Citizenship and Civility in Peri-Urban Mozambique

Abstract

In Mozambique, as elsewhere in Africa, the rural–urban divide was central to the juridico-political distinction between citizens and subjects during the colonial period. Paradoxically today, Mozambique’s extensive post-war legal reforms aimed at democratization and decentralization, largely mandated by the international donor community, have reinstated aspects of the colonial rural–urban distinction through the revitalization of the “customary” and the legal recognition of its authorities. Post-Socialist, neoliberal policies produced by urban elites attempt to redefine and regulate the “local,” through the demarcation of new administrative territories, jurisdictional boundaries, and, especially, the fetishized tropes of “community” and “custom,” in order to create a space for post-war reconciliation and a basis for the emergence of a “democratic civil society.”