The Morality of Revolution: Urban Cleanup Campaigns, Reeducation Camps, and Citizenship in Socialist Mozambique (1974-1988)

Abstract

Between 1974 and 1988, the revolutionary ruling party of Mozambique, Frelimo, launched several campaigns to cleanse the cities of residents it deemed antisocial and antithetical to the socialist revolution in Mozambique. The party established over twenty internment camps in remote locations throughout the country. Officially called ‘reeducation centers’, these camps were meant to rehabilitate wayward members of society through forced labor, political education, and moral regeneration. This study offers a critical historical examination of the cleanup campaigns and reeducation camps in socialist Mozambique. It explores the ideological and material infrastructure in which Frelimo devised and implemented its program of moral reform. Building on a new set of archival materials and interviews, the study foregrounds the contradictions of Frelimo’s ambitions and the gap between the ideals of social reform and the reality of the internment regimen. The examination of the campaigns, the empirical documentation of the organic functioning of the camps and the everyday life of internment shed light on the inner workings of authority and power, social control, and the carceral regime in contexts of austerity and national political transition. The study argues that the party’s incapacity to transmute the salvationist ideas of social reform into planned action produced spaces of social neglect and castigation that affected both the inmates and the personnel tasked to discipline and re-educate them. The conditions of austerity in which Frelimo implemented its reformist project produced a particular mode of a carceral regime that was not dictated by technologies of disciplinary surveillance. Camp supervisors and detainees themselves defined the kind of internment regimen that prevailed in the camps in ways that subverted the disciplinary aspirations of political leaders. While the party leaders envisioned the camps as sites of disciplinary pedagogy for the making of the new man and the new woman, in fact, the camps were spaces of social abandonment.