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The Morality of Revolution - Benedito Luís Machava

The Morality of Revolution

Reeducation Camps and the Politics of Punishment in Socialist Mozambique, 1968–1990
Buch | Hardcover
352 Seiten
2024
Ohio University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8214-2582-4 (ISBN)
CHF 129,15 inkl. MwSt
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This book foregrounds the contradictions between Frelimo’s socialist ambitions and the reality of its carceral regimen. Rather than rehabilitative institutions, the party’s camps were spaces of social abandonment where detainees suffered at the hands of overseers and endured wretched conditions in remote rural sites.
The Morality of Revolution offers the first historical examination of urban cleanup campaigns and reeducation camps in socialist Mozambique. The book presents the camps as the template for independent Mozambique’s punitive society under Frelimo. Individuals who transgressed the law and socialist normative codes of behavior were targeted by the revolutionary party, which obsessively pursued putative wrongdoers in an effort to build a new society from the ruins of Portuguese colonialism. Benedito Luís Machava argues that the socialist experiment, while ushering in an era of economic development and social progress, sought also to remake the moral fabric of Mozambican society. At play was the contradictory combination of high modernist, socialist aspirations and conservative anxieties rooted in a moralist reading of society.

From its inception in 1974 to its demise in the late 1980s, the reeducation program was a do-it-yourself enterprise. The Frelimo government, unable to finance and support the carceral regime, expected its agents and the detainees to carry out the ambitious project on their own. Without material and human resources to run the program, state officials compelled detainees to build their own detention facilities; to grow their own food; to enforce their own political education; and in many ways, to oversee their own incarceration. The state’s incapacity to translate the salvationist ideas of reeducation into planned action—a general feature of the socialist experiment in Mozambique—produced spaces of social neglect and castigation that negatively affected both the inmates and the personnel tasked with disciplining and reeducating them.

Benedito Luís Machava is an assistant professor of African history at Yale University, where his teaching and research interests include colonial and postcolonial Africa, Lusophone Africa, liberation struggles, decolonization, nation-state building, and socialism in Africa.

List of Illustrations


Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1 Revolutionary Morality and the Struggle for Mozambique, 1968–1974

Chapter 2 Political Transition and the Birth of the Reeducation Pipeline, 1974–1976

Chapter 3 “These Moral Deserters Must Be Reeducated” : Political Consolidation, Development, and the Punitive State, 1977–1983

Chapter 4 Vigilante Citizenship and the Politics of Denunciation, 1974–1984

Chapter 5 Reeducation Camps, Austerity, and the Carceral Regime: A Portrait from Niassa 142

Chapter 6 Abandonment and Everyday Life in Reeducation Camps, 1974–1982

Chapter 7 Wretchedness and Survival during Operação Produção and the Civil War, 1983–1989

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag 10.12.2024
Reihe/Serie New African Histories
Zusatzinfo 2 Maps
Verlagsort Athens
Sprache englisch
Maße 152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt Geisteswissenschaften Geschichte Regional- / Ländergeschichte
Recht / Steuern Strafrecht Kriminologie
Sozialwissenschaften Politik / Verwaltung Politische Systeme
Sozialwissenschaften Politik / Verwaltung Politische Theorie
ISBN-10 0-8214-2582-X / 082142582X
ISBN-13 978-0-8214-2582-4 / 9780821425824
Zustand Neuware
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