Ideological twinning: socialist aesthetics and political meetings in Maputo, Mozambique

Abstract

Based on recent ethnographical data from Maputo, Mozambique, this essay examines the revolutionary aesthetics of political meetings in a sociopolitical environment marked by the collapse of a national socialist ideology. Local political meetings in Mozambique articulate a paradoxical tension between sacrifice and revolution. While socialist rule disintegrated in the mid‐1980s, most local political meetings allow for the actualization of the revolutionary socialism which the governing Frelimo party was forced to sacrifice in order to remain in power. In the essay, it is thus examined how the enactment of a revolutionary aesthetics successfully exposes what Frelimo was incapable of realizing and thus momentarily captures the party's ideological legitimacy. Taking my inspiration from Roy Wagner's recent work on holography and invention, I explore the relationship between sacrifice and revolution as an articulation of a symmetrical ‘twinning’ of seemingly contrastive political principles that are held together by a singular political aesthetics that is actualized only at political meetings.

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

“…But in other instances, intelligibility across multiple registers is the explicit goal. We see this, for example, in a JRAI special issue on meetings (Abram ; Alexander ; Brown and Green ; Brown, Reed, and Yarrow ; Corsín Jiménez and Estalella ; Evans ; Keenan and Pottage ; Lamp ; Nielsen ; Reed ; Riles ; Strathern ; Yarrow ). As Hannah Brown, Adam Reed, and Thomas Yarrow () put it in their introduction, “meetings contain and animate social worlds outside the spatially and temporally demarcated arenas through which they take place” (11).…”

The Political Aesthetics of Middle Class Housing in (not so) Neoliberal Mozambique

“…Despite its revolutionary promises, however, Frelimo’s socialist‐inspired dreams of a brave new world collapsed irrevocably at the end of the civil war. Crucially for the present discussion, however, the underlying discourse of radical societal transformation survived, albeit in a reconfigured and less politically charged form (Nielsen 2014, 2017; Sumich , ). For, as we shall shortly see, if the nation could not be made autonomous and modern, privileged social subjects still could be.…”

The City and the Barracas: Urban Change, Spatial Differentiation and Citizenship in Maputo

“…However, they are still well entrenched and produce evolutionist views of urbanisation and urbanity. They found fertile ground in the largely modernising views that have underpinned Frelimo’s ethos (Sumich 2005 , 2010 , 2018 ; Nielsen 2017 ). Frelimo’s approach to Mozambique’s social and economic development was framed by a modernist worldview which believed that Mozambique’s more prosperous and just future needed to be based on a project that would eliminate what was understood as “backward” understandings of society fed by “tradition” (ibid.).…”

“…27 While, on the one hand, the interventions by the municipal government reflect Mozambique’s state modernist views, on the other hand, they still carry lingering traces of the state’s socialist past and its declared ambition of serving the entirety of the country’s population. Eventually, as pointed out by Nielsen ( 2017 , p. 139), Frelimo’s legitimacy still derives from activating and mobilising a socialist “political aesthetics”. The Maputo’s urban plan wishes, in its declared intentions, to deal with the persistent inequality and significant spatial differentiation in the city.…”

“…Informal urban areas tend to be perceived by the municipal government as sites of improper and incomplete urban form—as places that are still to be fully urbanised. This perception is founded on deep historical roots that run through both from pre- and post-independence periods—the colonial administration having associated subúrbios , the city of reed, to places of temporary and incomplete urban form awaiting to become planned cidade (Morton 2019 ; Roque 2009 ), and the post-colonial government having fully embraced modernisation and the evolutionism it entails (Sumich 2005 , 2010 , 2018 ; Nielsen 2017 ). From this history, the cidade de cimento emerges as the symbol of proper urban form, which, as we argue, in Mozambique still imprints concepts of what cities are and the form these should adopt.…”