Utopia Live: Singing the Mozambican struggle for national liberation
Abstract
This article engages a historical reconstruction of the formation of Makonde
revolutionary singing in the process of the Mozambican liberation struggle. The
history of ʻUtopia liveʼ is here entrusted to wartime genres, marked by heteroglossia
and the use of metaphor, and referring to moments when the ʻspace of
experienceʼ and the ʻhorizon of expectationʼ of the Struggle were still filled with
uncertainty and the sense of possibility. Progressively, however, singing expressions
were reorganised around socialismʼs nodes of meaning. Ideological tropes,
elaborated by Frelimoʼs ʻcourtlyʼ composers, were appropriated in popular singing.
The relations between the ʻpeopleʼ and their leaders were made apparent
through the organization of the performance space. The main contention of the
article is that unofficiality, heteroglossia, metaphor and poetic license, although
they feature in genres that have been marked out as ʻpopularʼ in academic discourse,
are by no means intrinsically ʻpopularʼ. Much on the contrary, they
are the first victims of populist modes of political actions, that is, of a politics
grounded on a concept of ʻpeopleʼ.