Against the Neoconservatives: Africa: War and Revolution

It is a little too easy to take the speeches and proclamations of African leaders for gospel truth. When somewhere, in one of those old colonial cities lost in the African bush, a political party all of a sudden declares it is “Marxist-Leninist,” international public opinion pretends to believe in the transmutation. Some people bemoan it, some rejoice, but, generally they prefer to accept the wordplay rather than weigh the social realities it ill conceals.

Mozambique, a land long colonized by the Portuguese, appears on the list of countries that have achieved their revolution, with the attributes that go with it: mass meetings; a single party in “the van of the peasant-worker alliance”; wide-spread politici...