Justin Pearce

This book examines the internal politics of the war that divided Angola for more than a quarter-century after its independence. It emphasises the Angolan people's relationship to the rival political forces that prevented the development of a united nation, an aspect of the conflict that has received little attention in earlier studies. Drawing upon interviews with farmers, town dwellers, soldiers and politicians in Central Angola, Justin Pearce examines the ideologies about nation and state that elites deployed in pursuit of hegemony and traces how people responded to these attempts at politicisation. The book not only demonstrates the potency of the rival conceptions of state and nation in shaping perceptions of self-interest and determining political loyalty, but also shows the ways in which allegiances could and did change for much of the Angolan population in response to the experience of military force.

Reviews
'This book, based on difficult and path-breaking fieldwork and acute analytical skills, gives a jolt to much of the literature on violent conflicts and on politics in, especially, Africa: it brings questions of political identity, how it is formed and sustained, how it evolves, how it relates to violent conflict, back into the foreground and it refreshes ideas of national identity at the same time.'
Christopher Cramer - School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

'This book is exceptional because of the hundreds of interviews Justin Pearce conducted with peasants loyal to both warring parties. Moreover, he is unique because he does not show a scintilla of preference between the MPLA and UNITA. Furthermore, he covers an interesting interregnum between the end of the war in 2002 and today.'
Gerald Bender - Associate Professor Emeritus, University of Southern California

'An essential reading for scholars and anyone interested in modern Angola. In this timely contribution, Justin Pearce’s penetrating analysis of nationalism and identity among the Ovimbundu from 1975 to 2002 shifts the focus from the conflict between MPLA and UNITA to how the population in the urban and rural areas of the central regions perceived their own interests and acted on them.'
Linda Heywood - Boston University

'Justin Pearce’s book sheds new light on the complexity of the stakes of the Angolan postcolonial civil war. It shows, convincingly, how the intertwining of political and ideological identities, communitarian and individual stakes, as well as Cold War proxy interests, fuelled, in a very complex way, this long conflict.'
Jean-Michel Mabeko-Tali - Howard University, Washington DC

'This is an exceptional book. Not only is this the finest study available on the politics of allegiance during the Angolan civil war, one of Africa’s deadliest and longest, and also least understood; it is also a pivotal contribution to the study of conflict, nation building, and identity formation in the post-Cold War period.'
Ricardo Soares de Oliveira - University of Oxford

'Studies on identity are not rare in Angola. Urban identity, or Angolanidade, has been the source of a number of scholarly undertakings. What is highly commendable in Pearce’s book is his treatment of another form of identity that has received less attention: rural identity. This book is particularly concerned with the motivations of those who joined and fought for UNITA. The outcome is, then, a discussion on political identity that avoids the traps of ethnic essentialism and embraces a concept of identity that is contingent and strategic. In this regard, this book is about the agency of those who fought for UNITA.'
António Tomás - University of Stellenbosch, South Africa

'Justin Pearce’s work on political identity adds to the group of recent books on Angola that have broken new ground and shed new light on conflict, politics, identity and the dynamics of rule in Angola.'
Source: Africa - News and Analysis (africajournalismtheworld.com)

The fractious history of Mozambique’s anti-colonial movement remains politically charged, just as in other post-colonial states where opposition movements have challenged the ruling party’s exclusive claim to the legacy of national liberation. This article examines the debates over the legacy of the former Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo) vice-president Uria Simango and the Catholic priest Mateus Gwenjere, who continue to be denounced as traitors by the current Frelimo government, and of the protests against the Frelimo leadership by student exiles at the Mozambique Institute in Dar es Salaam in 1967–68. I argue that, for critics of the current government, the figures of Simango and Gwenjere represent a vision that is opposed to the direction taken by Frelimo after Simango was ousted from the leadership in 1969. The events surrounding the protests provide a basis for a narrative about the supposedly exclusive and undemocratic character of the current regime. As Frelimo remains entrenched in power through violence and patronage, the opposition contestation of the official history can be seen as an appeal for a more inclusive imagining of the nation, valorising historic Frelimo figures denigrated by the official version of history, while not challenging the centrality of Frelimo in Mozambique’s liberation.

Twenty years after the Mozambican war ended, a return to arms from 2013 by the opposition movement Renamo served to revitalize support for the party in the 2014 election, and put pressure on the Frelimo government to consider demands for constitutional change. Building on existing research on post-war politics and on recent economic change, this article addresses the question of how Renamo obtained civilians’ approval for renewed armed action in the south of Sofala province, the region where conflict broke out in 2013. I argue that popular legitimacy for Renamo's challenge to the state is constituted in a narrative about Renamo that is congruent both with present-day grievances against the state and with understandings of local history dating to the anticolonial struggle that challenge the nationalist history on which Frelimo hegemony rests. Renamo has adapted this narrative in such a way as to claim a historic role for itself in defending the interests of central and northern Mozambique and in struggling for an inclusive and democratic state. In this way, Renamo has gained support for its renewed armed actions, not only among those politicized by Renamo in the earlier war but more broadly among civilians in the region.

International rivalry in the Cold War has dominated scholarship on the post-independence war in Angola, but little research has been done on how foreign support for the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) had an impact on political mobilisation inside Angola. This article draws upon interviews with people who remembered the conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s in the Angolan Central Highlands, the area in which UNITA made its strongest identity-based claims against the MPLA state, and which was fiercely contested during the war. It compares these with memoirs and other secondary material that record elite perspectives on the war. I argue that ideologies espoused by the external players in Angola had little direct impact on the political affiliations of people in the contested area. Nevertheless, external support for rival movements in Angola indirectly shaped and polarised popular attitudes towards the movements, notably by providing the MPLA and UNITA with the capacity to present themselves as state-like.

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This article considers the politics of memory and memorialisation in Angola today in the light of existing scholarship on this theme elsewhere in southern Africa. I examine young anti-government activists' preoccupation with history, and argue that this can be understood only with reference to the MPLA government's own renewed concern with history since the end of the civil war in 2002, and its attempts to recast the nationalist narratives of the pre-1990 era. Since 2002, the government has sought to contain the threat posed by democratic opposition by claiming an exclusive role for the MPLA as the defender of the nation and by silencing critical discussion of events from the one-party era: most notably the mass killings of May 1977. For opposition activists, the assertion of an alternative history serves not so much to attract the support of others as to provide evidence of the government's dishonesty, and thus to reinforce the activists' belief in the rightness of their own cause. As has happened elsewhere in the region, the Angolan government's insistence on asserting a particular view of history does little to gather support, and serves above all to open up a space for contestation.

This article explores political mobilization, legitimacy, and identity in the Angolan Central Highlands from the anti-colonial struggle of the 1960s until the end of the civil war in 2002. It examines how the rival movements, MPLA and UNITA, competed for support, and considers the nature of the relationships between political-military elites and the Angolan people. Whereas much scholarship on civil war has focused on the emergence of rebellions against the state, I argue that such an approach to the Angolan war is inappropriate since both protagonists were founded as anti-colonial movements and both organizations developed characteristics of states to different degrees. Central to each party's narrative was an ideology of the state as a complex of ideas and practices that linked together responsibilities towards the population, prerogatives of violence, and the identity of the nation. People expressed support for either or both movements in terms of common interest and identity, which in turn were shaped by the political education of the movement in control at the time.

Pull up at a traffic light in Luanda, and alongside the canned drinks, roasted cashew nuts or canisters of air freshener, the street vendors may offer you half a dozen independent and critical weekly newspapers. Private radio stations broadcast in several major cities, and recent legislation made provision for independent television. All this can make Angola's media seem, at first glance, healthily diverse. Yet as you might expect in a large and complex country recovering from decades of colonialism, Stalinism, western destabilisation and civil war, the reality is a lot more complicated than it might first appear.

worsened the men’s condition. Though hardly comparable to the perils of the mines, the return trip made plain an ethos that regarded the Mozambican miners as commodities to be discarded once used. The trains travelled largely at night because the railway usually gave other trains priority during daylight hours. In-bound miners arrived at their assigned destinations hungry and sleepless – disoriented, and therefore more compliant. And travelling in darkness, through sparsely settled areas, attracted less public attention. For the most part, the system was deliberately hidden, van Onselen writes. ‘All whites knew that the prosperity of the country depended on the mining industry but nobody wanted to see the coerced black labour that rendered the system possible and profitable’ (p. 66). The book limits itself in time to the first half of the 20th century and in space to the South African leg of the journey. Portuguese-language sources, archival or otherwise, rarely appear among the citations; as van Onselen readily concedes, he did not speak to former miners about their experiences, acknowledging that a book not shaped by their first-hand accounts ‘is bound to be deeply flawed and, at best, might be considered to be an experiment – and more likely a failed experiment’ (p. 8). It is unclear why he did not make use of oral histories; locating former miners in Mozambique or South Africa who could discuss train journeys in the 1950s, and who might want to, would no doubt have been difficult, but seemingly somewhere in the realm of possibility. The principal source for The Night Trains, the source which does give it its shape, is an incomplete collection of WNLA records found at the University of Johannesburg library. The administrative correspondence treats Mozambican passengers in the abstract, and so in the book they suffer mostly in the abstract. As for South Africans, van Onselen indicts them with the righteous passion of a prosecutor: the ‘liberal’ mining barons who claimed to value free labour while profiting from Mozambique’s system of forced labour, the railway functionaries who treated black workers as animals, and white South Africa at large, which either shrugged or averted its gaze. Scholars will find this account an important contribution to their knowledge of how WNLA functioned. But this is a trade paperback, with a far wider potential readership than most scholars could hope for. The South African reading public surely could use van Onselen’s bracing reminder of the sacrifices made by Mozambicans for South Africa’s economic growth.

Twenty years after the Mozambican war ended, a return to arms from 2013 by the opposition movement Renamo served to revitalize support for the party in the 2014 election, and put pressure on the Frelimo government to consider demands for constitutional change. Building on existing research on post-war politics and on recent economic change, this article addresses the question of how Renamo obtained civilians’ approval for renewed armed action in the south of Sofala province, the region where conflict broke out in 2013. I argue that popular legitimacy for Renamo's challenge to the state is constituted in a narrative about Renamo that is congruent both with present-day grievances against the state and with understandings of local history dating to the anticolonial struggle that challenge the nationalist history on which Frelimo hegemony rests. Renamo has adapted this narrative in such a way as to claim a historic role for itself in defending the interests of central and northern M...

The fractious history of Mozambique’s anti-colonial movement remains politically charged, just as in other post-colonial states where opposition movements have challenged the ruling party’s exclusive claim to the legacy of national liberation. This article examines the debates over the legacy of the former Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo) vice-president Uria Simango and the Catholic priest Mateus Gwenjere, who continue to be denounced as traitors by the current Frelimo government, and of the protests against the Frelimo leadership by student exiles at the Mozambique Institute in Dar es Salaam in 1967–68. I argue that, for critics of the current government, the figures of Simango and Gwenjere represent a vision that is opposed to the direction taken by Frelimo after Simango was ousted from the leadership in 1969. The events surrounding the protests provide a basis for a narrative about the supposedly exclusive and undemocratic character of the current regime. As Frelimo r...

The endurance and indeed the growing electoral support manifested by the Angolan opposition party UNITA since its defeat as an armed movement in 2002 defies generally gloomy prognoses both for opposition parties in dominant party systems and for defeated rebel movements that recast themselves as political parties. This article examines social service and training projects implemented by UNITA in the Angolan Central Highlands. I argue that the case of UNITA illustrates the need to take into account the importance of resources that accrue outside of the space of formal politics, including historical narratives and social relationships, which UNITA has mobilized and built upon in order to expand its vote share and consolidate its place within electoral politics.

courses of fear, development and securitisation as narratives central to Rwanda’s current social and political transformation (pp. –). This is a book that deserves to be widely read. The analysis could use more historical depth, and the rich corpus of ethnographic studies on Rwanda since the genocide is barely consulted. Still, Purdeková’s study will appeal to both Rwanda and African Studies scholars, and is a must-read for graduate students preparing to do fieldwork in Rwanda. Scholars working in development studies, peace and conflict studies, comparative politics and cultural anthropology will be rewarded for a careful read. Development workers and diplomats will also benefit, as understanding the power dynamics behind government efforts to unify and reconcile Rwandans is central to their work.

This article explores political mobilization, legitimacy, and identity in the Angolan Central Highlands from the anti-colonial struggle of the 1960s until the end of the civil war in 2002. It examines how the rival movements, MPLA and UNITA, competed for support, and considers the nature of the relationships between political-military elites and the Angolan people. Whereas much scholarship on civil war has focused on the emergence of rebellions against the state, I argue that such an approach to the Angolan war is inappropriate since both protagonists were founded as anti-colonial movements and both organizations developed characteristics of states to different degrees. Central to each party's narrative was an ideology of the state as a complex of ideas and practices that linked together responsibilities towards the population, prerogatives of violence, and the identity of the nation. People expressed support for either or both movements in terms of common interest and identity, which in turn were shaped by the political education of the movement in control at the time.

From theconversation.com

What is happening in Mozambique is not exactly a popular uprising. It was ignited by Dhlakama’s desire for a share of political power, and its associated wealth, in a situation where the state is synonymous with Frelimo. The Rome Accord deserves some blame for centralising politics while allowing an opposition movement to retain access to the means of violence: 20 years later, Dhlakama realised his soldiers were the only asset he had left. Nevertheless, the recent uprising could not have happened without popular support – support that Renamo mobilised by presenting ideas about history and democracy in a way that resonated with real grievances.

It was this war, together with the insurrection by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone, that drew international attention to the potential of the gem trade to perpetuate conflict, frequently with catastrophic consequences for civilians living in conflict zones. ...

CET ARTICLE TRAITE DES DIFFICULTÉS AUXQUELLES EST CONFRONTÉE L'UNITA À L'APPROCHE DES ÉLECTIONS, PARTICULIÈREMENT DANS LE PLANALTO CENTRAL, OÙ LE PARTI AVAIT OBTENU LA MAJORITÉ DES VOTES AUX ÉLECTIONS DE 1992. EN ...