Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Revisionism in Postcolonial Africa

The Case of Mozambique, 1975-1994

By Alice Dinerman

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About the Book

This groundbreaking study investigates defining themes in the field of social memory studies as they bear on the politics of post-Cold-War, post-apartheid Southern Africa.

Examining the government’s attempts to revise postcolonial Mozambique’s traumatic past with a view to negotiating the present, Alice Dinerman stresses the path-dependence of memory practices while tracing their divergent trajectories, shifting meanings and varied combinations within ruling discourse and performance.

Central themes include:

* the interplay between past and present
* the dialectic between remembering and forgetting
* the dynamics between popular and official memory discourses
* the politics of acknowledgement.

Dinerman’s original analysis is essential reading for students of modern Africa; the sociology of memory; Third World politics and post-conflict societies.

Table of Contents

List of Maps Acknowledgments Glossary and Acronyms Notes on Terminology, Orthography and Currency Prologue: The Making and Unmaking of the Namapa Naparamas 1. Myth as a ‘Meaning-making’ Device in Post-Independence Mozambique 2. Aspects of Precolonial and Colonial Nampula 3. From ‘Abaixo’ to ‘Chiefs of Production’, 1975-1987 4. The Context, 1987-1994 5. Multipartyism, the Retraditionalization of Local Administration and the Apparent Duplication of State Authority: The Case of Nampula Province 6. Labor, Tribute and Authority 7. In the Name of the State 8. Roots, Routes and Rootlessness: Ruling Political Practice and Mozambican Studies Bibliography