Table Of ContentNUNC COCNOSCO EX PARTE
THOMAS J. BATA LIBRARY
TRENT UNIVERSITY
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/socialistideologOOOOsaul
Socialist Ideology and the
Struggle for Southern Africa
by John S. Saul
Africa World Press, Inc.
P.O. Box 1892
Trenton, New Jersey 08607
Y\ Y HS 0
Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1
The Role of Ideology
in the Transition to Socialism 11
Chapter 2
Ideology in Africa:
Decomposition and Recomposition 33
Chapter 3
Development and Counter-Development
Strategies in Mozambique 65
Chapter 4
Zimbabwe: The Next Round 111
Chapter 5
South Africa: The Question of Strategy 155
Afterword: On Scholar Activism 189
Index 195
Africa World Press, Inc.
P.O. Box 1892
Trenton, N.J. 08607
©John S. Saul, 1990
First published by Africa World Press, Inc., 1990
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any
means electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior
written consent of the publisher.
Cover design by Ife Nii Owoo
Typeset by TypeHouse of Pennington, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 88-71175
ISBN: 0-86543-099-3 Cloth
0-86543-100-0 Paper
Introduction
“Now, in the early minutes of June 25, the flag-raising
jjLwb ceremony proceeds, the vast crowd cheering as Samora
r~wL Machel, briefly but eloquently, proclaims Mozambique’s
independence. We’re together, representatives of various
Western support groups, and we embrace one another enthusiastically.
Embrace, too, Mozambicans, strangers and old friends. I greet Janet
Mondlane, wife of Eduardo, FRELIMO’s first president, assassinated by
the Portuguese in 1969; greet Felisberto, a FRELIMO comrade from the
days when the movement’s office was a dingy office on Nkrumah Street in
Dar es Salaam; greet two militants with whom I travelled to the liberated
areas of Tete Province in 1972. Was that really only three years ago?
Enthusiastic guerillas fill the air with tracer bullets. Too much like the
real thing for my taste but who can blame them? Independence Day.”1
That was 1975. In June, 1985,1 return to Mozambique to celebrate the
tenth anniversary. And it is, to be sure, a boa festa. On the evening of the
24th, an impressive “gala” is staged by Mozambique’s national dance
troupe. In the morning hours of the 25th itself, President Samora Machel,
joined by five other presidents (from Tanzania, Zambia, Cape Verde,
Angola, and Botswana) and one prime minister (Robert Mugabe of
Zimbabwe), lays wreaths at the Heroes’ Monument in Maputo. Then
there is a mammoth, impressively organized march-past of thousands of
Mozambicans, from schools, from youth and women’s organizations,
from various workplaces and, that afternoon, a reception at the Polana
Hotel, the president speaking briefly, members of the Politburo leading
the dancing as a giant birthday cake is cut and distributed. Later in the
week we see the premiere of Mozambique’s first feature-length film, The
Time of the Leopards, a film which evokes the days of armed struggle
against the Portuguese, and another premiere, the production of a play
by the noted Angolan writer, Pepetela, performed by Mozambique’s
leading theatre group.
1
2 Socialist Ideology and the Struggle for Southern Africa
Yet there is also a more sombre counterpoint to the week’s events. It
serves to remind us just how harsh are the realities of the present phase in
Mozambique. Independence day in Manhica district, less than seventy
kilometers from the capital, finds the “armed bandits of the MNR/
RENAMO (Resistencia Nacional Mozambicana, South Africa’s principal
contribution to Mozambique’s first ten years of independence) attacking
a bus and clubbing twenty-seven people to death. A few days later, in the
same area, a convoy is hit. Five buses come under heavy fire, with thirty-
nine passengers killed and over one hundred wounded. More prosaically,
though no less importantly, as we eat our fill at the Polana we know that
many people in Maputo will not have enough to eat this week. Beyond
survival—although, under the circumstances, this is itself no small
accomplishment—there seems little enough, in all conscience, to celebrate.
A decade that had begun with so much hope has become a long and
difficult one.
* * *
Despite all the recent advances in southern Africa, then (the overthrow
of the Portuguese empire, the fall of Smith’s Rhodesia, the dramatic
revival of the resistance movement inside South Africa itself), difficult
times continue. Indeed, one principal theme of this book is an attempt to
understand the reasons for the grim denouement which has followed
upon the hard-won victory over colonialism in Mozambique. As we will
see, it is necessary to set that country’s difficulties within the broader
context of the aggression that the South African regime is inflicting upon
all of its neighbors. And we will find strong reasons for concurring with
the late Mozambican president, Samora Machel, when he argues that the
single most important cause of Mozambique’s current economic problems
“lies in the situation in southern Africa and in the wars that have been
forced upon us.”
Yet it is to the credit of Mozambican leaders that they have not yielded
to the understandable temptation to explain away all their difficulties in
terms of the state of siege under which they find themselves. Nor have they
fallen back on another (entirely plausible) excuse—the severe constraints
imposed upon them by the grim legacy which they have inherited from a
parasitic Portuguese colonialism. For much of their reflection upon the
problems facing them has revolved around a critical reconsideration of
the theoretical underpinnings and practical expression of their own
socialist project. Opinions will differ as to whether the FRELIMO
leadership has carried this process of self-criticism far enough (just as
opinions will differ as to how much socialist advance is actually going to
