Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Contents -- Introduction: "Globalization Made Me Do It" vs. "The Struggle Continues -- 1. The Failure of Southern African Liberation? -- 2. Tanzania Fifty Years On (1961-2011): Rethinking Ujamaa, Nyerere and Socialism in Africa -- 3. Mozambique - not Then but Now -- 4. On Taming a Revolution: The South African Case -- 5. The New Terms of Resistance: Proletariat, Precariat and the Present African Prospect -- 6. Conclusions: The Struggle Really Does Continue in Southern Africa -- Appendix 1: "More Comfortably Without Her?" Ruth First as Writer and Activist -- Appendix 2: Nelson Mandela and South Africa's Flawed Freedom -- Index.

SUMMARY
Part I of 'The African hero in Mozambican history', published in issue 163, launched a discussion of the possible role of the individual in African history … both in general terms and in terms of understanding more precisely the implications of the assassination of Eduardo Mondlane for the further development of Mozambique. Now, in Part II, this essay similarly considers (in subsection 3) the assassination of Mondlane's successor as leader of Frelimo (and the man who would later become the first president of a liberated Mozambique), Samora Machel. It remains focused on the broad theme of death and its impact on the history of Mozambique in subsection 4 that follows. But it now does so by reflecting upon the possible import of 'execution as a mode of governance', and specifically by re-examining Frelimo's secret executions, sometime in the first decade of Mozambican independence, of Uriah Simango, his wife and a number of his colleagues, a group that had come to form the movement's internal opposition when in exile in Tanzania in the 1960s. It suggests that these extremely secretive executions can best be seen as negative outcomes of the self-righteous vanguardism that has come to haunt Frelimo in power up to the present. Part II then concludes (in subsection 5) by examining a further series of deaths: the wave of mafia-style killings that, in this century (and beginning with the assassination of crusading journalist Carlos Cardoso in 2000), has come to be called 'Mozambique's quiet assassination epidemic'. How best, finally, to interpret such an unsavoury recent phenomenon as this grisly 'epidemic'?

SUMMARY
'A gun shot in the middle of a concert [is] something vulgar, [yet] something which is impossible to ignore', writes Stendhal, the greatest of political novelists. The same is true of death – especially of death by assassination and death by execution – in the political analysis of Africa. For, as argued here in two linked texts, one in this issue of the Review of African Political Economy, ROAPE, and a second in the following issue of ROAPE, such intrusions of planned and orchestrated deaths are seen to have provided key moments in African politics (and, not least, in Mozambican politics), albeit moments that have too seldom been allotted the theoretical attention they warrant or debated with the seriousness they deserve. In this Part I (and its subsection 1) of the present contribution to the Debate section of ROAPE, different ways of approaching this matter are first reflected upon. Then, in subsection 2, some of the issues so raised are exemplified with reference to the first of the two most pertinent assassinations in Mozambican history, the assassination in 1969 (in Dar es Salaam) of Frelimo's first president, Eduardo Mondlane. In Part II of this essay (to appear in the next issue of ROAPE), the discussion of Mondlane and his assassination will be complemented by a reflection on the assassination in 1986 of his immediate successor as Frelimo president (and the eventual first president of Mozambique), Samora Machel. Several other related matters will also be discussed in this Part II, matters I will anticipate at the end of this first part (below). But such sections, too, will help us to bring into focus the main theme of this two-part article and of the subsequent debate it seems to stimulate, which are: just what difference can the several assassinations and executions that have scarred Mozambican history be thought to have made to the shaping of longer-term outcomes in the country's history; and what, more generally, can we hope to learn from such a closer examination of the 'what ifs' of history?

ABSTRACT
This article underscores the importance of the relatively brief life but historically noteworthy emergence of the Zimbabwe People's Army (ZIPA) within the struggle for Zimbabwean liberation in the 1970s. For ZIPA was a movement that offered both a serious military challenge of its own to Smith's UDI regime but also the long-term possibility of a far more meaningful liberation than anything achieved since by ZANU's 'old guard' under the orchestration of Robert Mugabe. The roles played by Mugabe, Machel, Kaunda, Kissinger and Crosland in ensuring ZIPA's defeat are all emphasised, with a key source for the paper's reinterrogation of ZIPA's role being the recent autobiography of Wilfred Mhanda (aka Dzino Machingura), entitled Dzino. A link is also made to Lionel Cliffe's writing of the time (in ROAPE issue no. 8), in particular to his own experience while incarcerated in one of Kaunda's Zambian jails.

This article draws on a speech made at the Ruth First Symposium in London in June 2012. It describes Ruth First's role as a writer, political organiser and mobiliser of the freedom struggle within and without South Africa, drawing attention to her intellectual contribution and underscoring the importance of her Maputo years, with their broader significance. It discusses the personal tensions that many had with her, but points out that there was always a political issue at stake in these disagreements. It stresses her role as a scholar-activist, and following Brecht suggests that her assassination was an attempt by the assassins to 'sleep more comfortably'. It then draws powerfully on a letter from Rusty Bernstein to pose the question of what First would have made of the contemporary situation in South Africa, where the 'Empire of Capital' is still dominant.