Contingent identity and socialist democracy in the port of Maputo

Abstract

Failures of socialist revolutions in Africa are sometimes dismissed as alien to the history of socialism - attempts to gloss developmentalist nationalist projects in the discourse of socialism. This paper argues that the problematic relationship between party, state and broad-based political activism in African revolutions are not part of an incommensurate ethnicised history; they are like those that have repeatedly recurred and been debated in the history of socialism. It looks at one particular moment in the history of Frelimo's Mozambican revolution - the confrontation between the party and Mozambican port workers over the restructuring of work and pay in 1980. It argues that the ways that Frelimo envisioned its options at this moment illustrated two recurring tensions in Marxist-Leninist political practice - reluctance to confront the contingency of structure and the materiality of ideology