Land of the ancestors: semiotics, history and space in Chimanimani, Mozambique

Drawing on semiotic theory, the article looks at how space and identity are constituted by different political actors, notably the ruling party and customary authorities, in the context of a transfrontier conservation area in Chimanimani in central Mozambique. Based on radically different geographical and historical ramifications, these actors have arrived at different ideal models for managing access to land and natural resources. However, while conflicts resulting from incompatibility of these models are often reduced to a simple local-global dichotomy, case material from Chimanimani shows how both local communities and the state have been shaped by the interplay of local and non-local forces. The main difference lies in the strategy the political authorities have selected for maintaining continuity in the context of rapid socio-political transition. In the case of the ruling party this takes place through a corpus of selected texts, but in the case of customary authorities through flexibility of the code.