Paper short abstract:

According to Frelimo, communal village represented organized urban life in rural context. Different from colonial city, it was to be a new collective form of society. After analysing the high modernist premises of the program, the focus will move to the practice of implementation - and its failure.

Paper long abstract:

According to the Marxist ideology of Frelimo, communal village represented 'cidade do campo', organized urban life in a rural context. However, different from the colonial city, depicted as 'a bastion of vices', communal villages were to constitute a more advanced, collectively organized form of society, "where individual life will be totally annihilated, where individualism and ambition are destroyed; where we can assume fully our mission because we live in an organized way, programmed and with clearly delegated tasks" (Machel 1976, 51-52). Different from the liberal version of modernism, in Frelimo's view individualism was to be rejected as an integral part of the 'vocation to capitalism', and thus alien to Homem Novo.

The paper will examine the continuities and discontinuities from the colonial ideological heritage, notably the 'Reactionary Modernism' of Estado Novo, the legacy of the 'Modern movement' in architecture, and the Marxist twist after independence in 1975. After an analysis of the 'high modernist' premises of the communal villages programme (Scott 1998), the focus will move to the practice of programme implementation, which turned out to be rather different from the original premises. Finally I look at the situation today, as rural practices are increasingly invading the periurban areas and markets have become the dominant force. Theoretically, the paper is based on critical application of theory of practice approach (Adler and Pouliot 2011; Strengers and Maller 2016; Schatzki 2001).