Liberation ideology and national development strategy in Mozambique

Abstract

At the beginning of 1980 Mozambique's President Samora Machel declared that the coming decade would be ‘the decade of Mozambique's victory over under‐development’. By 1990 the country would be well on its way to advanced socialism. Speaking on the same issue before the People's Assembly in December 1979 Samora Machel had said: To win this war we must fully and consciously assume the values that we gained during the national liberation struggle’. These two statements set the tone for this article. Looking ahead to the aims of national development strategy in the 1980s Machel refers the people of Mozambique back to the values gained during the national liberation struggle before 1974. The focus of this article is precisely on the process of transforming liberation ideology into national development strategy underway in Mozambique since 1975. Objective and subjective factors, the colonial legacy and liberation ideology, are of relevance in analysing the process. The article begins by briefly outlining the colonial legacy as the point of departure and the material foundation of Mozambique's development after independence. It then turns to the ‘values gained’ during the armed liberation struggle from 1964 to 1974, and discuss theoretical issues which were raised during that period and which related to the perspective of Mozambique's post‐independence development. Finally, it looks at the new phase of national development after 1975. Dealing with the key areas of political mobilisation and organisation, the state sector and rural development, the focus here is on the political‐administrative and socio‐economic problems of transforming the values gained, the experiences made, the political line developed during the preceding 10 years into a national development strategy. The article is based on a dialectical relationship, whereby the colonial legacy, liberation ideology and post‐independence development strategy can be looked upon as thesis, antithesis and synthesis. This framework of analysis is considered to be helpful in understanding the complex and contradictory process of development which Mozambique has been undergoing since independence.