Jeanne Penvenne’s Women, Migration and the Cashew Economy in Southern Mozambique is an empirically rich history of labor, gender, and the colonial economy of Lourenço Marques (today Maputo) in the final decades of Portuguese colonial rule. Based on extensive interviews with former cashew workers, as well as wide-ranging research into the colonial archives, Penvenne’s book fills a significant gap within the history of Mozambique while offering important correctives to some of African labor history’s underexamined assumptions. The most important of these interventions is Penvenne’s persuasive argument against the enduring focus on specific types of predominantly male labor. The androcentric equation of labor with men dominated official colonial ideology, was reflected by the documents that colonial officials generated, and has since been reproduced by postcolonial scholars, in a way that has frequently rendered women’s labor all too invisible. As Penvenne notes, this distorted approach occludes the reality that women’s labor was essential within the colonial economy. Penvenne’s study examines the interlocking worlds of household, gift, industrial, and informal economies—what she terms the “whole cloth” of the history of cashew production—to demonstrate women’s fundamental role within the cashew industry, and by extension, the economy and society that the cashew industry helped support.

Penvenne begins her study with an introduction that lays out the book’s overarching arguments and the broad historical context of late colonial Mozambique and southern Africa. In the second half of the introduction she undertakes a comprehensive analysis of the conditions under which she interviewed former cashew workers, as well as the methodological and philosophical questions that the interviews generated. The first chapter discusses the history of “contestation” around cashews during the twentieth century, particularly the production and sale of cashew liquor—an industry in which women were central players. The second and third chapters use the history of the cashew factory at Tarana between World War II and independence to examine the work experiences and migratory strategies of female workers, with a particular interest in how these histories were shaped by gender dynamics. The fourth and fifth chapters shift to focus on women’s lives beyond their work. The fourth chapter explores the marital and family relationships that female workers navigated alongside their work in the cashew factory. The fifth chapter follows workers home into the suburbs of Lourenco Marques, analyzing the relationship between the expanding African “reed city” (bairros de caniço) and the European-dominated “cement city.” A brief epilogue discusses the postcolonial history of the cashew industry, attributing its recent travails to the catastrophic impact of the Mozambican civil war and the profoundly misguided suggestions of the World Bank.

This is a book with many strengths. One is the wealth of empirical material Penvenne has collected, especially the detailed interviews with former cashew workers, whose life histories provide a vibrant and important perspective upon the cashew industry, gender and family relationships, and the broader urban context of Lourenço Marques during the late colonial era. Another is the detailed account of the specific work processes through which cashews were converted into socially and economically valuable goods, particularly highlighted in the first and second chapters. At the same time, Penvenne does an excellent job of expanding the narrative from a focus on factory labor to an analysis of the larger social world of late colonial Mozambique, effectively using the subject of female workers as a base from which to explore a range of far-reaching historical dynamics, from the personal relations, family tensions, and childcare concerns that shaped workers’ everyday lives, to the possibilities and limitations of the suburban neighborhoods where workers made their homes, to the global economic relationships that structured the industry as a whole. The wide range of topics has the effect of pulling the book’s narrative in many different directions—especially given the difficulty of making colonial sources and oral histories speak to each other because of colonial officials’ general lack of interest in investigating women’s lives. Readers interested in the history of labor, gender relations, and late colonial Mozambique will find that this expansive approach offers many vital insights into an important and long-neglected history.