The title of this book reflects its double ambition: to make a contribution to feminist theorising by rethinking gender (and sexuality) based on material from Mozambique, and to say something about gender politics, sexuality and matriliny in Mozambique. The two ambitions are closely related. The chapters discuss sexuality and gender politics and policies in Mozambique over three decades, from Independence in 1975 to 2005. In doing so, they also investigate ways of understanding gender and sexuality. Gender policies from Portuguese colonialism through Frelimo socialism to later neo-liberal economic regimes share certain basic assumptions about women, men and gender relations. This however begs the question as to what extent such assumptions fit into the ways rural Mozambican men and women see themselves. The book is a discussion of Mozambican gender policies with a focus on the early post-Independence years, but it is also a conceptual discussion – facilitated by post-colonial feminist thinking – of how to understand gender and sexuality taking as a point of departure the lives and views of Mozambican men and women.

The discussions are based on 30 years of work off and on, in and with Mozambique, from full-time work in the National Women's Organization, the OMM (Organização daMulher Moçambicana) 1981–1984, over a series of shorter and longer visits, consultancy work and teaching at the Eduardo Mondlane University during the second half of the 1980s and the 1990s, to periods of fieldwork in Nampula province 1998–1999, 2003 and 2005.