Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Revisionism in Postcolonial Africa

This groundbreaking study investigates defining themes in the field of social memory studies as they bear on the politics of post-Cold-War, post-apartheid Southern Africa. Alice Dinerman offers a detailed chronicle of the Mozambican government's attempts to revise the country's troubled postcolonial past with a view to negotiating the political challenges posed by the present. In doing so, she lays bare the path-dependence of memory practices, while tracing their divergent trajectories, shifting meanings and varied combinations within ruling discourse and performance.
Central themes include:
the interplay between past and present
the dialectic between remembering and forgetting
the dynamics between popular and official memory discourses
the politics of acknowledgement.
Dinerman's original analysis is essential reading for students of modern Africa, the sociology of memory, Third World politics and post-conflict societies.

Alice Dinerman

List of Maps Acknowledgments Glossary and Acronyms Notes on Terminology, Orthography and Currency Prologue: The Making and Unmaking of the Namapa Naparamas 1. Myth as a 'Meaning-making' Device in Post-Independence Mozambique 2. Aspects of Precolonial and Colonial Nampula 3. From 'Abaixo' to 'Chiefs of Production', 1975-1987 4. The Context, 1987-1994 5. Multipartyism, the Retraditionalization of Local Administration and the Apparent Duplication of State Authority: The Case of Nampula Province 6. Labor, Tribute and Authority 7. In the Name of the State 8. Roots, Routes and Rootlessness: Ruling Political Practice and Mozambican Studies Bibliography