Forced Labor and Colonial Rule in Barue, 1940s–1960

Understanding the impact of developmental discourse requires understanding the political economy that it was targeting—which, in Mozambique, requires understanding the importance of forced labor. Forced labor was not a corollary to the Portuguese colonial project; instead, it was its core.Footnote ¹⁴ Forced labor was the foundation of the Mozambican political economy: colonial employers were dependent upon forced workers provided by the administration, and the export of forced workers dominated the economy in many rural districts. Forced labor was the primary focus of the colonial state: The colonial bureaucracy, from high-level officials to local “chiefs,” was largely occupied with ensuring the smooth functioning of the forced labor machine. Forced labor was also the lodestar of Portuguese civilizational ideology: Presented as an exemplary vehicle of “civilization,” forced labor was essential in Portugal's defense of its empire at home and abroad, and was one of the key policies through which Portugal fulfilled its “civilizing mission.”

Barue exemplified these dynamics. Barue was one of the last areas in Mozambique to be brought under Portuguese control at the end of the nineteenth century and was the epicenter of the largest uprising against Portuguese colonial rule in 1917.Footnote ¹⁵ Following the rebellion, the Portuguese deposed many of the local chiefs and dismembered their chieftaincies, to forestall similar uprisings in the future. The administratively installed “chiefs” empowered in their stead had few subjects and little authority; the district administrator in the 1940s, for example, reported that some “chiefs” held sovereignty over only three working-age males.Footnote ¹⁶ The limitations of the chiefs mirrored the colonial administration, which counted one administrator, one secretary, and two to four chiefs of post to govern the entire district. Four to six administrators were therefore responsible for governing an area that stretched more than twenty-five thousand square kilometers. Barue had few administrators, few roads, no railways, and almost no employers; it was considered one of the most remote, and most lightly governed, districts within central Mozambique.

As a result, Barue occupied a well-defined role within the colonial economy; its function was to send forced workers to employers established elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁷ In this, Barue was unexceptional, since many rural districts in Mozambique performed the same function. Virtually every employer in Mozambique, from vast sugar plantations to individual settler farmers, depended upon forced workers, who were conscripted into six-month “contracts.” These “contracts” sent workers into a wide range of jobs, from sweeping city streets to hauling lumber in isolated rural sawmills. While the tasks differed, “contract” work was uniformly known for its coercive foundations, low wages, and poor treatment.Footnote ¹⁸ Forced labor was not just an indispensable asset for Mozambique's colonial employers, but its ubiquity and profitability also made it a major economic sector in its own right. As one South African observer had explained in a 1951 book about Mozambique, forced labor export was one of the colony's most important “industries,” clarifying that it should be counted as an “industry” because “its vast and highly organized scale really qualifies it as such.”Footnote ¹⁹

Barue's residents were sent into forced work for white settler farmers. A small minority went to the handful of white farmers located in Barue itself, while the overwhelming majority was sent to the much larger concentration of farmers in nearby Chimoio district, the hub of settler agriculture in Mozambique. White farmers in Mozambique, as elsewhere in southern Africa, were notorious for abusive working conditions.Footnote ²⁰ In Chimoio, the colonial minister had noted during a visit that “the mentality of these colonialists in the labor question is almost pro-slavery,” while the district administrator acknowledged that farmers wished for “the native to be reduced to a state of servitude incompatible with our laws and with the most elementary principles of humanity.”Footnote ²¹ In Barue, meanwhile, the administrator summarized the farmers’ mistreatment of their workers by writing, “A black is a black, to be sure—but it is a pity that the color of their skins so closely resembles many whites’ souls.”Footnote ²²

The farmers’ terrible reputation ensured that they, like most other employers, were deeply dependent upon forced workers to remain economically viable. It was the colonial administration's job to supply these workers—a job they performed quite effectively. As the Barue district administrator explained, farmers simply “received workers on certain days, with the same regularity that you take a dose of Atabrine,” since

Forced labor was closely governed by colonial officials who organized and rationalized its operations by developing an elaborate scheme of labor reserves. Under this system, rural districts like Barue were officially designated as labor reserve districts for particular industries.Footnote ²⁴ This system made the colonial state into the ubiquitous middleman of the forced labor system. Employers requisitioned forced workers from colonial authorities, who transmitted these demands to their designated labor reserve districts, whose administrators were then required to conscript the number of workers that employers demanded. It was a system designed to maintain a harmonious balance between the supply of forced workers and the demand for their labor, as well as to guarantee state control over the forced labor system.Footnote ²⁵

This economic model made social and economic investment in the labor reserve districts unnecessary, since they were not expected to produce anything other than people. More than unnecessary, it made such investments potentially counterproductive, since improved conditions might make residents more likely to stay and less willing to accept labor elsewhere. For example, one administrator in Barue had explained in 1945 that establishing schools would create more liabilities than benefits for the colonial administration, since “I know perfectly well that every black who learns to read and write is two fewer hands for agriculture. This black will never take up a hoe for the rest of his life, and what the Colony needs most is agricultural workers.”Footnote ²⁶

Consonant with this economic model was the broader Portuguese ideology of colonial rule, which defined civilization, rather than development, as its primary objective.Footnote ²⁷ Forced labor was one of the central vehicles through which this civilizing mission was fulfilled.Footnote ²⁸ As one high-ranking colonial official writing in 1944 explained, forced labor

Forced labor remained the material, political, and ideological foundation of Portuguese colonial rule throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Imperial and colonial officials issued a parade of circulars—including two major reforms in 1947 and 1950—to restrict the use of forced labor, but practices on the ground were almost entirely unaffected.Footnote ³⁰ Colonial employers continued to demand forced workers, and administrators of districts like Barue continued to conscript them, buttressed by their conviction that forced labor was the only viable method of maintaining the colonial economy and bestowing labor's civilizing benefits upon subject populations. So little changed, in fact, that in 1956, the Barue administrator's annual report on labor simply copied the 1950 report, justifying forced labor by citing “the classic laziness of the native, who unfortunately is still very far from being able to independently evaluate the necessity of seeking out work.”Footnote ³¹

While the Portuguese system of forced labor remained remarkably stable throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the late 1950s and early 1960s saw a series of rapid, significant changes to Portuguese imperial policy, which abolished forced labor and brought forth a new emphasis upon development. Particularly important in propelling these changes was the threat, and then the reality, of anticolonial warfare, following the collapse of the Central African Federation and a brief revolt in Angola in February 1961.Footnote ³² Development was quickly elevated into a crucial strategy to prevent anticolonial disturbances from spreading into Mozambique. The governor, for example, told the public in a press conference that development initiatives would form “strong and powerful weapons that protect and defend us.”Footnote ³³ Or, as the governor general of Mozambique put it in a 1960 speech in Lisbon organized by the Colonial Ministry,

To that end, the Portuguese state began fortifying its repressive capacities alongside its newfound move toward economic development. New “information committees” were created to restrict the flow of information more tightly, “Psycho-Social Action Brigades” were formed to intensify propaganda efforts, and the secret police (PIDE) began expanding its reach in the colonies. The simultaneous crackdown upon potential “subversion” and promotion of development initiatives were twinned together as the two primary methods of defending the empire, forming what Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and António Costa Pinto, following Frederick Cooper, have astutely called a “repressive developmentalism.”Footnote ³⁵

The belief that development was necessary to defend colonial rule had an important influence on the ways that administrators reimagined labor within a developmental framework. Top officials grew particularly concerned with abolishing forced labor, which was central in anticolonial movements’ denunciations of Portuguese colonial rule—what the overseas minister, Adriano Moreira, called a “war of lies” against the Portuguese.Footnote ³⁶ The abolition of forced labor became a key theme in Portuguese propaganda heralding a new commitment to development; the Overseas Ministry, for example, declared that the “complete liberalization of the labor market” was “one of the Portuguese colonial administration's greatest recent triumphs, which crowns our initiatives of social promotion for the Portuguese population of traditional African civilization.”Footnote ³⁷ Local administrators who had previously spent much of their time and energy maintaining the forced labor system were now reinvented as agents of the developmental state, charged with helping colonial subjects, rather than simply conscripting them into labor. The provincial governor described this shift:

To replace the forced labor economy that had previously dominated rural Mozambique, colonial officials promoted a new economic model of rural development, through infrastructure improvements and guaranteed markets designed to make agriculture more economically viable. This orientation also sought to make smallholder farmers into a bulwark against anticolonial sentiment, since—as the governor put it—agriculture was “intimately linked to attaching oneself to the land.”Footnote ³⁹ Then, too, rural development aimed to protect the empire by integrating women into the colonial economy and, by extension, the Portuguese national project. Portuguese authorities had long applied a rigidly gendered lens to the colonial economy, forcing men into migrant labor while requiring women to remain at home, as a means of both maintaining social order and using subsistence farming to subsidize the migrant wage labor economy.Footnote ⁴⁰ Under the new approach, women were to be valorized as both agricultural producers and defenders of Portuguese colonial rule. Moreira, for example, defined women as “a stabilizing force” who could serve as “allies in our task of social promotion, because she is the one who can demand the most and benefit the most from the actions … of our overseas mission.”Footnote ⁴¹

In addition to rebuilding the agricultural economy, Portuguese authorities also tried to end forced labor by curbing employers’ demand for poorly paid migrant workers in favor of constructing a “stabilized” workforce. To that end, officials declared that it was “obviously beneficial” to discourage the use of migrant workers “until the need for them completely disappears” and directed businesses to “provide to their workers, and their families, permanent residency near their workplace.”Footnote ⁴² Women and families were, again, important in Portuguese officials’ vision of how this developmental approach would take shape, since it was women's domestic demands—rather than the coercive measures of the colonial state—that would henceforth propel African workers into the wage labor economy. Thus, the provincial governor suggested that administrators “instigate women to ask their husbands to buy things they like” and “hold meetings and parties where feminine vanity is stimulated, leading them to want to acquire more and better accoutrements.”Footnote ⁴³ Moreira, for his part, insisted that the “social revolution which salaried work represents in Africa” would fail if women did not “actively participate in this task of social engineering … It is through the profound love that the native has for his family that we must seek the consolidation of a positive attitude toward the labor market.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Officials acknowledged that this would be a slow process, as it “diverges from what has traditionally been pursued for many years.” Nonetheless, while the transition would be difficult, it was also deemed a necessary measure to promote “national cohesion.”Footnote ⁴⁵

These changes would have produced a profound transformation in the colonial political economy. Forced labor had been the core of the colonial economy and the primary objective of the administration; now, it was a serious threat to the empire's survival. The wage-labor economy had previously been an exclusively male preserve; now, the overseas minister was proclaiming that “the native woman cannot be simply ignored.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Exporting workers had been the sole economic function of rural districts like Barue; now, migrant labor was presented as a rapidly receding vestige of a disavowed past. By eliminating forced labor and abandoning migrant labor in favor of rural development and labor stabilization, Portuguese officials hoped to build a newly integrated colonial society, fortified against the threat of anticolonial sentiment. Development discourse, in other words, promised dramatic social and economic changes across Mozambique, which would break from the neglect and abuse of the past and safeguard the empire in the future.

Development, Famine, and Forced Labor in Barue, 1960–1965

Local administrators in the post-1960 Portuguese empire were faced with the overriding objective of implementing the new discourse of development. Barue was one of the areas specifically targeted for this intervention. One reason was that it was a frontier district, and the overseas minister had decreed that developing frontier regions was key to defending the empire, “because they are where foreign organizations make their most insolent and daring attempts to change our way of life and our territorial integrity.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Then too, Barue was considered a particularly propitious region for developmental programs owing to “the backward state of its population,” which could readily benefit from “major support, diffused through the areas of simple agricultural practices, small-scale cattle raising, and various basic trades.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The governor of the province, in an important report, thus declared it “urgent” that the Barue district administration begin pursuing “access routes, market guarantees for agricultural products,” as well as construct “an educational system, health assistance, etc.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Nonetheless, the developmental imaginations of imperial officials were difficult to implement in Barue. In education, for example, most of the district had gone years without having any schools at all. Education was theoretically the responsibility of the Catholic Church, which operated schools that were partially funded by the state, but the Church frequently lacked teachers, and the state frequently lacked money. Administrators were never particularly interested in changing this state of affairs, viewing education as an unwelcome distraction from the more pressing needs of finding workers. Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, a small handful of schools opened, but they remained few and far between. In 1961, for example, the administrator of Mungari, one of Barue's administrative posts, wrote that he was trying to build two schools in his area, but that “there are no chairs, educational materials, or even houses.” Similarly, the administrator of Macossa, another of Barue's administrative posts, wrote that “[t]he educational panorama in this area is heartbreaking, because it does not even exist.” There were no schools in Macossa, nor were there plans to build any, nor had there been any since 1954, when “a hut that served as a basic school, and which functioned for three or four years” had been closed “because the catechist-teacher occupied himself more in romancing and harassing the girls than in teaching them.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Health care was similarly nonexistent across most of Barue. Health services in Mozambique were generally offered through employers, as well as a rudimentary system of health centers run by the administration, but Barue had neither. Thus, the administrator of the Mungari post informed his superiors in 1962 that “the health centers remain abandoned, and medical assistance is not being provided.” The only health care offered over the previous six months had been two visits from the district's only doctor, both of which were “too brief to be considered as having any value.” This was a problem, he reported, because “There are infectious, contagious diseases which need to be monitored, like leprosy and tuberculosis. The first exists on a wide scale.”Footnote ⁵¹ He was informed by his superiors that the health department in Barue did not have a functioning vehicle, which made it impossible to conduct even basic medical visits.

Even if the health department had a vehicle, its possibilities would have been limited by the ongoing absence of transportation infrastructure. Barue's isolation was famous, owing to its skeletal and precariously maintained road network. In particular, some regions of Barue—particularly the area around the district headquarters—were carved up by rivers, and there was no money to either construct or repair bridges. As a result, river crossings were colloquially (and pejoratively) described as “native” or “kaffir” bridges, which consisted of “simple sticks from the forest, with woven mats on top, made of wood or even earth.” These needed to support fifteen- and seventeen-ton trucks carrying goods into Barue, or agricultural products out of Barue, and they frequently collapsed or washed out, inspiring persistent anxiety among drivers. The administrator acknowledged that “it is a miracle that these bridges can support the many tons of the trucks that pass over them”; a visiting inspector, less sanguine, wrote that they “do not offer any type of safety or security. Crossing them, you never know if it's going to be your last time.”Footnote ⁵²

The absence of infrastructure mattered, because reorienting Barue's economy away from forced migrant labor implied a new focus on rural crop production—which, in turn, required a road network capable of exporting crops in a timely fashion. Portuguese officials had consistently argued that parts of the district could support intensive agriculture and provide a new economic foundation for the region. One area in particular, Serra Choa, was described as an “immense and fertile region,” with officials promising that “thousands of European settlers could be established here.”Footnote ⁵³ Nonetheless, these aspirations could only be realized if the district's infrastructure could sustain intensive economic activity. Thus, one 1950 inspection had described Barue as “one of the regions of the colony that is able to support European colonization, not just because of the fertility of the soil, but also because of the niceness of its climate.” Nonetheless, “the lack of rapid communications and of conveniently located roads makes it extraordinarily difficult to export products from the region to consumer markets, thus hindering the economic development of the district.”Footnote ⁵⁴

The new orientation toward development thus made constructing a viable road network vital for Barue's economic future. The problem with prioritizing infrastructure, as with everything else, was the absence of funds with which to pay for it. In 1960, for example, the district administrator sent an update on his efforts to build a road to the aforementioned region of Serra Choa. Upgrading the existing footpath into an actual road had been planned for at least a decade, but the project had never been funded and the road had never been constructed.Footnote ⁵⁵ The new development philosophy did little to change this state of affairs; after one month on the job, eighty workers had managed to construct only 260 meters of road, the equivalent of slightly more than three kilometers per year. This was actually faster than previous years’ construction, which had totaled seven kilometers over three years. This left thirty-five kilometers still to construct, which the administrator estimated would take around seven years to complete. He noted that construction could be expedited if workers used machines, rather than carving out the road by hand, but added, “This administration does not have them, nor does it have the means to acquire them.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Funding was not only insufficient to build new roads, it was also insufficient to maintain existing roads, which remained in constant disrepair. The administrator had written in 1958 that “the roads have always been a chronic problem of this administration,” since “there are never enough workers or resources to respond to damage which, at any given moment, needed to be repaired some time ago.” Attempts to secure more funds for road maintenance were consistently unsuccessful, leading the district administrator to resignedly tell his superiors that “every administrator who came before me has observed these problems, and the government is too well aware of these problems for it to be necessary for me to take my turn repeating them.”Footnote ⁵⁷ He was more biting in his diary, sarcastically requesting that the provincial government “teach us how—with just one truck, two carpenters and a few already-scarce trees from the forest—to permanently maintain dozens of bridges in a serviceable state, when heavy trucks of more than 15 tons are constantly passing over them. I hope that they teach us how to do this, it would be appreciated.”Footnote ⁵⁸ His request for funding went unanswered, and the roads remained in terrible shape. In 1963, for example, the chief of the Macossa administrative post reported that it was necessary to travel in a convoy—two jeeps, along with a tractor and a mechanical winch—to navigate the roads. Even then, it took two days to travel 80 kilometers.Footnote ⁵⁹ When he tried to travel without the convoy, the jeep became hopelessly stuck, and “had to be transported by 30 men, almost on their backs.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Barue's derelict infrastructure posed a serious obstacle to any strategy of agricultural development. Some residents of Barue pursued agricultural livelihoods by growing cotton; many others sought to sell food crops, particularly maize. Nonetheless, there were challenges to relying upon either of these crops. Cotton did not grow well across significant stretches of the district, creating what the district administrator called “a true disaster for the native economy,” as many farmers did not earn enough from cotton to pay their taxes, either because “of their laziness, or the poor quality of the soil, or of the seeds that they received, or whatever the reason.”Footnote ⁶¹ Many individuals who were “unhappy with the weak earnings that this crop has given them” were instead seeking to grow maize and peanuts instead, alongside sorghum and millet for their own consumption.Footnote ⁶²

Individuals who wanted to shift from cotton to food crops, however, ran into the problem of finding ways to process and then ship their produce, which the absence of viable roads made extremely difficult. In 1952, for example, the administrator had reported that “with just one truck and with transport often disrupted for days,” some ten thousand sacks (of ninety-one  kilograms each) of maize had accumulated at the administrative post, which were then being left to rot, a situation he called “terrible advertising and an even worse inducement for the blacks.”Footnote ⁶³ A decade later, the situation was much the same, as the administrator reported that transport problems were preventing residents who cultivated maize from selling it, since there was no way to transfer it to market, which “was already being felt in the spirit of disappointed natives who no longer intend to plant maize in the coming agricultural year.” The provincial government responded that this was “terrible native policy,” and ordered that the administration “pay close attention to the repairs that have to be made to the roads,” because “without access, there is neither development nor progress.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Administrators in Barue thus found themselves in a conundrum. The new orientation of the Portuguese empire required a renewed approach to rural development, one focused on allowing peasants to earn a living through agriculture while still enjoying the benefits of health and education previously limited to the cities. But they had few resources with which to change the economic panorama they inherited. The previous economic strategy in Barue had simply sought to export as many workers as possible to regions with a greater concentration of wage labor; as a result, the economy of Barue had grown dependent upon the ongoing departure of its male residents for jobs elsewhere, which in turn continued to narrow the economic possibilities of Barue itself.

This was a difficult legacy for administrators to negotiate. Even though the Portuguese had substantially increased development spending, money remained scarce, particularly because much of the development funds were spent on cities, which the Overseas Ministry defined as “poles of economic development” and which Moreira proclaimed to be the “absolute priority” of development funding, “demanding the most urgent attention.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Much of those development funds which were invested in rural areas were directed toward large-scale agricultural projects destined for European settlers.Footnote ⁶⁶ These projects offered no appreciable benefit to the vast majority of rural districts, which, like Barue, were not incorporated within their geographical ambit. The disparity between comparatively well-funded large projects and generally ignored rural districts was occasionally on sharp display; for example, in February 1962, the administrator of the Mungari post reported that the Missão do Fomento do Zambeze, an agency tasked with planning large development projects like dams, had dispatched one of its three helicopters to Mungari.Footnote ⁶⁷ At the time of the helicopter's arrival, the administrator had gone several months without a functioning car: one had no front suspension and required 25 liters of gasoline to travel 100 kilometers, while the other had a broken clutch and a malfunctioning carburetor and had broken down on the road several times, forcing him to spend the night inside.Footnote ⁶⁸

Administrators thus confronted a profound shortage of the resources necessary to pursue a strategy of rural development; in the absence of these resources, the possibility of maintaining the preexisting political economy became more appealing. This strategy was theoretically foreclosed by the new orientation toward development, and especially by the fear that forced labor would undermine the larger project of imperial defense to which development was attached. When confronted with the contradiction between policies promulgated in Lisbon and the realities of an economy historically dependent upon forced labor, local administrators opted—as they had many times in the past—to circumvent imperial directives.

One manifestation of this was in public works projects, where Barue's administrators again began using unpaid labor, so as to pursue development projects beyond what would otherwise be possible with the limited resources at their command. In February 1962, for example, the administrator of Mungari said that “the roads cannot be repaired,” since forced labor had been abolished; three months later, he reversed himself, and reported that people had restarted working on the roads for no pay, a system they supposedly preferred because they worked for shorter periods, and because “money has no value for them.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Other administrators similarly justified the return of unpaid roadwork as a voluntary preference on the part of residents, allegedly out of a desire to help develop their communities; the administrator of Macossa, for example, reported, “As is customary, the natives have voluntarily begun repairing the pathways leading the administrative post to areas in the interior,” then added that this “custom” had been reinstated by him the previous year and that the workers would not be getting paid.Footnote ⁷⁰

Nor was it just through unpaid labor on public works that administrators began reinstating the old colonial economic model. Exporting workers remained a central objective of the administration, even as the ideology and official policy surrounding labor had been fundamentally transformed. Thus, in 1959, as the end of the forced labor regime was becoming an increasing certainty, and the turn to development gaining momentum, the administrator had declared that labor conscription would remain a necessity—not just because abandoning it would “suffocate agricultural enterprises,” but also because “in a poor district such as this, it would prevent 4,000 or 5,000 contos worth of salary from entering into the native economy, which the district's overall economy has always relied upon.”Footnote ⁷¹

The worsening famine in the early 1960s helped clarify these realities, as Barue's administrators had neither the resources nor the intention of ameliorating its effects through agricultural development. The administrator of Macossa, for example, noted in the early 1960s that during the course of his tenure, “Nothing has been done to improve native agriculture, and there has been no assistance from the Agricultural Technical Department,” and thus “nothing is being done in the direction of advising the native to adopt new agricultural processes, combat erosion, etc.” Indeed, the problems in Macossa were even more basic, since “There is not a single well, a single source of water.”Footnote ⁷² Similarly, the head of the Mungari post told his superiors that “it was necessary to open wells in this area,” because residents were complaining that “they only have duties and obligations and receive no benefits.”Footnote ⁷³ These calls went unanswered, even despite the famine; two years later the administrator noted that there were still no agricultural development initiatives and still no wells, as he reported, “Water! Water! It is the request that every mouth speaks.” The provincial government responded that there was no money for constructing wells, which would have to “await a future opportunity.”Footnote ⁷⁴

The fact that even a famine had not brought any appreciable efforts toward rural development made clear the limitations of reorganizing Barue's economy away from labor export. Thus, rather than using the famine to promote agricultural development, administrators instead used the famine to return Barue to its previous role as a labor reserve for employers elsewhere. It was not exactly a secret that many administrators harbored the desire to maintain the forced labor system. In 1959, for example, one inspector had argued that forced labor should be maintained, because it was “the only [method] that up to now can be considered effective at getting the native to work. To do otherwise risks the natives entering into a permanent idleness, with all of the problems that one can imagine.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Administrators, similarly, had spent many years attempting to persuade residents that since Barue did not have “any agricultural or industrial business, it is necessary that they go work in other regions to support themselves and their families.”Footnote ⁷⁶ This did not change overnight; for example, when the administrator of Mungari told residents that forced labor had officially been abolished, he nonetheless “continued to highlight the necessity of the natives seeking jobs in places where they can work.”Footnote ⁷⁷

In this mindset, the directive to end forced labor and minimize migrant labor was taken as a vague aspiration, rather than an actual policy—only to be followed, as one administrator put it, “to the extent possible.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Where it was not possible, as administrators often judged to be the case, administrators found new ways of maintaining the labor export economy.Footnote ⁷⁹ Administrators were now strictly banned from directly conscripting forced workers, but they could, and did, pressure people into accepting migrant labor through the local “chiefs,” which the district administrator called “a sure method of reaching the objectives in view without breaking legal norms.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Similarly, administrators could no longer directly ship workers to employers, as they had previously done. The role was now fulfilled by private “recruiters,” who formed the new link between migrant workers and employers dependent upon their poorly remunerated labor. The gender dynamics of migrant labor remained similarly unchanged. While the liberalization of the labor market meant that women were now allowed to take up wage labor, administrators tried hard to prevent this from happening. Women were not allowed to enter migrant work except with the permission of a husband, father, uncle, or older brother, while administrators were ordered “not to incentivize or favor, directly or indirectly” that women take up wage labor and to instead focus on keeping women engaged in subsistence agriculture, so as to preserve the “moral and social values that the woman represents and safeguards when she remains in the places and environment habitual to her.”Footnote ⁸¹

Along these lines, administrators quickly instrumentalized the famine as a new way to maintain old practices. The response to the famine was thus not to extend state control over rural areas under the banner of rural development. Instead, it was to use hunger to compel residents into migrant labor in a way that administrators were now prohibited from doing. Thus, men were told that they had to migrate in order to earn the wages necessary to feed families who might otherwise starve. The tactic of using famine to compel people into wage labor was not new; in 1947, for example, during a previous bad harvest, the administrator had “explained to people that—even outside of the obligation that they all have to work, now there would be a great advantage to their doing so, seeing that this would provide great help to their family. Aside from being one less mouth to feed, they can use the proceeds of their work to help their families, in these times that everyone fears.”Footnote ⁸² With administrative coercion now banned, such appeals became even more important. The administrator of Barue thus reported that he had used the famine to “make the native authorities see that men in their areas have to seek out work,” since “it is only through work that they will be able to receive food to survive.”Footnote ⁸³ Similarly, the administrator of Mandie ordered the chiefs to intensify their conscription efforts, arguing that “because the agricultural year was going badly—as they themselves had said—there would be every advantage, both for them and for the government, that they go to work, the money from which they could send to sustain their family if the agricultural year continued to go poorly.”Footnote ⁸⁴

This approach both reflected and reinforced the old Portuguese assumption that migrant wage labor was the only way to improve the lives of African subjects; the administrator himself noted the continuity, telling his superiors that in his attempts to conscript migrant workers, “I have continued to strike the same note, a note that is long tired of being struck, but which will continue to be struck, without a doubt.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The discursive framework surrounding labor had changed, from civilization to development. The means of compelling people into labor had also changed, from open violence to more indirect means. Nonetheless, the conviction that labor represented the best means of economic and social salvation remained. Thus, when the administrator of the Mandie post reported that he had intensified labor conscription in the wake of the famine, he explained that “this was being done only to help.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The old economic model of labor export was enlisted in the cause of development, reconciling a discourse of economic change with continuities in economic practice.