likely to result in smaller harvests.22

By this time, many back roads had become impassable after not having been maintained for several years, a development which further curtailed rural access to markets.23 Throughout the province, food-deficit, cashstrapped households resorted to eating inadequately processed bitter cassava in a desperate bid to stave off hunger or worse. An epidemic of wasting paralysis ensued.24 Declining terms of trade for small-scale producers, a trend that predated independence, aggravated rural poverty, malnutrition and the crisis of production.25

Post-independence developments made a mockery of Frelimo promises that national liberation would put an end to hunger and nudity. They also created a situation in which people who controlled local circuits of exchange and mechanisms of distribution, official or otherwise, wielded political power. By 1979, both the goods famine and deteriorating terms of trade were well on their way to becoming political issues of no mean importance and were repeatedly raised as major preoccupations in public meetings.26

122 From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production”

Collective agriculture

The vast majority of post-independence agricultural producer cooperatives languished for want of development resources and institutional support. According to government estimates from 1981, the cooperative sector as a whole accounted for a paltry 0.3 percent of national agricultural output.27 As elsewhere in the country, production techniques in collective undertakings in Eráti did not differ in the main from those deployed on household machambas. The one notable exception was the use of tractors to prepare fields. In cooperative ventures, the rotation of land and crops and the burning of cotton plants, a standard pest control measure, were not always practiced. Cooperative fields soon showed signs of soil degradation, and land and labor productivity were lower than on family machambas. 28

As in other provinces, control and management of planning, production and agricultural yields in Nampula were centralized in the hands of the Provincial Directorate of Agriculture (DPA) and the district administration. Production targets were set without taking into account the availability, capacity or predisposition of local labor. They also bore little relation to the state’s capacity to render material and technical assistance in a timely and efficient manner. Targets were handed down from on high without comment or explanation.29

Cooperators and participants in collective machambas – communal fields seen as pre-cooperatives – had little to no information about production yields. This and the tenuous relationship between individual earnings and participation rates bred suspicions among the membership of collective ventures that they were being shortchanged, either by cooperative officeholders or by higher-level authorities.30 While it is true that cooperative leaders and government authorities in Nampula, as elsewhere, embezzled funds,31 some cooperatives, notably those whose early promise earned them inclusion in “pilot” programs, were heavily subsidized by the state and soon ran into debt. In 1985, agricultural cooperatives in Eráti were reportedly over US$20,000, in the red.32

Unlike their less fortunate counterparts, cooperatives that were included in pilot programs of various stripes did not suffer for want of material assistance. Rather, their development was stymied by excessive levels of state material support, as a result of which their memberships quickly came to evince a “passive dependence” on the state. Such attitudes were fostered by the fact that agricultural inputs took precedence over technical or organizational training. While cooperatives in pilot programs achieved higher levels of productivity per hectare than other cooperatives, they also often registered higher costs per unit of production. The agricultural cooperative in Samora Machel Communal Village, Eráti District, which was touted as a national success story in 1977 when it earned 1,000 contos (about US$31,000), fell casualty to all of the problems described above. Interest in collective production in the aldeia quickly waned and the cooperative folded during the 1983–1984 campaign.33

From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” 123

By the late 1970s the main draw of joining a collective machamba or cooperative was the access membership provided to increasingly scarce commodities. Such membership, however notional, conferred the right to purchase dwindling stocks in consumer cooperatives, by that time the main legal rural outlet for state-distributed consumer goods and agricultural implements in the province.34

Perhaps the most salient characteristic of collective agriculture was just how tangential it was to the post-independence experience of the overwhelming majority of rural dwellers. Eráti hosted only four cooperatives. In 1982 total membership stood at 652 people.35 By 1981, virtually all collective machambas had disappeared.36 In the province there were 183 collective machambas and thirty-nine cooperatives during the 1980–1981 campaign. The provincial government estimated that, at the time, 11,000 people were involved in some form of collective agriculture, or about 0.46 percent of the provincial population.37 During the 1983–1984 campaign, total membership in the cooperative movement stood at about 5,232 people.38

Communal villages

The Frelimo institution to which rural dwellers had the greatest degree of exposure were the aldeias comunais. Many communal villages in Eráti, as throughout Mozambique, were inappropriately sited.39 Almost all, both in and beyond the district, were bereft of a viable economic base. In Eráti, as elsewhere, the aldeias soon became severely under-provisioned and overcrowded “collective residential ... units.”40 Not surprisingly, they had few defenders.41

In 1976 only two villages, accommodating about a thousand people, existed in Eráti.42 In 1979, the year that witnessed the first concerted campaign to construct aldeias, there were only four.43 The big push in terms of village formation seems to have occurred between 1982 and 1983, the year in which Renamo brought its destabilization campaign to the province. In 1982, sixteen villages were created and twenty-three more were slated to be created during 1983–1984.44 But, at the beginning of 1984, the District Commission for Communal Villages (CDAC) reported that Eráti hosted 118 villages at various stages of development.45 Clearly, many more villages had been formed the previous year than had been planned. Nonetheless, even at this stage, most people continued to live in the dispersed habitat until the eve of Renamo’s invasion of the district in March 1984.46

It was the army which eventually came to preside over the “socialization of the countryside” as the war spread to Nampula in 1983 and escalated there the following year. In Eráti, as throughout the province, rural dwellers were forcibly relocated to communal villages ahead of Renamo’s military advance. Compulsory resettlement was often accompanied by hut-burning, theft, vandalism, extortion and other abuses by government soldiers. Similar

124 From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” crimes were perpetrated by village-based militia, which had ostensibly been formed to protect the civilian population from the guerrillas.47

The trajectory of village formation in the province seems to have paralleled that of Eráti’s. By 1982, Nampula hosted 260 villages with 154,186 people, or about 7 percent of the population.48 By mid-1984, there were reportedly 810 villages and 497 bairroscomunais (communal neighborhoods in cities and towns), lodging about 58 percent of the population.49

On the face of it, the above scenario would seem to vindicate the argument advanced by Frelimo’s sympathizers that, as the war escalated, the pace of villagization was dictated primarily by military considerations. It thus appears to be consistent with their view that the resulting aldeias had little to do with – and, in fact, represented gross perversions of – Frelimo’s vision of rural collectivization as enunciated at its Third Party Congress.50 Against this interpretation, the revisionists have insisted that wartime villagization did not hopelessly deform Frelimo’s program for agrarian transformation but rather laid bare “its true nature”: to exercise control over millions of rural dwellers by incorporating them into party-sanctioned institutions.51 Whatever the truth of this assertion, it is certainly the case that Frelimo never acknowledged that the primary impetus for village formation throughout the 1980s was the war. Rather, state and party officials in Nampula extolled the accelerated pace of wartime villagization as evidence of revolutionary triumph, as we shall see below.52 Furthermore, the public rhetoric of Frelimo representatives in the province registered Renamo’s influence on the rate of state-directed villagization only to the extent that they implied that this “triumph” was achieved in spite of myriad constraints and hardships imposed by rebel-spearheaded destabilization.

In Eráti stepped-up villagization in 1983 was justified to the public not in terms of security considerations but rather in terms of Fourth Congress decisions to raise agricultural production and to proceed with socialist transition. By mid-year brigades were fanning through the district, bearing the message that “for organized and well-controlled production, it is necessary for the population to engage themselves in the socialization of the countryside. More concretely, the communal villages.”53 Such justifications came well after the collapse of virtually all experiments in collective forms of production and at a time when it was clear to all who cared to see that the concentration of the rural population posed a grave danger to the viability of smallholder agriculture. They were also articulated a few months after Renamo had begun to operate in Nampula Province and, therefore, at a time when security concerns were clearly overtaking development goals as the government’s paramount priority.

Thus, even if Frelimo-sympathizers are correct in linking stepped-up villagization to the government’s counter-insurgency program, they have sidestepped crucial questions implicitly posed by the revisionists: why was accelerated villagization trumpeted as proof of revolutionary advance long after Frelimo’s rural development strategy had given way to the wartime

From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” 125 imperatives of fighting a guerrilla army? And, to anticipate a bit, why did ruling discourses continue to affirm the viability and indispensability of the communal village program long after government officials had tacitly accepted – and, in some cases, even encouraged – the redispersal of the rural population in the heat of all-out war?54

The present study does not claim to supply answers to these questions. However, both further on in this discussion and in subsequent chapters, it considers some of the effects of Frelimo’s upbeat rhetoric with respect to villagization, which, it shows, helped to enable forms of mnemonic legitimation in post-socialist Mozambique. In what follows, I examine the uneven results of the Frelimo leadership’s attempt to reinvent rural hierarchies in the above context and identify the point at which interviewees began to sense a softening in the state’s stance on the question of traditional leadership and practice.

All in the family?

I begin this section with a synopsis of Geffray and Pedersen’s in-depth study of agrarian and political change in post-independence, pre-war Eráti. Their findings provide a wealth of detailed and compelling evidence of the centrality of lineage authority in state-mandated rural institutions during this period. Three themes are stressed: (1) the ways in which Frelimo’s agrarian policies undermined smallholder agriculture, lowering land and labor productivity; (2) how, in the course of doing so, these policies set in motion processes of social differentiation and polarization within and between rural communities; and (3) the ways in which stratifying tendencies within kinship groups abruptly arrested and reversed socio-political processes which, over a twenty-year span, had progressively eroded lineage, gerontocratic and parental controls over youth. I flesh out their own story line only where it is necessary to do so to facilitate understanding.

From the outset, lineage chiefs, or mahumu, acted as the primary interlocutors of the fledgling local administration. In posing as dedicated agents of Frelimo’s collectivizing vision, mahumu were driven by two overriding considerations. In the first instance, they were concerned to secure access to the rapidly contracting fund of consumer goods in the countryside by obtaining the district government’s authorization to establish a consumer cooperative in their area. The precondition for obtaining state authorization to establish a consumer cooperative in any given locale was evidence of steps by the residents in question to institute collective forms of agricultural production. As a result, collective machambas opened up throughout the district at local initiative with mahumu leading the way.55

When the first concerted campaigns to construct communal villages and to induce people to take up residence in them started in 1979, lineage chiefs were spurred to curry the local administration’s favor for an additional reason. In agreeing to host a communal village on their own land, they would forestall the prospect of forced relocation of their populations to

126 From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” another mutthetthe and their consequent subordination to another lineage. Some mahumu apparently “evinced a conscious will to dominate and exploit the resettled populations placed administratively in their dependence.”56

Agricultural decline and inter-lineage stratification

Even before large-scale population transfers took place, the leading families on whose land communal villages were sited enjoyed a decisive advantage in the emerging political dispensation and economic order. They and their close matrimonial allies tended to monopolize village-level leadership positions and, by extension, control over local trading circuits and mechanisms of distribution. Communities that were expected to move the greatest distance had the least political clout in the new village setting and the most restricted access to consumer goods.57 The already precarious economic position of communities targeted for resettlement was further weakened by the very process of relocation. The affected households fell victim to vandalism and theft perpetrated by government soldiers and village militia. Because forced relocation took place during the wet season, they lost substantial quantities of food reserves that were damaged from exposure to rain en route.58

In the wake of compulsory resettlement, political and economic marginalization deepened into social and material subordination. The forcibly transferred populations now had to eke out their subsistence on marginal, distant, and often far-flung tracts of land on offer to them by the newly dominant families. Their plots were typically non-arable or depleted. Alternatively, they often required clearing to be rendered cultivable. Negotiating access to land often meant accepting owner-imposed conditions which required further diversions of labor time. “Borrowers,” for instance, were typically expected to take care of cashew trees on leased land and to harvest their nuts for the sole benefit of “lenders.” Not surprisingly, resettled families often opted to travel long distances to work their old machambas, assuming this was still a viable option. As a consequence, they lost the dawn hours when the heaviest agricultural tasks are usually undertaken. Irrespective of the manner in which they sought to cope with their new circumstances, all the affected households suffered a precipitous drop in labor productivity and agricultural yields. The cumulative result was a rapid decline in food reserves.

In order to substitute for labor productivity losses, households substituted cassava for other, more nutritious, food crops, such as maize, millet, beans, peanuts and vegetables. The removal of people from their cashew and fruit trees led to the further deterioration of dietary standards. To make matters worse, blueprints and guidelines designed in Maputo precluded villagers from maintaining vegetable gardens near their homes by insisting on narrowly spaced houses and by stipulating that the land and access routes between them be kept “clean.”

From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” 127

By the end of 1984, the spread of famine conditions consolidated widening socio-economic inequalities. Their granaries now completely exhausted, a large number of smallholders had little choice but to work for the newly dominant families in exchange for food. The new labor arrangements compelled resettled families to divert their labor from their own machambas at the peak of the agricultural cycle. They thus set in motion a selfreinforcing cycle of food dependency of the transplanted communities on labor-recruiting families, who profited as result.

Intra-lineage stratification and the plight of male youth

The crystallization of new relations of domination and subordination between lineages was accompanied by deepening cleavages within them. Lineage notables of host mitthetthe enjoyed disproportionate representation in the membership in collective machambas. Mahumu and mi-jeio from both the newly dominant lineages and those belonging to neighboring mitthetthe were also overwhelmingly over-represented in the work teams which, as a matter of course, had first crack at the consumer cooperative’s stock of goods. In the vicinity of a local agricultural development center (Napai), which employed local people to work on project experimental fields, 63 percent of the labor force was drawn from the dominant mitthetthe and half of the workers were mi-jeio or mahumu. In this instance, privileged access to goods was supplemented by privileged access to wages.59

In sum, lineage notables recovered prerogatives they had lost in the 1960s, notably control over the circulation of commodities and cash in the local economy. These newly regained prerogatives, combined with the deepening authoritarianism of the central state, enabled them to reassert labor claims in youth. Understanding how this occurred requires examining the shifting fortunes of young men during the first decade of independence.60

As we have seen, after independence the rural regions of the north were rapidly abandoned by young men eager to find waged work in the cities and to escape the constraints and strictures of rural life. This large-scale outmigration clearly took place without the authorization of lineage notables and went against their wishes. Social seniors and chiefs resorted to the by then time-honored strategy of exerting downward pressure on the social threshold of adulthood, thereby ensuring exploitation of the labor of those too young to avail themselves of the migratory alternative. As a result, by the mid-1980s it was not uncommon to find married twelve- and thirteenyear-old boys.

The aspirations of male migrants were quickly frustrated by the severe disruptions to national economic activity precipitated by settler flight. Dismal urban job prospects resulted in the ebb and eventual reversal in rural–urban flows. Many of those youths who managed to carve out a niche for themselves in informal networks would fall casualty to Operation Production, the 1983 government campaign to deport supposedly “surplus”

128 From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” people from the country’s cities.61 In Eráti, the mass evictions forcibly reinserted the section of youth that had held out the longest in the urban milieu back into the rural environment, effectively reconstituting the lineage as a spatially coherent unity.

Young men returned to the district to find themselves in a position of extreme socio-economic vulnerability. Collective agricultural production had failed to provide a viable alternative to household agriculture and kinshipbased circuits of labor recruitment and exploitation. The new institutions had become indistinguishable from the old structure of authority these youths had so forthrightly rejected. The instability of rural markets undermined sources of income, such as cashew nut production, that had afforded young males a growing autonomy from their social seniors in the 1960s and early 1970s. Accelerated villagization had the same effect. Tightened administrative control severely circumscribed their freedom of movement. The local authorities regarded them with distrust. Under the circumstances, youth had little choice but to submit anew to the labor claims of their elders. The most tangible evidence of their renewed subordination was the fact that, by the early 1980s, cotton production was limited to the machambas of the mi-jeio. As in the 1940s and 1950s, differential yields of cotton bore testimony to differential access to extra-familial labor. In sum, the first decade of independence induced processes of socio-economic “regression.”62

The point that bears stressing here is that it was not simply market breakdown and/or the retreat of the state that enabled the reassertion of traditional power. Rather, it was the convergence of the goods famine, stateengendered conditions of access to resources, the privileged position of lineage notables in Frelimo rural institutions, the absence of employment opportunities locally or in the wider regional economy, and restrictions on freedom of movement that led to this outcome.

The district administrator lost little time in registering and moving to capitalize on the fortification of lineage power within the local political economy. By December 1984, he was openly and directly appealing to mahumu to exercise their newly revived claims to the labor of male youth in order to reverse the precipitous fall in cotton production.63 At the same time, and for much the same reasons, he was working to establish an alliance with the former régulos. 64 As Geffray and Pedersen pointed out, the prospects for this strategy’s success were dim at best. This is because the initiative was launched at a time when, as a result of villagization and the government’s failure to support smallholder agriculture, most peoples’ abilities to provide for even their most basic needs had been seriously compromised.

I return to this juncture further on in the discussion. In what follows, I look at the ways in which members of the colonial-recognized traditional hierarchy, notably former régulos and cabos, were able to retain privileged access to state institutions despite the promulgation of official proscriptions on their political activities.

From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” 129

Continuing royal rule by other means

If, in many places in Eráti, the creation of Frelimo-sanctioned institutions witnessed the surrender of chiefly power to non-royals, in others chiefs sought, at times successfully, to retain their privileged access to state institutions via surrogates.65 As elsewhere in Mozambique, in some cases, traditional authorities who had served the colonial administration directly were able to hide their identities. In others, local government officials were amenable to continuing alliances between official and chiefly authority that had obtained during the colonial period. Such political alignments were tacitly sanctioned in the name of social order, social welfare, rural development or some combination of all three factors.66

In Namapa, former régulos were given more than ample opportunity to continue royal rule by other means. First, the Frelimo government had decided to retain the administrative divisions inherited from the Portuguese, simply renaming regedorias “circles.” Second, and much more consequentially, the nascent local state administration had taken the expediency of setting up new structures of authority by working with and through the old. Chiefs Intalia and Uantera of present-day Muanona Locality, recalled that, when chiefs of their area were called to the district seat, they were told “when they went back home, to choose people who know how to read and write to be leaders of the population.” They recounted:

As we were hearing “abaixo régulo” being said, we régulos struck a deal. We said, “If we have to step down from power and to choose other people to lead, let’s seek out our relatives.” So, each one would choose his nephew, his brother, [and] go deliver the names to Namapa. We took our sons to the [administrative] post. There, each régulo was called to present his people. We were told, “From among those people, choose the secretary of the group.” So ... we would choose one of our relatives in order to secure our power.67

The two chiefs related this story in Muanona Center, the seat of Muanona Locality, the most remote administrative subdivision of Namapa. During the rainy season, access routes to the area, which sits at the far western end of the district and is home to the two chiefs’ adjoining regedorias, often become impassable. The “we” in their account stood for all the chiefs in Namirôa Administrative Post, of which Muanona is a subdivision. Intalia was a régulo in the colonial period. Uantera, I later learned, was a powerful humu who was acting in a caretaker capacity for the “real [opróprio]” Uantera. This latter Uantera, the nephew of the late colonial régulo, had taken up residence in Cabo Delgado, the place of his birth, in the post-independence period. Back in Namapa Center, José de Almeida, the nephew of “o próprio” Chief Uantera and one of the beneficiaries of these behind-the-scenes “deals,” corroborated the above version of events: “At that time, in order to be

130 From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” secretary, you had to be a relative of the régulos. During the transitional government, the majority were nephews, younger brothers and cousins.”68

Intalia and Uantera’s strategy, I subsequently learned, was widely deployed throughout the district by members of Portuguese-recognized traditional hierarchies, if not always with the success that it was in Muanona, where it took as many as six years for higher-level authorities to expose the caper.69 In the case of Muanona, chiefs reportedly held public meetings to allow their former wards to “elect” the chiefs’ nominees. But in at least one instance in the vicinity of Namapa, all pretense of elections was dispensed with.70

Although higher-level state and party authorities were often alerted that subterfuges of one sort or another were in the offing, such revelations did not always spell the end of royal rule. The Frelimo First Party Secretary of Namapa District explained that

When Frelimo discovered that there was an infiltration, right? But, when Frelimo discovered this, it let it go on like that. We could only revitalize [e.g. purge] in the case of complaints appearing, if the populations came to present a problem, saying that senhor over there is a nephew of a cabo or of a régulo but, nevertheless, he is working badly with the populations. So ... Frelimo had to revitalize, to arrange another element to substitute. But, in the event no complaints appeared, they were always maintained.71

José de Almeida’s own experience stands as living proof that “infiltrations” were, at least at times, accommodated upon their discovery. Almeida had served as the Secretary of the Circle in Muanona between 1974 and 1981. He was then transferred to Namirôa, where he worked as Secretary for Party Organization. In 1986 he was transferred back to Muanona, which, as a result of a national reorganization of state administration that year, became a locality. (It was at this time that Eráti was divided into two districts: Namapa and Nacarôa.) Almeida worked as First Secretary and administrator of the locality – a title which, in 1991, changed to “president of the locality” – from then until 1992, at which time he gave up both posts to work for the Rural Water Department.72

It was not always necessary for royals to hide their identities in order to be anointed as Frelimo grassroots representatives. The Frelimo First Party Secretary of Namapa cited Bernardo Mussa as an instance of a former régulo’s nephew being elected as secretary “at the régulo’s suggestion.”73 In 1975, Mussa became Secretary of Jacotho (Jacokho) BairroComunal, Odinepa Locality, a post he held until 1993.74 Chief Tubruto went so far as to say “between 1974 and 1977 it was policy for the nephews of chiefs to be secretaries.” During the 1977–1988 period the reverse “policy” obtained. Thereafter, secretaries could once again be relatives of former régulos.

75

Predictably, in places where some variant of royal rule persisted, official policies aimed at discouraging or eliminating “obscurantist” practices, such

From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” 131 as initiation rites or ceremonies to cleanse the earth, were often either heavily tempered or rendered thoroughly irrelevant. However, the continued political ascendancy of royal families did not necessarily guarantee synergistic relations between official and traditional authority even at the local level. According to Almeida, the new socio-political arrangements at times ran up against the limits of kinship solidarity:

There were secretaries that, although being relatives of the régulos, didn’t coordinate with him [sic], didn’t ask him for advice. But, in those cases, the problem that existed [was that] the régulos asked the secretary to give him some perk – because there were small benefits that the secretary used to receive from the population. So the régulo wanted to benefit also from that privilege. When the secretary resolved a problem [e.g. settled a local dispute] and didn’t give anything to his régulo who was his uncle – a chicken or some other contribution – the régulo would say, “You, why don’t you give me anything when you are my nephew and it was I that chose you for this office?”76

It was, perhaps, to forestall such an eventuality that some chiefs passed over their close relatives, opting to pursue a rather different strategy in order to safeguard their power and authority in the abruptly altered circumstances occasioned by independence. This second tack was brought to my attention by Adelino Ivala, a relative of Zinco, the elder from Lalaua mentioned in the Introduction. Ivala had recently graduated from the Instituto Superior Pedagógico in Maputo, where he had written his thesis on socio-political transformation in the upper Lúrio (today Lalaua District) between 1850 and 1933.77 The focus of his thesis is on a chieftaincy (that of Umpuhua) in which Ivala himself is a royal member and was next in line for the succession. He declined the position because he was committed to launching a career teaching in higher education.

Ivala reported that, in his home area in Méti Administrative Post, chiefs decided to arrange to have epotha, descendants of slaves, to be elected secretaries, enabling chiefs themselves to continue to exercise power behind the scenes.78 Thus, if some epotha-turned-secretaries used their newfound positions of power to insult and humiliate their former rulers,79 others continued to abide by their liminal social status and were chosen precisely because it was anticipated that they would do so.80

While my own interviews in Namapa did not turn up any evidence that secretaries were deliberately chosen because of their epotha status,81 I did come across one instance in which leadership had been foisted upon a commoner, who had assumed his new duties with great reluctance and grave misgivings. Vasco (an alias) had been a secretary of a GD in the former regulado of Meliva in the southeastern corner of the district. In 1994, the area fell under Renamo’s “control” and it was there that the interview took place. Vasco left little doubt about his disinclination to rule and humbly described

132 From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” his own and his colleagues’ meteoric, highly improbable rise to power:82 “I was a simple peasant. I was chosen by the people ... I didn’t want to be secretary but the population ... forced me to stay on.” He and others who shared his predicament “would go to see the mpéwé for them to hold a clandestine ceremony so the population would stay well ... because we said, ‘We are secretaries ... but we don’t know anything about the land.’”

Asked if he thought the population harbored resentment toward him for carrying out unpopular and often injurious state policy directives, he replied:

They thought well of me because the population would say, “It’s not the will of the secretary to take all of the people and put them in a village ... It’s an order from the government.” It was obligatory. Like it or not, it was always an order.

The fact that he was not denounced by local residents to Renamo guerrillas upon their arrival to the district lends poignant credence to his testimony.83 Vasco was one of several secretaries in the area who were living in Renamo’s zone and whose identity the population, royals and commoners alike, had seen fit to withhold from the guerrillas and the postwar Renamo civilian administration.84 Their survival eloquently affirms that grassroots secretaries had not always been held accountable for following orders handed down from on high.

In places where the attempt on the part of former régulos to retain privileged access to state institutions failed, or when it was later discovered and followed by “revitalizations,” this did not necessarily spell the end of all dialogue or give-and-take between former régulos and district authorities. In 1981, for instance, a group of former régulos from Namirôa Administrative Post came to Namapa Center to complain to the district administration about forced villagization in their area. People who had been resisting villagization had been arrested and beaten. It was right before the rainy season when resettlement would have imposed the greatest hardship. The district administration communicated the chiefs’ allegations to the provincial government which undertook an on-site investigation into the matter. The chiefs’ allegations were vindicated and, as a result, the local chefe do posto was removed and demoted.85

Beyond Namapa

The testimony of local administrators, past and present, supports the case for continuities between late colonial and post-independence rural power structures elsewhere in the province. At the same time, it provides evidence of the role of these selfsame administrators in accommodating and/or fostering these continuities. The story of Ernesto Mabonhane, who worked as the adjunct administrator and subsequently as the Secretary for Party Organi-

From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” 133 zation in Memba District between 1978 and 1980, was not atypical. The official orientations local officials received after independence were that “it couldn’t be someone from a régulo’s family. The people had to choose those who had suffered. These were the slaves ... It had to be someone who had been ordered who would order.” The reality he went on to describe, however, was discrepant:

It depended a lot on the behavior of the régulos themselves. Régulos who had mistreated the population weren’t accepted ... by the people. In cases where the régulo didn’t mistreat the population, their sons, nephews and cousins could be party secretaries. Frelimo had no problem with this. It happened here and in my province [Inhambane]. At the time, some were deputies in the assembly of the locality, district, province, even of the national parliament ... Yes, Frelimo saw. Even during the armed struggle, Frelimo worked with régulos.

Between 1980 and 1985, Mabonhane served as the administrator of Ribáuè, the first district in the province to be attacked by Renamo guerrillas. In early 1983, he sensed that it was only a matter of time before the war, then raging in neighboring Zambézia Province, would spill over into Nampula. He was also keenly aware that Ribáuè, situated as it is along the Nampula–Zambézia border, was likely to be one of the first districts to be affected. Accordingly, he solicited the assistance of former régulos as an expedient means of accelerating villagization in the district. Before proceeding in this manner, Mabonhane took the precautionary step of clearing his plan with the then provincial governor, Feliciano Gundana,86 and General Eduardo Nihia, then the military commander of Nampula Province and the Frelimo Second Party Secretary of Nampula Province.

The former régulos, like other local residents, resisted villagization if it meant moving to a wholly new territory in which other communities had historically-acquired rights in land and landed resources, such as cashew trees. As Mabonhane put it: “the régulo himself didn’t want to join with another régulo. And they didn’t want to meet halfway.” His solution was to create as many villages as possible to minimize the distance local residents would move and to ensure that historically dominant families retained their position at the top of local hierarchies.87

The following year, Ribáuè received praise from the Provincial Coordinating Commission for the Socialization of the Countryside (CCPSC), the body responsible for overseeing rural collectivization, for having become the first district in the province to achieve “full socialization.”88 Ironically, assuming the veracity of Mabonhane’s testimony, this distinction had been achieved by way of recourse to the very guardians of “obscurantism” that the socialization of the countryside would, the theory went, undermine and eventually negate. As we shall see in Chapter 7, similar tactics were used by the administrator of Moma at this time. Subsequent chapters, as well as the

134 From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” findings of several field investigations undertaken by a number of researchers, provide further evidence that the official banishment of chiefs into political pariahhood was, at best, unevenly applied elsewhere in the province.89

Periodizing the liberalization of state policies toward things traditional

Informants dated the first signs of the relaxation of prohibitions against chiefs or their close relatives assuming leadership roles in Frelimo institutions variously. A few linked it to a state-sponsored program to publicly expose, punish and rehabilitate people who had willingly served the repressive arm of the colonial state. Prominent amongst the “compromised,” as these collaborators came to be branded, were former elite commandos, paramilitary soldiers and members of the Portuguese secret service. In 1978, the compromised were stripped of their civil and political rights and their names and photographs were posted in their workplaces. The immediate aim was to ensure that the people in question didn’t “infiltrate” party organs, perform acts of sabotage or otherwise subvert the new government’s program for social transformation. The long-term goal was to enable them to join their peers in constructing a new society. The process of reintegration culminated in 1982, when Machel declared that former collaborators were no longer compromised, irrespective of whether or not they had confessed their guilt.90

Four Frelimo cadres tied this process to the easing of the central state’s hostility towards chiefs.91 Interestingly, one associated the “time of reconciliation” to the state’s first efforts to expose, stigmatize and penalize the compromised. Another pegged a general thawing of official-chiefly relations to the act of pardon itself, which he erroneously placed in 1986. This was the year of the country’s second general elections and the first time the formerly compromised could vote or run for public office.

Most interviewees in Namapa identified the beginnings of the state’s softening stance on the question of traditional leadership and practice with the district administrator whose tenure lasted between 1984 and 1987 and thus coincided with these elections. It was under his administration that districtwide proscriptions against initiation rites were lifted. The innovation of appointing former régulos and cabos to serve as “chiefs of production” for the district administration had been his initiative.92 He was the first administrator to appeal openly and directly to local mahumu to use their newly fortified political and economic ascendancy to compel male social juniors to cultivate cotton machambas. 93 And, as the war escalated in the district, it was at his behest that contacts and negotiations were initiated with a dissident chief in Renamo-held territory in the hopes of gaining his and his followers’ allegiances.94

In seeking to broker an alliance between official and traditional authority, the administrator in question, whom I will call Bahia, was, by his own

From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” 135

account, responding to an orientation that came down to the districts some time during “1984–85,” which, he recalled, ran something like this: “‘Each administrator is free to find ways of activating production in his area.’” By the start of the 1985–1986 campaign, Bahia had lined up two former régulos to serve as “elements of assistance in the area of production.” Additional traditional authorities – former régulos and a former cabo – were brought on board to work in this capacity in the years that followed.

At the same time, Bahia initiated an ongoing dialogue with a few leading chiefs in order to gain insight into rural politics and, especially, the local dynamics of the war, which, by 1985, had taken hold in the district. All of the chiefs with whom Bahia spoke stressed the pernicious effects of villagization. In particular, they emphasized the use of force in resettling rural communities and the prohibitive distances these communities had to walk to get to their own machambas and tree crops. The talks reinforced Bahia’s own perception that the experience of forced relocation and the conditions of existence in the aldeias were making “a part of the population” available to Renamo appeals.95

It was, however, another year before Bahia had the opportunity to seek to remedy this situation. The orientation which spurred Bahia’s actions in 1985 was in line with party directives and guidelines calling for an expansion of agricultural production that had been adopted by the Fourth Congress two years earlier. Higher output was to be attained “without special regard for the relations of production” through which this was achieved, with the family and private sectors leading the way.96 The shift in emphasis away from “socialist” forms of production was furthered by the Frelimo leadership’s decision, taken in 1985, to put the economy on a war footing.97

The specific form Bahia’s intervention took was heavily influenced not only by the shifting balance of power in the rural areas – specifically by the triumph of mahumu and mi-jeio over male youth – but also by the input of a longtime prominent actor on the Nampula scene: one José Bernardo de Faria Lobo, a Portuguese agronomist whose career in Mozambique spanned forty-five years (at the time, thirty-four years). Given Faria Lobo’s centrality to recent Nampulan history and, in particular, to the events described in part three of this chapter, we take a brief detour to review relevant aspects of his biography here.

The life and times of a Portuguese colonial

Faria Lobo had worked as an agrarian technician in charge of assistance to the family sector in the Namapa section of CAM’s zone of influence between 1950 and 1961.98 In that capacity, he spearheaded efforts to build the network of picadas throughout the district’s interior and to compel rural dwellers to resettle along this network’s flanks. The successive cashew treeplanting campaigns in the later half of the decade, designed to give smallholders an immediate economic stake in the new settlement pattern, had been his brainchild. In 1961, Faria Lobo went to work for the newly formed

136 From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” Cotton Institute where he held a series of posts, eventually becoming the head of technical services for the institute’s northern delegation. Unlike the vast majority of his colleagues, Faria Lobo opted to stay on in Mozambique after independence. He served as the head of the IAM’s northern delegation until the institute’s extinction in 1976, and then went to work for DPA in Nampula. In 1980, he became the general director of production for JFS, a position he held until he left Mozambique for Portugal in 1992.

After independence, Faria Lobo quickly established himself as a vocal and indefatigable critic of Frelimo’s handling of the crisis caused by decolonization and its program for rural transformation. In the first instance, and well before the country’s new leaders enunciated their strategy for socialist transition at the 1977 Third Party Congress, Faria Lobo’s primary concern was to halt and reverse population movements away from the picadas into the forest. As we have seen, this trend, which led to a decline in the quantity and, in the case of cotton, the quality of smallholder agricultural yields, predated independence. Faria Lobo’s solution was to promote phasing in a system of block farming within the old “concentrations” in order to facilitate the provision of technical assistance and to enhance the oversight capacity of state institutions. Smallholders who were still in the vicinity of the picadas would be called upon to farm in blocks. Those who had strayed further afield would be subject to a program of “conscientization” to encourage them to move back to the picadas ahead of the 1976–1977 agricultural season.99

In keeping with the vocabulary of the new regime, he proposed that these blocks, while consisting of individual machambas, would be based on “communal principles.”100 He seems to have had in mind the kind of production schemes that came to be embraced briefly by the Ministry of Agriculture in 1978 in the face of the adverse economic, environmental and social consequences of rapid rural “collectivization.” The ministry adopted a policy of gradualism which would, in its preliminary stages, encourage smallholders to cultivate on individual family plots, grouped into blocks. The hope was that, by virtue of their proximity to one another, these plots could benefit more readily from inputs and, by virtue of sharing agricultural equipment, participants would be more likely to develop an interest in more advanced cooperative undertakings.101 The ascendancy of the incrementalists was short-lived. In 1979, the “theory of blocks” was roundly denounced as “‘reactionary’ and based on the false premise that ‘African peasants are individualistic by nature and thus are not ready to begin a socialist transformation of the countryside.’”102

By 1983, however, renewed calls for gradualism were coming from no less an authoritative voice than the Frelimo Central Committee and the practice, if not the full-fledged “theory,” of block farming was rehabilitated. By the following agricultural season, an estimated 453,543 families in Nampula alone were participating in either block farming schemes or mutual assistance peasant associations, dwarfing the 5,232-strong cooperative movement.103 However, rather than being situated along the picadas, as

From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” 137 Faria Lobo had called for, block farming took place within the ambit of the communal village program. Predictably, it fell casualty to the same tendencies toward environmental degradation as other forms of production within the new habitat.

Faria Lobo was undeterred by the fall from official favor of block farming during the late 1970s. In fact, the progression of events made him ever more determined to demonstrate the righteousness of his cause. If, in the first years of independence, his primary motive in promoting block farming was to regroup an increasingly dispersed population along the hinterland’s feeder roads, by the end of the 1970s his main concern was to stem and reverse governmentdirected population flows into communal villages. Indeed, he quickly saw that the consequences of villagization would be far worse than those of the slow disintegration of the picadas that had been underway since the 1960s.104

A prime opportunity to modify the rural landscape in conformity with his own vision of development presented itself at the beginning of 1979, when a cyclone hit the littoral of Nampula and Zambézia provinces. The cyclone caused widespread crop damage and left thousands of people homeless. As in the 1950s, natural disaster provided an opportune occasion to reconfigure settlement patterns in the countryside. Unlike the 1950s, when the sole purpose was to draw rural dwellers from their dispersed homesteads to a more concentrated habitat, this time the objective was to draw them from both the dispersed habitat and overly concentrated settlements. Achieving this objective meant, among other things, ensuring that village residents who had lost their homes to the cyclone did not swell the ranks of those that had reverted to the pre-picada situation. In his capacity as a high-level DPA official, Faria Lobo played a leading role in the relief work undertaken in the cyclone’s aftermath. He oversaw the rehabilitation of the picadas in four districts (Mogincual, Mogovolas, Angoche and Moma) and the opening up of over 2,300 hectares of blocks alongside of them.105 The work, however, was brought to an abrupt halt by the provincial governor a few months after it had begun. Rural inhabitants who had left the aldeias were ordered to move back to them.106 It was not until mid-1986 that Faria Lobo would have another shot at rehabilitating the picada system in all of its aspects.

In the course of the rehabilitation effort and in keeping with his field experience in the colonial period, Faria Lobo opted to have former régulos serve as intermediaries in the execution of relief operations. It is unclear if such contraventions of official policy came to the attention of government authorities or, if they did, whether they influenced the governor’s decision to call off the block farming initiative. What is clear is that both before and after the cyclone, former régulos were Faria Lobo’s preferred junior partners in the rural areas. As he, himself, defiantly declaimed, “I always worked clandestinely with régulos.” Perhaps more importantly, he took it upon himself to routinely advise others in positions of authority to do likewise. Sometimes this advice was unsolicited but not always. Like both his predecessors and successors, Bahia had been counseled by his superiors to consult the veteran

138 From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” agronomist and former Namapa resident on how best to run the district before assuming his new post there.107

Faria Lobo’s precise motives in promoting block farming as a global solution to the crisis of smallholder agriculture in Nampula are difficult to discern. Four things, however, are clear. The first is that Faria Lobo considered Frelimo’s vision of rural collectivization to be a pipedream.108 Second, his critique of the aldeias comunais and of rapid cooperativization was sound. Third, with the collapse of Frelimo’s experiments in collective production and with the desperate need to raise agricultural output, no one else came forward with an alternative to Faria Lobo’s. Fourth, by the time his views came to prevail in the mid-1980s, all serious talk of “communal principles” and voluntary participation had long been cast aside: by then, the aim of all leading actors was purely and simply to approximate as closely as possible the inherited colonial model in matters pertaining to rural labor.

Economic crisis, war and chiefs of production

In the first half of the 1980s the Mozambican economy sharply deteriorated, setting the stage for the country’s heavy dependence on international aid in the post-1984 period. Real output fell about 37 percent between 1981 and 1985.109 During the same period, industrial production declined by over 50 percent, while family sector marketed agricultural production and national marketed agricultural production dropped by about 56 percent and 75 percent, respectively. Export earnings, which were then closely tied to agricultural performance, had plummeted to about 27 percent of their 1981 levels.110

The causes of the economy’s downward spiral were many. South African destabilization, which, by early 1984, had cost the economy roughly US$3.8 billion, ranks high among them. The succession of ecological disasters which beset the country in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the effects of global recession, low producer prices, shortages of incentive goods, and excessive and inefficient state intervention also played a role.111

Villagization was another major contributor to national economic crisis, a fact that was only belatedly acknowledged by academics who were sympathetic to Frelimo. From Gaza to Cabo Delgado the new settlement pattern seriously disrupted the already fragile balance between human and natural resources, drastically lowering land and labor productivity. The results were disastrous: sharp falls in marketed surpluses and dietary standards, widespread and often acute food shortages, and depleted soils and desertification.112 If popular discontent and dissent resulting from forced villagization did not always and everywhere work directly to Renamo’s advantage, the concentration of the rural population bore no small measure of responsibility for widespread hunger, the spread of famine conditions, rising morbidity rates and widening social tensions within and between rural communities.113

In 1985 Geffray and Pedersen had adjudged the new settlement pattern

From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” 139 unsustainable for precisely these reasons. So had Faria Lobo who, sensing that political conditions were ripe, approached the then governor, Feliciano Gundana, with a plan to dismantle the aldeias comunais and revive the colonial picada system. The governor gave the veteran agronomist the green light to submit a formal written proposal to the provincial government outlining his ideas.114 It fell to Gundana’s successor to act on this plan the following year.

In the meantime, despite the provincial government’s heightened awareness of the adverse effects of communal villages on smallholder agriculture, the constraints on ruling discourses were such that leading officials couldn’t publicly admit as much. Nowhere are these constraints and their effects more apparent than in the findings and recommendations of the Fourth Session of the CCPSC, held between September 30 and October 2, 1985.

The economy and official discourses

The Fourth Session of the CCPSC met in the midst of an ever-deepening crisis. While, in the course of its deliberations, the commission struck more than one triumphalist note, the evidence it presented left little doubt that the economic circumstances in which the province now found itself were dire indeed. The CCPSC reported, for instance, that the “situation of cotton” was “quite critical,” production having plunged from the province’s postcolonial high in 1981 of 40,000 tons to a mere 3,000 tons in 1985.115 Other economic indicators were equally bleak. The commission set itself the immediate goal of “reactivat[ing] the production of cotton and other crops ... with a view to reaching the indices of production attained in 1981.”116

One theme that dominated the session was the relationship between villagization and smallholder agriculture. A review of the CCPSC’s treatment of this topic vividly illustrates the kinds of circumlocutions that state officials were forced to perform as a result of top-level strictures against questioning the ideological and political premises that underpinned villagization policy. The documentation generated by the Fourth Session exemplifies the resolute refusal by officialdom to acknowledge two manifest realities: first, that the initial development objectives of rural collectivization had given way to the imperatives of counter-insurgency and, second, that any program of economic recovery based on reviving smallholder agriculture was utterly irreconcilable with the government’s strategy of rural control based on concentrating civilians in protected villages. In short, the archival record vindicates the revisionist critique of ruling discursive and political practices.

The commission proudly reported “a significant advance” in the organization of the aldeias comunais, claiming that a full 75 percent of the population in the province had now been villagized and that five districts had already “completed the integration [enquadramento] of the population in

140 From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” collective life.”117 The CCPSC congratulated “the whole population of the province for the positive work, because organizing ourselves in communal villages and communal bairros is to close ranks against the enemy,” defined as the “BA’s [armed bandits], hunger, nudity and illness.” “More and more,” it continued, “we are approaching the phase in which all of our population will be totally organized in collective molds of socialist life.”118 Revealingly, in this section of the commission’s report, the war is invoked only insofar as it represented a hindrance to accelerated villagization, rather than as the main reason the pace of village formation had dramatically quickened. Progress, the CCPSC alleged, had been achieved “despite the conditionalities resulting from the destabilizing action of the armed bands.” Such pronouncements responded to two closely related political imperatives. The first was to affirm the ongoing validity and even vitality of the village project as a development strategy. The second was to deny Renamo’s success in exploiting the inherently flawed nature of that project by reducing it to a strategy of population control.

Notwithstanding what it considered to be indubitable successes, the CCPSC puzzled over what it presented as a perplexing and troubling anomaly: “The number of communal villages and communal bairros grows progressively; in the meantime, production has an inverse behavior. In recent years the graph of agricultural production shows a vertiginous decline.”119 While registering the simultaneity of these two trends, far from drawing a causal relation between them, commission members expressed their conviction that the remedy for the latter trend lay in accentuating the former. As one summed up at the session’s close: “We have to exit this situation. The economic base is fundamental for the consolidation of any community. For this reason, it is necessary to proceed with the construction of communal villages, organizing their population for the increase of production.”120

It is difficult to believe that the CCPSC was as ignorant as it professed to be about the role of villagization in exacerbating the country’s economic crisis. According to Faria Lobo, senior provincial military commanders had expressed opposition to the forced resettlement of rural communities in the event that peasants had not first been given the opportunity to plant crops within the vicinity of their new sites of residence.121 District-based state and party officials repeatedly noted and/or complained about the prohibitive distances between the aldeias and peasant-owned cashew trees at provincial-level meetings or in written communiqués.122 The commission was well aware of the irrationality of the distribution of the villagized population in relation to the distribution of cashew trees – otherwise, it would not have felt compelled, as it had earlier in the year, to begin to redistribute cashew trees “which had been abandoned by absent large landowners and by populations as a result of adhering to the communal village movement.”123

The emphases, de-emphases and evasions that marked the CCPSC’s deliberations were reiterated by the president himself at the year’s end. Speaking

From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” 141 to the People’s Assembly, Machel made pointed reference to the existence of “reserves of underemployed people” and under-utilized resources, particularly in the family and private sectors. His litany of reasons why such productive potential remained untapped, like the analysis of the CCPSC, passes over in silence the effects of villagization:

We do not get down to hard reality to locate the bottlenecks that make production by farming families difficult: —what surpluses are produced by peasant families and where are they located; —where to concentrate consumer goods to encourage this or that crop; —how many tonnes of which crop have still to be distributed, from this and previous years; —which crops and what quantity are in danger of being lost through lack of distribution and where; —what action to take to prevent maize, sunflower, beans or cashew nuts produced by commercial farms and by the peasants from rotting or being spoiled. If we did this we would be able to detect problems in time, and many of them could be resolved. If we did this, output would be very much higher.

The core of the problem, as Machel defined it, was that “we have no trust in the people’s capacity.”124 He made clear that, in the short run at least, “the people’s capacity” would be harnessed by force if need be:

Cotton and cashew nuts are crops that colonialism used to exploit the Mozambican people. Today cotton and cashew crops are fundamental weapons for our independence. Cotton can be grown from Gaza to Niassa and Cabo Delgado. And it must be grown, compulsorily. ... Next year, 1986, is the year for rolling up our sleeves. In many sectors we have to start from scratch. The time has come for each one of us to realise and believe deeply that our land is large and rich, and that there is a place for everyone to work.125

Dzimba’s intervention

Gaspar Dzimba was appointed as governor of Nampula Province a few months later. If, by that time, the renewed stress on family sector agricultural production effectively compelled the redispersal of the population, the evolution of the war virtually guaranteed that such a redispersal was imminent, with or without official approval. Communal villages in Nampula, as elsewhere, were prime targets of Renamo attack. The devastating effectiveness of this aspect of rebel military strategy was greatly enhanced by thegovernment army’s marked reticence and/or inability to defend the

142 From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” population it had forcibly herded into the aldeias.

126 By mid-1986, every indication was that the rate of destruction would increase markedly since, at that time, Renamo held the military initiative. Operating from rear bases set up by the South Africans in Malawi, the rebels intensified their destabilization campaign in the central and northern regions of Mozambique.127

The first Renamo units are believed to have infiltrated into Nampula from Zambézia in May 1983, fanning east, south-east and north-east from their point of entry in Iapala Locality in Ribáuè. The guerrillas reportedly moved effortlessly through heavily populated areas. A year later they were operating in well over half of the province’s districts and controlled virtually all of the main access routes into Nampula City.128 Over a quarter of the province’s villages were razed during the first years of the war in Nampula. During that same time period, the systematic devastation that would, by the conflict’s end, knock out an estimated 30 percent of the province’s schools and 75 percent of its health posts in the rural areas was well underway.129 In the mid-1980s, the insurgents cut the railway line in the Nacala corridor, the transport route linking land-locked Malawi to the sea. Except for occasional interludes, the line remained closed for the next four years.130

The striking ease with which Renamo troops were able to entrench their military operations in the province in part reflected the complacency of the government army (the FAM). Extensive rural dissent attendant upon forced villagization, which in many areas occurred just ahead of Renamo’s advance, also worked to the guerrillas’ military advantage. So did the widespread hutburning, vandalism, theft, extortion and other abuses perpetrated by FAM troops and militia during the course of involuntary resettlement.131

This phase of the fighting turned out to be a mere prelude to the largescale Renamo invasion of Mozambique’s mid-section in late 1986. The offensive, which involved some 12,000 guerrillas, was aimed at cutting the country in two and came perilously close to achieving its goal.132 Renamo captured district capitals in Zambézia, northeast Tete and northern Manica and Sofala. With the assistance of Tanzanian and Zimbabwean troops, the government army mounted a successful counter-offensive the following year.The rebel push was beaten back just shy of Renamo’s final target, Quelimane, the provincial capital of Zambézia. A military stalemate ensued. The invasion, which sent tens of thousands of refugees across the Mozambique–Malawi border, marked an escalation in the war.133

The government decision to order smallholders to abandon the aldeias and to return to the picadas seems to have been taken in August 1986.134 By the time this decision was publicly announced and had begun to be implemented, however, the invasion was already well underway. Renamo’s military offensive could only have provided fresh impetus to the provincial administration to give its official imprimatur to, and to attempt to manage, large-scale population movements which were by then taking place. The express aim of the managed redispersal of the population was, according toone journalist, to “enable greater productivity” by diminishing “the

From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” 143 distance that the peasant walks to get to a machamba” and by providing ready access to cashew trees which had gone unattended or had been poorly attended as a result of accelerated villagization. The governor made clear that emancipation from the aldeias was the first step in the reconstruction of a highly regimented labor process, one modeled on colonial-era compulsory work schemes. During the 1986–1987 agricultural campaign, each peasant family would be required to cultivate four hectares of cash crops and basic staples under the strict supervision of capatazes, “who must mark a daily target for everyone working on a machamba.” In order to monitor people’s productive activity, the caderneta, the work identity card used during the colonial period, would be reintroduced.

The governor also announced new strictures on rural trade. Notably, Dzimba guaranteed that anyone who produced export crops would be rewarded with “sugar, soap, clothing and everything that he needs.” Restrictions on travel would be tightened and all travel for any purpose would be prohibited during the approaching agricultural campaign. With a view to remedying widespread labor shortages on state farms, Dzimba openly authorized a return to forced waged labor. Anyone who tried to flee, the governor warned, would be tracked down by militiamen and brought to book. No one would be spared from the general mobilization of labor. District-based party leaders were told that their machambas would have to be the best. Leading provincial and district officials were prohibited from taking holidays during the growing season.

More bark than bite?

It is, no doubt, pronouncements such as these that Minter has in mind when he warns against the dangers of abstracting official rhetoric from historical circumstance. As he puts the case with respect to both Mozambique and Angola, where another South African-backed rural insurgency raged:

Fundamental to understanding the post-colonial state’s relationship to the rural population ... is the fact that, in contrast to the colonial state, it did not establish effective mechanisms for the extraction of resources from the countryside. Despite occasional speeches by frustrated administrators recalling the forced labour and forced cultivation policies of colonial times, neither state farms nor peasants produced the profits they had provided to the colonial system. The old exploitative mechanisms were gone, but functioning new ones, exploitative or otherwise, were not institutionalized. As a result the state primarily related to the rural population, other than in military terms, as a promised provider of services, all too frequently undelivered.

Unable to reap profits from agricultural production, both Angola and Mozambique were forced to rely on other sources of revenue. In the case of

144 From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” Angola, oil served the purpose; in Mozambique’s case, taxes on consumption and import trade, as well as foreign aid, were the state’s economic mainstays. Minter concludes:

Despite the images of the post-colonial state as intrusively omnipresent – and the elements of reality on which the images were based – it was the insurgents who imposed the tightest controls on rural populations, extracting food, loot and forced porterage at gunpoint. The greatest flaws of the states, in contrast, probably came not so much from what they did as from what they failed to do.135

On Minter’s logic, then, the impotence of these two besieged states, and the frustration this clearly provoked in government and party officials, at once prompted speeches such as Machel’s and Dzimba’s and ensured that nothing of consequence came of them.

This reasoning fails to allow for the possibility that the state engaged in badly managed violence.136 By this, I refer to violence in the productive process that is, in the main, unproductive in terms of attaining its ostensible goal: generating marketed output. Unproductive violence, in this instance, could take many forms: it could mean that land was cleared but not sown; that it was sown but not tended; that crops were nominally tended but not harvested; or that they were harvested but, because of transport and logistical bottlenecks, they were never marketed.

Interviewees dated the onset of force in the post-independence period variously. On several occasions, informants insisted that the colonial forced labor regime had carried on uninterrupted and essentially intact under Frelimo.137 A former capataz who had worked in Odinepa Locality maintained that, during his entire tenure with the company between 1981 and 1993, it had been “the norm” for company employees to beat smallholders into producing cotton.138 As we have seen, Geffray and Pedersen reported coercion was frequently used during the first major mobilization in the service of cotton production in Eráti during the 1983–1984 campaign.139 Despite the variability of local testimony and reportage, the available evidence indicates that forced labor practices had been longstanding and, by the mid-1980s, had become an important, if not necessarily the dominant, method of surplus appropriation.

The governor’s intervention officially sanctioned and accentuated tendencies that were already becoming increasingly more pronounced. The reemergence of compulsory labor on an appreciable scale came at a time when provincial and district government officials felt that coercion was not only necessary to meet the production targets of the war economy but was also justifiable. In grossly under-utilizing family sector productive capacity, villagization, like Frelimo’s other agrarian policies, effectively reinforced the received colonial view that African smallholders were incurably lazy. It also lent credence to the closely allied dual economy thesis, another bequest of

From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” 145 Portuguese rule.140 To recapitulate: this thesis turned on the premise that, in the absence of financially exorbitant technological innovation, peasantproduced agricultural surpluses could only be secured by way of recourse toexternally-applied pressure. The image of an under-employed, inert peasantry in need of outside prodding could only have been further fortified by the unspoken, but no less powerful, interdictions on speaking about the effects of villagization in public.

In what follows I consider other tangible effects of Dzimba’s pronouncements. First and foremost, as Geffray has shown, peasants took advantage of the governor’s initiative to abandon the communal villages. While the central government declared itself opposed to Dzimba’s program of action a few months later, its public pronouncements to this effect did nothing to stem the migratory tide back to the dispersed habitat. Given Renamo’s military momentum, demographic upheaval probably would have occurred with or without Dzimba’s intervention. Nonetheless, at the very least, his speeches lent a legitimacy to the mass exodus from the communal villages that it would not have otherwise possessed. Many local party and state authorities in Eráti either allowed or actively encouraged the movement out of the aldeias. According to the district administrator at the time, Frelimo officials sought to persuade people to resettle along by the picadas by distributing such aid as was available along this web of back-country roads.141

Second, in accordance with Dzimba’s decree, the caderneta was reintroduced.142 Third, the 1986–1987 agricultural campaign seems to have witnessed modifications to rural marketing. According to the administrator of Namapa on whose watch this campaign was waged, access to officiallymarketed consumer goods was tied to cotton crop sales at this time. He held that this linkage was critical to the success of the district’s 1986–1987 cotton campaign, when production levels reached their wartime high.143 The practice of tying peasant purchases to crop sales had been officially authorized by the central government in 1982.144 Dzimba’s speech seems to have sanctioned, if not prompted, the informal practice of tying purchases to cotton crop sales, specifically. The strategy was enabled in large part by the availability of a much larger stock of commodities due to the assistance of a French donor. A 1988 provincial government report credited the strong performance registered by the family sector during the 1986–1987 cotton campaign to this major infusion of goods into the local economy.145

The 1986–1987 agricultural campaign witnessed other innovations and extraordinary measures in Nampula. Ten thousand hectares were reportedly opened up in the green zones of Nampula and Nacala cities.146 In Namapa, the district administrator enjoined smallholders to spend three days a week cultivating their food crops and three days a week cultivating their cotton machambas. 147 He also mandated that all government employees cultivate their own fields between 5 and 10 a.m. and only then report for official duty.148

146 From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production”

It was during this period that “experiments” were undertaken jointly by local administrations and JFS in which former régulos served as “chiefs of production,” presiding once again as overseers of smallholder agriculture under the supervision of former colonial capatazes. 149 The first of these experiments, which were simply a more systematized and coordinated effort of what had already been tried in Eráti during the previous growing season, took place in Memba District shortly after Dzimba’s appointment as governor in April 1986. The Memba campaign focused on rehabilitating abandoned cashew trees and weeding the picadas. At the time, a sizeable fraction of rural dwellers was living dispersed in the forest in order to remain hidden from both Renamo and the government army. The work succeeded in drawing the non-villagized population back to the picadas as smallholders, fearful that if they didn’t participate they would risk losing their rights in trees and land, made haste to assert their property claims.

During the next two agricultural campaigns, similar “experiments” were conducted in six other districts, one of which was Namapa. By that time, the majority of the population was living in dispersed settlements. In 1988, JFS assigned several chiefs of production the responsibilities of capatazes and granted them a salary equivalent to a chefe de zona (head of the zone), the next step up in the company job hierarchy. Other chiefs who collaborated in the work along the picadas, were given “stimuli,” such as bicycles. In most cases, the war itself hobbled these initiatives, bringing them to an abrupt end. The then provincial governor, Jacob Nyambir, was fully aware of and had approved these arrangements.

A strategy for political renewal or surplus extraction?

As Minter has pointed out, “By the mid-1980s pragmatism from the top mandated an open door to any sector of society that could provide resources, material or symbolic, for defence against the insurgents.”150 By that time, the government in Nampula was acutely aware that Renamo’s strategy of rural mobilization was based in large part on its appeals to traditional authorities, which were paying off in substantial swaths of the province.151 There are also strong indications from the 1986–1987 period that, at both district and provincial level, the state was moving to offset Renamo’s appeals to these authorities by mounting a hearts and minds campaign of its own. Dzimba’s orientations were taken by party and government officials in Namapa as a green light to initiate contacts and negotiations with a dissident chief in Renamo-controlled territory in Alua Administrative Post in 1987.152 And, as we have seen, the district administration had started a dialogue with prominent chiefs a few years earlier, as Renamo’s war spread to the area.

The clearest indication that the provincial government was convinced of the centrality of chiefly power, alliances and antagonisms in the local dynamics of the war is the fact that it had begun to consult and to dissemi-

From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” 147 nate to district officials the relevant portions of a massive 1967 study on traditional authorities and inter-clan relationships penned by the Portuguese anthropologist José Branquinho.153 No doubt the hope was that the study, which was commissioned with a view to furthering the colonial state’s counter-insurgency campaign against Frelimo, could be used to bolster Frelimo’s counter-insurgency campaign against Renamo.

In the face of developments such as these, Geffray has argued that, in embracing putative royals as “chiefs of production,” the government was simply and straightforwardly aping ruling relations that obtained in rural areas under Renamo’s control and that were driving the rise of chiefs to political ascendancy in areas nominally governed by Frelimo. Under the circumstances, the government’s appellation for chiefs was a deliberate misnomer whose primary ideological function was to dissimulate that Frelimo had been ignominiously reduced to imitative practice.154 The evidence, however, suggests that the newly-coined term was much more fitting than Geffray contends. It indicates that the government’s recourse to chiefs of production was motivated in good measure by considerations that were independent of the politico-military imperatives imposed by Renamo’s rural practice. Specifically, Frelimo officials hoped to capitalize on the perceived capacity of chiefs to mobilize and to discipline rural labor. The fact that the first “experiments” with chiefs were part and parcel of the post-independence state’s most concerted effort to rehabilitate the colonial labor regime lends support to this interpretation.

So do the self-described motivations of two of the actors who took the lead in initiating and implementing these experiments. One of these actors is the district administrator of Namapa at that time. The first two chiefs who, as he put it, he invited to serve as “element[s] of assistance in the area of production,” were Taibo and Alua. Both had served as régulos for the colonial administration and were widely reputed to be illegitimate. Chief Taibo had worked additionally as a capataz for CAM, as had his maternal uncle, the alleged usurper of legitimate power. The two chiefs’ regedorias sit astride the politically pivotal towns of Namapa Center and Alua, respectively. Both were, at the time of research in 1994, loci of manifest and intense struggles for power.

The district administrator, Bahia, had grown up in the vicinity of Mirrote, thirty-five kilometers from the district capital and, consequently, was no stranger to the intricate history of long-simmering chiefly succession disputes in the area. Nonetheless, he was candid that legitimacy, precolonial or otherwise, was not exactly uppermost in his mind at the time he had approached the two chiefs in question. If anything, he was seeking to avoid the perception that the district administration was in search of bona fide successors of precolonial leaders, in part because he knew this would open a Pandora’s box and in part because his was a search for colonial work, rather than royal, credentials. As he put the latter point, “I knew that to go to look for the Régulo Alua, it’s not because he is régulo by birth. But look: he’s the

148 From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” one who knows the work, how it was done.”155 In a sense, then, the title “chief of production” was an honest one because raising agricultural output, rather than enhancing state political legitimacy, topped the district administrator’s priorities.

The second actor is Faria Lobo, the driving force behind the return to colonial precedent. Unlike Bahia, Faria Lobo insisted that he prioritized working with chiefs who carried the mantle of precolonial legitimacy. Indeed, he argued, it was precisely for this reason that his appointees were capable of effectively harnessing the productive labor of their communities. Nonetheless, all of the chiefs Faria Lobo selected to participate in his experiments had served the colonial state as régulos. And in no case did he choose to work with a chief reputed to be a legitimate successor of a precolonial chief who did not have colonial work experience. What’s more, in the case of Namapa at least two of the chiefs he hired as capatazes – Chiefs Alua and Muhula – were not considered legitimate heirs of precolonial chiefs.156

While Faria Lobo admitted that he was, at the time, well aware of Renamo’s often successful attempts to construct alliances with chiefs, he denied that politico-military considerations figured into his own calculations and actions. Rather, he stressed, the enlistment of chiefs was but one facet in a movement to reconstruct the old agrarian structure in the wake of the collapse of Frelimo’s experiment in socialist agriculture and the absence of any other ready alternative. Furthermore, chiefs were told in no uncertain terms that the long-term sustainability of their role in the revived production arrangements was contingent on the satisfactoriness of their own job performance.157

In his work on the rural dynamics of the war, Geffray fails to mention that Dzimba’s orders for rural dwellers to abandon the aldeias and the agricultural experiments with “chiefs of production” were of a piece of a larger government initiative to re-install the colonial system of smallholder agricultural production. In rendering this larger context, he would have called into question two of his central claims: (1) that the government’s embrace of chiefs as junior partners in promoting agricultural campaigns unambiguously signaled Frelimo’s reluctant recognition of the unrivaled political legitimacy of traditional authorities; and (2) that this embrace was tantamount to the ruling party’s genuflection to Renamo ideology on this score.

Why Nampula?

One may well ask if Nampula represents an exceptional case and, if so, why. In what follows, I identify the reasons that the province was the site of most determined and frank attempt to resurrect the colonial labor regime. I accord analytic primacy to the centrality of the Nampulan peasantry to national marketed agricultural production, in general, and to agricultural exports, in particular.158 Moreover, I show that, in the period under review, the strategic importance of the province’s family sector to the country’s economy progressively grew.

From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” 149

While Zambézia was the most agriculturally productive region in Mozambique under Portuguese rule, the family sector in Nampula easily outproduced its counterpart in Zambézia, as well as elsewhere. Nampula was the chief producer of cashew nuts, Mozambique’s leading export in the late colonial period and a predominantly peasant-produced crop.159 The province retained its dominant position in this regard in the mid-1980s.160

In addition, Nampula was the colony’s primary producer of cotton, Mozambique’s second leading export on the eve of independence. As we have seen, up until the early 1960s the province’s pre-eminence in this sector of the economy was in good measure due to smallholder yields. In keeping with colony-wide trends, family sector cotton production in Nampula declined in both relative and absolute terms during the last decade of Portuguese rule, reflecting both the growing preponderance of settler agriculture and the relaxation of coercive controls.161 Mozambique’s accession to independence, however, prompted a reversal in these trends at both the provincial and national levels. The family sector began to recover its relative importance due to both the collapse of settler farming and the failure of rural collectivization, in all of its guises, to compensate for the losses in agricultural production consequent upon white flight. By the late 1970s, the peasantry’s own declining output accounted for about half of total cotton production nationally.162

The family sector’s partial recovery of its former predominance in the cotton sector was especially marked in Nampula. Local smallholders’ share of national cotton production hovered around 25 percent between 1976 and 1979, up from 12.7 percent during the 1974–1975 agricultural campaign, while their share of total family sector cotton production was an estimated 50 percent.163 The centrality of the Nampulan peasantry to national cotton production became ever more pronounced in the early 1980s. In 1981–1982 the province’s family sector reached its post-independence, pre-war high, marketing about 16,360 tons, or over 27 percent of the national total of some 60,000 tons.164 Output for this sector hit its nadir during Nampula’s 1984–1985 agricultural campaign – precisely when villagization rates reached their peak – reportedly falling to a low of about 1,323 tons. This was less than 8 percent of the level three years earlier and less than 3 percent of the Nampulan peasantry’s all-time high of 45,750 tons in 1963–1964. The total nonetheless represented about 25 percent of national cotton output (an estimated 5,200 tons) that year and about 69 percent of total family sector cotton production (an estimated 1,910 tons).165

The geography and prosecution of the war accentuated the importance of Nampula’s family sector to national economic activity. Zambézia, formerly the breadbasket of Mozambique’s agriculturally-based economy, was one of the main casualties of Renamo’s military incursions from Malawi in the mid-1980s, and bore the brunt of the rebel army’s invasion of Mozambique’s central provinces in 1986–1987. These assaults left Zambézia’s plantation sector, previously the primary producer of the province’s agricultural

150 From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” surpluses, completely decimated.166 They also generated major refugee movements out of the province into Malawi and neighboring provinces in Mozambique. The destruction caused by the government army’s counteroffensive in 1987, which consisted of scorched earth military tactics, further undermined the Zambézian agricultural economy and contributed to the depopulation of the province’s rural areas. The FAM thus bears its fair share of responsibility for the famine which beset the province that year.167

In summary, the effects of patterns of insurgency and counter-insurgency reinforced those caused by the failure of Frelimo’s rural development strategy: they both secured the Nampulan smallholder population a central role in the war economy. Dzimba’s intervention simply reflected this denouement. The fact that the central state plan envisaged more than a four-fold increase in national cotton output, a 50 percent rise in cashew nut production and a 42 percent jump in global agricultural marketing could only have given further impetus to an initiative such as his.168

A sui generis case?

The events of the mid-1980s described above seem to have been specific to Nampula. However, they were broadly consonant with, and should be seen as integral to, a set of complex, and often conflicting, initiatives launched by the Frelimo leadership to reconstitute state institutions in response to economic collapse, escalating war, political crisis and social calamity. It is to a brief discussion of these initiatives that I now turn.

In 1986, there was a major reorganization of state administration, whose proclaimed objective was the “structuring of Popular Power through to the base in all of the national territory.”169 In the rural areas, larger districts (of which Eráti was one) were broken up to make more manageable units of administration. In all, twenty-five new districts were created, bringing the national total to 128. In addition, a new tier of government was introduced below district level. Localities, hitherto the lowest rung of state administration, were rebaptized administrative posts which henceforth presided over newly created subdivisions, dubbed localities.170

Modifications to the administrative map can be usefully read as a lastditch attempt on the part of the Frelimo leadership to cope with, and seek to counterbalance, the centrifugal forces set in train both by the war-driven redispersal of the rural population and by economic liberalization.171 The attempt to extend the state’s reach in the outback came on the eve of the inauguration of a structural adjustment program aimed at imposing fiscal austerity and rolling back state institutions in all sectors and at all levels of administration. Not surprisingly, the strategy bore its own contradictions, as we shall see in Chapter 4.

Immediately following this reorganization, and as a means of investing it with popular authority, the second general elections for people’s assemblies at all levels of government were held.172 Particularly relevant to the present

From “abaixo” to “chiefs of production” 151 discussion is that restrictions on who could hold public office were relaxed. As we have seen, people who had been branded by Frelimo as having been “compromised” by colonial rule shed that stigma in 1982, along with the penalties attached to it. As a consequence, former collaborators of the colonial regime were eligible to run for assembly seats in the 1986 elections.173 In Nampula at least, the modified eligibility rules extended to traditional authorities who had directly served the colonial administration.174 The lifting of official sanctions against the holding of “obscurantist” rituals, which took place in Namapa in the 1986–1987 period, also occurred elsewhere in the country.175

While local officials and ordinary citizens may have associated the loosening of official proscriptions with Chissano’s accession to power,176 at least one set of state strictures had been revoked prior to Machel’s death in a mysterious plane crash in October 1986. The second general elections began in August of that year and were in full swing at the time of his death (and the final stages delayed as a consequence of it).177 The promulgation of new, more lenient, eligibility rules for candidacy to people’s assemblies had already taken place by that time and clearly bore his imprimatur.

Indeed, one can reasonably speculate that these rules would have been instituted sooner had the second general elections not been twice-delayed. Originally set to be held in 1983, they were rescheduled for 1985 and subsequently pushed back for yet another year because of the deteriorating security situation.178 The decision to hold them in 1986 was clearly based on the leadership’s perception that a poll could not await – or was, in fact, the essential precondition for – an improvement in the military balance of forces. In this respect at least, Chissano’s tenure represented a continuation, rather than a radical departure from, that of his predecessor.179

4 The context, 1987–1994

Between 1987 and 1994, Mozambique underwent a series of dramatic social, political and economic transformations. In January 1987, the government unveiled an IMF-sponsored structural adjustment program (the Economic Rehabilitation Program, or PRE). In July 1989, Frelimo formally abandoned Marxism-Leninism at its Fifth Party Congress. On this occasion, it also approved the lifting of the state’s monopoly on key social services and the removal of restrictions on the entrepreneurial activities of its members. In November 1990, a new constitution, guaranteeing expanded political freedoms and enshrining the principle of multipartyism, came into force. On 4 October 1992, the General Peace Accord (or AGP) was signed in Rome, culminating just over two years and twelve rounds of direct negotiations between the warring belligerents and leading to a country-wide ceasefire shortly thereafter. The AGP called for a UN peacekeeping operation – subsequently named ONUMOZ – to assist in all phases of the transition to a democraticallyelected government. The accord also cleared the way for a multiparty poll, eventually held during 27–29 October 1994, a year later than planned.

The remainder of this book focuses primarily on the late 1980s and early 1990s when the above events and transformations were taking place. The latter stages of this period are regarded by many analysts as the highwater mark of Mozambique’s external dependence. It was also at this time that, for reasons reviewed in Chapter 1, interest in reconstituting an updated version of chieftaincy peaked within the state administration, the ruling party and the donor community. In Nampula, this period witnessed the semi-official “retraditionalization” of rural administration: that is, the informal reinstatement of chiefs qua chiefs as local agents of the state. This chapter lays out aspects of the broader context in which rural political change took place. I examine the national and local settings in turn. My discussion of the national context includes a section on post-1994 developments.

Overview: 1987–1994

In introducing the PRE, the government’s aim was to avert complete economic collapse and to restore output. This objective could not be achieved

The context, 1987–1994 153 without a massive infusion of foreign exchange and a rescheduling of Mozambique’s external debt service, and neither could be obtained without meeting the conditions of the IMF.

The PRE’s impact was powerful and wide-ranging.1 GDP rose on average by more than 4.5 percent between 1987 and the end of 1989.2 Marketed agricultural production also increased: by 79 percent in 1987, 16 percent in 1988 and 17 percent in 1989 – although it is unclear how much of these rises represented the transfer of smallholder crop sales from parallel to official markets. Exports doubled in five years and industrial production grew by one-third in three years.3

The reform package revalued the metical; kick-started industrial and agricultural production; and brought an increase in the quantity and diversity of foodstuffs and consumer goods on the domestic market, particularly in urban areas. Market liberalization also sharply accentuated income differentials, accelerating processes of class formation. It fueled the growth of corruption in the state apparatus and in society at large. And it expanded the ranks of and intensified the hardships of the poor, even as the influx of international aid turned into a veritable deluge.

As the economy expanded, the plight of most Mozambicans worsened. By the late 1980s, an estimated 90 percent of all Mozambicans were living in poverty.4 While the war was the principal cause of the devastating hardships faced by the vast majority of Mozambicans, these were compounded by the PRE. Successive devaluations, price liberalization, cuts in government spending and the removal of government subsidies brought high rates of inflation, declines in the purchasing power of most citizens and, consequently, falling living standards. By 1990, infant mortality in Mozambique was the world’s second highest, with one of three children dying before reaching the age of five.5

Urban residents, who had hitherto benefited from cheap food rations, were especially hard hit.6 A wave of unprecedented wildcat public-sector strikes in the country’s industrial centers ushered in 1990.7 The vast majority of rural producers, the intended beneficiaries of price liberalization, did not fare any better. Farm-gate price increases failed to keep up with the rising cost of store-bought goods. According to a 1990 World Bank study, only a small number of smallholders who enjoyed relative physical security and ready market access were able to respond to producer price increases and reinvigorated markets by expanding cash crop production.8

A new structural adjustment program was introduced in 1990. The Economic and Social Rehabilitation Program, or PRES, put in place a “safety net,” by providing food subsidies to a smattering of the most vulnerable families, while requiring greater austerity than its predecessor.9 In the shortterm, increased stringency did not sustain enhanced economic performance. Rather, the economy faltered, with industrial production slumping by 50 percent between 1989 and 1993.10 A severe drought in 1991–1992 was largely responsible for an 8 percent decline in agricultural production in

154 The context, 1987–1994 1992. For the first time since the country had embarked on the path of adjustment, the economy contracted.11 In 1993, due to peace, plentiful rains and a bumper harvest, the economy experienced a partial recovery.12 In the meantime, Mozambique’s foreign debt, non-existent in 1982, burgeoned from US$2.9 billion in 1985 to over US$5.5 billion in 1995. The higher levels of international assistance made Mozambique the largest aid recipient in sub-Saharan Africa.13

Austerity, combined with war and aid-dependence,spurredthe spread of corruption. Public-sector employees, two-thirds of whom were living in poverty by the mid-1990s, reacted to their worsening financial situation by pursuing a range of economic strategies, some more above-board than others. Moonlighting, which often entails the use of public resources (e.g. vehicles) for private purposes, became common. So did stealing and reselling state-owned property and demanding kickbacks from contractors. Civil servants also resorted to exacting bribes from the public to discharge their official duties and, in the case of basic service providers, such as teachers and health-care workers, to “privatizing” their services.14 During the war, government relief workers and high-level military officials were particularly well positioned to appropriate and sell large quantities of internationallydonated food aid on their own account. The army rank and file, in turn, resorted to less refined methods of robbing the public. Hungry FAM soldiers who had not seen a paycheck in months took to looting trains and relief trucks. Government-aligned militia perpetrated similar attacks. Illegal activity bymilitary personnel reportedly grew in frequency in the last years of thewar.15

The opportunities attendant upon state divestiture prompted Frelimo officials at all levels of the state and party to use their positions and political connections to secure government contracts or the requisite resources to invest in privatized state assets. By the early 1990s the prospect of losing their jobs and the associated perquisites (e.g. housing, transport) in the event of a Renamo victory at the polls sent many of these officials scrambling to secure their economic futures by whatever means were at their disposal. The large donor presence – some 180 NGOs by 1990–1991 – in Mozambique also facilitated the spread of corruption: aid workers have not always been above offering bribes to government officials in order to bypass red tape or to try to ensure that their projects receive top priority.16

The growth of violent street crime and organized crime paralleled the institutionalization of corruption, becoming a major political issue. Faced with a sudden surge of armed robberies, assaults and murders in Maputo in 1991, city residents took to vigilantism, beating, lynching or burning to death several alleged thieves. Crime rates continued to soar throughout the period in question, a trend that was reinforced by both police indifference to, and complicity in, illegal activity.17

The introduction of the PRE coincided with the war’s intensification in the 1986–1987 period. Two years of military deadlock ensued as the human

The context, 1987–1994 155 and economic toll of the fighting escalated. In 1990, the war began to shift its center of gravity as government forces made gains in the interior of Nampula, Zambézia and Tete, and Renamo stepped up its attacks in Maputo and Gaza provinces.18 By the early 1990s, destabilization had taken between 600,000 and one million lives.19 In the country’s southern and central regions, agricultural production was seriously constrained and warrelated human suffering was compounded during the last two years of hostilities by the 1991–1992 drought, which affected the entire sub-continent and created famine conditions in wartime Mozambique. Systematic Renamo attacks on relief trucks greatly exacerbated the problem. By the war’s end, 60 percent of the country’s first-level primary schools were shuttered or destroyed and less than half of all primary-school goers were receiving an education; 42 percent of Mozambique’s health clinics and over 3,000 rural shops were closed or destroyed; 1.7 million Mozambicans were refugees living in camps or temporary residences in neighboring countries; at least 3.2 million people were displaced within the country’s borders; and an estimated quarter of a million children had been orphaned or separated from their parents.20

In between the advent of peace and the end of 1994, an estimated 4.3 million Mozambicans who had been uprooted by the war, including 1.6 million refugees, returned to their former homes or set up new domiciles; 20,537 Renamo and 71,281 FAM troops were demobilized at forty-nine assembly points or in situ, while 12,195 soldiers from both sides opted to form the nucleus of the new, unified army; a UN trust fund was established to “help Renamo transform itself from a military movement to a political party”; another, much smaller, UN fund was set up to help finance the electoral bids of all newly registered political parties; and the first halting steps were taken to integrate Renamo-controlled zones into the state administration.21 When ONUMOZ’s mandate elapsed in December 1994, the peace process, which cost an estimated US$1 billion,22 was considered complete. According to several analysts, Mozambique’s national sovereignty had been severely compromised by ONUMOZ’s extended and highly interventionist stay.23

Post-1994 developments

The 1994 elections capped the transition from civil war to peace and from single-party rule to a multiparty dispensation. They also set the stage for Mozambique’s emergence as the African darling of the Bretton Woods institutions and the UN. Programs aimed at reintegrating over 90,000 demobilized soldiers into post-conflict society won applause from international organizations and NGOs that sponsored the effort.24 Renamo succeeded in transforming itself from a guerrilla army into a political party – albeit a “minimally effective” one.25 Mozambique’s second general elections in 1999 and first municipal elections, held in 1998, while problematic and contentious, received the stamp of international approval.26 So did the second

156 The context, 1987–1994 local elections, held in 2003, whose results were accepted by the opposition. The end of the war saw the emergence of an independent and assertive press. Previously embargoed topics, such as racism, ethnic discrimination and Frelimo’s past recourse to summary executions of leading dissidents, have become the stuff of political debate in parliament, the media and everyday conversation.27

Mozambique’s economic reforms have earned high praise from the World Bank and the IMF for their deference to neoliberal principles. The economy grew by more than 10 percent on average in the late 1990s. A combination of flooding and torrential rains checked economic expansion in 2000 but, since then, the growth rate has bounced back to high levels.28 Frelimo’s faithful application ofIMF strictures and its model poverty reduction program qualified Mozambique for the World Bank’s Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) debt relief programs and ensured that the country continued to receive high levels of aid even at a time when donor interest in Africa was waning.29 Mozambique’s “investor-friendly” business climate has helped pave the way for the launch of several ambitious “mega-projects.” MOZAL, the biggest and most technologically sophisticated of these, is one of the largest aluminum smelters in the world and now Mozambique’s chief export earner.30

Certain leading social indicators have also given cause for optimism. Living standards, as gauged by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), have been steadily rising. More Mozambican children are now enrolled in primary school than ever before in the country’s history. The illiteracy rate, although still over 50 percent, is falling. The vast majority of youngsters is immunized against major child-killer diseases, such as polio, measles and tuberculosis. Infant mortality rates are dropping.31 And the incidence of poverty has reportedly fallen from almost 70 percent in 1997 to about 54 percent in 2003.32

However, the overall picture is far from rosy. Mozambique remains one of the poorest countries in the world, with per capita income estimated at about US$210.33 Despite substantial debt relief, Mozambique is still paying far more on debt servicing than on health care and donors continued to fund over half the budget through 2003.34 Aggregate economic statistics fail to disclose growing disparities between regions and social groups – two trends that are widely viewed as having fueled the war and as having earned Renamo recruits, supporters and sympathizers.35 With the HIV prevalence rate estimated at almost 15 percent in mid-2004, life expectancy, never high, has dropped below forty. The spread of AIDs threatens to shorten life spans still further, to dramatically increase the number of orphans, and to wipe out Mozambique’s most educated and skilled workers.36

Falling international prices for Mozambique’s key agricultural exports, such as cashew, cotton and copra, have jeopardized many rural livelihoods.37 The privatization of the banking sector resulted in the wholesale withdrawal of banks from the countryside, hampering the recovery of rural commerce.38

The context, 1987–1994 157 According to trade union representatives, the privatization of over 1,400 state-owned firms has led to the redundancy of some 120,000 workers, many of whom are owed months or even years in back wages.39 Some 8,000 factory workers and staff lost their jobs following government capitulation to World Bank pressure to sharply lower tariffs that had protected the cashewprocessing industry. Most of Mozambique’s large-scale cashew-processing plants are now closed; they are also heavily indebted and unlikely to reopen any time soon.40 The sugar and textile industries, among others, face stiff competition from the influx of cheap illegal imports on to the domestic market.41

The sale of smuggled goods on the Mozambican market is the tip of the iceberg of the underground economy. In all likelihood, drug trafficking alone is now more profitable than “all legal foreign trade combined,” generating tens of millions of dollars a year in local revenue and accounting for a good measure of the country’s recent economic growth. The involvement of the police, demobilized army officers and “very senior Mozambican officials,” long suspected, is now beyond question.42 The judiciary, law enforcement bodies and corrections system are riddled with corruption and, at all levels of government, impunity is for sale.43 The extent to which official institutions are now beholden to powerful crime syndicates was laid bare by the disappearance of some US$400 million from the banking system in the 1990s, the contract killings of a prominent journalist and bank manager investigating the swindle, and the laggardly pace and unevenness of the government’s response to both the financial scandal and the assassinations that followed. As of mid-2004, one of the homicide cases and one of the bank fraud cases had yet to go to trial.44

Multiparty competition and expanded political freedoms have not brought about democratic consolidation. Mozambique now “closely approximates a cross between a formal multiparty democracy and ... an elite power-sharing regime.”45 The hybrid character of national politics testifies first and foremost to the success of Renamo’s persistent attempts, in the face of Frelimo’s successive victories at the polls, to enter into high-level, behind-closed-door, bilateral talks with the ruling party with a view “to modify[ing] the outcomes and procedures of formal democracy.”46 To date, Renamo has been frustrated in its efforts to achieve its primary goal: securing gubernatorial appointments in the provinces in which it posted electoral majorities in 1994 and 1999. But informal inter-elite negotiations have achieved a more immediate Renamo objective: namely, to recreate, insofar as is possible, “the relationship between the major domestic parties that obtained during peace negotiations,” when the warring belligerents enjoyed a “rough parity” and “when organizational and political capacity were secondary in importance to either party’s ability to derail the entire process.”47

Recent patterns of political interaction recall those that characterized the peace talks in a second respect: they rely heavily on the intervention of powerful outsiders for their ongoing reproduction. The persistence of the “syndrome of the Rome negotiations”48 does not augur well for the

158 The context, 1987–1994 deepening of democratic practice within Mozambique. For the intensification of “strategies of extraversion” both bespeaks and heightens the highly centralized, top-down character of Frelimo’s and Renamo’s internal political structures, at once widening the gap between party leaders and local militants and between political elites and voters.49

At least two additional factors have inhibited processes of democratization. The first is Mozambique’s “strong form of centralized presidentialism,” which unduly concentrates appointive powers in the executive branch at all levels of government. The second is the slow pace of state decentralization. As of mid-2004, local government elections are still confined to thirtythree cities and towns, leaving the rural areas, where some 75 percent of Mozambicans lives, without any voice in district-level administration.50

The most significant victory registered by the rural poor in the postwar period has been a new land law, approved by parliament in 1997. Among other things, the law bolsters women’s land rights; it confers on “local communities” the legal standing to secure land title documents, an entitlement previously reserved solely for individuals and companies; it sanctions recourse to “customary norms and practices” in land-related issues so long as these are not at odds with constitutional principles; and it provides a range of protection and rights to smallholders against eviction and expropriation by the powerful.51 The law was the product of “one of the most open and democratic processes in many years in Mozambique.”52

However, gains by the laboring poor, rural or otherwise,53 have been few and far between and are precarious at best. Indeed, the present balance of power in Mozambique is such that representatives of “civil society” found themselves compelled to impress upon (unaccountable) donors that they, the donors, are in a much better position than Mozambican voters to bring the requisite pressure to bear on the government to get to the bottom of the banking scandals and their murderous aftermath.54

The 1999 elections results showed that the electorate remains deeply polarized and that political divisions strongly tend to coincide with regional divides. The potential for political hostility between the two sides to erupt into deadly confrontation was revealed in November 2000, when Renamo staged demonstrations across the country to protest the 1999 election results, among other things. In several cities and towns at least forty-one people lost their lives when the protests turned violent. The bloodiest clash was in Montepuez, where demonstrators tried to seize the town. In the police crackdown that followed, at least eighty-three people died of asphyxiation in a grossly overcrowded local jail.55

Concerns that continuing political tensions could spur a return to armed confrontation have been reinforced by Renamo’s ongoing refusal to disband weapon-toting groups in central Mozambique. The militia, comprised of former rebel soldiers who eluded demobilization in the 1993–1994 period, stand accused of beating and abducting government officials and Frelimo cadres, as well as other acts of intimidation.56 Renamo’s inclination toward

The context, 1987–1994 159 violence was most recently on display in October 2003 when some fifty former Renamo fighters, armed with clubs and machetes, sought to disrupt and/or abort the founding conference of a new political party formed by a former senior Renamo leader who was expelled from the party in 2000.57

Thus far, none of the more disturbing features of Mozambique’s still emergent postwar political economy have detracted from the Mozambican “success story,” as authored by the country’s leading external patrons and as deftly exploited by Mozambique’s ruling elites. The origins of this myth, which crystallized in the mid-1990s and grew ever more robust as a result of the macro-economic boom that marked the decade’s final years, reside in the depths of Mozambique’s external dependence at the end of the war.

This state of acute dependence, coinciding as it did with the collapse of the Soviet Union, made Mozambique a prime target for post-Cold Warinspired international initiatives aimed at building liberal democracies the world over and in Africa especially.58 The confluence of these factors in and of themselves would have probably been sufficient to turn Mozambique into “an experimental laboratory” for nation building by Cold War victors.59 However, a further consideration worked to make such an outcome all but certain. This was “the international community’s need for a success in peacekeeping” in the wake of a string of defeats in Africa. Most consequential in this respect was the return to civil war in Angola. The renewal of armed hostilities followed Unita’s refusal to accept the verdict of UN-sponsored multiparty elections, held in September 1992, which returned the MPLA to power. The Angolan debacle, in combination with subsequent peacekeeping failures in Somalia (1993) and Rwanda (1994), worked, over the course of the 1990s, to erode the “international consensus” regarding the prospects for successful nation-building in Africa and to dampen donor interest in the continent. By the decade’s close, international development assistance to Africa had plummeted by about a third.60 Ironically, however, the UN’s less than stellar record made the organization and its main sponsors ever more hungry for the successful denouement of their interventions in Mozambique.

In the first instance, this hunger manifested itself in the ambitious reach of the UN’s peacekeeping mission. ONUMOZ was not only colossal and costly. It also “broke new ground” in the lengths it went to in order to secure the peace.61 More recently, the magnitude of the political stakes that the UN and IFIs (international financial institutions) havein Mozambique’s postwar economic recovery and political stability is evident in the extent to which donors and IFIs have muted their criticism of the shortcomings of the official probes into the banking scandals and the murders that followed on them. And it is apparent in the overriding reality that whatever criticism has been forthcoming has been effectively drowned out by the actions of donors, which have, in recent years, made a point of showering more international assistance on the Mozambican government than it has requested.62

If Mozambique’s extreme dependence accounts for the country’s conversion into a “donor playground,”63 the Mozambican success story has paradox-

160 The context, 1987–1994 ically enabled the Frelimo government to achieve a greater measure of autonomy vis-à-vis its external patrons.64 This is because “as the international donors invest more ‘political capital’ in the Mozambican success, the greater the ability on the part of Mozambican government officials to exert influence over the process in order to tailor it to their needs.”65

Ironically, the government’s increased room for maneuver has led the ruling elite to adopt positions that might have clashed with donor agendas in the early 1990s but seem to enjoy tacit donor approval today. The policy of decentralization stands as a case in point. In recent years, the government’s “gradualist approach” to ceding power and authority has slowed to a near standstill. As already noted, the 2003 municipal elections did not expand the number of the country’s municipalities. In addition, a proposed new law on provincial, district and sub-district administration is unabashedly centralist in its orientation. According to Hanlon, this orientation suits donors, which now seek to exert greater control over their funds and over policy-making and see a strong central government as the best means of achieving these objectives.66

At the same time that “the centralizers” within the ruling party and the government have begun to reassert themselves politically, so too have those within these same institutions who oppose a legally-sanctioned return to chiefly rule. The article pertaining to traditional authorities in the nowrevoked 1994 Municipalities Law has failed to resurface in subsequent legislation. Rather, a government decree, issued in 2000, refers to “traditional leaders” as but one of several kinds of “community authorities” that “local communit[ies]” or “social group[s]” might choose to represent them in their dealings with officialdom. The decree makes clear that traditional leaders enjoy no special rank or status in relation to rural authorities of other stripes unless the collectivity in question deems that they should. Similar formulations can be found in recent legislation pertaining to land and natural resource management and in proposed constitutional amendments.67

In the meantime, by the late 1990s, in “many areas, district administrators [were] already meeting with traditional leaders and encouraging them to mobilise people to carry out tasks such as keeping the roads open and participating in the [1997] national census.”68 In recent years traditional authorities of various types have, in different parts of the country, helped promote government- and NGO-sponsored public health campaigns; they have participated in the distribution of emergency relief in the wake of natural disasters (e.g. flooding and tropical depressions); they have been elected to represent locals in community wildlife management schemes; they have been sought out to facilitate the resolution of local conflicts; and they have been called upon by both political parties and independents to help turn out the vote or to otherwise influence electoral behavior. They have also been empowered by law to vouch for the identity of local citizens who live in the same jurisdiction as they do and who wish to register to vote but lack the requisite documentation to do so.69

The context, 1987–1994 161

At the same time, it is clear that the authority and power of people claiming the mantle of traditional titles go only so far. Not all such claimants, for instance, have emerged victorious in community elections to lead local resource management initiatives. They are not the only local figures relied upon to resolve conflicts outside the formally-constituted legal apparatus or to carry out administrative tasks. Their legitimacy has been openly and broadly contested when local development projects in which their consent or participation has been critical have yielded unsatisfactory outcomes. Their political sway is highly restricted in certain parts of the country and their claim to leadership is often rejected wholesale by certain social groups, most notably youth, even in areas where the legitimacy of such claims (if not necessarily the claimants themselves) may enjoy widespread acceptance.70 The two-year-long public debate on the drafting of new land legislation in the mid-1990s exposed sharp divisions within the populace with respect to, as well as broad-based popular ambivalence toward, “tradition” and the role of royals in interpreting its meaning and directing its applications.71

Civil war and its legacies

The remainder of this chapter is concerned chiefly with local developments in Namapa in the early 1990s. The 1989–1990 period witnessed some of the heaviest and most generalized fighting of the war in the district. Renamo units moved through, and wreaked destruction in, all of Namapa’s administrative divisions during the first eight months of 1991. They also mounted major attacks on the district’s three towns and launched a series of ambushes along the Namialo-Pemba road. The assaults inflicted extensive damage and casualties. By mid-year, the accumulated toll of Renamo’s handiwork included 387 people kidnapped, forty-nine people killed, fortytwo villages burned, 689 houses burned, six schools destroyed, five shops burned and seven attacks on military-escorted columns, according to official estimates.72

War-driven large-scale population movements continued on into the early 1990s. In the face of ongoing Renamo attacks on communal villages and the progressively loosening administrative grip of the state, local populations streamed out of the aldeias. Many sought refuge either in the province’s cities and towns, local accommodation centers or the bairros of the district’s six administrative seats. Others sought protective cover in the dispersed habitat.73

August 1991 marked the beginning of a turnaround in the security situation in the vicinity of the district seat. The shift attested to a general abatement of the fighting in the wider region as the south became the main theater of combat. The district administration attributed changes on the local front, as well as subsequent military gains, to the joint action of the government army and the Naparamas. In October the district reported that government forces and the Naparamas were currently engaged in a “mop up

162 The context, 1987–1994 of the forests, dismantling advanced posts and bases of the enemy.” By February people had begun to venture out to their machambas, “even to places difficult to get to” and, in April, the administration reported that there had been “no enemy movement.”74

The immediate effect of Renamo’s retreat from its former military strongholds in the district was, from the administration’s standpoint, the intensification of the emergency situation several fold. In abandoned advanced posts, “the enemy left hunger, nudity and illnesses” and local populations required clothing, agricultural tools, seeds and immediate medical and relief assistance.75 The advent of relative calm locally also brought an influx of people from Cabo Delgado fleeing the war. Compounding this, from September 1992 onwards, Namapa residents began to return home from their wartime sanctuaries in Nacala, Nampula and Namialo. In the wake of the signing of the AGP, population flows into the district accelerated from both nearby cities and towns, as well as from Renamo bases. Finally, starting in March 1992, demobilized soldiers from both sides of the conflict began to return to the district, often with wartime-acquired dependants in tow.76

The ability of the district administration to satisfy the basic needs of the population was highly constrained. A third of the district’s ninety-three primary schools had either been destroyed by Renamo, or otherwise rendered inoperative by the war.77 The local authorities and NGO personnel registered a high incidence of anemia, malaria, diarrhea, tuberculosis, bilharzia, intestinal parasites, cholera and scabies among district residents.78 While Namapa hosts several health posts, in practice health-care delivery was limited to the rural hospital in Namapa Center and two mission-run health centers. The state-run hospital, one of five in Nampula’s rural areas, had been partially destroyed in a Renamo attack. The facility was desperately short of medicines, bereft of transport, poorly managed, plagued by unsanitary conditions and riven by corruption.79

With only a quarter of the wells and boreholes in the district functioning at the war’s end, potable water sources were few and far between.80 The situation in the district seat was only marginally better. The town was supplied with untreated water from the Lúrio river, which had in the recent past been known to carry cholera bacteria.81 In addition, the pipes were badly in need of replacement.82 During most of my stay in the district, the system was not functioning at all.83

By the war’s end, the productive capacity of smallholders had been severely eroded.84 The extent of this erosion was brought home to the NGO World Vision in a fairly forceful and unexpected manner when it tried to exchange improved varieties for local seeds. The program drew to an abrupt halt on day one when World Vision staff discovered that local smallholders literally had no seeds with which to exchange. As a result, the program’s launch was delayed by a year and seeds were distributed without payment in kind.85

According to a monthly report penned by the district administration, one sign of the deepening impoverishment of the majority of the peasantry was

The context, 1987–1994 163 the inability of a growing number of families to afford fees for initiation rites.86 In mid-1994, the going rates for girls and boys was less than US$0.50.87

The war, and the peace accord which ended it, also left a legacy of “dual administration.” The AGP held that Mozambican laws and official institutions would hold sway over the entire national territory, a provision which laid the basis for the extension of state administration to Renamo-held zones. Renamo, in its turn, was given the authority to appoint administrators of its zones from the locally resident population, including from its own ranks. Subsequent agreements between Chissano and Dhlakama the following year called for the appointment of three Renamo advisers to be assigned to each provincial administration to assist the process of territorial integration. They also led to the creation of a national commission to determine which zones fell under Renamo control and to approve Renamo nominees to administrate them. The commission, whose work was brought to an abrupt standstill a few months after it began to operate by Renamo’s boycott of its meetings, ruled that Renamo controlled five out of the country’s 128 districts and forty-two out of its 393 administrative posts. The status of numerous other districts and posts was left undetermined and the persistence of dual administration in many areas continued well past the inauguration of a new government following the elections.88

Only two of seventy-four administrative posts in Nampula were deemed to fall under Renamo’s jurisdiction (the status of a third remained in dispute). In addition, the rebels controlled numerous enclaves, which, together with the two posts, accounted for some 30 percent of the province’s territory, according to one estimate.89 In Namapa, Renamo controlled the southeast corner of Alua Administrative Post, an area that bordered Renamo strongholds in Memba and Monapo districts. The district STAE (the Technical Secretariat for Elections Administration), the technical arm of the National Elections Commission (CNE), registered less than 3 percent of the district’s 111,324 registered voters in the area.90 Unlike in many places in the province, people circulated freely in and out of Renamo’s zone.91 But no steps had been taken to extend the district administration to the area and, although the local director of agriculture maintained that food aid had been distributed there, local residents disputed the claim.92

Rural markets, capital and the PRE/PRES

One of the intended objectives of structural adjustment policies was to stimulate smallholder agricultural production and to promote rural marketing. However, trade in the hinterland continued to labor under severe structural constraints. The war seriously impeded economic activity, let alone economic recovery.93 At the same time, the PRE/PRES’ tight monetary policy reinforced two central features of the pre-1987 rural economy: goods shortages and barter. Economic trends already much in evidence in the late

164 The context, 1987–1994 1980s, notably rising living costs and deteriorating rural terms of trade, became increasingly pronounced in the early 1990s and continued to inhibit the expansion of smallholder agriculture.94

As the war escalated in Namapa in the late 1980s, most traders fled to provincial urban centers, only to return after the signing of the AGP.95 Others were forced to pull their operations back to the administrative seats of district posts and localities, increasing the distances rural dwellers had to travel to find marketing outlets.96 At the war’s height, official trade even here ground to a halt in some cases. By early 1991, the majority of shops had been “paralyzed because of the destruction of buildings by enemy action” although, by the war’s end, most were back in operation.97 The proliferation of itinerant traders (vendedores ambulantes), many relying on bicycles for transport, partially mitigated the adverse effects of the abandonment and destruction of rural stores.98

Nonetheless, persistent shortfalls of basic commodities and the limited availability of farming tools constrained economic activities and agricultural production. Many traders had suffered serious losses of operating capital during the war. Whole inventories had been stolen or burned, sometimes on more than one occasion. Vehicles had often met with similar fates. Some traders had entrusted their shops to employees at the height of the war only to subsequently discover that much of their merchandise was unaccounted for.99 Consequently, most traders both required credit and lacked the requisite collateral to get it. Wartime losses had prevented many traders from paying back old loans and, as a result, they were not eligible for new ones. Those who were eligible for bank credit faced prohibitively high interest rates and short repayment periods.100 In Nampula, as throughout the country, economic austerity has all-too-often discouraged market competition, favoring larger, wealthier, lower risk merchants over their smaller brethren.101

In Namapa, both Agricom, the parastatal agricultural marketing board, and Casa Salvador, the private wholesaler in the district, often delayed payment to traders or flatly refused to pay them in cash at all, exacerbating liquidity problems. Cash-flow problems made agricultural marketing fairly fitful and uncertain. To compensate for cash shortfalls, the two distributors were wont to insist that the traders pay producers solely in merchandise.102 Barter not only radically circumscribed consumer choice but also typically left agricultural producers shortchanged.103

Living costs continued to rise steeply. A study of Nampula’s westernmost districts by the Dutch Embassy gives a good indication of overall trends in the province. Minimum prices for agricultural crops had risen anywhere from 45 to 70 percent a year between 1991 and 1993. In contrast, agricultural tools had risen by 100 to 200 percent between 1992 and 1993 and essential consumer goods had risen on the order of 167 to 267 percent during the same period.104 Given that traders often paid peasant producers less than officially-stipulated minimum crop prices and that barter

The context, 1987–1994 165 continued to be a prevalent means of exchange, real terms of trade for smallholders were often even lower than these figures suggest.105 Other structural factors inhibiting the performance and expansion of rural markets included lack of transport, high transport costs, lack of sacks, inadequate storage facilities and poor road conditions.106

Increased economic activity and opportunity in the aftermath of the general ceasefire gave rise to disputes over control over rural markets. Returning shop-based traders often collided with ambulantes who had moved into their former area of influence.107 In general, government officials seemed to favor larger traders, at least in part because their activities were easier to monitor and to tax.108 This bias may also have been an expression of the increasingly visible and robust alliance between merchant capital and officialdom that was developing at all levels of authority during the period in question.109

Privatization accompanied the halting re-establishment of rural markets and the ebbing of the war in the district. In 1991 EEAN, which by the mid1980s had racked up the highest debt of all state farms in Nampula, was converted into a joint venture, with JFS putting up 51 percent of the capital and the Mozambican government weighing in with the remainder. The new company, the Cotton Development Society of Namialo (SODAN), opted to pursue a low-risk investment and production strategy.110 Perhaps JFS’s boldest move was undertaken before privatization when the company was charged with managing smallholder agriculture in Namapa for an ailing and highly ineffective EEAN: the hiring of some six chiefs in the district as capatazes. Subsequent developments reveal that company expectations of traditional authorities were overblown: all but one of these new hires had been laid off by 1992. The sole exception was Chief Namiquela (Namikela, Namequela), who had worked in that capacity during the colonial period.111

The budget crisis and the state

By the end of the 1980s, the most skilled public servants had the option of moonlighting for, or securing full-time employment with, one of scores of foreign-based NGOs and bilateral donors that had descended upon the country. At the bottom end of the pay-scale, however, state personnel had to earn second incomes to get by. 112 In Nampula, the crisis of the state bureaucracy was acute. In 1987, the province had taken the first steps towards decentralizing local government. Financial and administrative autonomy in the first phase meant that the eighteen district administrations and three city executive councils would henceforth be responsible for footing the wage bill of their own functionaries, among other employees. No sooner had decentralization entered into effect than “local organs,” as district and city governments are collectively known, were beset by severe and recurrent budget deficits. The budget crisis engendered ever-growing backlogs of unpaid salaries; high rates of absenteeism; worker indiscipline; poor job

166 The context, 1987–1994 performance; and the spread and institutionalization of corruption.113 In practice, local governments remained heavily dependent on provincial government subsidies but these were both insufficient and only sporadically forthcoming.

Namapa was a microcosm of province-wide trends. At the beginning of 1991, the district warned that conditions were ripe for strike action due to “the non-payment of back pay of some workers of the Administration for the years of 88/89” and the administration’s ongoing inability to meet its salary obligations.114 Wage arrears seem to go some way towards explaining lax security conditions at the Namapa District jail. At least the remarks of the Provincial Directorate of Assistance and Control (DPAC), the branch of government that oversees district administration, suggest as much:

The Director of the Jail has not received a salary since November 1989. Lack of food for the prisoners. The jail lacks a guard. The prisoners escape from the jail, afterwards committing diverse crimes against the population. When apprehended, they accuse the Director of the Jail as the person who gave them orders.115

Not surprisingly, the district administrator’s authority over his subordinates was, by this time, showing signs of severe attenuation. In mid-1991, for instance, the administration reported that “The District Directors, when they go to Nampula for work, stay there sometimes for more than 30 days.”116 District directors also stood accused of misappropriation of public monies, drunkenness on the job, indiscipline, “abuse of power” and other irregular behavior.117

The Namapa district assembly had been out of commission since at least 1988 for lack of finance.118 The executive council, in principle the assembly’s executive arm, acted in its stead. Consisting mainly of the district directors and headed by the district administrator, the executive council was effectively a simple extension of the state apparatus.119 Financial constraints had also debilitated the assemblies of the administrative posts and localities.120 The war’s end brought a renewed attempt to kick-start legislative organs. The initiative, however, does not seem to have produced concrete results.121

The predicament of the president of the district assembly, who had assumed his post in 1991 as a direct consequence of the legalization of political pluralism, was indicative. Up until the promulgation of the new constitution, the district administrator had simultaneously served as the president of the executive council, the president of the assembly, and the first secretary of the Frelimo Party at the district level. In keeping with newly adopted political reforms, he surrendered the latter two functions in 1991 while continuing to head the executive council. While the first Frelimo secretary of the district became a full-time, salaried party post, no such provision was made for the newly-installed president of the (long inoperative and effectively defunct) district assembly.

The context, 1987–1994 167

These developments occurred as the economics of survival grew increasingly harsh. At the same time, the shift from state-controlled circuits of distribution to market principles had eliminated one of the main perquisites of public office in local institutions which fell outside the compass of the formal state apparatus. Not surprisingly, the availability of suitably qualified people for voluntary public service at the grassroots level was rapidly diminishing, as was the likelihood of retaining such people as were available.122

By mid-1991, the district administration characterized the situation of the president of the assembly as “deplorable because he does not receive any remuneration, and the proposals sent to the Provincial Assembly [to rectify this] haven’t received a response.”123 In the wake of the peace accord, the administration resolved to provide the president with a stipend of eighty contos a month. In practice, he received what appears to have been a one-time lump sum of 320 contos (approximately US$344 at 1993 official exchange rates), covering the period from October 1992 through January 1993.124 When we met in mid-1994, by which time it had become clear that forthcoming local government reforms would eliminate the organs of “popular power,” the effectively jobless president voiced his intention to write to the provincial government demanding back pay for the 1993–1994 period.

The simultaneity of political reform and ongoing market liberalization, then, produced complex and contradictory pressures on the state’s lower reaches. Concerted attempts to lend some semblance of autonomy to the district assembly led the administration to assume new financial commitments to sustain a freshly appointed authority – even as it continued to default with regularity on longstanding ones. At the same time, the district authorities were discovering that, as a result of economic reforms, the state could no longer rely on unpaid party labor at the level of the locality.125

Moves toward fiscal reform

At the beginning of 1992, the Provincial Directorate of Finances (DPF), acting at the behest of the governor, prepared a report on the recent fiscal performance of the province’s local organs for 1990 and 1991. The report found that, in 1990, only five of eighteen rural districts had collected national tax – at that time, 1,500 meticais, approximately US$1.60 at 1990 nominal official exchange rates – from more than 10 percent of the eligible population; in 1991, only four did.126 The director poured scorn on the standard defense that district budgetary woes could be wholly blamed on the war: “One cannot present the justification that Mogincual, as it is totally plunged in a sea of war, is unable to collect at least ten Taxes, because the question would be: and the bureaucratic staff, doesn’t it also pay taxes?”127 He reserved special ire for the local organ whose revenue-raising capacity and vulnerability to Renamo attack least resembled those of Mogincual: the Nampula City Executive Council. In 1990, the council collected 21,960

168 The context, 1987–1994 contos in IRN out of potential total of 187,200 contos. In 1991, it netted 30,692 contos. Nonetheless, “it was possible to have an entertainment expense account, including alcoholic beverages, of a sum above 7,000 contos, in addition to misappropriations of funds ... by some functionaries, principallythose in charge of IRN collection.”128

To impose fiscal discipline and to ensure greater budgetary transparency, DPAC made a series of recommendations, including docking administrators’ salaries in the event “they don’t present acceptable justifications” for failing to fulfill their public treasury responsibilities.129 It is unclear what, if anything, came of DPAC’s proposals. What is clear is that, from then on, the Namapa administration, which collected taxes from less than 6 percent of the eligible population in 1991,130 began to report measures it was taking in order to bolster public receipts and to minimize and penalize tax evasion. It also began to devote considerable energy to providing plausible explanations for ongoing low revenue levels.131

Chiefs were, for the first time since independence, entrusted with overall responsibility for mobilizing the population to pay tax. While in principle this implied the displacement of party secretaries, in actuality local practice varied considerably, as I show in Chapter 5. Chiefs were also awarded bonuses in the event they met or exceeded pre-set government targets. The administration reportedly paid a total of 140 contos to seven traditional authorities, representing heavily populated regedorias, for services rendered during 1993.132 By early 1993, the onus of tax collection seems largely to have passed to law enforcement bodies, namely the police and local agents acting in their name.

Tax collection seems to have increased in 1993 but the evidence is ambiguous.133 In 1994, tax collection was, according to the chief adviser in the district secretariat, “much weaker” than it had been the previous year, a decrease he attributed to the spurious, but apparently highly effective, campaign tactics of the political opposition: “The [newly formed] parties said you don’t have to pay tax. This government is going to go.”134 The district administration remained heavily dependent on the provincial government for finance during this period and, even then, salaries went unpaid. In 1993, salaries were reportedly paid through March but went unpaid for June, September, October and November of that year.135

It is difficult to assess the administration’s revenue-raising capacity because of the limited availability, ambiguity and questionability of data on revenue levels, among other factors.136 At the outside, the number of citizens who paid IRN had risen from under 6 percent in 1992 to 10.5 percent in 1993. This increase is not spectacular or wholly unexpected given the advent of peace. Only seven out of the thirty-odd state-recognized chiefs met government targets for tax collection and, thus, were awarded bonuses in 1993. Whether by choice, incapacity or simply lack of means, the great majority of chiefs had collected little to no IRN payment and roughly 90 percent of the population made no contribution to state coffers.

The context, 1987–1994 169

Such realities were glossed by official pronouncements extolling the impressive advances made by chiefs in the area of tax collection. In August 1993, for instance, DPAC reported that in Namapa

[t]he national reconstruction tax (IRN) is being collected with great success ... an action that is developed by the régulos, who must present taxpayers at the District Administration or in the respective regedorias for the purpose of collection [on] scheduled days for each regulado, for which purpose a functionary of the Administration is responsible.137

The claim was reiterated in February 1994 in a report covering the latter half of 1993 – despite the fact that IRN was not collected during the months in question, unless its collection went unreported.138 DPAC’s glowing assessments are but one instance of a marked tendency within officialdom to overstate the salutary effects of the return to chiefly rule during this time.

Locally, revenue levels remained largely a function of the number of cotton producers with yields to sell.139 Significantly, the cotton markets, both in the colonial past and in the 1990s, constituted a site at which the state could enter into direct contact with rural dwellers without the mediation of local leadership of whatever ilk – in both instances, it was the cotton concession whichfacilitated the encounter.140 Rural authority only entered into play to the extent that, in the 1990s as in the colonial period, state and company representatives relied upon it to mobilize smallholders to produce cotton. On this score, as we have already seen, chiefs had dismally failed to live up to the expectations placed on them.

“Marginality” and law enforcement

The period after 1987 witnessed a rising incidence of robbery and homicide. At the beginning of 1991, the administration reported that “a high rate of marginality,” primarily among youth, had begun to pose a threat to “the security of State,” in addition to that of the population at large.141 In the wake of the peace accord, the state turned its attention to the question of law and order. This growing preoccupation was evidenced in stepped up law enforcement activity throughout the province. In Namapa, the administration began to devote increasing space in its monthly communiqués to enumerating the numbers and types of crimes, misdemeanors and traffic infractions reported, fines and summonses issued, arrests and detentions made, the numbers of citizens interrogated in the streets and in custody, and the revenue generated from law enforcement activity. Law enforcement agents stepped up patrols and held meetings “with the Régulos of the District in order to analyze the ... criminal situation as well as the system of force employed to neutralize agents of crime.”142 The police took to questioning and searching citizens on the street in order to apprehend and fine

170 The context, 1987–1994 tax-dodgers, as well as unregistered or otherwise suspect persons. Such practices occurred with increasing frequency in the postwar period, as the assiduously recorded statistics in district reports amply attest.143

The clampdown in Namapa, as in the province as a whole, was a straightforward attempt to assert state authority and control over government-held areas. It also appears to have been an integral component of the state’s revenue-raising exercise. Whatever the crackdown’s original intent, it provided a host of opportunities for corruption and extortion. Few such opportunities went unexploited.144 Like other state employees, law enforcement officers found it increasingly difficult to make ends meet on their income – even if they were receiving it. For many, the government’s law and order offensive enabled a revenue-raising campaign not for reduction of the public deficit but for personal consumption and accumulation. As a result, the populace in Nampula draw little distinction between law enforcement agents and their putative quarry.145 Law enforcement measures, which in the main targeted misdemeanors, did little to stem the rising tide of lawlessness. As I show in Chapter 6, chieftaincy was considered by people at all levels of social agency to be an antidote for the unabated growth of “marginality,” even as chiefs themselves expressed fear and helplessness in the face of the very “marginals” their own return to rule was expected to discipline and deter.

Pre-election instability

In the year ahead of the elections, the country was rocked by near continuous rioting and mutiny by various and sundry military and paramilitary forces, contributing to the climate of social disorder and lawlessness.146 At the beginning of September 1994, the provincial government of Nampula estimated that in the previous three months, there had been an average of one disturbance a day. Ten people had died as a result.147

Namapa District was also the locus of extensive unrest. August 1994 witnessed the two Naparama protests described in the Introduction. That same month, the 119-strong former militia of Casa Salvador raided the wholesaler’s warehouse for the third time in as many years.148 In early September, demobilized soldiers and militiamen staged protests in the district capital, vandalizing local stores and closing down the national road for several hours until police reinforcements from Nampula arrived on the scene.149 This was the social, economic and political milieu in which the retraditionalization of rural administration and struggles over local political authority, the subject of the next two chapters, took place.