Discipline, Disease, Dissent: The Pathologized Body in Mozambican Post-Independence Discourse

Abstract

In a series of speeches given across the northern reaches of newly independent Mozambique in 1983, president Samora Machel sought to encourage unity among his increasingly disenchanted populace by constructing a common enemy: a figure he often specifically frames as a threat to public health, whether parasite, infection or deformity. This article explores these uses of pathologization and public health by the state and pro-state media during the Mozambican nation-building period, and shows how Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa’s 2013 novel, Entre as Memórias Silenciadas, exposes and subverts these associations using the motif of the dissident dying or dead body.

Keywords

• Mozambique
• Frelimo
• media
• corporeality
• public health