CHAPTER FIVE

‘AN IMAGINARY NATION’

NATIONALISM, IDEOLOGY & THE MOZAMBICAN NATIONAL ELITE

Jason Sumich*

Between 2002 and 2004 I conducted research investigating the formation and social reproduction of the ruling elite in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique1. One day I was talking with Josina, whose parents became high-ranking members of the Frelimo party after independence in 19752. Although her family had risen to prominence in a movement that was once socialist, Josina described herself as a capitalist who backed ‘neo-liberal’ reforms. When I expressed doubts that this model would really help the poor, Josina told me that I had seriously misunderstood the nature of Mozambican society. According to her the inequalities that have arisen are not because the poor are denied opportunities, but because they did not want them:

There is a huge diffference here that I do not think you understand. You spend all of your time with people like us, we are educated and westernised.

* This research was undertaken with the assistance of the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics, Research Student Grant, The British East Africa Institute Small Grant, and the Radclifffe Brown Award from the Royal Institute of Anthropology. Supplemental Research and the writing of this article were possible due to my post-doctoral position at the Crisis States Research Centre, London School of Economics. I owe special thanks to CEA (Centre of African Studies) at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo for providing me an institutional home during my fijieldwork. I am indebted to Eric Morier-Genoud, Jo Beall, Ed Simpson, Fraser McNeill and Casey High for their generous comments and I would like to especially thank Sandy Robertson and James Sumich for their much needed editorial help and comments.

1 My data is derived from almost two years of ethnographic research followed by an additional month in 2006. The core of the research was based on participant observation, the collection of life histories and semi-structured interviews of 23 elites and their families and 16 members of the middle class and their families. My information was bolstered by many additional interviews among both elites and the middle class who did not constitute core informants. All names have been changed in this paper. Interviews were conducted in Portuguese and English and all translations are mine.

2 Frelimo (the Portuguese acronym for Mozambican Liberation Front) fought an eleven year liberation struggle and has ruled continuously since independence.

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3 During the colonial period the vast majority of the population was illiterate. The fact that her father could read and had access to books hints that his background was actually rather privileged.

Those of us who are privileged have tastes and desires that are very diffferent from everyone else. It is really a question of interest. Most people in this country are peasants, they have a machamba (a small plot of land) and they are interested and satisfijied with that. They do not really need education or anything more, in fact they do not really want it. For instance my father comes from a poor, rural background. He liked to read, but he was not that interested in education3. He did not become interested until he saw the Portuguese and how much they had in comparison to himself. Most people want to be left alone to farm their machambas. It is those of us who are privileged that want and need all of these things.

What interested me about Josina’s response was not only it resemblance to some of the colonial justifijications of inequality, but that it was not uncommon amongst those connected to the Frelimo based elite in Maputo. There was often an implicit assumption for members of this group that because they are educated and ‘modern’ they are fundamen-tally diffferent from the vast majority of the population in important ways and this is their claim to power. Ironically, this sense of diffference appeared to have its foundation in a vision of nationalism that once promised a revolutionary form of unity for all of the nation’s inhabitants.

In this chapter I trace the trajectory of the nationalism championed by the ruling Frelimo party to understand how an ideology that once prom-ised radical unity also came to be a powerful symbol of social diffference. Mozambique has experienced a whirlwind of political and social change since independence in 1975. In 1977, Frelimo declared itself a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party; early effforts towards a Mozambican ‘Perestroika’ were introduced in 1983 during a brutal foreign-imposed civil war; and from 1989 the party began to move to ‘free market’ democracy. However, underlying these dramatic changes has been a persistent, if evolving, sense of nationalism with an ideological bedrock based on a vision of modernity held by the ruling elite.

Elites, Nationalism and Modernity in Mozambique

Many studies of nationalism have pointed out that ruling elites often attempt to create legitimacy for their project by basing it on myths of some sort of primordial connection, the idea that the nation has ‘always’

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4 F. Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge and History, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005; and J. Ferguson, Global Shadows: Essays on Africa in the Neoliberal World, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

5 A. Robertson, People and the State: an Anthropology of Planned Development, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

existed and its inhabitants have self-identifijied themselves as its members since time immemorial. In sub-Saharan Africa this legitimising project has often been more difffijicult since the vast majority of the continent’s nations can be so obviously traced back to their not to distant origins, but the straight lines and fertile imaginations of imperial cartographers. This does not mean there have not been attempts, such as TANU/CCM’s ideol-ogy of African Socialism based on the return to a supposed moral purity that was corrupted by colonial rule or ZANU PF’s incorporation of the symbolism of the trading empire of Great Zimbabwe into the new national name, flag and currency. Frelimo also adopted elements of this by incor-porating various forms of early resistance against the Portuguese as nationalist fijigures, even if it is doubtful that those in question ever con-ceived of the territory as anything resembling a potential nation-state as it is currently understood. Nonetheless, there was a signifijicant diffference in Frelimo’s ideology of nationalism. Instead of being based on some sort of primordial connection that bound Mozambique’s diverse peoples together, it was a vision of a nation as of yet uncreated, a nation not built on its glorious past but on a radiant future still to come. I argue that the nationalism held by the Frelimo elite cannot be understood without understanding their modernist orientation; in fact they are part and par-cel of the same thing. The modernist orientation of the Frelimo elite is not so much temporal but, to paraphrase James Ferguson and Frederick Cooper, is a ‘local’ category that has its origins in their experience of colo-nialism4. In this case, it operates as an ideology to understand and redress the injustices of colonial rule and to explain their role within it. It was a way to create a new nation, diffferent than what came before that was as strong as the Europeans, but also diffferent and responsive to its inhabit-ants. The discourse of this ideology fijiltered throughout nationalist rheto-ric and programmes. It promised a sense of unity and potential based on something to come, something that would be inherently ‘modern’. However, as the promised brave new world never seemed to arrive, except for a chosen few, it has increasingly become a symbol of the powerful, a sign of their right to status and privilege.

Frelimo was able to come to power in a classically populist fashion5, as a primarily urban-based intellectual leadership formed an alliance

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6 D. Donham, Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution, Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press and James Currey, 1999.

7 J. Ferguson, Global Shadows.8 ibid, p. 186.9 ibid, p. 33.

with the northern peasantry and tapped into their desire to liberate the country and improve the miserable conditions of poverty, illiteracy and exploitation they sufffered. However, independence was to be only the fijirst step in a far more ambitious social revolution that increasingly drew its rhetoric from the Marxist-Leninist model. In a manner similar to what Donham described for the Derg in Ethoipia, this undertaking drew its inspiration not from an eventual communist utopia but from the con-crete examples of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China6. Frelimo also hoped to take a ‘backward’, humiliated, agrarian population and build them into an industrial nation that could no longer be exploited by foreign powers. The party leadership envisioned the complete trans-formation of the population, with peasants becoming workers, scattered machambas giving way to agro-industries, factories churning out goods and growing prosperity. On a social level the transformation was to be no less thorough. The brutalised, fractured and localised population would be transformed into a subject that was universally modern with science and rationality replacing ‘feudalism’, ‘superstition’ and exploitation, and also simultaneously nationalist, loyal to Mozambique and transcending ties of village, region, ethnicity and race. For the most devoted members of Frelimo’s Marxist intellectuals even this stage would eventually be sur-passed as a communist society would arise from the ashes of colonialism sometime in the future.

Modernism, for the Frelimo elite, was a fundamental part of the nation-alist project as they aimed not to give voice to what always was, but instead to create the foundations for what will be. In a recent book ‘Global Shadows: Africa in the Age of Neo-Liberalism’, Ferguson makes an impor-tant contribution to the vast literature on modernity when he describes it as a local category for his Zambian informant7. Modernity in this case is a way of describing the global pecking order and it is the ‘lack’ of it that is the cause of the gross material inequalities that characterise their lives8. Ferguson argues that when people in Africa speak of their ‘backwardness’ they are not referring to a sense of supposed cultural inferiority, but instead the socio-economic conditions the vast majority are forced to suf-fer9. There is much to commend this argument and Frelimo was speaking

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10 M. Hall and T. Young, Confronting Leviathan: Mozambique since Independence, London: Hurst & Co, 1997.

11 J. C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998.

12 H. West, ‘Creative Destruction and Sorcery of Construction: Power, Hope and Suspicion in Post-War Mozambique’, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, vol.147, 1997, pp. 675–698; and H. West, ‘Sorcery of Construction and Socialist Modernization: Ways of Understanding Power in Postcolonial Mozambique’, American Ethnologist, vol. 28, 2001, pp. 119–150.

very clearly about the exploitative practices that brought so much poverty and sufffering when they made the case for independence. However, the party’s ideology was also deeply concerned about what they felt was Mozambique’s cultural inferiority10. It was this inferiority and weakness that allowed them to be conquered by one of the weakest European pow-ers in the fijirst place (or as a common saying in Maputo would have it: ‘Our tragedy is that we were colonised by the Africa of Europe’). The construc-tion of the new nation also depended on the construction of a new mentality.

In many ways Frelimo’s projects resemble the description made famous by James C. Scott, with its combination of modernisation from an authori-tarian government and an ill disguised contempt for ‘local practices’11. This did not necessarily make the project illegitimate though and the party tapped into a widespread desire to create a new and diffferent world throughout the country. The initial project of modernist nationalism, in its revolutionary guise, failed in part as noted by Scott, because it was coercive and contemptuous of local practices, thus engendering opposi-tion. Just as importantly though, it failed because, through a variety of causes such as terrible planning mistakes, the naivety of the leadership, foreign aggression and a brutal civil war from 1977 to 1992, the promised modernity never appeared12. In fact, for the majority, life became even more arduous.

Revolutionary modernist nationalism collapsed with the end of the civil war and has been theoretically replaced by a new liberal ideology. It is undeniably true that tactics have changed and revolutionary zeal has often been replaced by cynicism and corruption on the part of elites and disillusionment and alienation among the wider population. However, even the new liberal state still claims legitimacy through its history as the liberators and creators of the nation and those who can bring about ‘development’. I argue that Frelimo’s nationalist ideology has not been discredited so much as reconceptualised by the national elite. What was

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13 J. Gledhill, ‘The Power Behind the Masks: Mexico’s Political Class and Social Elites at the End of the Millennium’, in C. Shore, and S. Nugent (eds), Elite Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives, London and New York: Routledge, 2002, pp. 39–60.

once an authoritarian, but potentially emancipatory, project based on the mass mobilisation of the populace has increasing become an indicator of status and power for the elite. The ideology of modernist nationalism however, serves as a ‘unifying fijield’ that creates unity and an internal legitimacy among elites13. They rule and occupy positions of status and power because they created the nation of Mozambique and they are the only ones with the skills necessary to bring a better future. Furthermore it is a claim to power amongst even a increasingly alienated population as they can argue with some success they are the only ones with sufffijicient skills to fulfijil the nationalist promise and bring a better, more prosperous future to the population, even as this future’s arrival date seems to recede ever further. However, the failure of socialism and, more recently, capital-ism to bring the brave new world any closer have created doubts among the national elite who are becoming increasingly uncertain about how to bring their project about. Is local culture a powerful unifying fijield that creates national identity; is it still Frelimo’s role to educate the populace towards a new mentality, or is it some combination of the two? Debates rage within the party as to the proper way forward, but in practice the modernity at the heart of the nationalist message serves as a symbol of everyday claims to social power in a nation they are still trying to build. This symbolism may be disputed, but it is generally understood by the wider population, at least in Maputo, the area I know best.

I begin by explaining the social origins and transformation of the elite and the origins of the development of modernist nationalism as a local category and how it has transformed through Mozambique’s changing political landscape. I will then discuss how this ideology is inculcated into younger generations of elites through education and expressed by self-presentation and consumption. I will end the paper with a brief discus-sion concerning what the Mozambican case has to offfer to the wider anthropological arguments concerning modernity and nationalism in Africa.

The Origins and Transformation of Revolutionary Nationalism

In Mozambique there are multiple groups that can claim the title of elite, from régulos (‘traditional’ authorities), to religious leaders, foreigners

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14 K. Sheldon, Pounders of Grain: A History of Women, Work and Politics in Mozambique, Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 2002.

15 E. Mondlane, The Struggle for Mozambique, London: Penguin Books, 1969.16 B. O’Laughlin, ‘Class and the Customary: The Ambiguous Legacy of Indigenato in

Mozambique’, African Afffairs, vol. 99, 2000, pp. 5–42; J. Penvenne, ‘The Unmaking of an African Petite Bourgeoisie: Lourenço Marques, Mozambique’, Working Papers in African Studies, no. 57, African Studies Center, Boston University, 1982; and J. Penvenne, ‘“We are all Portuguese!” Challenging the Political Economy of Assimilation: Lourenço Marques, 1870–1933’, in L. Vail (ed), The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989, pp. 255–288.

attached to multinationals or powerful international agencies, the top members of the Indian merchant class, various local level Frelimo author-ities and high-ranking members of Renamo, (Mozambican National Resistance) the former rebels and now the offfijicial opposition party. This paper focuses on a specifijic elite group that appears to be the socially dom-inant, if not uncontested, elite. It is based on members of the ruling Frelimo party in Maputo, their families and close business associates. I do not mean to claim that this group is completely homogenous; multiple factions and social cleavages exist. These divisions encompass the various social backgrounds of members of the elite, including race, religion, role (or lack of one) in the liberation struggle and level of education. Fierce disagreements exist within the party concerning the future of the nation. However, the central goal of somehow building a modern nation still remains, and it creates an overall unity for the elite while legitimising their positions of power and material interests. To understand why this is so, we have to examine the social origins of the dominant section of the Maputo elite from 1930 until independence.

Much of the leadership comes from the south among those who used to be members of a former offfijicial colonial category of assimilados (the assimilated), a group that proved to be extremely influential, despite the smallness of their numbers. One of the more common estimates puts them at around 5000, out of an African population of around 8,200,000 in 196014. To be an assimilado one had to fulfijil certain legal criteria: to swear loyalty to the colonial state, speak only Portuguese at home, adopt ‘European’ habits, abandon ‘heathen’ beliefs and have a Portuguese offfiji-cial vouch for one’s character. If one fulfijilled these criteria one was theo-retically granted full legal equality with the Portuguese15. While equality was not the case in practice, assimilados were granted a range of privi-leges, such as freedom from forced labour, better access to education, employment and urban residence, and jurisdiction under civil law16.

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17 A. Pitcher, Transforming Mozambique: The Politics of Privatization, 1975–2000, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

18 J. Penvenne, ‘“We are all Portuguese!”.19 M. Hall and T. Young, Confronting Leviathan: Mozambique since Independence.

Assimilados could gain preferential employment in the highest bastions of the colonial economy that a black person could realistically aspire to, such as nursing, teaching, railway administration and low level positions in the civil service. Due to the way the southern region was incorporated into the Portuguese empire, and to the proximity of the capital and the mines and markets of South Africa, a particular kind of assimilado elite developed in Maputo: One that had weak ties to ‘traditional’ authority, but greater opportunities to engage in commercial farming, labour migra-tion and the urban-based government sector17. However, their relative privileges could not mask the fact that they would remain second class citizens at best and were subjected to systematic discrimination and humiliation18. In many ways they were aspirants to a vision of modernity that under colonialism would always remain just out of reach19. The most alienated of this group later became well represented in the leadership of the liberation struggle.

The coalition that formed the leadership of the Frelimo party at inde-pendence was based on southern urban assimilados, more rural, mission-educated aspiring elites from the north and various other disafffected urbanites from Portuguese, Indian and Mulatto (mixed race) backgrounds. Assimilação (assimilation), along with most other colonial practices, was anathema to all that the new society was supposed to represent. The word assimilado began to take on connotations of selling out or collaboration. Once when I was arranging an interview with a man who had been an assimilado during the colonial period I was warned by his niece not to use that word or ‘he will throw you out of his house’. Nevertheless, as noted by Fry, socialism in Mozambique had many surprising similarities with assimilação:

In spite of the anti-colonial discourse of the center and Frelimo in general, it is impossible not to observe that the socialist project in Mozambique was if anything more ‘assimilationist’ than the Portuguese ever dared to imagine and it is tempting to suggest that this is one of the reasons why the Mozambican elite found the socialist program so attractive. Structurally speaking there was little diffference between an authoritarian capitalist state run by a small body of ‘illuminated’ Portuguese and assimilados and an

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20 P. Fry, ‘Cultures of Diffference: The Aftermath of Portuguese and British Colonial Policies in Southern Africa’, Social Anthropology, vol. 8, 2000, pp. 117–143, p. 129.

authoritarian socialist state run by an equally diminutive and equally enlightened vanguard party20.

Frelimo’s attempt was far more ambitious than the Portuguese ever dared dream. Instead of being restricted to a few chosen sons of colonialism, it should expand to include the entire nation.

The party’s attempts at social engineering drew from their own back-ground. The goals of the nationalist project were deeply intertwined with elite modernism: the nation was the instrument that could bring the ide-ology to fruition. As the following example will show, the appeal of this project for many of Frelimo’s cadres was based on the fact that it appeared to be the best way to alleviate the misery sufffered by the majority of the population, while having an added benefijit of being socially familiar. Sergio Abdul comes from an Indian/mixed race family and grew up on a plantation in the south during the colonial period with his step-father who had been active in an early nationalist movement. Sergio described his upbringing as ‘urban in a rural area’, the house was always fijilled with literature and they kept in touch with the intellectual currents of the capi-tal. Sergio managed to attend secondary school and then moved to the provincial capital where he worked as mechanic until liberation. He had been a Frelimo sympathiser and joined the party after independence because he was deeply attracted to the goal of the socialisation of the countryside. He grew up among peasants, knew fijirst hand the misery of the rural areas and strongly supported a movement that was dedicated to alleviating their hardships. He later left the party when a combination of mistakes, changing policies and the civil war meant this goal became impossible. Sergio continues to support Frelimo and although he is criti-cal of the neo-liberal turn, he feels they are the only ones who can eventu-ally bring a better life to the people. The nationalist vision of the party is based on people like Sergio, those whose background influenced a very particular, future oriented view of the nation that they would create.

The party’s goals, however, went much further. In the leadership’s view, building a better world meant that the nation’s citizens had to be com-pletely transformed. This goal though, was deeply influenced by the social background of the leadership. For the leadership, ‘traditional’ culture was not a base of ‘local’ knowledge, but the cause of the nation’s ‘backward-ness’, which resulted in defeat and humiliation during the colonial period.

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21 M. Hall and T. Young, Confronting Leviathan, p. 65.22 ibid, p. 86.

As observed by Hall and Young: ‘The Frelimo elite and the social strata to which it appealed were profoundly convinced of the superiority of mod-ern civilisation and the need to ‘catch up’ with it. The only way to resolve these dilemmas was to see the “people” as empty vessels, but possessing the potential to develop’21. Obviously the ‘people’ were not in fact empty vessels, but for Frelimo the creation of their state depended on destroying traditional structures and the party was willing to use state power to do so. This is not to say that every decision was based simply on abstract ideological goals. Policies were put into place for a variety of reasons, including security concerns, responses to adverse conditions, or simply the continuation of former Portuguese projects. However, even pragmatic choices made in response to a changing social environment were seen through the lens of the modernist ideology central to the nationalist project, and were attempts to buttress these overall goals. Shortly after independence the institution of régulos (‘chiefly’ leadership) was abol-ished, lobola (bridewealth) was outlawed and polygamous men were denied entry to the party. Major religious institutions, were under outright attack by the party from 1977 to 1979 and certain ancestral and rain-making ceremonies were banned. Practitioners of ‘sorcery’ could be sent to re-education camps and attempts were made to continue the Portuguese counterinsurgency strategy of moving the peasantry from their former scattered hamlets to centralised communal villages, which would become ‘cities in the bush’. Intense efffort was focused on combat-ing what was termed superstition or ‘obscurantism’ and replacing them with rationality and scientifijic socialism22. This was combined with almost messianic appeals from the fijirst president, Samora Machel that through the determination of the party, ‘underdevelopment’ would be overcome in ten years. Many members of the Frelimo elite were privately skeptical, especially as this plan depended on a bankrupt country achieving an annual economic growth rate of 17.5%. Much of the rank and fijile though was convinced and enthusiastic. As I was told by a lecturer at the national university: ‘It was amazing, many of the party members actually believed and would tell you with complete sincerity that everything will change and the country will be utterly unrecognisable in ten years’.

One of the foundations of Frelimo’s programme to create this modern nation during socialism was the creation of the Homem Novo (new man).

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23 S. Vieira, The New Man is a Process. A Speech by Sergio Vieira, Member of the Central Committee of Frelimo, to the Second Conference of the Ministry of Education and Culture, held in December 1977, p. 3.

24 ibid, p. 25.25 E. Mondlane, The Struggle for Mozambique; and A. Pitcher, Transforming

Mozambique.26 M. Hall and T. Young, Confronting Leviathan.27 M. Cahen, ‘Check on Socialism in Mozambique – What Check? What Socialism?’,

Review of African Political Economy, vol. 57, 1993, pp. 46–59; and C. Gefffray, A Causa das Armas, Oporto: Edições Afrontamento, 1991.

According to one of Frelimo’s leading theorists, Sergio Vieira, the new man would provide the decisive break from the past23. The new man would be based on science, ‘rationality’ and collective labour, but it was still in the process of being born24. Assimilados were modelled on the Portuguese national identity, but the new man would be both a universal subject and the embodiment of an emerging Mozambican personality and citizen. Whereas the enthusiasm among the population for a com-plete re-creation of the Mozambican personality probably varied, its allure to Frelimo militants was quite genuine. I was told by one former party member: ‘To be called a new man by Samora Machel was truly thrill-ing, we were going to build a new nation, part of a new world, everything was urgent … we lived in a permanent state of exultation’. The new man was to be the concrete expression of the great nationalist project, and a new type of person for a new nation was Frelimo’s ideology made flesh.

While the new man was to embody Frelimo’s modernist nationalism, the party hoped that in the meantime the experience of colonial oppres-sion could create the basis for a shared sense of citizenship25. However, just as the nationalism of Frelimo flowed from the social experiences of the leadership, reactions to it were influenced by a variety of local condi-tions. When Frelimo took power they had a tremendous degree of popu-lar support and they counted on their widespread acclaim to mobilise the population for the heroic efffort of building the nation. While much of the population was thrilled to achieve independence and a desire for change was widespread, their relationship to the evolution of Frelimo’s modernising nationalism was often more ambivalent. Frelimo had a strong social base that believed in their goals and this legitimised the par-ty’s power; the young residents of the south and far north, and ironically the better offf who tended to benefijit the most26. The rural population of the centre and parts of the north of the country though, largely became alienated from the government due to the party’s programme27. Just two years after independence Mozambique was caught up in another war.

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28 C. Gefffray, A Causa das Armas, and M. Hall and T. Young, Confronting Leviathan.

Frelimo supported the liberation movement in neighbouring Rhodesia and its white minority regime retaliated by forming a rebel army, Renamo, composed of Mozambican dissidents. After the Rhodesian regime fell and the newly named Zimbabwe became independent, South Africa became Renamo’s sponsor and formented the civil war that devastated Mozambique. Many of the Frelimo government’s real gains in education and health care were destroyed. Despite their brutality, Renamo thrived where the population had been deeply alienated by Frelimo’s social revo-lution. In parts of the centre and the north Renamo was initially greeted as liberators and it could count on the population’s overall indiffference towards which side won the war28. Frelimo may have tapped into a desire for thorough change when they came to power, but the actual programme was of course far more difffijicult, especially considering the weakness of the party’s control over its desperately poor nation. As the next example will demonstrate, many of the party leadership’s assumptions were based on wishful thinking.

Paulo was born in Maputo (then Lourenço Marques) in the 1920s. He came from a Portuguese working class family. His father was strongly opposed to the dictatorship of Antonio Salazar and Paulo became radi-calised early in his life. As he told me: ‘As a child I would see people send their servants to the police for some minor thing and the servant would have to hand a note to the police which would tell the police how many times to flog the poor person. It was not hard to see that the system was wrong’. In the 1940s he became a member of the communist party and later joined Frelimo during the liberation struggle. In his opinion Frelimo’s grand dream of creating a completely new and modern nation went wrong because Mozambique did not have the sufffijicient conditions to realise it:

Frelimo was not really a communist movement; it was a nationalist one, although progressive. The goal was not simply to free the nation, but also to transform it. For this the party wanted to create a modern socialist state but we simply did not have the conditions. We did not have the social prep-aration to make a revolution. At independence most people were peasants, even those who lived in the urban areas were psychologically peasants. The cities did not fulfijil their historic role by making them workers, most people were servants and now they wanted to be masters. We tried to turn peasants into workers, but we failed. We lived in an imaginary nation, the dream of the nation we wanted to create, not the flesh and blood nation we actually had.

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The amount of social preparation the population needed to achieve Frelimo’s goals is debatable. Nevertheless, the party was surprisingly ambitious considering that they came to power with a handful of guerrilla soldiers in a country that was largely illiterate and surrounded by power-ful, hostile white minority regimes. The revolutionary programme col-lapsed; however some form of modernisation is still central to elite effforts to legitimise themselves as the only ones who can continue to build the nation. Even Paulo, an orthodox Marxist, still supports Frelimo as a pro-gressive force, the embodiment of Mozambican nationalism.

Liberal Modernist Nationalism and the Persistence of the Past

Today the discourse of modernist development remains ubiquitous in nationalist rhetoric. If socialism failed, perhaps liberalism will succeed. Thus, in Maputo, one is constantly confronted with the government’s exhortations to join the struggle against absolute poverty and even musi-cians when interviewed on national television are routinely asked how their music will contribute to the development of the nation. However the failures of modernist nationalism have caused a sense of disquiet among some members of the elite. As Varyna, a young woman from an elite family explained, in her opinion, many of the central problems fac-ing Mozambique do not arise from overriding political or economic fac-tors, but within the population itself.

The problem is we blacks are still two hundred years behind. You can see it everywhere. When we get power it just becomes about lining your own pockets. Everything is about who you are and who you know. When some-thing goes wrong we just blame the outside. It’s the west or spirits, its always something. If something goes wrong they go and fijind a witchdoctor to fijind out what it is. Its not just disease, I mean they know something about herb-alism and that might work. They do it for stupid things, like relationship trouble. People think magic can stop someone from cheating on them. You would be surprised about the people I am talking about; I mean people who have been to university, they are educated and should know better.

Her comments recall the former idea of the ‘new man’, where social prob-lems stem from the fact that the nation’s inhabitants are ‘superstitious’ instead of rational. In fact, those who bear the brunt of her attack are the elite, the people who should be the closest to the modern ideal as they are educated and should know better. Other members of the political leader-ship feel that the continuing failure of the modernist ideal to transform the country is caused by political drift. As I was told by a former minister:

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29 T. Cruz e Silva, ‘Identity and Political Consciousness in Southern Mozambique, 1930–1974; Two Presbyterian Biographies Contextualised’, Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 24:1, 1998, pp. 223–236; T. Cruz e Silva, Protestant Churches and the Formation of Political Consciousness in Southern Mozambique (1930–1974), Basel: P. Schlettwein Publishing, 2001; M. Buendía Gómez, Educação Moçambicana: História de um Processo: 1962–1984, Maputo: Livraria Universitária/Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, 1999; and A. Pitcher, Transforming Mozambique.

‘Yes, there is the struggle against absolute poverty, but that is a slogan not a plan. How do we actually make this happen?’ Another, more junior, Frelimo party member declared: ‘What we need is a revolution inside of Frelimo. We just keep recycling old ideas and everything seems to just get worse.’ While the self-confijidence of this elite may have been damaged by their continuing failure to completely transform the nation, their legitimacy is based on the fact that they can bring some kind of develop-ment to the nation, even under liberalism. Plans are no longer as ambi-tious as in the revolutionary period, but some form of development still equals modernisation in the minds of the elite. The transformation of Mozambique from a poor agrarian backwater into something else has become the justifijication of the nationalist project. What the end result of the modernisation process is though, outside bolstering the power and status of elites, is becoming increasingly uncertain.

The following section will examine how the local category of elite mod-ernism is becoming ever more exclusive. What once signifijied the goal of populist nationalism has now become a symbol of one’s fijitness to hold positions of power. In the following section I examine how this ideology is inculcated through educational practices and how claims to social sta-tus are displayed by forms of consumption, especially among a new gen-eration of elites who were born after independence and for whom socialism is only a childhood memory. I argue that the changing forms of the nationalist goals have been instrumental, not only in re-enforcing overall elite unity, but also by allowing a group whose power stemmed from their membership in the party, and by extension, the control of the state, to expand into new opportunities.

Education and Distinction

Education in Mozambique is held in high regard, perhaps, in part, due to the colonial state’s dismal record for its provision. Portugal largely out-sourced education provision for the African population to the Catholic Church29. At independence in 1975 ‘one percent of the population – about

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30 W. Minter, Apartheid’s Contras: An Inquiry into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique, Johannesburg: University of Witswatersrand Press, 1996, p. 22.

31 J. Hanlon, Mozambique: The Revolution Under Fire, London: Zed Books, 1990; and B. Munslow, Mozambique: The Revolution and its Origins, London, New York and Lagos: Longman, 1983.

32 M. Buendia Gómez, Educação Moçambicana.33 M. Hall and T. Young, Confronting Leviathan.

80,000 people – had completed more than four years of school, and most were Portuguese settlers; in 1973 only forty of the 3000 university students were African’30.

Estimates put the illiteracy rate at independence at over 90%31. Access to a decent education became a mark of distinction as it was so rare and served as a symbolic entrance to a wider idea of modernity. This is not surprising as access to education was generally restricted to those from privileged families and it was this that allowed these families to bolster their position. Education allowed one to obtain jobs that through their relative importance and symbolic accompaniments (such as a suit and tie, residence in a better provisioned assimilado area of town or, for the highest of all, a car) displayed one’s lofty place in the social hierarchy for all to see. Furthermore it was education that allowed the chosen few to advance (as far as was possible) in the predominantly urban sector of the colonial economy. One former assimilado told me that when he went to elite Portuguese schools during the colonial period, some of his school friends no longer saw him as Black. Education gave one status and author-ity both among the general population, and as much as was possible, among the Portuguese.

When Frelimo took power they were determined to greatly overhaul the educational system of their new nation. This was both because the vast majority of the Portuguese population had fled following indepen-dence, virtually decapitating Mozambique’s professional and managerial class, and also because education would be one of the foundations of a new sense of national identity. Here the ideals of Frelimo could be spread to sections of the population which had little to no experience of the lib-eration struggle, and a new type of citizen, based on science and ‘rational-ity’ could be formed32. Furthermore, education would also respond to the demands from below and bring increased opportunities to the populace. Effforts were made to expand the educational system throughout the country, but a lack of resources and trained personnel made it difffijicult to reach the rural areas, outside of periodic campaigns33. It was in the cities that the government’s attempts were much more focused, especially

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Maputo. Naema, a secondary school student immediately after liberation and now a teacher at a private school, compared the revolutionary system to that of today in the following way:

It was all very exciting. We did not know much about Frelimo before libera-tion. I had seen the word Frelimo written on wall, but my uncle told me never to speak about it or we could get into trouble. When Frelimo came and got rid of the Portuguese we were all rejoicing, especially the young. We were going to build a new Mozambique. They (Frelimo) would come to our schools and teach us about our country. We would do voluntary cleaning in the city on Sundays; they wanted us to be good citizens. That was really good. Now the city is fijilthy and no one does anything. Many of my students do not even know the words to the national anthem. Patriotism does not mean anything anymore and they do not try and teach it like before.

Naema greatly appreciated the attempts towards nation building and, as a teenager herself, she was caught up in the euphoria of the times. Others, though, cast doubts as to the quality of the greatly expanded education system, even in Maputo where facilities were generally superior. Another former primary school student, now a resident in Portugal described her schooling shortly after independence as follows:

It was a strange time. Former guerrilla soldiers would just come to school and start classes. Many of them did not have any education, but they had just freed the nation and they thought that was enough. They would sit in front of the class and talk about their lives. They thought that was teaching. Even the other teachers had almost no experience. Many of them were very young and they had just a few years of school themselves. My teachers and I learned to read together.

Members of the Frelimo elite also shared this rather bleak assessment. A former high-ranking offfijicer told me:

Those were very exciting days. We were sure we could do a better job than the Portuguese had. They were foreigners and they wanted to exploit our country for their own purposes. We were going to make things better for our people. We were very ambitious and very young; we had immense responsi-bilities for people our age. That was part of the problem I guess. We wanted to educate the nation, but we were barely educated ourselves.

Frelimo’s social revolution initially intended to modernise the entire nation and education was a cornerstone of this policy. However this tre-mendously ambitious plan had to be undertaken with minimal resources and little in the way of personnel. What began as a great attempt for the nation soon began to be scaled back to urbanites generally and to the elite in particular.

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34 J. Sumich and J. Honwana, ‘Strong Party, Weak State?: Frelimo and State Survival through the Mozambican Civil War’, Crisis States Research Centre Working Papers, no. 23 (series 2), London School of Economics, 2007.

35 B. O’Laughlin, ‘Contingent Identity and Socialist Democracy in the Port of Maputo’, Unpublished Paper, The Hague, 2002.

The growing social stratifijication was initially offfset by an upsurge in social mobility, especially in Maputo, that followed liberation. The exo-dus of the Portuguese meant that almost all of the professional and mana-gerial positions in the country were vacant and Mozambicans were promoted to the colonialists’ former places34. With the opening of the education system for both children and adults, it did seem as if the oppor-tunity to gain distinction and social power through schooling had been expanded to at least some of the wider urban population35. Yet, due to the economic crisis and the growing civil war, an economy of privation soon developed and the role of education as an entrance to the ‘modern’ econ-omy, distinction and a position of responsibility in the new nation began to falter.

This was brought home to me during a dinner I attended with a rela-tively well-offf family (by Mozambican standards). After the meal the host-ess pulled out a photo album fijilled with pictures of establishing their family shortly after the revolution. The children were amused by the large Afro hairstyles and the outmoded fashions of their parents, but they were also shocked by how thin everyone was and the shoddy quality of their clothes and furniture. The host tried to explain that there was nothing else available during what she described as the tempo da fome (the time of hunger). I heard similar comments in debates concerning the legacy of the socialist period throughout my fijieldwork. Some claimed that things had been better during o tempo de Samora (the presidency of Samora Machel) as at least there was order, purpose and little crime, while cynics responded that was because there was nothing to steal. Others claimed negative solidarity, stating that everyone had been poor together, instead of the current situation where the rich supposedly monopolise every-thing. However even the most dedicated defenders of the revolutionary period conceded those despite the solidarity and euphoria, times were very hard and most were hungry. Although Frelimo had managed to broaden the system, the distinction and the status that modernity sym-bolised remained elusive, despite the promise, even for the privileged urbanites of the capital.

With the transition to capitalism, status diffferences are hardening and once again changing forms of education provision are signalling wider

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36 C. Leys, ‘The Kenyan Bureaucracy’, in C. Allen and G. Williams (eds), Sociology of “Developing Societies”: Sub-Saharan Africa, New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1982, pp. 176–178; M. Cohen, ‘Public Policy and Class Formation’, in C. Allen and G. Williams (eds), Sociology of “Developing Societies”: Sub-Saharan Africa, New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1982, pp. 179–182.

changes in the ideology of modernist nationalism. A short stroll through contemporary Maputo is usually enough to reveal the diffferences in the educational facilities patronised by elites and those used by the rest of the city in the current era. There are many state schools, but they are frequently in poor repair, with peeling paint and broken windows. Wave after wave of students issue forth from them throughout the day as overcrowding necessitates that schools work in multiple shifts. The difffer-ence between public institutions and private and international schools is striking. For the latter, the paint is fresh, the windows are intact and stu-dents are dropped offf by an array of expensive cars and SUVs. The facili-ties are far better, the teachers are among the best trained, and tuition (in 2002–2004) ranged from $100 a month, which can be difffijicult even for a middle class Maputo family, to $1,000 a month, far beyond the means of most. While many of the children of the elite study abroad, with South Africa, Swaziland, Brazil, Portugal and the UK being the most common destinations, they complete their initial schooling through private and international schools. The majority of the younger generation of the elite bypass state schools entirely and class diffferences within Maputo are indicated by those who have to rely on the public system and those who do not. Education was meant to transform the populace, responding both to the party leadership’s plans to create a new kind of citizen because of demands from below for a better life and to increased opportunities. How-ever, like many aspects of modernist nationalism, high quality education has become a mark of privilege, largely monopolised by a small elite.

As education is one of the central planks of the elite ideology of moder-nity. Privileged access to it implies both symbolic and real power. The elite obtain their power through their connection to the state and the Frelimo party. In this respect they have developed some of the character-istics of what has been called a state bourgeoisie36. However the fall of socialism has opened new opportunities for members of this elite and they are increasingly able to move beyond their Maputo base and expand into international networks. The privatisation of state assets has allowed Frelimo families to own businesses and acquire land and houses, and the influx of multinational businesses and aid agencies attached to the

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37 J. Gledhill, ‘The Power Behind the Masks: Mexico’s Political Class and Social Elites at the End of the Millennium’.

38 P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1984; and G. vom Bruck, ‘The Imagined “Consumer Democracy and Elite (Re)production in Yemen’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 11, 2005, pp. 255–275.

international community have also opened new, well-remunerated opportunities for current and former offfijicials and their families. Members of the elite often spend their professional lives circulating between the government, the international community and private businesses and thus control access to the major economic sectors within the country. The superior quality of education gives the elite the qualifijications to take advantage of these opportunities in a way very difffijicult for anyone else, while at the same time portraying the system as based on merit. They can argue that their high positions are justifijied because they are the only ones with the skills and experience to run a modern nation. This creates a ‘uni-fying fijield’ which holds together diffferent factions of the elite and forms the core of their group identity37.

Education and status tend to reinforce each other with education, giv-ing the outward qualifijication and membership in the elite, which allows access to extremely powerful social networks. This position of dominance is expressed by members of the elite through patterns of consumption and self-presentation. This became clear to me once during a conversation with a woman whose parents are high-ranking Frelimo members. She felt that Renamo could not run the country as they were, in her view, unedu-cated peasants and she illustrated this point to me with a story.

I remember in 1992 when peace was declared and Renamo came out of the bush. They were given houses, at least the big guys in the party were. It was one of the conditions of peace. When they (Renamo) came here they had no idea how to live in a city. They used to wash their clothes and leave them to dry on the front lawn! Can you believe that? These people think they could run a country. It’s a joke; they had never been out of the bush before.

I asked her if it had not been similar when Frelimo fijirst emerged from ‘the bush’ after the liberation struggle. She replied: ‘Of course not, Frelimo fought in the bush but they knew how to live in a city, they were not igno-rant’. Thus self-presentation through the consumption of high status goods, such as cars, western clothes and expensive, high quality educa-tion are crucial factors to express modernity and social power38. It is a claim to superiority over much of the population and to equality with

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global elites and the western world. This claim is recognised in Maputo, even if the justice of it is disputed. Once in a café I was approached by a man who felt as a foreigner I was duty bound to help him fund his revolt against what he felt was the current unjust state of afffairs. When I asked him what the outcome of his revolution would be, he smiled and replied: ‘I will be the one driving the Mercedes’. Although he claimed he wanted to wage a revolution he was displaying a logic similar to that of the elites. He made no arguments concerning redistribution, but instead argued that the markers of social power (a Mercedes, the car issued to govern-ment ministers) are being held by the wrong people. His revolution would make sure the proper people, in this case himself, possessed these objects.

Conclusion: Modernity, Nationalism and Power

In this paper I have argued that an ideology of modernity held by a politi-cally based dominant elite in Mozambique is crucial both to structuring power relationships and to the form of nationalism Frelimo has champi-oned. Although it has appeared in diffferent guises since independence it continues to take symbolic form as a claim to legitimacy, and gives shape to a sense of coherent elite unity insofar as it enables elites to monopolise opportunities both within the state and in the expanding market econ-omy, and also in more intangible ways. Through their educational and cultural opportunities and the fact that they are fluent in Portuguese and often English as well, they can more easily ‘fijit in’ with the foreigners who run the multinational businesses and the agencies of the international community, while being an embodiment of the nation at the same time. By understanding this ideology and its historical development this paper hopes to demonstrate the connections between ideas of a very particular kind of modernisation and nationalism in Mozambique.

Nationalism, as has often been argued, is always a modernist project. This was demonstrated in Benedict Anderson’s famous argument that nationalism is an ‘imagined community’ brought into being primarily through print capitalism and widespread education. While the ‘moder-nity’ of nationalism is not in any doubt, nationalists often try to clothe their goal in the garments of an imagined tradition of primordial and organic unity that has ‘always’ bound the nation’s people together. In late colonial Mozambique, where neither print capitalism nor education were particularly widespread, nationalism took a slightly diffferent trajectory. Frelimo did not attempt to disguise their project with the trappings of a

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mythic past, but explicitly stated that they were going to build a nation where none had existed before and unity would be based on shared prog-ress, not a primordial connection. For Frelimo, nationalism was part and parcel of their vision of modernity, however including Mozambique’s diverse peoples within this vision is a continuing struggle.

In Mozambique, modernist nationalism operates as a local category growing from the social experiences of many members who went on to form the nationalist leadership and it has survived the fall of socialism and provides a sense of mission for elites and a justifijication of their status and power. Despite the advent of capitalism, many elites throughout Africa and the wider world are expected to be ‘developmental’ and they attempt to derive legitimacy as those who can provide (or can claim to) some form of betterment for their impoverished people, if for nothing else, than as a way to access funds provided by donors. The premise of modernisation has been attacked from both the right and the left, but it remains a foundation of nation-building, even under capitalism. The real danger, as in the case of Frelimo, is what happens when nationalism is not based on a supposed primordial past but a glorious future that for many, fails to appear. I have argued that the idea of modernity is becoming a more distinctive feature of the Frelimo elite, a marker of power, as opposed to a premise for mass mobilisation. However, the steady erosion of older certainties has been accompanied by schisms and growing demoralisation for the members of the Maputo elite I know. They still maintain a strong hold on power, both because power, or access to it, is often the foundation for everything else they have managed to build, and because many sincerely believe there is no one else who could run the country. There is however the growing danger that Mozambique is start-ing to resemble Arthur Koestler’s famous aphorism concerning Stalinism: “Revolution betrayed, tradition decayed and utopia, yet once again delayed”.

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