Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Revisionism in Postcolonial Africa

Book excerpt: This groundbreaking study investigates defining themes in the field of social memory studies as they bear on the politics of post-Cold-War, post-apartheid Southern Africa. Examining the government's attempts to revise postcolonial Mozambique's traumatic past with a view to negotiating the present, Alice Dinerman stresses the path-dependence of memory practices while tracing their divergent trajectories, shifting meanings and varied combinations within ruling discourse and performance.Central themes include: * the interplay between past and present* the dialectic bet.