Naissance du Mozambique: Résistance et révoltes anticoloniales (1854-1918) by René PélissierReview by: Willfried F. FeuserCanadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 21, No. 3(1987), pp. 465-468Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian Association of African StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/485683 .

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465 Book Reviews / Comptes rendus

would allow; at one point, the author expresses satisfaction over the existence of an original source which made possible "for once, a wholly Comorian perspective on events ..." (31).

Related to the external perspective is the failure to balance historical background with a comparably well-done analysis of the contemporary situation. The chapters on politics, society, and economics are primarily recent political, social, and economic history, built upon the general history contained in the second chapter. (Chapters on geography and international relations complete the book's scope.) Newitt notes that his personal contact with the islands was limited to a two-month visit in 1973. This absence of a significant experiential base along with the paucity of reliable current data lead to a definitely tentative tone when the discussion finally turns to the Comoros of the I98os. As a result, one finishes the book with a solid introduction to the external and, to a lesser extent, internal systems and processes which have created the contemporary Comoros, but without any "feel" for the present-day Comorian people themselves. A few case studies of contemporary Comorian families, or even a number of recent human-interest photographs, would have helped considerably to complete the strong foundation laid by Newitt. In fact, I would begin a book of this type with a brief overview of the peoples in question, to give the reader more accurate imagery to accompany the abstract analysis of underlying patterns and forces.

The weaknesses cited are obviously minor. In view of the virtual absence of works in English on the Comoros, Newitt is the perfect choice for the first serious work, one which is far more useful than a coffee-table, travel book, however recent and beautiful its pictures, and one to be preferred to a narrow, "close-to-the-trees" portrayal by a Comorian writer. Its high quality, comprehensive nature and useful (if brief) biblio- graphic essay, make it overwhelmingly the first choice for any Anglophone reader seeking the best place to begin a study of any aspect of the Comoro Islands.

John L. Collier Foreign Service Institute Arlington, Virginia (USA)

Rene P1lissier. Naissance du Mozambique: Resistance et revoltes anticoloniales (1854-1918). 2 Vols. Orgeval: P1lissier, 1984. 888 pp.

Incompetence, vainglory, and wishful thinking were the hallmark of Portuguese colo- nialism at the time of the "Scramble for Africa." Incompetence nearly led to the liqui- dation of the Impirio, especially of Mozambique: a gaunt, long-drawn spectre wedged amid the more robust German, Boer, and British imperialism. Portugal's sustained territorial expansion was a fiction. Between the fortified ports from Palma in the north to Lourenqo Marques in the south, dotting Mozambique's over two hundred thousand kilometres of coastline, were the wide empty spaces; and the hinterland was mostly unexplored, although the Portuguese were nominally sovereign in a num- ber of places. At the beginning of 1895, three thousand Thonga rebels attacked the Limpopo-Transvaal railway two kilometres outside Lourenqo Marques. Two kilome- tres from the quays of the port began "a wild country, the only difference being, per- haps, that its inhabitants know more vices and have a smattering of Portuguese"

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466 CJAS/RCEA XXI:3 1987

(593). This comment is not by a critic of Portuguese colonialism but by the Royal Commissioner Ant6nio Enes, the heart and soul of the "Generation of 1895" (Rene P1lissier calls it the generation of the Centurions) that saved and consolidated Mozambique for the Portuguese crown. One of them, the young Lieutenant Aires de Ornelas (later to become Overseas Minister), when setting out on his tropical mission, discovered to his dismay that the army manual of the oldest European colonizing power made no mention whatever of warfare in Africa; so he had to consult the rele- vant British, French, and Italian publications.

The Enes group that no longer believed in saguate (dash), but only in the sword, comprised the flower of Portuguese nobility: Lt. Henrique Mitchell de Paiva Couceiro, the future Lugard of Angola, and four other young men who were to become Governors-General of either Angola or Mozambique. They came to avenge the shame brought upon Portugal by a series of defeats at the hands of African rulers and, worst of all, by the clash with British imperialism over Mashonaland. This clash led to the ultimatum of the British foreign minister, Lord Salisbury, to the governor Barros Gomes on i i January 1890, and caused a major political crisis in Lisbon: a Portuguese Fashoda. The most striking figure of the "Generation of 1895" was Mousinho de Albuquerque, a true caudilho, theoretician, steel-fisted administrator, as well as dar- ing tactician, who with a handful of soldiers captured Guigunha, the king of Gaza, on 28 December 1895, thus ending the last war of the Mfecane (Zulu expansion).

In view of the importance of the "Generation of 1895" in the military conquest of Mozambique, Pellissier's book is centred around their presence. Beginning with the turning-point of the Portuguese anti-slavery decree of 14 December 1854, which aimed at drying up the "gigantic slave-trading quagmire which is Mozambique," and finishing with the armistice at the end of the Great War, it falls into three periods: before the Centurions (1854-1894), the time of the Centurions (1894-1913), and the crisis of 1914-1918.

Acts of African resistance are to be found in all three periods, but the majority of the more successful ones clearly are situated before the appearance of the Centurions. In the north and in Zambezia, the resistance lasted longer, while in the south the heroic death of Guigunha's former military commander Maguiguana, a Thonga, at Mapulanguene on io August i897, marked the end of the conquest. Rather than the bullying and cowardly Ngoni aristocrat Guigunha, lionized by historians like Walter Rodney, this former cook was "the true lion of Gaza" (632).

The extreme north of the country and the distrito de Mogambique, both heavily influenced by the Swahili and Islam, produced rebellious rulers like Mussa Quanto and his grand-nephew the intractable Sultan Farelay of the Angoche region. The Swahili society whose exponents they were was based on predatory expansion, and slavery was its stock-in-trade. Basically, they fought against European encroachment to protect their monopoly in the exploitation of their fellow human beings, and one is sometimes hard put to classify them as proto-nationalists. Be that as it may, their resistance against overwhelming odds commands respect.

In the far north, which was placed under the control of a chartered company, the Companhia do Niassa in 1894, the Yao, straddling the border with British Nyassaland on the one hand and Deutsch-Ostafrika on the other, were the terror of the colonizers.

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467 Book Reviews / Comptes rendus

To the Portuguese, their third Metaca (Sultan), Bonomali, was the devil incarnate, especially since in January 1890 he had wiped out with apparently sadistic fury the expedition of lieutenant Eduardo Valadim, former aide-de-camp of Governor-General Augusto de Castilho, who had come with presents to offer him a treaty in order to neutralize the British penetration from Nyassaland. It took the colonizers nineteen years to plan their revenge in a campaign unjustly underestimated in the annals of Mozambican history.

However, the last people to lose their independence in Mozambique were the Makonde. Favoured to some extent by the German incursions into Mozambique under General von Lettow-Vorbeck in 1917 and 1918, they did not see their ancestral soil fully occupied until 192o. Forty-four years later, they were to become the first fighting men of the FRELIMO, "model partisans of the war of liberation" (307).

On the fascinating canvas of Mozambican resistance to Portuguese rule, the most sanguinary section is the central one known as Zambezia. From 1858 to 1888 Zam- bezia was the setting for the worst defeats and humiliations the Portuguese ever suf- fered in Mozambique. The last dramatic curtain-call of the yearning for independence came in the great revolt of 1917, before armed resistance on any noticeable scale was finally laid to rest in 1918, eight years before the definite "pacification" of Angola.

In Zambezia, the colonizing power exercised a precarious, often indirect control. The politico-economic structure of the province was confusing, with primary African states like Baru6, Monomotapa, and Manica jostling for position to regain their lost glory, while ephemeral but powerful secondary states having developed from prazos (domanial lands given out to a grantee by the crown) and super-prazos (Makanga, Mas- singire, and Massangano) emerged under new dynasties of Mulatto or Luso-Asiatic stock including Goans and Thais.

One lesson the Portuguese learned from their bloody encounters in Zambezia was that it was unnecessary and wasteful to employ white metropolitan troops to fight the African resistance in that province. Henceforth, with few exceptions, the Africans were left to conquer themselves. The dominant warlord of the i88os, therefore, became another senhor, Manuel Ant6nio de Sousa, a Goan established in the Gorongosa and Manica area, who crushed a revolt in Massingire on behalf of the crown in 1884. Superior in strategy to any Portuguese field commander of his day, he acted as a surrogate of the colonizer and openly advocated the very institution he was officially supposed to eradicate: "The Black is made for slavery as the European for liberty" (372 fn).

Pelissier gives us the first full canvas of Mozambican resistance, listing 160o mili- tary operations during the period 1854-1916. With the war period of 1916-1918 added, he arrives at the conclusion that for twenty-five percent of the time covered by his study the Portuguese colonizers were engaged in one campaign or the other to keep rebellious Mozambicans in check and to make them accept alien rule.

A number of tables listing all campaigns under the four main theatres of war - the Mocambique District, the Far North, Zambezia, and Southern Mozambique - the casualties suffered by the conquerors, the budgetary subventions received by Mozam- bique from the metropolis, the names of governors and African rulers, as well as an exhaustive fifty-page multilingual bibliography, virtually without a single factual or

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468 CJAS / RCEA XXI:3 1987

printing error, contribute to making this work a unique mine of information on the history of African resistance in general and that of Mozambique in particular.

Willfried F. Feuser University of Port Harcourt (Nigeria)

Dov Ronen. ed., Democracy and Pluralism in Africa. Boulder: Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers; and Sevenoaks, England: Hodder and Stoughton Educational, 1986. 22o pp.

"Democratic development" (Elliott Abrams, 64) has become fashionable in both intellectual and developmental circles as Africa's continuing crisis has resulted in economic contradiction and political repression. This set of nineteen short, succinct chapters by eighteen leading students of Africa is welcome because of its timely focus; but it is inconclusive in terms of its contribution. The juxtaposition of plural- ism with democracy is understandable but unhelpful because it locks discussion into one paradigm and level: modernisation and superstructure. Thus, only some of the social bases of democracy are recognised - ethnicity, ideology, and constitutionality - whereas others are neglected - political economy, class, and gender. This collection is strong on history but weak on dialectic. It is situated within the old rather than the new African Studies.

Distinctive African roots of democracy are discussed by John Ayoade and Ilungo Kabongo, and those of pluralism by Path6 Diagne and Bona Malwal. While five histor- ical cases - from Songhay to Somalia and Botswana - are presented by informed nationals. Richard Sklar has an interesting and original chapter on the democratic roles of the courts in a centralising Zimbabwe, and W.A.E. Skurinik looks at the press in African novels and politics. Despite occasional insights into the coexistence of democracy and the military, and of democracy and underdevelopment, this volume does not much advance concepts or policies, such as sub-national and informal pat- terns of participation. The editor illustrates and compounds the continuing ambigui- ties by concluding: "Democracy is attainable in Africa, as it is everywhere, if it is accepted to mean, as it should, self-rule and self-determination" (2o02).

Timothy M. Shaw Department of Political Science Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia (Canada)

Fa-Digi Sisoko. The Epic of Son-Jara: A West African Tradition. Translated by John William Johnson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. 242 pp.

Part one of this book is an analytical study of the Mande. Preceded by an introduction and accompanied by annotations to the text, part two is the first linear English trans- lation of the epic of Son-Jara (better known as Sunjata) from the heartland of Manden. The texts published by Gordon Innes were recorded in the Gambia, several hundreds miles from the center of Old Mali. A detailed account of the recording of the text and

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