The fight against tribalism constituted one of the main tenets of FRELIMO’s
discourse during the “struggle for national liberation”. However, the concept
has also been employed by the Front’s opponents, namely its dissidents and
the colonial authorities, to denounce the supposedly discriminatory nature
of its practices. Applying the instruments of textual and prosopographical
analysis to FRELIMO’s publications as well as to colonial records, this
study deconstructs the Front’s anti-tribalist narrative, showing its ambiguous
and variable character, and correlates it to the dissidents’ discourse and to
a measurement of ethno-regional dominance within FRELIMO. As a result,
references to tribalism are shown to constitute a communicative vector
employed by alternative political networks in their competition for scarce
resources.
