Michel Cahen. Os Outros: Um historiador em MoÖ§ambique, 1994. Basel: P. Schlettwein Publishing, 2004. xxxii + 229 pp. No price listed (paper), ISBN 978-3-908193-13-5.

Reviewed by M. Anne Pitcher (Colgate University)
Published on H-Luso-Africa (August, 2005)

Renamo: From Armed Movement to Political Party

Os Outros: Um historiador em Moçambique, 1994 (The Others: A Historian in Mozambique, 1994) is a courageous effort by the French historian and researcher, Michel Cahen, to document the transition by Renamo, the Mozambique National Resistance, from armed movement to political party during 1994. Following Mozambique's independence in 1975 and the government's declaration of Marxism-Leninism in 1977, Renamo fought against the ruling party, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique or Frelimo for around fifteen years before signing a peace accord in 1992. As part of the accord, national elections for the President and the National Assembly followed in 1994 and Frelimo and Renamo were the two major parties that contested them.

The book is courageous because for many years Mozambique's ruling party and its supporters constructed Renamo as armed bandits, or stooges of the South African and Rhodesian governments; as murderers, torturers, Satanists: in short, as The Others (Os Outros). In so doing, they effectively stifled most attempts by academics and investigative journalists during the war to find out who Renamo was, why, and how people joined it, and what it stood for. As Cahen observes, "during 15 years of war, not a single intellectual went to Renamo zones" (p. xxi). As a result, those outside of the movement's immediate circles knew very little about Renamo as an organization or about its supporters, even though, as Cahen notes, approximately half a million people across the country attended Renamo rallies during the 1994 electoral campaign and 34 percent of the electorate voted for Renamo's presidential candidate, Afonso Dhlakama. Although Cahen makes it perfectly clear that he is no sympathizer with either Renamo's methods or its agenda, as he emphasizes, "the appearance of a book not in favor of Renamo, but on Renamo and moreover, on the world of Renamo and its environs seems worthwhile to me " (p. xxviii).

On Renamo and the world of Renamo, Cahen has much to offer and he does so in an engaging style that is beautifully translated by Fatima Mendonça from a French edition published in 2002. Written in the form of a daily diary, Cahen gives us a captivating account of the trials and tribulations of Renamo's electoral campaign from its inception in September 1994 to the confirmation of the election results in late November 1994.

Over the course of the campaign, Cahen joined an entourage of journalists, security personnel, advisors, and generals accompanying Dhlakama as he campaigned throughout the country. At each of the sixty-four rallies he observed, Cahen counts heads, confers with the police, notes the content of speeches, and converses with supporters, helicopter pilots, the United Nations, and even Dhlakama himself. The day by day, hour by hour recollection of the mundane as well as the sublime moments of the campaign gives the work a sense of immediacy. Cahen's reproduction of conversations and interviews using colloquial expressions and idioms also adds richness, humor, and depth.

On several levels, the world of Renamo that Cahen reveals is one that many Mozambicans share. For example, when reflecting on the colonial period, several of Cahen's informants recounted events familiar to many Mozambicans (regardless of their contemporary political persuasion) who lived under the Portuguese. They recalled a world where the arbitrary power of the colonial regime constantly intervened in people's lives--to rob them of what little income they had, to inflict forced labor on them, or at its most extreme, to whisk them off to São Tomé. Moreover, socioeconomically, Renamo cadres were not so different from their Frelimo counterparts. They had some education but few of them had college degrees. They were traders, teachers, workers, and farmers. In their day to day lives, they encountered the same challenges and frustrations as other Mozambicans confronted: they experienced drought, lamented lost opportunities, and waited hours for transport.

But Cahen's interviews with Renamo cadres and his recollection of Dhlakama's speeches also shed some light on what distinguished Renamo as a military movement and as an opposition political party. Many cadres recounted that they joined Renamo because they disagreed with Frelimo policies or they had been abused or discriminated against by Frelimo in some way. One respondent from the center of the country felt that he was denied a grant to do his doctorate due to Frelimo's favoritism towards southerners. Another joined Renamo because the ruling party sent him to a reeducation camp where he was tortured on several occasions. Some cadres were former chiefs who had lost their positions after independence, while others were traders whose places of business were taken over by the state and made into cooperatives.

These details help to explain why Renamo experienced a relatively smooth transition from armed organization to political party in just two years. First, Cahen's findings suggest that Renamo had a substantial number of cadres in the political wing of the movement who were able to adjust rather quickly to the transition. This runs contrary to Frelimo's insistence that Renamo was largely a military organization. Frelimo supporters thus were surprised by the degree of organization of Renamo's campaign in 1994.

Second, Dhlakama drew on the original grievances driving those who joined Renamo in the 1980s to serve as central themes of his campaign. At nearly every stop, Dhlakama made frequent appeals to ethnicity and religion. He criticized the gamut of Frelimo policies and practices that had been implemented just after independence, such as communal villages, reeducation camps, forced removals from urban areas to the countryside of persons deemed unemployed, and the use of the secret police. He then built on these old grievances to criticize conditions in 1994, such as the lack of healthcare and education, escalating prices, rising corruption, and growing inequality between the elite and the ordinary people. Lastly, Dhlakama took advantage of the clause in the peace accord that mandated the holding of democratic elections to claim that he brought democracy and freedom to Mozambique.

While the transition may have been smooth, however, like most political parties, there were tensions within the party that Cahen subtly recognizes. First, Dhlakama's advisors did not always give him the best advice. They shielded information from him and he remained uninformed about the leanings of the electorate in certain parts of the country. Secondly, Cahen foreshadows a later break between Afonso Dhlakama and Raul Domingos, a well liked and popular member of the party, by observing that Domingos had little role in the campaign. Finally, in what Cahen sees as a serious tactical error, Dlakama abstained from serious campaigning in the southern part of Mozambique. In doing so, he reinforced a widespread belief in the south that Renamo would discriminate against southerners if it got into power and virtually handed three provinces to Frelimo.

Except for some isolated passages in the work, Cahen largely lets the reader draw her own conclusions about what this all means. What I concluded is that by personalizing their stories and by illustrating how members of Renamo shared the misfortunes of other Mozambicans, Cahen in effect humanizes them, sheering away their mystique as "armed bandits," without making a moral judgment one way or another about their motives. Secondly, Dhlakama's speeches were at times inflammatory and insulting but they do not suggest that he was some wild eyed, crazy megalomaniac as he was often depicted. Instead, Cahen shows that he acted like most opposition leaders and capitalized on weaknesses of the ruling party to demand accountability and to improve his own chances at victory. Further, the rifts and tensions in the party suggest that while Renamo was able to effect a transition to political party, it was not invincible, but vulnerable like other movements. Its leader was not all powerful, but a human, making human mistakes.

Cahen reveals that Renamo was not "the other," but knowable and flawed. Yet, at the end of it all, the work leaves me with certain questions that I wish Cahen had reflected upon. What about all the atrocities? What about the reports that "supporters" did not voluntarily join the movement but were kidnapped into it? How do Renamo cadres explain the countless deaths of ordinary Mozambicans and the attacks on schools, clinics, farms, and factories? If there was a political wing, how big was it? Were there tensions between the military and political wings of the party during the war or during the campaign? What did people at rallies, particularly women, from whom we hear almost nothing in the book, think about Renamo? What motivated people to vote for Renamo aside from receiving free t-shirts on occasion?

From the vantage point of the recent 2004 national elections, where Renamo received nearly a million fewer votes than it did in 1994, perhaps the answers to those questions would help to explain what has happened to this party in the last ten years. Undoubtedly, the dogged efforts by Frelimo to deprive Renamo of both legitimacy and resources have paid off, but what realignments and rifts among the cadres throughout the country can explain the abysmal turnout of Renamo supporters in 2004? Perhaps in another work, Michel Cahen can rely on his prodigious grasp of Mozambican history and his now intimate understanding of Renamo to explore the rise and decline of Mozambique's major opposition party.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-luso-africa.

Citation: M. Anne Pitcher. Review of Cahen, Michel, Os Outros: Um historiador em MoÖ§ambique, 1994. H-Luso-Africa, H-Net Reviews. August, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10812

Copyright © 2005 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.