Revolutionary youth in Mozambique: socialist discourses, organizations, and experiences among the independence generation (1964-1985)

Thesis

This study explores the process through which Mozambique’s Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo) constructed ‘youth’ as a political, revolutionary category during Samora Machel’s presidency (1975-1986), a period also known as the socialist era. During this time, the word Juventude (youth) came to be associated with a historic responsibility to construct the New Socialist Society, with ‘essential characteristics,’ such as enthusiasm, optimism and creativity, and with a special place in relation to the state- and nation-building project Frelimo brought underway during the first decade of independence: the Seiva da Nação (Sap/Lifeblood of the Nation). Drawing on a wide range of archival, media and oral history sources, this study investigates how, why and with what effects the Frelimo party engaged in this fundamental (re)construction of the category youth. I argue that this process was motivated and shaped in several ways by the foundation of a mass democratic organization for youth, the Organização da Juventude Moçambicana (OJM). Through the decision to create this organization, the Frelimo party leadership first articulated its revolutionary conceptualization of youth. Furthermore, this process had the consequence that Frelimo ‘wrote’ youth into its state-socialist script, and finally, it was through the OJM that young people across the country encountered, became literate in, and derived emotional and embodied experiences from Frelimo’s discourse about the revolutionary youth.

Authors: Wetzel, JM

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-yraqoaoaj
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: youth; FRELIMO; Homem Novo; African socialism; Samora Machel; Organization for Mozambican Youth; Organizacao da Juventude Mocambicana; nationalism
• Subjects: History, Modern; Socialism and youth; Youth; Maputo Bay (Mozambique); Africa