Peasant and state in Mozambique

Merle Bowen's study focuses on the evolution of the ‘middle peasantry’ in both colonial and postcolonial Mozambique. In doing so, she successfully challenges long‐standing, if highly problematic, notions that the Mozambican economy consists of a ‘traditional’, subsistence‐oriented peasant sector with only nominal links to ‘modern’ forms of agriculture, the urban areas, and regional and international markets. At the same time, she usefully illuminates continuities in colonial and post‐independence agrarian policies and shows the ways in which the experience of smallholder agricultural co‐operatives under the Portuguese shaped the peasantry's perceptions of, and responses to, collective agriculture under Frelimo. However, the evidence in Bowen's case study does not necessarily sustain her central thesis that the post‐independence state, like its colonial predecessor, was ‘anti‐peasant’. This is one of several criticisms made of Bowen's text.

The State Against the Peasantry: Rural Struggles in Colonial and Postcolonial Mozambique, by Merle L. Bowen, Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Pp.xiv + 256. US$65 (hardback); $19.50 (paperback). ISBN 0 8139 1910 X and 1917 7.