Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History最新文献

{"title":"Nationalism, Liberation, and Decolonization in Angola","authors":"D. Péclard","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.640","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.640","url":null,"abstract":"Angolan independence was achieved on November 11, 1975, after a 14-year-long war. The war was the result of three overlapping dynamics. The first was Portugal’s refusal to consider the possibility of a negotiated settlement for the independence of its colonies in Africa. Under the dictatorial regime of António Salazar, Portugal had become extremely dependent on its colonies, both economically and politically, and was therefore, by the late 1950s, bent on maintaining its colonial empire. The second was the development of nationalist feelings among Angolan elites, which eventually materialized in the late 1950s to early 1960s in two—and, as of 1966, three—competing nationalist movements. The third constituted a series of popular grievances within sectors of the Angolan population, especially landless farmers and plantation workers in the north, against their growing marginalization and impoverishment due to exploitative colonial policies. This eventually led to three uncoordinated revolts in January, February, and March 1961 that marked the beginning of the war of independence.\u0000 The division of Angolan nationalism into three competing movements—the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA)—was shaped by Angola’s long history of violent integration into Portugal’s colonial empire. The 20th-century Portuguese colonial state in Angola relied on the exploitation of the so-called native workforce through a vast system of forced labor and on taxation. It was also exclusionary and discriminatory, leaving very few avenues for upward social mobility for Angolan “natives.” It was therefore mostly at the margins of the colonial world that such mobility was possible, especially within Christian missions. The integration of these Angolan elite groups into the colonial world, or their exclusion, followed different paths according to local contexts and histories. As a result, the different lived experiences of the social groups that formed the backbone of the nationalist movement made it exceedingly difficult for them to agree on a common vision for independent Angola. This, together with the uncompromising thirst for power of the leadership of the three movements and Cold War logics, contributed to the civil war that engulfed the country at independence and lasted until 2002.","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125908790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Crusades in North Africa","authors":"Matt A. King","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.1174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.1174","url":null,"abstract":"Although Jerusalem was the ultimate target of many of the largest crusading expeditions during the medieval period, North Africa nonetheless played a crucial role in this movement. Following the establishment of the Crusader states at the end of the 11th century, Latin Christians clashed with the Fatimids of Egypt for regional control of the Levant and Nile River delta. This conflict gave way in the 13th century to the “Egyptian strategy,” through which crusaders thought the most likely way to retake Jerusalem was by attacking the rich and fertile lands of the Nile. The crusades of King Louis IX, which were directed at Egypt and Tunis, were motivated in part by the idea that seizing these lands in North Africa would ultimately lead to the reconquest of the Holy Land. Elsewhere in the Mediterranean, crusading fervor reached the shores of North Africa via the Reconquista. Beginning in the 13th century and extending through the early modern period, Christian leaders in Iberia viewed campaigns in northwest Africa as an extension of their earlier repulsion of Muslims from the peninsula. These crusades, which were theorized as dynastic enterprises that served to both spread Christianity and expand the borders of empires, persisted into the 16th century as the papacy marshaled the assistance of European Christian powers against the Ottomans. The response of Muslim dynasties in North Africa to these expeditions was never uniform, as some preferred diplomacy with the aggressing Franks and others conflict. However, there gradually developed in the Islamic world the idea that a persistent jihad against Mediterranean-wide Frankish aggression was an appropriate response. The memory of medieval crusades was a particularly potent one in France, where Louis IX’s expeditions were evoked during France’s conquest of Algeria in the 19th century.","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127910925","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"HIV and AIDS in Africa","authors":"Krista Johnson","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.1005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.1005","url":null,"abstract":"Africa has the largest number of people living with HIV, with an estimated 25.7 million HIV-positive people in Africa by the end of 2018. This figure represents over two-thirds of infected people globally. African women and girls represent a majority of those infected, and Africa is home to three-fourths of all HIV-infected women and girls. Across African countries, there are differences in the sizes and trajectories of HIV epidemics. Southern Africa has the worst epidemic, with the numbers infected still rising in some countries. Prompting a development and governance crisis in many southern African countries, HIV prevalence rates are as high as 20 percent of the adult population in some countries and nearing 50 percent of the adult population in certain communities. East Africa too has been hit hard by HIV, leading to high mortality and morbidity rates in that region as well. In most of West and North Africa, there has been limited spread of HIV, with most countries in these regions having HIV prevalence rates of less than 3 percent.\u0000 Africa’s encounter with HIV and AIDS began before it was first identified as a medical condition early in the 1980s. However, it was not recognized as an epidemic in most parts of Africa until much later. Framed largely as a public health crisis rather than a developmental one, much of the world’s focus on the AIDS pandemic in Africa has centered on access to treatment, and developing effective prevention strategies that have principally focused on behavior change practices for targeted populations. However, the HIV and AIDS pandemic in Africa did not emerge in a vacuum. It is the consequence of longer historical processes such as massive demographic growth, urbanization, and social change, as well as global inequalities and historical legacies of colonialism and imperialism. In this regard, a historical account of HIV in Africa offers an important corrective to the dominant biomedical response to AIDS in Africa. It is important to take note of longer historical processes that have shaped both the virus and the human response to it.","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"05 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129015768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Christianity in Kongo","authors":"Carlos Almeida","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.641","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.641","url":null,"abstract":"On the Atlantic coast of Africa, the Polity of Kongo, situated around the Congo River and to the south, constitutes a unique case of a secular lasting relationship with Christianity. In 1491, following Diogo Cão’s travels, Mwene Kongo Nzinga Nkuwu accepted the baptism offered him by the Portuguese priests. This set off a complex process of integration and appropriation of Christianity’s ritualistic and symbolic forms, accelerated, in particular, during the reign of Afonso Mvemba Nzinga (1504–1542).\u0000 From the beginning, the incorporation of Christianity into Kongo resulted from an autonomous decision by local political leaders. The complicated process of cultural translation of the Christian theological world to the Kongo cosmology, heterogeneous and discontinuous, full of ambiguities and misunderstandings, depended on the active participation of members of the Kongo aristocracy who were sent to Portugal to study or trained locally in the precepts of the faith.\u0000 Different religious orders established themselves in the region between the 15th and 19th centuries, Jesuits and Capuchins most prominent among them. In addition to countless reports and descriptions about the social reality of the region, some printed at the time, their presence resulted in a set of linguistic sources, including booklets, catechisms, and vocabularies that determine the way different concepts and rituals were translated into the Kongo frame of reference.\u0000 Christianity and the related process of acquiring and using the written communication reinforced the tendency of the political entity for agglutination around its center Mbanza Kongo. At the same time, they opened a diplomatic channel that Kongo manipulated in order to counter the political, economic, and religious pressure of the Portuguese Crown and its colony in Luanda, and to defend its own sphere of interests on an Atlantic scale.\u0000 After the fragmentation of the Kongo following the battle of Mbwila in 1665, Christianity, or at least the consolidated forms of its appropriation and the local agents of that process, continued to play a relevant political and social role, even when the presence of different European religious orders had become either scarce or virtually nonexistent. This pattern of establishing roots is well reflected in the successive prophetic movements that broke out throughout the 17th century, echoes of which were still visible at the turn of the 20th century, when new religious protagonists emerged on the scene.\u0000 The voluminous and diversified documentary archive continues to raise important theoretical and methodological debates about the nature of the processes of appropriation, reframing, and cultural hybridity generated in the context of this historical relationship.","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134633724","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"British Antislavery and West Africa","authors":"P. Scanlan","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.742","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.742","url":null,"abstract":"Resistance to slavery within African societies was as complex and heterogeneous as slavery itself. For enslaved Africans and their descendants taken by force to Europe’s colonies in the Americas, antislavery was an existential struggle. Among European states, Britain was among the first imperial powers to pass laws abolishing its slave trade (in 1807) and slavery in its colonies (in 1833). Antislavery was a transnational phenomenon, but Britain made suppressing the Atlantic slave trade an element of its foreign policy, employing a Royal Navy squadron to search for slave ships, pressing African leaders to sign anti-slave-trade treaties as a condition of trade and coordinating an international network of anti-slave-trade courts. And yet, for many leading British abolitionists, “Africa” was an ideological sandbox—an imagined blank space for speculation and experiment on the development of human societies and the progress of “civilization.”\u0000 In the 18th century, early British critics of the transatlantic slave trade argued that “Africa” presented an unparalleled commercial and imperial opportunity. Although the slave trade—and the plantations in the Americas that slave ships supplied with labor—were profitable, some argued that slave-trading regions could, with enough investment, produce goods and commodities that would be many times more lucrative. Moreover, if Britain were the first European power to abolish the slave trade, it might also be among the first to gain a territorial foothold on African soil. Over time, these arguments coalesced into the concept of “legitimate commerce.” A combination of Christian teaching, slave-trade suppression, and commercial incentives would persuade slave-trading polities to give up the practice and instead produce other goods. Legitimate commerce intertwined with a theory of civilization that held that any society that enslaved people was so degenerate in its social development that nearly any reform or intervention was justifiable. By the end of the 19th century, antislavery became a justification for European conquest.\u0000 There were at least three broad reform projects launched by British officials and merchants in Africa in the name of antislavery. First, drawing on critiques of the slave trade from the 18th century that emphasized the commercial potential of legitimate commerce, antislavery activists and politicians argued for replacing the slave trade with new kinds of export-oriented commerce. Second, in two colonies, Sierra Leone and Liberia, Britain and the United States experimented with the possibility of using Black people from the African diaspora as settlers and missionaries. In Sierra Leone, more than seventy thousand people, usually known as “Liberated Africans,” were repatriated from slave ships into the small colony. Third, in the mid-19th century, as the transatlantic slave trade declined, Britain and other European powers invested heavily in African plantation agriculture, particularly in cotton ","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125776000","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Archaeology of the Kerma Culture","authors":"S. Schrader, S. T. Smith","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.1071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.1071","url":null,"abstract":"Kerma was a Bronze Age culture (c. 2500–1500 bce) located in what is today Sudan and southern Egypt. It is one of the earliest complex societies in Africa and, at its height, rivaled Ancient Egypt. The ancient Kerma culture spans the Pre-Kerma, examining the settlements and cemeteries of this ancient culture during the Pre-Kerma (3500–2500 bce, included here as a precursor to the Kerma civilization), Early Kerma, Middle Kerma, Classic Kerma, and Recent Kerma periods. Much of what is known comes from the capital city and type site, Kerma. However, other urban centers such as Sai, as well as hinterland communities, are also discussed. An archaeological approach is crucial to the examination of Kerma’s past because an indigenous writing system had not yet been developed. Interaction with Egypt is discussed, but only as it relates to Kerma’s historical context. Chronological changes to craft production, religious practices, domestic spaces, and funerary rituals are framed by larger sociopolitical and socioeconomic issues, including inequality, political authority, and economic development.","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131754046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Bretton Woods Institutions and Economic Reform in Africa","authors":"A. Akinola","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.754","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.754","url":null,"abstract":"The activities of International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (together comprising the Bretton Woods Institutions) in Africa have continued to generate questions about the impact of economic reforms on democratization and economic growth. The Bretton Woods Institutions strongly believe that economic growth contributes significantly to poverty alleviation efforts and hence generates improvements in living standards, particularly in developing countries, including those in Africa. In the mid-1980s, as many African countries struggled to service their external debts and qualify for additional credit to provide services to their citizens and promote economic growth and development, the World Bank and the IMF offered to help them. However, the Bretton Woods Institutions conditioned their assistance on the willingness of each African country to undertake necessary structural reforms, which included a reduction in the public sector, devaluation of the national currency, deregulation of the foreign trade sector, and more reliance on markets for the allocation of resources.\u0000 These aid programs, which came to be known as Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) consisted of conditional lending to African countries in economic crisis. At this time, the World Bank felt that the effectiveness of its development programs in Africa and other regions of the world was being undermined by bloated and dysfunctional bureaucratic structures and governmental systems that were hostile to the market generally and entrepreneurship in particular. The World Bank’s desire to condition the extension of credit to African countries on institutional reforms was supposedly to improve bureaucratic efficiency, as well as economic performance, and enhance the effectiveness of the World Bank’s projects in these countries. Thus, the IMF and the World Bank emerged in the 1990s as major players in efforts to improve economic growth and development in Africa.\u0000 The SAPs were expected to improve macroeconomic performance, produce rapid economic growth, achieve economic diversification, and provide each African country with the resources that it needed to confront poverty and improve national living standards. In fact, in 1994, the World Bank expressed a lot of optimism about the impact of SAPs on African economies. However, many critics have argued that SAPs had virtually no positive impact on the macroeconomic performance of African economies and, instead, created a series of internal political and economic contradictions that have continued to haunt the continent to this day. As a result, critics say, many countries that implemented SAPs continue to suffer from high levels of poverty and became more dependent on external financial resources (such as loans, development aid, and food aid) than before they got involved with the Bretton Woods Institutions and their adjustment programs.","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124622791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cinema in Tanzania","authors":"J. Burns","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.819","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.819","url":null,"abstract":"Moving pictures have a long history in Tanzania. The first cinema shows appeared in the region at the turn of the 20th century. Indian entrepreneurs established tent shows before World War I and built permanent cinemas in the interwar period. Colonial officials feared cinema images would undermine their authority and attempted to censor films and segregate audiences. During and immediately following World War II Tanganyika and Zanzibar experienced a boom in cinema building as the popularity of going to the movies soared among urban Africans. Tanzanian audiences developed cosmopolitan tastes, embracing Bollywood actors, Elvis Presley, and Bruce Lee alike. After independence the new Tanzanian government adopted policies that ultimately encouraged the decline of cinema-going as a public leisure activity.\u0000 Films have been made in Tanganyika and Zanzibar since the first decade of the 20th century. Under German rule, visitors to Tanganyika made ethnographic and wildlife films. After World War I the new British administration in Tanganyika continued to allow commercial and documentary filmmakers to operate in the territory. In the 1930s the British government considered several initiatives to make educational films for African audiences. During World War II the Colonial Office created a film unit to produce and disseminate educational and propaganda films throughout Africa, including in both Tanganyika and Zanzibar. This work continued up until Tanganyika became independent in 1961. After independence the government of the new nation of Tanzania continued producing didactic movies for its citizens. They also made a handful of feature films for commercial distribution. In the 1990s a new video industry emerged in Dar es Salaam, in part inspired by the importation of inexpensive video films from Nigeria. Dubbed “Bongowood,” this new industry has been extremely prolific, producing hundreds of low-budget videos annually. These Swahili-language videos are consumed avidly within the country, as well as in Swahili-speaking areas of neighboring nations, and throughout the Swahili diaspora.","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129853216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Christian and Islamic Nubia, 543–1820","authors":"B. Żurawski","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.407","url":null,"abstract":"In the 6th century, after the arrival of the Christian missionaries from Constantinople, Nubia became the southernmost outpost of Byzantine culture in Africa. New religion brought new sacral iconography and literary genres based on Greek, which became the sacred language of the Nubian liturgy and hymnology. The Greco-Byzantine elements diluted in the indigenous African traditions created an original culture in the Middle Nile that preserved much of its Byzantine ideal until the fall of the Christian Kingdoms in the 14th and 15th centuries.\u0000 However, at the beginning of the 11th century, Nubia witnessed the process of nationalization of its culture, which is evidenced by the proliferation of the Nubian language in official documents and visitors’ graffiti in the churches.\u0000 The economy of Christian Nubia was enhanced by the high productivity of the riverine agriculture based on the widespread use of the water wheel (saagiya) and trade. Nubia played the role of intermediary in the exchange between Africa’s interior and the Mediterranean. However, the profitable trade in slaves, cattle, and gold was stripped of its benefits when the traditional north–south routes diverged from the Nile Valley, thus avoiding the Nile checkpoints where the duties in kind were levied from the caravans by the Christian rulers. The first symptoms of Nubia’s political decline appeared in the 9th century when the Arabs started to settle in the gold-bearing regions along the Nile. The fall of the Christian Kingdom of Makuria was preluded by a period of total dependence on the Mamlūk sultans of Egypt, who openly interfered in the dynastic disputes among the Nubian ruling families. The outbreak of the second plague pandemic in the mid-14th century destabilized the Nubian economy, ruined the agriculture, and forced people to turn to God and the heavenly intercessors for help.\u0000 In the 15th century, Nubia reverted to its original state of political segmentation and anarchy under the rule of petty kinglets who could not prevent the subjugation of Upper Nubia to Funj Sultans and Lower Nubia to the Ottomans. The last attempt at military unification of the Middle Nile by an indigenous power was the ascendance of the Islamized Nubian tribe of the Shaiqiyya, which in the early 18th century dominated a huge part of the Middle Nile. The coming of the Mamlūk refugees from Egypt in 1811 weakened the Shaiqiyya’s supremacy. Ten years later the Middle Nile was incorporated into the Ottoman eyālet of Egypt governed by Muhammed Ali.","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124513225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Renamo and Mozambique","authors":"Corinna Jentzsch","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.1028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.1028","url":null,"abstract":"The history of independent Mozambique is a history of war and peace, and it is closely intertwined with the history of the main opposition movement Renamo (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana), which formed as an armed movement and transitioned into a political party. Mozambique gained independence from Portuguese colonial rule in 1975 after a ten-year liberation struggle. The main liberation movement Frelimo (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) became the ruling party and introduced far-reaching social, economic, and political reforms. These reforms generated discontent, which contributed to the formation of opposition movements in the center of the country. From the late 1970s onwards, an armed movement, later known as Renamo, gained ground in central Mozambique and fought a guerrilla war against the Mozambican government. Renamo received support from Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) and apartheid South Africa who sought to undermine Frelimo aid to liberation movements in their respective countries. It was only in 1992 that Renamo and Frelimo reached a settlement with the help of international mediators, with a path to multiparty elections in 1994. Since then, Renamo has participated in elections as a political party but has never won a majority in parliament nor was it able to claim the presidency. Political conflict between Frelimo and Renamo has never subsided, with Renamo regularly protesting election results and alleging fraud. Tensions escalated in 2013 and led to low-level conflict in the central region. A ceasefire agreement in 2014 and a unilateral truce by Renamo in December 2016 ended that conflict, but a peace accord was only struck after Afonso Dhlakama—president of Renamo—died of natural causes in 2018. Since then, tensions have remained due to armed activity by a Renamo breakaway movement and a slow demobilization process, and peace remains precarious. Renamo’s transition from an armed movement into a political movement, similarly to Mozambique’s transition from war to peace, has not yet fully materialized.","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132815801","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}