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.

We denounced the attitude of the countries that, because they were members of NATO, never condemned Portugal. During a visit to West Germany, the Social Democratic Party offered us a million German Marks for medicines, but we said that we thought that it was immoral. We would rather see them give the medicines to the Portuguese and instead give us the weapons that they gave to Portugal. They never did. They never accepted our proposal, but the media made a big deal out of it.

Marcelino dos Santos, Frelimo

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.

Note: I wrote this article last summer, and it was published in Canadian Dimension, but in a highly edited way. This is the original, unedited version.

POLICE REPRESSION OF STUDENTS: Another brick in the wall

I learned that policemen are my friends
I learned that justice never ends
I learned that murderers die for their crimes
Even if we make a mistake sometimes
And that’s what I learned in school today
That’s what I learned in school
— Tom Paxton, “What Did You Learn in School Today?”

For the first time in over thirty-five years, the University of Toronto’s administration pressed charges against fourteen campus activists, who were arrested in late April by Toronto Police, for alleged forcible confinement, mischief to property and forcible detainer. The criminal offences allegedly occurred over a month before the arrests, at a peaceful sit-in staged on March 20 by over forty students and activists to protest fee hikes. The sit-in ended when administrators ordered campus police to violently remove protestors.

This group of protestors, who with other allies would later form the Committee for Just Education, argues for free education, questions the legitimacy of the administration’s authority, and makes its points through constant direct action. This kind of resistance is quite unsightly when UofT’s administration is publicly calling for the deregulation of student fees and massive commercialization of the university, as demonstrated in its Towards 2030 plan. Among other things, this plan blames poor people for not having the initiative to “assume debt” to finance their pursuit of postsecondary education (http://www.towards2030.utoronto.ca/sec3.html).

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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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