Migration and Forced Labor in the Social Imaginary of Southern Mozambique, 1920–1964

This paper revisits the historiography of forced labor and mobility in southern Mozambique during the Portuguese colonial era by reexamining several key works in the field. It seeks to understand how the population of southern Mozambique constructed a social imaginary on the margins of the civilizational fiction designed by colonial rule. Avoiding a state-centered or legalistic reading of this history, the article stresses the fragility of the colonial/modern design and the fundamentally compulsory character of colonial labor, and contrasts these against the diverse responses developed by colonial subjects. In particular, the article seeks to understand how the “repertoires of power” that colonial rulers used to consolidate their power reframed the processes of migration and social mobility. Colonial rule altered preexisting practices and conceptions of mobility within southern Mozambique, transforming them into exercises more analogous to domestic forms of resistance. As the dynamics of social mobility preceded the formation of the modern/colonial state, they can be reconstituted as a parallel logic and rationality, which existed alongside the constructions of the colonial enterprise; as a result, many of the policies undertaken by the colonial state were primarily geared toward ending this relative autonomy and controlling the movement of the colonized population.