The Middle Class in Mozambique: the state and the politics of transformation in Southern Africa by Jason Sumich (review)

This book offers a well-written, engaging study of the emergence of a middle class in a post-socialist African state, Mozambique, that gained its independence in 1975 after a protracted liberation struggle led by the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo). The author examines how his interlocutors–with whom he has interacted for more than a decade since the early 2000s–have negotiated and evaluate ‘their transition from revolutionaries to members of the urban middle class’ (p. 1). While recent studies of middle classes in the global South have often focused (too) exclusively on modes of consumption and new lifestyles, this book firmly places its middle-class story in a much broader historical narrative. The author shows how, paradoxically, the ‘socialist, egalitarian revolution’ of the 1970s soon developed into ‘an elitist project of social engineering’ (p. 7) that offered unprecedented avenues of upward social mobility to loyal party members. Economic and political liberalization since the 1990s, in turn, presented new opportunities for self-enrichment while the former ideological foundations crumbled. The official discourse now centred on the necessity to create a ‘national bourgeoisie’ (p. 97). But instead of promoting the development of an economically and politically autonomous middle class, government policies only transformed and refined older forms of political clientelism. The middle class remained ‘a politically dependent category with little control over resources or the means of production in an economy that is largely dependent on access to the state’ (p. 10). There is also a generational dimension to this rather sombre middle-class story: the windows of opportunity closed–the post-independence expansion of education and the post-1992 boom of privatization of housing–and many members of the younger generation will not be able to reproduce their middle-class parents’ social status. In any case, Sumich’s interlocutors were highly critical of state officials’ corruption and deplored the fiasco of Frelimo’s original socialist project, but retained their party membership because it continues to give privileged access to jobs and resources.

For a West Africanist like myself, this book offered a brilliant introduction to the contemporary history of Mozambique, with a special focus on discourses on citizenship and nationhood. I was particularly fascinated by Sumich’s analysis of the continuities of privilege and its changing ideological underpinnings: from the high modernism and urbanism of Portuguese-educated ‘assimilados’ to the Frelimo vanguard’s philosophy of ‘the new man’ to the meritocratic ideals of middle-class subjects in a liberal democratic system that defines citizenship increasingly in racialized terms (rather than categories of political loyalty as before). Sumich’s focus on the emergence and transformation of class boundaries provides a most productive perspective on these historical developments. Analyses of the historical middle classes’ boundary work in Europe have shown that the intensity of the politics of distinction can shift over time–for instance, from an early emphasis on the upper middle classes’ distance from aristocratic circles to a later stress on the symbolic boundaries vis-à-vis the lower classes (for a summary, see Kocka’s ‘The middle classes in Europe’ in The European Way: European societies in the 19th and 20th centuries, edited by H. Kaelble (Berghahn Books, 2004)). In the Mozambican case, if I understand Sumich correctly, it was only from the 1990s that an earlier two-class system–of privileged urbanized party cadres versus rural (and urban) masses–developed into a three-class structure of sorts, with an enormously wealthy political elite at the top (created through access to mineral wealth), most of the population struggling for survival at the bottom, and a besieged middle class in between. In the post-independence period, the proto-middle class’s major concern seems to have been to legitimate their privilege vis-à-vis the broader masses. Since the 1990s, by contrast, the fraught middle class’s emphasis shifted to erect firm moral boundaries vis-à-vis the outrageously rich elite.

I would have liked to learn more about this boundary between elite and middle class, and its economic and political as well as symbolic dimensions...