Meneses_1.pdf

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No vamos esquecer o tempo que passou,Quem pode esquecer o que passou?

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One cannot listen only to the tale of the hunter;the lion has its version too.

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This paper aims to discuss the role ofmemories and history, as a bridge tobroaden the debate on the meanings ofdecolonization and human movement in

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We will not forget the time that passed. Whocan forget what passed?

Popular revolutionarysong of Mozambique.

Maria Paula Meneses is a senior researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra. Previously she wasa Professor at Eduardo Mondlane University (Mozambique). Her current research interests include post-colonialdebates, legal pluralism, with especial reference to the relationships between the State and traditional authorities in

the African context, and the role of official history, memory and other histories within contemporary identity debates,with an emphasis on contemporary Africa. Currently she is coordinating two research projects focusing on the(dis)encounters prompted by the colonial encounter: ALCORA: New perspectives on the Colonial War and The col-laborators: Questioning the Future of the Past in Mozambique. Her work has been published in several countries.Recent publications include co-editing, with Boaventura de Sousa Santos, a volume on Epistemologies of the GlobalSouth (Almedina 2009 2011; Cortez 2010), integrating contributions of scholars from Africa, Asia, Latin America andEurope. The author wishes to thank everyone who has made this publication possible. She is grateful to FCT, whosegrant PTDC/AFR/103057/2008 - FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-008664 funded part of this research.

Images Out si de t he M i rror?

Mozambique and Portugal in World History

Maria Paula Meneses

Centro de Estudos Sociais, Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal

[email protected]

Abstract: The author, speaking as a Mozambican researcher living and working in Portugal,examines the different types of knowledge about the history of the colonial relationship and theindependence movement produced in the two countries. The colonial project entailed the con-struction of (at least) two divergent narratives on the meanings of the Portuguese presence inMozambique, narratives that render difficult any possibility of mutual recognition. Colonialisminvolved much forgetting and silencing; the dominant Eurocentric perspective on colonial his-tory needs to be questioned and problematized. This is not contradictory with a critical question-ing of the official post-colonial narrative of the independent Mozambican state, whose nation-

building function caused it to silence the diversity of memories generated by the interactionbetween colonizers and colonized and to justify the repression of those who questioned the offi-cial version of history. Public narratives, official or otherwise, that construct or reconstruct mem-ories are inevitably in competition with each other and reflect power relations. But the fullplurality of memory does not receive public attention; it must be dug out by activist researcherswho are able to distinguish subject and object and to produce knowledge in full understandingof the complex relations created by historical legacies.

2 African proverb.

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ISSN: 1540-5699. Copyright by Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press) and authors. All Rights Reserved.

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Journal of theSociology of Self-

A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)


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spaces defined by the memory of Africa inthe specific geopolitical context of thePortuguese colonization in Mozambique.

Regarding the meaning of concepts weoften use uncritically, one of the first ques-tions that we have to ask is: What isAfrica? In Portugal, as in other formercolonial metropolis, the expression is quiteoften used to refer to the former Africancolonies, an expression that seeks toinclude the complexity of the continent. Tospeak of Africa in an era that is stillcaptive of old colonial epistemologicallegacies requires that we, above all, openthe historic time to challenge representa-tions of space. This situation is neither

unique nor original; indeed, many academ-ics have been addressing this matter. What,in my view, is important when we speak ofAfrica, is seeing to what extent we are notreferring to an intellectual construction ofwestern colonialism. In this sense, what dowe know, and what do we know aboutAfrica? This question is particularly impor-tant in Mozambique, where many peoplefrequently affirm, vis--vis the officialhistory or the universal history, that

what we remember is not history. History iswhat is written in the books. We, Mozambicans,

we have traditions, other histories

.

3

To speak about Africa and to forgetAfrica are two different components ofrelatively recent colonial processes. Theimperial European governments, in searchof colonies, created civilizing missions tosave the souls of Africans. Entrepreneursand scientists also participated in drawingthe map of Africa as they searched for newinvestments based on the exploitation ofnatural and human resources. They drewthis European map according to theirideas of Africa, a map constructed throughtheir knowledges and scientific horizons.But according to Portuguese official rheto-ric of the time, modern colonialism was not

about exploitation but civilization. With thesuperiority of the race, Catholic values,science and economic know-how, the

Portuguese insisted instead that they hadmoral obligation to redeem the backwardheathens of Africa. The Portuguese weregoing to bring light to Africa, the DarkContinent, by transforming the so-callednatives into progressive citizens, ready totake their place in the modern world.According to this reasoning, the Portu-guese were not actually stealing land fromthe people that occupied the territory laterknown as Mozambique,

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or exploiting locallabor; instead, they presented themselvesas self-appointed trustees for supposedly

vulnerable natives, who had not yetreached a stage on the evolutionary scalethat would allow them to develop or makeresponsible decisions on their own (Mene-ses 2010a). The result of this moral, politi-cal, economic and scientific appropriationof the continent by the modern colonialmachine was to deny, then and now, recog-nition of the diverse ways that the conceptof Africa is hidden and forgotten.

This new Africa resulted from thecolonial European imagination thatconstructed the African object.

The

geographic expansion of Europe and its civiliza-tion

[] submitted the world to its memory

(Mudimbe 1984:xxi), an imaginary persistsin many publications, scientific and literary.With appropriate guidance and paternalis-tic love, the Portuguese administrationassumed that it could make the Africansinto progressive men and women,although it would take long time, evencenturies, to perform such a radical trans-formation. This conception about thenatives remained relatively unchangedthroughout much of the 20

th

century; thiswas the White Mans burden.

Questions of the memory or memoriesof colonization, and the probing of the

3 Collective interview, Mapulanguene,Mozambique, 2000.

4 As they did in other parts of the continent,such as Angola, Guinea Bissau, etc.


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meanings and impacts of the modern colo-nial abyssal fracture, continue toprofoundly affect the contemporary

academic and politicalfi

eld (Cooper &Stoler 1997; Blanchard, Blancel & Lemaire2005; Bertrand 2006). For the most part, thisarea of research continues to be activelysuppressed from the European conscienceof former colonial powers despite the factthat the theme of colonization is an object

ofspecialized studies in specific thematicareas (Santos 2001; Smouts 2007). The accu-mulated amnesias of this continent and theenforced silence regarding what the Afri-cans think about Europeans were inten-tional acts of forgetting signifying a denial

of any possibility of mutual recognition.Forgetting and silencing are centralmoments of colonization. To question colo-niality and its impact on knowledges, andthe persistence of misunderstandings andmisreadings, demands the historicizationof these spaces, these times, and the analy-sis of power relationships entailed in themultiplicity of contacts that occurredbetween Europe, Africa and the otherregions of the world.

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In short, it requiresanother history, rewritten by people madeinvisible by colonial power, through the

artifice of exceptionalism, by turning Euro-pean thought into the supreme example ofworld development, the very embodimentof world history, that is, of a linearprogression from ignorance (savagery) toknowledge (civilization). In Mudimbeswords,

offering and imposing the desirabilityof its own memory, colonization promises avision of progressive enrichment to the colo-nized

(1994:129). When the European colo-nizers contemplated Africa through theprism of their desire to conquer and domi-nate, they saw nothing but desolate lands,

diseases and natives to be tamed.

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Thismemory of Africa erased, and still erases,all traces of African cultural imprints on the

land. It became part of what Hegel termedunconscious nature.

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The Eurocentricmemory became the beginning of historyfor all the colonizeda process that meansthe loss of their own history. When colo-nized peoples have their memories, land,and power torn away from them, the resultis the destruction of the base from whichpeople launch themselves into the world.World (Eurocentric) history

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became theimperial road to power and domination.

An alternative reconstruction of worldhistory that includes voices that question

and problematize the continuing domi-nant, Eurocentric perspective would fulfilla responsible pedagogical public function.An other possible historiography wouldneed to address controversial issues thatchallenge the position and legitimacy ofdominant representations. Rather thangeneralizations and simplifications that tryto confine Africa into a scheme developedto explain in linear fashion the progress ofOccidental civilization, we face a doublechallenge: to explain the persistence of thecolonial relation in the construction of

world history while at the same timeproposing alternatives as to how this storyis interpreted. Constructing contextual

5 If one privileges the study of the relation-ship between Africa and Europe, one risks tomiss the broader picture of contacts establishedwith other regions of the worldnotably Asiaand its impact in the production of contempo-rary Africa.

6 It is interesting to note that European me-dieval world, as Du Bois puts it,

knew the blackman chiefly as a legend or occasional curiosity, butstill as a fellow manan Othello or a Prester John oran Antar

(1915: 6). The modern, capitalist colo-nial world, knows Africa only as a place of infe-riority, symbolized in Hegel, who, in his lectureson the philosophy of history, describes the Afri-can continent as having no history for it was stillenveloped in the dark mantle of the night.

7 When any part of the African continent ex-

hibits marks that might compare favorably withthe Western world, it was removed from Afri-can history and annexed to it, such being, for ex-ample, the case of Egyptian civilization,portrayed as being part of Mediterraneanworld, the European Africa.

8 Planted on places and bodies, by imposingthe right to name, to inscribe other knowledgesand epistemic references.


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histories, articulated within a web, wouldallow us to attain a cosmopolitan perspec-tive of the world.

I. A

FRICA

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EMORIES

The history of Africa has been markedby the devaluing of memoriesin thepluralwhere the past acquires similarforms to the future, full of problems andpopulated with dense silences. The crises oftimewhen it seems that one does nothave time for memoriesdo not occur onlybecause of the increasingly dominant pres-ence of neoliberal globalization; they alsoderive from a present replete with amne-sias. Further, they are connected to thecrises of singular explanations of the world,the crisis of the meta-narrative in history,specifically regimes of totalitarian powerthat sought to control the regimes ofmemory in a centralized manner.

Strategies of colonial interpretation ofpost-colonial situations operate by essen-tially trying to conserve an explanation thatjustifies and does not challenge the under-lying colonial presence in the knowledge

produced. Even today, years after achieve-ments of political independence, the coun-tries of the African continent are oftenidentified as Lusophone, Francophone orAnglophone. For the case I am analyzing,the so-called Portuguese Africa was trans-formed into Lusophone Africa; Our[Portuguese] Africa; the PALOPs, orPortuguese-speaking African Countries.The exceptionality of these countries drawsfrom their belonging to an old colonialproject, relentlessly present in their founda-tion, erasing other histories or exceeding

themthe ubiquitous link to Portugal.

9

But colonialism is a confrontation ofdifferent societies, each with its ownmemory. The Portuguese colonial ideology,

seemingly monolithic and supported byexpansionist practices, regarded the massof African social formationseach havingdifferent and often particular memories,competing with each otheras a singleentity, binding them together. This

pitifulpicture persists and is reproduced in manyways (Meneses 2010a). What has actuallychanged, if anything?

One can no longer speak of a singlemacro-narrative, of only one interpretationof history. In other words, the problemoperates inside of a single analytical field

and is seen only at the discursive level. Theissues, the scale, and the location of theseplaces remain unresolved. And this bringsback the question of decolonization.

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Thisthorny concept claims for a broader recon-ceptualization of the ruptures associatedwith the end of political colonization. Didthe representations of the colonial worldchange the same way both in the formercolonies and in the metropoles?

Europe planted its memory in the verycore of Africa. This phenomenon is notparticularly European; rather, is in the

nature of all colonial conquests andsystems of foreign occupation. Attemptingto (re)create the land and its people, toreconfigure the territory, the Portuguese,like other colonizers, asserted their right toname the land and its subjects, demandingthat the subjects accept the names, refer-ences, culture and history of the conqueror(Thiongo 2009:9). Thus, one must questionwhy there is such a resistance to openingup the canon of macro-history, the macro-narrative of world history. As severalpeople interviewed in Mozambique wouldstate, it does not make sense to exist with-out remembering the past and without

9 What made Mozambique unique in Por-tuguese colonial Africa, along with Angola, wasthe settlement of white colonists who were ex-pected to form the economic and political lead-ing backbone of the colony.

10 To explore the concept of decolonizationfrom a postcolonial perspective, in African con-texts, see, for example, Bragana 1986 and Shep-pard 2006.


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imagining the future; questioning fromwhere we came and to where we will go.Walter Benjamin writes that memory

is not

an instrument for exploring the past, but rathera medium

to do so (1999:576). Memory isessential to constructing an identity, that ofan individual as much as that of a collec-tive. To starve or destroy memories resultsin liquidating the past, the history thatbinds people together, that makes themwhat they are.

To impose a single history is to imposethe weight of experiences it carries and itsconceptions of self and othernessindeed,the weight of its memory, which includesseveral factors, such as religion and educa-

tion.

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The signs of this project can betraced everywhere, especially in claimingthe memory or memories of collective pastswhich, being unique, are distinct from asingle and vague general

past. The qualityof being unique is not allowing them/others to identify with us. While the persis-tent routes of nationalisms are not alwayshealthy in their principles and intentions,they at least signify that the situation ofamnesia generates much conflict whenimposed on a global scale, as Aquino deBragana and Jacques Depelchin once

anticipated (1986) when analyzing theconstruction of Mozambican history afterthe countrys independence.

This, in part, signifies that we remaininvolved in the search for other parts ofhistory/histories, of other people/peoples,facts, and other institutions that aresilenced and almost erased. This is a sign ofthe continuation of the struggle for libera-tion, against amnesia, against attempts atsilencing. Again, one needs to cautiouslyapproach the relationship between forget-

ting, these intentional memory lapses andthe work of the ethnographic collectionundertaken by Africanist researchers, by

ethnographers thatfi

ll the infi

nite shelvesof the colonial library. The practices ofproducing knowledge about the Africancontinent were, in actuality, guided byobjectives designed to operate and legiti-mize one determined project: the colonialmission (Meneses 2008). Possibly onecentral problem of this work has not beenfailing to develop some conceptual aspectssuch as rituals, magic, fetishism, paternal-ism, and the traditional local authorities,but the reaffirmation of tradition, of aprimal space and the continents inescap-

able mark of delay. This is not to argue thatthe colonial archives cannot be used, quitethe contrary. They should be used withnecessary precautions that analytically taketheir potential biases into consideration.Accentuating tradition impedes us fromseeing and questioning the problems of aMozambican working class that has beenpresent for more than a century,

12

and thedilemmas it confronts with the currenteconomic crisis. Emphasizing the study ofrural tradition prevents us from analyzingand conceptualizing the urban complexity

of many African countries. Or rather, werisk making them immune to the modern-ization that also happens within thesespaces and within the present. We riskmaking them immune to discussing theimplication of authoritarian regimes insituations of multiparty, of the implicationof cultural uprootings, etc. The present,which constructs narratives about the past,is also worth celebrating.

11 Cheikh Hamidou Kane, in his novel Am-biguous Adventure, insightfully remarks thepower of colonial schools in the subjugation ofthe colonized. He credits the schools as havingeven more power than the cannons for theymade conquest permanent, as the cannon com-

pels the body and the school bewitches the soul(1963:49).

12 In this sense, the role of migrants fromMozambique in the mines of South Africa sincethe nineteen century must also be taken intoconsideration to broaden studies on how therevolutionary consciousness was developed inthis region of the continent.


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II. MOZAMBIQUE: THE STRUGGLECONTINUES

The nationalist struggle in Mozam-bique, as in other contexts, brought aboutthe need to reconstruct the history,confronting the dominant colonial narra-tive. In short, independence called for areanalysis of the histories, now in theplural.

The end of authoritarian narrativesdoes not necessarily mean that delayedrealities remain incompatible with timeforever, or even worse, suspended outsideof it. It is not a synonym for the end ofhistory because whatever existing societyis, it is part of time. On June 25, 1975,Mozambique woke up independent, with asense of urgency regarding the reconstruc-tion of its history. As we sang at the time,we will not forget the time that passed. Acurrent challenge is the recuperation andthe production of memories. Identitieswere created and political alliances forged,to give a meaning to life and to help explainthe importance offighting Portugals colo-nial-fascist presence in Mozambique.

Colonial relations came in many forms,

such as conquest, rebellions, religiousmissions, scientific exploration, education,medical services, commerce and economicexploitation, voyages, art, etc. In additionto the absolute denial of the colonized,colonial relations, often marked by domi-nation and violence, are also characterizedby multifaceted processes of appropriation.There were numerous forms of appropria-tion, such as religious, economic, demo-graphic, political, linguistic, artistic,intellectual, etc. With different intensities inspace and in time, these appropriations and

(re)creations generated contradictions andconflicts throughout this process. Althoughasymmetrical, any process of appropriationencompassed a double relationship. Thisaspect is extraordinarily important becauseit reveals how colonization describes situa-

tions of political control over a given terri-tory by a foreign force with objectives toincorporate and exploit it. Colonization

hence goes much further than the restrictedmeanings we sometimes use to discuss thesubject. Secondly, questioning these colo-nial relations in our time opens the subjectto perceiving the ruptures and continuitiesof the colonial relation. If decolonization isa political relationship, as a politicalprocess it impacts upon the multiple partsinvolved in the colonial relation, nowconfronted with a dramatic change ofpower relations. Analyzing the Mozamb-ican reality, Aquino de Bragana woulddare to affirm that the power transfer

occurred without any impositions fromPortugal. Thus, the Mozambican case couldmean the possibility of a political transitionwithout the weight of the neocolonial rela-tionships usually attached to it (Bragana1986)

In this context, to speak of coloniallegacies is to recognize, firstly, that colonialrelationships contributed to formatting anyhistory, suggesting that this relationshippersists in how the world is perceivedtodayeven though this legacy is notalways recognized in a legal or cognitive

sense by its potential heirs. This means thatwhat remains in the past is more than amemory. To question the place of memoriesimplies questioning the place where weinquire into the memories about ourselves.Portugals colonization of the African conti-nent can be analyzed in terms of how thesituation impacted the regions13 where theprocess took place and by examining howthe very meaning of being European wasobjectively14 and subjectively constructedby the colonial experience. Within colonialjuridical thought, the concept of Portu-guese citizenship does not refer to anabstract categoryquite the contrary.

13 Amor e vinho (idlio pago) article pub-lished in the newspaper, O Africano, 11 June1913.


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Portuguese citizenship identified a specific,socially concrete, and moral standard: itapplied only to white men and women

born in Portugal, well-educated andwealthy, the genteel soul of colonization.Insuch a manner, to be European became acategory that defined a status and deter-mined these relationships. To be Europeancame to mean being part of a certain geopo-litical strategy of power, a space dominatedby a modern rationality which wore thecolor white.

Part of this reflection reflects my placeof questioning. As a Mozambicanresearcher working in Portugal, myperspective on contemporary Portuguese

society begins its interrogation from spacesthat are most familiar and from my placesof belonging, Mozambique. These reflec-tions also reflect my path, my commitmentto research in the field of social sciences.The political turbulence of the 1970s andthe 1980s in Mozambique was informed byscholarship, including empirical analysis,debates about agency and intervention,philosophy and history. It also includedscholarly and activist publications (BorgesCoelho, 2007). A peculiar aspect of thisknowledge production was the fact that

many of the persons involved in its produc-tion were not professionally trainedacademics. Still, it became possible to bringother voices, other problematics to theprocess of decolonizing Mozambique andfreeing the country from the weight of colo-

nial history.Portugal and Mozambique shared

places with each other but they hardly

share memories. It might be more adequateto say that they have shared silences and alack of contact. In the more than threedecades since its independence, Mozam-bique has come to grasp the difficulties thatrecognizing this aspect of sharing entails.This awareness raises very complex ques-tions inherent to the memory of the rela-tionship between the colonized and thecolonizer. Beyond historiography of acommon period, it would be more preciseto speak of two historical macro-narrativesdeveloped upon a common denominator

within the same territory and the sameconflict: a macro-narrative about a colonialwar in the final era of the Portuguese impe-rial colonization,15 and another one, seenfrom the Mozambican side, about theprocess that led to the national indepen-dence of Mozambique.

These two histories have distinct pathsthat were influenced by the social memoryof what happened and by how it waspolitically generated. Working now as aresearcher in Portugal, it has been a curioustransition from forgetting the omitted to a

growing presence of this relationship andsharing. Yet even here, no one speaks of thereasons behind this war. Very few seek tounderstand why the war has two namesthat reflect different paths and differentinterpretations. After all, when did thecolonial war begin? What was the colonialwar? Why is it said to have started only in1960 when all who ponder over this themehave other colonial wars in mind? Theother colonial wars date back to the veryend of the 19th century and the early 20thcentury and were at the time calledcampaigns of occupation.16

14 An attentive reading of the legal codes re-veals an abyssal frontier between nationalityand citizenship. The blacks were nationals ofMozambique and were deprived of rights to cit-izenship and submitted to a specific and ex-tremely repressive disciplinary regime, theRegime of Indigenato, abolished only in 1961.

Under this regime, legal citizens (legal being thePortuguese)acknowledged themselves as in-vested with the right to govern the subjects thatwere declared to be further behind on the roadto progress and civilization. The legitimacy oftheir political power rested on the colonial mis-sion to assimilate the less developed into amodel of life that was defined superior by thecitizens (Meneses 2007a).

15 The Portuguese colonial war, fought si-multaneously in Angola, Guinea Bissau andMozambique.

16 On this subject see ; Albuquerque 1935;Caetano 1947; Ennes 1971, 2002.


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In the south of Mozambique, where themilitary campaign was against the state ofGaza, the struggle ended at the very end of

the 19

th

century (Albuquerque 1935; Ennes2002). When the Portuguese finally impris-oned the head of Gaza state, Ngungun-yane, they condemned himtogether withhis closest political advisorsa life of exilein the Azores, that is, in Portugal. Ngungu-nyane died there, in semi-captivity, withoutever being submitted to trial. A thread ofviolence connects these violent campaignswith the final stage of the colonial presenceof Portugal in Mozambique, in the 1960s.There are shared moments united bydistinct memories; they rest upon the thin

lines that link the military vehicles, theChaimites,17 which occupied parts ofLisbon, on the dawn of the coup detat ofApril 25thand which came to symbolizethe liberation from the colonial dictatorshipin Portugalto the war against the state ofGaza.

The fate of Ngungunyanesimulta-neously acts of triumph and humiliationembodies the colonial relationship betweenPortugal and Mozambique (Meneses2010b). This colonial act was both a practiceof power, intended to pacify a populace,

and a performance of power intended toproduce docile minds. The fate of Gazastate also symbolized the dismembermentof the colonial subjects from the individualand collective body. The colonial fracture,represented in the exile of Ngungunyane,was characterized by dismemberment andomission of former political structures, bythe attempt to bury all the memories thesesubjects carried.

On the other side, in Mozambique, thequest for memory has followed a different

path. Or rather, from a strong remembranceof Portugal as a symbol of the colonial rela-tion aimed at creating a sense of national

unity,

18

people have been sliding towardforgetting.Throughout most of its short history,

the Mozambican state has pursued anation-building policy that includes thepolitical adoption of an official historygrounded in a set of public (and intenselypublicized) memories about its colonialpast, both recent and distant (Meneses2007a). The Mozambican state has therebysought to eliminate, silence or make invisi-ble the diversity of memories generated bythe complex social interactions between the

colonizers and colonized over the longperiod of Portuguese colonialism. Soonafter independence, FRELIMO,19 the lead-ing political force in the country, carried outa complex political strategy that sought todeal with the ambivalent and hybrid iden-tities that constitute the intricate coloniallegacy. To put an end to all forms of possi-ble continuities with the colonial past, thetarget of this policy became those caught intransition, i.e., the collaboratorsa ratherdiverse group that is rarely spoken of, if notvirtually omitted (the estimated size of the

group is 100,000 people).20 The collabora-tors were accused of having collaboratedwith the colonial system, up to the indepen-

17 Chaimites were armored military vehi-cles, produced in Portugal to fight the guerrillanationalist movements. They were named afterChaimite, the sacred capital of Gaza state (nowin Mozambique), defeated by the Portuguese in1895. Chaimite became the symbol of the sub-mission of the colonial other.

18 Contained in the attribution, for years, ofthe political conflicts and errors of Portuguesecolonialism.

19 FRELIMO is the nationalist movementthat led the fight for the independence ofMozambique from Portuguese colonization. Af-terwards, it turned into a political party and has

been in power since independence, both duringthe single-party and multi-party periods.

20 A process of Portuguese indoctrinationstarted in Mozambique during the 1960s (Borg-

es Coelho 2003; Souto, 2007) when colonial en-largement policy sought to extend Portugueseidentity to the overseas populations overseas inAfrica. When the pressure of the liberationmovement increased, especially in the military,such actions were taken to convey the idea thatMozambique was an integral part of the Portu-guese nation and that all the former colonialsubjects were Portuguese.


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dence of Mozambique; FRELIMOs politicsof memory was founded upon the idea ofnot forgetting the time that passed. This

strategy aimed to transform the collaboratorsbased on presumption of guilt, repentance,punishment and re-education (Coelho2003:191). In the aftermath of this politicalprocess, in the early 1980s, most of thecollaborators were recognized as politi-cally re-educated and accepted as full citi-zens. Their subsequent rehabilitation wasobtained at the cost of erasing their pastfrom the public sphere and treating it as apast that was to be kept a private, silencedmemory.

The guerrilla nationalist was projected

as the icon of the truly Mozambican citizen,the model of the new man. The myth ofthe guerrilla nationalist was created as anattempt to generate new political identitiesduring the first years of independence.Mozambique was cast as being made up oftwo main groups: those who had fought forindependence and the others who made upthe mass majority of Mozambican society.These moments of hierarchization afterindependence derived from the necessityto limit the electoral capacity of the citizenswho were committed to fascist colonialism.21

The category of second-class citizensincluded many of those whom FRELIMOidentified as having been allies or support-ers of the Portuguese colonial presence(Meneses 2007b). Shortly after indepen-dence, FRELIMO sought to overcome theseparation thus created between thosedeemed to be collaborators and theMozambican population. In 1977-78, thefirst signs of a political strategy seeking todeal with the memory of these colonialconnections emerged. Samora Machel, thenthe president of Mozambique, had not

opted to form a Truth and ReconciliationCommission. He addressed this issue inseveral speeches, culminating in an impor-

tant public meeting in 1982.The multiplemeetings and the integration processes for

the collaborators can be seen as an unoffi-cial Truth and Reconciliation Commission,which sought to elucidate, clarify, and offerknowledge about the complexity of theseMozambicans history.

The collaborators were a significantand extremely heterogeneous group, lump-ing together all who did not fit into theepic story that fabricated the new man: theproject of the new Mozambican citizen.22

They were those who had given in to temp-

tation, having committed themselves to thecolonial system. Among them were formermembers of the Portuguese political colo-nial police, the PIDE-DGS; members ofANP,23 soldiers in the Portuguese army; thegodmothers of war, traditional authorities,politicians, members of the lower echelonsof the administrative apparatus, or thosewho were not with us [with FRELIMO].Seen as the traces of the colonial presence,re-routing and re-educating memorythrough forgetting was an important taskthat Mozambique sought to fulfill.

However, if the question of politicalcontent and ideology confronted within theliberation movement in Mozambique ispresent in political analyses of these strug-gles, it is directed towards comprehendingthe distinct geopolitical contexts of thesecountries. In Portugal, I have learned aboutthe peculiarities of this situation. My workis not on Portugal and it is my objective todebate the course of historiography or thecollective Portuguese memory from thisperiod. What is surprising when analyzingthe situation from Mozambique, neverthe-less, is the rediscovery of African issues by

21 In this manner, the introduction to thefirst electoral law in 1977 distinguished betweenthose that were involved in the colonial struc-tures of the oppressor and the Mozambican peo-

ple, the former being prohibited from politicalparticipation.

22 See, on this subject, Meneses 2007b.23 PIDE-DGS: the repressive police during

the dictatorship.Aco Nacional Popular: the sin-gle political party that ruled Portugal through-out the period of the dictatorship.


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academia in Portugal, which still largelydeclines to recognize other memories ofthis war, the reasons behind it, and the

political projects involved in it.In Mozambique, the heart of nationalhistory is located in the memory of thestruggle for national liberation. The heroesare those produced by this struggle, withwhich Mozambique began. The construc-tion of this history rests upon a politiciza-tion that was exacerbated by the process ofconstructing the national political memory.The construction of membership wasfounded upon a political analysis thataccentuated the dichotomization of spacesbetween liberated areas where the new

man was being produced and the colonialterritory perceived as a negative space ofpast legacies. Even if the territory wasinhabited by a great majority of Mozamb-icans up to that point in time, it was, as Ipreviously mentioned, necessary to extir-pate it. These too are colonial legacies(Mbembe 2002).

III. A MAPOF CONFLICTS: THENATIONAL HISTORY

The tension between the nationalproject, or the modern territorial base thatwas mapped, legislated and historicized bythe hand of colonialism, and the successive(re)constructions of various identities thatwere present in the geocultural territoryidentifiable as the Mozambique of ourtimes, has translated into a co-habitationthat was never peaceful (even when inter-preted as such by those in power) andinvolved very little dialogue. This realitymanifests itself in the successive reconfigu-rations of conflicting identities (ideological,

ethnic, racial, and religious) that havegenerated other presuppositions andconcepts that have helped to define othergeo-cultural places that came to be namedas Mozambique, but in which otherpeoples, other cultural, linguistic, and reli-

gious archives were also present. The longduration of the history requires someanalytical breath when focusing on the

specifi

city that Mozambique is today.In modern times, the most visibleexpression of opposite narratives to thoseof the colonizers is the grand narrativegenerated by the anti-colonial struggle,centered upon denouncing colonialism andits vices (discrimination, subalternization,concealing of knowledges, etc.) and theelaboration of a national project for thefuture. From this narrative, promisingmore of a new future than of a possiblereview of the pastand nationalistalthough quite Eurocentric in its core, but

organically localemerged the idea of aMozambique for Mozambicans, and whatcame to be designated as Mozambican-ness. The countrys call for equality causedthe dramatic erasure of the differences thatmade its social fabric, generating profoundcontradictions, synonymous with the conti-nuities of imperial mechanisms that remainactive (Meneses & Ribeiro 2008). For exam-ple, how does one situate the idea of thenation driven by the anti-colonial strugglewith other grand narratives, such asethnicity, race, religions, and gender?

Where is it situated in relation to the newdiscursive hegemony that is linked to thenational project? Before independence, butmainly after independence, the politicalproject of Mozambique and the politicalproject of FRELIMO seemed to coincide.The literature of combat24 was one ofarmored weapons; it promoted the nationsstruggle for recovery and was imbuedwith the mission of inventing a single pastthat could create Mozambicans, who,without fracture and without difference,were united against a common enemy,colonization. In short, proposals thatrejected, amended and, finally, posed achallenge to the hegemony of the national

24 Literature produced during the national-ist army struggle.


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project created in the midst of an exoge-nous proposal,25 questioning its value asrepresenting the Mozambican nation,

while simultaneously debating its disconti-nuity with the Mozambican state.26 Suchnarratives question the single sense ofhistoriography, with its heroes and nationalmyths, which are more elaborated thanorganic.27 In fact, in the literature ofcombat, found upon the figure of revolu-tionary combatant, it became possible tointegrate only very partially and in a verysubaltern way the urban intellectual. Theproject of constructing the new man didnot captivate the memories of the past orthe diversity of the present. Nevertheless,

diversity insisted upon its presence, find-ing other forms of protests and affirmation:art, music, literature, etc.

The construction of proposed politicalalternatives to the colonial situation bothdenounced the empire and sought, simul-taneously, to make a new revolutionarysubject visiblethe revolutionary Mozam-bican who identified with the people andwhose purity was filtered by the modernnationalism distinguished by FRELIMO.This political context explains the trial ofvarious nationalist ex-political prisoners

(including such renowned poets as JosCaveirinha and Rui Nogar, and the painterMalangatana Valente28), in 1977, for contra-dicting the monopolizing vision ofFRELIMO over the meaning of national-ism.29

If we allow decolonization to question

the impact of violent and exploitative rela-tionships, we will find that our legacies andmemories are far short of decolonization.

Recognizing this problem brings us to theurgency of a critical engagement withcurrent political consequences, both intel-lectual and social, of centuries of Westernexpansion in the colonized world todispute the naturalization and depoliticiza-tion of the world. In one sense, postcolo-nialism is greater than the meeting ofvarious perspectives and concepts ofpower, for it is a language which seeks toreflect upon processes of decolonizationas they take place in the spaces of themetropole and those in colonized spaces.

In the latter, historical reinterpretationswere necessary to rescue Mozambiquefrom the silence of interpretations imposedby colonial history. From the outset, thisreinterpretation was imbued with revolu-tionary purity and was indisputablebecause it was constructed from the testi-monies of FRELIMOs leaders, the livingheroes that fought for national liberation.This process did not need a mediatinghistoriography; rather, what was neededwas to avoid inquiring about sources andabout alternative interpretations that were

likely to cause disputes.Thus, the time and space of liberation

came to be made history, which was morelikely to be disseminated than questionedor interpreted. For academic consolation,the colonial situation emerged into anexcellent space for research and inquiryinto a new history from silenced memories.For Aquino de Bragana and JacquesDepelchin (1986), history, as an academicdiscipline, had to play a key role inconstructing national political memory.However, the opening to democracy and toa multiparty system that Mozambiquewitnessed in the 90s allowed the surfacingof other moments of questioning and otherhidden spaces of violence. (Re)constructingMozambican-ness was necessary, yet thisnew political project now had to integrate

25 As a geopolitical project, Mozambique isthe result of the division of Africa carried out inthe Berlin Conference in the late 19th century.

26 The 2004 national constitution, for exam-ple, recognizes the multicultural character of the

country (art. 4).27 For example, see Ncomo 2003.28 See Laban, 1998.29 As Craveirinha later explained, these

former political prisoners, who were accused oftreason and then submitted to re-education pro-cesses, underwent a difficult period of politicalmarginalization after independence (Laban1998).


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these other, less politically instrumentalmemories. These memories, however, didnot meet great challenges through new

interpretations and new versions. A politi-cal reading of the complex situation inMozambique reveals a peculiar characteris-tic of its political process: the multipartidar-ism of a single party (Meneses & Santos2008). The armed struggle for nationalliberation could not be claimed as the onlyfoundation of Mozambican unity sincethere were other conflicts and other politi-cal processes. As the elders frequently say,because our dead still speak very loud, inMozambique it was not worth speaking ofthe past because that brings back the shad-

ows of memories we do not want toremember. Contrary to Portugal, theemphasis in Mozambique was on the needto struggle for liberation, the roots of thestruggle and not the struggle itself. Never-theless, the evolution of the nationalistmovement can only be understood withinits broader context, taking into account, notjust influential internal factors, but all thefactors resulting from the confrontationwith colonial power. In this sense, theconjoining of memories was due to aconvocation of all memoriesnationalist

and colonialto comprehend this momentof rupture. Mozambican history needscolonial sources, and Portuguese historyalso needs to analyze the sources of theliberation movements involved in the war.These are two sides of many remaininghistories to be studied.

Let us return to the factor of time in ouranalysis. Always speeding ahead, timeconstructs the past. An immaterial shadowof what happened, the past is a narrativecreated in the present. Its discourseapproaches the past, but it is not the past.Such constructions occur in many forms:music, art pieces, oral history, etc.; all areforms of conjugating the past into thepresent. All are forms of organizing timebeyond formally written narratives.

Public narratives, explanations,

constructions of official memories arealways complex due to the number of play-ers and the number of intentions that

produce them. Yet again, these pluralmemories reflect power relations by beingone of many versions produced byplayersthat predominate over others. There aremany actors that participate in the produc-tion of memories: individual actors, collec-tive actors, institutional, private, etc. Ahistorical memory that is produced byhistorians is only one of many strands.

There are in fact others that we cannotforget if we seek to make the analysis of oursocieties more complex. It is not possible toconstruct official narratives by ignoring the

collective memories of groups that aresilenced for some reason. Political memoryor official history already seeks to constructa unifying narrative within the nationalspace to create social cohesion and legiti-mize political options. The History of

Mozambique is the history found and taughtthrough textbooks, but it collides withother, parallel memories.

Therefore, one needs to address thesevarious locations of memories, theepistemic discovery of an otherness, thepresence of multiple memories. This is the

first moment that announces changes inrelation to the official memory, with historyas a macro-narrative of our societies. Thesecond is recognizing the process ofconstructing history from this othernessand from its recuperation.

IV. CONCLUSION: WEAVINGNARRATIVES, CONSTRUCTINGHISTORY

The debate about investigation and

presentation of the African continentexposes a problematic reality, a theoreticalextroversion characterized by the importa-tion of uncritical paradigms, problems andperspectives, by politicians and Africanintellectuals alike (Hountondji 2002, 2009).


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Today, contemporary Africa needs toconfront two major inquiries: analysis ofthe implications of the colonial legacy for

itself, and the quest to recover that whichcame before colonization and has remainedpresent in its social structures, its politicalstructures and its identities. The objective isnot to create a conceptual space for theother, but recognizing that otherness is aconstant in processes of social develop-ment.

During the colonial period, the denialof this condition resulted in keeping other-ness outside the time of civilization and itstransformation into the time of culture, thetime outside the space of Western (read:

colonial) modernity.Today the problem is more complex.On one hand, we often continue to makeour interpretations from a center that stillhas not been decolonized. It is hencethrough the eyes of Imperial Europe thatthese African spaces are still perceivedthrough epistemically colonial lenses. Onthe other hand, while we want to(re)construct other histories and (re)intro-duce ourselves to the debate of othermemories, the situation we observe reflectsthe difficulty of constructing another

analytical grid which would escape fromdominant interpretations and allow us tointroduce the memories of other actors.

Imperial projects have hardly beenreformulated, maintaining themselves inthe essentially hegemonic conception of theGlobal North over the Global South despitethe independence of African countries andthe end of the so-called Cold War.30 Thequestions raised by debt, migration, weakor problem states, world poverty, andinstitutional and epistemic racism areamong the moments that bring to our atten-

tion the persistence of colonization. Manyacademic relations in the fields of anthro-pology and history express and treat this

colonial expression as the persistentmemory of colonization and as a powerrelation. In this sense, constructing contem-porary histories in our times is perhaps oneof the principal elements necessary for the(re)emergence of another subject as well asan active political actor. We become awareof ourselves and others, recognizing thatthe presence of an other implies that wemust know the past and the paths ofother(s).

To think of memories in the plural,placing them as diverse narratives of histo-

ries about locations, involves an obligationto think of identity processes, or the socialand political metamorphoses known tosocieties. If we agree that recognizing signi-fies remembering the other, the relation-ships between I and the other becomespaces of struggle for recognition, spaces ofdemocratizing memory and of the knowl-edges that they convey.

Even the collective memory that wecall our memory and which seems to over-lap with others, is not anything real orconcrete. On the contrary, our memory is

also a narration, a story of arrival and theresulting construction of memories(history, community, etc.) articulatedwithin present power relations. The inte-gration of memories into a whole occursthough political filter managed by politicalmemory; or rather, by the officially estab-lished bodies of power.

Historians tend to use the notion ofmemory to incorporate unauthorized orunofficial versions of the past while groupswhose identities rest upon a specific historychallenge legitimate versions of the pastand the monopoly of experts, as a duty tomemory (Bensoussan 1998; Ferenczi &Boltanski 200; Ruscio 2005).

As a result, new silencing occurs, and,as previously mentioned, since there aremany variables at work in constructing

30 Indeed, the cold war, as a concept, appliesto very restricted areas of the globe; specifically,in the case of the African continent, wars and se-vere conflict situations were experiencedthroughout the entire 20th century, thus ques-tioning the validity of the use of cold war.


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these memories, there will always besegments of memory that feel excluded orinsufficiently integrated. What to remem-

ber, and for whom? Who are we and whereare we going?The way to address the questions of

memory is therefore to recognize twoessential questions. On the one hand,collective memories have various produc-ers originating from a plural origin,whether it be the point of view of thedistinct locations of distinct narrators orperspective of that which is being narratedand the forms the material assumes. On theother hand, if we are to accept the pluralorigin of collective memory, it is fundamen-

tal to manage these diverse producers in aninclusive and democratic manner (BorgesCoelho 2007). We often speak of democra-tizing our societies, yet the histories,memories, knowledges and experiences ofthese groups escape from the space of thisdemocratization. In this sense, and borrow-ing from Boaventura de Sousa Santos(2007), the silences that other memorieshave been subjected to and their absencefrom imperial academic circuits stronglyindicates the presence of alternativediscourses that question insistently the

centrality of a single, universal history.Questioning the colonial raises infinite

questions in both imperial metropolitanand colonized spaces. The struggle forMozambiques independence was linkednot only to other political processes via aidfrom the African continent, but also to otheroutside processes including the struggleagainst fascism in Portugal. This involvedrejecting racial discrimination and theboundaries of difference in a call to joinforces to resist colonial and fascist oppres-sion, transforming them into a unifiedcause against a common oppressor.

To reclaim the past, as Frantz Fanoninsisted, triggers a chance of fundamentalimportance (Fanon 1963:210) for the subal-tern other. Instead of shame, the pastshould be branded with dignity, glory and

solemnity (Ibid.). From this perspective,the silences of the Otherness are not asynonym for the victimization of alterity,

but of an increasingly active, and even radi-cal presence of these other historicalactorsa condition for transforming thememories and narratives they produce.

This kind of knowledge, or better yet,inter-knowledge, rests upon recognizingthe mutuality of differences and similari-ties, which allows relationships betweensocieties to be reconstructed. The legaciesdistilled in the memories would not simplybe transmitted: they would be repudiated,selectively accepted, falsified and modifiedthrough numerous demands and negotia-

tions. They would involve sentiments,nostalgia and envy, remembering andforgetting, fighting for recognition andsuspicions of illegitimacy. Like the colonialquestion, historical legacies create relations(many times quite conflictive) between thepotential heirs, simultaneously dividingand connecting the parts together.

Historical scholarship entails distanc-ing the self from the objects of knowledge,which in the case of the activist involve-ment with a new subjectthe history ofMozambiqueis the unfair world present

out there, which the researcher only tack-les minimally. On the other side, and asRadha dSouza reminds us, activisminvolves transcending the subject-object divide,crossing the boundaries between the self as theknower and the knowledge of the world, about astate of being when the knower identifies withthe knowledge so completely, where the distinc-tion between the knower and the knowledge is soblurred that the knower is able to make a quali-tative leap into the unknown (2009:35). Theproduction of this new historical knowl-edge requires the acknowledgment of anddistinguishing between the subject and theobject. Speaking about others will thereforealways have to be sustained by knowledgeproduced with others in a complex andsymbiotic relationship.


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