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Journal of Southern African Studies

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State resettlement policies in post‐colonial rural

Mozambique: the impact of the communal village
programme on Tete province, 1977–1982
a
João Paulo Borges Coelho
a
University of Eduardo Mondlane
Published online: 24 Feb 2007.
To cite this article: João Paulo Borges Coelho (1998) State resettlement policies in post‐colonial rural Mozambique: the
impact of the communal village programme on Tete province, 1977–1982, Journal of Southern African Studies, 24:1, 61-91,
DOI: 10.1080/03057079808708567
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Journal of Southern African Studies, Volume 24, Number 1, March 1998 61
State Resettlement Policies in

Post-Colonial Rural Mozambique: The
Impact of the Communal Village
Programme on Tete Province, 1977-1982
JOÃO PAULO BORGES COELHO
(University of Eduardo Mondlane)
Downloaded by [Thammasat University Libraries] at 04:33 07 October 2014
This article considers the impact of the villagisation policy implemented by the new Frelimo
government in Tete province between 1977 and 1982. It traces continuities with the
unpopular policy of colonial era aldeamentos, the concentrated settlements which served
counter-insurgency purposes during the war for independence, and which had been a
subject of guerrilla attack. The article focuses on the economic basis of the new villages,
exploring the introduction of collective production, interventions in marketing, and the
ecological implications of concentrated settlement. A discussion of the early years of
Renamo's war in Tete, and its interaction with the state's rural policies, forms the final
section of the article.
Introduction
After independence, the development strategy established by the new regime for Mozam-
bique's rural areas was based on a country-wide villagisation programme run by the state
and based on two main pillars: population resettlement and the transformation of production
relations. It is the aim of this article to assess the impact of such policies on the Province
of Tete, examining the extent to which they were capable of bringing the peasantry out of
the deep crisis which had been fostered by colonial underdevelopment in general, and the
major resettlement programme established by the colonial state in the context of the
nationalist war for independence, in particular.
The article begins by exploring the transition period between 1974 and 1977, seeking
a better understanding of the provincial context during the passage from the supposed
disintegration of the colonial aldeamentos (the strategic villages designed to increase state
control over the rural population), to the implementation of the new settlement policies. The
next section assesses the extent to which the aldeamento pattern was effectively replaced
by the new settlements. The third section concerns the implementation of the communal
villages programme until late 1982. Because of their importance and complexity, questions
related to village economic activity, including agricultural production and marketing,
receive special attention in the fourth section. The final section looks at the connection
between the programme's effects on the rural economy, and the ruthless war which
followed.
0305-7070/98/010061-31 © 1998 Journal of Southern African Studies
62 Journal of Southern African Studies
The Transition Period, 1974-1977

t h e months which followed the military coup of 25 April 1974 in Portugal were times of
great confusion in Mozambique, and not only politically and militarily: they also gave rise
to massive and incoherent population movements. The impact of the nationalist war had
reduced inequalities amongst the rural population in Tete Province, 'levelling' the vast
majority to a state of extreme poverty. Remaining distinctions were determined by where
people had been living at the end of the nationalist war.
In 1974-1975, many people lived in the colonial aldeamentos, the concentrated
settlements which had been established between 1968 and 1974 in an effort to control the
rural population, and to prevent contacts between them and the guerrilla forces.1 These
people endured both psychological pressures from the colonial authorities and deep mistrust
from the nationalist movement, emerging as perhaps the sector of the population most
traumatised by the war. Generally it can be said, however, that they viewed Frelimo as 'the
enemy of the aldeamentos' and, consequently, the entity which would free them from their
life under confinement. Towards the end of 1974, as pressure began easing, great numbers
of people therefore left the aldeamentos, heading to their home areas or simply seeking
better lands nearby.2
In addition to the aldeamento population, another major sector of the Tete peasantry had
been living under Frelimo protection during the war. Particularly after the Lusaka Agree-
ment of 7 September 1974, which resulted in the cease-fire, Frelimo combatants headed to
the main towns and administrative centres in great numbers, producing a very delicate and
complex political situation. This move occurred (with some variation) in the entire Tete
territory and, due to the relative shortage of staff, provoked a pronounced slackness of the
structures which had been controlling the liberated areas. As late as 1978, the deputy-direc-
tor of CNAC (the Comissao Nacional das Aldeias Comunais, the state department created
to coordinate the establishment of communal villages after independence), referring to
extensive areas he was visiting in Frelimo's former First Sector, wrote that people said that,
'they thought Frelimo had already forgotten they existed. They had never received basic
supplies or even seen a Frelimo soldier since 1975'.3 An indirect result of such slackness
was the gradual dispersion of people from these former settlements: in just a few years there
were scarcely any signs left of the former nationalists' people's bases. They were replaced
by the pre-war, scattered way of settlement.
Finally, a third sector of the peasantry in Tete was formed by the former war refugees
who were now returning from Zambia and Malawi. Crossing back over poorly controlled
frontiers, they tended to head to their home areas and re-establish the type of settlement
they had lived in before escaping from the war.
The movement of the peasantry - the overwhelming majority of the population - was
not propitious for the new Government. Scattered homesteads, the lack of communications
(the few existing roads were still mined to a great extent), and the poor structures of
Frelimo and the new Government, prevented the new regime from establishing means for
controlling the people and the territory. Several other factors contributed to the Govern-
ment's concern. As it was viewed at the time, the peasant sector produced almost
exclusively for subsistence in barren lands and through out-dated agricultural techniques.
1 There were 251 aldeamentos in Tete. See J.P. Borges Coelho, 'Protected Villages and Communal Villages in the
Mozambican Province of Tete (1968-1982): A History of State Resettlement Policies, Development and War',
PhD thesis, University of Bradford, 1993.
2 Ministry of Agriculture (MA), Comissão Nacional das Aldeias Comunais (CNAC), Aldeias Comunais (AC)/190,
Comissao Provincial das Aldeias Comunais (CPAQ/Tete, 'Relatório da Reunião Provincial das Aldeias
Comunais', 7 November 1979.
3 MA, CNAC, AC/190, CPAC/Tete, 'Relatório à 5a Sessão da Assembleia Provincial de Tete', December 1979.
State Resettlement Policies in Mozambique 63
The use of draught animals in agriculture was very restricted, in spite of the province being
a traditional cattle-owning area, due to the spread of tse-tse flies, the war, and poor herd
management. Cattle losses during the war had been severe: for example, of the more than
62,000 cows in Marara in 1970, only 1,350 could be found in 1975.4 This decline continued
after independence: the 122,982 cows counted in 1975 for Tete Province as a whole had
further decreased to 107,659 according to the 1977 figures.5 Structures for input supply and
marketing were almost absent; Seeds and implements, not to mention consumption goods,
were scarce.
Unlike some of Mozambique's other provinces, Tete had little prospect of agricultural
development outside the peasant sector; The war had left an extremely fragile private sector
which was increasingly regarded with mistrust by the provincial state structures due to its
uncooperative attitude, a lack of statistics regarding its productive activity in the Provincial
Directorate of Agriculture (DPA), and also probably due to the new authorities' increas-
ingly state-centred view of the economy. The state sector was established for the first time
in 1976, through state intervention in a private farm, the Casa Agrícola da Angónia, which
had been accused of economic sabotage. Subsequently, neighbouring private farms were
grouped with it to form the Unidade de Producäo da Angónia, the first and only state farm
in the entire province. The U.P. Angónia, or CAIA, was organised on several dispersed
farms. Over the following years, it continued to absorb settler farms, becoming an immense
state complex with serious problems of production planning and organisation, access to
agricultural inputs and productivity. Conflicts also emerged between the state farms and
surrounding household and cooperative farmers over land.6
Consequently, in spite of being a sector central to socio-economic transformation from
the official Frelimo perspective, the peasantry was not monitored either politically or
economically by the new authorities in the short term. In fact, Tete's villagisation
programme, if it can be considered as such, was very modest in the first couple of years,
particularly if compared with the other northern provinces which had experience of the
nationalist struggle: by the end of 1977 Cabo Delgado had established almost all its
communal villages and Niassa more than half. Tete, however, had only three embryonic
communal villages to show to the central authorities, two resulting from the transformation
of former aldeamentos, and one drawing on the experience of Frelimo war-time bases.7 The
dispersion and mobility of the population, as well as the gradual disintegration of the rural
economy, were not the only reasons for the delay. There were other reasons such as the
extreme weakness of the state structures at the provincial level. The programme was to be
directed by Frelimo and to integrate the several provincial directorates, but Frelimo lacked
a department directly concerned with this issue, and state departments such as the provincial
directorates of Public Works and Housing, of Commerce and of Transport, were simply not
co-operating.8
The security conditions of the Province were also a major deterrent to the villagisation
4 MA, Gabinete de Oŗganizacão e Desenvolvimento das Cooperativas Agrãrias (GODCA), G/391: Direcção
Provincial de Agricultura (DPA)/Tete, 'Relatório da Delegação de Tete à la Reunião Nacional do Ministério de
Agricultura a levar a efeito na cidade da Beira de 18 a 21 Setembro de 1975', 15 September 1975.
5 Ibid. and MA, CNAC, AC/190: DPA/Tete, 'Relatório a apresentar por ocasião do III Conselho Agrário Nacional',
no date [1978].
6 MA, CNAC, AC/190: DPA/Tete, 'Relatório a apresentar por ocasião do in Conselho Agrário Nacional', no date
[1978]; MA, GODCA, G/134: MA (Brigada Tete/Niassa), 'Relatório da Brigada do MA do lançamento da
planificação das campanhas agrícolas 1978/79 e 1979/80', April 1979; Centro de Estudos Africanos (CEA),
'Familias Camponesas na Angónia e Processo de Socialização do Campo', Maputo, 1983, pp. 14, 19-22.
7 MA, CNAC, AC/003: Governo Provincial (GP/Tete, 'Aldeias Comunais', 15 November 1977.
8 Ibid. This situation, as much as the pronouncements of Frelimo's Third Congress, was behind the major
re-organisation of state structures concerned with these issues in 1977 and 1978.
programme. Tete, together with the western provinces of Manica and Gaza, became the
setting of a new war almost immediately after independence. Rhodesia, reacting to the
alignment of Mozambique with the international community against white settler rule,
escalated its military operations from 'search and destroy' incursions into the Zimbabwean
sanctuaries in Mozambique and Zambia, to open military expeditions into Mozambique in
which economic targets and human settlements were attacked. Tete was perhaps most
affected by this new war.9 Sometimes these operations assumed the cover of Mozambican
resistance against the new regime. In the last year of colonial rule, Rhodesia's Central
Intelligence Organization (CIO) and Mozambique's Portuguese Security Police (DGS)
sought to launch black pseudo-guerrilla units, called Flechas. Caught by the sudden end of
the war in Mozambique, the CIO sought to convert these units into pseudo-guerrilla groups
which would resist the new government. Most probably, they also integrated demobilised
members of the Grupos Especiais (mostly African 'Special Groups' created by the colonial
regime to fight Frelimo) who were being harassed by Frelimo, and former members of the
numerous small nationalist groups in Tete. This process is an important element behind the
creation of Renamo, the anti-Frelimo movement which would become so notorious in the
following decade.10 The movement, acting in scattered small groups, penetrated as deep as
Tete's hinterland of Mardvia, on the north of the Zambezi, and tried to give a political
character to its actions. The reaction of the new security forces was poor: they were
seriously understaffed, used to guerrilla methods and not to pursuit operations, and lacked
roads and vehicles as well as radio communications. The Rhodesian forces escalated more
conventional operations in the area, as indicated in the following UN report:
... at the beginning the attacks were restricted to short rides of 50 men at the most, directed
against refugees from Zimbabwe and others. Subsequently, these attacks were intensified and
multiplied, becoming large scale operations directed not only against the civil population but
also trying to hit basic economic and social infrastructure. The weaponry used in these attacks
was steadily improved. Besides armoured vehicles and aeroplanes, artillery and napalm bombs
were increasingly used; From May 1977, the Rhodesian forces used Mirage jet-fighters and 500
kilogram fragmentation bombs."
The Communal Village Programme and Settlement Patterns

From 1977 on, the communal villages were no longer a product of local and regional
commitment, but were more and more the product of efforts by the state at its national and
provincial levels. From a local movement inspired by political guidelines, the communal
villages became the focus of a state programme, with institutional coordination, standards
to be established, and targets to be reached. The creation of CNAC (the National
Commission of Communal Villages), soon followed by the establishment of CPAC,
CNAC's provincial branch, marked the beginning of such a programme in Tete. It would
soon consider the villagisation of the entire Tele population as its objective, as happened
in other provinces.
The programme, it has to be said from the outset, is very difficult to assess in
quantitative terms for two sorts of reasons. First, the criteria which defined a communal
village varied between the several institutions concerned. Second, in part due to the
9 By late 1977, according to UN estimates, the war had affected 25,000 people in Tete, 15,000 in Gaza, and 10,000
in Manica. MA, CNAC, AC/057: UN Report, A/32/268. S/12413, 10 October 1977 [French version].
10 See Alex Vines, Renamo. Terrorism in Mozambique (London, James Currey, 1991), pp. 15-17; David Martin
and Phyllis Johnson (eds), Destructive Engagement -- Southern Africa at War (Harare, Zimbabwe Publishing
House, 1986), Chapter 1.
11 MA, CNAC, AC/057: UN Report, A/32/268. S/12413, 20 October 1977 [French version].
confusion over criteria, but also because of poor staff training and the lack of institutional
coordination, the lists of communal villages compiled by various institutions varied
substantially. Consequently, the quantitative data supporting this discussion, must be
considered as approximate.
Theoretically, a human settlement was considered to be a communal village when it
satisfied the following conditions: collective or cooperative production formed (or was on
the way to forming) the basis of the economy; it had a planned physical setting with distinct
residential and productive areas; and it had institutions of local administration which ran
village development and life in general. A communal village could be reported by
government sources as in one of three different stages: those being planned (and therefore
not yet established); 'embryonic' villages, i.e., those which had partially filled the above
conditions; and those which met all the criteria. Frequently, particularly after 1980, the will
to report great achievements to the higher levels of the state, or simply a confusion between
plan and reality by intermediate authorities, led to the designation of villages still being
planned as completed. These are relatively easy to discern, but the differences between the
several intermediate stages which the 'embryonic' villages went through before completion
were rather more complex. In Tete, this issue was further complicated by the existence of
former aldeamentos, some of which were being transformed into communal villages, and
therefore in some sort of 'embryonic' stage during the period under focus.
The limited state capacity to foster the villagisation programme, added to the require-
ments needed for a human settlement to be designated as a communal village, produced a
situation of slow advances and great complexity. Usually, both state departments and
scholars classify communal villages according to the three main peasant sectors mentioned
above: people from former aldeamentos, people from former Frelimo bases, and 'returnees'
from neighbouring countries, to which was added the category of villages formed through
'political mobilisation'.12 Araújo developed this classification further, introducing new
categories for villages formed as a consequence of natural disasters and villages formed on
the basis of collective forms of production, as distinct from peasant mobilisation.13
However, this typology, which closely follows the process as viewed by the state, fails
to distinguish between defacto human settlements and the origin of the population settled.
A communal village established in the physical setting of a former aldeamento is different
from a communal village formed by people from a former aldeamento but established in
a new area. In Tete, this question seems of crucial importance for reasons discussed below.
In addition, it does not seem legitimate to consider 'villages formed.during the armed
struggle' for two reasons: there were no communal villages during that period, in the sense
of the confined human settlements developed after independence, and the communal
villages apparently of this origin were formed after a process of population dispersal had
occurred. Some communal villages were thus physically the same as the colonial aldea-
mentos, but no communal village could be said to be born directly of previously successful
experiences in the liberated areas. Moreover, in the case of Tete it seems irrelevant to
12 MA, CNAC, AC/013: Presidência da República, 'Proposta para a Criação do Secretariado Nacional das Aldeias
Comunais', January 1978, p. 5; CNAC, 'Documento de Trabalho Interno Preparado com Vista à Elaboração de
um "Relatório de Orientação sobre o Desenvolvimento das Aldeais Comunais" ', Maputo, 16 May 1978; Manuel
Araújo, 'Características da Distribuição Espacial da População Rural na República Popular de Moçambique: Um
Exemplo da Transformação no Uso do Espaço', PhD, Lisbon, Faculty of Arts, 1988.
13 Araújo, 'Características da Distribuição Espacial da População Rural', pp. 187-194. According to Araújo, Tete
communal villages had the following origins: 13 per cent were formed in the 'liberated areas' during the armed
struggle; 0.7 per cent were formed through peasant mobilisation; 26.7 per cent were formed as a consequence
of natural disasters; 46.6 per cent were formed from the transformation of former aldeamentos; and 13 per cent
were formed by 'returnees'.
Table I. The Tete communal village programme (1978-1982)
1978 1980 1982
No. Population %of No. Population %of No. Population %of

District Vil. in villages Total Vil. in villages Total Vil. in villages Total
Zumbo 0 0 0 4 2,271 7.0 6 6,156 18.1

Maravia 3 2,179 6.8 4 2,179 6.4 4 2,517 7.0
Chiuta 1 578 1.4 2 3,070 7.4 2 3,070 7.0
Macanga 2 3,638 6.3 3 10,567 17.3 3 10,567 16.4
Ang6nia 2 2,997 1.4 5 5,335 2.4 5 5,495 2.4
Moatize 2 3,160 3.6 3 4,607 5.0 3 2,905 3.0
Mutarara 4 5,135 4.0 9 24,385 18.0 9 43,767 30.6
Magoe 1 1,250 12.8 1 1,250 12.0 1 3,143 28.7
C. Bassa 1 5,000 14.2 2 5,000 13.4 3 7,199 18.3
Changara 1 3,500 4.2 2 3,500 4.0 3 1,985 2.1

Total 17 27,437 5.4 35 62,164 9.2 39 86,804 13.3
Sources: MA, CNAC, AC/003: CPAC/Tete, 'Relatorio',29 July 1978; MA, CNAC, AC/190: CPAC/Tete,
'Relat6rio a 5a Sessao da Assembleia Provincial de Tete', December 1979; MA, CNAC, AC/190:
CPAC/Tete, 'No. 36/CPAC/80, Relacao das Aldeias Comunais existentes na Provfncia, por Distritos,
especificando a sua origem e numero de habitantes', 8 February 1980; MA, CNAC, AC/259: WFP/Maputo,
'Draft of project proposal', 1981; MA, CNAC, AC/256: CNAC 'Relacao nominal das Aldeias Comunais
existentes a nfvel nacional com os respectivos numero> de habitantes', 31 October 1981; MA, CNAC,
AC/215: CNAC, 'Aldeias Comunais existentes a nfvel nacional', May 1982; MA, CNAC, AC/128: CNAC,
'Resumo da situacao do desenvolvimento das Aldeias Comunais (at& 31 de Maio de 1982) na Republica
Popular de Mocambique', May 1982; MA, CNAC, AC/153: CNAC, 'Relat6rio de balanco e prestacao de
contas ao Comitd Central do Partido Frelimo (Confidencial)', 14 December 1982; Manuel Aratijo,
'Caracteristicas da DistribuicSo Espacial da Populacao Rural na Republica Popular de Mocambique: Um
Exemplo da Transformacao no Uso do Espaco', PhD, Faculty of Arts, Lisbon, 1988.
distinguish between villages resulting from popular mobilisation and villages formed on the
basis of collective production, these categories being effectively identical and practically
non-existent. Collective production was at any rate pursued, with varying degrees of
success, in all villages irrespective of their origins. Last but not least, many villages were
formed by people from two or more origins.
Table 2 attempts to integrate the criteria both of people's origin and type of settlement.
The table suggests some clear conclusions. The first is that most of the people living in the
communal villages came from the aldeamentos (almost 60 per cent of the total by 1982);
less attention, in terms of villagisation, was paid to the people from the liberated areas, who
had provided the bulk of Frelimo's support during the struggle for independence, and to the
former war refugees. Second, a great part of the communal villages were established in the
same location as the former aldeamentos. Even if suitable soils and abundant water were
the cause for such a continuity, the permanence of large human settlements, frequently of
more than 1,000 people, associated with the prevalent slash and burn agricultural tech-
niques, was undoubtedly creating serious soil degradation, even if this is difficult to assess
in quantitative terms. The state's ability to foster profound transformations in this and other
aspects of social and economic life in the villages was therefore of vital importance if
people's negative view of the aldeamentos was to be changed, and if their trust in a
movement which had promised them liberation from these 'concentration camps' was to be
kept. We will return to this question later.
A last important issue is the extent to which the communal village programme was
capable of achieving the proposed transformation of rural settlement. State goals were very
Table 2. Tete communal villages in 1982: origins of people and settlement
Type of settlement
Former New
People origin Aldeamento Village Total
Aldeamento 18 6 24
Frelimo area - 2 2
'Returnees' - 3 3
Frelimo area + 'returnees' - 2 2
Aldeamento + 'returnees' 2 4 6
Aldeamento + Frelimo Area + 'returnees' 2 - 2
Total 22 ' 17 39
Sources: MA, CNAC, AC/190: CPAC/Tete, 'No. 36/CPAC/80, Relacao das Aldeias
Comunais existentes na Provfncia, por Distritos, especificando a sua origem e niimero
de habitantes', 8 February 1980; Interview, Maxwell Amone Mwanza and Miguel Lufs
Coutinho, Chief and Head, respectively, Technical Division of Tete Department of
Physical Planning, Tete, July 1992.
ambitious: it was planned to create 14 villages for 5,000 people per year, reaching a total
of 111 new villages for almost 450,000 people by 1985, and to villagise the entire Tete
population by 1990.14 In practice, however, of the 783,893 people living in Tete in 1982,
only 86,804 people lived in communal villages: almost 90 percent remained outside the
Table 3. Persistence of the Aldeamento pattern of nucleation in Tete after

independence
Aldeamentos Aldeamentos
transformed remaining
into as
No. of communal 'informal' Aldeamentos
Aldeamentos villages villages 'disappeared'
Districts (1974) (1982) (1982) (1982)
Zumbo 9" 4 5 _
Maravia 14 2 9 3
Chiuta 12 - 7 5
Macanga 24b 1 17 6
Ang6nia 18 - 12 6
Moatize 44 2 29 13
Mutarara 29 3 12 14
MiSgoe 15" 1 8 6
Cahora Bassa 28C 3 14 11
Changara 57d 2 36 19
Totals 250 18 149 83
"The Zumbo territory south of the Zambezi was administratively integrated in Magoe;
""including former Bene (later renamed Chifunde) and excluding Chiuta; cChi6co was
integrated in Cahora Bassa; dincluding Marara and former Tete Central Area.
Sources: Interview, Maxwell Amone Mwanza and Miguel Luis Coutinho, Chief and
Head, respectively, Technical Division of Tete Department of Physical Planning, Tete,
July 1992; J. P. Borges Coelho, 'Record of Tete Aldeamentos', Maputo, AHM, 1993.
14 MA, CNAC, AC/092: CNAC, 'Dados que vamos fornecer ao Diário de Moçambique (Confidencial)', 4 November
1982.
villages.15 A great portion of these people was dispersed throughout the territory. However,
a significant part of them remained in the former aldeamentos, as shown in Table 3.
Though it is not possible to estimate the extent to which people left the aldeamentos, they
certainly shrank significantly. Those who left returned to their home areas; those who
remained were perhaps satisfied with their lands, with some of the facilities left by the
colonial scheme, or they may have remained under the shadow authority of their regulos or
chiefs. Those aldeamentos where important regulos had their residences during the war were
often reported as having persisted as 'informal' villages in the period under study. The
question of these 'informal' villages was important: amongst other things, what was at stake
was whether they were entitled to benefit from state support. Discussion of these issues within
state departments seems to have taken place quite rarely, revealing a trend of directing the
envisaged forms of state support towards the villages 'formally' considered as communal
villages in order to avoid the dispersion of the scarce state capacities through an 'endless'
number of villages.16 Jos6 Forjaz, then director of the National Directorate for Housing, and
Oscar Monteiro, then Minister of State Administration, expressed apprehensions about such
trends. Monteiro commented, 'It is not a crime living in a village which is not a communal
village. The state must be concerned with the entire population of our country'.17
In short, far from establishing a new settlement pattern after independence, the
communal villages in Tete were but one element of a wider and complex settlement pattern
which included what we have called 'informal' villages, and scattered homesteads.
The State and the Development of the: Villagisation Programme, 1977-

1982
One of the main conclusions of the Third Frelimo Congress with regard to communal
villages was the need to improve state support through better coordination of its several
departments. The task was assigned to CNAC arid, at provincial levels, CPAC. CPAC/Tete
was created in April 1978 in a context of great difficulties in the coordination of state action
in the field. Provincial directorates saw communal villages as a low priority, and the newly
created CPAC had little authority. According to Romao Tembo, the first director of
CPAC/Tete, 'everyone resisted collaborating. They missed the [coordination] meetings or
sent people without enough importance to act as real representatives. We had problems. We
felt abandoned in those days!'18
CPAC was to be guided by the recommendations of a Coordinating Council formed by
relevant provincial state departments. However, CPAC/Tete's Coordinating Council rarely
managed to assemble all its members in meetings. During the preparatory process for the
important First National Meeting on Communal Villages, held in March 1980, for example,
CPAC/Tete was forced to rely on its own executive structure: all state departments, with
the exception of the provincial departments of Public Works and Housing and Cooperatives
missed the preparatory meeting.19
15 The estimate of the provincial population is based on the census of 1980 plus population growth of 2.8 per cent
per year, as proposed by Araújo, 'Características da Distribuição Espacial da População Rural', p. 310. Araújo's
numbers for communal village occupants are higher than those cited here (137,800, p. 208), but refer to 1982/83.
MA, CNAC, AC/128: CNAC, 'Resumo da situação do desenvolvimento das Aldeias Comunais (até 31 de Maio
de 1982) na República Popular de Moçambique', May 1982, lists a total villagised population of 84,558.
16 MA, CNAC, AC/105: CNAC, 'Acta da 3a Reunião Preparatória da Reunião Nacional das Aldeias Comunais',
23 February 1980, pp. 7-8.
17 Ibid., p. 13, and see Forjaz's comments, pp. 7-8.
18 Interview, Tete, July 1992.
19 MA, CNAC, AC/105: CNAC, 'Acta da 3a Reunião Preparatória da Reunião Nacional das Aldeias Comunais',
23 February 1980.
Table 4. Losses caused by the 1978 Zambezi floods
Losses Tete Manica Zambézia Sofala Total
Dead 31 3 2 9 45
Displaced 89,568 22,000 30,000 77,420 218,988
Crops lost (ha) 25,114 9,500 9,000 17,880 61,494
Schools destroyed 53 14 20 68 155
Shops destroyed - 3 5 - 8
Source: MA, CNAC, AC/009: CNAC, 'Relatório sobre as cheias do rio Zambeze', no
date [1978].
When CPAC/Tete was being created in March 1978, severe floods occurred along the
Zambezi river. Considered the biggest in the region in this century, the floods affected four
out of the ten Mozambican provinces. Caused by heavy rains in Zambia, they were
aggravated by sudden discharges from the up-stream Kariba dam which forced the Cahora
Bassa dam to open eight of its ten floodgates. Tete was undoubtedly the most affected
province. The capital city had its vital bridge over the Zambezi seriously damaged, and its
water supply motor and the broadcasting transmitter were submerged.20 Mutarara was the
most affected district in the province with, officially, 31 dead and, 89,568 displaced, 23,114
hectares of crops lost and more than 50 schools destroyed or damaged.21 In Mutarara,
Inhangoma island, a fertile and densely populated area delimited by the rivers Zambezi,
Shire and Ziu-Ziu, was severely affected.
In the aftermath of the disaster, the Government empowered an Inter-Provincial
Commission of Natural Disasters and Communal Villages to coordinate the emergency
relief operations. The strategy to be adopted by the commission was clearly expressed in
its name: the relief operations were linked with resettlement. Moreover, CNAC was
appointed as Commission coordinator and Lopes Tembe, CNAC s deputy-director, was
appointed its leader.22 After the first emergency measures, which involved transferring
people to more secure places, the Commission focused its activity for the rest of that year
on Mutarara, particularly at Inhangoma. The Commission's goals coincided with those of
the Tete Governor: to resettle people from the lower, floodable areas in new communal
villages on more elevated areas. Even if the new agricultural areas remained by the river
edges, people's permanent residences were to be placed in new sites out of the reach of the
waters. Political commissars were appointed to provide orientation: some of them had
experience of a similar exercise carried out in the aftermath of the Limpopo river floods
some months earlier.23 Locating the new villages was assigned to the National Housing
Directorate in Maputo.24 In July, a team was dispatched to Tete. The criteria which formed
the basis of village demarcation were: relative protection from the waters, land and water
20 MA, CNAC, AC/009: Comissão Inter-Provincial das Calamidades Naturais e Aldeias Naturais (CIPCNAC), 'Acta
da la Reunião Inter-Provincial das Calamidades Narurais e Aldeias Comunais', 12 April 1978, p. 4.
21 MA, CNAC, AC/009: CNAC, 'Relatório sobre as cheias do rio Zambeze', no date [1978].
22 MA, CNAC, AC/003: Ministério das Obras Públicas e Habitação/Direcção Nacional da Habitação (MOPH/DNH),
'Proposta para a constituição de uma equipa de apoio às novas aldeias no vale do Zambeze', 24 April 1978; MA,
CNAC, AC/009: CIPCNAC, 'Relatório da visita às Províncias de Tete, Sofala, Zambézia e Manica, pelos
camaradas Lopes Tembe e Lourenço Mutaca, na qualidade de responsável e responsável-adjunto da Comissão
Inter-Provincial das Calamidades Naturais e Aldeias Comunais', 8 May 1978.
23 Some of these commissars caused problems in Cahora Bassa, another disaster area, where they relocated villages
which had already started building on the grounds that they should be near the main road. Most of the people
whose houses were torn down refused to rebuild, and the area became 'very difficult to villagise', according to
the district authorities. MA, CNAC, AC/009, CIPCNAC, 'Acta da Reunião', p. 21.
24 MA, CNAC, AC/003: MOPH/DNH, 'Proposta para a constituição de uma equipa de apoio às novas aldeias no
vale do Zambeze', 24 April 1978.
availability, and proximity to the railway line. In a few days, seven future communal
villages were demarcated in Mutarara. Soon, two more followed.
Apparently the Maputo-based study did not fully take into account the views of the local
communities: all the new villages faced resistance, which the authorities explained as being
principally the result of the undercover influence exerted by former régulos and religious
leaders. However, the reasons behind such reservations were much more complex and
tangible. First of all, the experience of the aldeamentos, which Mutarara had been the last
district to endure less than five years earlier, was still vivid in people's memory: the
authorities themselves recognised this when writing that, 'people in Inhangoma ... are not
mobilised fto join the communal villages] because they consider them as new aldeamentos
where they will carry on enduring exploitation'.25 Besides the recent traumas caused by the
violence associated with the aldeamento process or by the floods, the main reason for
community resistance to the new villages lay in the fact that they would be exchanging the
fertile, irrigated lowlands of the margins of the rivers Zambezi, Shire and Ziu-Ziu for new
places they knew were less productive.
People thus tended to leave the emergency camps, heading back to their former areas
by the river as soon as the waters went down. The authorities, on the other hand, wanted
to transform these camps into communal villages, or to remove people to third sites. Local
communities could not afford openly to oppose the authorities, and, as had happened some
years before, part of the population fled to Malawi while others covertly resisted by
avoiding visiting officials. The authorities could not afford an open confrontation with the
people either. They used what was termed 'aggressive political mobilisation', alongside
other measures such as only delivering emergency aid to the communal villages. These
strategies led on occasion to the new authorities being compared with their colonial
predecessors: both were keen to villagise people against their will. Almost one quarter of
the total communal villages of Tete were created exclusively on the basis of central
initiative.
It is thus clear that the official criteria for establishing a communal village were not
necessarily the same as the criteria held by local people, who could covertly or openly resist
as a result. It is also clear that the leading role taken by central government authorities
hardly helped to strengthen provincial institutions, which was absolutely necessary in order
to plan and implement future villages. Subsequent events showed that even the criteria
established centrally were not entirely followed on the ground: compromises during
implementation were common. For example, the communal village settled at Vila Nova da
Fronteira grew continuously to become one of the largest in the Province and even in the
entire country, with almost 7,000 people by 1981. In spite of being a centrally defined basic
criterion, drinkable water was not readily available: water was brought by train from Beira
on a daily basis.26
Soon after the interventions resulting from the 'emergency procedures' of the central
authorities, the provincial authorities started establishing communal villages elsewhere.
CPAC prioritised the gathering of information through visits to the districts and provincial
and district seminars. At the village level, on top of the other activities, there was also the
building of model houses particularly at Capirizange and M'condezi in Moatize. The need
for quick results led CPAC to give priority to building physical infrastructure, instead of
25 MA, CNAC, AC/009: CIPCNAC, 'Acta da 4a Reunião Inter-Provincial das Calamidades Naturais e Aldeias
Comunais', 18 July 1978, p. 7; MOPH/DNH, 'Relatório sobre a viagem efectuada ao Distrito da Mutarara para
apoiar a implantação das Aldeias Comunais', July 1978, p. 10.
26 Interview, Maxwell Amone Mwanza and Miguel Luís Coutinho, Chief and Head, respectively, Technical Division
of the Tete Department of Physical Planning, Tete, July 1992. Mwanza participated in the brigades which
established most of the Tete communal villages.
starting from the economic and productive base of the villages and their social organis-
ation.27
Table 5 shows the communal villages established in Tete, excluding 25 'embryonic
nucleations', i.e. settlements that were developing into communal villages by 1982 but still
lacked key features.28 It shows that during the two years following the events in Mutarara
90 per cent of Tete's communal villages were completed. Some were fostered by CPAC,
and most by local authorities following political orientation. Most of the villages from this
latter group were located far from the provincial capital, lacked passable roads, and
therefore benefited little from any form of state support. The former group, and particularly
the Moatize villages, had a very different experience. Political enthusiasm and a belief that
the delay in the beginning of the programme could be overcome by greater state
commitment, led CPAC's first director to consider, much later, that the main problem in
these cases had been excessive state support:
I think the crisis [of the communal villages near the city of Tete] was due to excessive state
support.... We used to send groups of one or two hundred people [from the city] to build the
communal village, to cut down stakes and build houses. Afterwards, we would say to the
villagers: 'Everything is ready now. Here you have your houses. Let us distribute them'.... The
villagers would only watch. Everything was supposed to be done by the state.29
However, the manner in which it was envisaged that local people would be involved in the
communal villages was more important than the question of the absence or excess of state
support in determining village development. Two factors are important here: the first is
related to the absence of people's active participation in the previous aldeamento process
which led to a belief that the nucleations were basically state undertakings; the second is
that these new nucleations, like the previous ones, were contrary to people's experience and
beliefs concerning how to organise their lives. Political guidelines which called for people's
participation in locating and developing villages seemed to have been hampered by the
state's need to speed up the programme — the practice in Mutarara, in which discussions
with the people were superficial or simply absent, was expanded to the entire Province. By
late 1979, when more than half of the villages were already completed and the rest on the
way to being established, the Provincial Meeting on the Communal villages clearly
concluded that 'the location of the habitation sites in most of the villages of the Province
was defined by district or provincial authorities without popular participation'.30
Besides affecting such vital aspects of the village as land availability or access to roads,
the location problems also affected the space within the village and the effort spent on them
by the state. Water availability remained a major problem: northern Tete is characterised by
a multitude of small rivers which are often out of water during the dry season, while the
southern region is regularly hit by major droughts, both factors which do not favour large
human agglomerations. In general, state action in supporting the villages in this field started
late, after 1980. This was a result of a number of factors, ranging from the chronic state
weakness in Tete, to the difficult communications, to village location. The existence of
relatively important facilities left by the aldeamentos might also have played a role in the
27 MA, CNAC, AC/003: CPAC/Tete, 'Piano de Actividades para 1978', 30 June 1978. Significantly, 'dynamising
of agricultural production and craft cooperatives as well as household production' appears as only the seventh
priority in the first yearly plan.
28 'Nucleation' was conceived of as the grouping of people into larger centres. Most of these nucleations, particularly
in Moatize and Changara, had been aldeamentos, while those in Zumbo, Marávia, Macanga and Mágòe had been
círculos in Frelimo liberated areas.
29 Interview, Romão Tembo, Tete, July 1992.
30 MA, CNAC, AC/190: CPAC/Tete, 'Relatório da Reunião Provincial das Aldeias Comunais', 7 November 1979.
Table 5. Communal villages established in Tete
District 1977/1978 1979 1980 1981
Zumbo Eduardo M'Pangula Puato

Mondlane Cassuende
Josina Machel
Melauze
Mari via Nhimbe Nhenda

Molwera
Uncanha (Piri-Piri)
Chitita N'Sadzop Kariramo

Macanga Gandale Chidzolomondo
Namadende
Angdnia Lido N'Katu6 M'Pandula

Chiumbune Chinvano
Moatize Capirizange (OUA) Samoa

M'Condezi
Mutarara Sinjal Zimira

Nhamayabwe Charre
1 de Maio Bau£
Missuassua Cumbiamuana
V.N.Fronteira
Magoe Cadzindira
Cahora Bassa Chipera Chissua Nhancapiriri
Changara Temangau Capimbi Chicompende
Source: MA, CNAC, AC/144: Ministeiio da Saude, 'Dados sobre Aideias Comunais colhidos em todas as
Provincias, excepto Maputo, por elementos do Gabinet; de Estudos', July 1977; MA, CNAC, AC/190:
CPAC/Tete, 'No. 36/CPAC/80, Relacao das Aideias Comunais existentes na Provincia, por Distritos,
especificando a sua origem e ntimero de habitantes', 8 February 1980; MA, CNAC, AC/190: CPAC/Tete,
"Relat6rio a 5a Sessao da Assembleia Provincial de Tete', December 1979; MA, CNAC, AC/256: CNAC, 'Relacao
nominal das Aideias Comunais existentes a nivel nacional com os respectivos ntimeros de habitantes', 31 October
1981; MA, CNAC, AC/215: CNAC, 'Aideias Comunais existentes a nivel nacional', May 1982.
postponement of new works. Serious water problems were reported for many villages, as
had been the case in the aldeamentos.
Generally, villagers tended to be more receptive to and willing to participate in the state
health and education programmes. This was largely because these appeared as more
tangible in their eyes, and also due to the way the programmes were conceived. The main
obstacle was undoubtedly the state's inability to reach the villages due to difficult
communications, which translated into a general lack of supplies in terms of medicines and
medical and school equipment. Although schools could be found in every communal
village, they were frequently either schools built in the aldeamentos under the 1972 colonial
school programme, or simply classes attended under the trees in the open air. The problem
with health posts was partially the same: there were far fewer health posts than schools in
1982 because, in part, of the greater demands in terms of quality of buildings. Other issues
also made the health programme more difficult to implement. This was in part because of
the official attitude towards 'traditional' healers. A general attitude of rejection was quite
clear in the instructions issued by CPAC: 'As to healers, who seed divergence amongst
families, we must conduct a relentless combat against them. Consequently, if they are
Table 6. Health and education programmes in Tete communal villages
Communal Health
Districts villages posts APEs Schools
Zumbo 6 2 2 6
MaraVia 4 4 3 3
Chiuta 2 _ - -
Macanga 3 1 1 2
Ang6nia 5 -, - -
Moatize 3 1 5 2
Mutarara 9 4 8 10
Magoe 1 1 1 2
Cahora Bassa 3 2 2 2
Changara 3 - - 1
Totals 39 15 22 28
Source: MA, CNAC AC/009: CPAC/Tete, 's/r\ 25 November 1978;

MA, CNAC, A/242: MOPH/DNH, 'Relat6rio\ 19 May 1978.
detected inside the communal village they must go through severe re-education [meaning
confinement and political education, sometimes for several years] and the instruments they
use to cheat the people, as well as the garments they wear in the ceremonies, must be
apprehended and sent to the provincial structures'.31
Further difficulties arose from the fact that, unlike teachers or school monitors, the
health monitors (APEs) did not earn salaries from the state. During their first year on duty
in the village they, as well as their families, were to be fed, dressed and housed by the
villagers. Supposedly, this would give them time to build their own houses and clear their
own machambas (fields), supported by the villagers in time-consuming tasks such as
seeding and weeding. Although benefiting from the results of cooperative production, the
APEs were to be exempt from cooperative work. However, since this form of production
was neither widespread nor bringing tangible results, the APEs often stood in the uneasy
position of having to depend on the good will of the villagers to subsist. Their awkward
status led many of the relatively skilled and educated APEs to leave the communal villages
in search of a better life.32
At provincial and central levels, the conclusion that the results from state intervention
in the communal villages (not only in the social fields described above but particularly at
the production level), were modest was soon reached. State coordination was much below
that demanded by the Third Congress strategy to foster the programme and to mobilise the
peasants. However, development could only result from concrete and tangible socio-econ-
omic improvements, rather than from political and ideological mobilisation.
By 1979, new measures were introduced in an attempt to reverse these general trends
by concentrating state efforts in particular regions. The reasoning for this move was the
following, according to Felix Amane, then Governor of Tete:
... our experience in supporting the districts, since independence, has been characterised by
dispersion. This means that provincial level structures act on the several districts without
planning and coordinating with each other. That is why results are hardly noticeable. The
provincial structures tend systematically to cover the districts already provided with some
infrastructures and to forget the ones which carry on a daily struggle against very serious
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.; CNAC, 'Síntese dos Trabalhos da Delegação da CNAC à Província de Tete', Maputo, 22 June 1981, p.
11.
problems, hence needing much support, either material or human and moral. In order to
overcome these deficiencies, the Party structures saw the need to create a Pilot District in each
Province.33
Interestingly, this type of option was not new: some parallels can be found in similar
experiences in colonial Tanganyika, for example, where from the 1950s the policy of the
'Focal Point Approach', renamed the 'Improvement Approach' after independence, was
adopted.34 Of course, there were also important differences. In Tanganyika the goal was to
support the rural 'progressive sectors' in order to rapidly show tangible results to the
remaining sectors, whereas the Mozambican 'Pilot Approach' was based on geographical
criteria and primarily aimed at 'attacking' the most backward areas in order to foster an
homogeneous development of the districts. MaraVia was selected as Tete's Pilot District
because of the important role played by its population in supporting Frelimo during the
struggle for independence, and because it was considered to have been 'forgotten' by the
state since independence. The selection meant that from then on the Party Provincial
Committee and the Provincial Assembly would 'directly control' state action in Marivia.35
In parallel, pilot communal villages and cooperatives were selected in each district. Almost
half of these villages were still 'embryonic' at the time they were selected, the objective
being to foster their 'conclusion'.36
The selection of Marfvia as a Pilot District was also made in coordination with the
central authorities, namely CNAC, even if such coordination was hardly traceable, and was
soon followed by continuous visits of 'central' teams for field assessment and research.
Subsequent events, in fact, revealed an unbalanced coordination of central and provincial
authorities: on the part of the latter, lack of skills and means to act was a good reason to
appeal to the former, which kept referring to the rudimentary organisation of provincial
departments such as CPAC. No tangible results seem to have emerged from this approach:
even if more coordination was needed on the part of the state, the answer did not depend
on 'more state' but perhaps on 'better state' and more peasant involvement. This could only
be achieved through a clearer definition of and closer identification with local interests,
ultimately implying a reconsideration of the villagisation strategy as a whole. On the other
hand, the 'Pilot Approach' clearly revealed the lack of provincial means, including material
means, skills and coordination, to develop such a strategy, whose implementation heavily
depended on direct central action, even if the latter was still modest.
Household vs Cooperative Agriculture:

The government intended cooperatives to be the main form of production in the communal
villages. This meant that where there was no articulation between communal villages
and state farms (in which case the villagers were intended to integrate themselves as
wage labourers), household agriculture was expected to develop into cooperative farming.
Tete, where no state sector could be found besides very localised undertakings such as
U.P. Ang6nia and Moatize's coal industry, was almost entirely seen in this light. The
impact of such a strategy will be assessed along two main lines, namely the extent to
which cooperative production was capable of establishing itself as the dominant economy
33 MA, CNAC, AC/190: Governo Provincial (GP)/Tete, 'Directiva no. 1/79 de Sua Excelência o Governador da
Provfncia', 25 June 1979.
34 Andrew Coulson (ed), African Socialism in Practice: The Tanzanian Experience (Nottingham, Spokesman, 1977),
p. 8.
35 MA, CNAC, AC/190: GP/Tete, 'Directiva no. 1/79 de Sua Excelência o Governador da Província', 25 June 1979.
36 MA, CNAC, AC/128: CNAC, 'Lista nominal das Aldeias Comunais Piloto', 25 August 1983.
of the communal villages, and the way in which cooperative farming affected the
predominant household agriculture.
In addition to the farming cooperatives, other cooperatives were created in Tete
communal villages, such as for fishing in the Cahora Bassa shallow lake. However, because
by 1982 all Tete fishing cooperatives were considered as 'not working', farming and
consumer cooperatives will be the focus of the following discussion. Table 7 refers to
farming cooperatives established in Tete communal villages in the 1981-1982 agricultural
season, and requires some comment. First, numbers must be considered as approximate.
The recording done by the various institutions was often contradictory because of poor
statistical work and the blurred distinction between mere collective machambas and
effective cooperatives. In order to exclude imprecise categories, and principally because the
village is our main focus, cooperatives referred to as existing outside communal villages are
not included in the table. Nonetheless, data on area and members is missing for some
cooperatives, either because cooperatives were recently formed, or because they were not
yet considered as properly established cooperatives.
The table indicates that in spite of their late creation, farming cooperatives initially
experienced a pronounced growth (nine by 1979), which corresponded to the great increase
in the numbers of communal villages, and certainly was a delayed result of central measures
such as the creation of GODCA (the Office for Organising Farming Cooperatives). The
relatively high yearly increase in the numbers of cooperatives in the years which followed
(seven or so per year), was related to the attempt to consolidate the already established
communal villages, and seems to have resulted from the delayed impact of central planning
action from 1980. By 1982, 74 per cent of Tete's communal villages were developing
pre-cooperatives and cooperatives. Besides being included in the general communal village
programme, cooperative consolidation was attempted through such measures as the 'Pilot
Approach', referred to above, and more particularly through two projects promoted by the
Ministry of Agriculture, namely Projects CO-1 CADECO and CO-2 CRED.
Project CO-1 CADECO (the Centre for Supporting Cooperative Development) was
fostered by GODCA and financed by the Nordic countries through MONAP (the Mozam-
bique Nordic Agricultural Programme). It aimed to establish centres at the provincial level.
A centre was established in the District of Changara in Tete in August 1981, and was
supposed to cover the Provinces of Tete, Manica and Sofala. In Tete, CO-1 had two
working fronts, in Changara and in Moatize. Briefly, CO-1 assisted the cooperatives in
introducing new techniques for harrowing, seeding (maize, cotton, sunflower, sesame,
beans) and weeding; it financed the acquisition of and trained animals for draught power,
and introduced new irrigation techniques.37
Project CO-2 CRED (the Regional Centre for Experiment and Development) was
coordinated by INIA, the Institute for Agronomic Research. In addition to the cooperatives,
Project CO-2 was to assist the household sector and the communal villages in general. CO-2
acted in the District of Ang6nia under a Coordinating Council headed by the District
Administrator and including CRED itself, the district structures of Frelimo, Agriculture,
Agricom, Mecanagro, BPD (the Popular Bank for Development) and CAIA. By early 1982
it was planned to integrate the district structures of Health and Education. CO-2 CRED
started its activity in Ang6nia in January 1982, assisting local cooperatives in animal
breeding for draught power, production planning and organisation in general.38
Table 8 permits a general evaluation of the results of the cooperative movement. It
37 MA, Gabinete de Organização e Desenvolvimento das Cooperativas Agrárias (GODCA), G/134: DPA/Tete,
'2o Seminario Provincial das Cooperativas Agrarias', 16 May 1982, pp. 21-22.
38 Ibid., pp. 23-24.
Table 7. Farming cooperatives in Tete communal villages in 1982
Area
District C. village Cooperative Creation (ha) Members
Zumbo E. Mondlane E. Mondlane 1981 n/a n/a

J. Machel J. Machel 1981 n/a n/a
Melalize Melauze 1981 n/a n/a
Cassuende Cassuende 1982 n/a n/a
Maravia Nhimbe Nhimbe 1981 30 170

Molwera Molwera 1981 30 55
Piri-Piri E. Mondlane 1982 60 150
Macanga Gandale Gandale 1980 83 67

Namadende Namadende 1982 n/a n/a
Chidzolomoiido Chidzolomindo 1982 89 21
Ang6nia Lido M. Ngouabi 1979 14 12

Chiumbune Mkanjula Base 1979 52 129
N'Katue N'Katue- 1980 77 52
M'Pandula III Congresso 1979 12 9
Chinvano J. Machel 1979 8 7
Moatize Capirizange 25 Setembro 1979 206 60

M'Condezi M'Condezi 1981 40 291
Samoa S. Machel 1980 59 57
Mutarara Nhamayabwe' Nhamayabwi 1981 n/a n/a

1 de Maio 7 de Abril 1980 55 12
Missuassua J. Machel 1980 65 60
Bau£ Baui 1982 n/a n/a
Cumbiamuana 24 de Mho 1980 32 32
Magoe Cadzindira Cazindira 1981 n/a n/a
Cahora Bassa Chissua 3 Fevereiro 1979 29 54
Changara Capimbi HI Congresso 1979 85 55
E. Mondlane 1979 85 55
Chicompende M. Wiriamu 1979 73 28
Totals 39 29 1,184 1,376
Source: MA, GODCA, G/134: GODCA, 'Situacao das cooperativas de producao agricola na
campanha 1978/79 em Tete', 1978; MA, GODCA, G/134: DPA/Tete, 'Relatorio ao Conselho
Consultivo Alargado do GODCA', 2 August 1980; MA, CNAC, AC/155: CPAC/Tete, 'Lista
nominal das cooperativas existentes nas Aldeias Comunais', 12 February 1982.
reveals that, in spite of the short period of activity of the two projects above, some regional
distinctions were already emerging. In general, areas where specific action was being
undertaken had greater villagertntegration in the cooperatives, and in the case of the areas
under the influence of CO-1 and CO-2, all villages had cooperatives. Also clear is the fact
that CO-1 and CO-2 avoided remote and poor areas: the areas chosen had reasonable
communication systems (Moatize and Changara), or had historically better agricultural
performances and thus had better chances of success (Angdnia). Moreover, some distinc-
tions can be drawn between the areas subjected to specific action, particularly those under
CO-1 and CO-2, which showed a more 'technical attitude', and Mardvia which was
subjected to the 'Pilot Approach', where assistance was supposedly provided by all state
departments and which had a more political and administrative profile. Cooperatives created
under this latter approach, resulting mainly from political mobilisation, had much larger
Table 8. Some indicators of Tete farming cooperatives in 1982
Average Average
%of %of no. of area per
People villages families members co-op
Specific in with Co-op in per member
Area action villages co-ops members co-ops* co-op (ha)
Changara and Moatize CO-1 4,890 100 546 56 91 1

Ang6nia CO-2 5,495 100 207 19 42 0.7
Maravia Pilot
district 2,517 75 375 74 125 0.3
Tete Province 86,804 74 1,376 8 47 0.8
'Based on an average of 5 people per family and 1 cooperative member per family.
Source: MA GODCA, G/249: CADECO (Projecto CO-1), .'Relat6rio', 6 January 1983.
numbers of members per cooperative (125 on average) and had a much smaller area per
member (0.3 hectares on average). In general, however, results achieved through specific
interventions were modest, and did not contrast very strongly with an overall picture of low
membership, modest productivity and poor organisation, the reasons for which need to be
discussed in historical perspective.
As already mentioned, in general the new villages were formed primarily through the
'nucleation' of people, and consequently building physical infrastructures preceded the
organisation of the village economic base. Since Tete was a province where the communal
village programme was launched later than average, cooperatives only emerged after the
Third Frelimo Congress in a period when decisions taken centrally were becoming
dominant. In the early phase, collective production in the new villages consisted of
collective machambas and pre-cooperatives, designations for what were nearly always
symbolic activities undertaken by politically mobilised villagers under the guidance of
dynamising groups or village political authorities. This was the starting point from which
central and provincial authorities intended to create a standardised and effective economic
base for the villages.
The villages close to the main roads, and particularly those near the city of Tete first
experienced pressure from the authorities to foster collective production in the context of
the village. Popular enthusiasm was the 'fuel' which kept this activity under way during this
period, as was the case with the building of village infrastructure. Arguing on the same lines
as Romao Tembo, the first director of CPAC/Tete, the District Administrator of Angdnia
summarised the 'spirit' of this early stage:
At the beginning, when the cooperatives were created, the tactic we used was wrong.
Machinery was brought in in excess, cooperativists were replaced by students from schools and
state clerks in weeding and harvesting. Cooperativists did not have the opportunity of feeling
that they owned their own cooperative and became mere spectators. All cooperatives which
were born under these circumstances ended up going through demobilisation crises. Coopera-
tivists considered their cooperatives as state machambas and passively waited for external
solutions to their problems, including the achievement of their production plans. This charac-
teristic is common to most of the cooperatives in this Province.39
These early developments had important consequences beyond heavily influencing the
cooperativist attitude. In Changara, according to the District Administrator, the widespread
use of machinery led to the clearance of lands for cultivation irrespective of the number of
39 Ibid., p. 9.
Table 9. Evolution of Tete fanning cooperatives in communal villages
1978-1979 1979-1980
Area Area
Province Cooperative (ha) Members (ha) Members
Ang6nia Josina Machel 18 17 10 6

III Congresso 18 20 25 9
Mkanjula Base 40 25 66 77
Marien Ngouabi 67 33 52 14
N'Katut - - 60 38
Macanga Gandale - - 62 48
Moatize 25 Setembro 424 210 150 170
Samora Machel ._ _ 90 45
Changara III Congresso 71 54 78 55
Eduardo Mondlane 93 48 88 55
Massacre Wiriamu 67 24 71 25
Cabora Bassa 3 Fevereiro 44 62 26 11
Mutarara Josina Machel _ _ . 60 40
24 Julho _ _ 32 18
7Abril - - 55 12
Average 94 55 62 42
Source: MA, GODCA, G/134: GODCA, 'Situacao das cooperativas de producao

agrfcola na campanha 1978/79 em Tete', 1978; MA, GODCA, G/134: DPA/Tete,
'Relatorio ao Conselho Consultivo Alargado do GODCA', 2 August 1980; Table 7.
cooperative members, and to the introduction of types of crops with no concern for soil and
climatic suitability.40
Table 9 shows the evolution of farming cooperatives in Tete communal villages in the
1978-1979 and 1979-1980 agricultural seasons, in terms of planned areas and cooperative
members. According to the table, cooperatives created in the early phase were not capable
of maintaining either planned areas or their members. It is important to note that such
decreases were more pronounced in the case of planned areas, resulting in a considerable
reduction in the planned area per cooperative member from 1.7 ha to 1.4 ha between 1979
and 1980. At first sight, this ratio does not seem very different from the 2 ha per family
in the household sector. Yet the picture changes if the same ratio is estimated on the basis
of area effectively cultivated, instead of just planned. Figures of cooperative cultivated area
for the 1979-1980 agricultural season showed a ratio of just 1 ha per cooperative member,
and even less if the calculation was based on the harvested area.41 As will be discussed
below, such distinctions are crucial.
The decreases referred to above were related to the gradual end of the period of grace
experienced by the cooperatives during this first stage, which was replaced by a vital need
to present tangible economic results if they were to survive. The withdrawal of the subsidies
of the early stage (free occasional labour brought from elsewhere and other forms of
support), placed the relationship between the state and the cooperatives on a very different
level, a shift which caused many difficulties. First of all, at the level of the services
provided by the state for land clearance and tillage, local initiative in clearing new lands
and tilling for cultivation was limited by traditional ways of performing such operations,
namely the burning of vegetation and the use of hoes. The former was openly combated by
40 Ibid., pp. 9-10.

41 MA, GODCA, G/134: DPA/Tete, 'Relatório ao Conselho Consultivo Alargado do GODCA', 2 August 1980.
Table 10. Tete fanning cooperatives: areas and agricultural operations in the 1981-1982
season (ha)
%of
Culture Cleared Tilled Harrowed Sown Weeded achievement
Cotton 200 180 180 180 100 50

Sunflower 510 222 191 94 9 1.7
Maize 1,000 638 622 586 300 30
Groundnuts 116 29 29 14 - 0
Beans 180 50 50 34 29 16
Potatoes 150 86 86 18 15 10
Horticulture 9 .- - - - 0
Total 2,165 1,205 1,158 926 453 15.3
Source: MA, GODCA, G/134: DPA/Tete, *2o Seminario Provincial das Cooperativas
Agrarias', 16 May 1982.
the authorities; the second depended on instruments which were neither imported nor
locally produced, due to the government focus on the 'modern' sector. Transformations in
this respect partially depended on Mecanagro, the state firm which provided agricultural
machinery services. In an apparent paradox, problems which emerged were due both to an
excess and to a lack of services of this kind. Particularly in the early stages, the use of
tractors led to the clearing and tilling of areas far in excess of those the cooperative
members could cultivate. Later, cases of Mecanagro failing to provide support multiplied,
according to a bitter evaluation made by GODCA during its Second Consultative Council.
On the one hand, problems were caused by the poor state of the roads, an insufficient
number of machines, and poor Mecanagro internal organisation which led to incomplete or
late delivery of services. The poor assistance provided by Mecanagro was considered to be
a major problem throughout the existence of the Tete cooperatives, and the main cause of
the failure of the 1980-1981 agricultural season.42 On the other hand, control of agricultural
machinery was a powerful instrument through which local Mecanagro employees could
earn large illegal profits: due to long distances and lack of communications these corrupt
practices were often not detected or combated for months.43
Assuming that the cooperative had overcome these problems, it had next to face
planting the lands and weeding its crops. Again, procedures of seed selection and storing
followed in household agriculture could not meet cooperative needs either in quantitative
or qualitative terms. In the case of crops for own consumption, household agriculture could
not leave many seeds for cooperatives without seriously affecting subsistence. As for cash
crops, the long colonial tradition of state intervention in peasant agriculture has to be
recalled here as not having pushed for improved seed selection. Consequently, cooperative
development in this regard heavily depended on the state's capacity to provide seeds:
between 1978 and 1981 in Tete, the absence or late delivery of seeds was regularly
mentioned as an important reason for the failure of cooperative production.44 Finally, these
42 MA, CNAC, AC/190: DPA/Tete, 'Relatório a apresentar por ocasião do in Conselho Agrário Nacional', no date
[1978]; MA, GODCA, G/038: GODCA, 'Deslocação à Província de Tete. Campanha agrícola de 1980/81', 3
October 1980; MA, CNAC, AC/155: CPAC/Tete, 'Estado de implementação do PEC/81 e do PPI/81', 7May 1981.
43 MA, CNAC, AC/151: CNAC, 'Relatório da visita de trabalho efectuada pelo Excelentíssimo Senhor
Director-Adjunto às Provincias de Sofala e Tete', 22 April 1982, pp. 7-8.
44 MA, GODCA, G/134: MA (Brigada Tete/Niassa), 'Relatório da Brigada do MA do lancamento da planificação
das campanhas agrícolas 1978/79 e 1979/80', April 1979; MA, CNAC, AC/155: CPAC/Tete, 'Estado de
implementação do PEC/81 e do PPI/81', 7 May 1981.
Table 11. Yields of some products on Tete fanning cooperatives

(in tonnes)
Crops 1978-1979 1979-1980 1980-1981
Cotton _ _ 18
Sunflower 5 28 18
Maize 1,145 246 120
Groundnuts 10 _ _
Beans 70 13 -
Potatoes 380 57 -
Horticulture - 20 12
Totals 1,610 364 168
Source: MA, GODCA, G/134: Ministeno da Agriculture (Brigada

Tete/Niassa), 'Relat6rio da Brigada do MA do lancamento da

planifica?ao das campanhas agricolas 1978/79 e 1979/80', April
1979; MA, CNAC, AC/155: CPAC/Tete, 'Relat6rio da Reuniao
Provincial das Aldeias Comunais', 7 November 1979; MA,
GODCA, G/038: GODCA, 'Deslocac.ao a Provfncia de Tete.
Campanha agricola de 1980/81', 3 October 1980; MA, GODCA,
G/109: GODCA, 'Grificos de anSlise do movimento cooperativo',
1982.
reasons, added to the 'spirit of relying on the stale', also affected weeding operations. Table
10 reveals how seriously such factors could reduce initial expectations.
Excluded from the table above are losses which occurred between crop maturing and
harvests, which would render the picture even gloomier. Table 11 presents cooperative
evolution according to yields in major crops. Total 1980-1981 yields were about 10 per
cent of those in 1978-1979. This picture is yet more striking if yields are related to the
number of cooperative members: from the more than 3,000 kilos per member in the
1978-1979 year, production dropped to an average of scarcely 150 kilos per member in
1980-1981.45
The argument about seed supply can be widened to include other inputs to be provided
by the state, namely farming tools (basically hoes, catanas, machetes, knives and ploughs),
fertilisers, pesticides and so forth. The local availability of such items depended on the rural
trade system which was hampered by several factors. The liberation struggle had reduced
the number of private shopkeepers to tiny levels. Where they existed, in spite of having
submitted the peasantry to high levels of exploitation, they had historically performed the
role both of supplying the rural areas with production factors and consumer goods, and of
buying local surpluses. After independence, the state attempted to assume total control of
rural trade by restraining their movements, and denying them access to bank credit,
confident of its own ability to replace them. However, the state departments which were
supposed to ensure rural trade were inefficient for three main reasons: geography, i.e.,
scattered village locations and the absence of district and local roads; organisational
problems such as the lack of trading posts to cover a significant percentage of communal
villages; and under-capitalisation (this being related to the state decision to give priority to
the 'modern' sector) resulting in a scarcity of trucks to assure product transportation, and
poorly supplied local shops.
The 'geographical' reason was perhaps also connected with the priorities established by
45 While yields decreased from l,610to 168 tonnes, as seen in the table, the number of cooperative members increased
from 493 to 1,175 in the same period.
the Government: being a backward province based on household agriculture, Tete did not
attract great state investments in this period. The problems with trading posts established
by state companies such as Cogropa, Encatex and Agricom were also several, starting with
their low numbers, both fixed and mobile.46 The Lojas do Povo (state owned People's
Shops) established in some villages to reinforce the presence of the state in this field, were
supposed to sell at low prices, providing an alternative to private speculation. However,
they also were poorly established.47 The CNAC director bitterly complained that in many
cases the prices charged by the Lojas do Povo were too high: villagers had to pay for their
heavy transportation costs and for the incompetence and low productivity of their staff.
Above all, the administrative and bureaucratic costs and the under-capitalisation of the
state-run supply sector resulted in the absence of products: empty shelves were the most
common characteristic of the Lojas do Povo.
The consumer cooperatives were supposed to overcome some of these problems. By
handing over to the villagers control of both the buying of peasant and cooperative
surpluses and the selling of these products at reasonable and fair prices, it was hoped that
local revenues would be invested to a greater extent in village development.48 But the
consumer cooperative programme started relatively late and developed slowly in Tete,
covering less than 40 per cent of the communal villages by 1982.49 Cooperatives in Tete
depended on state supply and transportation systems, and lacked capital to finance
acquisitions.50 The absence of, or the poor quality of, tools was a constant cause for local
complaints, and people from the border areas commonly went to Zambia and Malawi to
acquire their working instruments.
Some of the problems affecting cooperative supply were also experienced in marketing
harvested products. The two main sectors of Tete agriculture, household and cooperative,
were affected differently by the poor marketing network. Generally, the household sector
could react more flexibly. Thus, neighbouring countries, particularly Malawi, always
showed a readiness to buy household produce through establishing well supplied markets
along Mozambique's borders at the end of each agricultural season.51 Households in interior
regions frequently traded their produce through the parallel market or candonga, which was
mostly run by itinerant agents working for private traders.52 But the main reaction of family
producers to the feebleness of the trade network was to decrease production, particularly
cash crop production, and to migrate to the cities, to neighbouring countries or to jobs on
state farms in other provinces.53 The farming cooperatives could not, however, afford this
reaction. Obliged to follow legal procedures, they did not have access to border markets or
the candonga. On the other hand, reducing production as a way of answering the market
crisis contradicted their very nature, and consequently several cases were reported of
harvests rotting in deficient warehouses where the harvest had been successful.54
46 CNAC, 'Síntese dos Trabalhos da Delegaçáo da CNAC à Província de Tete', Maputo, 22 June 1981.
47 There were only six in Tete in 1978. MA, CNAC, AC/119: Comissão Nacional de Abastecimento, 'Informação',
4 September 1977.
48 Ibid.
49 MA, CNAC, AC/153: CNAC, 'Relatório de balanço e prestação de contas ao Comité Central do Partido Frelimo
(Confidencial)', 14 December 1982.
50 CEA, 'A Transformação da Agriculture Familiar na Província de Nampula', Maputo, Universidade Eduardo
Mondlane, 1980, pp. 37-38.
51 MA, CNAC, AC/190: DPA/Tete, 'Relatório a apresentar por ocasião do III Conselho Agrário Nacional', no date
[1978], p. 12; MA, GODCA, G/134: MA, 'Relatório da Brigada do MA do lançamento da planificação das
campanhas agrícolas 1978/79 e 1979/80', April 1979.
52 MA, CNAC, AC/195: CNAC, 'Algumas observações sobre a actuação do Estado em relação ao Sector Cooperativo
e das Aldeias Comunais na Província de Tete', pp. 9-10.
53 Ibid.
54 MA, CNAC, AC/151: CNAC, 'Relatório dos trabalhos efectuados com o Director-Adjunto Nacional das Aldeias
Comunais durante a sua visita à Província de Tete', 11 October 1980, p. 2.
Table 12. Formal training of Tete cooperativists (1978-1981)
Participants
Year Subject Total Approved
1978 Potato cultivation techniques using chemical

and organic fertilisers 15 10
1978 Rabbit breeding 10 5
1980 Organisation and planning (held in Bulgaria) 3 3
1981 Use of animal drawn ploughs (held in Maputo) 4 4
1981 Basic accountancy and cooperative management 13 8
1981 Basic Agriculture 3 3
Source: MA, GODCA, G/134: DPA/Tete, '2o Seminario Provincial das Cooperativas
Agrarias', 16 May 1982.
According to the recommendations issued at the First National Meeting on Communal

Villages in March 1980, the BPD was to establish a credit policy which, though safeguard-
ing repayment, was to finance communal village development in areas such as agriculture
and commerce with low interest loans.55 In Tete, the implementation of such a policy was
hampered by two sorts of factors: the poor economic performance of the cooperatives,
which discouraged bank involvement; and the poor capacity for extending the bank network
to the rural areas due to transportation problems and lack of infrastructure. By 1981, there
were only three BPD branches in Tete's rural areas.56 State bodies such as Mecanagro and
the BPD often usurped the cooperative planning process, while Agricom started to function
as a BPD debt collector.57
The training of cooperative members in matters of cooperative organisation as well as
in new agricultural techniques was a critical issue. Only with skilled members could the
cooperatives assure improved functioning and a growing decision making-capacity. How-
ever, state promotion of training activities was very modest, as shown in Table 12. The
state's apparent lack of interest in involving the cooperative sector in the decision-making
process was accentuated by increased enforcement of more centralised and demanding
yearly plans from 1980 on, and the establishment of the Prospective Indicative Plan which
apparently had the sole role of pressing for production increases in order to meet the
ambitious central plans, without discussing the serious problems affecting the sector. Table
13 reveals how the 1981-1982 Central Plan for Tete cooperatives neither took account of
the yields from the previous season nor had anj' correspondence with reality. The reasons
presented at the time for the low yields only reinforce the arguments made above. Crops
such as potatoes, beans and groundnuts failed because the Province did not receive the
seeds it was expecting; maize, sunflower and cotton failures were attributed to poor
Mecanagro service in tilling and harrowing, lack of seeds (or partial use of local seeds) and,
in the case of cotton and sunflower, poor cooperative organisation and floods at the Zambezi
river.58
These developments could only have aggravated the organisational problems, resulting
in low cooperativist mobilisation and poor cooperative performance, as has been argued
above, and in the widening of the gap between state departments and cooperatives. At this
55 CNAC, 'I Reunião Nacional das Aldeias Comunais -- Resoluções sobre Questões Económicas e Financeiras',
Aldeia Comunal 3 de Fevereiro, 1980, pp. 10-11.
56 CNAC, 'Síntese dos Trabalhos da Delegação da CNAC à Província de Tete', Maputo, 22 June 1981 ; MA, CNAC,
AC/155: CPAC/Tete, 'Anteprojecto do Plano Estatal Central para 1982 de realização na Província de Tete
(Confidencial)', 27 May 1981.
57 MA, GODCA, G/134: DPA/Tete, '2o Seminário Provincial das Cooperativas Agrárias', 16 May 1982, pp. 32-33.
58 MA, CNAC, AC/155: CPAC/Tete, 'Estado de implementação do PEC/81 e do PPI/81', 7 May 1981.
Table 13. The central plan and Tete cooperatives in

1981/82 (yields in tonnes)
1980-1981 1981-1982
Crops Effective Estimated Probable
Cotton 18 150 .55

Sunflower 18 180 14
Maize 120 1,260 314
Groundnuts 0 0 0
Beans 0 50 11
Potatoes 0 720 0
Horticulture 12 40 0
Totals 168 2,400 394
Source: Table 11; MA, CNAC, AC/155: CPAC/Tete,

'Estado de ¡mplementaçao do PEC/81 e do PPI/81', 7
May 1981.
stage, signs were multiplying of a clear distinction between, on the one side, a stratum of
party and state officials, sometimes including cooperative leaders, and on the other the
peasants nucleated in the villages. In 1979, in Zumbo, cooperative members refused to carry
on with cooperative work because the money from the 1975-1976 season had been kept by
the district authorities who claimed to be waiting for good opportunities to invest it;59
cooperative 25 de Setembro in Moatize also interrupted its work early in 1982, after having
discovered that some DPA officials had taken away the money from their last harvest.60
Such divisions also appeared in the villages and the cooperatives themselves: some local
political and administrative leaders ceased to be considered by villagers and cooperative
members as defending their interests but rather as 'playing on the side of the government'.
At cooperative 24 de Julho in Mutarara, open conflicts were reported in 1982 between the
Party secretary and the cooperative. Here, local authorities kept the money the cooperative
had raised from the sale of cotton to pay its debts to the bank; the money received from
the sale of sunflowers was used to buy hoes which the cooperative members did not want.
As a result, the president of the cooperative, backed by all members, declined to participate
in the Second Provincial Seminar on Cooperatives and refused further collaboration with
the Government until the matter was settled. Other cooperatives reacted against the state by
letting their crops waste in the fields, as in Mutarara, or in the warehouses, as in cooperative
Samora Machel in Moatize, where the consumer cooperative was also burnt.61
There were other reasons behind the increased hardships faced by families in the
communal villages. Household agriculture was affected by population nucleation itself, and
more particularly by the extent to which it was subordinated to cooperative production (or
to the state farm system in other regions). As to the effects of villagisation in general,
problems in the communal villages were not very different from the ones the peasants had
faced some years before during the aldeamento process. Land availability was a serious
problem. Land in Tete was characterised by small scattered pockets of fertile soils which
could not support large, concentrated numbers of people: this was a problem which was
difficult if not impossible to solve. Its solution was further hampered by the lack of studies
59 MA, GODCA, G/134: MA, 'Relatório da Brigada do MA do lançamento da planificação das campanhas agrícolas
1978/79 e 1979/80', April 1979.
60 MA, GODCA, G/134: DPA/Tete, '20 Seminário Provincial das Cooperativas Agrárias', 16 May 1982, p. 36.
61 MA, GODCA, G/038: GODCA, 'Deslocação à Província de Tete. Campanha agrícola de 1980/81", 3 October
1980.
of farming soil preceding villagisation. In Tete, land distribution around the villages
apparently did not follow a standard formula: it greatly depended on local authorities.
Dominant families tended to take hold of the best lands, even sometimes running local land
distribution. This was in spite of some indications that the authorities were aware of the
problem, and had tried several ways of minimising it, for instance by adopting new names
for the villages which were not related to the dominant families.62 According to Casal,
Most of the lands are placed under occupation and utilisation rights by local lineages, which
creates very acute conflicts between the incomers sind these raatrilineal lineages. The verdict of
such conflicts - when taken to trial at the village people's court - is in most of the cases in
favour of the traditional proprietors as the mechanisms for exerting lineage power are still very
vivid and easily overcome Frelimo political structures at the village level; sometimes the
traditional representatives also take part in the village political and administrative organs and
manage to efface the strength and political meaning of the official people's courts.63
This process certainly contributed to the beginning of social differentiation in the communal
villages, a process which did not have time to mature due to the short life and difficult
conditions in the villages. Nonetheless, for the newcomers to the villages, the immediate
result was further hardships in gaining access to land.
Land shortage was far from being the only problem. It produced two important effects:
increased population density provoked much higher pressure on the land, and it lengthened
distances to the machambas. The former led to serious land erosion, a process which was
accompanied by a rapid degradation of other natural resources, particularly of fuelwood,
wood for housing, and wildlife and fruits which had the important role of supplementing
the household economy. Around the communed villages, then, land shortage was com-
pounded by land degradation. As the number of incomers grew, and this process reached
unbearable levels, people were forced to farm on new, more distant lands. The trend for the
distance between residence and machamba to increase was aggravated by the process of
continuous land degradation/-as well as by state efforts to keep and even, to increase the
nucleation levels. According to Maxwell Mwanza, head of the Provincial Physical Planning
Department, the government continued to contact people on the machambas and 'strongly
suggest' their movement to the villages.64 Consequently, and in spite of peoples' efforts to
overcome this problem by staying at the machambas as long as possible, or by maintaining
the village as the formal place of residence while living most of the time near their crops,65
the fact is that the distances to the machambas played an increasing role in the economy
of the villagised family.
Cooperatives were installed in this weak and greatly disrupted economy. They not only
competed with household agriculture, but brought further negative influences. In every
possible sense household agriculture became not only debilitated but also treated as
'illegitimate' within the communal village process, even if occasionally this trend was
fought by some state structures. Under the general strategy of development, cooperatives,
in parallel with the state farms, were to lead the rural economy and society in the transition
to socialism. Household agriculture, which did not receive any state investments throughout
the period, was seen as condemned to disappear, as characterised by negative and backward
political and economic, as well as social and cultural, values. Consequently, although
62 Interview, Maxwell Amone Mwanza and Miguel Luís Coutinho, Chief and Head, respectively, Technical Division
of the Tete Department of Physical Planning, Tete, July 1992.
63 A. Y. Casal, 'A Crise da Produção Familiar nas Aldeias Comunais em Moçambique', Revista Internacional de
Estudos Africanos, 8/9 (1988), p. 176.
64 Interview, Tete, July 1992.
65 Christian Geffray, A Causa das Armas. Antropologia da Guerra Contemporânea em Moçambique (Porto,
Afrontamento, 1991), p. 136.
precise data are not available for each case, cooperatives most probably increased an
already acute competition for village lands. As Araiijo writes: 'When land distribution is
undertaken it is not uncommon for the most fertile soils to be provided to the cooperatives,
while the family units have to be limited to the lands remaining, sometimes characterised
by a mediocre soil fertility'.66
However, these early elements of conflict were probably attenuated by the fact that
cooperative participation was open to everyone. Beyond political forms of propaganda, an
ordinary peasant would adhere to the cooperative project in the expectation that, backed by
the immense strength of the government, with its machines and money and trucks and
consumer goods, cooperatives would be a much easier way to make a living. While Frelimo
and the government looked at the cooperatives from the point of view of their macro-strat-
egy of transition to socialism, the peasants, quite legitimately, seem to have seen it as a
'short-cut' to improving their lives. A well established commercial network for supplying
the villages with production inputs and consumer goods would probably have been a factor
favouring the cooperative movement's integration into the government's strategy. In
practice, however, the prevailing situation of weak economic integration seems to have
pulled the cooperatives into the household orbit. This was probably the reason why
cooperative members in Tete pressed for their cooperatives to develop food crops which
would strengthen their own food security, instead of commercial crops. Nor probably could
it have been different without great financial and technological investments which the state
was not prepared to make in the cooperatives. The prevalence of the same crops in the
cooperatives as on the family plots, meant that each agricultural operation required
intensive labour participation at the same time of the year. This explains perhaps some of
the absenteeism experienced by the vast majority of Tete cooperatives: their members chose
to assure their own machambas before that of the cooperative.
Casal summarised the relationship between the cooperative and household sectors by
writing that the disadvantage faced by the domestic units was twofold: first, family
production decreased because some producers were transferred into cooperative production;
and second, families had to keep on assuring the maintenance or reproduction of the
cooperative labour force despite the scarce or absent cooperative results.67 With the failure
of cooperative production, household production, though severely weakened, remained the
only way of guaranteeing the survival of the villagers. From the early 1980s, hunger
became a commonplace in the Province, hitting first the areas more vulnerable to drought
and floods such as Magoe, Cahora Bassa and Changara in the south, and Mutarara in the
east. Routes heading to Ang6nia began to emerge, where groups of peasants would go to
buy foodstuffs whenever they could afford it.68
By 1982, the rural world was, in Tete, on the verge of collapse. The cooperative
members responded by asking the state for money in advance (requests which were strongly
refused by the provincial authorities on the grounds that the cooperatives should fight
hunger by producing), by reverting to the family economy, or by seeking wage labour when
and wherever possible.69 The villagers, based on their family machambas, reacted by
looking at the communal villages as a failed experience; they no longer believed in the life
of abundance which had been advertised in the propaganda of the early days of indepen-
dence.
66 Araújo, 'Características da Distribuição Espacial da População Rural', p. 350.

67 Casal, 'A Crise da Produção Familiar', pp. 157-191.
68 Interview, Maxwell Amone Mwanza and Miguel Luís Coutinho, Tete, July 1992.
69 MA, GODCA, G/134: DPA/Tete, '20 Seminário Provincial das Cooperativas Agrárias', 16 May 1982, pp. 11-12,
19-21.
War and the Decline of the Tete Communal Village Programme

Renamo, the guerrilla movement fighting Mozambique's independent Government, arrived
in Tete when the Province was involved in the rural situation discussed above. The first
signs of military instability in Tete came early in 1982 when truck drivers reported the
presence of guerrilla forces on the road heading south to Changara and Zimbabwe. Soon
other signs emerged, such as the shooting at the; house of the CO-1 Project's local manager
on 27 July, which signalled that selected targets were being hit in addition to road
ambushes. From August to October, a series of powerful attacks was launched which
followed a consistent pattern, indicating something of their nature and objectives.
As seen in Table 14, these 1982 operations, soon attributed to the MNR (the English
acronym for the Mozambican National Resistance, later Renamo), were limited to eastern
Tete, particularly to Changara.70 The conjuncture prevailing at the time when Renamo
arrived in Tete helps explain why the movement's activities were located in particular areas.
Changara borders Manica Province, where Renamo was well established. Malawi also
represented an important source of support to Renamo, not just because of its past close
collaboration with the Portuguese colonial regime, but also because it was 'trapped' by
South Africa, which granted vital support to its economy and communications, and in this
sense was in a position to pull Malawi into its destabilisation strategy. Renamo's penetra-
tion of eastern Tete thus became possible both from Manica in the south, and from Malawi
in the northeast. Probably as a result of such connections, Renamo experienced an increased
operational ability from the second half of 1982, through factors which included the union
of its forces with those of Africa Livre, another contra movement which operated in
Zambe'zia Province between 1979 and 1982.71 A third element determining the location of
Renamo's first operations in eastern Tete was that the Gorongosa region, in central
Mozambique, was selected as a privileged base for Renamo's operations. Gorongosa was
close to the home area of the Ndau, an ethnic group who supported and supplied the
movement with men from the outset, and it was a strategic area easily accessible from
Malawi, through a route following the Shire river across Mutarara district, from where
immense areas in central Mozambique could be controlled.72
All the above elements shaped Renamo's penetration from Manica's districts of
Tambara and Guro, and from southern Malawi (and probably Morrumbala district, in
western Zambe'zia), into Tete's areas of Changara and Mutarara, as well as neighbouring
Moatize and Macanga. From these areas the military action spread into the western districts:
Maravia in late 1983, Zumbo in 1985, and Cahora Bassa and Magoe in late 1986 or 1987.73
Of course, the concentration of the state's agricultural initiatives in Tete's eastern areas,
including communal villages and cooperatives, also played a role in Renamo's focus on
eastern Tete.74 In addition, due to the government's weak airborne communications,
ambushing and landmining of the few roads heading west soon isolated the western districts
without the need, on the part of Renamo, for local operations. By November 1982,
CPAC/Tete was reporting that: 'Access roads, which are strategic targets for the armed
70 MA, CNAC, AC/131: CPAC/Tete, 'No. 287/CPAC/82 (Confidencial)', 30 November 1982; Interview, Maxwell
Amone Mwanza and Miguel Luís Coutinho, Tete, July 1992.
71 Vines, Renamo, pp. 54-55.
72 This route was used by Frelimo during the independence struggle in the 1970s. It was the most direct path from
Malawi to Gorongosa. The Gorongosa mountains had been strategically important for controlling Mozambique's
central areas since the times of the prazeiro Gouveia in the nineteenth century.
73 Interview, Maxwell Amone Mwanza and Miguel Luís Coutinho, Tete, July 1992.
74 According to Countinho, Renamo operations to the south of the city of Tete were confined to Changara for a long
time, and were limited to the west by the Mazoe river. Military convoys only became necessary on the road to
Songo and Cahora Bassa in 1988. Ibid.
Table 14. Main Renamo military operations in Tete (August-October 1982)
Date District Place Target Damage
5 Aug Changara M. Winamu Coop. Looting of food and clothing

5 Aug Changara Mudue/Cancune" Village Assault, house burning looting of food and clothing
5 Aug Changara Carate" Village Assault, looting of food and clothing
5 Aug Changara Nhaphonzoab Village Assault, looting of food and clothing
14Sep Moatize N'cungas* Village Village was burnt, looting of food and clothing
24Sep Moatize Djenjeb Village Village was burnt, looting of food and clothing
26Sep Moatize Cateme" Village Village was burnt, looting of food and clothing
Oct Mutarara Doa* Village Village was burnt, looting of food and clothing
Oct Mutarara BaueYMbinhe Village Village was burnt, looting of food and clothing
Oct Mutarara Muanga Coop. Cooperative was demolished, looting of food
7 Oct Changara Capimbi Village Assault
7 Oct Changara Temangau CO-1 centre Assault and destruction of project facilities
10 Oct Macanga 25 de Setembro Coop. Assault, looting of food and clothing
10 Oct Moatize Canchira* Village • Village was assaulted and burnt, looting of food
10 Oct Moatize Catipo" Village Village was assaulted and burnt, looting of food
13 Oct Macanga Central Area CPAC truck Truck was burnt
13 Oct Macanga Eduardo Mondlane Coop. Installations were burnt, looting of food
15 Oct Moatize N'thudzib Village Village was burnt, looting of food and clothing
31 Oct Moatize Samoa Village Village was burnt, looting of food and clothing
"Former aldeamentos being transformed into communal villages.

'New communal villages being created.
Source: MA, CNAC, AC/131: CPAC/Tete, 'No. 287/CPAC/82 (Confidencial)', 30 November 1982.
bandits, became practically impassable to almost every district or communal village north
of the Zambezi.... Due to its proximity to the provincial capital, it is still possible to reach
safely Moatize's central area. Access to the remaining districts now requires military
escorts'.75
Table 14 reveals a clear pattern in Renamo's first military operations in Tete, composed
on the one hand by a focus on communal villages and cooperatives as targets, and on the
other by the method of destroying infrastructure and houses and stealing goods. Almost 70
per cent of the targets were communal villages, mostly former aldeamentos which were
being 'transformed' and newly created villages, while the rest were cooperatives. There
were many reasons for the focus of early Renamo operations on ambushing vehicles, and
attacks on communal villages and cooperatives. The former, besides being easy targets
(commonly poorly escorted or unescorted truck drivers), also hampered movement and
communications in general. The latter were frequently the only 'marks of state presence'
in the rural areas, and it was within these villages that the scarce shops and food stocks
were concentrated, as well as people who might be recruited to the guerrilla forces.
Normally, great numbers of villagers were forced to carry food and goods stolen from the
villages to Renamo hiding areas, and many of these were integrated, frequently through
violent means, into Renamo gangs. In its attacks, Renamo consistently burned village
houses, ransacked shops and stole people's belongings, particularly food and clothes.76
The communal villages, however, only included a minority of the provincial population,
around 13 per cent overall, and as low as 2 per cent in Changara (see Table 1). The vast
majority of the people lived in scattered household settlements, or in the former aldeamen-
tos. These also endured Renamo food requisitions and brutality, as well as severe drought
which rendered their crops unviable.
In his general approach, Gersony has distinguished among the areas under Renamo
influence. First, there were 'tax areas', 'in which the population resides in extremely
dispersed patterns' and is obliged to make regular or irregular contributions of food, clothes
and other possessions, as well as to carry goods, and where Renamo guerrillas abducted
women for sex and men to be integrated into their ranks. Second, there were the more
strictly and permanently monitored 'control areas' in which people from the area, or
brought from other areas, lived. Gersony subdivides these areas into combatant bases (for
resident guerrillas), field areas (with Renamo machambas cultivated by captives), and
dependent areas (peopled by 'the elderly, who cannot serve in other more taxing functions,
and young children'). Finally, there were 'destruction areas' which included villages and
areas generally under Government control which were targeted for destruction.77
Of course, the pattern of organisation varied over space and time. Tete, and particularly
Changara and Mutarara during this early stage, must have been an immense destruction area
(if Gersony's typology is to be adopted) before Renamo established a more permanent
presence with pockets of tax areas and combatant bases. Within such areas the level of
violence exerted by Renamo remained high, including abduction as a means of recruiting,
theft, sexual abuse, forced transport of booty and aimless destruction and slaughter. Terror
was the most constant characteristic of Renamo's action irrespective of the specific area: a
more settled Renamo presence did not lead to a decrease in the level of terror, which, on
the contrary, grew as the local commanders became more familiar with their areas of
operation and were given a certain liberty of action. Indeed, this became a decisive
75 MA, CNAC, AC/131: CPAC/Tete, 'No. 287/CPAC/82 (Confidencial)', 30 November 1982.

76 A general pattern of Renamo attacks, similar to the ones in this area, is described in Robert Gersony, 'Summary
of Mozambican Refugee Accounts of Principally Conflict-Related Experience in Mozambique', Washington DC,
Department of State/Bureau for Refugee Programs, 1988, p. 19.
77 Gersony, 'Summary of Mozambican Refugee Accounts', pp. 10-20.
argument used by some analysts to question the possibility of a popular base for Renamo,
advanced by some on the grounds of the local unpopularity of the Government's rural
policies.78 Minter wrote that 'both logically and empirically, lack of support for Frelimo in
rural Mozambique does not imply support for Renamo'.79 As evidence of local disavowal
of the Government's rural policies, at least as they were developing until 1983, on the one
hand, and of terror exerted by Renamo locally on the other, could probably be gathered ad
infinitum, Minter's assertion could well suggest a 'third stand' for the majority of the local
population, even if nuanced by some level of internal social differentiation which obviously
gave rise to unequal means to cope with the situation.
The pattern of Renamo action described above does not fit with a picture of widespread
popular support for the movement. However, the recurrent mention of theft of food and
clothing, besides being explained as meeting the needs of the guerrilla units, suggests some
sort of autonomous or opportunistic popular participation. This aspect is better understood
if the social context of great instability provoked by the joint effects of drought and war,
as well as the diversified local strategies to cope with the situation, are taken into account.
Late 1982 and early 1983 were times of great movement of villagised and dispersed
populations, heading north or south in search of food, escaping from the war zones, or
simply hiding from Renamo's roaming gangs. Sometimes the decision to send a group for
food elsewhere was taken at a communal village general meeting, as was the case at village
Cancune. But this probably was exceptional as the level of village political and social
organisation permitting the design of collective strategies was sharply undermined by the
withdrawal of the already weak local party and state, as well as any form of local
administration. As has been profusely documented, village political and administrative
leaders, or 'state representatives' such as teachers and nurses, were key targets of Renamo's
violent action from the outset of the war. Moreover, villages and cooperatives were, in most
cases, protected by feeble security detachments which made them tempting military targets
from a guerrilla point of view.
These factors, added to the problems discussed in the previous section, provoked rapid
social disintegration. State development strategies and interventions collapsed. The Presi-
dent of the Tete union of cooperatives told a CO-1 Project meeting:
The bandits threaten us that they don't want cooperatives but we still do cooperatives! They
come to steal and destroy our machambas and consumer cooperatives, and to take our cattle.
People not integrated in cooperatives laugh at us! People not integrated in cooperatives take the
road, hitching a ride, going on foot or bicycle in search for food, which they bring back home.
We, the ones working at the cooperative machamba, cannot leave the place for a whole week
in search for food. And then the people laugh at us again and ask - if Frelimo supports the
cooperatives how come you starve?80
78 Some, such as Gervase Clarence-Smith, hastily inferred a popular base for Renamo from the people's reaction
to Frelimo's rural policies. This and other related questions have sparked sometimes bitter debate between those
who tended to explain Renamo's growth on the basis of its Rhodesian/South African connections, and those who
considered Mozambique's rural policies as a major cause for the rapid spread of Renamo's influence. Both parties
had reasons for their focus, since the causes of Renamo's 'success' are complex: on the one hand, the emergence
of Renamo as a direct instrument of Rhodesia and South Africa for destabilising Mozambique, as well as the
continuous direct support of South Africa throughout the war, is unquestionable; on the other hand, it is also now
unquestionable that internal conflicts, deriving in part from rural contradictions, played an important role in the
growth of Renamo 'beyond South Africa's wildest dreams', as Clarence-Smith puts it. See contributions to the
debate sparked by Gervase Clarence-Smith, 'The Roots of the Mozambican Counter-Revolution', Southern
African Review of Books, 2, 4 (1989), pp. 7-10, from William Minter, Paul Fauvet, Michel Cahen and Otto Roesch,
in Southern African Review of Books, 2, 6 (1989); 3, 2 (1989-1990); 5, 5 (1990). Also see Bridget O'Laughlin,
'A Base Social da Guerra em Mocambique', Estudos Moçambicanos, 10 (1992), pp. 107-142.
79 William Minter, 'Clarence-Smith on Mozambique', Southern African Review of Books, 2, 6 (1989), p. 22. Also
see Otto Roesch, 'Mozambique the Debate Continues', Southern African Review of Books, 5, 5 (1990).
80 MA, GODCA, G/199: CADECO (Projecto CO-1), 'Acta sintetizada do VII Colectivo de Direcção Alargado do
Programa de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento Cooperativo Agrário (Projecto CO-1)', 13 April 1983.
The cooperatives' small remaining money reserves rapidly began being plundered by
members, including presidents, not necessarily tlirough theft but as part of an attempt to buy
food elsewhere. 'Informal distribution' of cooperative money amongst members became a
strategy for food acquisition, and a means of safeguarding the money from Renamo. At
village Capimbi, for instance, when Renamo gangs approached, cooperatives /// Congresso
and Eduardo Mondlane distributed their money among their members so that in case of
attack they could run away with it.81 Given the lack of proper registration of these actions,
this suggests a 'final distribution' and, symbolically, the dissolution of the cooperative.
At the same time, cooperative production was coming to a halt: the Massacre de
Wiriamu cooperative sowed only 3.5 ha, with no results; the /// Congresso cooperative
planted 5 ha, and Eduardo Mondlane 14 ha, but the seeds did not germinate; the remaining
Changara cooperatives, Unidade and Maputo, simply did not sow, and were reported as
suffering from almost total absenteeism, 'their presidents being the first ones to miss the
work'.82 In Moatize, CO-1 CADECO had withdrawn its support from September, on the
grounds of lack of security for its technicians. The Samora Machel pilot cooperative, for
instance, suffered devastating Renamo attacks on 31 October and 6 December.83 In practical
terms, cooperatives had temporarily ceased existing as such by late 1982.84 A still clearer
indicator of the people's 'third stand' in the context of the war is perhaps the astonishment
revealed by the CO-1 project technicians who reported, after Renamo's attack on the
Temangau Centre,
... the odd role played by the [surrounding] populations, whose attitudes clearly discouraged
the permanence of the few technicians who had decided to return to the Centre after the armed
bandits had left. This was the reason why they felt obliged to abandon the Centre immediately,
to the city of Tete where they remain at present.... [T]he neighbouring population, surrounding
the Centre, ... did not panic with the events of that day, with the exception of the Centre wage
workers and a few people from the party and mass organisations, whose houses were set on
fire. Also to be mentioned is the fact that the enemy attacked in broad daylight (9.45 a.m.), •
penetrating through the residential area of the population, who did not panic nor immediately
warn the Centre. [The Centre] was [therefore] unexpectedly attacked and occupied.85
Strategies for survival came to be centred on the family, and included hiding or fleeing to
district capitals before these also became a war zone, and to neighbouring countries through
paths which a great part of the older people had crossed some years before. Robbery must
have also been included in the range of local strategies for survival, either in independent
gangs or through occasional participation in Renamo raids,86 even if, at least in this first
phase, this was apparently not so structured as suggested for other provinces.87 This seems
to have been the case in southern Changara district where, according to Derluguian, 'hunger
81 MA, GODCA, G/249: GP/Tete, 'Relatório síntese sobre os trabalhos realizados com cooperativistas e aldeãos
de Changara', 25 October 1983.
82 MA, GODCA, G/249: CADECO (Projecto CO-1), 'Relatório', 6 January 1983.
83 Ibid.; MA, GODCA, G/199: CADECO (Projecto CO-1),' Acta sintetizada do VII Colectivo de Direcção Alargado
do Programa de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento Cooperativo Agrário (Projecto CO-1)', 13 April 1983.
84 The situation partially improved in the second half of 1983. However, a major Renamo offensive in 1985 brought
external support practically to a halt. For many years thereafter, most of Tete was simply a war zone.
85 MA, GODCA, G/112: CADECO (Projecto CO-1), 'Síntese da reunião com os técnicos', 19 October 1982.
86 Ken Wilson, 'The Socio-Economic Impact of War and Flight in Posto Derre, Morrumbala District, Zambezia',
Oxford, 1992, describes Renamo's expansion in this period as 'greatly facilitated by its collaboration with
pre-existing or emergent bandit and guerrilla forces who ranged from small groups of armed robbers to populist
militia opposed to state rural development programmes'.
87 Geffray, A Causa das Armas, referring to Nampula in a later period, shows a mutually beneficial relationship
between traditional authority and Renamo: Renamo used traditional authorities as a form of indirect rule, while
traditional authorities used Renamo to restore at least part of the role they played before the arrival of Frelimo.
In general, as the war progressed, and areas became more 'stable', this type of phenomenon probably became
more common.
gangs were regularly called upon to participate in ambushes on international aid convoys
and Malawi-Zimbabwean transports by a local Renamo commander'.88
Conclusion
Evidence from the discussion above does not point to a direct connection between the
process of villagisation and the war waged by Renamo. Such a development would have
required a different relationship between the rural population and Renamo than that which
seems to have prevailed, at least in this initial stage. In fact, Renamo emerged in these early
days of the war as a simple instrument of aggression run from the exterior. Its evolution
as a war machine nurtured a war culture which was blind to people's aspirations. The
communal villages, as the most obvious and vulnerable symbols of the presence of
Frelimo's state in remote rural areas, were attacked and ravaged precisely as such, and not
because their disappearance was supported by a deep popular aspiration. People were
ruthlessly ordered out of the communal villages because the Government authorities wanted
them to remain in them: while the Government was seeking to maintain the nucleations for
administration and control purposes, Renamo needed people to be settled in a dispersed
manner so that it could extract the meagre peasant surpluses and abduct men for its military
activities.
Villagisation cannot thus be considered as a cause of the war. However, it cannot be
inferred that there was no relationship between villagisation and the war, as Fauvet has done
on the grounds of a fragile statistical base.89 In fact, villagisation, as well as broad problems
like the lack of marketing and supply systems, were connected with the war in the sense
that the war caught a rural people in a very weak state. From then on, people nurtured an
ambiguous relationship with the Government, refusing to make special efforts to defend the
villages which they did not consider as their own. In December 1982, CNAC reported to
Frelimo's Central Committee that Renamo had attacked and destroyed 17 communal
villages in Tete in five months, i.e., almost 50 per cent of the communal villages in the
Province.90 On the other hand, popular reservations towards Renamo were clearly shown by
the fact that many people simply fled to safer areas.
JoAo PAULO BORGES COELHO

University of Eduardo Mondlane
88 Gueorgui Derluguian, 'Social Decomposition and Armed Violence in Post-Colonial Mozambique', Review, 13,
4 (1990), p. 157.
89 Paul Fauvet, 'Clarence-Smith on Mozambique', Southern African Review of Books, 2, 6 (1989), pp. 26-27,
concluded that since the areas with the most villagisation did not correspond to the areas most affected by war,
there was no relationship between villagisation and war. He thus neglects other causes for the territorial localisation
of the war. He draws on the example of Cabo Delgado province, which is usually depicted as Frelimo's stronghold
in Mozambique, noting that it was the most villagised area, and simultaneously the least affected by the war.
However, he does not mention that Cabo Delgado is the furthest province from the former Rhodesia, Malawi and
South Africa, which all provided Renamo with support. Nor does he take into account the history of colonial
aldeamentos in Cabo Delgado: these were seen as less problematic here than in other areas because people were
used to larger and more stable villages than elsewhere, a factor which eased the transition from the aldeamentos
to the communal villages (in Cabo Delgado around 70 per cent of the communal villages, and not just 'some',
as Fauvet claims, had their origins in former aldeamentos).
90 MA, CNAC, AC/153: CNAC, 'Relatório de balanço e prestação de contas ao Comité Central do Partido Frelimo
(Confidencial)', 14 December 1982.

Coelho 1998

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On: 07 October 2014, At: 04:33

Journal of Southern African Studies

State resettlement policies in post‐colonial rural

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057079808708567

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State Resettlement Policies in

The Transition Period, 1974-1977

The Communal Village Programme and Settlement Patterns

Table I. The Tete communal village programme (1978-1982)

1978 1980 1982

No. Population %of No. Population %of No. Population %of

Zumbo 0 0 0 4 2,271 7.0 6 6,156 18.1

Changara 1 3,500 4.2 2 3,500 4.0 3 1,985 2.1

Table 2. Tete communal villages in 1982: origins of people and settlement

Table 3. Persistence of the Aldeamento pattern of nucleation in Tete after

The State and the Development of the: Villagisation Programme, 1977-

Table 4. Losses caused by the 1978 Zambezi floods

Losses Tete Manica Zambézia Sofala Total

Table 5. Communal villages established in Tete

District 1977/1978 1979 1980 1981

Zumbo Eduardo M'Pangula Puato

Mari via Nhimbe Nhenda

Chitita N'Sadzop Kariramo

Angdnia Lido N'Katu6 M'Pandula

Moatize Capirizange (OUA) Samoa

Mutarara Sinjal Zimira

Table 6. Health and education programmes in Tete communal villages

Source: MA, CNAC AC/009: CPAC/Tete, 's/r\ 25 November 1978;

Household vs Cooperative Agriculture:

Table 7. Farming cooperatives in Tete communal villages in 1982

Zumbo E. Mondlane E. Mondlane 1981 n/a n/a

Maravia Nhimbe Nhimbe 1981 30 170

Macanga Gandale Gandale 1980 83 67

Ang6nia Lido M. Ngouabi 1979 14 12

Moatize Capirizange 25 Setembro 1979 206 60

Mutarara Nhamayabwe' Nhamayabwi 1981 n/a n/a

Table 8. Some indicators of Tete farming cooperatives in 1982

Changara and Moatize CO-1 4,890 100 546 56 91 1

Source: MA GODCA, G/249: CADECO (Projecto CO-1), .'Relat6rio', 6 January 1983.

Table 9. Evolution of Tete fanning cooperatives in communal villages

Ang6nia Josina Machel 18 17 10 6

Source: MA, GODCA, G/134: GODCA, 'Situacao das cooperativas de producao

40 Ibid., pp. 9-10.

Cotton 200 180 180 180 100 50

Table 11. Yields of some products on Tete fanning cooperatives

Crops 1978-1979 1979-1980 1980-1981

Source: MA, GODCA, G/134: Ministeno da Agriculture (Brigada

Tete/Niassa), 'Relat6rio da Brigada do MA do lancamento da

Table 12. Formal training of Tete cooperativists (1978-1981)

1978 Potato cultivation techniques using chemical

According to the recommendations issued at the First National Meeting on Communal

Table 13. The central plan and Tete cooperatives in

Cotton 18 150 .55

Source: Table 11; MA, CNAC, AC/155: CPAC/Tete,

66 Araújo, 'Características da Distribuição Espacial da População Rural', p. 350.

War and the Decline of the Tete Communal Village Programme

Table 14. Main Renamo military operations in Tete (August-October 1982)

Date District Place Target Damage

5 Aug Changara M. Winamu Coop. Looting of food and clothing

"Former aldeamentos being transformed into communal villages.

75 MA, CNAC, AC/131: CPAC/Tete, 'No. 287/CPAC/82 (Confidencial)', 30 November 1982.