frelimo and socialism in mozambique

FRELIMO and Socialism in MozambiqueAuthor(s): Azinna NwaforReviewed work(s):Source: Contemporary Marxism, No. 7, Revolution in Southern Africa (Fall 1983), pp. 28-68Published by: Social Justice/Global OptionsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29765743 .Accessed: 06/01/2012 02:16

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FRELIMO and Socialism

in Mozambique

Azinna Nwafor

Gramsci wrote that "the Russian revolution was a revolution carried out by men organised in the Communist Party: in the Party they fashioned for themselves a new personality, acquired new sentiments and brought into being a morality whose goal is to become a universal consciousness

striven after by all mankind."1 FRELIMO (Frente de Liberta^?o de Mogam

bique), as the instrument and historical form of the social process which

culminated in the liberation of the Mozambican people, created, in the

words of Samora Machel, a new personality "with a new mentality, acquired

through struggle, (who) becomes an agent of transformation and activiza tion for social relations of a new type which will characterize the new society in all fields ? production, education, culture, leadership structures, and rela?

tions with the grass roots in every field. The structures of socialism."2 In the conception of the new personality is encapsulated the political

characterization of the Mozambican Revolution in its concreteness and

specificity, its special configuration of forces, and its solutions to the prob? lems and aspirations of the people, in a synthesis that creatively conjoins and mutually enriches the universal principles of world revolutionary struggle and the specific principles derived from the experience of their own peo?

ple's struggle. As Machel stated with admirable concision, "We can be a

source of inspiration for other revolutions just as we drew inspiration, and

continue to do so, from' the struggle of other peoples. But there is no single model for other peoples. We are all models for all." The Mozambican model

refers, in particular, to the role of the liberated zones, the solution of inter?

nal contradictions and definition of common objectives, and the transfor? mation of the armed struggle for national liberation into a people's revolu?

tionary war. And it inculcates as well the deep and variegated role of the

people's culture which influenced and was itself influenced by the Revolution.

A fuller verston of this article appears in the Fall 1982 issue of Omenana.

FRELIMO and Socialism 29

The Mozambique experience represents, in fact, an embodiment of Cabral's view that,

the value of culture as an element of resistance to foreign domina? tion lies in the fact that culture is the vigorous manifestation on

the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to be dominated. Culture is

simultaneously the fruit of a people's history and a determinant of history, by the positive or negative influence which it exerts on the evolution of relationships between man and his environ?

ment, among men or groups of men within a society, as well as

among different societies. Ignorance of this fact may explain the failure of several attempts at foreign domination ? as well as the failure of some national liberation movements.3

The ideologies of negritude and African authenticity?with their incor? rect and absurd claims to the existence of continental or racial cultures ?

are false and petty bourgeois ideologies of neocolonial domination of the national productive forces, which masked the contradictions between

exploiters and exploited that existed in African societies. In combatting these

ideologies, an anti-imperialist and revolutionary Mozambique affirmed itself with a violent rupture from these ideas:

Black is beautiful. White is beautiful. Yellow is beautiful. We won our war by taking up arms and organising the people, not by grow?

ing our hair in a way that our grandparents did not do, nor by affecting styles of dress that had a certain meaning in the USA but had no meaning in Africa.4

For whether black, white, or yellow, the enemy is the enemy and he is not

defined by his skin pigmentation. The enemy in our area of the world is

"colonialist-capitalist exploitation." In other words, in any particular society at any moment the culture

of the people ? a product of the people's history

? has a mass character and is at the same time unevenly developed among the various groups and social classes of the society. Society is the bearer and creator of culture, and the

political unity of the liberation movement implies the achievement of the cultural unity of the social groups and classes of key importance to the libera? tion struggle. At the core of FRELIMO's conception of forms of cultural

expression is the notion of art on intimate terms with the people and the

Revolution, superbly achieved in the poetry of combat?part of the

weaponry of the guerrillas?with its complete identification of the poet's sensibility with revolutionary practice:

And later I will forge simple words which even the children can understand words which will enter every house like the wind and fall like red hot embers on our people's souls5

30 NWAFOR

And the poet of combat, it is insisted, must be concerned to educate himself

aesthetically "so as not to make verses which are only transcriptions of

party slogans. There are means which already exist for this. . . .Our poets must strive to reach an artistic form suitable for revolutionary content which

they want to transmit poetically."6 A "cultural offensive" was initiated in

all branches of the arts ? dance, painting, the plastic arts, music, and

poetry?and these cultural forms were mobilized throughout the country to extend, deepen, and convey the Revolution together with a foundation of socialist ideas to the people. In the cadence of a representative voice of the poetic offensive:

. . .words like grenades

leaving the shrapnel of ideas in our bodies

bursting walls of ignorance and patient

and strong and constant

they explained and in the words we discovered the truth.7

This is poetry out of necessity, out of reality, whose essential

characteristic, as we have seen, is the absolute identification of the poet's sensibility with revolutionary practice. In the words of a FRELIMO

pamphlet:

This poetry doesn't speak of myths, of abstract things, but speaks of our life of struggle, of our hopes and certainties, our deter?

mination, our love of our comrades, for nature and for our country. And when the poet writes "Forward comrades!" he goes forward himself. He is pleased to have a gun and grasps it truly, as truly as his hands are calloused from using the hoe and his feet are

exhausted from long marches.

For FRELIMO, therefore, the armed struggle for liberation is a cultural act ? simultaneously a product and a determinant of culture?which com?

bats not only the foreign culture but also foreign domination as a whole, and in the process defines the objectives of cultural resistance as an

integral and determining part of the struggle. In Cabral's memorable

conceptualization:

The armed struggle for liberation, in the concrete conditions of

life of African peoples, confronted with the imperialist challenge, is an act of insemination upon history

? the major expression of our culture and of our African essence. In the moment of vic?

tory, it must be translated into a significant leap forward of the culture of the people who are liberating themselves.8

We may note a similar phenomenon, a few years later, in the

Nicaraguan Revolution, where a revolutionary popular culture flourished

during the insurrection, rescuing and placing poetry and theater at the ser


vice of the Revolution. In that struggle, street theater mushroomed through the barrios (working class urban districts); poems were painted on the walls of liberated zones?reminiscent of the "people's newsboards," jornais de povo, in Mozambique, with their load of inspirational and instructional poetic fare ? in a simultaneous conjunction of agitprop, the reassertion of long suppressed cultural traditions of the people, the violent rejection of cultural

imperialism, and direct expression of revolutionary solidarity. And there

too, in their specific circumstance, "people recognised the significance of

popular culture as another weapon in their struggle, a direct challenge to the deformations of television programmes made in the USA, of the regime's appropriation of ethnic art-forms, and the Somozismo propaganda machine."9

From National Liberation Movement to Vanguard Party

FRELIMO is indeed an exemplary and preeminent demonstration of the actuality of a victorious liberation movement which, on the morrow

of its victory and accession to power, transformed itself from a movement

for national liberation into a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party for a con?

tinued and uninterrupted revolutionizing of society and state. As described in the FRELIMO constitution, its vanguard role was envisaged as follows:

As the leading force of society and the state, the Party must guide, mobilise and organise the broad masses in the task of building People's Democracy, carry out the construction of our state appa? ratus which materialises the power of the worker-peasant alliance and serves as an instrument for the construction of the ideological, political, economic, cultural and social bases of socialist society.

For the Mozambican Revolution is fully aware that the struggle for national

liberation is not resolved by a nationalist solution, a solution that in itself

opens two and only two possible paths for an independent nation: the path of continued imperialist domination through the establishment of neocolonial

structures, and that of a transition towards socialism ? and the abolition, for all time, of "the exploitation of man by man"?through the destruc?

tion of the capitalist structures implanted in the national territory by

imperialism. In opting unequivocally for the path of socialism, which they discovered

by their own specific experience as the only path of complete liberation

of their national productive forces, FRELIMO recognized that the destruc?

tion of the state structures of imperialist exploitation and continuation of

the revolutionary process could only take place under the political leader?

ship of a proletarian vanguard organized in a well-structured, Marxist

Leninist party?at once the initiator and coordinator of mass action. We

had anticipated this development in an essay written in 1975.10 In the intro?

ductory report to the FRELIMO Third Congress of February 3, 1977, at

which it was formally transformed into a Marxist-Leninist party, Samora

Machel stated:

The working class is the leading class of history. Only it is capable of engaging in the whole process of the transformation of nature

32 NWAFOR

and society and of stimulating and guiding this process. This

requires a conscious and active participation in tasks at all levels of society. . . The peasantry is the most numerous part of our

population ? the principal force of our country. It is the peasantry

allied with the working force?the leading force?which constitute the political power base [of the Mozambican people's transition to socialism].

Cabral in his analysis also maintained the same political allegiance to the working class and the program of socialist transformation in the strug? gle against neocolonial stabilization of the liberation process, specifying as well the necessity and capacity of the proletariat to assume hegemony over the movement of the plebeian masses, enabling the proletarian revolu? tion in "peasant nations," as Marx stated in a celebrated passage, to "ob?

tain the chorus without which its solo will prove a requiem in all peasant countries." Cabral saw the working class composed of urban workers and

agricultural proletarians, all exploited by the indirect domination of imper? ialism, as constituting the true popular vanguard of the national struggle in the neocolonial situation, "whatever the level of its political consciousness

(given a certain minimum, namely the awareness of its own needs)" However, this working class

. . .will not be able to completely fulfil its mission in this struggle (which does not end with the gaining of independence) unless it

firmly unites with the other exploited strata, the peasants in general (hired men, sharecroppers, tenants and small farmers) and the nationalist petty bourgeoisie. The creation of this alliance demands the mobilisation and organisation of the nationalist forces within the framework (or by the creation) of a strong and well-structured

political organisation.11

But why, as in Mozambique, adopt "Marxism-Leninism as a basic guide"? Samora Machel, theoretician and strategist of the Mozambican Revolu?

tion, explained in this manner:

Ideas come from practice. When we set out, all those years ago, we wanted to liberate our people, and we found that people have to liberate themselves if the thing is to be real. We found that

people could not liberate themselves unless they were active par?

ticipants in the process of liberation. And so, little by little, we

applied a revolutionary practice ? in the wartime zones that we

controlled and protected from colonial power?which enabled this

indispensable participation, this mass participation?political and

social, cultural and military?to begin to grow and develop itself. We acquired a lot of experience. We learned much. We committed errors and saw how to correct them. We enjoyed successes and saw how to improve on them. In doing this, we evolved a theory out of our practice; and then we found that this theory of ours,

- FRELIMO and Socialism 33

evolving out of our practice, had already acquired a theorisation under different circumstances, elsewhere, in different times and

places. This theory or theorisation is Marxism-Leninism."12

They discovered that the distillate of their revolutionary practice is the theory of Marxism-Leninism; like Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain they

were pleasantly surprised to discover that they had in fact been speaking prose all the time without knowing it. In other words, as Machel under? lined on another occasion,

What we are saying is that our movement's revolutionary ideology was forged in each of the political battles which it was necessary to wage, in each of the options it was necessary to choose.... Marxism-Leninism is not something

we chose from

a book. It was in the process of the struggle that the people's inter? ests asserted themselves and became more and more clearly demarcated from the interests of the colonial exploiter and the would-be national (Mozambican) exploiter. It was in the process of struggle that we synthesized the lessons of each experience, forg? ing our ideology, constructing the theoretical instruments of our

struggle.13

This Marxism-Leninism, disseminated in the form of Poder Popular?People's Power, the power of the popular classes ? is not an exotic plant alien to African conditions and struggles. It is, rather, a theory of class struggle specific to concrete Mozambican or other African conditions, and arising out of the experience and practice of the people's struggle for liberation.

Machel's profound formulation provides vivid illustration of the cor? rectness of theoretical insistence on the existence of socialist democracy only through the self-activity of the popular classes, in which "the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice" (Marx), and confirms Lenin's dictum that "correct revolutionary theory. . .assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement."14 Indeed the notion that ideology or ideas come from practice first assumes in the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology the dominant place it will ever after? wards retain in Marx's thought. Richard Bernstein has rightly said that

Praxis is the central concept in Marx's outlook ? the key to

understanding his early philosophical speculations and his detailed

analysis of the structure of capitalism. It provides the perspec? tive for grasping Marx's conception of man as "the ensemble of social relationships" and his emphasis on production; it is the basis for comprehending what Marx meant by "revolutionary practice."15

FRELIMO, formed in Dar es Salaam in 1962 as a coalition of nation

34 NWAFOR

alist groupings in exile, represents a continuation and transcendence

(Aufhebung) of a particularly fecund history of Mozambican resistance and

risings against colonial domination. President Machel, proclaiming inde?

pendence on June 25, 1975, recalled this epic tradition of resistance when he stated:

In the course of. . .the historic process of the wars of conquest, the Mozambican People rose up heroically. . .against the colo? nialist plunder. From the resistance of the Muenemutapa to the insurrection of Barue, Mozambican history prides itself on the

glorious deeds of the masses in the struggle for the defence of freedom and independence. The defeat of the historic resistance of the People is due exclusively to the treason of the feudal ruling classes, to their greed and ambition, which allowed the enemy to divide the People and so conquer it.

Mozambique provides, indeed, a supreme testimonial to the indomitability and varieties of the resistance of African masses to colonial domination which Amilcar Cabral acutely depicted?as also the source of this unrelenting resistance by the masses?and on the basis of which the theory and organiza? tion of his revolutionary activity rested. As he observed,

In the course of the process of colonialist domination, the masses, whatever the characteristic of the social structure of the group to which they belong, do not stop resisting the colonial power. In a first phase

? that of conquest, cynically called

"pacification"? they resist, gun in hand, foreign occupation. In a second phase

? that of the golden age of triumphant colonialism?they offer the foreign domination passive resistance, almost silent, but blazoned with many revolts, usually individual and once in awhile collective. The revolt is particularly in the field of work and taxes, even in social contacts with the representatives, foreign or indigenous, of the colonial power. In a third phase

?

that of the liberation struggle ? it is the masses who provide the

main strength which employs political or armed resistance to

challenge and to destroy foreign domination. Such a prolonged and varied resistance is possible only because while keeping their culture and identity, the masses keep intact the sense of their indi? vidual and collective dignity, despite the worries, humiliations and brutalities to which they are subjected.16

FRELIMO is indeed heir to the Mozambican tradition of resistance, much as Lenin's Bolshevik Party considered itself, with justification, heir to the real Narodnik revolutionary tradition. However, it is not a simple linear continuation of that tradition of resistance. Rather, it constitutes in

itself both a continuity and a decisive break in the tradition, incorporating a new and higher level of the struggle for liberation?discontinuous in its

aims, ideology, and organization. In other words, FRELIMO as a vanguard


organization for the transition of society to socialism is at one and the same

time the realization and the supersession of the Mozambican revolutionary tradition. The key, therefore, to the history of Mozambican resistance is not continuity, but discontinuity, in a process accompanied by a deep disloca? tion of political, ideological, and cultural traditions. On the political level, the principal ideological influences and representatives of the early resistance

movements were traditional chiefs and spirit mediums, not the leadership and the ideological hegemony of a working class vanguard party: where earlier movements had been revolutionary in temper and ideology, they had not been, as with FRELIMO, socialist.

The Alliance of Proletariat and Peasantry

This situation demands, as a consequence, a systematic class concep?

tion of social reality. In the formative conditions of the Bolshevik

breakthrough towards socialism in the Soviet Union, it was Russia's

backward socioeconomic structure which established the objective basis for

the alliance of the proletariat and peasantry. Raphael Samuel has recently underlined this centrality of external forces on Marxist theory:

So far from being immune to exogenous influences, Marxism may rather be seen ? in the light of its history?as a palimpsest on

which they are inscribed. Lenin's "law of uneven development" ?

a fundamental contribution to Marxist theory ? is evidently

related to the "backwardness" of imperial Russia in the Europe of its time and the changes in his theory of the Party or the State

may plausibly be said, if not to reflect, then certainly to register, the strength or otherwise of the Russian workers' movement.

Gramsci's notion of hegemony (i.e., the captivity of subaltern

classes, and cultural subordination to their rulers) must similarly be related to the circumstances of his time, and it is surely no

accident that it was elaborated in his Prison Notebooks, with the

trenches and the fortresses of bourgeois rule around him, rather

than in the revolutionary period of the Turin workers' councils.17

Similarly, it is the socioeconomic "backwardness" of African societies

that necessitates an alliance of the proletariat as the leading force with the

physically formidable force of the peasantry. This is an alliance of classes

with dissimilar aims. As such it requires a strict differentiation of amor?

phous and populist concepts such as "the people"?which is inevitably bound to break up into its constituent class forces. But as their different

aims can only be realized by joint struggle, the vague and abstract concept of "the people" must be replaced with a class-specific concept, of "the peo?

ple" as the revolutionary alliance of the oppressed and the exploited, aris?

ing out of a concrete understanding of the conditions for proletarian revolu?

tion. Allen Isaacman writes that "after the imposition of colonial rule it

is much easier to identify the economic forces which underly both class

differentiation and the decision whether or not to challenge the colonial

36 NWAFOR

system."18 However (and this constitutes a definitive rupture with the tradi? tion of resistance), because the consciousness and ability to lead this strug? gle exist ? in objective class terms ? only in the class-consciousness of the

proletariat, however embryonic, it alone?as both Cabral and Machel have testified ? is capable of being the leading class of social transformation in the struggle for socialism. The political consciousness of the peasantry is

incapable, by itself, of reaching a fundamental social critique of the capitalist system. Thus Machel could justifiably proclaim, on Independence Day, the establishment of a "State born of our people's struggle for freedom and

independence, which spanned many centuries, (but) a State in which the

power of the alliance of working people is being established in our country for the first time."

The organization of the FRELIMO vanguard party constitutes also a fundamental discontinuity in the tradition of resistance. Decisively forged in the heat of the armed revolutionary struggle amidst a perpetual and tumultuous fight to clarify and develop its political standpoint, it finally emerged as the vanguard of the leading force in the society. This party, whose organization presupposed the actuality of the revolutionary strug?

gle and was itself progressively transformed in the course of that very strug?

gle, is the strictly centralized organization of the proletariat's most con?

scious elements, whose vanguard role is conceivable only as an instrument of the revolutionary struggle of the popular masses, to whom it is profoundly linked. In consequence of this perspective, political and organizational ques? tions are seen as inseparable. But given at the same time the spontaneous enthusiasm of the masses in the profoundly popular nature of the revolu?

tionary process, the party becomes simultaneously the tangible embodi? ment of proletarian class consciousness?modulating a continuous interplay between leadership organization and spontaneous mass action, while strictly avoiding the determination of overall policy and direction of the revolu? tion by spontaneity. FRELIMO is, therefore, an organization which struc?

tured and perceived itself simultaneously as the producer and the product, the prerequisite and the consequence of revolutionary mass movements: it is, in Lukacs's phrase [from Lenin], "the result as well as the originator of historical-dialectical development."

FRELIMO ? Front for the Liberation of Mozambique ? was formed

in exile in the British colony of Tanganyika?now Tanzania?in September 1962, as a revolutionary front for national liberation uniting three recently established exile organizations: UDENAMO (Uni?o Nacional Democr?tica de Mozambique, formed in 1960 by exiles from forced labor and colonial

oppression, in Southern Rhodesia); MANU (Mozambique African Na?

tional Union, formed in Tanganyika in 1961); and UNAMI (Uni?o Africana de Mozambique Independente, formed in 1961 in Northern Rhodesia and

Nyasaland). Overcoming the differences which had kept these organiza? tions separate in the past: "tribalism, regionalism, lack of a clear and detailed set of goals and of agreed relevant strategies,"19 they united in a shared

commitment "to the total liquidation of Portuguese colonial domination and of all vestiges of colonialism and imperialism."20


That these organizations were formed in exile is not accidental, but rather reveals a crucial reality of Portuguese colonial domination. Exploita? tion of the rural workers was extremely brutal under Portuguese colonialism,

epitomized in its regimen of forced labor, which in turn generated massive and continual emigration, legal and clandestine, from the Portuguese col? onies of Angola and Mozambique

? a volume of emigration far in excess

of that from elsewhere throughout Africa. It is true that forced labor fur? nished the primitive accumulation of European colonialism throughout Africa, but its distinctiveness in Portuguese colonies is defined by the scale and continuity of its mass use. Indeed, as in South Africa, "whole areas

of economic activity are fundamentally irrational, and are only sustained and made profitable by the use of forced labour: the whole cotton industry of Northern Mozambique, the colony's main export crop, is a precarious creation in a basically unsuitable climatic and pedological [soil] environment."21

In this world of pervasive forced labor, migrant labor outside the Portu?

guese colonies became a refracted mode of forced labor within. It differed

only in degree, not in structure, from forced labor under Portuguese con?

ditions, in which the recruits to the Rand gold mines were not merely responding to simple economic incentives but were also, through their migra? tion, taking flight from the specific oppression of the contract system.

Ultimately, the colonial government officially organized and profited from this vast emigration, as in the Mozambique-South African Convention

governing Mozambican sale of African labor to the Rand. In James Duf?

fy's astringent view, "the Mozambique-South African Convention is an

international projection of contract labour."22 The situation of the African

peasantry in these conditions was further aggravated by the peculiarity of a colonization scheme for the massisve implantation of a metropolitan Portu?

guese peasantry in the African colonies?a consistent and meticulous pro?

ject for creating, alongside and in place of the African peasantry, a col? onial European peasantry with the attendant eviction of the one by the other. Machel has noted of these settlement projects, which were intended to achieve a double objective, i.e., "to absorb the unemployed rural man?

power in Portugal, and to transform the European farmers into defence bastions of the colonial order," that they were radically opposed to the inter? ests of the African rural communities.

Plunder of the land and the transfer of the rural population to new zones systematically reduces them to misery and augments the supply of cheap labour for the companies and colons.... The

creation of the Limpopo settlement in the late 1950's, for exam?

ple, blocked and destroyed the development of a prosperous African rural community, which was already integrated into the

market economy, and which has laid the basis for mechanised

agriculture.

Furthermore, in the Portuguese colonies, legal trade-union or party

political activity was unknown, as every conceivable form of political activ

38 NWAFOR

ity was strictly forbidden to Africans, and proscription was enforced by a ruthless apparatus of state repression. Africans suspected of dissidence or subversion were arrested, and invariably deported to prison camps. Pro? testers were massacred, as in the Mueda massacres of peaceful demonstrators

on June 16, 1960, in the northern province of Cabo Delgado, which Machel was later to cite as one of those events which "clearly showed that the only way to liberation was armed struggle." In these conditions, the immense difficulties of organizing resistance within the colonies alone were alleviated

by initially organizing it in the exile communities of neighboring African countries. But the exile condition also exacted its own price in the diffi?

culty of achieving a unity of viewpoint among the three movements or a common strategic objective. Machel has summed up the problem of the exile politicians, who had to rid themselves of the futile in-fighting of an

irrelevant brand of nationalist politics: having long resided outside Mozam?

bique, and thus lacking real knowledge of the existing situation there, their

political experience was acquired in close association with nationalist

organizations of former British colonies:

These elements confused the situation of a developed colonial

power like Great Britain with the situation of Portugal, an

underdeveloped, nonindustrialised country with the status of a

semi-colony. They ignored the distinction between a bourgeois democracy. . .and a fascist country where censorship and political repression prevent any display of opposition.23

FRELIMO was committed from the outset to an armed struggle for the liberation of Mozambique and, as Machel further stressed, those who desired

only a political struggle ignored the impossibility of a legal struggle under the specific conditions of Portuguese colonialism:

Because of the concrete conditions of Portuguese colonialism it was not possible to wage legal struggle. Objectively this was an

advantage because legal, political struggle is a great occasion for the emergence of elitism ? the formation of a "political elite" who take over as representatives of the local bourgeoisie when the colon? ialist bourgeoisie leave. Now we can see why the armed struggle

was a highly political act. Par excellence. . . .The impossibility of

waging legal struggle was a great contribution by the Portuguese colonialists to our struggle. It forced our political struggle to be armed struggle. This is as opposed to the concept that "politics" is the exclusive fief of a privileged ruling class in the urban cen? tres. But to say that armed struggle is essential under such con?

ditions is not enough. A small minority can also come to power

by waging armed struggle ? but with the aim of only satisfying

their own class interests. It is not automatic that armed struggle always implies the participation of the people, or that even when it does, that the people really come out on top. Because of the nature of the Portuguese colonial regime we were faced with the


question of whether to wage armed struggle. There could be only one answer?Yes! Then?armed struggle/?/^

a bourgeois revolu?

tion? There were some who also said?yes. We had to decide on armed struggle plus a people's revolution.

The conditions for liberation demanded, therefore, the waging of a peo? ple's war. A people's war "not only means a war waged with the participa? tion of the people, but that the aim is for the people to have real power in their hands. This can only be done by the elimination of the exploiting class, whatever its colour. That is why a correct definition of the enemy is of crucial importance."

Armed Struggle and the Development of Ideological Unity

Between 1962 and 1964 FRELIMO prepared for the armed struggle, politically mobilizing and organizing the masses, preparing cadres who would orient and direct these masses toward an active participation in the war of liberation, and forging the closest bonds between the cadres and the masses. It included the development of the consciousness of the unity of the people in the struggle, in which the unity of the workers in the town and the peasants in the countryside was seen as the foundation of a national

unity involving all patriotic forces "from the Rovuma to the Maputo"; an accurate definition of the enemy not simply as Portuguese colonialism but as the exploiting class, from which "it becomes clear that it is not a ques? tion of the colour of the skin: there can be Portuguese exploiters and Mozam? bican exploiters"; an explanation of the aim of the armed struggle as "the

emancipation of the workers"; the conception of the armed struggle as part of a protracted process of a profound revolution for the transformation of

society; and restoration of the self-confidence of the people in their capaci? ty for victory in the armed struggle and the construction of a better society.

Machel has provided a graphic account of the development of this worldview among the fighters in the period of military-political prepara? tion for the war:

It was in the course of political-military training that we forged national unity, and developed a common outlook, a patriotic con?

sciousness and a class consciousness. We came (to the camp at

Nachingwea in Tanzania) as Makondes, Makuas. . .Rongas or

Senas, and we left as Mozambicans. We came in as black, white, coloured and Indian persons, and we went out as Mozambicans.

We came with a limited vision, because the only zone we knew was our zone. It was there that we took on the full dimension of our country and the values of the revolution. Frequently, we

arrived animated only by a sentiment of revolt and anger against the oppressor; we left with a clear consciousness about the objec? tive for which we were fighting and with a clear definition of who the enemy was. It is for this reason that we say that Nachingwea camp was the laboratory and forge of the Mozambican Man (and

40 NWAFOR

embryo of the Mozambican Nation).24

On September 25, 1964, FRELIMO launched the armed struggle with a series of coordinated attacks in the Cabo Delgado district, especially in the Mueda area, some 50 miles south of the border and scene of the 1960

Portuguese slaughter of peaceful demonstrators. This marked the opening of the third front in the war against Portuguese colonialism in Africa.

Although the last front to be launched ? the MPLA had begun the strug? gle in Angola in February 1961, and the PAIGC initiated armed offensive in Guinea-Bissau in January 1963 ? the advance of FRELIMO in Mozam?

bique is generally seen as the single most decisive force behind the military coup of the Armed Forces Movement which overthrew the Salazarist dic?

tatorship in April 1974 under the twin slogans of "Decolonization and Democratization."

Already the spectacular smashing of General Arriaga's "Gordian Knot" offensive in June 1970 had demoralized the Portuguese and irreversibly turned the tide against them. Commenting on this victory in the General

Report to the Third Congress of February 1977, FRELIMO recorded that,

After the defeat of the colonial forces in operation "Gordian Knot,"

capitalism, which was already entering a period of crisis, started to become ever more fearful for its future in Mozambique. The colonial bourgeoisie stepped up the flight of hard currency and started the process of economic sabotage. The exodus of colons also started at this period. According to colonial statistics, about

6,000 colons left in 1971; in 1972, about 12,500; and in 1973, some

22,000 abandoned Mozambique.

By April 1974, FRELIMO's brilliant advances had their forward units

poised to cross the Save River into southernmost Mozambique. Indeed, the collapse of Operation "Gordian Knot"affirmed the profoundly popular nature of the revolutionary process and hastened the disintegration of Por?

tuguese colonialism. It is true that PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau had scored

impressive, seriously crippling blows against the Portuguese military forces

there, confining them to rapidly diminishing areas of colonial control,25

yet had it not been for developments elsewhere which imposed both a disper? sal of efforts and an effective prohibition on cutting their losses, Guinea Bissau could well have been abandoned. It was General de Arriaga who

explained that he would find continuing the war in Guinea rather than

pulling out unacceptable, except for the fact that "a man who dies in Guinea is indirectly defending Angola and Mozambique."26 But the development of the Angolan struggle had been retarded by the emergence not only of three separate movements, but also of a deep division within the MPLA. So it was precisely in Mozambique that the Portuguese position had deteriorated so irreparably that General Costa Gomes, Portuguese chief of staff, in a press conference in Maputo (then Lourenco Marques) acknowledged in May 1974 that "our forces have reached the limits of neuro

psychological exhaustion."27


From September 1964 onwards the liberation struggle advanced steadily throughout the north. The period 1964 to 1968 witnessed the growth of FRELIMO power in the districts of Cabo Delgado and Niassa; the establish? ment of "liberated zones," enclaves effectively freed from Portuguese con?

trol and the system of exploitation; the creation within the liberated zones

of a new society and an embryonic state; and the expansion of the armed

struggle to Tete province. This stage of struggle culminated in the second

Party Congress ? the first to be held inside Mozambique?convened in June

1968 in the liberated areas of Niassa province. But at the very height of their successes two fundamentally opposed

ideological factions with different perspectives and class orientations split FRELIMO apart. It was polarized between forces who sought the continued intensification of the revolutionary process and conservative petty bourgeois forces who, fearful of the erosion of their political base by the integration of the masses with the FRELIMO militants, desperately sought, through a neocolonial solution, to negate the Revolution and thus necessarily to ally themselves with imperialist capital. The latter faction included Lazaro

Nkavandame, Uria Simango, and Mateus Gwengere. Their worldview com?

bined an elitist orientation; a racist and xenophobic definition of the enemy aiming at the emergence of an independent black nation in which black

exploiters of the people would replace white exploiters; and opportunist tribalist consciousness: Nkavandame's recidivist tribalism led him to seek a separatist Makonde nation, appealing to Tanzanian authorities to allocate half the available support in money and supplies to a secessionist movement which "would be composed of the Makonde of Cabo Delgado only, and its task would be to liberate that province. . .with the support of Tanzania."28

Enamored of putschist strategies for the seizure of power, this element believed that a frontal militarist assault by a small group of militants would

quickly overwhelm the colonial state and force the enemy's immediate

capitulation, more effectively than the protracted struggle imperative for

people's revolutionary war. They "accepted the principle of armed strug? gle but considered it merely a technical and mechanical experience. Such

leaders, in effect, refuse to consider armed struggle as a process of people's participation and as the fundamentally political undertaking which it is."29 And in a movement which defined itself as part of a worldwide anti

imperialist struggle for liberation from capitalist exploitation, and which extended an internationalist solidarity to all struggles against imperialist oppression, Simango?who epitomized this petty bourgeois vacillation in its purest form?rejected any condemnation of American imperialist inter? vention in Vietnam on the grounds that "the peasants of Niassa had no

interest in foreign struggles."

Opposed to this group was the continually deepening and thorough? going process of the Revolution embodied in Eduardo Mondlane, Samora

Machel, Marcelino dos Santos, and Joaquim Chissano. They insisted on FRELIMO's opposition to colonialism but also stressed that Portuguese defeat would mark, not the end, but only the beginning of the process of

42 NWAFOR

struggle against all systems of exploitation and for the creation of a new

and just society. They saw in the liberated zone a laboratory for the develop? ment of the new society; for this zone constituted not only the physical libera? tion of territory, but the liberation from old habits of thought

? liberation from a system. In Maehel's formulation:

We had arrived at the conclusion that the liberated zone con?

stituted the highest point of contradictions with the old habits of the enemy, leading to the point of rupture. It was a violent rup? ture. In the liberated zones, because the enemy could not penetrate

physically, we were insulated from his ideas and habits. . . .The liberated zones were a political laboratory, a scientific laboratory, a laboratory of ideas. There we could try out what had to be done later.

They also rejected the notion of an educated elite that should lead the country and appropriate its wealth, and assailed the racist standpoint of the oppo? sition, together with their narrow nationalisms which are inimical to the true interests of the people. They insisted on the primacy of the class struggle and the definition of the enemy as anyone who exploits or creates the con?

ditions for the exploitation of the people, whatever his color, race, nationality, or religion. The war itself was not conceived and waged in militarist terms, but as a "politico-military" struggle. For them a guerrilla war is "a peo?

ple's war, and it is a mass struggle." To conduct such a war without the

support and active participation of the populace is to court inevitable disaster. The guerrilla force is "the people's fighting vanguard."

At the 1968 Party Congress and at subsequent Central Committee

meetings in April 1969 and May 1970, this revolutionary faction prevailed decisively over the forces of opportunism and reaction, and proceeded explic? itly to redefine FRELIMO's objective to include both "national inde?

pendence and an end to exploitation of man by man." On February 3, 1969, the FRELIMO President, Eduardo Mondlane, was assassinated by Portu?

guese agents in a conspiracy in which Simango, Nkavandame, and Gwengere and their lieutenants were implicated.30

The isolation and expulsion from the party of these ghosts and echoes of primitive Mozambican resistance movements facilitated the further

development of FRELIMO's revolutionary line and created the conditions for transforming the armed struggle into a people's war for socialist con?

struction. An ideological unity now prevailed within FRELIMO due to

this purification of its ranks. It was a unity built not merely on the insuffi? cient basis of the negation of the enemy and the simple demand for inde?

pendence, but on the essential basis of "a clear and unequivocal definition of the principles of what we want to do, how we want to do it, and what kind of society we want to build, and above all,. . . principles [which] must

be lived by and developed through consistent practice." With the achievement of this unity, FRELIMO emerged from its fierce inter? nal struggle immensely strengthened and renewed. The impressive


catalogue of victories immediately thereafter testified eloquently to the

importance of the fundamental struggle within the movement: "the strug?

gle against ourselves, against our own weaknesses," the most difficult struggle of all, in itself "the expression of the internal contradictions in the economic, social, and cultural (and therefore historical) reality" of Mozambique.

The correct resolution of this battle, and the ensuing unity of the revolu?

tionary forces, had these results: the strategic defeat of colonialism in the

period from May to September 1970, during Operation "Gordian Knot," the smashing of the blockade of the Zambezi by the extension of the armed

struggle to south of the Zambezi in November 1970, and the opening of the Manica and Sofala front in June 1972. But the crucial turning point

was the destruction of General Kaulza de Arriaga's Operation "Gordian Knot."

In 1969 General Kaulza de Arriaga arrived in Mozambique as the new commander of all Portuguese ground forces, and in 1970 he was

appointed commander-in-chief. His commission was to salvage a rapidly deteriorating military situation and to crush FRELIMO once and for all. To this end he launched Operation "Gordian Knot" in June, and quickly proclaimed it a total success. He wrote:

In the Cabo Delgado district, the situation by Spring 1970 was

giving considerable concern. It was characterized mainly by the

great freedom of action which the enemy had in crossing the River Rovuma. . . .The enemy also had a number of well-organised bases

inside Cabo Delgado itself, with large garrisons, from which they had launched a southward offensive. However, this was contain?

ed by the Portuguese forces. A counter-offensive was launched, a great effort was made to seal the Rovuma frontier, and within

six months there was not a single permanent guerrilla base left in Cabo Delgado. The guerrilla forces were largely demoralised and increasingly alienated from the bulk of the African

population.31

This counteroffensive was code-named the "Gordian Knot," and Arriaga's mendacious assessment of its success was duly amplified by an uncritical

press. The Times of London reported on December 23, 1970: "Spurred on

by an energetic new commanding general, the army in Mozambique of

between 50,000 and 60,000 is in a stronger position than at any time since

guerrilla activity began in 1964.... Radiating confidence, staff officers said

that their only outstanding problem now was that the main FRELIMO

bases lay over the borders in Tanzania and Zambia." In reality, Operation "Gordian Knot" was a stupendous military

disaster, as Arriaga was outfought and outmaneuvered, and signaled an

irrecoverable Portuguese defeat. Thereafter, in prolonged strategic duels

of the succeeding years between the two commanders-in-chief, Machel and

Arriaga, the Portuguese were defeated in one engagement after another

and outflanked by FRELIMO's long march south. By June 1972, the war

44 NWAFOR

had been further extended from eastern Tete to Manica and Sofala, the lands of the lower Zambezi, directly inland from Beira. Centered on

Gorongosa, this part of the country contains the important Beira-Malawi and Beira-Umtali railway lines. For the first time in the FRELIMO advance, it entered areas of considerable white settlement, especially around Vila

Pery but also at Inhaminga, a township on the railway north of Beira and south of the Zambezi. By February 1974, the district governor of Beira, Colonel Sousa Teiles, had to confess to the district council that some areas

under his authority were now "controlled by FRELIMO terrorists."

By March, not only was FRELIMO operating south of Beira, but it was also conducting political mobilizations as far south as the Save River. These operations at Gorongosa, Inhaminga, and southwards incontrovertibly demonstrated both the efficacy of its organization and the strength of its

political mobilization of the people, a process now greatly facilitated by a grim harvest of Portuguese massacres of the population, and their policy of en?

forced resettlement and concentration in strategic hamlets or "aldeamentos."

An example of the massacres occurred at Wiriyamu on December 16, 1972, in which the military commander in Tete issued explicit orders for a total extermination of the inhabitants of the area: the relevant officers' document was later published in full in the Manchester Guardian of April 23, 1974.

At this stage, in fact, the Portuguese forces had effectively collapsed. Tony Hodges grasped this reality when he noted that "it was Portugal's

string of military setbacks in Mozambique in 1973-74 that finally convinced

important sections of the Portuguese establishment and military hierarchy that a political solution was urgently required to the crises in Mozambique,

Angola, and Guinea-Bissau (where over one hundred and fifty thousand

troops had by then been committed)."32 The urgency of a solution to the war was underlined not only by the virtual collapse of the Portuguese army, but also by the accompanying social disintegration of Mozambique.

The liberation fighters were within miles of Beira. African workers,

inspired by the prospect of quick victory in the liberation strug?

gle, staged a wave of strikes in the cities, shutting down railways, docks, iron works, newspapers and public buildings. Reports began to arrive of African peasants seizing and occupying the lands of

white farmers.33

These events subsequently forced President Spinola of the provisional government of Portugal, on July 27, 1974, to proclaim "the recognition of the right of the peoples of the Portuguese overseas territories to self

determination, including the immediate recognition of their right to

independence." On April 25, 1974, the Salazarist dictatorship was overthrown by the

Portuguese Armed Forces Movement, MFA. In this singular event, the

national liberation struggles of the African people succeeded in simultan?

eously vanquishing Portuguese colonialism in Africa and contributing

decisively to the destruction of Portuguese fascism.


Thirteen years earlier, Amilcar Cabral had anticipated this outcome:

While the fall of fascism in Portugal might not lead to the end of Portuguese colonialism ? and this hypothesis has been put for? ward by some Portuguese opposition leaders?we are certain that the elimination of Portuguese colonialism will bring about the destruction of Portuguese fascism. Through our liberation struggle we are making an effective contribution towards the defeat of Por?

tuguese fascism and giving the Portuguese people the best possi? ble proof of our solidarity.34

The members of the MFA, wrho had learned so much and so deeply from the African struggles they had fought so tenaciously to suppress, ex?

plicitly affirmed this connection. A territorial meeting of the MFA in Bissau on July 29, 1974, drafted and unanimously passed a historic declaration

stating:

The colonised peoples and the people of Portugal are allies. The

struggle for national liberation has contributed powerfully to the overthrow of fascism and, in large degree, has lain at the base of the MFA whose officers have learned, in Africa, the horrors

of a fruitless war, and have therefore understood the roots of the

evils which afflict the society of Portugal.

With the overthrow of the dictatorship, what followed was a simple ratifica?

tion of the consequences of the epochal victory, as all attempts to substitute a neocolonial order were manifestly doomed to failure. The revolutionary

struggle for the complete transformation and construction of a new soci?

ety would now continue under different but by no means less arduous con?

ditions of Portuguese colonial defeat.

Independence and Popular Democracy

On June 25, 1975, an independent Mozambique was proclaimed. But, as we have already seen, independence for FRELIMO is not simply coter?

minous with the expulsion of Portuguese colonialism from the national

territory?the nationalist objective?but is only a "precondition for the

end of exploitation and the establishment of a people's regime." For Por?

tuguese colonialism is merely "the form that imperialist domination assumed

in our country, the exploitation of a whole people and their resources by

foreign capitalism, both Portuguese and from other countries" (Machel). Rather, independence is a process that demands the elimination of all exploi? tation of man in society through the destruction of the capitalist structure

implanted in the national territory by imperialism, and the construction

of a new society without exploitation ? the socialist objective. Machel

declared on Independence Day:

The colonial state, an instrument of domination and exploita? tion by a foreign bourgeoisie and imperialism, which has already been partially destroyed by the struggle, must be replaced by a

46 NWAFOR

people's state, forged through an alliance of workers and peasants,

guided by FRELIMO and defended by the People's Forces for the Liberation of Mozambique, a state which wipes out exploita? tion and releases the creative initiative of the masses and the pro? ductive forces. [In the new society they set out to build,] the State will be based on the principle that every change in society is a

result of man's struggle on the fronts of class struggle, the fight for production and scientific innovation, and also the contradic? tions in natural phenomena.

Again this choice of objectives is not determined by any abstract con?

ception of social organization, but derives from the concrete conditions and

experience of their struggles for national liberation. Already by 1966, FRELIMO had driven the colonial forces from the provinces of Cabo

Delgado and Niassa, and organized these areas as liberated zones. Col? onial structures of domination were dismantled, and the zones were

transformed, in Machel's words, into "laboratories" of revolutionary policy. They provided the conditions for continuing the political and social transfor? mation of mass support for FRELIMO into mass participation and popular democracy "so that people could liberate themselves," simultaneously with the construction of anticolonial structures for a new society and an embry? onic state without exploitation. The liberated zones "constituted the highest point of contradictions" with colonial society, leading to a violent historical

rupture, at the national level, with the "old myths, values, and habits, with the structures of social life, organization and production inherited from the colonialist society."

Nor was the creation of a new life in these zones merely an accident or the automatic result of breaking off contact with colonial society. "Far

reaching political, ideological and organisation efforts had to be made to overcome the influence of the past, the attempts of traditional forms to reassert themselves and the new exploiters. In the liberated zones the con? crete process for ending the exploitation of man by man existed." This

explains "the fact that the very first measures we took after independence were to nationalize education, public health, justice, property?to a cer?

tain extent?and even funeral parlours. Because this corresponded to the

struggle we waged in the liberated zones against exploitation in these fields." In other words, the liberated zones were "a political laboratory, a scientific

laboratory, a laboratory of ideas." A transitional government which lasted from September 20, 1974, until

independence in 1975 assumed the task essentially of consolidating an ardu?

ously won independence, especially by extending popular mobilization and the power of the worker-peasant alliance. To accomplish this goal FRELIMO

quickly extended its party and mass structures all over the country through the agency of "dynamizing" groups?grupos dinamizadores?which were set

up in every factory and enterprise, and at the level of local communities, and described as "our fundamental weapon in fighting against all forms

of economic sabotage; against all attempts to confuse, corrupt and subvert the workers." Since independence the process of mass mobilization and


popular democracy has been further deepened in a dramatic increase of the number of dynamizing groups throughout the country and their increas?

ingly central role in the continuing Revolution, in a determined effort to

give men and women the means with which "to exercise a real popular self-determination for the first time in history," which is, after all, the whole

purpose of historical materialism and the objective of a socialist revolution.35

Contrary to the assertion by Tony Hodges that the dynamizing groups were organized "with leaders appointed from above by FRELIMO,"36 the

popular democratic manner of selecting these groups constitutes their

distinguishing characteristic. In rural communities, urban zones, hospitals, schools, and industrial centers, Mozambicans freely and enthusiastically gather to choose their own representatives in general assemblies of the people, and through this process "the dynamizing groups have instilled in the

oppressed masses of Mozambique a sense of self-confidence and knowledge that for the first time they have a voice in their own future."37 They are

indeed schools for the inculcation and promotion of popular democratic skills and class unity.38 Michael Kaufman of the New York Times (November 14, 1977), has testified to the palpable popular enthusiasm of the revolu?

tionary process and the "evidence that the degree of mobilization and national purpose attained here is great and may be more durable than

anything Africa has known." In fact, a recent analogue of Mozambique's dynamizing groups is to be seen in the later development of the Sandinista Defense Committees (CDS), as the most advanced form of the new

democracy of the Nicaraguan Revolution. As with the popular participa? tion at every level through the dynamizing groups, the Sandinista Defense Committees "embrace men and women, workers and peasants, cities and

countryside alike. . . their functions touch every facet of political decision

making: production and distribution, social programmes, militia organiza? tions. Based on the smallest unit of population

? the urban block or manzana?a CDS is permanently accessible to every Nicaraguan."39

In general, dynamizing groups are mass organizations with a clear class character?exclusive of the exploiting class, and independent of the new state?which enable the popular classes to exercise their real self determination and "their historic role, their role in the process of transfor? mation." The principal task of this and other mass organizations is to

organize the defense of the Revolution in every sphere: the political, the

economic, and the military. The activities in these spheres fuse in the cen?

tral need of the mass organizations to stimulate and increase production through collective labor with the formation of communal villages, cooperatives, and state farms. The role of mass organizations in transform?

ing the state apparatus has also been stressed with the formation of dynamiz? ing groups throughout all government offices and state services. Through these the people identify their demands and bring them to the attention of the pertinent state agency, and ensure that policies are properly executed or criticized if they are not. A bureaucratic excrescence on the Revolution is especially vigorously combatted. One recalls that the vile, repellent character and collective personification of counterrevolution, Xiconhoca

48 NWAFOR

[a cartoon character], who is by turns saboteur, smuggler, bandit, and bureaucrat?the detritus of socialism on the march ? is the outrageous embodiment of the internal enemy.

In addition to stimulating production, the stress on collective labor reinforced the unity of the popular classes. Dynamizing groups were also active in mobilizing the Mozambican working class and in transforming relations of production within the industrial front. FRELIMO saw in these activities instances of a permanent dynamic that must exist between the

party, the state, and the popular classes to secure an "intimate machinery" for consolidating the Revolution. Other notable mass organizations, developed in the course of the struggle in the wartime liberated zones and now widespread across Mozambique, include the new organizations of

women, of youth, and of the new working class unions. The Organization of Mozambican Women (OMM

? Organizag?o das

Mulheres de Mozambique) was formed in the liberated zones during the war and has, since independence, been extended across the country. It was conceived as a mass women's movement for the self-liberation of Mozam?

bican women from their double oppression: "on the one hand, reactionary traditions which deprive them of initiative in society and reduce them to

mere instruments of men, and on the other, the colonial-capitalist system which regards them as objects of exploitation and a means of production."40 In battling against this heritage of oppression, the participation of women in all sectors has been seen as an essential condition for the triumph of the Revolution and for the advancement of the new society. As a wartime document on the role of women stated:

The emancipation of women is not an act of charity, nor the result of a position born out of humanity or compassion. The libera? tion of women is a fundamental necessity of the Revolution, a

guarantee of its continuity, a condition of its triumph. It has as its primary objective the destruction of an oppressive system and the creation of a new society in which the full human potential is achieved. Within this context the issue of the emancipation of

women flows logically.41

Women in the Revolutionary Process

FRELIMO indefatigably sought to promote the equality of women in the revolutionary process, with women taking the initiative, organizing, fighting: during the war they were organized in women's military detachments and contributed decisively in the struggle for liberation, thereby controverting their own status in traditional society. After independence, when the tradition of the dead generations weighed heavily?like a

nightmare?on the struggle for the revolutionary transformation of the role of women in society, the Revolution quickened the pace and resolution of its combative power against the unmistakable relapse into the past.

In a determined ideological and policy campaign launched under the direction of the Organization of Mozambican Women, itself reorganized


and strengthened in 1976, the battle for women's liberation was enjoined as "an ideological battle against ideas which stem from decadent traditions and against the multiple attempts by the bourgeoisie to destroy the value of the fight for freedom." As a national policy, job, wage, and other forms of discrimination in the public sphere were explicitly forbidden. Women's

participation in work traditionally regarded as exclusively for men was pro? moted as a profoundly mobilizing factor, a decisive factor establishing sex? ual equality in practice. A relentless press campaign fiercely condemned the evils of sexual discrimination and exploitation, particularly inveighing against the noxious traditions of bride price and polygamy, which dehumanized women and "insured that their principal role was to serve men ? their fathers, brothers and husbands." Prostitution was vehemently pilloried as a decadent vestige of the "colonial capitalist system,"42 and has since been virtually liquidated.

The restructuring of the OMM was principally aimed at its transform? ation into a nationwide women's movement capable of articulating and

securing the demands of women in liberated Mozambique, with particular emphasis initially devoted to organizing women living in communal villages, cooperatives and state farms ? structures of the new society whose radical

concept of popular participation, collective endeavors, and equitable distribu? tion of proceeds from the joint labor advanced the ends of equality of men

and women. To facilitate the full incorporation of women on equal terms in production, the development of childcare centers and a national net?

work of creches is designed to release women from domestic oppression and

permit their full participation in economic activity. Finally, women have been elected in significant proportions as deputies to both local assemblies

and the People's Assembly?the highest legislative body. Nevertheless, the persistence of traditional sex roles in the domestic

sphere remains a major obstacle to the total liberation of women. This is a problem that has also been encountered elsewhere. A January 1980 docu? ment of the Organization of Nicaraguan Women stated the belief that "the basis of the problem of women lies in the enslaving subjection of women

to domestic labor. Domestic labor must be recognized as the material

obstacle which limits the full integration of women into society."43 In

Mozambique, the elimination of this material obstacle to full equality for women is being pursued both through a new system of family law that would release women from this enslavement, and by the continued revolutioniz?

ing of the country, in the process of which the full integration of women

into society will advance along with the overall struggle of the mass organiza? tions to consolidate the Revolution.

The participation of students and general responsibility of the youth in the revolutionary process are actively promoted through the Mozam? bican Youth Organization (OJM

? Organizag?o da Juventude de Mogam

bique), which was founded at a congress in Maputo on November 28, 1977. The seed for an active student participation within the framework of an

overall popular participation were already planted in the liberated zones,

50 NWAFOR

where studies and armed struggle were carried on simultaneously. In these

zones, outside the confines of colonial society and its corrosive deforma?

tion, young cadres, "immunized," in Machel's word, against the values and ideas of the old society, against Portuguese colonialist, tribal, and feudal

concepts, were inculcated with new values, the values of the worker and

peasant class, educated with consciousness of the sacrifices and privations of the people's struggle for liberation, and imbued with the idea of service to the people as being of the highest value. In the words of a FRELIMO combat poem:

The essential is the new consciousness;

knowledge made the instrument of those who do not know.

A collective worldview is instilled in the students (or continuadores? the continuers of the Revolution begun by their fathers and elders?as they are better known): "in the liberated areas the new culture that developed consisted of a collective and common way of production, a common

behaviour, a common form of expression, a common v/ay of defining priority needs, material goods, wages: in short, a common way of facing the world"

(Graca Machel, Minister of Education and Culture). Only such a collec? tive worldview could lead to the development of genuinely popular and non

elitist personalities with a clear and unequivocal dedication to the ideas and practice of the Revolution. To this end also their educational curriculum combined theoretical knowledge with agricultural production and manual labor. Participation in manual labor is intended to destroy elitist ideas and a contempt for the people, and to foster a bond of common purpose and

unity of the mass of the Mozambican people and an educated minority completely identified with the deepest aspirations of the people to which

they belong. In these schools which forge new men, scientific ideas, and a new society simultaneously, "the students must be workers 'who are

prepared to serve the people'." "Poem by the Sea" wonderfully and graph? ically encapsulates these ideas:

What matters is the union of the intellect

with the hand in the collective and liberating act of working the land, so that for all will grow the undulating green of the maize field.

What matters is the mind and the acts and the feeling of each individual

merging in the community


like drops of water one by one

creating an immense ocean that fills the world.

Near the sea a new poem for new men.

The continuadores actively participated in campaigns to abolish illiteracy in Mozambique:

Ignorance, superstition, backwardness

crumbling like sand-castles in the wind of science and materialism

FRELIMO considered education the patrimony of every Mozambican, and

organized a national literacy campaign on this basis. Literacy not only con?

stituted a precondition for the technical and scientific knowledge necessary for increased production in all areas of the economy, but in a common

language provided at the same time a cohesive symbol of national unity. This outlook characterized a recent national conference on language and education which adopted Portuguese?within a context of bilingualism (Por? tuguese and mother-tongue)?as the language of school and adult literacy education, because it was:

The language of national unity; The language of FRELIMO thought; The language with an already developed scientific vocabulary; and The language which permitted a two-way communication with the world at large.

Portuguese has become, therefore, the medium of instruction at all schools at all levels, the language of literacy texts, of all communications between the party and the mass organizations, of all debates from the district level

upwards, the language of the daily newspapers and weekly magazines. This was found necessary for the development of the economy and the exten?

sion of education, which will in turn provide a firm base for the diffusion and advancement of the national languages. It is the present conjuncture of the struggle, with its emphasis on consolidating national unity and forging international links, which determined the primacy accorded to Portuguese; a later one could require concentration on the development of the national

language. The relationship is seen as a dialectical one: in the conditions of People's Power, the vigorous promotion of the official language does not

constitute a threat to the development of the national languages, but rather

guarantees their ultimate growth. The literacy campaign was started during the armed struggle, as the

political and economic organization of the liberated zones showed the critical need for basic literacy in a population which Portuguese colonialism had left massively illiterate. The campaign quickened during the transitional

52 NWAFOR

period when FRELIMO declared it the duty of those who knew how to

read to teach those who did not. This stuggle against illiteracy, in which continuadores were mobilized to dismantle a critical obstacle to freedom and

self-determination, elicited an immense enthusiasm. Something of the excite? ment of this process was caught in Sergio Vieiras "Four Parts of a Poem of Education Left Incomplete":

They were children

under the bullets

teaching adults

and we were all children

learning from adults of fifteen years. . .

With independence, the campaign was reorganized and intensified, achiev?

ing ever greater victories in the battle against ignorance as the students continued to affirm and carry out their service to the people and the

Revolution.

As to democratic mass organizations of industrial workers, Mr. Tony Hodges knowingly assures us that in Mozambique "trade-unions are

illegal."44 He is not writing of the colonial regime, which not only proscribed all trade-union activities, but whose corporativist-fascist labor laws and offi?

cially sponsored workers' cooperatives regulating the repressive exploita? tion of African labor were based on the motif that "the African should be

forced, by every means available, to work."45 These things have indeed been

abolished, dismantled with the colonial state, but only to be replaced by new structures with the creation of Production Councils as revolutionary organizations of the working class. It is true that shortly after independence the government, to prevent industrial paralysis and collapse, appointed

Administrative Committees to reopen the abandoned nationalized factories and direct production. But these administrative structures proved incapable of mobilizing the active participation of the workers in production: workers

complained that certain of the committees were "bureaucratic," "distant from the rank and file," and even that some maintained "unalterable and

bourgeois" work methods. As a consequence, thoroughgoing industrial

restructuring was undertaken, announced by President Machel on October

19, 1976, which was designed to ensure that "the workers can participate in an active, collective and conscious way in the discussion and resolution of their problems, especially in relation to production and productivity." This reshaping of the organization of labor was centered on the establish? ment of shop-floor Production Councils to direct the daily operations of

each plant. The Production Councils, unlike the Administrative Commit?

tees, were elected by all the workers in a factory after extensive meetings and discussions. Beginning in the capital, Maputo, in November 1976, this

factory reorganization, with worker-control of the production process, was

completed throughout the country in about a year. As the Minister of Labor at the time stated: "The fundamental idea is not just increasing produc


tion.... It is not only this that we want to do. We want to organise the

working class and. . . (establish) new types of relationships which would

destroy the capitalist relationships based on the domination of the exploiters, the boss, over the exploited, the workers." By means of this reorganization of the labor process, the workers ? the associated producers

? were effec?

tively integrated into the decision-making process, exercising a truly col? lective control over the means of production.

By strengthening and relying on these mass organizations: dynamiz? ing groups, Production Councils, women's organizations, youth organiza? tions, peasant organizations, the Revolution acquired, as Fidel Castro said of analogous organizations of the Cuban Revolution, "the foundations for the ensuing steps, which foreshadow a much more direct participation by the masses in decision-making and problem-solving, as well as a multi faceted input everywhere, especially in the context of problems affecting them in their home territories." The revolutionary process is thereby transformed into "a formidable school of government in which millions of people will learn to take on responsibilities and resolve problems of

government.46

Democratic Centralism and the People's Assembly Lenin introduced democratic centralism as the form of organization

par excellence of the revolutionary party whose aim is to forge the ideological and practical unity of the working class against the state apparatus of the whole system of exploitation. Gramsci counterposed it to "bureaucratic centralism." The direct participation of the masses in the affairs of state

through the organs of People's Power constitutes the practice of democratic centralism which, through this participation, avoids a descent into bureaucratic centralism. This practice involves, concretely, the elections

by the masses themselves of those who will perform their duties at various levels of national life; the periodic accountability of elected delegates and leaders of executive committees to the community that elected them; the

power invested in the electors to recall at any time delegates who have shown dereliction in fulfillment of their mandates. It is governed, above all, by continual recognition that the actual repositories of supreme authority are

the electors, the masses, not the elected delegates or executive committee members. This is a system of democracy, of proletarian democracy,

. . .because, in the first place, it rests upon the entire people; sec?

ond, because it offers full participation to the people, as has never

happened before in any other type of human society; third, because there is an open and permanent debate, engaging the whole people in the enactment of all essential laws. Here the laws are discussed with the masses, and the passage of a bill involves not only the step of democratic consultation with them, but also an educational process for the majority of the people. . . .Thus the "dictatorship" is that of the immense majority of the people.

That is why it may be called with equal truth dictatorship, workers'

democracy, or People's Democracy.47

54 NWAFOR

Yet Hodges, an unrelenting critic of the Mozambican state from an

undeviating standpoint of bourgeois democracy, asserts that it is simply authoritarian. "Despite claims that it is building 'People's Democratic Power,' the FRELIMO regime has excluded the mass of the population, including the workers, from participating in effective political decision-making, has

suppressed most democratic rights and civil liberties, and has in practice erected an authoritarian one-party state."48

Beginning on September 25 and ending on December 4, 1977, elec? tions establishing the "fundamental steps for the building of democratic

people's power at the level of the whole country" were held throughout Mozambique, from the election of assembly-delegates at the level of the immediate community of village or town, to the selection of delegates to

the national People's Assembly, "the supreme organ of the state." Elec? tions for members of local assemblies were held from September 25 to

November 13, for district and municipal assemblies by November 27, and

for 10 provincial assemblies and the People's Assembly by December 4.

At the first session of the People's Assembly on December 23, Machel

proudly proclaimed the process a "a real school, a university in which national and class unity have been consolidated. The elections are the reality of our freedom." These were indeed elections by the immense masses

themselves in which millions of men and women, millions of workers, elected their representatives at all levels in affirmation of the reality of their power.

At the first level of popular power?the local assemblies ? which are of the utmost importance, being "more directly linked to the daily life of the

masses," all adults living in towns, villages, and newly organized cooperatives elected over 22,000 men and women as deputies to 894 local assemblies,

revealing the vitality of the popular democratic process at this crucial level. As Isaacman noted:

Not only were the nominees selected by popularly based dyna? mizing groups but the final judgment was left to local com?

munities. The people played a very direct and central role, reflected in the national rejection rate of 10 percent, which in some areas ran as high as 15-20 percent of the proposed candidates. Even heads of dynamizing groups and the OMM were not

immune. In the final analysis the local elections served both as a school for political education and consciousness raising and ensured the effective representation of the Mozambican people in the political process. Charges that they were an authoritarian hoax are simply untrue.49

The election of deputies to the district, municipal, and provincial assemblies was similarly marked by enthusiastic popular participation. The

deputies elected to the local assemblies selected from their members represen? tatives to the district assembly. Municipal elections to the 10 provincial capitals were held on two levels. At community meetings?either at place of residence in village, group of hamlets, or city quarter (bairro), or at place


of work in factory, cooperative, or communal village ?

dynamizing groups proposed candidates for election. Those elected throughout the city then met and selected members to serve in the municipal assembly. Delegates to the district and municipal assemblies, within each province, thereafter elected the provincial legislatures. The People's Assembly was elected on

December 4, 1977, when each of the 10 provincial assemblies approved the list of 226 men and women nominated by the FRELIMO Central

Committee.

This practice of democratic centralism demonstrated its ability to foster the unity of the working class in this election process through the social

composition of the elected assemblies, where at all levels workers and

peasants constituted a majority of the seats. Their numerical preponderance reached its highest level in the People's Assembly directly nominated by the Central Committee of FRELIMO, where they received additional repre? sentation from deputies selected from mass organizations such as the Youth

Movement and the Organization of Mozambican Women. Women were, in fact, well represented on the whole. At the first level of People's Power, 6,300 women were elected to local assemblies, constituting about 30% of the total membership.

The assemblies, finally, are defined and function as the ultimate

"organisation of decision, execution and control" and must dedicate themselves to solving concrete problems in the people's lives, hardly the

"rubber-stamp"50 role envisaged for them by Hodges. The People's Assembly, which is entrusted with basic legislative tasks that include develop? ment of state budgets and a national taxation system, ratification of inter? national agreements and treaties, and suspension of constitutional

guarantees in a state of emergency, passed in its first session legislation guaranteeing free medicine to all citizens, approved a treaty of friendship with Cuba, and determined that local elections will be held every two and a half years. Ultimately, recognition that actual authority resides in the masses is seen in the specific mandate to the assemblies to commingle with and listen to their constituents in order to resolve

. . . difficulties in water supply to a communal village or communal

suburb, difficulties in outlets for goods produced by the people, the school that must be opened, the road that must be cut in the

middle of the brush, the shop that must be opened, the cooperative that must be supported, the cultural and sporting activities that are

disorganised.51

The right of prompt recall of delegates further guarantees this sovereignty of the people as real repositories of supreme authority.

Dismantling the Heritage of Colonialism

The Mozambican state inherited at independence an extremely catastrophic and perilously backward economic and financial situation, "a result of unbridled plunder, the financial conditions imposed by colonialism

56 NWAFOR

and the disorganised exploitation of our potential" (Machel). The massive role of foreign capital in the exploitation of Portugal's colonial resources

amounted to what has been described as a "covert condominium" of the colonial economy, in which the de facto power of foreign monopoly capital made it the peer of the colonial administration in a mutually profitable relationship. The dangers posed to the liberation struggle by this situation were pointed out by Perry Anderson, writing on the eve of armed struggle that "when the regime enters its final days, foreign capital will try to detach itself from Portugal, and to conjugate condominium into neocolonialism under conditions of independence."52 Universal mass forced labor induc? ed a massive and continual migration from colonial Mozambique to South Africa and Rhodesia, effectively endowing Mozambique with two

metropoles: Lisbon and Johannesburg. In 1973 over 200,000 Mozambicans were working on the Rand gold mines of South Africa and on Rhodesian farms and mines. As a 1976 United Nations report concluded: "The kind of development carried out in Mozambique has been unable for many years to absorb the growing population into productive employment and the large number, over a quarter of a million, who found employment abroad became a major source of foreign exchange for Mozambique and Portugal, and increased the dependence of Mozambique on surrounding countries." The colonial economy was further deformed by the presence of a parasitic and

incendiary white lumpenproletariat, characterized by the most virulent of racialisms. The vast bureaucratic colonization schemes attempting to

transplant the Portuguese countryside physically to Africa are manifesta? tions of the root debility and retardation of Portuguese colonialism. There, as Anderson has observed, "the phenomena of white unemployment and a white peasantry are in full logical continuity with the phenomenon of African forced labour."

FRELIMO understood this reality of the country they sought to

transform and its consequences for their struggle. Outlining their plans for building an independent, planned, and advanced economy that could

satisfy the elementary needs of the people, FRELIMO noted, in their Third

Party Congress of February 1977,

In our country the level of development is exceedingly low and the main obstacle to economic development is the dependency in which our economy finds itself in relation to foreign monopolies. Because of this, the building up of an economy capable of satis?

fying the basic needs of the working people and enabling a tran?

sition to socialism necessarily implies the liquidation of colonial and neocolonial dependency in relation to imperialist states and international monopolies.

This perilous economic heritage was further disjointed at independence

by the massive exodus of skilled technical and managerial labor in forceful

protest against a threat to the system of exploitation in Mozambique, aban?

doning factories, estates, business enterprises, and other key property. This


flight of class forces resolutely hostile to the new regime was accompanied by economic sabotage and the lack of primary materials, mainly imported from Rhodesia, severely disrupting industrial production.

Furthermore, the revolutionary government's decision in March 1976 to comply with United Nations sanctions imposed against the illegitimate Smith regime of Rhodesia by closing its borders with that country imposed additional hardships,53 while revealing the increasingly extreme dependence of its economy on Rhodesia. This was exacerbated by the disruptions caused

by repeated Rhodesian raids deep inside Mozambican territory to attack economic targets as well as Zimbabwean guerrilla bases and refugee camps. These attacks were primarily intended to destabilize the new regime and did inflict severe economic losses and sacrifices on the revolutionary state.

And as if not to be outdone, a string of natural disasters created more economic difficulties: a drought in the north in 1976 reduced the normally low level of food production, a situation complicated by grossly inadequate transportation facilities for distribution of imported foodstuffs; the

devastating floods in the south in 1977 left hundreds of thousands of peasants homeless and inundated many abandoned European estates in the process of transformation into state farms or communal villages. Thus, at inde?

pendence, FRELIMO inherited an economy in extremity, with industrial

production on the verge of collapse and rural agricultural production threatened with paralysis.

Within a month of independence, at the first session of the Council of Ministers, Mozambique nationalized all facilities in health, education, law, and funerals. Private funeral firms were outlawed and a state funeral

organization established. Consigning lawyers ?

quiddities, tricks, tenures, and all ? to the historical archives, FRELIMO held as a decided revolu?

tionary victory the suppression of courtroom defense and the inherited

judicial system, a "bastion" of the colonial state apparatus for the repres? sion and exploitation of Mozambican working people. In education, all

private schools, including those owned by the Catholic Church?"a powerful factor in the cultural and human alienation of the Mozambican," and in intimate and pivotal relationship with the "machinery of aggression and domination over our people"

? were taken over by the state and universal free education established. A massive literacy campaign was launched to

combat the colonial heritage of phenomenal mass illiteracy and arrested acculturation of an infinitesimal minority of "assimilated" Africans, whose assimilation consisted of the deliberate process of limited and controlled

incorporation into the mental and cultural universe of the system of exploi? tation, and the correlative process of negation of the history and culture of the people.

A restructured curriculum imparted a new perspective to the history and culture of the people. The great African kingdoms were presented therein as states of exploitative class societies. The kings and chiefs, of revered

memory to cultural nationalists and neocolonial chieftains alike

58 NWAFOR

as props for the propagation of a retrograde ideology and convenient

mystification of the roles of various classes at different moments of their

history, were certainly not the makers of African history. In fact some of the chiefs collaborated with colonial invaders whose conquests negated the historical process of the African people. Others were co-opted through intimi? dation or corruption, whereas even the most resolute leaders of primary resistance were prevented by a limited perspective from leading a national resistance of all the people. Not until the working masses took control of the struggle could it assume a truly national dimension. Thus, the real glory and heroism of African history resided in the productive activity of the work?

ing people, in their robust culture, and in their unending and heroic resistance to oppression, from foreign and local exploiters alike. The masses

were the makers of African history, the true victims of foreign domina?

tion, who in their diurnal struggles, in their songs, dances, and stories were

custodians of the authentic memories of independence. This worldview is

vividly conveyed by Cabral:

Repressed, persecuted, humiliated, betrayed by certain social

groups who have compromised with the foreign power, culture took refuge in the villages, in the forests, and in the spirits of the victims of domination. Culture survives all these challenges and

through the struggle for liberation blossoms forth again. Thus the question of a "return to the source" or of a "cultural renaissance" does not arise and could not arise for the masses

of these people, for it is they who are the repository of the culture and at the same time the only social sector who can persevere and build it up and make history.54

The government at the same time also nationalized public health with the declared conviction that all Mozambicans had a right to proper medical treatment: "Conscious of the depth of the problem (of public health) and of the necessity to find radical solutions to end exploitation and specula? tion on disease, the government of the People's Republic of Mozambique decided to nationalize and forbid the exercise of medical practice for lucrative

ends," states a FRELIMO Central Committee Resolution on public health

adopted in February 1976. With this end in view, and to offset the impact of the massive exodus of doctors provoked by the decree, a national health

plan was inaugurated with the aims of 1) developing an extensive program of preventive or prophylactic struggle against disease, as opposed to curative medicine which only "enabled the medical personnel to enrich themselves";

2) developing a health delivery system for the rural population which under

colonialism was "left to itself with neither public-health organization nor

guidance," because there was "nothing there to enrich doctors and nurses"; and 3) restructuring hospitals to make them accessible and responsive to

the needs of both patients and the larger community, "mobilizing and

organising the people so they can participate consciously and actively in

the fight against disease." A Socialization of Health Bill enacted in 1977

made most medical facilities free for the first time.


There was in addition nationalization of land and of urban property, which had previously been owned by land speculators, and of all rented

property. The "cement cities" of concrete and towering luxury buildings were mixed with the sweat and blood of Mozambican workers, but our

mothers and fathers were never able to occupy them except as servants,

declared Machel. The people were merely taking back what they had pro? duced. The rents were drastically reduced, "on the average by 200 to 300

percent from the colonial period."55 These nationalizations, in the context of People's Power, were in fact simultaneously processes for the socializa? tion of an economy formerly controlled by foreign monopolies, in a necessary

struggle against an incipient national bourgeoisie to prevent the emergence of local exploiters. As Machel has explained, the speed and urgency of these initial nationalizations had nothing to do with the flight of the Portuguese and the abandonment of property.

It was a question of the extension of FRELIMO power and

organization to the whole country. The nationalization decrees were the means of establishing People's Power and consolidating the gains of the revolution. It was an integral part of our overall

programme. We could not build a new society on the structures

of the old where there was exploitation and discrimination at every level. Education, public health, property

? these were key instru? ments of the bourgeoisie which had to be taken away from them.

They were the instruments by which they hoped to retain power; to organize and consolidate their position and move into areas

abandoned by the Portuguese. We had to nip such efforts in the bud. A crocodile is very dangerous when it is grown up and in

its own element in the middle of the river where it is stronger than us. Better to kill it on the bank when it is still young and in a place where we are stronger. People are still living in revolu?

tion. They feel the need to transform society. Another fundamental

problem is that we are incapable of being managers of capitalism. Even if we tried we would fail.

In 1977 the three main private insurance firms were taken over and

converted into the State Insurance Agency, Emose (Empresa Mocambicana de Seguros); the important Sonarep oil refinery near Maputo was national?

ized and Petromec, a state petroleum company, established. In 1975 the Bank of Mozambique was created by the state, and in 1978 five of the six

private commercial banks were nationalized and a second state bank, the

People's Development Bank, established. In fact a vital state economy has

been organized in finance, imports and exports, and the wholesale trade; abandoned factories and farms have been taken under public control; and an extensive network of consumer cooperatives has been established. Such

private enterprises as have been permitted to exist do so within the

framework of the national plan. As Marcelino dos Santos stated in December

1977, in his capacity as Minister for Development and Economic Planning: "We direct the state enterprises, we support the cooperative sector, we

60 NWAFOR

control the private sector."

The breakdown of the transport system with the mass exodus of Portu?

guese and Asians, who had controlled transportation under colonial rule,

severely hampered the distribution of basic commodities and contributed to shortages and long queues. This problem was vigorously tackled with the establishment of a National Supplies Commission in 1977 to reorganize the transport and distribution systems. The stimulation of production within the framework of People's Power necessitated the transformation of both urban and rural production processes. In the urban areas and in the Fac? tories this has been accomplished through Production Councils which, as we have already seen, established new production relationships and con?

solidated greater worker control over the production process. In the coun?

tryside, said Machel,

National liberation for the broad masses of the peasantry means a radical change in the situation of the peasantry; the abolition of forced labour; an end to the plunder of the land and its ex?

ploitation by company concessions; an end to the big plantations; liquidation of the practice of selling workers abroad; restructur?

ing the tax system in favour of the workers. These demands amount to the dissolution of the colonial state; the state of com?

pulsory crops and plantations; the state of dependency on imper? ialism as represented by the multinationals and of subservience to the South African mining interests and Rhodesian plantation agriculture.

With this dissolution of the colonial state, the problem created by the

scattered rural population was revealed, as was the difficulty, under those

conditions, of increasing the level of production and improving the living standard of the people. For,

. . .the great mass of the Mozambican peasantry are dispersed all over the country, practising subsistence farming. . .with an ex?

tremely low productivity of labour. . . .This situation was ag?

gravated by the isolation of the peasants in relations to each other,

preventing them from organising and combining their forces in the sense of either controlling nature or of constituting a force

capable of resisting capitalist exploitation. Furthermore, this

dispersal increases the difficulty of developing and diffusing political, technical, and scientific knowledge to permit an organised

struggle against superstition and reactionary traditions. It is for all this that the peasant, feeling himself crushed and incapable of changing his status, tried to flee from this vicious circle of misery and stagnation by emigrating to the cities or across the frontier to try to improve his livelihood.

This necessitated the radical restructuring of the countryside into communal

villages, "where the people will have an organised life, developing produc


tion collectively, on the basis of their traditions, and promoting the exchange of knowledge."

The communal villages (aldeais communais) were established by a Cen? tral Committee decree of February 1976. The right and responsibility of the peasants to assume control of the production process underlies this struc? ture. The local dynamizing groups as well as the local officials of the com?

munal village are popularly elected. As a result,

. . . the social benefits have dramatically improved the quality of life for the peasants who, for the first time, have access to schools and proper health facilities, and sometimes even day-care cen? tres. Moreover, a number of communal villages have already built consumer cooperatives to insure that basic necessities are available even in the most remote areas and to offer an alternative to the rural European and Asian-owned shops notorious for their price

gouging; Perhaps the best indication that the communal villages are succeeding is the enthusiasm of the participants, which in turn

has attracted new members to most of the new communities.56

In addition, the nationalized abandoned farms have been transformed into a network of state farms, also organized on the principle of collective labor and collective self-determination of the workers. And "by all accounts

nationalisation appears to be succeeding. The abandoned farms are once

again producing key consumer foodstuffs as well as export crops and pro?

viding employment for thousands of workers. In a few cases such as Macuse in Quelimane, they have equalled or surpassed colonial levels of

production."57 As even the New York Times noted, on November 12, 1977:

Here in Mozambique, despite the departure of 250,000 Portuguese settlers ? the people who ran industry, the civil service and the

larger plantations ?

nothing very drastic has happened. Phones, railroads and airlines work. Abandoned stores and factories are

being run, admittedly at reduced levels of production, but run

nevertheless by workers' committees with the aid of relatively few

experts.

Ultimately, however, the transition to a comprehensive planned econ

nomy is projected as the key to the conquest of hunger, illiteracy, and poverty, and the eradication of the profound humiliation and social and economic retardation bequeathed by colonialism. These steps will be taken together with the eventual harnessing of Cabora Bassa to serve the economic needs

of Mozambique, as the key to the nation's socialist industrialization. In

presenting the Prospective Indicative Plan for the Eighties to the People's

Assembly, in October 1981, Samora Machel stated that it is

...a fundamental achievement of the Mozambican workers. . . made by Mozambicans for Mozambicans. It helps us

build our confidence in our own capacities and strengthens our

62 NWAFOR

belief in the immense creative force of the people.... It is not a piece of wishful thinking or guesswork, nor a transplant from

elsewhere, but the product of the effort of the Mozambican man, and as such of pride to us all.

Relations With South Africa

At the same time, present economic difficulties which derive essen?

tially from the colonial heritage of extreme economic backwardness and

dependence on the South African economy are frankly admitted and clearly explained to the people. This dependence on South Africa which that country seeks to maintain and foster, in which South Africa continues to be the source of both essential manufactured goods and vital foreign exchange earnings, is filled with vulnerabilities and grave dangers for the revolutionary state. Integrated into the South African economy under colonialism,

Mozambique constituted "a vast reservoir of manpower at derisory prices for the South African mining industry and the great Rhodesian planta? tions" (Machel). Its conditions of underdevelopment did not permit an

immediate and complete disentanglement from these bonds of dependence at its liberation. Faced then with the flight of technicians and a shortage of replacement parts, joined with a dramatic rise in the value of imports, mostly of raw materials (oil, spare parts, and foodstuffs) which worsened its balance of payments deficit, it continued its dependent economic rela?

tionship with South Africa. This meant, in the first instance, a continua? tion of the migratory flow of labor to South African mines, which provided significant foreign exchange earnings in gold from remittances of the migrant

workers. This contribution to the reduction of the balance of payments deficit was a compelling reason to retain the relationship even when South Africa

drastically reduced the number of Mozambicans employed in the gold mines from over 100,000 to 30,000 by January 1978. This economic pressure was

intensified in April 1978, when South Africa abrogated the preferential gold rate at which miners' wages were remitted.

The economic pressure has also included the sponsoring of counter?

revolutionary guerrilla forces within Mozambique for the destabilization of the state, in the hope of perpetuating a neocolonial economic depen? dence of the whole Southern African region on the apartheid regime. Jean Pierre Langellier wrote of the Mozambique National Resistance, in Le Monde in 1980, that though it has sought to invest itself with nationalist legitimacy, it "owes its survival basically to support from South Africa, former white

Rhodesia and various Portuguese business circles.... Its radio station, the Voice of Free Africa, which used to broadcast from Rhodesia, is now located in South Africa."58 The struggle against these South African phantoms has involved an additional drain of valuable resources for productive develop?

ment. In addition, the shipment of South African exports and imports through the port of Maputo serves as an important source of foreign

exchange earning for Mozambique. In 1977 South African freight volume

exported through Maputo averaged about 17,000 tons daily, constituting


about 17% of the apartheid regime's total external trade. And in February 1979 an agreement was concluded with South Africa that would raise its

daily freight exports through Mozambique to 30-35,000 tons by 1981. Finally, the grandiose Cabora Bassa hydroelectric power system, designed and built

by the Portuguese for the South Africans and with considerable South African investment in its construction, was the ultimate embodiment of colonial despoliation of Mozambique. Bestriding two eras, Cabora Bassa is both testimony to Mozambique's past servitude and herald of its future

power when harnessed to serve the economic necessities of the nation. At

present it provides most of its generated power, at extremely cheap rates, to South Africa. Prime Minister John Vorster of South Africa assured his Parliament on August 30, 1974?on the threshold of Mozambican

independence ? that Mozambique could not survive economically without

cooperating with South Africa, boasting that Cabora Bassa would become a "white elephant" without the supply of its electricity to Pretoria.

It is the reality of this economic dependence on South Africa by Mozambique and the whole Southern African region?in trade, transpor? tation, and migratory labor?that has been the basis of South Africa's ardent

pursuit of the goal of a "constellation of southern African states," which

envisages the transformation of this economic dependence and subordina? tion into a regional political and security collaboration with South Africa, even into a form of "confederation" of the area. But the fetid odor of the

apartheid regime to African states of whatever political persuasion con?

demned the constellation idea to failure. Not only did Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland firmly reject it, but the ignominious defeat of Bishop Abel

Muzorewa in Zimbabwe delivered the crushing coup de grace to the idea.

Meanwhile, the emergence in November 1980 of the Southern African

Development Coordination Council (SADCC)?a group of nine Organiza? tion of African Unity member countries initiated in 1979 by the five front?

line states, in their determination to reduce significantly, with international

assistance, the economic dependence of the region on South Africa?looms

large as a potentially powerful "counter-constellation."

An intransigent FRELIMO has never entertained any illusions about its enforced present temporary relationship with South Africa, and of

Pretoria's desire to reverse the historical process in Mozambique. However, its inevitable economic difficulties notwithstanding, given its heritage, this

has not compromised by any means its revolutionary transformation of

Mozambican society, nor attenuated its unreserved commitment to the

struggle of the people of South Africa for liberation?and not merely for

dismantling the apartheid structures of domination which constitute only a secondary problem. For as Machel has said of the struggle for South Africa:

There is a danger of losing sight of the class struggle by keeping racism in the fore. Despite different characteristics, the struggle is essentially the same as elsewhere in southern Africa; it is against the exploitation by colonialist capitalism. Racism is only a form

64 NWAFOR

and instrument of action. Fundamentally it is a question of oppres? sion and exploitation. Racism lends a particular colour to it; but odious and horrendous as it is, it is not the principal problem. There is a risk that fighting to end apartheid diverts attention from the main problem. In fact, racism is a fundamental ingredient of colonialist oppression. The result of getting the priorities wrong would make the ending of apartheid look like a final victory. As

long as there is oppression there can never be equality. What is

equality under colonial capitalism? Is the aim that all blacks should look like whites? No. The fight against apartheid must be seen as

part of the general class struggle. And Mozambique cannot feel free with colonial capitalist exploitation on

its borders. Therefore, conscious of these difficult economic constraints and the consequent hardness of the road ahead which can only be traversed

by revolutionary means, we must end on a note of what has indeed been a truly remarkable odyssey and achievement, succinctly summed up by Isaacman:

In a remarkably short period of time, most of the basic inequalities fostered during colonialism have been either eliminated or sharply reduced. . . .The opportunity to learn to read and write is no

longer a privilege of either race or class. Both are rights of citizen?

ship as is access to proper health care, decent housing, fair wages, and collective control over the means of production. The oppor?

tunity to vote, to debate, and to participate in the decision-making process

? be it at the work place or public meeting?is not only guaranteed in the Constitution but enshrined in Mozambique's national ideology which emphasizes mass participation and mobilisation.59

The building of socialism is a difficult process. The war for liberation was

waged with the people and won with the people. The much more difficult war for economic development and socialist construction can be won only with the people; and FRELIMO has embarked on this new path with the

unshakable certainty of the victory of the Revolution.

Internationalism

Finally, for FRELIMO, internationalism is a living reality, originating from within its struggle for liberation, and a constant of its revolutionary process whose theory and practice evoke the memorable injunction of Che Guevara's farewell letter: 'Above all, be capable always of feeling to the

depths any injustice committed against anyone in any part of the world. That is the finest quality in a revolutionary." The Third Party Congress in February 1977 perceived the Mozambican Revolution as "an integral part of the world-proletarian revolution," a detachment of the "vast anti

imperialist front." The People's Republic has, therefore, proudly proclaimed and assumed its duties, international and historic, in the struggle for the

liberation of Africa and mankind, sustaining in the process enormous suf


ferings and punishing blows in its active solidarity with the Southern African

people, just as, still bleeding from the wounds and lacerations of their own

struggle, the Mozambican people unhesitatingly suffered yet more blood? shed and destruction to liberate Zimbabwe.

This role on the front line in the struggle for the liquidation of impe? rialist exploitation is accompanied by recognition that the Mozambican

people themselves did not struggle alone for their independence. FRELIMO established an organizational unity with the national liberation movements

of Angola and Guinea-Bissau in the war against colonialism and imperialism in Africa, the CONCP?Conference of Nationalist Organizations of the

Portuguese Colonies?the first organization in the African colonies "to have

joined together to discuss, to plan together, to study together the problems concerning the development of their struggle."60 They also received the

solidarity of the people of Tanzania and Zambia who "without any hesita? tion or calculation of any kind, accepted all the risks involved in their posi? tion as our strategic rear, who suffered loss of life and property because

they did not compromise with colonialism" (Machel), and whose solidarity contributed immeasurably to the victory of the Mozambican people. FRELIMO's celebration of solidarity with the Portuguese people reveals

profoundly the immense stature and quality of the Revolution. Machel, on Independence Day, paid a moving tribute to the Portuguese people as

"allies in the fight against colonial-fascism and with whom we have bonds of fraternal solidarity forged through our mutual help and reciprocal con?

tribution in the struggle for the liberation of our two people." He went on

to note that "because our struggle never took on a racial character and because our people were always able to distinguish between the colonial fascist regime and the Portuguese people, today we can extend a friendly hand to the Portuguese people, without any complexes of any kind, so that we can build a future of friendship together, without hatred or feelings of

revenge, on the bases of mutual respect and respect for the personality of

each people." And as I write, Portuguese Prime Minister Francisco Pinto Balsemao is on a state visit to Mozambique, where he has strongly con?

demned South African acts of aggression against Mozambique, Angola, and Namibia.

There is also, above all, the indispensable solidarity of the socialist states for the victory and consolidation of the Revolution. This constitutes, in the historical conjuncture, a critical condition for the construction of

socialism in a "backward country." The conception of its ideological and

political affinity and solidarity with these states as arising from their shared

unity in the "great world front of revolutionary forces" and "common anti

imperialist struggle," underlies FRELIMO's relations with the socialist coun?

tries, "a liberated zone of humanity where a new society is being built free from the exploitation of man by man." Mozambique firmly locates itself within this socialist group of nations whose emergence has decisively transformed the international balance of forces against imperialism, and

whom experience has shown to be the most resolute defenders of the gains of the Revolution and a socialist trajectory. As a consequence, it has sought

66 NWAFOR

to "develop and intensify its militant relations with all socialist countries,

seeking to benefit from their experience, insofar as it is the common

patrimony of mankind in the political, ideological, organisational, economic, social and cultural spheres." Having thus solidly anchored the construc?

tion of socialism through the agency of People's Power internally and through internationalist socialist solidarity externally, Mozambique could then

simultaneously establish close political and economic relations with neighbor? ing African states, especially those in the front line of struggle against apar? theid and for the liberation of Africa, or with many capitalist states (in par? ticular, the Scandinavian countries which participate significantly in the economic development of Mozambique) without any complexes whatsoever.

And the Mozambican Revolution as an integral part of the anti

imperialist revolutionary front is, lastly, international in its effects. Already, shortly before his death on June 4, 1971, Georg Lukacs had strikingly compared the international reverberations of the Vietnamese struggle against American imperialism to the devastating impact of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 on the fate of French feudalism and the prevailing European social

order.61 Since then a gigantic tidal wave of revolutionary conquests has swept over Mozambique and a host of other countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Indeed it is triumphant social revolutions of the working people, such as those of Vietnam and Mozambique, that the current thespian administration of the United States government seeks so dramatically but

vainly to reverse by its unleashing of a new Cold War. For the origins of

this new Cold War lie in "the failure of detente to contain the spread of Communism outside Europe,"62 in conditions of precipitous economic decline: in 1965 when Lyndon Johnson first ordered combat troops into

Vietnam, the U.S. accounted for 40% of total world GNP; by 1975, at the

Saigon debacle, this proportion had fallen to 25%, with steady continuing decline. Anthony Barnett has indeed incisively situated this new Cold War in relation with the earlier Cold War:

In 1950 the Cold War began in full measure after the success of

China's revolution and the explosion of the first Soviet atom-bomb.

Washington considered carefully a preventive war but opted instead for massive, global "containment". . .

.(That) Cold War was built upon huge post-war economic superiority of the U.S. It was used to extend, reinforce and reproduce that advantage globally, confining Communism and suppressing insurgency. It reached its apogee in 1964-65: two years in which the U.S. covertly assisted coups in Brazil, Zaire and Indonesia (respectively the

largest and potentially richest countries of South America, Africa and Southeast Asia) while at the same time it successfully invaded the Dominican Republic and began to land troops in Vietnam; all with domestic acquiescence. Vietnam changed that, while

detente failed to obtain a compensating "strategic enmeshment" of the U.S.S.R. (Kissinger's phrase). The new Cold War is an

attempt by the United States, therefore, from a position of steadily weakening economic advantage, to return to its former superiority


through the use of its inherited strategic gains: by imposing a new "containment" on the U.S.S.R., by crushing "Communist" revolu?

tions and by enforcing its financial interests on its allies.63

Needless to say, this attempt to reconstruct an empire of exploitation is bound to fail. While such an exercise in futility may not uniformly suffer the fate of the rescue mission in the sands of an Iranian desert, the inco? herence and nostalgic wildness that so strongly distinguish Rawhide's policy objectives attest to the impossibility of rolling back profound historical

processes.

NOTES The author has chosen not to footnote those quotes with obvious or readily available

sources.

1. Antonio Gramsci, Selections From Political Writings 1910-1920 (London: Lawrence &

Wishart, 1977), p. 334.

2. Interview in Wilfred Burchett, Southern Africa Stands Up (New \brk: Urizen, 1978), p. 173.

3. Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source (New York: African Information Service, 1973), p. 41.

4. Radio Maputo interview with Sergio Vieira; see The African Communist 89 (1982), p. 37.

5. Quoted in Chris Searle, "Poetry and Resistance in Mozambique," Race and Class

(Spring 1982), p. 308. 6. Ibid., p. 316.

7. Sergio Vieira, from Sunflower Hope, cited in Chris Searle, op. cit., p. 320.

8. Cabral, op. cit., pp. 55-56.

9. George Black, Triumph of the People (London: Zed Press, 1981) p. 170.

10. See Azinna Nwafor, "The Liberation of Angola," Monthly Review (February 1976). 11. Amilcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea (London: Stage 1, 1969), p. 106. Italics in the

original. 12. Quoted in Basil Davidson, The People's Cause (London: Essex, 1981), p. 158.

13. Report of Standing Committee of the 4th Session of Central Committee of

FRELIMO (August 2, 1978). 14. VI. Lenin, "Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder," Collected Works, Vol.

31, p. 25.

15. R J. Bernstein, Praxis and Action (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

1971), p. 13.

16. Cabral, Return to the Source, op. cit., pp. 68-69.

17. Raphael Samuel, "British Marxist Historians," New Left Review (March-April 1980), p. 24.

18. Allen and Barbara Isaacman, "Resistance and Collaboration in Southern Africa," International Journal of African Historical Studies (1977), p. 42.

19. Editorial, Mozambique Revolution 51 (April-June 1972). 20. FRELIMO founding Constitution, in Ronald H. Chilcote (ed.) (Stanford, Calif.:

Hoover Institution Press, 1972), pp. 429-31.

21. Perry Anderson, "Portugal and the End of Ultra-Colonialism," New Left Review

(1962). 22. James Duffy, Portuguese Africa (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959),

p. 173.

23. Samora Machel, Mozambique: Sowing the Seeds of Revolution (London: MAGIC, 1974). 24. Samora Machel, Address in Independence Square, Maputo, November 5, 1981;

The African Communist 89 (1982), p. 30.

68 NWAFOR -

25. Patrick Chabal, "National Liberation in Portuguese Guinea, 1956-1974," African

Affairs, (January 1981), p. 84.

26. Quoted in Basil Davidson, op. cit., p. 128.

27. Ibid., p. 9.

28. Basil Davidson, In the Eye of the Storm (London: Longman, 1972), p. 228.

29. Mozambique Revolution (April-June 1972), p. 16.

30. Ellen Ray, (ed.), Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa (Seacaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart,

1979) , p. 138.

31. Kaulza de Arriaga, The Portuguese Answer (London: Stacey, 1973), p. 57.

32. Carter and P. O'Meara (eds.), Southern Africa: The Continuing Crisis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979) p. 61.

33. Tony Hodges, "Portugal and the Revolutions in Angola and Mozambique," International (Spring 1975), p. 29.

34. Cabral, Revolution in Guinea, op. cit., p. 19.

35. Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (London: NLB, 1980), p. 22.

36. Tony Hodges in Carter and O'Meara, op. cit., p. 68.

37. Marcelino dos Santos. Quoted by Allen Isaacman, in A Luta Continua: Creating a New Society in Mozambique (1978), p. 42.

38. Ibid., p. 37.

39. George Black, op. cit., p. 239.

40. Samora Machel, The Tasks Ahead (New York: Africa Information Service. 1975),

p. 120.

41. Quoted in Noticias (April 5, 1976): cf. Isaacman, A Luta Continua, op. cit., p. 32.

42. Isaacman, A Luta Continua, op. cit., p. 34.

43. Black, op. cit., p. 328.

44. Tony Hodges in Carter and O'Meara, op. cit., p. 69.

45. Duffy, op. cit., p. 317.

46. Marta Harnecker, Cuba: Dictatorship or Democracy? (Westport, Conn: Lawrence Hill,

1980) , p. XXVii.

47. Ibid., p. XXXii.

48. Hodges in Carter and O'Meara, op. cit., p. 67.


50. Hodges in Carter and O'Meara, op. cit., p. 69.

51. Quoted in Isaacman, A Luta Continua, op. cit., p. 46.

52. Anderson, New Left Review (Winter 1962). 53. Isaacman, A Luta Continua, op. cit., p. 49.

54. Cabral, Return to the Source, op. cit., p. 61. Italics in the text.


56. Ibid., p. 55.

57. Ibid., pp. 56-57.

58. Cf. Wall Street Journal (June 17, 1982). 59. Isaacman, A Luta Continua, op. cit., p. 87.

60. Cabral, Revolution in Guinea, op. cit., p. 87.

61. Interview in New Left Review (July-August 1971). 62. Anthony Barnett in New Statesman February 12, 1982. Cf. Roy and Zhores

Medvedev, "The U.S.S.R. and the Arms Race," New Left Review (Nov.-Dec. 1981), p. 21.

63. Anthony Barnett in New Statesman February 12, 1982.

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