FRACTURED LANDSCAPES AND THE POLITICS OF SPACE: Remembrance and Memory in Nwadjahane (Southern Mozambique)

Abstract

Nwadjahane, a small village in southern Mozambique, is set apart from other settlements as the birthplace of Eduardo Mondlane, one of the nation's founding fathers. Declared a national heritage site and made into an open-air museum, Nwadjahane has become a landscape where national and local memories are negotiated. Mondlane is at once a national hero celebrated with statues, exhibitions, and commemorations, as well as locally linked to ancestors and memorialized through ritual sites and sacred trees. I examine how diverse audiences engage, appropriate, and contest the different spaces of Nwadjahane: the village, the museum, the space of ancestors. Highlighting the fractured nature and the politics of this landscape, the tensions, contradictions, claims, and counterclaims made upon a single locale, I use Foucault's concept of heterotopia as an analytical tool to interrogate the juxtaposition of distinct spaces and temporalities, focusing particularly on local interpretations and the historical conditions that made Nwadjahane a national heritage site.