Social Decomposition and Armed Violence in Post-Colonial Mozambique
Author(s)
Derluguian, Georgi M.
Abstract
Armed violence in post-colonial Mozambique derives from the degeneration of colonial peasantry into a marginalized “non-class.” Precolonial African rural producers were forced into being peasants (i.e., a class) in the process of peripheralization. Catastrophic/revolutionary decolonization led to Mozambique’s disengagement from the world-system and the rapid disappearance of colonial class categories. A simple return to the precolonial situation was impossible, but so was integration into a supposedly alternative socialist world-system, since the latter never possessed truly systemic qualities. Thus, postrevolutionary Mozambique went into a social nowhere, a historical “black hole.” Mozambican peasantry became an ex-peasantry, or rather, a non-peasantry. Thereupon, atavistic quasi-zoological forms of sociality came to the surface, often making weapons the only source of law and thus producing a war which fragmented into a myriad of different conflicts. But common to all those conflicts was their non-political nature and the embarrassing lack of ideological or any other “modern” type of motivation.
