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Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Revisionism in Postcolonial Africa: The Case of Mozambique, 1975-1994. By Alice Dinerman. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Pp. xx, 394; 5 maps. $140.00/£ 80.
Mozambique was once the shining symbol of radical postcolonial transformation, socialist orientation, Third World solidarity, the struggle against tribalism, racism, the oppression of women, illiteracy, disease, and underdevelopment. The People's Republic of Mozambique also became the site of one of the most ferocious "regional conflicts" in the endgame of the Cold War, which took a million human lives. And then, as if the faucet was turned, Mozambique became a shining symbol of post-Cold War negotiated conflict resolution, IMF-directed market reform, and internationally supervised elections. Moreover, these extreme vicissitudes registered under the watch of the same ruling party, Frente da Libertaçâo de Moçambique (FRELIMO), and even under the same roster of personalities dating back to the romantic prehistory of armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism. Such an astonishing history would provide a great study in political adaptation, if not a paraphrase of the whole postcolonial periphery from the epoch of developmental hopes to the epoch of market pragmatism and venality.
Alice Dinerman boldly set out to analyze how, during the 1990s, the...