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. Examining the government's attempts to revise postcolonial Mozambique's traumatic past with a view to negotiating the present, Alice Dinerman stresses 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.