Independence as Discovery: Mozambique's 1975 Nationalization of Funeral Services

Abstract

In July 1975, a month after Mozambique's independence from Portugal, the state nationalized all health care, schooling, and legal counsel, so that all Mozambicans would have equal access to these key services – at least theoretically. The fourth, seemingly anomalous sector to be nationalized on the ‘Day of Nationalizations’: funeral services. The inflationary costs of burial in the capital, Lourenço Marques (today's Maputo) came to the attention of cabinet ministers only during the few weeks they had been ministers. Reacting with disgust, they decided there would be no ‘commercialization of death’ in the People's Republic of Mozambique. Based largely on interviews with the former minister of health and with Isaac Araújo, whose family ran perhaps the first African-owned funeral services business in Lourenço Marques, this article uses the episode to discuss the nature of government decision-making during the very earliest days of independence, a period that I argue deserves special attention. Emphasized is the role that Lourenço Marques played as context: how for neophyte ministers, learning to wield the levers of state was also a process of discovery about life in the capital city.

In late June 1975, a few days after Mozambique's independence from Portugal, President Samora Machel named the 18 men and one woman who would constitute the government's first cabinet of ministers. ¹ Most of them were in their 30s. None had any significant experience in government administration. This is not to say they did not have management experience. Many ministers were simultaneously leading officials of FRELIMO, the anticolonial movement that, with Machel at the helm, had managed a successful 10-year guerilla campaign against a well-armed NATO member state. FRELIMO claimed sole legitimate authority over the new government, and it filled the cabinet's security, diplomatic, and political posts with men from its upper ranks. But it awarded some ministries, such as health, finance, and justice­, to people who could contribute the kind of professional know-how that guerilla leaders could not. ² FRELIMO was fortunate their services were available. Technical expertise of this sort was scarce in Mozambique. Most of the country's professional and managerial class – most of it European – was gone or was soon to leave. Some were forced out, but most were simply frightened or anxious about what was to come under a self-declared revolutionary socialist regime. ³

Centuries of underdevelopment left independent Mozambique among the world's poorest countries. Industrialization during the last two decades of Portuguese rule gave the new rulers something of an economic base with which to work, but with sky-high rates of infant mortality and illiteracy and malnutrition, in city and countryside, FRELIMO said that its mission was to ‘dismantle the colonial apparatus’ and construct a state and a nation upon the blank slate. ⁴ The constitution of the People's Republic of Mozambique committed the government to end ‘the exploitation of man by man’. ⁵ That was a tall order for an already impoverished country where a generalized flight of the settler minority was sending the economy into a tailspin. ⁶

The regime's first major policy, which went into effect at the zero hour of independence, appropriated for the state all Mozambican land, halting its purchase and sale. The measure intended to end the kinds of displacements and dispossessions brought about by decades of commercial farming and land speculation. A month later, President Machel addressed what FRELIMO considered other pillars of colonial-era exploitation. On 24 July 1975, commemorated for years afterward as the Day of the Nationalizations, he announced the state takeover of all private schools, medical facilities, and legal representation. ⁷ Wealth would no longer afford more privileged access to education, better health, or justice, and the religious institutions that ran many schools and hospitals would no longer have the same influence in Mozambican life. (How to expand access to all Mozambicans was a matter left for another day.) In these first nationalizations, the regime checked off boxes that might have topped the to-do list of most social revolutions. The fourth sector nationalized that day, however, seems oddly out of place. President Machel announced that the state was also taking over funeral agencies. These were the handful of businesses that sold coffins, caskets, and floral arrangements for the relative few who could afford such luxuries, and then transported the dead to cemeteries in style.

Abolishing the ‘commercialization of death’, as the president called the funerals trade, was in keeping with FRELIMO's aggressive instincts for social leveling. Still, in the scheme of things coffin production was hardly an obvious candidate to be among the first industries in Mozambique targeted for state expropriation. Only in cities, such as in the capital Lourenço Marques, was there even a market for funeral services (or legal services, for that matter) and fewer than one in 10 Mozambicans lived in a city. Given the overwhelming challenges of the time, it was a curious priority. With their decision, cabinet ministers had taken even themselves by surprise. Health minister Hélder Martins, a physician to whose portfolio funeral services were added that July, later explained that the cabinet only learned of the industry's unseemly practices during the weeks just after independence. Ministers were unanimous in their revulsion and resolved to put funeral agencies immediately out of business. ⁸

A funeral is where grief, custom, a crowd, and economic reality meet the unspeakable – and where all these things might be transformed. Because it addresses one of the most sensitive intersections of individual, society, and belief, the study of death and burial in Africa has been a long-time staple of ethnography, and in recent decades has gone in more historical directions. ⁹ How funeral practices changed at different moments in time provides insight into the impacts of colonial rule in Africa, conflicts between Western and indigenous understandings of the body, and clashes of gender and generation among Africans themselves. ¹⁰ Scholars have explored how the stagecraft of burials related to the development of mass consumerism, mass politics, the rise of mission Christianity and African independent churches, anti-colonial resistance, technological change, and how people have processed mass death. ¹¹ The quest for a dignified burial in colonial cities (e.g. Lourenço Marques) is part of the story of how labor migration and urbanization produced new urban cultures and altered urban–rural dynamics. ¹² As John Parker argues in his recent history of death and dying in Ghana, funerary cultures have not just been an expression of individual and collective identities, but have shaped them: ‘The cultural work of the dead, that is to say, was directed towards the creation and the maintenance of the world of the living’. ¹³ Despite spanning 350 years of change, though, Parker's monumental account ends in the 1950s, just before Ghana's independence. Independence has been a common chronological boundary for a body of scholarship that either fits squarely in the pre-colonial and colonial eras or squarely in the postcolonial era, but that has yet to address decolonization itself.

Everywhere in decolonizing Africa, new regimes sought to restore ‘authentic’ African values and establish new ones. ¹⁴ Though conceived on the fly, nationalizing funeral services was part of this kind of legitimizing strategy. It gave FRELIMO an early opportunity to establish its brand of frugal, pragmatic socialism in stark relief against what it called the corrupt, decadent values of colonial capitalism. A small intervention compared to other measures of the time, it was given greater symbolic significance by the fact that it was death that was being decolonized, helping FRELIMO show that it sought to transform not just economic and social relations but culture as well.

How the politics of burial changed as the colonial era abruptly became the post-colonial era, that is, reveals as much about the making of a new regime and its process of policymaking as about conflicting attitudes toward death and dying. National independences in Africa that followed far smoother transitions than Mozambique's, such as those in Ghana and Tanganyika, could soon enough look a lot like revolutions, and revolutions during the era of decolonization, such as those in Ethiopia and Egypt, bore many of the features of a national independence. In all these cases, historians have justifiably been drawn to how regimes consolidated their power, propagated the image of a unified nation, positioned themselves on the global stage, and rolled out ambitious (and ultimately disappointing) development initiatives. ¹⁵ But whatever path a government might follow, there was in each case a bracing moment when new leaders assumed the rudder of a state and a bureaucracy they were largely if not totally unfamiliar with. In many cases, they also had to familiarize themselves with the full breadth and diversity of their own people, their needs, and their demands. These early moments are often overlooked in favor of later grander episodes. Sometime after struggles for independence, and sometime before or during the drafting of far-reaching plans, governments took stock and they improvised.

Africa's independence era is fading from living memory and with it the ability to carry out robust oral histories of the period. But Mozambique's independence, one of the more dramatic transfers of power, was also one of the more recent, and fortunately many of the ministers in the country's first cabinet are still around to talk about it. This article is based largely on interviews with former minister Martins and with Isaac Araújo, whose family ran the city's first African-owned funeral agency, as well as on media accounts of the funeral industry. An article about funeral services might seem a mere footnote to FRELIMO policymaking and the tragic, defining events of independent Mozambique's first decade or so: the Machel era. But the new nation's first days and weeks can offer a special perspective, as they would for any new nation. Nationalizing funeral services showed that even the more dogmatic thinkers within the regime, whose understanding of colonialism often seemed set in stone, were trying to interpret the colonial legacy in order to address it, at the very moment the colonial era officially became the past. ¹⁶

FRELIMO's earliest efforts, I argue, were not just the roll-out of ready-made ‘revolutionary’ solutions, but also a search for problems to solve. In this, Lourenço Marques (today's Maputo) was important as context. ¹⁷ For neophyte ministers, learning to wield the levers of state was simultaneously a process of discovery, and rediscovery, about life in the capital city.

The 1960s were years of rapid growth for Lourenço Marques due to a loosening of controls on local industry and foreign investment as well as an influx of settlers from the metropole. ¹⁸ The war against FRELIMO guerillas, though it took place in Mozambique's far north, brought thousands of military personnel to the colonial capital. The city's population doubled in size over the decade, and new apartment blocks and high-rises lined the avenues of the city of cement, the formalized core of the capital where most of the Europeans and South Asians of Lourenço Marques lived.

The funeral industry grew in parallel with the growing base of settler consumers, with five funeral agencies in operation in the city of cement by the 1970s. ¹⁹ They sold coffins and caskets and made burial arrangements at the Lhanguene cemetery on the outskirts of town. The business model centered on persuading customers to buy more than the basic, unpolished pinewood coffin. Agencies pushed more elegant caskets – the ones of quality, polished wood topped with ribbons and floral arrangements – much like a car dealer upsells on stereos. The quality of a casket was graded using the same terminology used to describe status. Whites born in Mozambique, for instance, who were often looked down upon by those who arrived more recently from the metropole, were called Portuguese de segunda – a way of saying Portuguese of the second class – and a coffin de segunda was a second-class coffin. ²⁰ Everyone wanted their deceased relatives to seem de primeira.

Europeans in the Lourenço Marques area numbered around 100,000, and competition among the five agencies for their business was intense. Hearses queued outside the central morgue and their drivers milled around hoping to reap clients from among the mourners. They earned an unsavory reputation for ill-timed sales pitches. ²¹ It made local headlines when an associate of one funeral agency slipped a business card to a woman at her loved one's deathbed, before the loved one was dead. ²² In another instance, police were called when a funeral agency employee, claiming an unpaid debt, blocked a funeral procession leaving the morgue. ²³

In 1969, local legislation attempted to put a stop to agencies harassing people in this way and to bring the costs of coffins and caskets, and other funeral services under control. ²⁴ Still, burial expenses continued to climb. The city had doubled in size during the 1960s, the real estate market overheated, and by the early 1970s, Mozambique was also suffering a generalized inflation crisis. Gravesites tripled in price compared to just a few years before. The market centered squarely on the settler consumer, and while rabid competition among agencies for their business surely must have cut into profits, the promise of large profits fueled the rabid competition. Two local firms now fabricated coffins and caskets for sale to funeral agencies, but agencies also set up unregistered, clandestine woodshops of their own to cut out the middle-man and avoid paying taxes. Imports of high-end caskets from Portugal were prohibited to protect the burgeoning local industry, but also because their hollow chambers were allegedly being used to smuggle contraband goods into Mozambique. In 1973, invited by a local magazine to participate in a roundtable discussion of the industry, the proprietor of one of the agencies refused: ‘We are five dogs biting at one another!’ ²⁵

For most Africans in Lourenço Marques – about three-quarters of the city's population – death followed an entirely different trajectory. Most Africans (and a number of poor and working-class whites) lived in the city's flood-prone subúrbios, then collectively called the caniço. ‘Caniço’ was the Portuguese word for ‘reed’; reeds were the primary building material of many houses and fences in these neighborhoods, and epitomized the precariousness of living in a place without secure tenure or the most basic municipal infrastructure. While the more than 300,000 people living in these neighborhoods represented many different economic strata, nearly all suffered the shared indignity of attempting to transport the body of a deceased relative out of a house and through the caniço's sodden, unpaved lanes, often too narrow for passage. Even today, neighborhood secretaries in the subúrbios rigidly enforce an unwritten rule: the width of a laneway must be at least the width of a coffin. ²⁶

The entry-level coffin marketed by funeral agencies was still an extraordinary expense. Most Africans in Lourenço Marques earned less than 1000 escudos per month, with many earning far less; by the early 1970s, gravesites at Lhanguene cost 3000 escudos and coffins cost several thousands, up to 8000 for a lead-lined casket. ²⁷ People improvised solutions, wrapping the deceased in fabric or newspaper or placing them in boxes made of cardboard or wood scrap. ²⁸ Some tried to transport the dead as quickly as possible to the countryside for burial at family homesteads, others to small gravesites on farms just outside the city. When people died in the hospital, their bodies were stored at the morgue until someone paid the fees to have them released. ²⁹ With so little shelf space in the overcrowded morgue, the corpses of the poor were often placed on the floor. If, within four days, families could not find the funds to pay burial fees, they suffered the traumatizing experience of having their relatives consigned to the municipality's common grave – a frequent occurrence. As one unnamed funeral agency owner told a reporter, Lisbon had managed to close its common grave, so why had Lourenço Marques not done the same? ‘Hadn’t the wretched poor contributed their life's work to the growth of the municipality?’ ³⁰

To mitigate the indignities of death in Lourenço Marques – and for many less established residents, to avoid the additional horror of not being buried at one's rural homestead – many belonged to self-organized burial societies. These were sometimes organized along regional or ethnic lines, similar to burial societies in other southern African cities, and elsewhere. Members paid monthly dues to a common fund so that they would be entitled to help when it was necessary; for the many without kin in the city, fellow members carried out the rituals of preparation and mourning and tried to arrange to transport the dead home. As historian Garrey Dennie has written of similar groups in Johannesburg, they ‘were actively engaged in cutting the pathways that would transform the social wilderness into a predictable social universe’. ³¹ In the 1950s, Daniel Malé and a half-dozen other members of a Presbyterian church at the edge of the subúrbios established a burial society they later called the Associação Cristã de Lhanguene. ³² The group's monthly meetings were social occasions; collecting the dues was only part of the agenda. In a 2019 interview, Malé recalled the funeral of his father, and how the burial society helped him purchase a decent casket from the Santos agency downtown. ‘They were gentle white folks’, he said of the agency. ‘But it was a business’. Amid fears of anti-colonial insurgency, authorities began to suspect that these unregistered, African-led burial societies, with their large pots of donations, were funding subversive activities, and the Portuguese secret police kept them under surveillance. ³³ Hoping to avoid trouble, Malé's association halted collections and disbursements. Their pooled funds – which had grown to 40,000 escudos – remained untouched in a downtown bank for years, until after independence, when the association started meeting again. Though it policed burial societies, the colonial state's relationship with the African dead was one of indifference and neglect, just as it was toward much of African urban life. ³⁴

During the final decade or so of Portuguese rule, many Africans in Lourenço Marques acquired greater buying power. Most could not afford a high-end casket in town, but by independence, there were at least three funeral agencies operating in the subúrbios and offering lower price points. The first opened for business in 1971, in Chamanculo, the largest and densest of the city's predominately African neighborhoods. The owner of the agency was António Araújo, a truck driver for the municipality. ³⁵ The son of a Goan father who had worked for Mozambique's railway and an African mother, he had connections both at city hall and among the city's African upper crust. In the early 1960s, Araújo built an enormous rental housing compound on one side of his property and a popular club on the other. He had no time to prowl the city morgue. He set up an office beside his home and his customers were all walk-ins. A family would inform him of a loved one's death and then choose a coffin. He would then hand-deliver the necessary paperwork to an official at the health department, who would promptly visit the home of the deceased and certify the cause of death. If the cause was other than ‘natural’, the body would have to be transported to the morgue for an autopsy. Araújo would go to the cemetery to sign up for a 15-minute slot for transporting the coffin. His firm did not prepare the body for burial; the family did that itself. Nor did the firm bury the body. At the specified time, Araújo's son Isaac would drive the agency hearse, a station wagon, to the cemetery gate, and there cemetery workers would fetch the coffin and bring it to the gravesite. ‘You had to bury bodies quickly because there was nowhere else to put them’, Isaac said in a 2016 interview. Bodies needing transport to the countryside were placed in a coffin made of zinc panels, the same panels used almost universally in the caniço to roof people's houses.

Isaac also supervised the carpenters who made the coffins. The workshop produced three grades of product, each model fabricated from mahogany planks sourced from the sawmill next door. The least expensive option featured a simple black fabric wrapping and cost 600 escudos, a sum roughly equivalent to the monthly wage of the average waiter at a downtown café. ³⁶ The mid-level coffin added artificial flowers and more elaborate wrapping, and cost about three times as much. The luxury model was varnished wood, took two or three days to sand and polish, and cost 4,000 escudos, a significant expense even to the top earners in the subúrbios.

Isaac Araújo said that, unlike agencies in town, which demanded cash up front, his father's firm allowed customers to pay in installments. Sometimes they simply paid what they could, when they could. Tempo reported that suburban agencies might be ‘poor in appearance’, but ‘their proprietors are today wealthy men’. ³⁷ One suburban funeral operator, unnamed in the article, boasted that he once marched into the home of a debtor and walked out with an expensive piece of furniture. He did not return it until the debt was paid.

By the 1970s, the municipality opened up land for gravesites in ‘recuperable areas’ at prices as low as 100 escudos, making burial more accessible to the city's African residents if not necessarily more dignified. ³⁸ ‘Recuperable’ land meant derelict. Tempo magazine called the gesture ‘a form of discrimination similar to the current common grave’. Late-colonial Lourenço Marques demonstrated how racial segregation could function just as well without apartheid-style racial zoning: through the suppression of African wages (including forced labor before 1962), the prejudice of private landlords, the systematic neglect of African neighborhoods, and the diligent suppression of dissent. There were many poor Portuguese in African neighborhoods, but generally speaking, the gap in living standards between most Europeans and most Africans was enormous. So was the gap in the conditions of their dead – the difference, often, between being buried in a polished casket set carefully in a grave or being dumped, unwitnessed, in a pit.

Down the street from the common grave was the local zoo. In an area behind the zoo, dearly departed pet dogs were laid to rest in individual plots marked by marble headstones. ³⁹

Each minister in the independent Mozambique's cabinet had his own personal experience of Portuguese rule. They were Black, mestiço, of South Asian and of European descent; the only woman was Graça Simbine, minister of education and culture, soon to be married to President Machel. Many had lived in Lourenço Marques at one time or another, but not all who had lived in Lourenço Marques lived in the caniço. Among those who had, most had spent the previous decade and more studying in Portugal or living in exile, with many participating in the liberation struggle in some way. ⁴⁰ The city had changed considerably in the meantime, and so had Mozambique.

Some appointees had served in the transition cabinet, installed the previous year following the negotiations that ended the war for independence. During the nine-month handover process, they had worked alongside representatives of the Portuguese and began to familiarize themselves with aspects of the bureaucratic apparatus. But FRELIMO's ongoing distrust of Lisbon had limited cooperation. ⁴¹ Other than the officials who received this brief and constrained apprenticeship, all the ministers who took office in June 1975 were new to government administration.

The armed struggle itself gave them some preparation. For FRELIMO to run a guerilla war for so long, and battle a NATO power to a military stalemate, certainly represented an organizational feat, one that required its own kind of fugitive bureaucracy. FRELIMO cultivated an idea that its wartime ‘liberated zones’ in the rural north were a model for the coming socialist transformation of Mozambique as a whole. It was governance of a kind, but FRELIMO's claims of ‘transforming’ these war zones, rather than occupying them, were exaggerated. ⁴² Historian Michael Panzer has argued that it was among Mozambican refugees in neighboring Tanzania, not in the guerilla-occupied areas of Mozambique itself, that the FRELIMO hierarchy-in-exile developed a ‘proto-state’. ⁴³ The schools and clinics FRELIMO ran for Mozambicans in Tanzania, with the blessing and support of Tanzania's President Julius Nyerere, constituted nascent state institutions through which the independence movement legitimized itself. Panzer's intention is to show that FRELIMO's authoritarian governing ideology long preceded independence and was rooted in the experience of ruling refugee communities. There can be no question that FRELIMO's post-independence approach to governance drew from these wartime experiences. Still, as leadership itself understood, post-independence bureaucracies were significantly larger than what FRELIMO had managed before and required getting a handle on existing colonial institutions (if not ‘dismantling’ or ‘demolishing’ them, as the rhetoric had it). These institutions had their own, entrenched bureaucratic cultures, procedures, forms of knowledge, and inertia. ⁴⁴

In the weeks after independence, the Council of Ministers met every day for several hours at a time, often twice a day, and the location of the meetings frequently changed, possibly for security reasons. ⁴⁵ The president chaired the meetings, and ministers would table issues for the entire cabinet to discuss. The ministers were receiving a kind of education. ‘We were going to learn how to be ministers’, said Martins. ‘And President Samora would say that he was learning to be president’. Machel was receiving guidance from Julius Nyerere. But the ministers had to learn mostly from each other.

Martins, a doctor who received his medical training in Lisbon, had been FRELIMO's health chief during the war. ⁴⁶ During the transition, he headed a commission that traveled around the country surveying the state of public health. Mozambique barely had any health infrastructure in the countryside, and infant mortality was among the highest in the world. At independence, only a few dozen trained physicians remained for a population of approximately 12 million. ⁴⁷ Martins had to keep hospitals and clinics running and recruit foreign doctors to staff them while also attempting to move policy in the direction of preventative, rather than curative care. His annual budget only gave him the equivalent of 50 cents per Mozambican to work with. ⁴⁸

Martins regularly arrived at the ministry at 6 a.m., hoping to get some work done before his daily cabinet meeting. Many mornings, Rui Nogar was waiting for him. Nogar, the noted poet and onetime political prisoner, was now head of the social assistance agency, which answered to Martins. In previous years, the agency funneled its resources mostly to poor whites, including a funeral subsidy for needy government employees, and each request required the minister's personal signature – just one of the many bureaucratic peculiarities to which Martins was now being introduced. On his visits to the ministry, Nogar told Martins about what he had come to learn about the inflationary costs of burial. One day he told Martins of rumored behavior he found particularly alarming: hospital nurses would tip off a funeral agency when a patient was close to death. This earned the informant a commission and gave the agency the first crack at contacting the patient's family. But one rumor disturbed Nogar most: that nurses were even hastening people's deaths in order to get the commission. ‘Each agency wanted the dead for themselves’, said Martins. ‘It was undignified… in fact, macabre’.

Health was on the agenda at that morning's cabinet meeting, a subject capable of provoking some of the president's angriest tirades on colonial-era injustice. Before joining FRELIMO in exile, Machel had been a nurse in Lourenço Marques and on Inhaca Island across the bay. During the ministers’ discussion about nationalizing medical institutions, Machel recalled some of the abuses he had witnessed as a nurse, and he referred in general terms to the vulture-like funeral agencies that hovered about the morgue, which adjoined Lourenço Marques's main hospital. Martins spoke up. He told the president of what Nogar had told him just that morning. The president then confirmed from his own experience in the early 1960s that funeral agencies had jockeyed for business, that nurses had indeed earned tips for inside information, and that there had been suspicions that some nurses were killing their patients. The justice minister said he had previously ‘heard some echoes’ of the unseemliness of the industry, recalled Martins, but the rest of the cabinet was hearing of it for the first time. ⁴⁹ They all found it scandalous, and quickly decided on nationalizing the businesses that the president said ‘commercialized death’.

The episode blurs some of the distinctions we might otherwise make between ad hoc decision-making and what counts for advance planning. FRELIMO leaders had already adopted a Marxian analysis of the past and a Marxian language when talking about the future. ⁵⁰ The ‘liberation front’, however, was still 18 months away from declaring itself a vanguard party in the Marxist-Leninist mold, which it did in February 1977. So, on the one hand, FRELIMO at independence had committed Mozambique to a revolutionary path, distinguishing its ‘scientific’ socialism from what it considered the more sentimental, and ultimately vacuous brand of African socialism to which new governments of the 1960s had been susceptible. ⁵¹ But on the other hand, Mozambique's revolutionary path had yet to be charted. FRELIMO policymakers emphasized that they would not blindly import foreign solutions, such as from friends in the Eastern Bloc, and that decisions should respond pragmatically to the specific exigencies of Mozambique. FRELIMO clearly intended to dominate and direct the economy (which it did soon enough), but did not, for instance, outright nationalize the private sector. In the early years, rather, the state appropriated, or otherwise ‘intervened’ in, businesses and institutions that were deemed of strategic importance, of social consequence (such as private schools and private hospitals), or that had been abandoned by their owners or managers. ⁵²

The many ad hoc or ‘pragmatic’ solutions of the first year or so after independence nonetheless helped FRELIMO weave what became an enduring and very selective story about its salvation of the Mozambican people from colonialism, what historian and novelist João Paulo Borges Coelho has called the ‘liberation script’. ⁵³ Nationalizing funeral services provided content for the revolutionary story. In this sense, the measure might even seem preordained. FRELIMO leadership already understood Lourenço Marques as radiating capitalist, anti-Mozambican values. Discovery of the funeral industry's more lurid details conveniently filled out a picture that had already been drawn.

And yet it was a discovery all the same. The details made a difference. Learning some of the grounded realities of everyday life in the capital of the settler colony, or learning them again, focused minds, oriented priorities, and prompted policymaking in ways that rigid ideology or a push toward state-centered rule cannot account for alone. No other African country had nationalized funeral services, not even fellow revolutionary regimes. ⁵⁴ Cabinet ministers had not, until a few weeks after independence, thought about the demand among Africans in urban areas for funeral services. Nor had FRELIMO, before independence, expressed the desire to provide free and dignified burials for all. Indeed, the nationalizations did not establish a decent burial as a universal right, and the health ministry never made coffins universally available, nor intended to. The effort to make coffins and caskets more affordable accompanied the decision to nationalize, but had not been what inspired the decision to nationalize funeral agencies during that morning cabinet meeting, not exactly.

Rather, the spark was disgust for a niche industry profiting from death, one that needed to be made an example of. Given Mozambique's circumstances, the very idea of an ostentatious, expensive burial was repulsive to government ministers when it came to their attention, as was the unsubstantiated rumor of bedside murders.

On 24 July, at the national football stadium on the outskirts of town, Machel announced the nationalizations and gave his reasoning for them. In his speeches, Machel frequently spoke of Mozambique's cities as places of moral corruption alien to the Mozambican character. The ‘commercialization of death’ was the epitome of the depravity of colonial capitalism, and he remarked sarcastically that it was the kind of thing that could only happen in ‘Lourenço Marques, the capital of civilized people’. ⁵⁵

I’ve already heard, and I’ve been here 30 days, that when someone dies, families cry, not because of the death, but because they don’t know how it is they are going to bury their people. Is it so, or not? And they say: ‘Why is it that you died at this moment? Why didn’t you wait a few days? Because that's when I receive…my monthly pay. But you died today, in the middle of the month, and I don’t have any money. What am I going to do now?’ They ask the corpse to come back to life; to die at the end of the month, when there's money.

He carried his analysis further with observations about what he considered the indecent obsession with dead bodies, how funeral agents fought each other over ‘first-class corpses…first-class fertilizer’. ⁵⁶ Bodies had been divided by class, he said, and people would go to funerals to take in the pomp and spectacle of it – the casket, the car that transported it – and to remark on whether the corpse was first or second class. ‘The Government is also going to take responsibility for this’, he said. ‘We don’t want corpses of the first, the second, of the third class. We want only corpses. We don’t want to bury classes, but corpses’.

Machel was not just attacking showy funerals. He was condemning the undue sentimentality that accompanied even humble burials. He did so in terms similar to how FRELIMO, with its modernizing conceits, often attacked so-called mystifications of indigenous origin, from spiritual healing to ancestor worship. A month after the nationalizations, Tempo magazine, which now followed a FRELIMO line, wrote that during the colonial era, Mozambicans had come to ‘assimilate’ from Europeans the

bourgeois, obscurantist, and decadent habit of venerating the dead…giving more importance to a dead person than to one who is alive and produces, who works. The exploitative system imposed this habit, this mentality, and thus the merchants appeared, the exploiters – funeral agencies. ⁵⁷

The magazine expressed disgust for this ‘cult of the dead’: ‘Why are there mausoleums built by specialists and designed by architects when there are still Mozambicans being born in the rain?’ ⁵⁸

Justifications for the funeral policy borrowed from more than a century of Marxist rhetoric desacralizing death. When Marx himself, in ‘The 18^th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ (1852), had called for forgetting the dead, he meant it metaphorically: revolutionaries needed to move on from the past. ⁵⁹ Cheekily echoing an earlier revolutionary, Jesus, he argued that the ‘revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content’. ⁶⁰ But when later radicals talked about death, they often spoke about it along more strictly materialist lines. The religious rites of burial were ‘nonsense’, wrote a Bolshevik named M.S. Ol’minskii, in 1924. When the time came, he said that his own corpse ‘should be sent to a factory without any ritual, and in the factory the fat should be used for technical purposes and the rest for fertilizer’ – the words that Machel may have been echoing years later. ⁶¹ In Maoist China, the Communist Party denounced expensive funerals as part of its mantra of frugality. ⁶² Especially during the Cultural Revolution, extravagant burials were also seen as a superstitious holdover of Confucianism and feudalism (superstitious in part because geomancers determined the spots where the dead were to be interred). ⁶³ Communist China and the Soviet Union encouraged cremation, as did many other socialist regimes.

Machel was steeped in Maoist doctrine, introduced to him during the guerilla struggle by Chinese military advisors. ⁶⁴ His speeches often idealized the peasantry, demonized the urban bourgeoisie, and celebrated self-discipline, self-denial, and self-reliance. ⁶⁵ He was as taken with the Maoist model of frugality as his former patron Julius Nyerere was. ⁶⁶ Historian Benedito Machava has argued that the puritanical moralizing bent of FRELIMO discourse owed much to the leadership's mission-school backgrounds as well. ⁶⁷ Perhaps Machel's disgust with ostentatious burial also had roots in Christian teaching – at least this has been one of the readings of Jesus’ aforementioned counsel to ‘let the dead bury their own dead’. ⁶⁸

But beyond ideological considerations, for FRELIMO to focus on death when it did also held some practical advantages for a new regime attempting to make its mark. Added to the other measures of the Day of Nationalizations, the funeral policy left the impression that the new state would intervene at every stage of the life cycle, from cradle to grave. ⁶⁹ Machel's blunt, unsentimental language about ‘corpses’ and ‘fertilizer’, moreover, must have shocked Mozambican sensibilities. The dead were usually only talked about, if talked about, with great circumspection. Here, though, the regime could demonstrate to what was still a relatively new audience that it would not simply obey cultural norms or old-fashioned niceties, whether associated with alien rule or not; that it was willing to topple idols; that it would be bold in its mission to reset values, remake Mozambican society, and mold the ‘New Man’ of the socialist future. How Machel talked about the funeral policy was far more radical than the funeral policy.

Machel's speeches frequently gave Mozambicans orientation to how they should interpret FRELIMO policies, so that his speeches became part of policymaking itself. ⁷⁰ Some have questioned if the FRELIMO hierarchy actually believed its own rhetoric. According to this view, leaders were cynical pretenders or naïfs who made superficial use of whatever Marxist analysis was at hand to legitimize what was essentially an authoritarian power grab. ⁷¹ According to a slightly different interpretation, they were true believers so long as Marxist rhetoric supported FRELIMO's primarily nationalist project, which included subordinating a vast and diverse population to state control. ⁷² Scholarship presumes that rhetoric was a calculation, and the way Machel talked about burials on the Day of the Nationalizations certainly was this. But I suggest that another dynamic was also at work.

If the funeral policy itself was the result of a cabinet exploring its reach, the speech introducing the policy allowed Machel, known for improvisations on the stump, a chance to explore the problem further, in real time. In his performance, he was trying ideas for size, tailoring them for a more meaningful fit, riffing on ‘fertilizer’ not just to convince his audience, or to tell them how to think of the policy, but maybe also to understand things for himself. On the path from cabinet discussion to policy to speech and then to implementation, a new regime was working through what it was by improvising what it was, self-fashioning, and then re-fashioning.

In the days after the funeral policy was announced, the state appropriated not just funeral agencies themselves, but also the two workshops in the capital that made coffins and caskets. The many different coffin models on offer were reduced to two: a cheaper one and a somewhat more expensive model for those who wanted more flair. Premium caskets, still in stock from before independence, would also be sold until they ran out. ⁷³ For all the talk about a classless society of the dead, some dead would still be buried with more pomp than others. The state-owned funerals enterprise may have been instituted with a social mission in mind, but it still had to break even. While the Ministry of Health could make coffins cheaper and more accessible, said Martins, it could not afford to give them away for free. Burials still cost a fee, and by necessity, many of the dead would continue to be consigned to the common grave. Compromises like these were also part of the process of a regime figuring out what it was.

The nationalization was one of FRELIMO's first experiences in bringing a business to heel. Isaac Araújo recalled with bitterness when the president called funeral agencies ‘exploiters’ and his father lost his coffin-making business. Representatives of the newly instituted state funeral agency, one of them a distant relative, came to lock up the office and seized tools, coffins, and the hearse. When they returned, Isaac's mother told him to flee. She feared they were coming to arrest him. Some months before, his father and brother had spent 45 days in jail, accused of writing anti-FRELIMO messages on a cemetery wall. (‘Someone said it was them’, Isaac said.) He himself had served in the Portuguese army, and this might have been sufficient reason to ship him off to a re-education camp. ⁷⁴ Instead, the visitors had come to ask Isaac to come work for the state funeral agency. They needed his expertise. When he refused, he was taken to police headquarters for questioning. ‘This one is a bandido’, said one of the officers. ‘To them we were all bandido’, Isaac later recalled, referring to the way all business owners in revolutionary Mozambique came under suspicion. When he explained he had been trained in civil construction and had other skills to offer, the police let him go.

In April 1976, Notícias, the state-run daily newspaper, reported that nationalizing funeral services was ‘one of the most important measures taken by the government of the People's Republic of Mozambique’. ⁷⁵ An accelerated, two-month course for funeral agents was being established. Holdover employees from the colonial era would now get better training. All coffins – 34 per day – were now being produced at a single workshop manned by 42 workers. ‘Worker brigades’ were being formed to raise employees’ ‘political consciousness’. Some employees, it seems, had not been sufficiently cooperative with new authorities.

With funeral services considered in the capable hands of a subordinate, Martins, the health minister, addressed burial across Mozambique, where it was a public health issue, not a matter of social equality. In rural areas, many people buried their dead in ways that were within easy reach of animals or too close to water sources. The ministry encouraged households to bury their dead further from homesteads. But Martins continued to be haunted by the visit he had made to the common grave in Maputo, soon after taking his post. ‘I’m a doctor. I’m used to seeing people dead. But nothing impacted me like this did. It was a disgrace’. ⁷⁶ Cremation, he resolved, would be the answer to the problem of urban burials. In either 1977 or 1978, Martins went to Eastern Europe, where cremation had become nearly universal, to tour various industrial-grade facilities. In Hungary, Yugoslavia, and East Germany, Martins learned that a single crematorium could incinerate 24 cadavers per day. This would more than cover the Maputo morgue's daily intake. Scientific socialism offered a high-tech solution to the problem of burial space. But all the crematoriums Martins visited were made by the same Swedish company, and the price tag was far out of Mozambique's reach. When Martins asked Sweden, one of FRELIMO's more generous supporters, if the country could donate a crematorium or two, the Swedes replied that they had prioritized other forms of aid.

Material shortages and rationing were a part of urban life for much of independent Mozambique's first two decades, beginning with the flight from the country of most of the commercial class, followed later by the government's cash crunch, failed agricultural policies, and then by the destructive advance of RENAMO insurgents, whose violent rampage through the country was backed first by Rhodesia and then, in the 1980s, by the apartheid regime in South Africa. In 1979, FRELIMO rolled out an elaborate economic plan for Mozambique's future development, a plan emphasizing state farms, industrialization, and forced villagization. That same year, due to the inability to service its fleet, the state funeral agency had only one working hearse, down from 18. ⁷⁷ In 1985, President Machel himself made sure that more vehicles were purchased, but two years later there was again just one drivable hearse. ⁷⁸ There was little wood available for coffins, and because there were not enough nails the coffins that the workshops sold sometimes fell apart. When Isaac Araújo's mother died, he risked crossing the South African border to buy a coffin for her there. Even though civil war was burning in the countryside, and transiting through it meant driving in an army column on a road threatened by ambush, there were more dignified coffins for sale in apartheid South Africa than were available in Maputo.

The 1980s were excruciating years for Mozambique, marked by the war, mass displacement, and hunger, and by the mid-1980s the state itself was bankrupt and on the verge of collapse. The Machel era ended in 1986 with his death in an airplane crash. The funeral ceremonies that followed, which shut down Maputo and ended in the burial of Machel's body at a tomb built for heroes of the Mozambican republic, belied the official distaste for elaborate burial ceremonies. ⁷⁹ But it was the kind of common exception for extraordinary figures practiced by other socialist regimes that otherwise supported cremation and no-nonsense disposal of the dead. ⁸⁰ At Machel's death, Mozambique was already moving toward an IMF/World Bank bailout, structural adjustment, and privatization. FRELIMO officially abandoned its Marxist-Leninist orientation in 1989, several years after it had effectively done so.

The Araújos recouped their business in 1993, and in 2016, when I last spoke with Isaac Araújo, he was still making coffins in his workshop. They were now made out of plywood, and six models were on display. Martins, who I also spoke to in 2016, lamented that since the re-privatization of funeral agencies, the queue of hearses prowling for business at the city morgue was longer than it had ever been. As of early 2023, the common grave remained in operation.

The funeral policy was, in the scheme of things, a relatively small measure in its scale and scope, and the state funerals agency seems to have functioned properly for at most about half a decade. We can understand this nationalization more as a short-lived salutary reform than the revolutionary act it was initially touted as or the cultural intervention that Machel had implied. This is less a reflection on the merits of the funeral policy specifically than on the larger trajectory of Mozambique's fraught decolonization. ‘How to dispose of the dead is as politicized, and as integral to the practice of sovereignty, as the act of determining who dies and how’, argue anthropologists Deborah Posel and Pamila Gupta, linking the concepts of ‘biopolitics’ and ‘necropolitics’ to the politics of burial in Africa. ⁸¹ Such theorizing ought to take account of the great limitations, in resources and otherwise, faced by postcolonial states (or colonial states, for that matter) in exercising this putative sovereign power and truly affecting people's lives and bodies. ⁸² Breaking with the past, to restate the obvious, was hard.

More revealing than the brief productive life of Mozambique's state funeral agency were the circumstances of its birth. How the urban funerals industry ended up the unlikely target of one of FRELIMO's first interventions speaks to the urgency of the moment, the casting about for priorities, the need to give substance to a political brand still in the making, the working out of new postures relative to new audiences. Atop the bureaucracy for the first time, the regime looked around the capital city and saw old realities and old problems in new ways. In public FRELIMO demonized the bureaucracy, and according to Luís de Brito, the authoritarian regime's key interest was ‘transforming the state apparatus into the true place of the new independent power’ in its mission to ‘build a modern and developed nation’. ⁸³ We can acknowledge the zeal for control he describes while also recognizing that there were government ministers curious to explore how the bureaucracy worked, discovering what it could do, and testing out different possibilities.

Whatever administrative structures new African regimes inherited from colonial predecessors – and there were many, even in revolutionary Mozambique – leaders often felt like they were starting from scratch. ⁸⁴ This was because of the deep legacy of underdevelopment they faced. It was because of the great distance between their lofty goals and the limited means available to accomplish them. But it was also because, while the state itself was not new, it was new to new leaders.