Sure Road? Nationalisms in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique: 28

Malyn Newitt, in: H-Luso-Africa, H-Net Reviews. December, 2012.

‘In this book’s Introduction, the rhetorical question posed in the title gets a prompt answer: no, there was no ‘sure road’ to fulfilling nationalist ambitions for these countries, now independent of Portugal for nearly forty years. Yet that answer may not satisfy everyone, least of all those African officials who in recent years have commissioned the writing of national liberation histories. Those are projects largely of patriotic historiography – a resurgent intellectual current that this book opposes. The editor’s misgivings about that kind of history concern its teleology; that is, the interpretation and even re-invention of the past in terms of present-day outcomes.

… This book’s aim, however, is not to rehearse the critique of official narratives. That would be an anti-climax for readers already aware of the many pre- and post-mortems of nationalist projects in these countries. Rather, the editor has sought to assemble new facts and theoretical approaches. To these ends, the book pays attention to such things as conflicting sub-nationalisms, cultural politics, and the eclipse of ‘Marxist’ development ambitions by high modernist models that serve the happy few.

David Sogge, Transnational Institute, Amsterdam, in African Affairs, Volume 112, Issue 449, October 2013

‘Edited volumes resulting from conferences (like this one from a workshop on ‘The Politics of Nations and Nationalisms in Lusophone Africa’ in 2007 at Oxford University) often feel disjointed and lack a coherent theme. This is decidedly not the case in Sure Road? Nationalisms in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, edited by Eric Morier-Genoud. Morier-Genoud, a scholar of Mozambique, makes a compelling case for examining nationalisms in these three disparate former Portuguese colonies based on a shared colonial history, late and contested paths to independence, and the opening (to varying degrees) of authoritarian political systems in recent years. The editor highlights a glaring lacuna of studies of nationalism in these three countries and argues that now is a propitious time to examine nationalism due to a growing interest among the young, and to the aging and dying of those who participated directly in the creation of these nations in the 1960s and 1970s. The book will be of interest to scholars because of its high calibre and the original insights of the individual chapters. A general audience will appreciate the analyses of contemporary nationalism in these PALOP (Países Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa) countries’.

Jeremy Ball, Dickinson College, in Kronos 39.1, 2013