The prosaic title of Jeanne Penvenne's long-awaited monograph conveys neither its impressive analytical scope and empathic methodology, nor the challenges involved in interpreting the lives of women cashew workers in late colonial Lourenço Marques (Maputo), Mozambique. After giving thoughtful treatment in her first book to African men's experiences of urban wage work under the racist and often brutal structures of Portuguese colonialism, the author sets out here to correct the androcentric scripting of Mozambican labour history found in state archives, colonial-era social science, and post-independence scholarship.Footnote 2 That Women, Migration, & the Cashew Economy includes the author's own earlier work in its historiographic critique is just one of the principled choices behind the book's organization and content. Anchoring urban social and labour history in the stories and songs of women who shouldered the heavier burdens of Mozambique's leading post-Second World War industry, Penvenne exposes not only the gendered construction of the ‘formal’ cashew sector, but the gendered violence at its core.
The book's examination of the diverse forms of this violence, within and beyond the factory gates, is painstaking and cumulatively painful. The rural poverty and domestic troubles that propelled women to move to the city, the unsafe and exploitative factory working conditions, the employer fraud and sexual harassment, the noxious effects of waged poverty on family welfare – these interlaced hardships, as recounted by three generations of female cashew shellers at the Cajú Industrial de Moçambique (CIM), materialize vividly over the book's five chapters. Yet if the narrative's morally indignant tone occasionally feels overdone, Penvenne's evidence lends powerful support to her more innovative historical claims. Contrary to colonial views of women as a constraint on factory production, female labour was ‘foundational’ to the cashew industry, just as women workers’ experiential knowledge – what they recall, and how they perform it – is essential to the ‘whole cloth’ of urbanization and labour history in southern Mozambique. Centering women's memories, Penvenne argues, yields both a counter-hegemonic view of this urban and labour history and a rare, wide-angled glimpse of its agrarian and familial base. Through the testimony of her narrators (a term she asserts in place of ‘informants’), she links rural farm to factory floor, gift economy to capitalist market, childcare woes to a migrant labour system that drained the region of adult men. In so doing she dissolves categorical distinctions (formal vs informal economy, housework vs wage work) that have underpinned male-centered labour history in Mozambique, weaving together processes scholars have treated as disparate into a more expansively gendered whole.
The book's empirical depth should put paid to the author's unease about its gestation period – the work presented here takes time! In a searching introduction that details the project's evolution and methodology, Penvenne makes clear her strong commitment to ethical, participatory research; her sensitivity to generational and socioeconomic diversity among women; and her understanding that if her narrators ‘speak for themselves’ in recorded interviews, it is her voice dictating the analysis. Some might challenge aspects of her handling of women's words, such as the assumption that one can so neatly separate the voice of a researcher from those of her subjects, or that a brief acknowledgement of ‘survivor bias’ obviates the need to query its effects on women's performance of agency in the face of state, corporate, and patriarchal power. But Penvenne tackles other oral history concerns head on, structuring her text around the themes narrators foregrounded in their accounts even while recognizing that women's memories (elicited in 1993) were ineluctably shaped by the post-civil war precarity of their lives.
In Chapter One, Penvenne surveys the history of industrial cashew processing within the wider frame of rural women's cashew cultivation, consumption, distilling, and exchange; and she stresses the importance of cashew income, squeezed ever more tightly by the late colonial state, to household food security in men's absence. She chooses four of the women's songs as ‘touchstones’ to scaffold her analysis in Chapters Two through Five, critiquing her abundant documentary evidence – sometimes in distracting detail – through the lens of women's perspectives and values. Penvenne's arguments in these chapters range from poignant but unsurprising (women moved to the city to escape rural suffering, but found new abuses and privations there) to forcefully myth-debunking (common-law unions could offer women more security than marriage, and family welfare rested more on kin and friendship networks than conjugal ties). Even the most vulnerable women, she suggests, exercised ‘agency in tight corners’, and through their innovative family forms and livelihood strategies helped to build not only the cashew sector, but the city of Lourenço Marques itself. Not even the most demeaning government documents, newspapers, or industry reports contradict women workers’ claim that CIM ‘grew from our strength’, and that female reproductive labour – deployed through collaborative social networks – sustained the caniço (reed) neighbourhoods that sheltered the African working class.
With an epilogue addressing the devastation of Mozambique's cashew processing industry by war and World Bank policies after 1975, helpful glossary and maps, and a lively (and often urgent) narrative style, Women, Migration, and the Cashew Economy is a much-needed corrective to Mozambican labour history. It should also be welcomed as a valuable Lusophone contribution to the historiography of gender in colonial Africa, and as an engaging resource for undergraduate and graduate classes.
