Voices Twice Silenced

Abstract

In the course of gathering life histories in northern Mozambique, the author encountered men who had been the victims of torture at the hands of the Portuguese during the Mozambican war for independence. The author gives an account of his conversations with these men, reflecting upon the urgency with which they told him their stories decades after their experience of violence. Where Portuguese attempts to `rehabilitate' political prisoners and to use them as counterinsurgency operatives rendered all torture victims suspect in the eyes of the post-independence state, and where the atmosphere of political suspicion was exacerbated by civil war, these men were frustrated in their attempts to find a public discursive space in which to make sense of what had happened to them. They consequently spoke of their experiences as if mourning their own deaths, the author argues, while demanding as recently departed ancestors that they not be forgotten.