The fight against tribalism constituted one of the main tenets of FRELIMO’s discourse during the “struggle for national liberation”. However, the concept has also been employed by the Front’s opponents, namely its dissidents and the colonial authorities, to denounce the supposedly discriminatory nature of its practices. Applying the instruments of textual and prosopographical analysis to FRELIMO’s publications as well as to colonial records, this study deconstructs the Front’s anti-tribalist narrative, showing its ambiguous and variable character, and correlates it to the dissidents’ discourse and to a measurement of ethno-regional dominance within FRELIMO. As a result, references to tribalism are shown to constitute a communicative vector employed by alternative political networks in their competition for scarce resources.