Introduction

Seen in terms of conventional political science, and also as experienced by Mozambican men and women, the recent history of Mozambique has been very dramatic. There have been several changes of political regimes and almost three decades of war, fromthe onset of the armed struggle in 1964 to the Rome peace agreement in 1992. There have been two remarkable political shifts during this period. First there was the rapid transition in 1975 from Portuguese colonialism to political independence and Frelimo socialism. Second, in the late 1980s the government moved from Frelimo socialism to neo-liberal economic policies and a Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP, in Portuguese: PRE – Programa da Re-estruturação Económica) under World Bank leadership. This time the name of the government did not change. Frelimo remained in power, but with a somewhat different political and economic agenda after its fifth Party Congress in 1989.

The point I want to make in this chapter has to do with the contradiction between on the one hand the ways in which each of these different politics of government have seen themselves as radical breaks with the immediate past, and on the other hand the ways in which these different political regimes (in theory as well as in practice) have approached issues of gender. Examined through a gendered lens these apparently radically different political lines have much in common. Considered from this angle the political continuities seem much more dominant than the radical breaks.