Aquino [de Bragança, director of the African Studies Centre at Maputo’s Eduardo Mondlane University], speaking at the journalists’ club on 13 August 1977, remarked that ‘bourgeois’ journalism could often be much better, from a professional standpoint, than journalism of the left. He recalled that when he was in Moscow, since he was unable to read Russian, he looked for papers in French or English, and found that L’Humanité, the daily paper of the French Communist Party, was the only one readily available. ‘After reading it, I was convinced they were going to take the Bastille,’ he remarked drily. He had to find someone with a subscription to Le Monde if he wanted to know what was going on in the world. (53)

Paul Fauvet and Marcelo Mosse, Carlos Cardoso: Telling the Truth in Mozambique. Cape Town: Double Storey Books, 2003.

Mozambicans are now beginning to insist that, while the world’s best economists may not be as bright as peasant farmers, they cannot possibly be that stupid. Could it be that the IMF programme really is successful, but that it has different goals and a different agenda from what the Mozambicans are told? (107)

Joseph Hanlon, Peace Without Profit. Woodbridge: James Currey, 1995.

But it was rather disconcerting … to find the World Bank standing marginally to the left of spokespersons from the Mozambican government. (105)

My friend also referred to a long series of discussions he and I had had over the years (including during the period when I had taught at the FRELIMO party school) in which I had often emphasized the costs of FRELIMO’s embracing the particularly lifeless brand of Marxism on offer from the Soviets as the ideological instrument for codifying its radical intentions. We should probably have listened more to you, he said lightly, then – in a wry voice – ‘Of course, you didn’t have in your briefcase the military hardware that we also felt we needed’! (107-108)

John S. Saul. “Mozambique: The Failure of Socialism?” Transformation 14 (1991): 104-110.

[On] 15 June 1980, President Samora Machel announced on the radio that the old ‘escudo’ [currency] would be replaced, one for one, by a new ‘metical’, over the following three days….

To reduce the number of people in the bank queues, people with jobs were encouraged to bring their money into the workplaces and one person would queue for them all. On Monday the office manager told us all to bring in our money the next day, and we did. I handed in about a month’s salary as did 40 other people, and he went to queue at the bank. It was late when he reached the front of the queue, so he took the bag of new money home and gave it to us the next day. No one thought it was strange. This was what Samora told us to do. Everyone knew that anyone walking away from a bank had a huge pile of money. Yet we heard no stories of people being robbed….

There was total trust — a belief that Frelimo was working for you and that everyone was working together to build something new. (101)

Joseph Hanlon and Teresa Smart, Do Bicycles Equal Development in Mozambique? Woodbridge: James Currey, 2008.

One [explanation of the collapse of socialism in Mozambique] is obviously that of the cold war warriors in Pretoria and the State Department which holds that socialism is a lunatic, evil project which runs against human nature and is doomed to failure everywhere. I will not waste any time on this argument. (83)

Dan O’Meara. “The Collapse of Mozambican Socialism,” Transformation 14 (1991): 82-103.

Frelimo’s advances in the guerrilla war against Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique led to the disillusionment of Portuguese troops and citizens in the colonial mission. While Frelimo attempted to bring about a social revolution in the liberated zones it made military advances in the rest of Mozambique. Meanwhile, in Portugal, internal contradictions came to a head. On April 25, 1974, military officers in Portugal staged a coup against the fascist regime. Hastings notes that “the single most decisive factor behind the April coup in Portugal was the advance of Frelimo in Mozambique” [AH 263]. Although a significant majority of the 80,000 troops in Mozambique by 1974 were indigenous, there were still tens of thousands of Portuguese soldiers deployed there, and many more in Angola and Guinea-Bissau. Also, there were apparently 100,000 draft resisters and deserters who were living outside of Portugal [RL 38].

Negotiations and military struggle for independence

Fighting did not stop after the coup in Portugal, as various military and political figures seemed to have differing ideas about how Mozambique should be managed. Some elements, represented by the Head of State General Antonio Spinola, looked to preserve some kind of arrangement where Mozambique would be part of a federation. Other elements, including the more leftist Armed Forces Movement, seemed to want to get rid of the colonial system entirely [JM 5]. After the coup, the new Portuguese regime looked to negotiate with Frelimo in order to bring the fighting to an end. Portugal’s negotiations team ended up embodying these two tendencies, one of what was perceived as neocolonialism, the other of ending colonialism entirely.

Frelimo’s position remained consistent:

recognition of the inalienable right of Mozambique to independence, transfer of power to the Mozambican people, and acceptance of FRELIMO as their sole, legitimate, representative. [JM 5]

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We discussed in the last couple of pieces how the borders between Mozambique and its neighbours were, sometimes, porous enough for entire communities to cross over. The river Rovuma comprises most of the northern border of Mozambique with what is now Tanzania, and was then Tanganyika, which became a constitutional monarchy in 1961, and fully independent from the British in 1962. Many Mozambican migrants were present in Tanganyika, working on sisal plantations [HW 150]. President Julius Nyerere was committed to African socialism and pan-Africanism, and Tanganyika and later Tanzania thus acted as hosts to the resistance movements of other territories.

There were those rare Mozambicans who were able to go abroad to study (since it was virtually impossible in Mozambique or Portugal for Africans to do so). One of these was Eduardo Mondlane, the son of a Gaza chief from the south, who studied at Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), Lisbon (Portugal), Oberlin (Ohio) and Northwestern (Illinois) [WC 71]. Many gathered in Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania to form nationalist organizations dedicated to freeing Mozambique from Portuguese rule. (I want to discuss, perhaps in another paper, the development of Mozambican nationalism in theoretical context.)

Nationalism and Leadership

Mozambican migrants in Tanganyika formed dance clubs and funeral associations [HW 150], which eventually led to the formation of MANU, or Mozambique African National Union, in 1961 — which seems to have been modeled after the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU). MANU members mobilized by selling membership cards to Mozambicans, mostly of the Makonde in the Mueda plateau (which was right across the river from Tanganyika). Resentment against the Portuguese was high among the Makonde of Mueda, and was exacerbated by a massacre of demonstrators that took place in 1960.

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Like just about any other process, colonization is deeply contradictory. It emanates from the drive to conquer and subjugate for economic reasons, but there’s no such thing as just “economic reasons.” There is pride and prestige involved, and that becomes a significant motivating factor as well. They operate in conjunction. But this matter of pride and prestige comes from the subjugation of entire peoples — and brazen exploitation — and somehow this is transmogrified into a civilizing mission. Colonialism came to bring civilization, commerce and Christianity to the masses, after all. So, really, relax, we’re doing you a favour by occupying your country and killing thousands and perhaps millions of you and stealing your natural resources and, where possible, exploiting your labour. Hooray! But here, I’m not too concerned about how the Portuguese elite used colonialism to feel better about themselves [see PA 108-116]. Rather, I’m going to focus on the imposition of certain politics as they played out in Mozambique.

Indigenato: Citizen and Subject

In 1950, according to a census cited by Perry Anderson, Mozambicans numbered about 5.67 million (not including the Portuguese settlers) [PA 109], and white settlers numbered about 48,000 [PA 100] and mestiços (“mixed”) numbered 25,000 [PA 110]. While official Portuguese ideology was anti-racialist, the regime set up a legal system of differentiation between Portuguese citizens and natives/subjects — needless to say, the categories corresponded to racial lines. The entire system of separation was called Indigenato:

Article 23 of the Decree-Law excludes all natives from any rights vis-a-vis non-native political institutions (i.e. the caricature of voting and common rights possessed by the white population). Article 9 restricts freedom of movement. Article 32 states that work is an indispensable element for the native’s progress and permits administrative enforcement of it. Article 26 specifies that obligatory labour can be enforced for fiscal default. [PA 108]

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No long theoretical preamble here — I’ll try to provide a brief history of colonial Mozambique. I focus mostly on when it gets closer to independence (in 1975), because that’s what we’re gunning for in my paper (and because colonial occupation gets more systematic after the 1880s). I’m also leaving out the pre-colonial history, not because I don’t think it’s important, but because I do think colonialism radically transformed a lot of things, and to whatever extent it preserved, eradicated or transformed pre-colonial relations, that’s what the post-colonial moment had to work with.

Colonialism is brutal, and just about anywhere you go in the world today you can see its after-effects reverberating. There are those who would consider themselves critical and yet try to pass off one kind of colonialism as better than another (because, I don’t know, the French causing a million deaths in Algeria is better than the British causing a few more million in India?), and then there are snots like Sarkozy who imagine that colonialism was the best thing to happen to savage races since Jesus. The truth is that colonialism fucked shit up, everywhere. The violence was tremendous, physically, morally, psychologically, structurally, violence to modes of thought and production of knowledge. Many more forms of violence beside. After significant, bloody and often violent resistance (yeah, even in India, Gandhi notwithstanding) many colonizing powers decided to give up formal political control to the emergent native bourgeoisies of the colonies (something Frantz Fanon referred to as “false decolonization”), maintaining significant political ties and dependent economic relations, i.e., establishing neo-colonialism.

But when it comes to brute force and utter persistence in maintaining formal political control over colonies, Portuguese colonialism wins. (Remember, Rhodesia and South Africa were no longer British colonies, so much as they were ruled by gangs of rich white men, and so that took longer — 1980 and 1994 respectively, and 1990 for Namibia.)

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As I considered my earlier post on the definition of “meaningful development” I realized that a lot of what I said could also be stated in terms of the Marxian theory as I understand it.

My second-last paragraph pointed out that individuals often have an individualized perspective on development (e.g., the necessity for education) even though these perspectives may be widely shared. Here we have an example of the dialectic between immediate needs and objective needs. The immediate need of many in Mozambique is an increase in income by which they can sustain themselves. Many have realized that being educated, or getting their children educated, leads to an increase in income. They thus strive to get at least some of their children (if they survive) educated. We’re still at the level of immediate needs here, the necessity of education is individualized and it becomes dependent upon a transaction. Compare to Adorno (though he isn’t talking about a society like Mozambique’s):

Not only are needs satisfied purely indirectly, by means of exchange-values, but within the relevant economic sectors produced by the profit-motive, and thus at the cost of the objective needs of the consumers, namely those for adequate housing, and completely so in terms of the education and information over the processes which most affect them.

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