The State against the Peasantry: Rural Struggles in Colonial and Postcolonial Mozambique. Merle L. Bowen. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Pp. 320.

The coming to power of Frelimo in 1975 was facilitated by the Mozambican peasantry due to the fact that Frelimo was actively supported by the rural peasants. Along with ZANU in Zimbabwe, Frelimo was one of the few liberation organisations sustained and supported by China to achieve state power, in part due to the adoption of avowedly Maoist tactics. Indeed, Mozambique's population was almost all peasant and rural and the economic base of the country was agriculture. Yet, having achieved political power at the state level, Frelimo degenerated "from a popular and victorious liberation movement into a bureaucratic, anti-peasant, one-party state (p. 1)." At the same time, Frelimo gave priority to industrialisation, common to many African countries at the time, with agriculture reduced to supplying exports for earning foreign exchange and raw materials for domestic industry. As it turned out, the policies adopted by Frelimo were as unfavourable to Mozambique's peasantry as those of the Portuguese. Bowen demonstrates that this has not been an aberration arising after the wholesale adoption of neo-liberal solutions to Mozambique's developmental impasse, but rather, it was already in place during Frelimo's socialist vanguard era. They have continued under World Bank strictures and directives, but essentially spring from a shared set of negative policies towards the peasantry. Bowen's work seeks to provide a new look at the effect these policies have had on the peasantry and agricultural production.

Bowen focuses on the colonial period between 1950 and 1975. It is from this point that she then looks at the socialist collectivization experiment. In contrast to those who have blamed Mozambique's calamitous post-independence decline on apartheid South Africa's destabilization attempts and the vicious civil war with South African supported contras (i.e. Renamo), Bowen argues that Mozambique's decline in production is rooted in policies established during colonialism and continued by Frelimo. She takes issue also with those who argued that the main reason for the major fall in agricultural production was the disturbance of settlement patterns and the denigration of traditional practices by the "modernizing" Frelimo cadres sent out into the rural areas. Bowen rightly, I believe, argues that such attempts by Frelimo were progressive and provided, invariably for the first time ever, precious health and education facilities, as well as potable water, to nearly one and a half thousand communal villages. In addition, Bowen is right to point out that much of "traditional authority" derived its position from the colonial period and with ties to the authoritarian colonial regime. Their demise should not be overly lamented.

Frelimo's problem, Bowen asserts, was that it thought it could change the peasantry through collective production, the setting up of co-operatives and urbanisation through establishing communal villages. The opposition to a fraction of "middle class" agricultural producers was rooted in a hostility by Frelimo, shared by the Portuguese colonialists, to an emergent middle class that may develop economic and political independence and resist the state. Whilst it did dismantle oppressive rural structures, Frelimo's ambition to clear away what they regarded as an antiquated way of living and production was doomed, particularly as there was no debate with affected persons on how this could be achieved and whether, indeed, change was even desired. To argue her case, Bowen uses data collected from in-depth fieldwork carried out in the Ilha de Josina Machel for two years, which is a rural area where the Incomati and Matseculi rivers merge in Manhica district, Maputo Province.

The strength of Bowen's book is in the assertion of the continuation of the colonial period and Frelimo's rule -- both the Portuguese and the post-independence authorities set up co-operatives. She also shows how individuals and family groups accommodated both colonialist and socialist policies to form survival strategies. Simply put, Frelimo (and the colonialists) did not curtail options outside of the official policies: agency remained and indeed stimulated a relative degree of manoeuvrability, with the co-operative ventures being utilised to the peasants' own benefit. This of course was severely diminished as the war intensified in the rural areas.

The book is an intriguing story of the development (and decline) of peasant-based agriculture in southern Mozambique from the 1950s until the mid-1980s. The study broadens its focus to illustrate how the micro-region was brought into the South African mining industry and how peasants interacted with the Portuguese settler farms. The focus on southern Mozambique does lead to perhaps an over-emphasis on the effect of this integration, with Bowen arguing Portuguese Mozambique was integrated into a regional southern African economy and that this was necessarily under South African hegemony. Mozambique's economy was hence structured mainly in the interests of South African capital. Whilst this is true to a degree, it is far more so for the southern part of the country, namely Maputo, Gaza and Inhambane provinces, than it is for the central and northern parts of Mozambique. This aside, the study is an excellent example of in-depth fieldwork and critical empirical analysis. The book is recommended for researchers interested in the history of southern Mozambique, agriculture in southern Africa, and of the role of the peasantry in African economic life.

Ian Taylor
University of Botswana