EMPIRE LINES

For EMPIRE LINES’ 30th episode, we’re heading offline and out into the museum space – to SOAS’ Brunei Gallery, in London. Richard Gray is co-curator of their latest exhibition, Our Sophisticated Weapon: Posters of the Mozambican Revolution.

Cashew nuts are a paradoxical symbol in Mozambique. Brought over from Brazil by 16th century Portuguese colonists, they were used to attract – and commit – Mozambican peasant farmers to compulsory cultivation. Yet they became a national icon for post-colonial Mozambique, peppering propaganda imagery from its independence in June 1975. Associated with abundance, Mozambique produced and processed over half the world’s cashew supply, which remained the state’s greatest export until the 1980s.

Kept illiterate under Portuguese rule, Mozambique’s masses were mobilised using vivid visual art. The Frelimo government celebrated the industry’s revival with colourful posters, symbolising the post-colonial promises of plenty, socialist internationalism, and a new humanity. But beyond propaganda, these posters reveal how artist collectives appropriated communist and capitalist graphic design, including comics, creating a movement which threatened those who sought to destabilise Mozambique from the inside out, like South Africa and Zimbabwe. Set amongst the sounds of Nampula province, co-curator Richard Gray traces the colonial history of the cashew nut to the neoimperial practices of international financial institutions today.

Our Sophisticated Weapon: Posters of the Mozambican Revolution runs at the Brunei Gallery at SOAS, London until 11 December 2021. Find out more about the exhibition online, read the catalogue of interviews with the surviving artists, and attend SOAS School of Arts’ special seminar on 11 December 2021.

PRESENTER: Richard Gray, postgraduate research student at SOAS University of London. He is the co-curator of Our Sophisticated Weapon and formerly a ‘cooperante internacionalista’ (internationalist co-worker), contracted as a teacher by the Mozambican government in the late 1970s.

ART: Let Us Harvest All The Cashew Nuts, To Harvest The Nuts Is To Develop Mozambique, Alexandre Milhafre (c. 1979).

SOUNDS: TRKZ.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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*CORRECTION: The war with Renamo caused around one million civilian deaths and displaced five million throughout Mozambique. Around one million were likely displaced from Nampula province, from where many went to Malawi.