Monday, April 22, 2019

Mozambique: Joseph Hanlon’s "The Revolution of the Fire"

Why do some people want to read a book describing contemporary politics and international relations thirty years after publication? Of course, recent history or overview will be preferable. Memoirs always evoke the author's memories or create a background for the memo. Overview and analysis do retain their relevance if they are revisited for decades after the events they describe. But the details of the ongoing contemporary commentary on specific political issues may not even apply to our time - why is someone reading such a book now?

This is a question worthy of the beginning of Joseph Hanlon's 1984 work "Mozambique: Revolution under Fire". Less than a decade after Frelimo came to power, the colonial Portuguese fled the country, and the book gave a very brief introduction to Mozambique's position in the early 1980s. At the time, most of the problems remained unresolved. Most of the challenges facing the Frelimo government remain unresolved, not to mention overcoming. Therefore, at least it can be said that the incident is developing rapidly and the regional situation is still unstable. Because some people think that works like Joseph Hanlong's book have barely retained their relevance on the day of their original publication, let alone about thirty years. But now it's the contemporary snapshots provided by this book that make it more worth reading.

Joseph Hanlon's article summarizes the history of the rise of Frelimo. Participants have made progress in the country's health care, agriculture, education and general political restructuring, or have not actually made progress. He believes Mozambique's relationship with its neighbors and its position in international politics and trade.

It is here that we discover the true interest in Mozambique: the revolution under fire. First of all, this book is unwavering in the Cold War paradigm, which was inevitable at the time. In the twenty-first century, it is easy to forget that in the second half of the twentieth century, if international relations were not built in the struggle between the East and the West and between communism and capitalism, it would be impossible to write anything about international relations. Mozambique, of course, because its professional left-wing government is considered to be in the communist camp, but Joseph Hanlon often reminds us that although this is inevitable, given Frelimo's ideological tendencies, in practice this does not necessarily mean compliance. Socialist policy, or receiving assistance from the Soviet Union. This does mean that the country's economy and its society are undermined by external forces that have received great support from the United States. At the time, not the only privatization within a poor country was exacerbated by external aggression.

Secondly, read "Mozambique: The Revolution under Fire", and we think of how much change has taken place in the past three decades. At the time of this writing, Zimbabwe is new and independent, and South Africa remains a determined apartheid country. The South African Development Coordination Conference is only in its infancy and is still being promoted by optimism, which helps to promote economic integration between countries that rely mainly on South Africa.

Third, paradoxically, this book reminds us that even the revolutionary government rarely changes through its own policies and actions. There is no place to inherit as a blank sector, and existing practices, interests and structures inevitably must be considered and adapted. They may also be challenged, but Joseph Hanlon's book once again shows how difficult this task has always been.

Fourth, the book's very amazing appendix is ​​used to illustrate how complex and obvious the problem is. Mozambique was unable to support itself when crop failures due to drought and other damage caused by war. Joseph Hanlon provided an interesting analysis that under the conditions recognized at the time, promoting agricultural development may be more costly and less efficient in purchasing food on the open market.

So, Joseph Hanlon's Mozambique: The ideas and descriptions presented by the revolution under the fire challenge us to reinterpret the regions we are seeing now, not just the texts that are relevant to their own time. This book reminds us that what we assume today is that we must explain the dominant paradigm of current events, which may be completely inappropriate in ten or twenty years. Joseph Hanlon's work was written to describe the rapidly changing scenes of the 1980s, but it now reminds us that no matter how permanent some ideas are, they actually represent only short-lived assumptions.




Orignal From: Mozambique: Joseph Hanlon's "The Revolution of the Fire"

No comments:

Post a Comment