Vol. 34 No. 3 (2025): Nordic Journal of African Studies
General articles

The Mother of Awashi: Violence and Virtuality in the War for Cabo Delgado (Mozambique)

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Paolo Israel
University of the Western Cape
Bio

Published 2025-09-26

Keywords

  • Mozambique,
  • Cabo Delgado,
  • jihadism,
  • violence,
  • social media,
  • new war
    • ...More
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Copyright (c) 2025 Paolo Israel

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

The Mother of Awashi: Violence and Virtuality in the War for Cabo Delgado (Mozambique). (2025). Nordic Journal of African Studies, 34(3), 227–243. https://doi.org/10.53228/kb57af85

Abstract

In September 2020, a video circulating on social media plunged he country of Mozambique into a deep moral crisis. The video showed five young men, dressed in the uniform of the Mozambican army, cruelly whipping a naked woman along a road and eventually riddling her with bullets. The clip came from the war zone of Cabo Delgado, in the north of the country, where an insurgency labelled as Islamist has raged since October 2017. It was the sixth video of its kind leaked in the space of a few weeks – and the most brutal, because it depicted violence against a harmless civilian. Immediately, the internet was abuzz with grief. Various versions of the circumstances of the shooting emerged. A fierce debate erupted about the morality of the war. Pressured by Amnesty International to institute an inquiry into the matter, the Mozambican government dismissed the video as “subversive propaganda” and “montage”. By engaging in a micro-analysis of the harrowing incident of the “mother of Awashi” – the crossroads village where the woman was shot dead – this article aims to reflect on the entanglement between violence and virtuality in the “new war” being fought in Cabo Delgado.

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