Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Revisionism in Postcolonial Africa: The Case of Mozambique, 1975-1994

"When Mozambique's sixteen-year-long armed conflict ended in 1992, it was considered one of the most vicious wars in independent Africa. The war took one million lives, devastated the country's economy, brutalized the population and left most people destitute. On one side stood the government, dominated by Frelimo, the ruling party which had won Mozambique its independence from Portugal in 1975. On the other was Renamo, a proxy army created and used by the dying white supremacist regimes of the region to destabilize Mozambique. The war produced no clear victor and an internationally-brokered peace deal guaranteed Renamo, widely recognized as the main perpetrator of wartime atrocities, a place in Mozambique's post-war political system." "Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Revisionism in Postcolonial Africa examines the government's attempts to revise postcolonial Mozambique's traumatic past with a view to negotiating the present. Alice Dinerman stresses the path-dependence of memory practices while tracing their divergent trajectories, shifting meanings and varied combinations within ruling discourse and performance."--BOOK JACKET.