"Samora's children" - the celebration of (post-) socialist citizenship in Mozambique

This paper interrogates the creation and afterlife of socialist beliefs and practices in the biographies of a cohort of people educated to become homens novos, conceived of as new socialist citizens. Its empirical part is based on a case study of the School of Friendship (SdF), an education project between Mozambique and East Germany. The paper demonstrates that the SdF was successful in creating a cohort of people for whom socialist solidarity was a key component of their identity. At the same time, they interpreted what a socialist citizen should be in their own way, thus using their education as what Bourdieu calls a strategy-generating institution. This enabled protagonists to navigate the post-socialist political order, not simply regarding socialism as the nostalgic reminder of a golden past. But the majority live and celebrate socialist citizenship among themselves, and hardly engage with political contestation in present-day Mozambique.