Despite the “sensitivity of the subject” (22) of the reeducation camps in Mozambique today, Benedito Luís Machava wrote a deeply researched book. One idea that has permeated his book from the beginning is to “produce a history that is meaningful in the present” (25). Providing an exhaustive examination of the reeducation program in Mozambique, The Morality of Revolution is a welcome contribution to the growing scholarship on punishment in Africa, as it broadens the debates about “modalities of carceral punishment” and their role in advancing “projects of nation-building and citizenship” (16) in postcolonial contexts.

In punishment studies, context matters to understand the connections between punishment, legality, and governmentality. To provide a window into Frelimo’s governmentality, Machava contextualizes the history of the reeducation camps and cleanup campaigns within Mozambique’s socialist experiment, or Frelimo’s “pursuit of grand ideals of decolonization, development, social reform, and nation-building” (15). The topic of the camps is not new, but Machava’s vigorous approach and revealing results made the case that the camps were not marginal institutions. Instead, they were a crucial “component of Frelimo’s project of nation-building and socialist revolution” (5) to produce the Homen Novo (New Man), a central pillar to Samorismo, or Machel’s socialism.

A history from below that recovers the voices of the reeducatees, Machava’s book contains seven chapters. Chapter 1 examines the salvationist policies of Frelimo (Mozambique Liberation Front) during the last phase of the armed struggle to remake Mozambique. It discusses the intellectual architecture of Frelimo’s revolutionary morality and its pedagogical and punitive mechanisms to construct the New Man (29), an agent of change. Frelimo pushed for nativist and salvationist ideals inspired by the Marxist lexicon, the gospel of progress, various brands of socialism, and the politics of Portuguese rule in Mozambique to turn its military camps into laboratories for “exemplary disciplinary pedagogies” (44). Chapter 2 discusses the beginning of the socialist experiment and Frelimo’s use of the Nachingwea trials (where inmates narrated their past betrayal and confessed their wrongdoing) as a blueprint for Mozambique’s punitive culture and system. After independence, Frelimo redefined a new citizenship, labeling those who lacked the moral attributes of the New Man as enemies from within and condemning them to reeducation. Machava contends that the “enemy became a broad category” (49) while crime and punishment were respectively conceived as “an act of enemity” (55) against morality and “a moralizing technique” (56). The enemy was symbolized by Xiconhoca, a cartoon that symbolized “Frelimo’s iconography of the moral decay” (93) and a nemesis of the New Man.

Chapter 3 focuses on Frelimo’s consolidation of its socialist experience (1977–1983) and the place of the reeducation program in this developmental initiative. Through the reorganization of neighborhoods and documentation of urban residents, the regime replaced its salvationist views with a developmental discourse that sent over a million people who “fell outside Frelimo’s moral citizenship” to the camps (85). This shift, aimed at restoring the rule of law, materialized in the 1983 Operacão Producão, the largest urban cleanup campaign; Offensiva (1983–1988), a political campaign that sharpened the state’s punitive apparatus; and a ban on prostitution and miniskirts labeled as “reminders of the humiliations of colonialism” (123). Chapter 4 offers an analysis of the forensic intelligence of the revolutionary morality and how it contributed to the geography of the cleanup campaigns and the demography of the camps. The intimate politics of self-policing, vigilantism, and denunciation practices helped the state identify and “flush out, clean up, sweep out, steamroll, and crush” the enemies from within (vagrants, prostitutes, drunkards, idlers, etc.) (93) of the cities.

Two chapters explore detention conditions in the reeducation camps and how austerity limited their functioning. While Chapter 5 unpacks the human and material constraints of the camps, focusing on Niassa, the largest camp, Chapter 6 paints a portrait of the social life within the camps. The scarcity of resources (buildings, personnel, staff, and equipment); the violence of the system; the makeshift character of the cleanup campaigns; and the conceptualization of the camps as an exceptional penal system outside the rule of law turned the reeducation program into “a do-it-yourself enterprise that produced a carceral regime that was contrary to Frelimo’s technocratic moralism” (145). As Machava puts it, the reeducation camps were “spaces of social abandonment” (173) where detainees and guards developed new forms of sociability to survive and fend for themselves. The last chapter investigates the reintegration of the camps into the developmental agenda and their transformation into agrarian farms, but also their role in cementing anti-Frelimo sentiments as they became a “war zone” and a recruiting hub for the rebel group Renamo.

Using various sources, including petitions, minutes, circulars, newspapers, novels, movies, and oral sources, Machava chronicles the revolution of morality as a failed enterprise. Although the regime designed the reeducation camps as a “sophisticated pedagogical penitentiary” (17) through labor, he argues, the “carceral regime of reeducation in socialist Mozambique was not an archipelago endowed with a biopolitical mechanism of surveillance but an extension of the society in which it existed” (19). Drawing on a Foucauldian approach, he contends that the reeducation camp was “a panopticon without sight” (144). Moreover, Frelimo’s politics of punishment were very selective; women were the main targets. It was also anchored around a strong and harsh lexicon (moral decadence, urban decency, decay, social degeneracy, corruption, and idleness) and the use of medical analogies and allegories and clinical vocabularies. With this lexicon, “many people paid the price of morality” (238).

Readers are left to wonder what the carceral regime looked like in the other nineteen camps besides the Niassa camp. Despite this flaw, The Morality of Revolution is a well-written book that adds an important dimension to the scholarship on the global history of mass incarceration and penal regimes and on socialism in Africa and the Global South at large.