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

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Darch on Sumich, 'The Middle Class in Mozambique: the State and the Politics of Transformation in Southern Africa' H-Luso-Africa 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 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Luso-Africa 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. 2 H-Luso-Africa 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.
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