Borderlands, boundaries, and the contours of colonial rule: African labor in Manica District, Mozambique, c. 1904-1908

International Journal of African Historical Studies

Volumn 36, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 59-82

  Allina Pisano, Eric ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33745074983     PISSN: 03617882     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3559319     Document Type: Review

References (86)

1. One case that is especially relevant to this essay was the Anglo-Portuguese conflict over the borders of Mozambique and its hinterland (present-day Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi). See Eric Axelson, Portugal and the Scramble for Africa, 1875-1891 (Johannesburg, 1967)
2. Philip R. Warhurst, Anglo-Portuguese Relations in South-Central Africa, 1890-1900 (London, 1962)
3. Malyn Newitt, History of Mozambique (Bloomington, Ind., 1995), Chapter 14
4. David N. Beach takes a different and enlightening approach to the same subject in "The Origins of Moçambique and Zimbabwe: Paiva de Andrada, the Companhia de Moçambique, and African Diplomacy, 1881-1891," Working Paper 89, Department of History, University of Zimbabwe (Harare, 1992)
5. A Portuguese translation of this paper appeared in Arquivo 13 (1993), 5-80. Other well-studied cases include the setting of borders along the lower Zaire River and parts of West Africa where British and French territories abutted
6. For an overview of these cases and others see Simon Katzenellenbogen, "It Didn't Happen at Berlin: Politics, Economics, and Ignorance in the Setting of Africa's Colonial Boundaries," in Paul Nugent and A. I. Asiwaju, eds., African Boundaries: Barriers, Conduits, and Opportunities (London, 1996), 21-34
7. A far from exhaustive sampling of this literature includes A. I. Asiwaju, "Migrations as Revolt: The Example of the Ivory Coast and Upper Volta before 1945," Journal of African History 17, 4 (1976), 577-94
8. William Miles, Hausaland Divided: Colonialism and Independence in Nigeria and Niger (Ithaca, 1994)
9. Patrick Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860-1910 (Portsmouth, 1994)
10. Joel Maurício das Nêves, "Economy, Society and Labour Migration in Central Mozambique, 1930-c.1965: A Case Study of Manica Province" (Ph.D. thesis. University of London, 1998)
11. Ruth First and others, Black Gold: The Mozambican Miner, Proletarian and Peasant (New York, 1983)
12. Colin Murray, Families Divided: The Impact of Migrant Labour in Lesotho (Cambridge, 1981)
13. Nugent and Asiwaju, African Boundaries
14. Malyn Newitt, "Labour Migration from the Tete District," unpublished paper; Leroy Vail and Landeg White, Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique: A Study of Quelimane District (Minneapolis, 1980), especially 169-78
15. Leroy Vail, "The Political Economy of South-east Africa," in David Birmingham and Phyllis M. Martin, eds., History of Central Africa, II (London, 1983), 200-250
16. For the late colonial era, see Corrado Tornimbeni, "'Working Boundaries': Boundaries, Colonial Controls, and Labour Circulation in Beira District, Mozambique, 1942-1960s," in Malyn Newitt, ed., Community and the State in Lusophone Africa (London, 2003)
17. Asiwaju, "Migrations as Revolt," made the classic statement for migration as resistance. For studies of central Mozambique, see Allen Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman, "Resistance and Collaboration in Southern and Central Africa, c. 1850-1920," International Journal of African Historical Studies 10, 1 (1977), 31-62
18. Allen Isaacman, Cotton is the Mother of Poverty: Peasants, Work, and Rural Struggle in Colonial Mozambique, 1938-1961 (Portsmouth, 1995), 210-13
19. das Nêves, "Economy, Society and Labour Migration." Michael Adas has made important contributions to the literature: "From Avoidance to Confrontation: Peasant Protest in Precolonial and Colonial Southeast Asia," Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, 2 (1981), 217-47
20. Adas, "From Footdragging to Flight: The Evasive History of Peasant Avoidance Protest in South and South-east Asia," Journal of Peasant Studies 13, 2 (1986), 54-86
21. For the broader theoretical underpinnings of these arguments, see James C. Scott, "Everyday Forms of Resistance," in Forest D. Colburn, ed., Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Armonk, N.Y., 1989), 3-33
22. For the broader economic effects of migrations, see Newitt, "Labour Migration in the Tete District"
23. Vail, "Political Economy of East-Central Africa."
24. The impact of borders on ethnicity is the subject of A. I. Asiwaju, ed., Partitioned Africans: Ethnic Relations across Africa's International Boundaries 1884-1984 (New York, 1985)
25. For borders' impact on other forms of social identity, including gender, see Megan Vaughan, "Household Units and Historical Processes in Southern Malawi," Review of African Political Economy 34 (1985), 35-45
26. Stephen C. Lubkemann, "Situating Wartime Migration in Central Mozambique: Gendered Social Struggle and the Transnationalization of Polygyny" (Ph.D. thesis. Brown University, 2000)
27. Aside from the importance of controlling movement in and of itself, colonial administrators especially worried about people moving into territory controlled by a different European power. Metropolitan rivalries were mapped onto the African continent and colonial administrations continually worried about losing face to neighboring colleagues. Asiwaju, "Migrations as Revolt," 581, 592
28. Bill Paton, Labour Export Policy in the Development of Southern Africa (London, 1995)
29. Simon E. Katzenellenbogen, South Africa and Southern Mozambique: Labour, Railways and Trade in the Making of a Relationship (Manchester, 1982)
30. First and others, Black Gold
31. Paton, Labour Export Policy, 21-22
32. Terry Elkiss, The Quest for an African Eldorado: Sofala, Southern Zambezia, and the Portuguese, 1500-1865 (Waltham, Mass., 1981)
33. H. Ellert, Rivers of Gold (Gweru, 1993)
34. An 1894 article in the Correio da Beira referred to Manica's mines as those "from whence the Queen of Sheba got the large quantities of gold with which she made her presents to King Solomon," Correio da Beira 56 (22 April 1894), 122
35. Sometimes this was because African rulers themselves sought exclusive control of gold recovery and trade. In other cases they wanted to avoid Portuguese interest and the resultant destabilization that such interest often brought. H. H. K. Bhila, Trade and Politics in a Shona Kingdom: The Manyika and their African and Portuguese Neighbors. 1575-1902 (Essex, 1982), especially 97-100
36. S. I. G. Mudenge, A Political History of Munhumutapa, c. 1400-1902 (Harare, 1988), 171-72
37. See the published sources in Documentos sobres os Portugueses em Moçambique e na África Central [Documents on the Portuguese in Mozambique and Central Africa], 9 volumes (Lisbon, 1962-1989)
38. These events are covered in such classics as R.J. Hammond, Portugal in Africa, 1850-1910: A Study in Uneconomic Imperialism (Stanford, 1966)
39. Warhurst, Anglo-Portuguese Relations in South-Central Africa
40. and Axelson, Portugal and the Scramble for Africa
41. Studies of chartered company rule in Mozambique include Leroy Vail, "Mozambique's Chartered Companies: The Rule of the Feeble," Journal of African History 17, 4 (1976), 389-416
42. Barry Neil-Tomlinson and Leroy Vail, "Discussion: The Mozambique Company," Journal of African History 18, 2 (1977), 283-86
43. Barry Neil-Tomlinson, "The Niassa Chartered Company, 1891-1929," Journal of African History 18, 1 (1977), 109-128
44. Neil-Tomlinson, "The Growth of a Colonial Economy and the Development of African Labor: Manica and Sofala and the Mozambique Chartered Company, 1892-1910," in Mozambique: Proceedings of a Seminar (Edinburgh, 1978)
45. Miguel da Cruz, "História da Formação da Classe Trabalhadora em Manica e Sofala ao Sul do Pungue, 1892-1926" (Licenciatura thesis, Eduardo Mondlane University, 1982)
46. Barry Neil-Tomlinson, "The Mozambique Chartered Company, 1892-1910" (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1987)
47. Inês Nogueira da Costa, "No Centenário da Companhia de Moçambique, 1888-1988," Arquivo 6 (1989), 65-76
48. Eduardo da Conceição Medeiros, História de Cabo Delgado e do Niassa (c. 1836-1929) (Maputo, 1997)
49. Vail, "Mozambique's Chartered Companies"; Newitt, History of Mozambique, 358-60
50. In its efforts to appeal to European investors, the Company administration most often described its territory as larger than England and Wales together
51. The conflation of commercial and sovereign entities is far from unique to Mozambique or Portuguese colonies. As Crawford Young notes, Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany all made use of chartered companies from the 1880s to the early 1900s or longer. Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, 1994), 103-105
52. Belgian King Leopold's Congo Free State is probably the best-known case, having been chronicled most recently in Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston, 1998)
53. Other works on chartered company operations include Coquery-Vidrovitch, Le Congo au temps des grandes compagnies concessionaires 1898-1930 (Paris, 1972)
54. John S. Galbraith, Crown and Charter: The Early Years of the British South Africa Company (Berkeley, 1974)
55. Mozambique Company, Handbook of the Mozambique Company (London, 1893), xii
56. For more on the Company's conquest of its territory, see Barry Neil-Tomlinson, "Mozambique Chartered Company," Chapter 3
57. Cruz, "História da Formação da Classe Trabalhadora," Chapter 1
58. Eric Allina-Pisano, "Negotiating Colonialism: Africans, the State, and the Market in Manica District, Mozambique, 1895-c. 1935" (Ph. D. thesis, Yale University, 2002), Chapters 1 and 2
59. Neil-Tomlinson, "Mozambique Chartered Company," Chapter 4
60. Allina-Pisano, "Negotiating Colonialism," 70, 101
61. Relatório e Contas da Companhia de Moçambique (Gerência de 1902) Apresentados à Assembléa Geral Ordinária de 25 de Agosto de 1903 (Lisboa, 1903), 21. Neil-Tomlinson, "Mozambique Chartered Company," 209
62. For an account of the three-way diplomacy and maneuvering that led up to the 1891 Ultimatum, see Beach, "Origins of Moçambique and Zimbabwe."
63. Charles van Onselen, Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia 1900-1933 (London, 1976), 90
64. th century as one of "peasant prosperity" and points to the major role that women played in an expanded agricultural production. Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870-1939 (Portsmouth, 1992), especially 53-61
65. See also Ian Phimister, "Zimbabwe: The Path of Capitalist Development," in Birmingham and Martin, eds., History of Central Africa, II, 256
66. Malyn Newitt has written on movements in both directions along the Mozambique-Malawi and Mozambique-Zimbabwe borders in the upper Zambezi valley province of Tete; see his "Labor Migration from the Tete District," unpublished manuscript. My thanks to him for making this study available. This type of negotiated return was probably practiced by African communities all along newly created colonial boundaries. For a similar account of such local-level deal-making in the Congo Independent Stale, see Robert Harms, Games Against Nature: An Eco-cultural History of the Nunu of Equatorial Africa (Cambridge, 1987), 192-93
67. Neil-Tomlinson, "Mozambique Chartered Company," 242; AHM, CdM/SG/Relatórios/ Caixa 223: Manica, 1898 Mensais e Anual, Report of 8 March 1897, SGR/4889/01, 7
68. AHM, CdM/SG/Relatórios/Caixa 230: Circumscripção de Manica, "Relatório Anual de 1908," SGR/4978/01, 251-255, 312
69. This process is discussed at length in Allina-Pisano, "Negotiating Colonialism," Chapter 4
70. Katzenellenbogen, South Africa and Southern Mozambique
71. Luís António Covane, O Trabalho Migratório e a Agricultura no Sul de Moçambique (1920-1992) (Maputo, 2001)
72. Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity
73. Alan H. Jeeves, Migrant Labour in South Africa's Mining Economy: The Struggle for the Gold Mines' Labour Supply 1890-1920 (Kingston and Montréal, 1985)
74. For more on this aspect of colonial labor legislation in the colonies, see James Duffy, Portuguese Africa (Cambridge, 1959), especially 155-57
75. and A Question of Slavery (Cambridge, 1967), especially 139-40
76. Saguate is not Portuguese in origin, though it is in common usage in Lusophone Asia and East Africa. The Portuguese almost certainly borrowed it from Konkani, a language spoken in coastal Goa, one of the earliest Portuguese settlements in Asia. See Sebastião Dalgado, Glosário Luso-Asiático, II (Hamburg, 1982), 271. I am grateful to K. David Jackson for this reference
77. For example, see Mudenge, Political History of Munhumutapa, 258-59, 349-50
78. Benigna de Jesus Lurdina Mateus Lisboa Zimba, "Overseas Trade, Regional Politics, and Gender Roles: Southern Mozambique, ca. 1720 to ca. 1830" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan, 1999), 303-311
79. See Allina-Pisano, "Negotiating Colonialism," Afterword
80. See, for example, Tornimbeni, "Working Boundaries." The bulk of the literature focuses on international boundaries: Asiwaju and Nugent, African Boundaries
81. Asiwaju and Adeniyi, Borderlands in Africa
82. Asiwaju, ed., Partitioned Africans
83. A number of historians have demonstrated this theme: Sara Berry, "Hegemony on a Shoestring: Indirect Rule and Access to Agricultural Land," Africa 62, 3 (1992), 327-56
84. Frederick Cooper, "Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History," American Historical Review 99, 5 (1994), 1516-15
85. Barbara M. Cooper, Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900-1989 (Portsmouth, N.H., 1997)
86. David Robinson, Paths of Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauritania 1880-1920 (Athens, 2000)