ILL BURY YOU IN THE BORDER - WOMENS LAND STRUGGLES IN POSTWAR FACAZISSE (MAGUDE DISTRICT), MOZAMBIQUE

As in many other areas of post-war Mozambique, the locality of Facazis se (in Magude District, Maputo Province) has experienced numerous form s of land conflict in the process of rural resettlement The most serio us tensions have emerged predominantly among female farmers, and surro und the fairness of methods of land allocation, resentment of displace d people who refuse to give up borrowed land, and disputes over the pr oper location of boundaries between cultivated fields. This paper, bas ed on participant-observation and interviews among women in Facazisse, argues that we cannot understand the significance of recent land stru ggles - either for rural social relations or for Mozambican land law r eform - unless we examine them from a gendered cultural and historical perspective, relying on women's explanations of the meaning of change s in local land administration during the colonial and postcolonial pe riods. Women's oral testimony draws a sharp contrast between 'traditio nal' land administration (the 'ways of long ago'), when their responsi bility for agriculture fostered a sense of 'cultivating community' amo ng them, and gave women practical and ritual control over everyday lan d management, with the present system in Facazisse, in which the cumul ative impact of colonial land alienation, new methods of land division , and wartime land distribution measures have drastically eroded women 's authority autonomy, and land-based kinship. The profound implicatio ns of these changes for rural women are already evident in the emergen ce of xifula witchcraft as a weapon in post-war land conflicts, and wo men's increasingly restrictive definitions of who does and does not be long to the 'cultivating community'. Women's current land conflicts, i n other words, are also struggles over the gendered construction of co mmunity and authority in Facazisse, and over the continuing power of h istorical memory to shape the outcome of those struggles in women's fa vour.