Despite Portugal's heritage of 500 years of colonial rule in Africa, the administration of what is now Mozambique occurred only in 1942, when the charter of the Mozambique Company (1892–1942) ended and its territory became the provinces of Manica and Sofala. From that point, all of Mozambique was administered by Portugal, although scarcely two generations later the military coup of 25 April 1974 confirmed the colonial endgame. Mozambique became independent in June of 1975. This book gives us an enhanced appreciation of the Mozambique Company's half-century of rule, its relationships with its British hinterland, with Portugal's policymakers, and with the chiefs and peoples of Central Mozambique.
Eric Allina's Slavery by Any Other Name delivers a detailed view of Mozambique Company rule, largely through the lens of the labor regime it developed to build and maintain its infrastructure and to supply a workforce to white-owned farms and mines. His title underscores the dramatic images revealed in the very words of the company's officials. He repeatedly refers to labor coercion under the Mozambique Company as enslavement, quotes allegations that labor recruiters for Portuguese maize farmers routinely sold blacks as through they were chickens and goats (p. 46), and tells us that workers fled the ‘killing fields of Manica's white farmers’ (p. 104). His examples are dramatic and his judgments are passionate and sustained.
Skeptics of scholars’ insistence on the extent, longevity, and cruelty of Mozambique's colonial experience with forced labor may reconsider in light of Allina's elegant and detailed rendering of labor abuse over the decades of Mozambique Company rule. The book is divided into eight broadly chronological chapters. The divisions are also topical and several underscore themes long present in Portuguese colonial history. Chapter One, from slavery to empire, looks at comparative slavery and the early so-called civilizing mission discourse in the Portuguese empire. Chapters Two and Three contrast law and practice, recalling James Duffy's observation that reformist legal aspirations in Portuguese Africa were rarely enacted in reality.
In those chapters, Allina provides evidence of abuse from wage fraud to criminal negligence. He captures what Alexander Keese and others call mentalities of administrators: the internal discourse that allowed the Portuguese to speak to themselves, represent themselves, and imagine their own future. Chapters Four and Five focus on the efforts of lineage and chiefly leadership to accommodate and deflect the company's unpredictable demands for labor. Border gaming strategies and bargains struck to afford people control over the timing and use of their labor were sustained and revealing.
Although much of the narrative explicitly concerns male actors, Allina notes the many ways women's agency shaped and was shaped by labor policy in Company lands. Chapter Six considers both men's and the company's strategies for ‘disciplining youth and controlling women's labor’ (pp. 125–38). Here especially Allina draws insights from comparative scholarly literature, connecting what was happening on both sides of the border and picking up on gender, generational, and borderland tensions from historical literature all around Southern Africa.
Chapters Seven and Eight highlight men who secured more promising waged labor or achieved the equivalent of British progressive farmer status as agrícolas or ‘model farmers’. Like assimilados (assimilated Africans), agrícolas were exempt from labor conscription. Allina reveals that farm folk, like urban folk, made sure their neighbors retained their labor conscription protections if possible. If model farmers needed to produce a certain number of bags of maize each year to retain their status, bags of maize made the rounds from household to household to be counted, much as chairs, forks, and cups were passed around to maintain the threshold criteria of assimilation status in the capital city. Allina also provides a wealth of evidence that whether assimilado, agrícola, or default native, Mozambican men had to avoid being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong Portuguese person. Allina concludes that although Portugal was hardly unique among colonial powers in Africa for its use of institutionalized violence to extract African labor, ‘there is no question that parts of Portuguese-ruled Africa fell at the far end of the spectrum of brutality of labor practices’ (p. 180).
I have several regrets about this otherwise quite fine book. I would have liked a clearer concluding sense of how the specific qualities of the broader eras shaped labor policy, and thus African life under Company rule. For example, inflation in the context of competing currencies, and surges and drops in labor demand, particularly from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s, produced big changes. Allina does not graph an overview of the number and placement of conscripts and escapees through time, although the archival data seems sufficient to have supported that. Furthermore, although he makes eloquent use of discourse, dialog, and comments from the detailed archival record, fewer than forty of his more than nine hundred footnotes draw on the oral testimony he gathered from local figures. As a result, the people who emerge as historical actors are, once again, the administrators and chiefs named in the archival record rather than African individuals. Finally, none of the 17 photographs between pages 104 and 105 are dated. If historians seek change through time, the placement of images in time makes a difference.
Despite these missed opportunities, I am very happy to have this valuable book on my shelf.
