Kronos: Southern African Histories

Cabo Delgado in Peace: Memories and Forebodings

SÉRGIO SANTIMANO — 2024-12-18

In 1996, Mozambican photographer Sérgio Santimano travelled to Cabo Delgado to carry out photographic work, with the objective of documenting the province in a time of peace and renewal. His travels resulted in the exhibition, Cabo Delgado: A Photographic Story about Africa (Cabo Delgado: uma história fotográfica sobre África), which consolidated his international renown. In this photo-essay, we revisit a selection of Santimano’s photographs on Cabo Delgado, with the aim of offering an image different from that of devastation and death which has dominated the national and global news since an Islamist insurgency erupted in the province in October 2017. While providing a pathway into memories of Cabo Delgado as a place rich with life, history, culture and individuality, Santimano’s photographs also offer eerie forebodings of the present.

Contributors

Patricia Hayes — 2024-12-18

Graphic Histories of Solidarity, in Solidarity

KONI BENSON — 2024-12-18

Revolutionary experiments require building revolutionary relationships. This praxis of material and social creativity to reorganise power dynamics and weave connections across weaponised divides, are evident in the content, the form and the backstory woven into Janet Biehl’s Their Blood Got Mixed: Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS. Written and illustrated by Janet Biehl, it is a graphic memoir that can be read as both an historical narrative and a blueprint of a contemporary revolutionary experiment that combines political theory and graphic art to tell the story of how ISIS has been driven back in Northern Syria by people fighting for a society based on principles of direct democracy, political secularism, gender equality, and ecological sustainability. Whereas in the past, after the liberation of Rojava in 2012, Biehl spent time interviewing leadership, this book relays her interviews with women across the region and across the various projects of reorganising and defending social, political, cultural and economic life in 2019 after four years of warfare against ISIS and the Turkish state. Reflecting on the relationships that make revolutionary history, and that produce artistic histories of revolutionary experiments, this review article considers the history in this book and of this book, in conversation with recently published graphic non-fiction, and draws on engaged scholarship concerned with the politics of collective knowledge production in and for movements of solidarity urgently needed in the face of the imploding crisis of colonial borders.

Dénètem Touam Bona, Fugitive, where are you running?

PAOLO ISRAEL — 2024-12-18

Introduction: Fugitive, Where are you Running? is a collection of essays, most of which were previously published in French, by writer, philosopher and curator Dénètem Touam Bona. The author’s inclination to straddle geographic and conceptual lines is reflected in the scope, exuberance and poetic verve of the volume. The first three chapters (‘Return of the Maroni’, ‘The Art of the Fugue’, ‘Manhunt’) lay the conceptual foundation by foregrounding categories of marronage, fugitivity and fugue. The fugitive slave is presented as the figure that haunts the establishment of capitalist modernity and the only possible ‘line of flight’ from it. The fugue is the art of subtle evasion from the prisons of racialised capitalism and an alternative to the triumphalist politics of armed liberation struggles. Touam Bona proposes an impressionistic, rhapsodic and allegorical travel through the various incarnations of the maroon community – with its spontaneous and horizontal modes of organisation and accretion – and capitalism’s death drive to surveil and suppress them.

Muslims and Politics in Postcolonial Mozambique

LIAZZAT J. K. BONATE — 2024-12-18

Introduction: This is a collection of previously published articles addressing the relationship between the post-colonial state under the Frelimo government and Muslims of Mozambique. The book aims at understanding the state’s policies towards religion and secularity, the formation of Muslim elites and counter-elites, and inter-religious and inter-Muslim competition and conflicts between 1975 and 2022. The last chapter of the book attempts to provide a historical interpretation for the origins and evolution of the current jihadi insurgency in Cabo Delgado. Although some important research on Islam in Mozambique has been done in recent years, including by Daria Trentini, Christian Laheij, Chapane Mutiua, Mário Machaqueiro and myself, among others, this is a welcome publication because the general scope of the research on this topic still remains scarce as compared to other regions of Africa and the world.

Cold War Liberation

BONGANI KONA — 2024-12-18

Introduction: This absorbing account of relations between the Soviet Union and the leaders of anticolonial movements fighting to liberate Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau from Portuguese rule in the 1960s and 1970s is in part the fruit of Natalia Telepneva’s doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Odd Arne Westad,1 whose own work looms large in the historiography of the Cold War. The book opens like a spy thriller with a Soviet military plane landing in Luanda on the day Agostinho Neto, leader of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), is set to be inaugurated as the first president of independent Angola. On board the An-12 is an intelligence officer by the name of Boris Putilin, ‘whose job had been to coordinate arms transfers from the Soviet Union’2 to the MPLA. Putilin is almost shot at by an Angolan solider but is rescued in time to attend the inauguration by the chief of airport security.

At Ansha's

AMINA ALAOUI SOULIMANI — 2024-12-18

Introduction: At Ansha’s is a world that speaks for itself, a place-based ethnography that travels in and out of binaries of extension – spatial and idiomatic antonyms that converge in the making of history and the human. Trentini locates her main protagonist, Ansha, as a migrant from Mueda, Cabo Delgado in Nampula, and offers a rich descriptive landscape that tells many stories; notably, Ansha’s passage from being under the control of majini (spirits) to becoming a healer – a transition from illness to healing. The ethnography, through Ansha’s memory, is situated at the conjuncture of Mozambique’s socialist era, FRELIMO and RENAMO’s confrontation, and the anti-colonial war. It recognises the aftermath of dispossession and state violence as an open wound.

The Hijab

DEVARAKSHANAM BETTY GOVINDEN — 2024-12-18

Introduction: Dedicated to the ‘Muslim girls and women protesting for their rights in India and Iran’, historians P. K. Yasser Arafath and G. Arunima have compiled a deeply engaging collection of essays that explore the wearing of the hijab from a multitude of perspectives. The contributions traverse different national contexts and explore multiple and entangled strands of the debates around the hijab, underscoring its breadth and complexity. And as the essays in The Hijab: Islam, Women and the Politics of Clothing demonstrate, not only is this is a complex debate, but also one on very rugged terrain.

Rabhia

FERNANDA PINTO DE ALMEIDA — 2024-12-18

Introduction: The growing interest in Mozambican crime fiction since the early 2000’s reflects a move to portray underexplored characters, stories and spaces of postcolonial life through the lens of the police procedural. This period has not only seen numerous debates in Mozambique surrounding the purported ‘death’ of Mozambican literature, but it has coincided with a significant literary shift towards the crime novel. Works such as Mia Couto’s Under the Frangipani and Lília Momplé’s Neighbours have drawn Anglophone readers and scholars into these conversations.1 Since then, Mozambican writers have continued to expand the boundaries of the crime novel in order to question the status of ‘engaged’ literature and to offer readers nuanced explorations of the genre alongside that of the country’s social inheritances of colonialism, liberation struggle, civil war and ongoing armed conflict.

Violence and the Voice Note: The War for Cabo Delgado in Social Media (Mozambique, 2020)

PAOLO ISRAEL — 2024-12-18

In Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, the year of 2020 marked a dramatic escalation of military activities of the Islamist insurgent group locally known as Al-Shabab or mashababe. This intensification was accompanied by a more immaterial phenomenon: the rise in prominence of social media, both as battleground and as public forum. While the insurgents sacked and occupied major towns and district headquarters, the Web 2.0 networks – Facebook and WhatsApp especially – became the central arena in which the war was apprehended and discussed. This essay is an exploration of the entwining of social media with the ‘new war’ in Cabo Delgado, focussing on the events that surround the conquest of the Makonde plateau, mythical cradle of the Mozambican liberation struggle. Building on a budding literature on digital militarism, the essay dwells especially on orality and the use of the voice note as a medium to convey information deemed to be more trustworthy and stable than images. Tracking these media and their interrelations, the essay establishes a narrative, however fragmentary, of the downfall of the Makonde plateau; highlights recurring features of violence in the Cabo Delgado conflict; and provides fresh insight into the formation of the Local Force (Força Local), a State-sponsored militia largely constituted by war veterans.

Our Stories: Cartography of a Conflict

CATARINA CASIMIRO TRINDADE — 2024-12-18

This photo-essay, entitled ‘Our Stories: Cartography of a Conflict’, is born from the fieldwork carried out in the scope of the research ‘Past, Present and Future in the Voice of Women and Girls Affected by the Conflict in Cabo Delgado: A Feminist Analysis’, as a way of naming and disseminating the diversity of voices of displaced women, and broadening the visibility of their stories, which have very often been reduced to statistics. The aim of this article is to share their perceptions and demands, their stories and journeys in search of security and possible horizons for their re-existence. This photo-essay shows that women displaced and affected by the conflict need to be named, singularised in their aspirations, needs and struggles. Their life stories are the reason for this work. It is their pain and resilience, their desires, their invisible and visible powers, their strategies for rebuilding their lives, families and communities that we want to make known. Their voices need to be heard, read, understood and placed at the centre of all governmental and civil society interventions for reconstruction, humanitarian response and peacebuilding in Cabo Delgado. Each woman participating in this photo-essay has chosen to share her story and her face, and has decided how to be photographed and represented, with the desire that somehow their trajectories become sources of direct knowledge to guide the paths to Peace in the province. They want to be known and recognised in their dignity, in their determination and perseverance, as well as in their deepest needs. The story of each woman shared in this article is a local and national reference to build a nonviolent future in Mozambique.

Spectres of Black Flags in the Miombo: The Islamic State's coverage of their Mozambique province, 2022-2023

STIG JARLE HANSEN — 2024-12-18

This article studies the Islamic State’s only remaining periodical, Al-Naba, identifying the most common tropes and patterns in the periodical’s Sub-Saharan Africa coverage, and on Mozambique in particular. The Islamic State’s increasingly important coverage of Africa focuses on terror attacks, military campaigns and on the fight against Christianity. However, it also employs more traditional anti-colonial arguments that have been used by other, more accepted, political actors during the struggle for decolonisation. Al-Naba also functions as a ‘shamer’ of non-African Muslims, to get them to join jihad by pointing to the African successes of the organisation and set these successes up as examples to be followed. In this sense, the article illustrates how African jihadist branches can have global agency.

'Here we Punish, Here we Discipline': Forced Displacement, Silencing and the Multiple Faces of Violence in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique

ZACARIAS MILISSE CHAMBE — 2024-12-18

Forced displacement and silencing are inextricably bound for communities who have experienced different forms of violence in different contexts. This article explores the narratives about the war that began on 5 October 2017 in the district of Mocímboa da Praia, on the coast of the province of Cabo Delgado, northern Mozambique, by a group of radical guerrillas locally known as mashababe. Since then, from isolated attacks on remote villages, violence has spread to more districts in the region, with kidnappings of civilians, looting of barns and houses, thus imposing the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of people in addition to an inestimable number of dead and missing people. This article combines the history and ethnographic work carried out between 2018 and 2021 with the homeless populations from conflict regions and hosted in the ‘Nacaca Displaced Persons Camp’ (Campo de Deslocados de Nacaca), built in the district of Montepuez, south of Cabo Delgado, a region previously considered safe. The aim of this paper is to analyse how the multiple faces of traumatic violence (physical, psychological and symbolic) are processed in which war victims are continually exposed through silencing imposed by different actors who frequent their new places of refuge.

Between Resilience and Radicalisation: Reassessing the Trajectory of Internally Displaced Populations in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique

EGNA SIDUMO — 2024-12-18

Displacement is an endemic phenomenon that affects those uprooted, the communities that feel the impact of those arriving, governments, and the international agencies which are increasingly engaged in organising the displaced. The current war in the north of Mozambique, which has caused a massive displacement of people from 2017 onwards, may be related to a number of factors, including economic, social and even political. Although some actors and analysts include ethnicity as part of the causes, this has more often than not been analytically downplayed when grappling with the dynamics of, particularly, the groups that oppose the Mozambican government. This article analyses the dynamics of relationships between internally displaced people and host communities in Cabo Delgado, especially underlining, firstly, the resilience of communities in the face of extremist violence and, secondly, the distrust that typically shapes conflict. The latter dimension is aggravated by a historical past based on ethnic, political and social differences – cleavages that are accentuated and reproduced within the centres of displaced people and between these and host communities. We argue that factors such as poverty, hunger, lack of jobs or work opportunities, as well as poor access to arable land for family food production, exacerbate the relationship dynamics and create an environment conducive to the outbreak of small-scale conflicts that can, in the medium and long term, open spaces for radicalisation and more violence.

The Morality of Schooling: Women's Education as an Arena for Social Tension in Cabo Delgado

CARMELIZA ROSARIO — 2024-12-18

In this article, I reflect on education as a continuing arena of tension for people in Cabo Delgado. The tension between formal (state-sponsored) and religious education as a backdrop of the conflict in Cabo Delgado has been widely mentioned but largely misunderstood. Scholars have consistently mentioned poverty and people’s lack of access to formal education as drivers of the disenfranchisement that has led to violent extremism in the province. There are also references to how the insurgent movement has shunned formal education in favour of Islamic teachings. The existing literature about the insurgent’s rejection of state-sponsored education, especially for girls, fails to address a trajectory whereby formal (state-sponsored) education has been a field of tension for a long time. Similar tensions happened across the Swahili coast in both English and French colonies. From interviews focused on women’s relationships and experiences with both the colonial and postcolonial state, it emerged that Muslim populations in Cabo Delgado, particularly on the coast, have a long history of suspicion towards state-sponsored education. This includes showcasing a locally established practice for women’s education that predated and existed alongside formal education. This follows that cultural and religious dynamics do not preclude women’s influence in society, particularly education. In fact, it relies on her active participation. At the same time, despite potential violent cooptation, in the context of the conflict, the insurgent movement is able to tap into the existing tensions, including that around state-sponsored education. Evidence from the field indicates that, despite the disadvantages of resisting formal education, religious education remains central to most people, not just those following the extremist movement. What may appear to be an extremist rupture from mainstream practice should be understood within a logic operating on shared and familiar values.

God, Grievance and Greed: War in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique

LIAZZAT J. K. BONATE — 2024-12-18

In 2017 a ‘new war’, characterised as a jihadist insurgency, erupted in the northerly Mozambican province of Cabo Delgado.The war began in the context of the discovery of new natural resources, the setting up of transnational extractive industries and of an economic crisis generated by the ‘hidden debt’ scandal. Harsh military responses from the Mozambican government and international actors – SADC and Rwanda especially – have not halted the insurgency, which has dramatically expanded, especially since the insurgents declared their allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) in 2019, causing massive internal displacement of the civil population. This article is an introduction to the special issue, God, Grievance and Greed: War in Cabo Delgado (Mozambique), which aims to bring historical and ethnographic depth to the study of this conflict. The issue draws together a series of layered interventions reflecting the multi-faceted nature of the events, as well as their social and human dimensions, without silencing the voices of the people involved. This introduction serves to frame those interventions, establishing a broad chronology of the conflict; provide an overview of the complex history of Cabo Delgado; discuss the literature produced so far on the insurgency; and locate the events in Cabo Delgado at the interface between local dynamics – capitalist extraction, the erosion of democratic processes, youth marginalisation, ethnic conflict – and global jihadism.

Domination, Collaboration and Conflict in Cabo Delgado’s History of Extractivism

JOÃO FEIJÓ — 2024-12-18

A long history of extractive industries and activities have shaped the societies of northern Mozambique, and the Cabo Delgado province in particular. For centuries, the growing international demand on local resources had a great impact on the northern micro-societies. The demand for cheap labour and natural resources, ranging from ivory and cotton, to timber, rubies, land, gas and more, involved thousands of local actors in its extraction, reproducing systems of local power. The persistence of poverty, inequality and conflicts, as well as simmering and sometimes grand-scale violence, fits into a long-term trend of extractivism. Through a historical approach and field observations, we focus on the political economy of extracting natural resources.
We point out the persisting basic patterns of extractivism that accompanied Mozambique’s integration into global markets, and continued or even deepened, in the post-independence period. These activities are oriented towards foreign markets. They are instigated by foreign investment, but invariably carried out in collaboration with a chain of national gatekeepers. In a clientelist system, local elites resort to their proximity to the state to reproduce their power, often at the expense of state expropriation. Weak state institutions have the functional effect of reproducing the elites, also serving the interests of extractivist capital. It is, however, a system with many and profound contradictions, producing conflict and violence, which also recurrently put those interests at risk.

The Jihadi Insurgency in Cabo Delgado: Ideology, Protagonists and Causes

LIAZZAT J. K. BONATE — 2024-12-18

Based on fieldwork interviews with the internally displaced Muslims from the regions affected by the insurgency, such as Palma, Mocímboa da Praia, Macomia, Quissanga and others, this article unpacks the context, ideology and protagonists that gave rise and afforded sustenance to the insurgency in Cabo Delgado. After providing an overview of the historical trajectory of Islam in Mozambique, the article presents the ideological and historical underpinnings of the contemporary global jihadi movements, expanding into Africa and Mozambique. The article argues that for jihadism to take roots in any place, there should exist militant protagonists and the grievances that serve as emotional entry points for recruitment. Thus, the article examines the processes by which jihadi protagonists emerged in various communities and the grievances they articulated in order to provoke the insurgency against the State.

Growing Apart: The Historical Construction of Difference in Northern Cabo Delgado, Mozambique

ANA MARGARIDA SOUSA SANTOS — 2024-12-18

How do past experiences of violence map onto present day narratives of insurgency in northern Mozambique? In the insurgency that began in northern Mozambique in 2017, narratives of past violent encounters and animosity between different ethnic groups sharing the coastal space emerge as a way of making sense of the conflict. This article explores the ways these narratives stem from existing historical tensions between Makonde and Mwani inhabiting the northern districts of Cabo Delgado. Drawing on ethnography and oral history to highlight the continuities in narrative, I will explore the ways in which current violence is interpreted through references to pivotal moments of violence in the past. I will address the historical construction of difference between Makonde and Mwani to consider what it may tell us about the fractures that underpin the insurgency.