Allen F. Isaacman

Legacies of Engagement: Scholarship Informed by Political Commitment

Abstract: Scholar-activists, by virtue of their critical engagement in the central issues of the day and their role in the production and dissemination of knowledge, have a unique opportunity to challenge the inherited orthodoxies in the academy and in the larger world in which we live. Within the field of African studies they have served as powerful critics and have broken new substantive, conceptual, methodological, and epistemological ground. To sustain this thesis, this essay explores three interrelated issues. First, it critically assesses the concept of value-free research—a notion which is commonly used to dismiss engaged scholarship as inherently flawed. Second, it documents how a number of African American scholars, passionately committed to social justice and to an end to racial oppression, produced pioneering work on Africa well before the field of African studies gained academic legitimacy in the post–World War II era. Finally, it highlights some of the critically important contributions that activist scholars have made to the study of Africa. The intellectual biographies of six prominent Africanists—Claude Aké, Basil Davidson, Francis Deng, Susan Geiger, Joseph Harris, and Walter Rodney—illuminate how political commitment can fuel theoretical and methodological innovation.

Digitization, History, and the Making of a Postcolonial Archive of Southern African Liberation Struggles: The Aluka Project

This paper describes the history of an initiative to digitize a postcolonial archive on the struggle for freedom in Southern Africa. The authors outline the intellectual architecture of the project and the complex epistemological, political, and technical challenges that they confronted in their endeavor to construct a digital archive that might help reorient scholarly debates on the struggle for liberation.

The Prazeros as Transfrontiersmen: A Study in Social and Cultural Change

Fifteenth-century maritime expansion precipitated an unprecedented exchange of ideas and technology between Europe and the indigenous societies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.2 While scholars have focused on the broad political and economic impact of the overseas exploration, they have been less concerned with patterns of local interaction and the concomitant processes of social change. Recently social scientists have developed a number of analytical models to interpret the outcome of cultural contact between European overseas communities and the indigenous populations. These forms range from plural societies, with their separatist ideologies, to new hybrid cultures. While interculturation has been recognized as a common phenomenon on the frontier,3 scholars have failed to consider the possibility that

Chiefs, Rural Differentiation and Peasant Protest: The Mozambican Forced Cotton Regime, 1938-1961

In 1938 the Portuguese government imposed a system of forced cotton cultivation throughout Mozampique. Within a decade peasant production increased tenfold. By 1961 it had almost doubled again. Mozambican cotton, imported at artificially depressed prices, fueled the Portuguese textile industry and saved Lisbon millions of dollars annually in hard currency. In the decade after World War II, Mozambican cotton regularly sold on the metropolitan market for less than two-thirds of the international rate (see Table 1). This gap widened in 1950-51 when the average price per kilogram of Mozambican cotton was approximately

Historical Amnesia, or, the Logic of Capital Accumulation: Cotton Production in Colonial and Postcolonial Mozambique

.50 compared to the world rate of

The mozambique cotton cooperative: The creation of a grassroots alternative to forced commodity production

1.32. For the 1947 to 1955 period, the total savings was in excess of

A Socialist Legal System in the Making: Mozambique before and after Independence

99 million (see Table 1). At first glance these figures would seem to demonstrate the power of the state to restructure rural production and to extract peasant surplus. In reality, however, considerable discrepancies existed between the formulation of the cotton regime in Lisbon and the makeshift contingencies which colonial officials felt compelled to adopt to insure peasant compliance. Despite the repressive nature of the colonial regime, the coercive mechanisms at its disposal proved insufficient to insure the systems success. State officials therefore sought to shift the burden of overseeing peasant cotton production to chiefs, or regulos, on whom the system increasingly came to depend.

The Origin, Formation and Early History of the Chikunda of South Central Africa

In this article, the very different cotton production schemes that the state introduced in colonial and post-colonial Mozambique are explored. Three distinct periods in the history of cotton production are examined. In the first, the focus is on the impact of cotton cultivation on the daily lives of peasants trapped in a highly coercive labor regime which Portugal imposed in 1938 and enforced for almost a quarter of a century. An outline of the abortive attempt of the newly independent FRELIMO government to revitalize cotton production from 1977 to 1985 as part of its broader socialist agenda to transform the countryside, is given next, and the study is concluded with a discussion of recent state efforts to promote joint cotton ventures under the guise of the IMF—World Bank structural adjustment program. An analysis of these changing cotton regimes offers a way of exploring a wide set of issues in the sustainability debate, The Mozambican cotton scheme demonstrates the extent to which state development planning often is not only about either social or ecological sustainability but also about control, power, and effectively silencing the rural poor by experts disconnected from the countryside. It is also stressed that the politics of memory is an important dimension of the sustainability debate and the broader ideological struggles which it reflects. Try as they might, neither the colonial state nor the postcolonial state could control how peasants constructed and interpreted the past. The official representations of cotton as a path to progress, whether on a capitalist or a social road, were simply dismissed by most growers who knew better.

Madzi-Manga, Mhondoro and the use of oral traditions—a chapter in Barue religious and political history

In 1957 a dozen northern Mozambicans living in the Makonde highlands organized the Mozambique African Voluntary Cotton Society. By 1959 membership had increased to almost three thousand and output per grower far exceeded per capita yields of neighboring peasant producers. A year later the colonial state outlawed the cooperative. Portuguese officials claimed that it had become a hotbed of subversive activity. Subsequent efforts by the leaders of the banned organization to form a rice cooperative met a similar fate. Despite its short life, the Mozambique African Voluntary Cotton Society played a significant role in the economic and political history of the colony. It was among the first independently organized African agricultural cooperatives in the country. Whereas its counterparts in neighboring colonies were almost exclusively formed to combat the exploitative marketing practices of foreign middlemen, the Mozambique African Voluntary Cotton Society also sought to protect its members from labor abuses inherent in the system of forced cotton production. As a grassroots movement, firmly implanted among Makonde peasants, the cooperative provided a hospitable terrain for covert anti-colonial activities while serving as a training ground for some of Mozambiques future nationalist leaders. Finally, its links to the cooperative movement in neighboring Tanganyika and to TANU (Tanganyika African National Union) suggest the significant, though generally overlooked, impact the British colony had on the growth of nationalism in northern Mozambique. The significance of the Mozambique African Voluntary Cotton Society transcends the details of its own history. Like cooperatives in other parts of Africa, it permitted peasants free space in which to operate while simultaneously binding them firmly to the colonial-capitalist system. Formed in reaction to the colonial states policy of forcibly restructuring local production to meet the needs of the metropolitan textile industry and serving as a center for covert political activity, the cotton cooperative nevertheless provided the conditions in which peasant labor could be more easily extracted. Analysis of the cooperative also provides insights into the relationship between commodity production and incipient class formation in peasant societies.

Extending South Africa's Tentacles of Empire: The Deterritorialisation of Cahora Bassa Dam

Publisher Summary On June 25, 1975, Mozambique gained its independence after ten years of armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism. The new government, led by FRELIMO (the Mozambican Liberation Front), was committed to dismantling the colonialist-capitalist system and starting the country on the long process of socialist transformation. The government recognized the need to construct a new legal system that would reflect and reinforce the aspirations of the popular classes, workers and peasants, although it assigned this task a lower priority than the economic transformation. It drew heavily on the experiences in the liberated zones, those areas governed by FRELIMO during the armed struggle, as it did in all the other sectors to be transformed. In these liberated regions the legal process had been democratized and, through trial and error, an embryonic system of popular justice had evolved. A central principle is a commitment to involving the entire community in all aspects of the legal process in order to protect and promote the interests of workers and peasants and ensure their active participation in the process of creating a socialist state. In short, popular justice is a critical component of class struggle in Mozambique. The chapter examines the development of popular justice and the tensions inherent in institutionalizing and formalizing it on a national scale. Both in the liberated zones and during the post-independence period this process has been characterized by a dialectic between experimentation and formalization, practice and theory, that ensures both popular input and adherence to revolutionary principles.