THE ESTABLISHMENT of the Frente de Ubertafdo de Mozambique (FRELIMO) party/state upon independence in 1975 was, for most rural Mozambicans, inseparable from FRELIMO policy on former autoridades gentilicas, meaning chiefs recognized and utilized by the Portuguese colonial regime as Harry G West is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. He has conducted research in Mozambique over the past six years. On 23 June 1999, Scott Kloeck-Jenson was killed along with his wife Barbara and their two children, Zoe and Noah, in a car accident in South Africa. Scott's death is a great loss to the community of scholars and policy-makers working in Mozambique. He and his family will be dearly missed by friends both in Mozambique and at home in the United States. Scott was in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Resident Program Manager for the University of Wisconsin Land Tenure Center's Research Project in Mozambique. He had conducted research in Mozambique over die past diree years. This article draws upon bodi individual and collaborative research undertaken by me authors. hi 1992 and 1993, West worked in Sofala, Manica, Gaza and Inhambane provinces with die support of the University of Wisconsin's Land Tenure Center (LTC) Research Project in footnote continued overieaf 455 1. Regedorias were also called regulados in many places.

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In this article I examine how rural Mozambicans in the Mueda plateau region experienced the socialist modernization policies of FRELIMO, the anti‐colonial guerrilla movement that eventually took power over the postindependence Mozambican state. In interpreting and engaging with the dramatic transformations brought on by FRELIMO socialism, Muedans often drew on the familiar language of sorcery, notwithstanding FRELIMO attempts to banish sorcery‐related beliefs and practices. While Muedans sometimes resisted the modernization agenda and sometimes embraced it, they could not make systematic instrumental use of sorcery discourse to pursue strategic ends. Rather, sorcery served them more broadly as a social diagnostics of power relations —one that preserved ways of understanding power that are saturated with ambivalence, [power, postcolonial Africa, sorcery, surveillance, guerrilla war, villagization, modernization]

This article examines the way in which female guerrillas both appropriated and contributed to the FRELIMO narrative of women's participation in the struggle for Mozambican liberation. The author argues that ideological commitment to the cause was essential to defining the experience of violence for these girls and young women and that, concurrent with their convictions, they felt empowered rather than victimized by the war. The article contributes to an emerging literature suggesting that the culturally-specific meanings given to the social category of youth as well as to experiences of violence are essential to understanding the impact upon Africa's youth of the continent's many armed conflicts.

In the first two years following the peace accord in Rome on 4 Ocotber 1992 between Mozambique's governing party, the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo), and the Resistência National Moçambicana (Renamo) guerrilla leadership, over one million refugees returned to the country while as many as three million moved back to the areas they were forced to flee during the war. With the post-accord commitment of the United Nations to monitor the ‘peace process’ as well as the political transition to a multi-party democratic régime, the international community invested itself strongly in supporting Mozambicans in their attempt to rebuild their war-torn country. The United Nations Operation in Mozambique (Unomoz) presented an acid test for the future of UN-sponsored ‘peacekeeping’ initiativesthe recent difficulties or failures in Angola, Somalia, and Bosnia having thrown into question the sensibility of such expensive operations with little probability of producing sustainable results. For the donor community, the end of the war signalled an opportunity to advance discussions and practical steps towards liberalising the Mozambican economy and decentralising state power — thereby offering a new laboratory for model testing.