The Morality of Revolution: Reeducation Camps and the Politics of Punishment in Socialist Mozambique, 1968–1990

Abstract

Benedito Luís Machava offers a bold and original intervention into debates on postcolonial statecraft, revealing how moral ideology shaped the architecture of repression and reform in socialist Mozambique between 1968 and 1990. Machava challenges prevailing assumptions by asserting that reeducation camps were not marginal institutions or imitations of external models. Rather, they were integral to Frelimo’s ambitious project of nation-building and a socialist revolution (p. 5), which had roots in liberation wartime disciplinary pedagogy and punitive sanctions under which punishment was regarded as revolutionary (pp. 52; 55). On the eve of independence in 1974, Frelimo’s political elite led the “moral crusade”, a social revolution to create a new kind of citizen with a new mentality: the Homem Novo (New Man) and Mulher Nova (New Woman) liberated from ideias velhas (old ideas), and values including tribalism, individualism and racism and intrigue (p. 44). Yet Frelimo’s deepseated ambition and moral vision to build a new  citizenry, especially in urban areas, was riddled with contradictions, improvisations, and failures.