The unemployed river must undergo self-criticism! Mozambican socialism, development and the environment in the writings of António Quadros

This article examines two little-studied literary inventions by Portuguese painter and writer António Quadros. The first, Eu, o Povo (1975), is a collection of “poemas da revolução” (poems of the revolution) authored by Mutimati Barnabé João, a Mozambican guerrilla soldier of Quadros’s invention. The second is a series of articles published in the early 1980s in the context of a radical agricultural laboratory, TBARN, that Quadros founded and led in the early years of socialist Mozambique. This article teases out Quadros’s conception of development as rooted in the harmonious “dialectic” of humankind and nature in the context of debates about national development in Mozambique and the broader Southern and Eastern African regions. It argues that Quadros’s contributions underline the vibrancy of radical politics in the early years of socialist Mozambique, in contrast to a tendency amongst commentators to analyse the socialist experiment exclusively in relation to the state’s top-down and centralised policymaking. It proposes that Quadros’s writings are a serious attempt to address fundamental questions concerning technology, the role of the state and the role of small-scale farmers, which articulate two major competing visions of development in socialist Mozambique: (Maoist) ideas of “popular initiative” and (Soviet) economic planning.