State Discourse on Internal Security and the Politics of Punishment in Post-Independence Mozambique (1975–1983)

Abstract

This article explores state discourse on domestic security threats and the way the Mozambican party-state sought to counter them in the decade after independence. It analyses the ways in which government forces dealt with ideological enemies, crime and social disorder. It is argued that Frelimo's quest for hegemony and its obsessive aim of building a state-nation under the project of ‘socialist revolution’ led to harsh intolerance of all that was considered a hindrance to these objectives. As obstacles to the project arose from the outset, the party-state developed a political analysis of security that did not distinguish internal from external security threats. The result was the institutionalisation of a politics of punishment as a state instrument of power and social control aiming to repress, deter and educate party-state opponents and all individuals outside the realm of socialist and revolutionary principles defined by the party-state. The article demonstrates that much of this politics of punishment represented to considerable sections of Mozambican society a return to the ‘old regime’ insofar as the post-independence state reproduced some colonial mechanisms of punishment and social control.