ABSTRACT
The massacre at Wiriyamu was revealed in the early summer of 1973. In July, The Times of London splashed its front page with the story, depicting murder, massacre, and mayhem in Tete, Mozambique. Wiriyamu was a contested terrain from the point of view of the Portuguese. The Portuguese focused on Wiriyamu's etymology and contextual hermeneutics—all contestable terrains, as to see—by vigorously denying the very existence of Wiriyamu as a place, let alone a place where a massacre had taken place. However, like any theory seeking supremacy in the social sciences, essentialism as employed in this discourse on massacre has numerous mutually porous characteristics, and they come with attendant pitfalls. The Wiriyamu massacre was depicted not as an event but as written text, unfolded on contested grounds over a naked truth, on a rock bed of essentialism, a seed of a larger imperial truth, most dreadful and deadly.
