Mozambique

["James M. Blaut" <70671.2032@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I don't propose to debate Joao. I DO want to state -- once -- my
disagreement with his historico-ethnographic construct, which seems to me
to be leading up to his political proposals ..

I don't agree that there was no private property in pre-colonial Africa,
not evern feudalism (the Marxist concept, not the bourgeois concept) and
that private property is insignificant t in rural Mozambnique today.   I
don't agree that African societies,  apart from European influences,
were/are static, stagnant, nonevolutionary, burdened with an "Asiatic mode
of production." I think that Suret-Canale, the bourgeois French journalist,
(though he was a socialist)  is not a good source for underdstanding
African societies, least of all for typologies of  their class/nonclass
structures. I think that what Joao calls "African Socialism" (capitalized)
is indelibly associated with Leopold Senghor and neocolonialism. II'm under
he impression that Nyerere's noble Ujamaa effort  in Tanzania has not been
successful because the outside world is capitalist . .

Joao is of course free to hold whatever views he wants to, just like the
rest of us.

Jim Blaut