Darch on Sumich, 'The Middle Class in Mozambique: The State and the Politics of Transformation in Southern Africa' - H-Net

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Darch on Sumich, 'The Middle Class in Mozambique: The
State and the Politics of Transformation in Southern Africa'
Review published on Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Jason Sumich. The Middle Class in Mozambique: The State and the Politics of Transformation in
Southern Africa. The International African Library Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2018. 190 pp. $105.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-108-47288-3; $24.00 (e-book), ISBN 978-1-108-57702-1.

Reviewed by Colin Darch (University of Cape Town) Published on H-Luso-Africa (November, 2020)
Commissioned by Philip J. Havik (Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical (IHMT))

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=55879

As far as I am aware, Jason Sumich's new book is the first full-length contribution—in English at
least—to the study of the middle class focusing on Mozambique, a topic on which he has previously
published widely and has perhaps made his own.[1] It is therefore pioneering and should be warmly
welcomed, and indeed the narrative, although short, is engaging, readable, and well structured.
Sumich might have done more in this book to tackle long-standing ambiguities about the social
category of the "middle class" as an object of study, and in addition the text raises questions about
the rigor of his method as an anthropologist writing historically. I will expand on these two points in
the course of this review.

It is already clear that the book can be and will be (mis)read as a historical text—for example, as "an
insightful contribution to the history of Mozambique and class formation under colonial and
postcolonial conditions" or as an "introduction to the contemporary history of Mozambique," to quote
two recent reviewers.[2] This is mainly because the book is organized historically rather than, as one
might expect, thematically, and is presented as a narrative around a periodization that takes the
moments of independence in 1975 and of the Acordo Geral de Paz (AGP) in 1992 as two of its key
inflection points. The five narrative chapters follow a broad and highly conventional periodization of,
successively, the late colonial period; the early independent state; the "civil war and the economic
chaos"; a chapter titled "Democratisation," covering the period from 1992 to 2004; and a final
chapter titled "Decay," the heart of the book, focusing on the period from 2005 to 2015. These are
bracketed by an introduction that addresses theoretical (but not methodological) issues, especially
around the question of what the term "middle class" actually means, and a conclusion that brings the
narrative up to 2016. Perhaps surprisingly, given Sumich's evident enthusiasm for João Paulo Borges
Coelho's concept of the "liberation script," which he references several times, he does not argue for
this periodization in any detail. But the power of Borges Coelho's concept hangs precisely on its
identification of a semiofficial historical metanarrative that is not arbitrary in its division into periods
and that makes sense only in terms of a view of history in which the armed struggle against the
Portuguese from 1964 to 1974 becomes the history of modern Mozambique in and of itself, occupying
the whole available historical space from the early 1960s onward. As Borges Coelho says, the
liberation script consists of "a coherent and fixed narrative corpus made of a sequence of events in a
timeline and ordered in a number of broad phases separated by Frelimo Congresses which operate as
periodization marks. Each congress occurs to solve a crisis that was aggravating within each period,

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Darch on Sumich, 'The Middle Class in Mozambique: The State and the Politics of Transformation in Southern
Africa'. H-Luso-Africa. 11-18-2020.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/7926/reviews/6805844/darch-sumich-middle-class-mozambique-state-and-politics
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and to neutralize the threat that that crisis represented to the nationalist endeavor. The opening of a
new phase [is] only made possible by the resolution of the crisis of the previous one."[3]

Thus, the second congress in 1968 marked the sharpening to the point of crisis of the struggle
between the two lines (if not its resolution) and the consequent militarization of FRELIMO; the formal
adoption of Marxism-Leninism in 1977 at the third congress supposedly equipped what is now the
vanguard Frelimo Party with the tools to bend the inherited colonial state structures to its will; and
the fourth congress in April 1983 offered a democratic moment in which a space opened up for
ordinary cadres to criticize the party leadership.[4] The fifth congress in July 1989 involved a shake-
up at the top levels of the party while the possibility of a negotiated peace slowly emerged, and the
"extraordinary" sixth congress in August 1991 went a step further and dropped Marxism as Frelimo's
official ideology, after the single-party parliament had already preemptively approved a pluralist
constitution, without Renamo participation, late in 1990.

These steps, viewed with hindsight, show some agility as well as opportunism on Frelimo's part in
laying the groundwork for holding on to power (or rather "solving the crisis" as Borges Coelho has it)
and open up questions about the real character of Mozambique's process of so-called
democratization. Luciano Canfora has argued in another context that democratization can all too
often have the effect of stabilizing existing relations of property and power rather than marking a
rupture, and in hindsight it is clear that the painfully negotiated AGP did exactly that, creating space
not so much for multipartidarismo as for what is effectively a two-party system in which Frelimo has
remained dominant (although not always in the context of a "party-state") and Renamo has
unwillingly played the apparently permanent role of "loyal opposition." Other parties, by and large
and designedly, do not get a look-in.

In the last few decades, the middle class has become a fashionable object of study for sociologists,
anthropologists, and economists around the world, including the global south. Indeed, the emergence
of a growing middle class has been held out by some as the latest (and still teleological) solution to
the problem of socioeconomic development, especially in Africa, as Sumich points out.[5] On the
broader African middle class, Henning Melber's edited volume The Rise of Africa's Middle Classes:
Myths, Realities and Critical Engagements (2017), to which Sumich contributed a chapter, and the
collection The Emerging Middle Class in Africa (2015) edited by the economists Mthuli Ncube and
Charles Leyeka Lufumpa have brought the concept to the fore.[6] However, it remains a slippery
idea. Apart from the obvious economic categorization that locates the middle class between the poor
and the wealthy in terms of income and/or consumption, multiple competing definitions based on
sociological variables—such as educational level, professional status, educational achievement,
"lifestyle," and even aspiration—have all been deployed. Simple classifications based on income can
be relative (that is, within a national distribution) or absolute (for example, per capita income in US
dollars). An absence of theoretical agreement around these issues makes cross-national comparative
analysis generally difficult, a problem that Sumich chooses not to address despite acknowledging
it: "For my purposes, the middle class shares some general sociological characteristics that make this
social category more or less recognizable across the globe. These characteristics include broad
economic factors, such as a degree of material power, and social marks of distinction such as certain
levels of formal education and cultural capital, employment in a professional capacity, and a largely
urban-based lifestyle" (p. 8).

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Darch on Sumich, 'The Middle Class in Mozambique: The State and the Politics of Transformation in Southern
Africa'. H-Luso-Africa. 11-18-2020.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/7926/reviews/6805844/darch-sumich-middle-class-mozambique-state-and-politics
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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All this has presented me with a problem of lecture, of leitura: how is the book meant to be read?
Sumich paints a picture of a broadly dissatisfied urban "middle class" in Maputo based on research
carried out over a decade, between 2002 and 2016. During those years, he immersed himself in this
particular urban social milieu, and his narrative relies mainly on the testimonies—in effect, the petits
récits—of a narrow group of a couple of dozen lightly disguised informants, with multiple direct
quotations. The book is organized around this cadre's largely unfiltered perceptions of present-day
social reality and contemporary political history—a discourse of signification, to appropriate Sumich's
preferred terminology—with extensive references to the experience of a range of other countries,
both in Africa and elsewhere. In fact, Sumich's theoretical reading is impressively wide-ranging: in a
bibliography of around two hundred referenced publications he cites material on Hungary, Indonesia,
Bengal, and Melanesia, among many other places. However, only a third of his sources deal directly
with Mozambique, and of those only a handful are in Portuguese or by Mozambican scholars, such as
Yussuf Adam, Teresa Cruz e Silva, Benedito Machava, or Borges Coelho. For whatever reason, he
ignores the extensive memoir and biographical literature of the last two decades, by and on Frelimo
as well as opposition figures, which reveals their subjects' wide range of social origin in the families
of teachers, minor state functionaries, health workers, and so on. Frelimo's own voice is barely heard:
Sérgio Vieira and Samora Machel are quoted once each, on both occasions from English translations.
Sumich cites a handful of statistics from secondary sources but is generally dismissive of
Mozambican statistical data—presumably including the Instituto Nacional de Estatística's various
household surveys—as being "vague and unreliable" (p. 9).

These were the years of the presidential mandates of Armando Guebuza (in office from early 2005 to
early 2015), who had already become the Frelimo Party's official presidenciável (eligible presidential
candidate) in 2002, when he took on the role of party secretary-general. The "hidden debt" scandal,
involving secret loans of around two billion dollars to the government—on Guebuza's watch—broke in
2016, shortly after he had left office (pp. 150-51). The period of Sumich's immersion in Maputo
society was, therefore, marked by the fairly rapid breakdown of the then dominant narrative of the
country as a post-conflict success story, after the negotiated end (in 1992-94) of the sixteen-year post-
independence war with Renamo and a long period of uninterrupted economic growth. The quotations
from Sumich's informants, however, also reveal a final and parallel breakdown of popular belief, not
only in post-conflict success but also in the heroic narrative of the armed struggle for national
liberation and the failed post-independence social revolution. The consequent sense of collective
disillusionment in both founding mythos and present reality permeates the book. This is a direct
consequence of Sumich's methodology: by privileging the perceptions of a small selection of
Mozambican interlocutors, their collective disillusionment emerges clearly. Nonetheless, the extent
to which it is valid to generalize from their experience remains an open question.

Anthropological method is both the book's strength and its weakness. On the one hand, from the
extensive quotations of direct (but presumably translated) testimony we gain an understanding of
how a (rather small) sample of privileged urban Mozambicans—twenty-five or so people are
mentioned by name—see themselves and their society.[7] On the other hand, Sumich does not
provide us with any basis for evaluating the extent to which his informants' representation of such
issues as corruption, levels of violent criminality, the competence of state structures, and so on does
in fact reflect what is empirically known. He refrains from discussing the problem, and indeed, it may
be that such an interrogation of the relationship of analysis to evidence, of the idiographic and the
local to the nomothetic, in the construction of a chronological narrative is irrelevant to what he is

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Darch on Sumich, 'The Middle Class in Mozambique: The State and the Politics of Transformation in Southern
Africa'. H-Luso-Africa. 11-18-2020.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/7926/reviews/6805844/darch-sumich-middle-class-mozambique-state-and-politics
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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trying to achieve. The contradictions and exaggerations may be the point, although this is not stated
in so many words. In a recent brief response to a group of three reviewers, all of whom have
published on the middle class elsewhere, Sumich offered the following comments about his objectives
in the book: "My goal was not to try to map a category of 'middleclassness' as an empirical reality,
especially as it is debatable how beneficial the concept of a middle class is as an analytical category.
However, it can be very meaningful as a folk concept. My interlocutors generally saw themselves as
occupying some sort of middle in their social world. To varying degrees they felt subject to, or
hostages of, the whims of a 'they' who occupy the summit of society and the roiling discontent of a
'them' below. Building from this, I understand the concept of a middle class as a discourse among
those with significant if differing levels of privilege. It is a claim concerning the nature of reality and
one's role within it. In my view, the middle class ... is a system of signification where global influences
combine with pre-existing social logics to form the hierarchies—with their often amorphous
middles—that have drawn our attention."[8] The idea expressed here that the middle class is a kind of
narrative rather than an actual social group emerges from anthropology's long-standing
preoccupation with questions of identity, self-identification, and representation. The term "folk
concept" is anthropologists' expression denoting a vague idea that is popularly understood within a
given social group but that does not have a specific or formal definition. Hence, Sumich's two dozen
friends define themselves as middle class, and that is apparently sufficient both for his and their
purposes.

In a passage in which he seems to be arguing that Samora Machel occupied a dominant position in
Mozambique that was analogous to Joseph Stalin's in the Soviet Union, Sumich argues that Machel
was "the living embodiment of Frelimo's social revolution ... the public face of the party." His
speeches were "programmatic" and spelled out how transformation was to be achieved (p. 84). This is
not entirely inaccurate. However, little is known about the internal Frelimo Party processes by which
policy was developed within the Politburo or the Central Committee, or what debates took place in
the closed sessions of the Assembleia Popular, and it may well be that Machel's positions were
sometimes defeated (for example, regarding the executions of the Nachingwea "traitors"), in a way
that it is hard to imagine Stalin's were.[9] Similarly, Sumich's assertion that Joaquim Chissano, after
1986, "found it difficult to assume Samora's role" seems to discount the extent to which Chissano was
his own man and had the confidence of the party (p. 88).

Popular narratives of contemporary history, especially in a society in which independent sources of
information are few and far between, exercise a powerful grip, and Sumich's reproduction of what is
frequently middle-class gossip (boatos, fofoca, papos da esquina; synonyms for gossip) about current
or recent events provides multiple vivid examples of this.[10] "Rumors" have long been a focus of
anthropological attention, of course; it may also be worth noting the level of disapproval of boateiros
(rumor-mongers) as little better than bandits during the revolutionary period.[11] Sumich reproduces
widely circulated jokes, such as the one about a fish (p. 86n1) that was popular in the 1980s but
misses the point about carapau (p. 90), a nutritious species of mackerel that was widely believed at
that time to have been overfished by Spanish vessels in the Mozambique Channel, leaving only the
"small bony" juveniles for local consumption.

Sumich briefly discusses Operação Produção, a brutal attempt by the government to resolve the
problem of urban unemployment by inventing a social category of marginais or improdutivos
(marginal or unproductive people). These unfortunates were identified bureaucratically through the

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Darch on Sumich, 'The Middle Class in Mozambique: The State and the Politics of Transformation in Southern
Africa'. H-Luso-Africa. 11-18-2020.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/7926/reviews/6805844/darch-sumich-middle-class-mozambique-state-and-politics
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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absence of certain kinds of ID cards, and were then flown off to the countryside in the far north to
work in agriculture. This project was launched in the aftermath of the Fourth Congress, and there is
some evidence that it was initially popular (as Sumich acknowledges) among people who saw the
unemployed as responsible for crime and as an economic burden in a period of scarce resources. The
Frelimo Party has never renounced the measure, and indeed, has sometimes defended it.[12] Sumich
states that between thirty thousand and fifty thousand people were removed in this way, but this is
almost certainly an inflated figure of the kind that his interlocutors would likely believe in (p. 85).
Official data has it that in phase two, compulsory removals totaled around ten thousand people, about
half of them from Maputo. Most of the improdutivos were flown to Niassa on aircraft belonging to
LAM, the national airline; the expulsion of even five thousand deportees needed as many as twenty-
six flights, along a 1,500-kilometer route to Lichinga, where there was almost no preparation to
receive them. Nonetheless, in folk memory, "thousands and thousands" of people were forcibly
shipped off, and the actual number is probably less important than the symbolizing of the unjustness
of the process.[13]

There are multiple examples of minor historical infelicities that arise from an anthropological reliance
on popular memory. Sumich takes "traditional leadership" as a given rather than a hotly contested
term, and even quotes "a woman from a party-connected family" without comment as saying that "we
broke the tribal system most people lived in" (pp. 80, 82, 103, emphasis added). On page 49 he states
that large numbers of Africans who fought in the colonial army were "considered traitors by Frelimo,"
when in fact it was the volunteer members of such units as PIDE's Flechas, and the army's
Grupos Especiais and Grupos Especiais Páraquedistas who were greatly mistrusted, and not the
many draftees. The unnuanced claim that the Portuguese colonial state "made few provisions for
African education" makes no allowance for the fact that the 1940 Concordat and the 1941 Missionary
Statute were the basis for a system carefully designed to keep Africans in their place as cheap
labor (p. 69). This was an intervention with a clear political objective not the abandonment of the
field to chance and the Presbyterians. The food riots of 2008, 2010, and 2012 are mentioned several
times with no reference to analyses and testimonies published by Luís de Brito at the Instituto de
Estudos Sociais e Económicos in Maputo.[14] There are other examples.

In the end, despite these criticisms, what Sumich does achieve is to provide a snapshot of the
attitudes and perceptions of a narrow social stratum that is purposefully vaguely defined except in
terms of the common belief of its members that they inhabit a kind of social middle space, "subject to
... the whims of a 'they' who occupy the summit of society and the roiling discontent of a 'them'
below."[15] This is, quite deliberately, a long way from class analysis in the classical sense.[16]
Sumich has remarked elsewhere that he is "an anthropologist rather than a historian" and that his
text focuses on the "projects of transformation that were the most salient for my interlocutors ... due
to the fact that they had occurred within living memory."[17] At the risk of criticizing the author for a
book that he has not written rather than for the one he has, let me conclude by saying that Sumich's
text suffers principally from his reticence on the methodological and epistemological matters
indicated above. Its virtues lie in what it tells us about contemporary urban Mozambicans' attitudes
toward society and history rather than in any claim to present a historical narrative per se.

Notes

[1]. Sumich has published articles on this and related topics. See, among others, with Morten

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Darch on Sumich, 'The Middle Class in Mozambique: The State and the Politics of Transformation in Southern
Africa'. H-Luso-Africa. 11-18-2020.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/7926/reviews/6805844/darch-sumich-middle-class-mozambique-state-and-politics
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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Nielsen,"The Political Aesthetics of Middle-Class Housing in (Not So) Neoliberal Mozambique,"
Antipode 52, no. 4 (2012): 1216-34; "The Party and the State?: The Ambiguities of Power in
Mozambique," in Negotiating Statehood: Dynamics of Power and Domination in Africa, ed. Tobias
Hagmann and Didier Péclard (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 134-53; "Tenuous Belonging:
Citizenship, Democracy and Power in Mozambique," Social Analysis 57, no. 2 (2013): 99-116; "The
Uncertainty of Prosperity: Dependence and the Politics of Middle Class Privilege in Maputo," Ethnos
1 (2015): 1-21; "Politics after the Time of Hunger in Mozambique: A Critique of Neo-Patrimonial
Interpretations of Elites," Journal of Southern African Studies 34, no. 1 (2008): 111-25; and "Just
Another African Country: Socialism, Capitalism and Temporality in Mozambique," Third World
Quarterly (July 2020): 1-17.

[2]. Nkululeko Mabandla, review of The Middle Class in Mozambique, Africa (IAI) 90, no. 3 (May
2020): 599; and Carola Lentz, review of The Middle Class in Mozambique, Africa (IAI) 90, no. 3 (May
2020): 601.

[3]. João Paulo Borges Coelho, "Politics and Contemporary History in Mozambique: A Set of
Epistemological Notes," Kronos no. 39 (2013): 21.

[4]. On the question of the parallel militarization of the Portuguese state and the liberation movement
in the late 1960s, see my co-authored work, Colin Darch and David Hedges, "Não temos a
possibilidade de herdar nada de Portugal: As raízes do exclusivismo político em Moçambique,
1969-1977," in Territórios da língua portuguesa: Culturas, sociedades, políticas, ed. Glaucia Villas
Bôas (Rio de Janeiro: IFCS/UFRJ, 1999), 135-49. A volume of delegate speeches
from the fourth congress was published later. See Intervenções dos delegados ao 4º Congresso
(Maputo: Frelimo, 1985).

[5]. See, for example, the survey by Pierre Jacquemot, "Africa's 'Middle Class': Realities, Issues, and
Perspectives," Afrique Contemporaine 244, no. 4 (2012): 17-31.

[6]. Jason Sumich, "The Middle Class of Mozambique and the Politics of the Blank Slate," in The Rise
of Africa's Middle Class: Myths, Realities and Critical Engagements, ed. Henning Melber (London:
Zed Books, 2017), 159-69.

[7]. The quotations from Sumich's informants are un-contextualized: Are they translations from
Portuguese? Were they recorded or reconstructed from notes or from memory?

[8]. The three reviewers were Nkululeko Mabandla, Leela Fernandes, and Carola Lentz. See
reviews of The Middle Class in Mozambique by Jason Sumich, Africa (IAI) 90, no. 3 (May
2020): 598-603, including Jason Sumich's comments to reviews, Africa (IAI) 90, no. 3 (May
2020): 602-3.

[9]. See John Saul, "The African Hero in Mozambican History: On Assassinations and Executions. Part
II," Review of African Political Economy 47, no. 164 (2020): 340.

[10]. Toward the end of the conflict with Renamo, in March 1991, the Mozambican News Agency
(AIM) admitted that much news went unreported, attributing this to problems of the communications
infrastructure (MozambiqueFile, March 1991, p. 23). But this was an excuse: Mozambicans often had

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Darch on Sumich, 'The Middle Class in Mozambique: The State and the Politics of Transformation in Southern
Africa'. H-Luso-Africa. 11-18-2020.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/7926/reviews/6805844/darch-sumich-middle-class-mozambique-state-and-politics
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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"to switch to foreign radio stations to find out what [was] happening in their country." Carlos
Cardoso, quoted in Paul Fauvet and Marcelo Mosse, Carlos Cardoso: Telling the Truth in
Mozambique (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2003), 224.

[11]. See, for example, articles in Notícias: "Denunciemos os boateiros," Notícias (April 26, 1984);
"Alguém diz que viu?" Notícias (April 27, 1984); and "Instrumento dos bandidos: Cerrar
fileiras também contra boatos, posição assumida pelos moradores dos DU's 5 e 8," Notícias (October
15, 1984).

[12]. See, for example, the comments of Joaquim Chissano in the weekly Savana, November 19, 2004;
and Lina Magaia, in O País [Maputo], August 3, 2007.

[13]. For a detailed study of Operação Produção, based on interviews and documentary research, see
Carlos Quembo, Poder do poder: Operação Produção e a invenção dos improdutivos urbanos no
Moçambique, 1983-1988 (Maputo: Alcance, 2017).

[14]. Luís de Brito, Egídio Chaimite, Crescêncio Pereira, Lúcio Posse, Michael Sambo, and Alex
Shankland, Revoltas da fome: Protestos populares em Moçambique, 2008-2012 (Maputo: IESE,
2015); and Luís de Brito, ed., Agora eles têm medo de nós: Uma colectânea de textos sobre as
revoltas populares em Moçambique, 2008-2012 (Maputo: IESE, 2017).

[15]. Sumich, comments to reviews, Africa.

[16]. In an earlier publication, Sumich argued that the concept of the middle class is "fundamentally
political" and "ideologically potent," while recognizing that what he terms the "rhetoric of class" is
currently "out of fashion." Sumich, "The Uncertainty of Prosperity," 823, 827, 825.

[17]. Sumich, comments to review, Africa.

Citation: Colin Darch. Review of Sumich, Jason, The Middle Class in Mozambique: The State and the
Politics of Transformation in Southern Africa. H-Luso-Africa, H-Net Reviews. November, 2020. URL:
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55879

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0
United States License.

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Darch on Sumich, 'The Middle Class in Mozambique: The State and the Politics of Transformation in Southern
Africa'. H-Luso-Africa. 11-18-2020.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/7926/reviews/6805844/darch-sumich-middle-class-mozambique-state-and-politics
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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