Social decomposition and armed violence in postcolonial Mozambique

Armed violence in post-colonial Mozambique derives from the degeneration of colonial peasantry into a marginalized "non-class'. Precolonial African rural producers were forced into being peasants in the process of peripheralization. Catastrophic/revolutionary decolonization led to Mozambique's disengagement from the world-system and the rapid disappearance of colonial class categories. A simple return to the precolonial situation was impossible, but so was integration into a supposedly alternative socialist world-system, since the latter never possessed truly systemic qualities. Thus, postrevolutionary Mozambique went into a social nowhere, a historical "black hole'. Mozambican peasantry became an ex-peasantry, or rather, a non-peasantry. -from Author