Hannah Kelley: Student

“The Politics of Peace in Mozambique: Post-Conflict Democratization 1992-2000″, is by Carrie L. Manning, who spoke in our class this week.

The author elucidated something that many of us know intuitively but don’t always articulate our objection to. Manning wants the reader to understand that democracy is a process rather than an election.

In the introduction reference is made to the so-called “high order game” (Tsebelis). This is where the incentives of staying in the politics game are high, even as the risks of political participation are less and less. This situation in Mozambique was created by International Donors, the UN and other players who invested money, human capital and varied resources in making sure that the end of the war was final and that democracy took root (50%+ of Mozambique’s budget in 1999 was from international aid). Because of this investment the pressure and accountability from all sides (Renamo, Frelimo, Donors) became intensified and ‘constrained’ the actor’s ability to opt-out of the transition to a multi-party democracy.

Based on this “game”, Renamo and Frelimo have engaged with one another in a maturing and progressive way since the beginning of the end of their civil conflict in 1992. Manning says that this engagement – or negotiating process – will affect the actors faith in the process and their commitment to it without their having anticipated it.

In other words, democracy isn’t defined by having an election based on one-vote-per-citizen. It isn’t defined simply by the existence of a multi-party system. Rather, democracy is, and should be, a process rather than a term, a document, rhetoric. Manning asserts that in new democracies the electoral process is rather an opportunity to see the country’s faith in and commitment to the essential democratic institutions that will create the grounding for their continued maturity and development as a democratic state.

I like this phrase on page 17 of her book: “The question of how democracy might contribute to the resolution of civil war becomes less of a puzzle when one looks at democracy not as the outcome of years of political tolerance, moderation, and socioeconomic development, but as a system of institutionalized nonviolent conflict between organized political forces.”

Democracy has to be applied, understood, utilized differently in different contexts.

In Harry G. West’s book Kupilikula he quotes Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembé as encouraging those studying democracy in Africa to think of ‘African languages of power’ — in this case, democracy interpreted through Mozambican reality. In Mozambique, democracy foremost is a way to maintain peace and manage conflict with weapons like: law, words, campaigns, elections, public opinion, political aggression…and not the physical brutality of the 80’s.

___

Manning also spoke about the evolution of Renamo as an armed proxy army of South Africa, into a different entity that embodied rural grievances and the discontent of those disillusioned by Frelimo, the “New Man”, aldiamentos and perpetuation of ethnic oppression that eerily echoed Portuguese discrimination. Perhaps it was due to this evolution in Renamo’s composition that it was deemed appropriate to facilitate their transition into a democratic party.

Still…reading accounts of violence by the bandidos armados in the library today, I felt sick.

I am starting to get more and more interested in this election and what it means to Mozambicans.

There are so many political parties in Mozambique.

Just look at this list.

I can think of a handful of US political parties: Democratic Party, Republican Party, Green Party, Independent Party, Libertarian Party, Socialist Party…there may be more. But it just doesn’t seem like we have enough to fill a page with.

Many of Mozambique’s political parties were founded after 1990, in a time where the civil war in the country was coming to an end and the main opposition to the indepence-era FRELIMO was the group RENAMO, that faced the challenge of becoming a political party where it once was an armed guerrilla resistance movement (the acronym actually stands for ‘Mozambican National Resistance’).

Mozambique has had three national, presidential elections since 1994, and is about the have it’s fourth national election as an independent ‘democratic’ nation. The FRELIMO candidate has taken the presidency in every election, but for some reason this hasn’t caused RENAMO to revert back to violence or other dramatic tactics. There is value placed on the electoral system.

One thing that interests me, in fact I’ve been thinking a lot about it over the past week, is Mozambique’s system of proportional representation (PR). We don’t have this system in the US, indeed I wish we did; we have another system often referred to as a plurality or first/furthest past the post system (FPTP).

Let’s start with our system, since I’m familiar with it.

In the US, we give the election win to whomever receives the most amount of votes, regardless of whether they won the majority of votes or not.

So there could be 5 candidates for a slot: a democrat, a republican, an independent, a green party candidate, and a libertarian.

The republican candidate could win with only 21% of the vote, even though they are not supported by the other 79% of the voting public. The first person with the most votes wins. Winner takes all, nothing else is divided up.

This often leads to the lamentable argument among friends and relatives, coworkers etc. of persuading others to not “throw away” their vote. The theory is that if you vote for the green party, libertarian party etc., they will never win because they are not likely or expected to win, so you are just taking your vote away from the plurality that the best “likely” candidate needs to get “past the post”.

Excuse all of the parenthesis, this is how I usually talk in person.

In any case, it’s a terrible choice to have to make.

If you’re like me, and you hate partisan politics in the US, you’ll agree and know exactly what I’m talking about. How many times have you heard someone say that they were going to vote for the “lesser of two evils”? I’ve heard it a lot.

So, what about proportional representation?

In Mozambique they work with party lists. That is to say that the party, be it FRELIMO, MDM, RENAMO, etc. will compose a list of 10 or so candidates that they rank from the top down in order or preference, and votes will vote for their parties list. This means that if FRELIMO gets, for example, 50% of the vote for their assembly seats (the equivalent of parliament), that numbers 1-5 on their list will be represented for that district. The rest get divied up between the remaining percentages of voters, but there is a 5% minimum to receive representation.*

*update, Manning in her lecture to our class says that this threshold has since been lowered to something like 1%.

I may not be explaining this perfectly, and I hope someone will correct me if I’m wrong, but essentially this seems to be the system and it also appears much better than an all-or-nothing system.

The presidential systems between our two countries are also a little different.

In Mozambique the president has to win with an absolute majority. In other words if the example I gave above of the politician winning in the US with only 21% were a presidential election in Mozambique, Mozambique would take the politician with 21% and the next highest voted for candidate (let’s say with 18%) and would hold a run-off election for just those two candidates, forcing a majority vote for one or the other.

In the US, we have an appalling lack of party diversity, but if we did, we would still have elected as president the person with 21% of the vote. (Well, electoral college matters aside).

The point is that we don’t have run-offs, we have a the-best-of-the-losers system for most politics, otherwise known as FPTP – first past the post.

In Mozambique another difference in the presidency is that the president nominates the head of parliament (assambleia nacional da republica) and also the council of ministers that help to run the country. The head of parliament is not separate from the presidency and therefore does not act as a check to presidential power (See Carrie Manning, “Semi-presidentialism and the preservation of ambiguity in post-war Mozambique”).

However many other things are similar… for example Mozambique has 5 year presidential term limits.

The constitution of Mozambique is constantly changing. The most recent versions of the constitution have been from 1990 and 2004, although amendments and supplementary laws seem to come up frequently.

I haven’t had time to figure out the difference between Mozambique’s constitutional basis and the US’s constitutional basis, but I will. Maybe tomorrow..

…Via late Latin from Greek dēmokratia, from dēmos ‘the people’ + -kratia ‘power, rule.’

I’ve been charged with asking myself what democracy means to me, and also with relating this relationship with democracy to what the same word and loose concept may mean to a Mozambican.

In a derridian spirit I’ve chosen to begin with the definition.

(Me)an-ing. Me (Hannah) an(d) ing.

-ing:

2 forming adjectives from nouns : hulking.
ORIGIN Middle English : alteration of earlier -ende, later -inde.

People, Me, an, creation of adjectives, rule.

I see democracy in theory as good. Checks and balances, political mediums to voice my concerns, equality with other citizens, these are, although ignored too much in practice, things that I care about and would fight to have/keep? But I don’t see equality in practice. In Detroit and Metro-Detroit I see a lot of people who aren’t sure who their representatives are, let alone what things they are voting on, changing, fighting or not fighting for. People seem to remember that they have “representation” when they are misrepresented. It’s a very negative way of conducting democracy – regressive vs. progressive political action.

People don’t contact their politicians because it “won’t change anything”. That’s the same line that many give for not voting, for not mobilizing or caring. That’s democracy?

We read “On Democracy”, or parts of it, by Robert Dahl for the class today. Dahl points out a few things that have led to the demise of democratic systems at different points in time, including: Civil unrest, war, militarization, corruption, and this is interesting — “a decline in the sturdy civic spirit”. (page 7) That last bit sounds familiar.

When we think of words, we think of working definitions. Words mean whatever they communicate in reality. “Meanings”, in many cases, cannot be static and are ever dependent on the way they are used in context, who is using them, what they mean to say (is it a play on words?). This all applies to the word democracy — that thing that is ever being lauded and exported and either liberating or oppressing…it’s used so much for rhetorical purposes nowadays that it’s hard for me to connect it to the things that I really do care about.

That’s what I want. People learning to live together. Not accept oppression – but work for an egalitarian society. To paraphrase Dr. King, ‘We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools.’

But I’m moving away from calling this egalitarian society a “democracy”.

So in other words, to me, democracy has come to mean politicization, big media, the Iraq war, partisan politics… but it still also means that middle-school-civics-class definition (which I never had, btw) of everyone having a voice/representation, checks and balances/anti-corruption, meritocracy, something along those lines.

And Mozambique?

I’m guessing that democracy is meaning a number of things to the average Mozambican. There are so many different groups vying to change the political face of their country — NGO’s, banks, investors, neighbors, the active remnants of a one-party system..

I assume democracy means something closer to the tired-out politicized definition that I mentioned.

But it could be that Mozambicans are welcoming democracy per se as a transition away from the chaos and turbulent politics of the past. Maybe democracy will be perceived as the missing ingredient to finally create the “Mozambique for Mozambicans”, that was promised by Frelimo decades ago. But as I mentioned, “democracy” will change based on the way and context it is used in, who is doing the using, and what they mean to say. Is democracy organic in Mozambique? Are forces pushing the term on Mozambicans from the outside? If social equality isn’t achieved while Mozambique is experimenting with democracy, will the public blame the system or the context?

Mozambique is the theme of the Honors Seminar I’m taking this semester at Wayne State. The country was colonized by the Portuguese in the 1500’s, and in 1975 the country gained independence – headed by the mobilization efforts of FRELIMO (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique). Although the Frelimo bunch was trying to create a paradigm shift away from the oppressiveness of Portuguese colonizers, the official language for the new Republica de Moçambique, as the name suggests, was still Portuguese.

Why identify with the “oppressor” in such an basic and personal way?

Mozambique has a history of indigenous language repression and educational policies that contributed to the loss of prestige of many native Mozambican tongues. The Portuguese colonizers referred to native languages as “Dogs’ Languages” (Kitoko-Nsiku) and propagated language ideologies that demeaned the native languages while valuing Portuguese as linguistically superior.

Question begets question: Just what is the status of indigenous languages in Mozambique? Are there a lot, or do most people speak Portuguese?

To give examples of how prevalent native languages are, in the 1997 census Emakhuwa was the first language of 26% of the population and also the primary language spoken in the home for 26% of the population. In the same census year, 14.4% of the population spoke Xichangana as a first language and 11.3% used it in the home (Lopes, Census). As of 1980, less than 25% of Mozambicans spoke Portuguese fluently and only 1.2% of Mozambicans spoke Portuguese as a first language (Mkuti).

I am interested in studying why native languages in Mozambique appear to still suffer from low social prestige even after national independence from the Portuguese, and considering their overwhelming and undisputed presence in Mozambican society. Throughout the course of this seminar, I hope to understand the language ideologies and policies that keep native languages from achieving official status in Mozambique, and the attitudes of Mozambicans toward the official inclusion/exclusion of their native languages.

Which brings me to…language ideology:

Language ideology has been defined as a set “of beliefs about language articulated by users” of that language (Silverstein). These beliefs may affect language standards for writing and official discourse, usage of other languages and dialects in society and “correctness” in speech, among other things. When language ideologies target certain linguistic groups negatively while simultaneously elevating the status of others, they can cause extreme social tension and frustrate aims at social equality. Because a person’s identity is deeply tied to the language that they express themselves in, an ideology that devalues a given language may be considered a judgment on the social worth of its speakers as well.

Examples of language ideology in the US are views that Spanglish and code-switching between English and another language are inherently inferior communicative vehicles, negative or denigratory ideas about dialects, speechways etc. Think about how some Americans view African-American (Vernacular) English, Southern English or Creole English varieties like Jamaican or Geechee.

There are many written resources that I can draw upon to support this study. However, I’m still not sure what direction I want the final product of my interest in the topic to take.

I could create a multimedia presentation with video and photo montages, put to a background of Mozambican music/indigenous spoken dialogue.

I could write a paper, but that’s a little fome.

Eventually I’ll figure out what I can do. I’ve always loved photography, the written word… I hope that the final product refreshes the dialogue on language ideology and treatment of indigenous languages.

Some sources

Kitoko-Nsiku, Edouard. “Dog’s Languages or People’s Languages? The Return of Bantu Languages to Primary Schools in Mozambique.” Current Issues in Language Planning. Vol. 8, No. 2, 2007, 258-282.

Lopes, A.J. “The Language Situation in Mozambique.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Vol. 19, Issue 5, September 1998, 440 – 486.

Mkuti, Lukas Dominikus. “Language and Education in Mozambique Since 1940: Policy, Implementation, and Future Perspectives.” Doctoral Dissertation. University of Arizona. 1996.

Mozambican census, 1997. http://www.ine.gov.mz/censos_dir/recenseamento_geral/censo97_resultados.ppt

Silverstein, Michael. “Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology.” The Elements: A Parasession on  Linguistic Units and Levels. Eds, Paul R. Clyne, William F. Hanks, and Carol L. Hofbauer.  Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, 1979. 193-247.