This groundbreaking study investigates defining themes in the field of social memory studies as they bear on the politics of post-Cold-War, post-apartheid Southern Africa. Alice Dinerman offers a detailed chronicle of the Mozambican government’s attempts to revise the country's troubled postcolonial past with a view to negotiating the political challenges posed by the present. In doing so, she lays bare the path-dependence of memory practices, while tracing their divergent trajectories, shifting meanings and varied combinations within ruling discourse and performance.

Central themes include:

• the interplay between past and present
• the dialectic between remembering and forgetting
• the dynamics between popular and official memory discourses
• the politics of acknowledgement.

Dinerman’s original analysis is essential reading for students of modern Africa, the sociology of memory, Third World politics and post-conflict societies.