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In this article, the very different cotton production schemes that the state introduced in colonial and post-colonial Mozambique are explored. Three distinct periods in the history of cotton production are examined. In the first, the focus is on the impact of cotton cultivation on the daily lives of peasants trapped in a highly coercive labor regime which Portugal imposed in 1938 and enforced for almost a quarter of a century. An outline of the abortive attempt of the newly independent FRELIMO government to revitalize cotton production from 1977 to 1985 as part of its broader socialist agenda to transform the countryside, is given next, and the study is concluded with a discussion of recent state efforts to promote joint cotton ventures under the guise of the IMF—World Bank structural adjustment program. An analysis of these changing cotton regimes offers a way of exploring a wide set of issues in the sustainability debate, The Mozambican cotton scheme demonstrates the extent to which state development planning often is not only about either social or ecological sustainability but also about control, power, and effectively silencing the rural poor by experts disconnected from the countryside. It is also stressed that the politics of memory is an important dimension of the sustainability debate and the broader ideological struggles which it reflects. Try as they might, neither the colonial state nor the postcolonial state could control how peasants constructed and interpreted the past. The official representations of cotton as a path to progress, whether on a capitalist or a social road, were simply dismissed by most growers who knew better.

Journal of Southern African StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:This paper examines the intertwined social and environmental histories of the Cahora Bassa dam constructed on the Lower Zambesi River in Mozambique. A basic premise of this historical analysis is that social and ecological sustainability are necessarily linked. We trace the transformations wrought by Cahora Bassa and the devastating effects on peasant communities inundated by the dam's reservoir, on down-river communities and on the ecosystems of the Lower Zambesi. The grandiose aims of the Portuguese colonial state to 'develop' the Lower Zambesi by regulating the river contrast sharply with the exploitation of African workers recruited to build the dam. The project was also steeped in the discourse of national security, which provided a convenient rationale for burying information regarding the dam's likely consequences. Oral testimonies from the labourers who constructed the dam and peasants whose livelihoods were disrupted reveal the harsh costs of Cahora Bassa. Similarly, the regulation of the Lower Zambesi irrevocably altered the region's ecosystems contributing to a general loss of ecological integrity. The Cahora Bassa project demonstrates that questions of sustainability are linked to relations of domination and struggles over meaning. The history of Cahora Bassa is about an authoritarian colonial state willing to achieve a set of economic and strategic objectives using all the coercive power at its disposal without regard for the social and ecological consequences.

Peasants are an ambiguous social category. They are difficult to define and their political behavior defies most generalizations. Nevertheless, social scientists, many working outside of Africa, have produced a voluminous literature debating both the critical characteristics and the analytical utility of the term peasant. Some take the view that peasants have been defined so broadly and contradictorily as to render the concept virtually useless and that the notion should either be discarded or referred to only by negation (Dalton, 1972; Hill, 1963; Moore, 1972; Ennew, Hirst, and Tribe, 1977; Friedmann, 1980). Other scholars obviously disagree, having advanced definitions of the essence of peasants and varieties of agrarian change. Culturalists such as Kroeber (1948) and Redfield (1956) highlighted the peasants' folk version of a higher culture. Chayanov (1966) emphasized the demographic cycle of the peasant household, exhibiting a natural pattern of growth and change. Wolf (1966) and Godelier (1973) shifted the focus to the historically derived relationships of domination in which peasants were subsumed. Shanin defined peasants “as a kind of arrangement of humanity” (1973: 76) in which their partial involvement in the market and their partial subordination to the state or appropriating class were their most salient characteristics. These debates were reproduced within African Studies. Those skeptical that the concept had any analytical value initially prevailed. This position was defended most vigorously in a theoretical essay by Fallers (1961) and in Hill's (1963) masterful work on agrarian change in southern Ghana. As late as 1972, Post noted that “most writers either evade this issue or display analytical uncertainty or forthrightly reject the term [peasant]” (1972: 223).

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: Scholar-activists, by virtue of their critical engagement in the central issues of the day and their role in the production and dissemination of knowledge, have a unique opportunity to challenge the inherited orthodoxies in the academy and in the larger world in which we live. Within the field of African studies they have served as powerful critics and have broken new substantive, conceptual, methodological, and epistemological ground. To sustain this thesis, this essay explores three interrelated issues. First, it critically assesses the concept of value-free research—a notion which is commonly used to dismiss engaged scholarship as inherently flawed. Second, it documents how a number of African American scholars, passionately committed to social justice and to an end to racial oppression, produced pioneering work on Africa well before the field of African studies gained academic legitimacy in the post–World War II era. Finally, it highlights some of the critically important contributions that activist scholars have made to the study of Africa. The intellectual biographies of six prominent Africanists—Claude Aké, Basil Davidson, Francis Deng, Susan Geiger, Joseph Harris, and Walter Rodney—illuminate how political commitment can fuel theoretical and methodological innovation.

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