10 - A Socialist Legal System in the Making: Mozambique before and after Independence

Abstract

On June 25, 1975, Mozambique gained its independence after ten years of armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism. The new government, led by FRELIMO (the Mozambican Liberation Front), was committed to dismantling the colonialist-capitalist system and starting the country on the long process of socialist transformation. The government recognized the need to construct a new legal system that would reflect and reinforce the aspirations of the popular classes, workers and peasants, although it assigned this task a lower priority than the economic transformation. It drew heavily on the experiences in the liberated zones, those areas governed by FRELIMO during the armed struggle, as it did in all the other sectors to be transformed. In these liberated regions the legal process had been democratized and, through trial and error, an embryonic system of popular justice had evolved. A central principle is a commitment to involving the entire community in all aspects of the legal process in order to protect and promote the interests of workers and peasants and ensure their active participation in the process of creating a socialist state. In short, popular justice is a critical component of class struggle in Mozambique. The chapter examines the development of popular justice and the tensions inherent in institutionalizing and formalizing it on a national scale. Both in the liberated zones and during the post-independence period this process has been characterized by a dialectic between experimentation and formalization, practice and theory, that ensures both popular input and adherence to revolutionary principles.