The Formulaic Revolution Song and the "Popular Memory" of the Mozambican Liberation Struggle

This article presents a historical reconstruction of the formation of Makonde "revolutionary singing" as genre of memorialisation of the Mozambican Liberation Struggle; tracking the "descent" of formulas and watchwords produced by the revolutionary elites into popular orality. Along this trajectory, we will encounter wartime genres that were later forgotten or foregone, which refer to moments when the "space of experience" and the "horizon of expectation" of the Struggle were still filled with uncertainty and the sense of possibility. Progressively, these singing expressions were reorganised around socialism's nodes of meaning; while ideological tropes, elaborated by Frelimo's "courtly" composers, were appropriated in popular singing.