In light of twenty-first-century climate-driven displacement, Joanna Tague's argument that Mozambican refugees in Tanzania in the 1960s and 1970s acquired skills and fueled development is of interest. Tague interrogates contemporary assumptions about refugees, modes of empowerment, and development and takes us back to the era of decolonization, the Cold War, and the liberation from minority rule Southern Africa. In the 1960s, Tanzania launched its nation-building project just as Mozambicans arrived in Tanzania to mount their struggle against Portugal. Tague considers the nature and extent of the collaboration and contestation among the many parties of this engagement and shows what those experiences might tell us, if anything, about state strategies for managing displaced persons in the future.
On the one hand, this book is about displaced Mozambicans and their aspirations, experiences, and tragedies. On the other, it is about Tanzania's efforts to achieve its national development goals in partnership with international relief organizations and Mozambican refugees. The book tells two stories, and one works better than the other. The first story unfolds in Dar es Salaam as Mozambique's anticolonial activists uncomfortably merged into the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), led by Eduardo Mondlane. Tague closely follows Mondlane's quest for empowerment through education from his childhood in rural Mozambique to his doctorate in the United States. Until his assassination in 1969, Mondlane sought international support to shelter, educate, arm, and train Mozambicans. Tague charts the schisms and distrust that emerged as FRELIMO launched its insurgency, placed students with scholarships, and sorted out soldiers from students. This story already has a strong Portuguese and French literature which, unfortunately, Tague does not tap. Tague contributes an almost uncomfortably intimate portrait of Janet and Eduardo Mondlane; indeed, Janet Mondlane is the only woman to emerge clearly in the book.
The second story focuses on Mozambican refugees who built and occupied camps in sparsely populated Southern Tanzania. It is stronger and more original than the first. Tague introduces Tanzanian and expatriate humanitarian aid workers and follows the kinds of relationships that they developed, through education and opportunity, with refugees over time. Notably, Mozambicans in those camps became self-supporting. Tague demonstrates that this process took place thanks to skilled Tanzanian camp managers; regular and sufficient contributions of emergency food aid, necessary tools, and technical support; and the essential contribution of Mozambican labor.
The majority of Mozambicans who crossed the Rovuma River into Tanzania in the early years were Makonde. Between 1967 and 1969, they were joined by Yao, Nyasa, and Makua peoples. All shared language and family on both sides of the border, and many had previously worked in Tanzania as migrant laborers. Tague is interested in the fact that Mozambicans variously self-identified, or were identified by others, as freedom fighters, anticolonial activists, refugees, settlers, students, and migrants, and that the terms were used situationally. Mozambican and Tanzanian political leaders courted international support for both refugee settlements and FRELIMO students and soldiers. In this analysis, Tague highlights local, regional, and global players and the dilemmas and relationships that shaped the period. In this window of possibilities, what Tague refers to as the ‘International Refugee Regime’ had not yet come into being, and President Julius Nyerere was still optimistic about dovetailing refugee settlement with the development of communal ujamaa villages (8).
What are the memories and legacies of these processes? The book opens with Tague's 2009 conversation with Father Benue as they viewed the roads, cultivated fields, mature trees, water towers, homes, clinics, and schools around Lake Rutamba in Southern Tanzania. Benue insisted that Mozambican refugees built it all. Nyerere located refugee settlements in areas lacking basic infrastructure, and counted on refugee labor, along with technical, logistical and material support, to make the camps productive. Nyerere held that refugees should be welcomed and treated as though they would not leave. Tanzanians partially shared and subsequently took over the water towers, schools, health facilities, and roads built by Mozambicans. Tanzanians were not ‘hidden losers’.Footnote 1
National and international humanitarian workers essentially functioned as agricultural extension agents and civil engineers overseeing the building of village home plots and essential infrastructure. Refugees trained in carpentry, construction, and new agricultural techniques. In a familiar scenario, women accomplished a disproportionate burden of household and agricultural labor, but men in village governance diminished and dismissed their efforts. Women and children appear in the photos grouped, along with the single map, in the book's final chapter. It would have been productive to hear more from them. Tague contrasts the processes and results of village creation in Mozambique and Tanzania, both before and after independence. Indeed, the most striking contrast between the villages in Tanzania and Mozambique is the consistent and appropriate support Mozambicans received from people like Cassian Njunde, the Tanzanian camp supervisor. This success story depended upon all parties in the process fulfilling their responsibilities. This engagement diverges shockingly from the lack of support Mozambicans who were displaced during Operation Production in the 1980s received in Mozambique. Mozambican labor was key to building villages and infrastructure in Tanzania, but so too was Tanzania's essential and sustained logistical and material support. That is the wider lesson for refugee displacement. Could the story that emerged in the 1960s along the shores of Lake Rutamba be replicated in the twenty-first century? The scale of displacement and access to arable lands now make that a pressing question indeed.
