Conceptions of gender in colonial and post-colonial discourses: The case of Mozambique.

Signe Arnfred
The Nordic Africa Institute
Uppsala Sweden
signe.arnfred@nai.uu.se

Paper Prepared for CODESRIA’s 10^TH General Assembly on “Africa in the New Millennium”, Kampala, Uganda, 8-12 December 2002. 

DRAFT, Nov 2002.

Seen in terms of conventional political science – and also as experienced from below, by Mozambican men and women - the recent history of Mozambique, during the latest fifty years, has been very dramatic, with several changes of political regimes, and almost three decades of war – from the onset of the armed struggle in 1964 to the Rome peace agreement in 1992. 

Most remarkable among the political shifts during these fifty years have been first the shift in 1975 from Portuguese colonialism to political Independence and Frelimo socialism, after a successful war of liberation, and second the shift in the late 1980s from Frelimo socialism to neo-liberal economic policies and structural adjustment program  (PRE – Programa da Re-estruturação Económica) under World Bank leadership. This time the name of the government did not change; Frelimo remained in power, but after its fifth Party Congress 1989 with a somewhat different political and economic agenda. 

The point I want to make in this paper has to do with the contradiction between on the one hand the ways in which each of these different politics of government have seen themselves as radical breaks with the immediate past – the Frelimo socialism of Independent Mozambique certainly saw itself as a break with Portuguese colonialism; and almost to the same extent institutions promoting the SAP/PRE saw this as a radical break with Frelimo socialism – and on the other hand the ways in which these different political regimes (in theory as well as in practice) have approached ssues of gender. Examined through a gendered lens these apparently radically different political lines have a lot in common; considered from this angle the political continuities seem to be much more dominant than the radical breaks. 

Thus from one point of view these fifty years of history include dramatic changes in lines of government: From colonial dominance and economic exploitation, over socialist politics and (attempts at) planned economy in a one-party state, to multi-party democracy and neo-liberal economic structures. From another point of view the dramatic changes become almost overshadowed by persistent continuities in certain political approaches. Within the field of politics and policies on gender, arguments and lines of thinking of each new period can be shown to build heavily on the previous one.  This in spite of the fact that for each of the decisive breaks: First Independence, and later the neo-liberal turn, part of the very profile of the change have been its gender policies: Frelimo Socialism boasted a high profile regarding women’s emancipation, as in the famous words of Samora Machel: “The liberation of women is a necessity for the revolution, a guarantee of its continuity and a condition for its success” (Machel 1973). Similarly the present period of donor-dominated development hammers the importance of gender mainstreaming in all political spheres. 

In the paper I’ll examine political documents – political speeches, official reports etc – from these three major periods: 1: Portuguese colonialism, 2: Frelimo socialism and 3: the SAP/PRE period of donor dominated development. I shall focus on lines of thinking and implicit assumptions, but also on actual policies on gender issues in the respective periods. 

Portuguese colonialism.

Portuguese colonial documents and political speeches are interesting reading for their  ideological bluntness: “To us Portuguese, colonization is essentially to lift the indigenous populations to our own level of civilization, by teaching them our religion, our language, our costumes. (...) It is our mentality that we want to transmit to the people of the colonies, we are not intending to take away their riches” (Ministro das Colonías[1], 1940). Colonization for the Portuguese, according to the Archbishop of Lourenço Marques, is about civilization, Christianization and aportuguesamento  – Portugalisation – of the indigenous population (Arquebispo Lourenço Marques, 1960: 2)[2]. 

Gender issues are rarely mentioned in this kind of political statements. In the colonial context, gender relations matching a Christian ideal are taken for granted as an aspect of the civilizing, Christianizing and Portugalizing mission. The conception of gender embedded in the civilizing mission only becomes explicit when it is challenged, which it is a) in general by the overall position of women; according to one colonial report in spite of per (European) definition woman-degrading costumes such as bride price (lobolo), levirate and polygamy “women in traditional settings enjoy considerable preponderance and prestige” (Rita Ferreira et al 1964: 75). And b) in particular in the matrilineal societies in northern Mozambique.

It is pathetic to see how the writers of colonial reports[3] are struggling to make the position of women in the matrilineal North[4] fit the pre-conceived image of the oppressed subordinated African woman in need of liberation. According to Silva Rego (1960) in the North it is the woman who dominates the family: the husband must leave his own village in order to marry; if the marriage doesn’t work out he will have to leave, and the woman will re-marry (Silva Rego 1960: 85). This of course is unacceptable by Christian standards, but the women take pride in the system as it is, and they fight against changes. This matriarchy might even look like women’s emancipation, Silva Rego says, hastening to explain that in actual fact this is far from the case. First because the individual dignity of the woman is not respected – the women are subordinated to the clan; secondly because true emancipation of the woman is for her to be part of a Christian family, with the man as the natural head of the family (chefe natural da familia) and the woman, at his side (Silva Rego 1960: 86, 25). 

Measured against the Christian marriage – monogamy, indissolubility and the man as head of the family – everything is wrong with family relations under conditions of matriliny: marriages are not particularly stable, and worst of all: the husband/father has no particular position. Men’s position are derived through women (not the other way round) and men are important as uncles (mothers’ brothers) not as fathers/progenitors. To the colonial administration, matriliny – or matriarchy (matriarchado) as it is called in contemporary texts – is a pain in the neck, presenting “indisputable inconveniences” (Rita Ferreira et al 1964: 78) for a series of reasons: Apart from family life being less stable, and the father not head of the family, “it is an acknowledged fact that patrilineal societies are better suited than the matrilineal ones for adaptation to rapid social and economic change” (Rita Ferreira et al 1964: 78). Matriliny doesn’t conform, neither to the demands of Christianity, nor to the demands of development, and furthermore these societies are irritatingly resistant to change.  

The difficult matrilineal societies in the north are described as particularly primitive and behind; the women are embedded in demeaning traditional customs, they have less access to schools and they are burdened by heavy workloads. Thus defined the women are now positioned in the usual subordinate situation, from where Christianity and civilization can come to their rescue with offers of dignity in Christian marriages, courses in sowing and hygiene (sowing was considered important as the half nakedness of the women was perceived as offensive) and men taking over in agricultural work (Rita Ferreira et al 1964: 79). 

There is an interesting relation between work and gender in this colonial discourse. As for men, inducing (or forcing) them to work is a part of the civilizing mission. The image of the lazy African is the point of departure; work as such has a civilizing effect, repression of idleness is a goal in itself “dignifying and uplifting the native through the work” (Governador Geral de Mozambique, 1948).  This line of argument seems only valid for men, however. As for women, the opposite seems to be the case. For women a heavy workload is an indication of subordination, the civilizing mission being to lift it off her shoulders, in order to enable her to devote herself to housework. “Development goes in the direction of leaving the bulk of agricultural work to the man. Also in Africa the woman shall become the queen of the home: a Rainha do lar” (Silva Rego 1960: 26). Civilization thus also includes the well known division of public/private with the husband “the natural head of the family” as worker and breadwinner, and the wife and mother as “queen of the home”. 

This is how things worked – or were supposed to work – at the level of ideology. In practical terms Portuguese colonialism was indeed based on women’s productive work in family agriculture, feeding the family while the men were away on forced or contract labour. Colonial exploitation of Mozambican wage labour was conditioned by salaries being kept very low, as male workers’ families were supported through women’s work on the land. Also the forced cotton cultivation in the North depended heavily on women’s labour. According to Allen Isaacman (1996) the physical burdens of the cotton regime – forced cultivation on family plots, usually one hectare for husband-and-wife, and half a hectare for single women – fell disproportionately on women’s shoulders: “Women were forced to help their husbands clear new fields and, in men’s absence, to cut trees and remove heavy stumps and even plow – strenous tasks that on the past had been performed almost exclusively by men” (Isaacman 1996: 53). At the same time, of course, women maintained principal responsibility for food production and household work. The colonial regime, thus, depended on women’s double workload: In the official ideology they were (or ought to be) housewives – Rainhas do lar –  in actual fact they were major producers. 

An additional problem with the Rainha do lar – ideology is that it naturalizes women’s procreative capacity, and tuck their role as mothers away into the private sphere. In this move the carpet is pulled under the feet of the women in northern Mozambique, taking pride in their role as mothers, not in the private context of nuclear male-headed families, but in powerful positions as lineage elders.  Power based on maternity and fertility is not recognized in the civilized Christian context, however, where fertility is trivialized as a function of nature, and maternity is reduced to education of children in private seclusion of the patriarchal family. 

Yet another aspect of women’s lives, also not accepted in its own right in Christian/colonial thinking, is sexuality. The general attitude of the Portuguese colonial power was a strong condemnation of the female initiation rites, because of their focus  on development and education of female sexuality[5]. Female initiation rites were considered by the colonial administration as well as by the Catholic church as “immoral and offensive to the human nature” (Medeiros 1995: 5). The attitude of the Protestant missions was no more permissive. In the writings of Henri Junod, a clergyman of the Swiss Mission[6], customs relating to female sexuality are so “vile and immoral” (Junod 1912/1974: 176) that he only can speak of them in an appendix for “doctors and ethnographers” written in Latin. It is bad enough to face explicit education of male sexuality; but to confront education of female sexuality is beyond the pale.

Similarly, Terence Ranger reports from Masasi district in Southern Tanzania, populated by matrilineal Makhuwa, Maconde and Yao peoples immediately north of Mozambique, how “the missionaries did not approve of the concept of womanhood in Masasi society” (Ranger 1972: 237). Ranger’s discussion relates to Protestant missionary attitudes to female initiation rites, which they considered as “much more obscene than the male ceremony”. “It was difficult,” writes Ranger “for the missionaries, perhaps especially for the white laywomen who had most to do with female initiation, to see the rites as Africans saw them. (....) There was a constant tension between the mission view of the role of women in Masasi, and the women’s view of their own role” (Ranger 1972: 237, 247). On the ‘civilized’ background of the Victorian ideal of female passionlessness[7] and ‘the Angel of the House’ (a Rainha do lar ) – as opposed to the demonized and demeaning image of the sexualized woman as prostitute and whore – it is not surprising that explicit celebration of female sexuality should be considered obscene and repugnant. According to this logic explicit female sexuality is indistinguishable from prostitution.

I have focused in the analysis of colonial attitudes to gender on the matrilineal societies in Northern Mozambique, because here the clashes between Christian so-called civilization and African realities are most explicit. In actual fact, however, the situation was very similar in other parts of Mozambique. Even if here, to the missionaries and colonizers’ relief, thanks to patrilineal kinship systems the man and father would be the “natural head of the family”, and thanks to the brideprice (lobolo) marriages would tend to be more stable, ie it was here more difficult for women to break out of a marriage. It is interesting to see that Rita Ferreira, pointing to the preponderant and prestigeous position of women in ‘traditional’ society, also remarks that women’s powerful positions instead of disappearing, in fact had been increasing in recent years, thanks to the absence of many men for prolonged periods (six to eighteen months) on work contracts away from home (Rita Ferreira et al 1964: 76). This is a limited power, however, Rita Ferreira adds, as the women are also more traditional and behind, less educated etc than the men. Thus the analysis ends up in the expected conclusion of subjugated women in need of civilization and education 

Summing up, the colonial attitude in terms of work, family, maternity and sexuality the situation looks as follows: 

Work: According to colonial ideology the men are lazy and the women are overworked[8]. Men are urged, if not forced, to work more, with the legitimation that work in itself is a civilizing endeavour. In the case of women, however, non-domestic work is an indication of oppression and subordination; at the level of ideology women should remain in the private sphere and devote themselves to housework as Rainhas do lar. At the level of practical policies, however, colonial economy was based on women’s productive work in agriculture. Partly to feed their families, but also to secure agricultural output for export, as in the case of cotton.

Family: At the level of ideology the family aimed at in colonial politics would be the Christian model, a goal for which the missionaries (Catholics and Protestants alike) were perpetually struggling. This ideal family did not correspond very neatly to family structures anywhere in Mozambique – thus the necessity of missionary struggle. The ideal family was monogamous, stable (divorces not tolerated) and with the man and father as family head. Nevertheless the missionaries talk of equality between man and wife, but it is an edition of equality for which the natural superiority of the man is a precondition: with woman as man’s companion (and subordinate) but with equal dignity in front of God (Biber 1987: 64). Also at the level of families, however, colonial realities (of course) were different. Families were broken up and dispersed by migratory work and by forced labour. Struggling to keep families together was one of many forms of resistance to colonial oppression. 

Maternity: Women’s role as mothers is located in the private sphere, as one aspect of her position as Rainha do lar.  Since the Christian family structure is unwaveringly patriarchal, and since motherhood in addition to being privatized is also naturalized and trivialized, no (or very little) potential female power is embedded in the role as mother.

Sexuality: Female sexuality is considered a tool for procreation and nothing more. The civilized norm for women is passionlessness: “Close your eyes and think of England” – which was allegedly the Victorian advice given to young women facing their sexual debut. To acknowledge the existence of female sexuality, to focus young women on their sexual potentials educating them in the area of sexual pleasure was considered vile, immoral and offensive to human nature.

Frelimo socialism.

Unlike in colonial times, when gender was not a policy issue in itself, in Frelimo context gender – or rather women’s emancipation – becomes an issue in its own right. During the armed struggle against Portuguese colonial power, issues of gender equality had been put on the agenda by women themselves, demanding the creation a women’s wing of the Frelimo guerilla army: In addition to the important female support to the guerilla struggle in terms of transport of weapons and other material, production and preparation of food etc., women claimed the right to become soldiers and to fight along with the men. The Destacamento Feminino was created in 1967, a few years later (1973) supplemented by the creation of a non-military women’s organization, the Organização da Mulher Moçambicana (OMM) in order to facilitate information and mobilization of peasant populations in support of the guerilla war. In one sense the OMM was a political organization, created to support Frelimo warfare; in another sense it was a politization of female gender networks which had always been there, creating a link from these networks to political power, ie Frelimo. As I was told by women in Cabo Delgado in 1983: OBS! Quote regarding Frelimo support to women against men. Interviewing in the north of Mozambique in 1983-84, I realized that in daily talk  ‘OMM’ was often synonymous with ‘women’. 

During the war it seems that women were still in command in the OMM, and even supported by Frelimo. After Independence in 1975 however, Frelimo took over. Things as important as development of a policy for women’s liberation could not be left to women – and certainly not to the largely uneducated peasant women who had struggled with Frelimo in the north of Mozambique. Centrally positioned in the Frelimo political line was the fight against ‘traditional society’ and the whole array of ‘usos e costumes’ of which the daily life of most Mozambicans was constructed. The performance of customary ceremonies was not directly criminalized, but strong political campaigns were waged against any such performance. These were the years of what has later been termed ‘the abaixo politics’.  ‘Abaixo ‘ means ‘down with’, and ‘down with lobolo’, ‘down with polygamy’, ‘down with initiation rites’ was shouted at every political meeting.  Frelimo’s socio-historical analysis was put forward, for instance in the documents for the 2^nd OMM conference in 1976. This conference preceded the 3^rd Frelimo congress in 1977 with only a few months, and these two events together mark the transformation of the previous political front Frelimo into a socialist party. The fingerprints of a communist party socio-historical analysis are strong in the OMM 2^nd conference documents. ‘Traditional society’ is seen as ‘feudal’ and it is analysed in terms of exploitation and oppression, not just by colonialism, but in equal measure by indigenous power structures. Any customary belief and practice is considered obscurantist, oppressive and an obstacle to progress and modernity.  Central in all of this is the alleged oppression and humiliation of women. 

Regarding the understanding of women’s position in ‘traditional society’ Frelimo’s analysis is not very different from the colonial one: Women are constructed as humiliated and oppressed. The analysis goes as follows: All Mozambicans, men and women alike were exploited and oppressed by the colonial system, but in addition to this “the Mozambican peasant woman is the victim of another form of oppression which is linked to the traditional-feudal ideology. This ideology sees the women as having only the role of serving the man – as object of pleasure, producer of children and worker without a salary. (...) This position of women is reinforced through institutions and ceremonies such as ‘initiation rites’, as well as the whole system of marriage, including lobolo, premature and forced marriages, and polygamy ” (OMM 1976: 89). 

Just as was the case in colonial writings, however – where, even if the image of the oppressed and overworked woman was maintained, it had to be acknowledged that “women in traditional settings enjoy a considerable preponderance and prestige” – there is on this point a certain ambiguity in some OMM /Frelimo documents. The dominant line is that about the oppression of women in ‘feudal-traditional’ society, this being one major legitimation for Frelimo’s push for modernization. Here and there, however, a different understanding is felt, an understanding indicating that women’s positions might also be threatened and marginalized, and not promoted and increased (as the dominant line would see it) with modernization. This understanding, from my point of view, is much more precise; but it remained an undercurrent, only popping up here and there in OMM/Frelimo writings, as in this passage from the OMM 2^nd conference documents: “In the countryside, where in reality it is the woman who make plans, who organize and who has since immemorial times been the main producer, we nevertheless see her relegated to the role of simple workforce in our cooperatives and communal villages” (OMM 1976: 58). 

Anyhow, in the dominant OMM/Frelimo understanding the way to women’s emancipation goes through her participation in the principal task – tarefa principal – of the revolution. As put by Samora Machel in his speech to the 2^nd  OMM conference in November 1976: “The decisive factor for the emancipation of woman is her engagement in the principal task, the task which transforms society. At that time [ie during the liberation war, SA] it was the struggle for liberation. What then constitutes the principal task in the present phase of the revolution? The principal task of the present phase of our process is the following: The construction of the material and ideological base for building a socialist society. Thus for the implementation of this strategy, which has as its objective the construction of socialism, the principal task is production and the principal form of action is class struggle” (Machel 1976: 23). 

Whereas participation in the war of liberation in many cases did bring changes also of male/female gender relations, strengthening the position of women vis a vis the men at a local levels,  participation in production or, as it was later re-phrased, participation in “the increase of production and productivity so as to fulfill the economic plan” (Rebelo 1981) did not have similar perspectives, from women’s points of view. In post-independence Frelimo politics women were instrumentalized as a workforce for the state and nation building. The focus in Rebelo’s speech[9] is the state and the economic plan, not the women. Women are requested to work hard in production – which in fact they had always been doing, and increasingly during the Portuguese colonial regime – and in addition to this not to forget their tasks as wives and mothers. Nevertheless this kind of politics was launched as ‘women’s emancipation’.[10]

In actual fact what happened was just that the double workload for women –  production as well as domestic work – was maintained, only with a different emphasis compared to the colonial ideology. Where during colonialism the lead image had been the Rainha do lar  (however with women’s productive role maintained and increased) the lead image now was the woman soldier and the woman producer – the image of the state farm tractor driver being very popular in Party contexts – however with the domestic roles as wife and mother maintained. In the socialist theory of women’s emancipation – from which the Frelimo women’s politics drew inspiration – the emancipatory effect of ‘women as wage workers’ is conditioned by state organized alleviation of domestic tasks in terms of creches, kindergartens etc. Such conditions were not in place in Mozambique. 

Also the Frelimo ideology regarding gender equality was characterized by a certain ambiguity, however of a different kind, more like double standards, similar (again) to the colonial double standards of “social priority of the man over his wife, but equal dignity in front of God” (Biber 1987: 64). In OMM/ Frelimo contexts the position of the man as family head is taken for granted, the gender equality aspect amounts to woman being seen as man’s companion, not his subordinate. Unlike the colonial writers, however, the Frelimo leadership was not troubled by matriliny – presumably because they knew nothing about it. Most of the party cadres came from the patrilineal South. Matriliny was only ‘discovered’ in Frelimo contexts in the course of the preparations for the Extraordinary OMM conference in 1984[11]. 

The man as family head / the woman as man’s companion were standard ingredients in the so-called ‘socialist family’ strongly supported by Frelimo as well as by OMM. Just like the Christian family model, the so-called ‘socialist family’ is monogamous, stable and should not be dissolved. Women’s easy access to divorce in the (matrlineal) North was frowned upon by the Party (Arnfred 1988). In the concluding document from the OMM Extraordinary Conference in 1984, the OMM is (as always) toeing the Party line: “The OMM Extraordinary Conference emphasized specifically the vital importance of the coherence, stability and harmony of the family, because this is the basic cell of our society, the foundation of the Mozambican Nation, and the basis for the consolidation of our State” (OMM 1984). 

In a speech during this travels in Gaza province in 1982 Samora Machel acknowledges the similarity between Frelimo and Christian morals: “We have the same ideas regarding the combat of alcoholism and prostitution, but we differ regarding the ways of interpreting phenomena in the world” (Machel 1981: 42). In this speech Samora Machel specifically pays homage to the Protestant missions in southern Mozambique. The protestants, like the Frelimo militants, had their reasons to be opposed to the Portuguese/Catholic colonial regime, enforcing aportuguesamento  and greatly impeding the Protestant missionary work. Thus an alliance developed between the Protestant church and the Frelimo militants, as expressed by Samora Machel in the Gaza speech: “Here, in the province of Gaza, the Protestant church, which was a center for the struggle against colonialism, cultivated some of these values” (Machel 1982: 40). The values, to which Machel refers, are the importance of monogamous and stable marriages, based on love, and the rejection of “idleness (vagabundice) alcoholism, prostitution and marginality” (Machel 1982: 40). “The Protestants helped us a lot” Machel continues, “they educated us in order to for us to know the value of a human being. Ever since the Portuguese effected the total domination of our country, the Protestants constructed churches, and there they taught us about our history, our value as human beings, our identity. They taught us that we were Mozambicans, Africans and not Portuguese” (Machel 1982: 40). In this speech Machel also talks of the values of individual and collective higiene and cleanliness, of clean nails and well-combed hair, and of the dignity of the family. Here as elsewhere he is coming down hard on women having children with different men, ie. children without fathers, ‘children of the bush’: “Such children are born like goats, coming from the bush, without knowledge of their father” (Machel 1982: 39). To be human in Samora’s eyes is to live in a patriarchal, monogamous family: “We are human beings, we have family, we have parents, we have sons and daughters, we have husbands and wives, we form a cell of society. For this reason we condemn adultery, for this reason we condemn ‘children of the bush’” (Machel 1982: 40). 

Even worse than ‘children of the bush’ are prostitutes, “women who transform their bodis into shops. (...) A prostitute is a rotten person with a foul stench” (Machel 1982: 33).  A particular kind of prostitutes, according to Machel, are “girls of twelve to sixteen years” who hunt down adult men in political power. Interestingly, the President’s blame is laid exclusively on the girls, and not on his fellow Party members, the powerful politicians letting themselves be seduced.  In a later speech, at the occasion of the Extraordinary OMM conference in 1984, Samora Machel continued this line of blaming the women: “It is a shame to be a single mother. The phenomenon, the very concept, should be extinct” (Machel 1984. Quoted in Arnfred 1985: 18). 

I am quoting the Frelimo (and Mozambique) President  at length, because I find the similarities between Frelimo and Christian/Protestant morals sadly striking. In spite of all talk of ‘women’s emancipation’ Frelimo morals are strictly androcentric and even patriarchal. In the speeches of Samora Machel this whole moral package is termed “socialist ethics” (Machel 1982: 40). In actual fact, however, it is very similar to the ‘protestant ethics’ outlined by Max Weber in his famous work (Weber 1920/1984)[12]. Even Machels critique of vagabundice belongs here. According to Weber, for Protestants “waste of time is the first and in principle the deadliest of sins” (Weber 1920/1984: 167). Weber also notes how Protestantism even more fiercely than Catholicism bans sexuality: Catholicism decrees celibacy for priests, monks and nuns, but it does not interfere with sexual life in general, as long as it is practiced in matrimony. Under Protestant puritanism, however, “sexual intercourse is permitted, even within marriage, only as the means chosen by God for the increase of His glory, according to the commandment: ‘Be fruitful and multiply’” (Weber 1920/1984: 168). The Frelimo approach to (female) sexuality has (too) many similarities with the Protestant line. Female initiation rites are considered, if not explicitly as vile and immoral, then certainly as oppressive and humiliating, and centrally positioned among the usos e costumes  that are considered social problems for women, and which should be extinct. The OMM 2^nd conference documents, just as later the extraordinary OMM conference documents, talk of initiation rites, lobolo, polygamy etc as ‘women’s social problems’. In actual fact as I see it however, these usos e costumes were Frelimo’s problems, indicating aspects of Mozambican social life that did not conform to Frelimo’s strongly Christian /Protestant inspired version of modernity and development. 

Also in the denouncing of ‘tradtional-feudal society’: lobolo, polygamy and the rest, there is however an interesting ambiguity in Frelimo’s line. Samora Machel in the Gaza speech referred to above is, as usual, strongly against ‘traditional-feudal society’ – but he is also against young people who want to marry without specific ceremony and without consulting the parents: “They think that this is Independence” the President snorts, “they behave like animals, and they say that this is Independence!” (Machel 1982: 34). Furthermore these youngsters, when reproached by their parents, call the parents old fashioned and outdated, ultrapassados.  In this dispute the President is on the side of the parents, who are instructed to maintain their authority vis a vis the misbehaving offspring. Thus traditional marriage is bad, but no marriage at all is even worse, and the parents, much more rooted in ‘tradition’ that the younger generation, are supported. This ambiguity later develops into a line of ‘positive and negative aspects of tradition’ The decision regarding what is positive and what is negative remains, however,  with Frelimo. As it is put in the General Resolution resulting from the OMM extraordinary conference regarding initiation rites: “The Extraordinary Conference recommends that the local bodies of OMM, in coordination with the institutions of Education and Health, should go deeper into the study of context and practice of initiation rites, in order carefully to concretizise which are their negative and which their positive aspects. These bodies should submit their considerations to the Party leadership in order for it to have appropriate foundation for issuing directions as to what should be combated and what should be maintained” (OMM 1984).  

One aspect of women’s lives, which was not considered a social problem and thus did not figure in the OMM/Frelimo list of ‘women’s social problems’ was motherhood. There were Frelimo politics on work, family and (female) sexuality, but nothing on maternity – apart from projects of saude materno-infantil – mother-child health /reproductive health. Like ‘gender’ in colonial days, to Frelimo ‘motherhood’ was uncontroversial. As long as women produced the necessary amount of children for the Nation, all was well and fine.  Mozambique is fairly sparsely populated, at the Frelimo government welcomed a population increase. Talk of family planning was in terms of spacing births, less of limiting families. Here again women were instrumentalized and subordinated in relation the Nation’s needs.

Summing up, I have characterized Frelimo ideology as follows:

Work: The model is the Soviet-socialist inspired ‘women in male jobs’: The woman soldier, the woman tractor driver. Tacitly however, it is presumed that women also take care of domestic tasks. In actual reality women work a lot, particularly in agricultural production, as they have always been doing.

Family: The ‘socialist family’ is forwarded as the ideal. This family model however is indistinguishable from a Christian, particularly a Protestant ideal.

Sexuality: Female sexuality is dealt with only in negative terms (as prostutution, blaming the woman). Campaigns are waged against female initiation rites.

Maternity  is taken for granted.

I have focused critically on Frelimo ideology, because of its deplorable lack of understanding of actual conditions of male/female relations in Mozambican daily life, and because of its unsavory (to my taste) mix of socialist/communist ideology with Protestant puritanism, both of these lines of thought being strongly androcentric and patriarchal, if not outright misogynist.  Nevertheless, in actual political practice in the post-Independence years, quite a lot of things did happen that were useful also for women: Wide-ranging programmes of education and mobilization and political participation at local levels, to name just a few of many important changes in the early years of Independence. Before long, however, the Frelimo/Renamo war paralyzed political and economic change, and the Mozambique that emerged from the war, at the time of the Peace Accord in 1992, in many respects was very different from the immediate post-Independence situation. 

Donor dominated development.

The Mozambique of Frelimo socialism was a very particular country with a very particular colonial past and an equally important history of struggle. The Mozambique of SAP and PRE is just another poor African country. From the late 1980s onwards Mozambique became integrated in the ‘normal’ development setup under the neo-liberal auspices of the IMP and the World Bank, with donor agencies pouring in and with masses of international NGOs. Maputo’s bumpy streets were flooded with donor agencies’ expensive cars, and the previously empty shops were filled with goods for those who can buy.  

These transformations also brought changes in the field of gender. From the first UN Women’s conference in Mexico City 1975 and helped along by a further series of UN conferences on women, population and human rights, a globalized approach to ‘women’ and ‘gender ‘ in development contexts has been created. In a strange kind of dialogue between struggling women and accomodating/coopting state and donor bureaucracies, a standardized language and standard approaches to gender issues have been developed. Thus gender politics in this era depend a lot on gender struggle from below. The ideas of ‘women in development’ and later ‘gender and development’ were invented by women’s groups and introduced into development language through lobbying and advocacy. Most frequently the government and donor agencies – in a general climate of neo-liberal politics – do their best to coopt and integrate, if possible by undermining in practice the political implications in the gender language that they have felt obliged to apply. The very language of gender is a case in point[13]. When the vocabulary of gender-and-development was introduced into the development debate in the 1980s, it was advocated by feminists, who wanted to critizise the dominant women-in-development (WID) approach for dealing only with integration of women into existing development policies, with no critical analysis of development as such, and with no criticism of the unequal power relationships between men and women. Nevertheless, in spite of the good intentions, which were through gender-and-development (GAD) thinking to politicize the WID debate, the opposite seems to have happened. Where talking about women implied awareness of women's marginalisation and subordination (this being the reason for specific efforts for integrating women) the term gender is used as a neutral term, referring to both women and men.

Because of the overall standardization of development approaches in neo-liberal economic contexts, development approaches to gender in Mozambique are not very different from development approaches to gender elsewhere. What is specifically Mozambican is rather the kind of dialogue, the kind of challenge to government and development machineries that the lobby groups of women activists, women’s NGOs and intellectual women manage to establish. During the Frelimo era Mozambican civil society organizations were almost non existent, and OMM had been the one and only women’s organization. With the political changes in the late 1980s – with PRE Programa de Re-estruturação Economica, later re-named PRES Programa de Re-estruturação Economica e Social, and with the end of socialism – NGOs emerged all over the place, including a series of NGOs working with women’s issues. An umbrella organization, Forum Mulher, was created, embracing national and international NGOs, government institutions working with women’s issues, as well as women/gender aware individuals from trade unions and political parties[14].  Over the years Forum Mulher has become a focus for debate on women’s issues and quite an important lobby group, usable for pushing women’s issues where and when it is felt needed. The Post-Beijing plan of action was a result of this kind of lobby work: a series of plans regarding development of relevant gender issues in various ministries. The planning in this case took place at a very general level – but nevertheless it could be used as a tool for putting further pressure on the government. 

That pressure is needed is obvious. The development of a unified, donor financed and supervised plan for the ministry of Agriculture, the so-called PROAGRI: National Programme of Agrarian Development – may in this context serve as an example.  The PROAGRI process started in the mid-1990s and since then a series of plans have been elaborated and a series of joint donor evaluations have taken place. From the side of the donors there has been a more or less steady insistence regarding consideration of gender factors in the PROAGRI planning process, and various gender focal points internally in the Ministry of Agriculture as well as in the Directories for Agriculture in the provincial governments have been established. Nevertheless the push for gender awareness in PROAGRI contexts continues an uphill struggle.

As expressed by one woman who at an early point was involved in the PROAGRI process, all this about ‘gender awareness’ is in actual fact very simple: “Actually it is nothing revolutionary, it is just simply to acknowledge the fact that in agriculture men and women generally perform different tasks, complementary and socially defined, and that when somebody plan to make an intervention in this sector, it will be a good idea to make an analysis regarding who does what and why, in order to be able to direct the support to the proper persons, in the most adequate form, for the best effect. (...) An important aspect, in this context not to be forgotten, is that in Mozambique, for historical reasons, the major part of the actual work with the crops in the field is done by women, as their regular and permanent work. The men will clear the bush, and they may participate in the sowing and the harvesting, but for the rest of the time they will often be on the lookout for waged employment in order to be able to buy such non-agricultural products as the family needs. The men also deal with the cattle. If we consider the fact that the family sector produces around 95% of the country’s basic agricultural products, it becomes abundantly clear that is the Mozambican women who feed Mozambique with grain, potatoes, groundnuts and vegetables. Any support to the family sector should thus be directed to this group...” (Adam 1997: 9).

This indeed seems very simple and straightforward. That the main producers in family agriculture are women is a well known fact, and since in Mozambique the family sector in agriculture is by far the largest one[15], in terms of persons engaged in production, as well as in terms of produced goods, women obviously are centrally positioned.  How then is this reflected in the plan? 

Well, it is not. The PROAGRI Master Document, containing the 1998 – 2003 plan, is a masterpiece in deliberate gender blindness. The family sector figures fairly prominently in the plan. It is acknowledged that this sector comprises some 3.000.000 families occupying a total farming area of 3.500.000 ha of land. It is also acknowledged that about 55% of the total farmed area is concentrated in the three northern provinces of Nampula, Cabo Delgado and Niassa. But gender aspects are not mentioned with one word. In the text of the document neither men nor women are agents; the way it is put is as follows: “the family sector grows commercial crops such as ....”, “the family sector engages in the cutting and sale of firewod...” (Ministry of Agriculture 1998: 29). To be noted here is a) that the sector as such is the subject, neither men nor women, b) that what is mentioned are commercial crops and firewood for sale. That women in the family sector produce food to feed the vast majority of the Mozambican population outside the market economy is apparently of no concern. Also not mentioned is the fact that the three northern provinces in which 55% of the total farmed area are located are populated by Makhuwa, Maconde and Yao peoples, all matrilineal.  

That such is not mentioned comes, however, as no surprise. Especially as the general strategy of the whole PROAGRI endeavour is defined as  “the transformation of the subsistence agriculture into one that is more integrated in the functions of production, distribution and processing, in order to achieve the development of a subsistence agrarian sector which contributes with surpluses for the market and the development of an efficient and participatory entrepreneurial sector” (Ministry of Agriculture 1998: 37). The gender effects of this strategy are not investigated, and maybe for good reasons: Transformation of subsistence agriculture into more market-oriented production will – especially in the matrilineal areas, where the generally the women control not only food production but also the distribution of food – imply transfer of social power from women to men[16]. And as for the development of ‘an efficient and participatory entrepreneur sector’ – one may wonder if these ‘entrepreneurs’ in their majority will be women – or men? 

Oddly reminiscent of the colonial as well as the Frelimo ambiguities, acknowledging womens “preponderance and prestige” in traditional settings (Rita Ferreira et al 1964: 75) or that in the countryside it is “the woman who organize and who has since immemorial times been the main producer” (OMM 1976: 58), also in the PROAGRI plan such ambiguities are present as an, however weak, undercurrent. No talk of women, no, but it is acknowledged that in the family sector “producers are highly efficient in the utilization of the existing means and that they possess an enormous potential to increase the current levels of production” (Ministry of Agriculture 1998: 53). The way, however, in which this potential will be developed is through marketization, which by all indications is most likely to favour men. 

Thus the PROAGRI plan is full of gender, but it is all implicit, and strategies tend to favour men. Maybe this is the reason for the consistent gender blindness? Gender is mentioned only once in the 94 pages long document, in the following words: “An evaluation of the PROAGRI in the light of the gender issue will be conducted in 1998” (Ministry of Agriculture 1998: 92). In my reading, this looks like a war against women. No wonder that the present coordinator of the Gender Unit in the Ministry of Agriculture is frustrated: “We have difficulties in getting the leaders within the Ministry to take gender seriously. Some within the Ministry say that we are doing this work related to gender because it is the wish of the donors, and that we are doing it in order to ensure that we get the funds” (personal communication from a current review team). 

At a certain point Gender Units were created in several ministries, however without a clear mandate and outside the hierarchies of power. The 1998 review requested in PROAGRI Master Document has this to say about the Ministry of Agriculture Gender Unit: “It is placed in a situation where it does not have neither sufficient authority nor autonomy for doing what it ought to do. (...) At the moment the coordinator of the Gender Unit in the Ministry of Agriculture does not participate in the management group meetings, nor does she participate in the counseling group. In this way there are few possibilities of letting the women’s views be heard in these fora, or for introducing and promoting gender perspectives in the Ministry’s policies and plans” (quoted in Arthur 2000: 14).

The situation in the Ministry of Agriculture may be extreme, but it is not unique. In a critical evaluation of the Mozambican governments gender politics and programmes post-Beijing, ie from 1995 – 1999, commissioned by Forum Mulher, Maria José Arthur gives several similar examples. Summing up regarding the ministerial Gender Units she says: “If these units are not given capacity to make interventions, power to take decisions and means to carry theom out, they will remain no more than (false?) symbols of an intention which will never get beyond dead words on paper” (Arthur 2000: 14). 

At a very formal level all looks fine. Male/female equality is guaranteed in the constitution, and the government – like most African countries – has ratified the CEDAW convention. At the level of political practice, however, things look very different. A case in point is here the family law – or rather the lacking family law. Very early in the immediate post-independence period, a Family Law project was developed, in order to replace the Portuguese Código Civil from 1967, containing several clauses contradiction the constitution. The Family Law project contained clauses regarding acceptance of ‘de facto’ unions in order legally to protect the majority of women who were married ‘traditionally’ and not according to any law; the concept of a ‘male family head’ was eliminated. Maybe for these reasons the Family Law project was never turned into law. In 1982 a directive was issued, through which parts of the Family Law project could be used as guiding principle for juridical decisions. But in 1992 this directive was annulled, with the implication that it is now again the patriarchal values of the Portuguese Codigo Civil which rule family relations. As an aspect of the post-Beijing mobilization women’s groups have since 1997 been pushing parlamentary action regarding the Family Law, but the issue has been repeatedly postponed, and still now, at the end of 2002 there is no solution. 

In 2000, without consulting the civil society women’s groups and NGOs, the Mozambican government created a Ministry of Women and Coordination of Social Welfare. In practical terms, however, the situation was a continuation of the previous structure with a Department for Children, Women and Family within the Ministry for Coordination of Social Welfare. The new ministry now works with a National Directorate for Women running the gender issues within the ministry. The fact that the National Director is a previous head of Forum Mulher facilitates quite close collaboration between this government body and women’s groups. 

There is neither time nor space to go through all relevant Mozambican policy areas in this draft paper. Very generally it may be concluded that as for work, women’s work in the market sector is considered an indication of gender equality. This is not much different from the socialist vision of the woman wage worker and tractor driver: women in men’s work. What women have to deal with apart from this kind of work, in terms of housework and caretaking, seems more invisible than ever. 

Family: Frelimo, still in power, seems to stick to its old preference for Christian family values. In a Government programme proposal for 2000 – 2004 it is stated that “The Frelimo government will (...) guarantee the continuation of the Fatherland and stability of the family, the basic cell of our society” (Frelimo Comité Central 1999, quoted in Arthur 2000: 11).  Women’s groups are struggling for different visions of family life, more on women’s terms. 

Sexuality: Female initiation rites, which were a hot issue in colonial times as well as during Frelimo socialism, is a non-issue nowadays.  People are free to perform any ritual they feel like, and initiation rites are now again openly taking place, particularly in the northern part of the country.  Because of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which is widespread also in Mozambique (the prevalence rate of HIV infected on a national level is currently 12% (Danida 2002) sexuality is often associated to risk and danger.  But the strongly moral tone of previous politics have eased.

Motherhood is also not an issue. A Rainha do lar has disappeared. In struggling for a new family law, women’s groups are also fighting for legal protection of women as mothers, even if there is no father around. Motherhood as a basis for female power positions has no political recognition. 

Conclusion

In spite of the overall conclusion, which was stated already n the beginning of this paper: That examined through a gendered lens the political continuities during the latest fifty years of turbulent Mozambican history have been more apparent than the radical changes – some changes have taken place. One of the more important ones is the appearance of civil society pressure groups for women’s rights, gender equality and seeing things from women’s points of view. These pressure groups fight an uphill struggle. First they must fight just for putting and keeping women’s issues on the agenda, and secondly they must fight on the issue of how women’s issues are integrated in overall politics. I this way they might also, with time, be able to integrate and acknowledge the forms of female power which are, still, embedded in the social systems of the vast and populous matrilineal societies in the north of Mozambique. 

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