Eric Morier-Genoud's monograph, spanning the period from 1940, when Lisbon gave the Papacy the task of creating a network of schools in Mozambique, until 1986, when the country's socialist experiment effectively ended, makes an important contribution to our understanding of church politics in colonial and early postcolonial Mozambique. This carefully researched book draws on a wide variety of church archives, colonial repositories, contemporary newspaper accounts, and interviews with more than thirty elders, including individuals in the Catholic Church hierarchy.
How Catholic politics developed, and the extent of their influence on Central Mozambique, are the framing questions that Morier-Genoud poses. The debate on whether the church was on the side of nationalists in Mozambique and other parts of Africa or that of authoritarian colonial regimes, Morier-Genoud contends, is a false dichotomy, obscuring more than it reveals. Instead, he argues that the focus should be on the effects of policies and practices of the church on the ground.
The monograph addresses three significant issues, beginning with politics inside the church. Readers will find a wealth of detailed information that shows that the Catholic Church did not speak with one voice. Morier-Genoud documents the multiple debates and disagreements that created real cleavages within the church hierarchy and between competing religious orders. The Franciscans’ faithful support of the colonial regime and the Burgos Brothers’ sympathies for the cause of Mozambican independence were cases in point, as were the theological and pedagogical clashes that periodically surfaced within the church hierarchy.
These divisions in the church speak to the larger and more contentious question of church-state relations, which is the second focus of the study. To bolster his claim that the Catholic Church was not simply the handmaiden of Lisbon, Morier-Genoud underscores the good works of the reformist Bishop of Beira, as well as the growing criticism of Portuguese rule articulated by the Burgos and the White Fathers, both of whom were ultimately expelled from the colony. He also stresses how a handful of seminarians and priests joined the liberation movement.
Despite his cautionary note about false binaries, the evidence overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that the Catholic Church, as an institution, was racist, culturally arrogant, and subservient to Lisbon. It was not only the 1940 Concordat that formalized this alliance, but also practices that actually took place on a daily basis. In missionary classrooms, African students were often physically and verbally abused, taught that they had not history nor culture, and deemed incapable of going beyond third grade. Most priests closed their eyes to Portugal's brutal system of forced labor and the colonial regime's sexual exploitation of African women recruited to work on the roads and European farms. Many others were even more complicit. Morier-Genoud offers several examples of how close ties between senior church officials and members of the Portuguese security agency Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (PIDE) often resulted in the arrest of Mozambican dissidents. In a similar vein, the majority of senior church officials condemned African nationalists as ‘terrorists’ or ‘communists’ — this criticism continued in the postindependence socialist government of Samora Machel.
To his credit, Morier-Genoud attempts to explore religion from an ‘African angle’. This theme is an extremely important dimension of the colonial encounter which extends well beyond Mozambique. Unfortunately, this discussion, found primarily in Chapter Three, ‘The Formation of African Churches’, is the most fragmentary and unsatisfying part of the book. It is little more than a statistical summary of which church orders were more effective than others in converting Africans, followed by a perfunctory and unconvincing discussion of the social composition of the converts and a brief discussion of the lives of the African seminarians. The author attributes the sharp variation in the conversation rate, which ranged from 44.5 per cent of the total population to 0.4 per cent, to a variety of factors such as populations density, the length of time the missionaries spent in a region, and the very different conversion strategies of missionaries and evangelists. He compares, for example, the Franciscans unexacting criteria for baptism to the very demanding requirements of the White Fathers. While Morier-Genoud acknowledges that Africans’ agency is the most important force explaining differential conversion rate, he glosses over that dynamic because it is difficult to demonstrate statistically.
Similarly, the author only spends five pages examining the social composition of those who converted, but apart from a vague reference to a small but influential ‘African bourgeoisie’ he makes no effort to specify the backgrounds of different church members. Given the preponderance of impoverished peasants and coerced workers who populated the countryside throughout the colonial period, his class analysis rings hollow. He ignores how age, gender, and different local cultures may have influenced Africans’ decisions to convert. The author's summary of which Africans chose to become clergy and how they experienced life in the Zobue seminary is also underdeveloped. Of 32 African students, only seven were ordained. What Morier-Genoud does not explore is why the number was so small and what personal, academic, and political challenges those seminarians faced. Interviews and life histories could have filled this important gap.
Morier-Genoud's study will be of particular interest to students of Catholic Church politics in Mozambique and other Portuguese colonies. Hopefully, the author will write a fuller and a deeper analysis of the political, social, and cultural role of the church in Mozambique in the near future.
