Silent Agents of Nationalist Struggle? Women of Mozambique, Fighting a War Within a War

ABSTRACT What narratives carry women who experienced war in the first person, even if they are not military or even directly part of a nationalist movement? How can they challenge the colonial and nationalist archives, that insist in silencing women’s experiences in their chronicles? In contemporary Mozambique, while the dominant nationalist historiography has acknowledged the role played by the women who left home and joined the nationalist armed struggle, the analysis tends to rend invisible the experiences of women that, from home, participated in the struggle. Methodologically, archival research is combined with ethnographic methods to explore the lived experiences of African women whose destinies were crossed by the nationalist war in Mozambique (1964–1974). In-depth interviews with three women, supported by semi-structured interviews with relatives and acquaintances, are used to research ‘home’ as a key political space of women’s anti-colonial resistance and a context where emancipatory projects were dreamed. In parallel, this article aims to discuss the patriarchal dimension of knowledge kept in official archives, thus contributing to questioning the masculine hegemony in the ‘national’ discourse, as well as to reintroduce the question of agency and instrumentality back into the liberation narrative.