Based on documents from a long-lost and unexplored colonial archive,Slavery by Any Other Nametells the story of how Portugal privatized part of its empire to the Mozambique Company. In the late ...nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the company governed central Mozambique under a royal charter and built a vast forced labor regime camouflaged by the rhetoric of the civilizing mission.
Oral testimonies from more than one hundred Mozambican elders provide a vital counterpoint to the perspectives of colonial officials detailed in the archival records of the Mozambique Company. Putting elders' voices into dialogue with officials' reports, Eric Allina reconstructs this modern form of slavery, explains the impact this coercive labor system had on Africans' lives, and describes strategies they used to mitigate or deflect its burdens. In analyzing Africans' responses to colonial oppression, Allina documents how some Africans succeeded in recovering degrees of sovereignty, not through resistance, but by placing increasing burdens on fellow Africans-a dynamic that paralleled developments throughout much of the continent.
This volume also traces the international debate on slavery, labor, and colonialism that ebbed and flowed during the first several decades of the twentieth century, exploring a conversation that extended from the backwoods of the Mozambique-Zimbabwe borderlands to ministerial offices in Lisbon and London.Slavery by Any Other Namesituates this history of forced labor in colonial Africa within the broader and deeper history of empire, slavery, and abolition, showing how colonial rule in Africa simultaneously continued and transformed past forms of bondage.
This article focuses on independence-era Mozambique, examining how currents of ideological homogeneity, rooted in the 1960s struggle against colonial rule, contributed to displacement in the 1980s. ...Frelimo, the movement that fought Portuguese colonial rule and took power at independence in 1975, crafted a vision of political life intolerant of any challenge to orthodoxy, leaving those who did not share its vision no place in its polity. Once white supremacist-sponsored political violence evolved into a vernacular civil war, beginning in late 1982, the country saw a destructive displacement of enormous proportions. As a prologue to this crisis, the article considers how people who did not share Frelimo's political vision underwent a political displacement and sought refuge from ideology. Come the crisis of the 1980s, these "proto-refugees" - pre-positioned to withdraw territorially - became physically as well as politically displaced, and thus understood as refugees in conventional thinking.
Este texto analisa a experiência africana do trabalho forçado na época colonial em Moçambique, onde a administração desenvolvia um regime de trabalho semelhante a uma “escravidão moderna”. ...Observadores do período e também os pesquisadores acadêmicos subsequentes têm utilizado o modificador “moderno” para descrever tipos de trabalho forçado e traçar linhas de diferenciação das formas mais antigas de escravidão. Este trabalho tem como objetivo historicizar noções de trabalho livre em meio a uma atmosfera mais ampla de coerção e compreender o silêncio de certos atores no que diz respeito à questão da escravidão. O texto explora o modo como os africanos em Moçambique entendiam as práticas de trabalho colonial, enfatizando as questões de dignidade, honra e degradação.
This article argues that Portuguese accounts of cannibalism in sixteenth-century southeast Africa reflect important but mostly unrecognised elements of the region's political and cultural history. ...The article analyses descriptions of the Zimba cannibals in Ethiopia Oriental, written by the Portuguese priest João dos Santos. Dos Santos's evidence figures significantly in scholarship for this period, and while many historians include his colourful descriptions of cannibalism, none has taken them seriously, largely dismissing them as a product of European myth-making. In focusing on the question of cannibalism, the article asks not whether the Zimba ate human flesh, nor why they might have, but how dos Santos came to believe that they did. Early modern European cultural outlooks had a role in producing such accounts, but the argument here focuses on how claims of cannibalism reflected African, rather than European, perspectives. Such claims were a vernacular expression of beliefs about, and critiques of, political power in the threatening and unsettled political environment of the time. In transmitting descriptions of cannibalism from African informants, dos Santos acted as an unwitting vehicle for this vernacular critique, conveying its meaning quite imperfectly to his readers.
David livingstone took portugal to task, in the 1860s, for failing to eliminate slaving in the areas of Africa to which it laid claim. Had Portugal ever had “a vestige of desire to promote the ...amelioration of Africa”? He accused Portugal of being an “effete nation” engaged in the “murderous traffic in man.”¹ With the passage of the antislavery Brussels Act in 1890 and the resulting more effective coastal patrols, and with greater European control of African territory in the closing decade of the century, the number of slaves exported from Africa did drop, yet the colonial powers, especially Britain
Portugal’s presence in southeast africa began with Vasco da Gama’s arrival on the east African coast in 1498, but conquest did not come until four centuries later, in the age of “high imperialism.” ...East Africa had not been da Gama’s destination; from the earliest voyages of the 1440s, Portugal’s goal was India and its access to great Asian wealth, above all, in the spice trade. Instead of India, da Gama sailed into a global network little known to Europe that linked the east African coast to the Middle East and, across the Indian Ocean, to South and Southeast Asia. Swahili
From Law to Practice Eric Allina
Slavery by Any Other Name,
03/2012
Book Chapter
Toward the end of may 1929, a mozambican named Massungue advised seven African contract laborers, most likely destined for assignment to Portuguese-run maize farms along the rail line through central ...Mozambique westward from the coast to then British-ruled Southern Rhodesia. Massungue told the men they could expect the “worst possible treatment” from the labor agent who had sought them out: he would “punish them violently with his own hands,” and the rations they would receive would be insufficient for nourishment. The agent, Massungue warned, “sold blacks as if they were chickens and goats.”¹
The agent in question disputed these accusations,
The mozambique company’s rule, as with colonial administrations elsewhere in Africa, introduced rigidly hierarchical lines of authority. It presupposed a one-way flow of power: from the top down. ...Under the pressure of the colonial regime of forced labor, power relations within African societies—between elders and juniors, between women and men—became more unbalanced.¹ People in relatively more secure positions were less subject to principles of reciprocity, based on norms of mutual obligation, and could at times ignore them with impunity.
Although within African communities young people were expected to recognize the authority and status that came with age, nearly
Upward Mobility Eric Allina
Slavery by Any Other Name,
03/2012
Book Chapter
The imprint of salazarismo, the name by which dictator António Salazar’s ruling ideology became known, was evident as early as 1930, when he added the post of minister of the colonies to his powerful ...primary role as minister of finance. The Colonial Act of that year, the foundational document for his management of the empire, asserted that part of the “organic essence of the Portuguese nation in fulfilling its historic role is to occupy and colonize overseas domains and to civilize the populations there, exercising as well the moral influence to which it is linked by the inheritance of the
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