Enduring Socialism

Explorations of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation

Harry G. West, Parvathi Raman, Harry G. West, Parvathi Raman

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781845458720
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

Against the historical backdrop of successive socialist and post-socialist claims to have completely remade society, the contributors to this volume explore the complex and often paradoxical continuities between diverse post-socialist presents and their corresponding socialist and pre-socialist pasts. The chapters focus on ways in which: pre-socialist economic, political, and cultural forms in fact endured an era of socialism and have found new life in the post-socialist present, notwithstanding revolutionary socialist claims; continuities with a pre-socialist past have been produced within the historical imaginary of post-socialism; and socialist economic, political, and cultural forms have in fact endured in a purportedly postsocialist era, despite the claims of neo-liberal reformers.

CHAPTER 1

From Socialist Chiefs to Postsocialist
Cadres: Neotraditional Authority in
Neoliberal Mozambique

Harry G. West

In October of 1992, after sixteen years of brutal civil war in Mozambique, the ruling FRELIMO party and RENAMO insurgents signed a peace accord, laying the groundwork for elections to be staged in October of 1994. FRELIMO – the socialist revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, which waged war between 1964 and 1974 to achieve independence from the Portuguese and to establish a postcolonial state – had acceded to IMF-sponsored structural adjustment in 1987, renounced its commitment to Marxism-Leninism in 1989, legalized opposition political parties in 1990, and redrafted the constitution to protect rights of religious and political expression in 1991. Its victory at the ballot box in 1994 was part and parcel of a second postcolonial revolution in Mozambique, this one neoliberal.

Mozambique's neoliberal revolution has been as profound an affair as the socialist revolution before it, even if its key battles have often been fought in foreign capitals, in the embassies of Maputo's Sommerschield district, and in the projects and workshops sponsored by UN agencies, the World Bank, and the legions of NGOs and PVOs working in the country (Hanlon 1991). By the late 1990s, reformers not only pronounced liberalization of the Mozambican economy and polity a success, they also suggested that Mozambique constituted a model for postsocialist transition and post-war reconstruction elsewhere in the post-Cold War world. Ironically, in so doing, they echoed socialist revolutionaries who had in previous decades asserted that Mozambique constituted a model for socialist modernization.

The neoliberal revolution has been most visible in Mozambique in the lively national assembly, in a vibrant independent media, in high rates of economic growth, in a sharp increase in air traffic (domestic and foreign), and in the appearance of upmarket resorts on the nation's stunning beaches. The revolution, however, has not been confined to the capital and other cities and towns, nor has it been limited to political and economic processes of national and international dimension. It has also been waged in thousands upon thousands of villages and settlements by reformers intent upon achieving ‘rural development’ where ‘socialist modernization’ failed. Debates about the causes of socialism's failure in Mozambique – its inherent collapse due to excessive centralization, commandism and bureaucratic incompetence versus its sabotage by external forces including South Africa and a RENAMO (Mozambican National Resistance) insurgency that, with South African support, destroyed the essential infrastructure of the socialist project – have given way to a dominant neoliberal discourse extolling the virtues of civil society and calling for its empowerment through varied forms of political and economic decentralization and democratization (Pitcher 2002). Indeed, through ‘democratic decentralization’, neoliberal reformers have sought to rewrite the political and economic landscape of rural Mozambique as completely as the socialist revolutionaries before them. As Domingos do Rosário Artur and Bernhard Weimer describe it, the objective of reform has been, at once, to move the nation ‘from a commandist, centrally planned and largely, ineffective (war) economy to a more and more globally integrated free market economy’, and ‘from a one-party-regime of democratic centralism (with a hyper-centralized administration), to a formal multiparty democracy and the gradual introduction of a decentralized system of governance and administration’ (Artur and Weimer 1998: 4).

In 1997, the Mozambican assembly passed a law establishing a framework for the creation of democratically elected local governments, but only in the nation's thirty-three largest towns and cities.¹ Democratic decentralization would take a different form in the nation's rural areas. After years of closed-door debate and equivocation, the Mozambican Council of Ministers issued a decree in June of 2000 preserving government's role in the appointment of district- and post-level administrators, but mandating these state officials to consult and cooperate with ‘Community Authorities’ (Buur and Kyed 2003). Included among those who might be ‘recognized’ as Community Authorities were FRELIMO party secretaries and members of their executive councils, ‘traditional authorities’, and ‘other legitimate leaders’ (including, presumably, influential religious leaders).

The inclusion of ‘traditional authorities’ within the category of potential Community Authorities was controversial but, as we shall see, was also the very essence of the Community Authorities Decree. During its guerrilla campaign against the Portuguese, FRELIMO had generally cast ‘traditional authorities’ as collaborators in the colonial exploitation of the Mozambican people (West and Kloeck-Jenson 1999: 456). The colonial administration had indeed used chiefs as tax collectors, labour recruiters and policing agents, rewarding them for their cooperation through commissions, and punishing them for noncompliance through beatings, deposition or exile. In its ‘liberated zones’ during the independence war, and elsewhere after independence, FRELIMO replaced the institutions of ‘traditional authority’ with party structures, staffed by loyal cadres.

The FRELIMO abolition of the chieftaincy met with mixed sentiments among rural Mozambicans in accordance with diverse local histories, differential social positions and perspectives, and ever-changing circumstances. During the civil war, RENAMO capitalized on rural ambivalence regarding this and other FRELIMO policies, in some cases finding ex-chiefs eager allies in their quest to capture and control rural areas (Geffray 1990),² and in some cases reproducing the institutions of ‘traditional authority’ in areas they already controlled through the nomination of a community member willing to serve the insurgency's interests and the bestowal upon that individual of the mantle of chief (Kyed forthcoming; Kyed and Buur 2006). Although in this way RENAMO sometimes mounted and sustained neotraditions of dubious local legitimacy, by the war's end ‘traditional authorities’ of one kind or another constituted the opposition party's most powerful constituency in the rural areas (West and Kloeck-Jenson 1999: 460, 467).

Denied power at the national and provincial levels by FRELIMO electoral victories in 1994 and, again, in 1999, RENAMO remained enthusiastic about the possibility of gaining power at local levels, envisioning the withdrawal of FRELIMO secretaries from those communities where ‘traditional authority’ was to be reestablished. RENAMO expectations and demands were underscored by international donors, who often conceived of ‘traditional authority’ as an African variant of civil society, the recognition of which would not only legalize forms of grass-roots governance long oppressed by the centralized hierarchy of FRELIMO socialism ( Weimer 1996: 48–49; Artur and Weimer 1998: 23) but also serve in the contemporary moment as a means to empower local communities to solve their own problems with little or no cost to the downsized poststructural adjustment state (Alexander 1997: 3; West and Kloeck-Jenson 1999: 461; Buur and Kyed 2006).

Only after strategists within the FRELIMO party itself recognized the potential political gains – in fact, the urgent necessity – in separating ‘traditional authorities’ from RENAMO and, where possible, drawing them into cooperative relations with the ruling party, was the Community Authorities Decree issued, however (Artur and Weimer 1998: 6; Kyed forthcoming). By including FRELIMO secretaries and ‘other legitimate leaders’ along with ‘traditional authorities’ in the category of people eligible to be recognized as Community Authorities, and by leaving undefined the mechanism whereby the state was to determine and certify authorities ‘recognized as such by their respective communities’, the FRELIMO government granted local officials enormous leeway to steer the process in such a way as to support the ruling party agenda. In areas where FRELIMO enjoyed strong popular support – especially in the southern third of the country, or in the ex-'liberated zones' of the far north – FRELIMO party secretaries were generally (re)named Community Authorities. According to Lars Buur and Helene Maria Kyed, there were by April 2003 915 such appointments made throughout the country (Buur and Kyed 2006). By the same date, some 1,071 ‘traditional authorities’ had been named as Community Authorities, often in areas where RENAMO enjoyed significant popular support (ibid.).³

Helene Maria Kyed provides a description of the process of recognition of Community Authorities based on fieldwork she conducted in Manica province:

The implementation process began in 2001 with attempts to identify and then register ‘true chiefs’…This was followed later the same year by the convening of ‘legitimisation meetings’, where state officials consulted with communities verifying that the person whose name was inscribed in the official register was indeed considered legitimate by the community she or he represented. This process ended in 2002 with formal state-recognition ceremonies held by the district administrator. Here, a contract was signed between the registered chief and the state. The chief was bestowed with state regalia: the national flag, emblems of the republic and a sign reading ‘autoridade comunitária’ – which bestowed upon him/her the title and status of ‘community authority’. (Kyed forthcoming)

Through such acts, the landscape of authority in Mozambique has once again been dramatically rewritten. Unlike socialist revolutionaries before them, agents and advocates of this revolutionary intervention have readily admitted that the brave new world they conceive draws substantially from the past. Whereas RENAMO leaders – as well as many representatives of the donor community in Mozambique – trace a resuscitated ‘traditional authority’ to an historical past reaching up to the moment immediately prior to its suppression by the socialist state, researchers and policy makers in the Ministry of State Administration have painted a more imprecise picture of ‘traditional authority’ as a manifestation of ‘customs and beliefs practiced from long ago’ (African American Institute 1997: 14). Where the most obvious historical reference for ‘traditional authorities’ serving as administrative intermediaries in Mozambique would be colonial-era ‘autoridades gentilicas’ – the three-tiered hierarchy of native authorities of which the régulo was the highest ranking – such references are, of course, generally muted in the present-day context of the celebration of ‘traditional authority’ as a form of African civil society.

Continuities between ‘traditional authority’, as instantiated under the rubric of Community Authority in the postsocialist era, and any historical predecessor are more tenuous than any of these parties admit. While in some locales FRELIMO socialism drove ‘traditional authorities’ underground, in others it drove them from their domains of authority altogether. Still other ‘traditional authorities’ were driven from their homes by the Mozambican civil war (Englund 2002; Kyed and Buur 2006; Kyed forthcoming). Some have since returned, and some have not. In any case, many died in the years between the ban and the 2000 decree, some leaving recognized successors and some not. In some instances, the very communities over which these authorities once presided have been radically reconfigured, whether by the socialist project of communal villagization or by flight during the civil war (Englund 2002; Kyed and Buur 2006). State officials seeking to identify and certify ‘traditional authorities’ are, consequently, as likely to touch off complex disputes between multiple claimants (Dinerman 2004: 27; Buur and Kyed 2006; Gonçalves 2006; Kyed and Buur 2006; Kyed forthcoming) as to find authorities ‘recognized as such by their respective communities’.⁴ State recognition of traditional authority in the neoliberal era has consequently been as much an exercise in the reinvention of tradition – even the invention of neotraditions – as in the revival of ‘customs and beliefs practiced from long ago’.

While this point has been persuasively argued (West and Kloeck-Jenson 1999; Kyed forthcoming), it remains indisputable that essential forms of continuity do link presocialist and postsocialist forms of ‘traditional authority’ in Mozambique. Even where rural populations have been moved en masse into villages under the socialist-era villagization programme they have generally continued to conceive of themselves to some degree as members of distinctive kin groups. Notwithstanding disruptions, claimants to positions of ‘traditional authority’ today generally assert their legitimacy through lines of descent from presocialist office holders, and claim authority over fellow ‘family’ members, as in the past. Even the essential dynamics of legitimacy contests – commonplace in the precolonial era as well as the colonial – manifest some continuity with the presocialist past.

Simplistic portrayals of a ‘revival’ of ‘traditional authority’ conceal complexities that merit attention, however. In so far as the recognition of Community Authorities has constituted yet another iteration in an apparently never-ending process of the invention and reinvention of tradition – a process that simultaneously makes reference to the past while remaking the past in the present – the presocialist past has not been the only point of historical reference for those involved today in the (re)production of ‘traditional authority’ (or, the production of neotraditional authority). In substantial ways, the socialist past has also, paradoxically, served as a reference point for emergent forms of ‘traditional authority’ in the postsocialist period.

Community Authorities today in fact enact an authority much like that of the FRELIMO party cadres who supplanted ‘traditional authorities’ at the outset of the socialist era and whom, in some instances, they now replace in turn. To begin with, it falls upon Community Authorities – where appointed – to undertake many of the same tasks that FRELIMO secretaries and their executive councils (or ‘dynamizing groups’) undertook during the socialist period.⁵ Included among these tasks are: the recruitment and organization of labour to build and maintain roadways, wells, dikes, drainage ditches, irrigation systems, cemeteries, health clinics, maternity wards, child nutrition centres, and schools; the recruitment and organization of community members to participate in vaccination and sanitation initiatives to prevent epidemics (including cholera, meningitis, diarrhoea, malaria, tuberculosis, and sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS), and to build pit latrines; reporting to local administrators and the police of criminals and crimes (including the illegal exploitation, transport or sale of natural resources, and the existence of arms caches and land mines); contribution to community education in the management and sustainable use of natural resources (including the management of game, forest fires, firewood and charcoal); fostering agricultural production, the use of animal traction as a means of transportation (in coastal areas, the building and maintenance of boats), and the construction of local marketplaces and fairgrounds; encouraging parents to send their children to school; fostering school sports, games, and other character-building and educational recreational activities for children; preventing premature marriages; collaborating in the maintenance of peace and social harmony; cooperating with local tribunals in the resolution of small civil disputes (taking into account local customs and practices, within the limits of the law); organizing an annual census; organizing the collection of local taxes; and informing the community of ongoing government discussion and debates, and of the passage of new laws.⁶

Even a casual reading of this list of duties reveals its programmatic nature – one that not only contains myriad forms of social engineering closely associated with the project of socialist modernization (such as the construction of pit latrines, the use of animal traction, and the prevention of premature marriages), but also perpetuates the commandism of vanguard socialism.⁷ Government documents laying the foundation for democratic decentralization through the recognition of Community Authorities refer to these institutions or figures as representatives of their respective communities, but make almost no mention of the ways in which community ideas and initiatives might figure in a new form of politics enacted through them (Kyed forthcoming). Conceived as such, Community Authorities, like party secretaries before them, serve as conduits for the transmission of information and/or directives from the state, rather than as means of expression or empowerment of ‘their’ communities (Buur and Kyed 2006; Gonçalves 2006; Kyed forthcoming). They constitute fingers that extend the reach of the state – still controlled by FRELIMO – into every village, every neighbourhood, indeed, every household (Kyed forthcoming), just as party structures (comprising village secretaries, neighbourhood secretaries and ten-house secretaries) did during the period of FRELIMO socialism.

To be sure, these newly recognized Community Authorities capture resources for the people they purportedly represent by securing state funding and/or attracting development projects to their villages or neighbourhoods. Where once the state controlled all such resources, in the neoliberal era local authorities may – indeed, must – cultivate direct linkages with international institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and sometimes even foreign investors, to achieve such ends. With much at stake, every lineage or household in the village seeks representation at the level of Community Authority; but this was also the case in the socialist period, when the potential benefits of having one's kinsman serve the party as secretary were considerable, and jockeying for such positions was consequently intense. In any cas...