Mozambique has been in political turmoil for the past three months, following the elections that were described as fraudulent by national and international observers, including the European Union Election Observation Mission, but where the results were nonetheless confirmed by the supreme court on 23 December 2024.
There has been surprise at the sustained and widespread popular contestation that has arisen following the elections, in a country where civic space has long been under pressure and where repression has intensified in recent years. However, dissatisfaction among citizens has been brewing for quite some time, as illustrated by work on more nuanced and context-specific expressions of citizen voice.
A study I co-led in partnership with Kaleidoscópio and IDS for the A4EA research programme showed that protest songs are a vehicle citizens use to articulate their disappointment with the ruling party’s unfulfilled promises of a better future and its growing alienation from most citizens and the issues that concern them.
Through writing, performing and singing protest songs, citizens have challenged the ruling party’s legitimacy as the sole authorised ruler of Mozambique, demanded for better public services and participatory deliberative democracy.
The build-up to unrest
For attentive observers, the contestation following the 2023 municipal elections was a preview of what was to happen in the presidential and legislative elections of 9 October 2024. In 2023, widespread protests took place after electoral fraud was widely believed to have cheated opposition leader Venâncio Mondlane of victory in the capital, Maputo. After the 2024 elections, in which Venâncio Mondlane ran for President, the current wave of protests was triggered when the supposedly independent National Election Commission ignored evidence of massive fraud and declared that the Presidency had been won by the candidate from the Frelimo party, which has ruled Mozambique for decades, in a result disputed by Mondlane but upheld by the country’s top electoral court in December.
What might be harder to grasp is why there has been such turmoil following these elections when they had Mozambique’s lowest ever recorded levels of voter turnout.
There is great scepticism amongst citizens in Mozambique about electoral democracy and a general sense that politicians neglect the people in between the elections, but always need them during the election time. Thus, many citizens see non-voting as a form of political protest, even though, as work by IDS and IESE researcher Egídio Chaimite demonstrates that abstention has been used by the ruling party as a scaffolding for fraud.
I would argue that we are seeing a virtuous confluence between those who still believe in electoral democracy and those who have sought change through contentious action, bringing together voters and non-voters (abstentionists, people who have been prevented from voting and people below the voting age).
Diversity of people protesting
Most reporting on ongoing uprising tends to homogenise protesters as a mass of young angry males burning tyres or being shot by the police. It is true that many of those protesting are young men who have not voted; it is also true that those killed by the state’s armed branches are young men, but they are not the only ones.
A focus exclusively on them as well as on street protests overlooks the diversity of the people involved – particularly the participation of women of all ages – and the strategies adopted by them. This narrow focus misses the profound transformation in civic consciousness and political subjectivity of Mozambicans.
It wasn’t just Casimira, the woman photographed in the middle of riot police officers speaking with and pointing her finger to one of them nor the woman mowed down by a military vehicle during another protest. While those are some of the emblematic cases that got media attention, they are just a glimpse of women’s political agency during this period. They are heterogenous in terms of age, class, religion, marital status, mothers and childless, urban and rural, and political affiliation, including Frelimo women disgruntled with the party’s performance.
They are engaged in various forms of civic and uncivil, online and offline, open and under the radar political action, individually and collectively (with female and male protesters), across Mozambique and abroad (the diaspora).
This encompasses, marching (including attempting to reach the Palácio da Ponta Vermelha, the president official residence in Maputo) and joining night marches, protesting in front of the supreme court with their faces covered, occupying the streets singing protest songs and the national anthem, dancing, praying, cooking, pan-bashing in the evening and jokingly sharing photos of their damaged kitchen heroes.
It also includes producing intervention music (such as Ivete Mafundza’s Em Marcha and Lizha James’s Voz do Povo) and social media content, creating and running WhatsApp groups to mobilise action, designing and featuring in campaigns about freedom of expression and the constitutional right to protest, and threatening to carry out naked protests. They have also looked after the injured, mourned and buried friends, neighbours and relatives killed by the security forces; and formed part of groups created to provide water, food and health care to protesters in the frontline.
Gendered protests
Gender relations surface in the claims and demands made by male and female young protesters, as their placards read “women don’t have husbands because of Frelimo” or “young men can’t get an erection because of misfortune”. These claims, articulated jokingly, reveal shame and frustration for not being able to meet social expectations, for which they blame Frelimo.
Women’s practices (some sexualised) and discourses as well as interactions fellow male protesters often in humours, but sometimes in abusive ways reveal complex gender relations and complicity with patriarchy. For instance, when young women watched smiling as another young woman was physically harassed during a protest by a young male protester, fuelling fears of gender-based violence and intensifying demands from feminist groups (such as Ascha Mukadzi , OPHENTA and Fórum Mulher) for engendering the protests.
Women’s involvement in protests in not new. Women’s rights and feminist groups as well as women not associated with the latter undertake them regularly, but not with the intensity of civic energy that we are witnessing. For example, in a study conducted between April 2019 and December 2021, also as part of the A4EA research programme, we discussed how participants in women-led street protests believed that if they stayed at home, nothing would change and that by voicing their discontent they challenged gender norms of silence.
Today, female protesters in Mozambique continue disrupting a habitus predicated on their silence and exclusion from engaging with the state as agential citizens particularly, but not only, around electoral politics. Their demands are not just about women’s interests as women, it also contains elements of feminist visions for the future, articulated with larger societal demands.
Uncertain future
I write this blog with one eye on this document and the other on my WhatsApp feed, following the developments of what promises to be an eventful week. January 15 is the date defined by the Constitutional Council for the investiture of Frelimo’s Daniel Chapo as President of Mozambique, while January 9 is the date announced by Venâncio Mondlane, who claims to have won the election, for his return to Mozambique, after two months in an unknown location. The political future of Mozambique is uncertain, but the process of women’s political subjectivation seems irreversible.
Kátia Taela is a feminist anthropologist based in Mozambique and Honorary Associate at IDS.
