Animal history in Africa—the multi-species story of the continent’s past—as a separate subdisciplinary “turn” is both recent and tentative, but as an integrated theme within the broader historiography it is both pioneering and enduring. Historians of Africa have long engaged with animals as vectors of change in human history and, of course, at the same time, understood that humans were a key agent of change in animal histories too, especially in the long-lived and extensive writing on epizootics, livestock farming, pastoralism, hunting, and conservation. African animal histories should resist the imposition of intellectual paradigms from the Global North.
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Animals in African History
Sandra Swart
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Archaeology of Colonial Settlement at the Cape
Antonia Malan
Colonial settlement at the southern tip of Africa was pre-dated by 150 years of occasional encounters with European mariners. They touched on the coast to refresh water barrels, barter for meat with the local pastoralists, and repair their crafts, or in some cases found themselves wrecked and desperate on the shores of the “Cape of Storms.” It became the “Cape of Good Hope” after fleets of European ships profiteered from the sea route to the resources of India and Asia, among them the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British.
The formal date for permanent foreign occupation of the Cape is 1652, when a Dutch East India Company (VOC, the Company) force anchored in Table Bay and, with some basic tools, materials, and supplies, set up camp.
After the decline and bankruptcy of the VOC in the late 18th century, a brief military occupation by the British (1795–1802), and an interim Dutch (“Batavian”) administration (1803–1806), the Cape became a British colony. By 1820 the Cape Colony stretched northward as far as the Orange River, and eastward to the Fish and Tugela rivers. Colonial settlement expanded with the arrival of traders, pastoralists, missionaries, and emigrants and created volatile zones in which settlers and African hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and farmers contested with one another over land and resources. The colonial project continued into the later 19th century, spurred by the discovery of gold and diamonds far inland where independent Boer republics and Griqua states had been established. British imperialism and the lure of mineral wealth led to wars of annexation. Following the Second South African (“Anglo-Boer”) War (1899–1902) and subsequent attempts to reunify the country, in 1910 the “Union of South Africa” became a self-governing dominion within the British Empire, gaining formal independence in 1934.
Thus, colonial settlement at the Cape covers a 250-year period and a vast area (roughly equivalent to the Western Cape, Eastern Cape, Northern Cape Provinces, and parts of North West Province). From an archaeological perspective, studies encompass the city of Cape Town and sites fanning out from there chronologically and spatially, such as grazing grounds, military outposts, the towns and villages of the coast and hinterland, arable and pastoral farms, sites of conflict and interaction, missions, and mines.
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Communism in South Africa
Irina Filatova
The history of communism in South Africa began with the formation in 1921 of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA). The party was entirely white, as was the majority of organized labor—its main constituency. The CPSA attempted to fight for equality of black and white workers, but white labor refused to desegregate, and the party’s support among Africans was practically nonexistent. In 1928, the Communist International (Comintern), of which the CPSA was a member, sent it an instruction to work for an “independent native republic.” This slogan helped the party to attract a black membership, but resulted in much infighting.
The CPSA’s position strengthened during World War II, but in 1950, after Afrikaner nationalists came to power, the party was banned. It re-emerged in 1953 as the underground South African Communist Party (SACP). Since then, the party has worked closely with the African National Congress (ANC). Many of its cadres were simultaneously ANC members. In 1955, communists helped to formulate the Freedom Charter, the ANC’s overarching program. In 1960, the SACP launched the armed struggle against apartheid. The ANC took the nascent liberation army under its wing in 1963. In the early 1960s, many party members, including Nelson Mandela, were arrested or forced into exile.
The party had a deep ideological influence on the ANC: from 1969, its ideas on South Africa as a colony of a special type and on the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) have become part of all ANC programs.
After the end of apartheid, communists occupied important positions in all ANC governments. Despite this, many in the SACP have been unhappy with the direction the ANC has taken. However, the party has not contested elections on its own, trying instead to influence ANC policies from inside. This has cost it its reputation as a militant revolutionary party.
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Culture and Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1795
Gerald Groenewald
In 1652 the Dutch East India Company founded a “refreshment station” in Table Bay on the southwestern coast of Africa for its fleets to and from the East Indies. Within a few years, this outpost developed into a fully-fledged settler colony with a “free-burgher” population who made an existence as grain, wine, and livestock farmers in the interior, or engaged in entrepreneurial activities in Cape Town, the largest settlement in the colony. The corollary of this development was the subjugation of the indigenous Khoikhoi and San inhabitants of the region, and the importation and use of a relatively large slave labor force in the agrarian and urban economies.
The colony continued to expand throughout the 18th century due to continued immigration from Europe and the rapid growth of the settler population through natural increase. During that century, about one-third of the colony’s population lived in Cape Town, a cosmopolitan harbor city with a large transient, and overwhelmingly male, population which remained connected with both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. The unique society and culture that developed at the Cape was influenced by both these worlds. Although in many ways, the managerial superstructure of the Cape was similar to that of a Dutch city, the cosmopolitan and diverse nature of its population meant that a variety of identities and cultures co-existed alongside each other and found expression in a variety of public forms.
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History of Social Welfare Policy in South Africa
H. Chitonge
South Africa’s social sector has evolved from simple and disjointed nonstate initiatives into a complex set of interventions, institutions, programs and services. The review presented in this paper shows that the development of social policy and institutions in South Africa has been shaped by the political and economic situation both locally and internationally. Like social policy in many other countries around the world, the state was initially reluctant to accept responsibility for the provision of social welfare services; most of the services were provided in a fragmented way by nonstate actors, including the Church. But from the 1920s, the state started to gradually accept the responsibility to provide social services including education, health care, housing and social welfare. Although different South African governments have, from colonial times to the 21st century, consistently rejected the idea of making South Africa a welfare state, the state has, with time, increasingly taken on greater responsibility, not only in terms of regulating all social services but also the provision of all public services in the country.
Of all the social services, it is the cash transfer program (social grants) that currently attracts political and public attention in the country. However, it is the provision of education services that has consistently accounted for the largest share of public expenditure since the beginning of the democratic dispensation in 1994. For instance, in the 2022 to 2023 national budget, education services accounted for 20.4 percent of total public expenditures, followed by social development (social welfare) at 16.9 percent, and health care services at 12 percent. Social policy expenditure together accounts for almost half of government expenditure, which is roughly about 14 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).
The social policy scholarship in the country has historically focused on social welfare, a situation that gives the impression that social policy is synonymous with social welfare policy. Although this article focuses on the history of social welfare policy in South Africa, it is important to note that social policy is a broader field of public policy that includes education, health care, and social welfare (which in South Africa is also referred to as social development).
One of the fundamental features that defines the history of social policy in South Africa is racial discrimination; institutionalized during colonial and apartheid periods, it has continued to shape and reproduce racial disparities in access to social services even thirty years after the fall of apartheid. While the democratic South African government has increasingly accepted and taken greater responsibility to provide social services, social policy in the country is characterized by a persistent tension arising from the commitment to neoliberal principles of fiscal discipline and austerity on one hand and espousing social democratic principles which emphasize the provision of meaningful support to citizens both as a form of social investment, as well as an instrument for addressing the legacies of colonialism and apartheid on the other. Since the dawn of democracy, this tension has been exacerbated by the growing calls to address racial injustices of the past, as evident in the number of protests, against the background of persistently weak economic growth since 2010.
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History of South Africa’s Bantustans
Laura Phillips
With the passing of the Bantu Authorities Act in 1951, the apartheid state set in motion the creation of ten bantustans, one of South Africa’s most infamous projects of racial ordering. Also known as “homelands” in official parlance, the bantustans were set up in an attempt to legitimize the apartheid project and to deprive black South Africans of their citizenship by creating ten parallel “countries”, corresponding to state designated ethnic group. The bantustan project was controversial and developed slowly, first by consolidating “native” reserve land and later by giving these territories increasing power for self-governance. By the 1980s there were four “independent” bantustans (Transkei, Ciskei, Venda, and Bophuthatswana) and six “self-governing” ones (Lebowa, Gazankulu, KwaNdebele, Qwaqwa, KaNgwane, and KwaZulu).
While a few bantustan leaders worked with the anti-apartheid liberation movements, the bantustans were largely rejected as political frauds governed by illegitimately installed chiefs. They acted as dumping grounds for surplus cheap African labor and allowed the apartheid government to justify large-scale forced removals from “white” farmlands and cities. But the bantustans were also incubators of a black middle class and bureaucratic elite. Despite the formal dissolution of the bantustans in 1994 and their reincorporation into a unitary democratic state, the rule of chiefs and the growth of this black middle class have a deep-rooted legacy in the post-1994 era. As several contemporary commentators have noted, South Africa has witnessed the “bantustan-ificaton” of the post-apartheid landscape.
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Indians in South Africa
Goolam Vahed
The first persons of Indian descent in South Africa arrived as slaves transported there by the Dutch East India Company during the 17th century and were integrated into the “Cape Coloured” and “Malay” populations. Most Indians in South Africa are descendants of migrants who arrived in substantive numbers from 1860 as indentured workers on the sugar plantations of the British colony of Natal and free migrants who followed from the 1870s. After completing their indentures, many chose to remain in Natal, moving off the plantations and making lives for themselves as market gardeners and hawkers. The period after 1920 witnessed the rapid urbanization of Indians and the entry of many into industrial work. The merchant class, while hounded by racist legislation, consolidated a presence in both urban and rural areas. Despite government threats of repatriation, Indians were eventually accepted as citizens in 1961, albeit without the vote and subject to discriminatory legislation. In the first half of the 20th century Indians relied on India for redress. From the 1950s, they built nonracial alliances with the majority African population and played vital roles in the antiapartheid liberation movement. However, when nonracial democracy loomed, over 60 percent of Indians voted for the former white minority parties in the first democratic elections in 1994. Many were concerned about the implications of majority rule. This angst reflected that relations between Africans and Indians had been strained at particular historical junctures as Indians tried to negotiate a political identity within a field of Black consciousness, nonracialism, and African Nationalism. The rubric of “Indian” has been challenged in the postapartheid period by rupturing along religious, ethnic, and class lines. However, it is difficult to escape race identity since “Indian” continues to be a racial, as well as legal and political, identity in South Africa. This, together with many Indians’ relatively privileged position vis-à-vis Africans and rising xenophobia and Afrophobia in a context of widespread poverty, continues to subject many to concerns about their place in the fabric of South African society. This has powered a steady trickle of business and professional emigration. The working classes on the other hand remain embedded in a township “place” identity.
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Joshua Nkomo
Eliakim Sibanda
Joshua Nkomo was a dominant force in the anticolonial independence movement in colonial Rhodesia between 1949 and 1980, and then a major political figure in independent Zimbabwe from 1980 until his death on July 1, 1999. Four historical themes emerge, however, themes that form the context of Nkomo’s life and work and that have intersected in the larger story of Zimbabwe’s independence. First is the politics of the state, which revolves around the question of state power and who controls it, and which has ethnicity as its subtext. Second is the struggle over property ownership, pitting the haves against the have-nots, which has informed class formation. Third is the politics of land, which has likewise informed the nature of class formation and political cleavages. Fourth is the theme of ethnicity and race, especially pitting one ethnicity or race against another. Nkomo rose from a railway welfare officer to lead a militant union, and then three political parties between 1957 and 1987. He made significant contributions to the downfall of a white supremacist colonial regime in Zimbabwe. After independence, the anticolonial revolutionary became a statesman who championed both reconciliation and social justice until his death in 1999. After independence, Nkomo, would become a Member of Parliament, Minister of Home Affairs, and rose eventually to be Vice-President of Zimbabwe.
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Land Resettlement and Restitution in Zimbabwe
Joseph Mujere
Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform Program has attracted a lot of scholarly attention. While some scholars have argued that the process through which landless peasants reclaimed land was chaotic and violent, others have praised it for having been one of the most radical redistributive land reform programs in Africa. While these debates have dominated scholarship on land reform program in Zimbabwe since 2000, what has been lacking has been a historical analysis of the entanglement between land resettlement and struggles over restitution. Land restitution has been at the center of the land redistribution in Zimbabwe. In spite of the successes that the government has made in redistributing land, land restitution is the last frontier in the struggle over land. Ruins, ancestral graves, and sacred sites are important landscape features whose emotive presence and materiality enable communities to make land claims and counterclaims.
Land restitution processes have been initiated in a variety of regional and country contexts. In former settler societies such as Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, Canada, and Australia, indigenous populations have laid claims over land dispossessed under colonial rule. In post-conflict societies internally displaced people have also attempted to lay claims over land that they had to leave behind fleeing from violence. Further, where large-scale land deals have been unsuccessful or revoked through resistance land reclamation has also been instigated. Land restitution is concerned with restoring landed property to former owners. As compared to land redistribution, restitution is not concerned with ironing out of inequitable distribution of land to create a just future but with reestablishment of former rights based on principles of justice rather than equality. Restitution is therefore based on returning land to former owners who can prove claims. Land restitution is an elastic concept covering a range of processes designed to appease what are perceived as historical injustices around loss of land rights.
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The Marine Fisheries of South Africa
Lance van Sittert
The South African fisheries are environmentally bifurcated by the different current regimes on the west (Benguela) and east (Agulhas) coasts. Limited precolonial subsistence use of the littoral zone was supplemented from the mid-17th century by commercial harvesting of marine mammals for international trade and fish to ration imported slave labor. The liberalization of trade after 1814 led to the commercialization of Benguela fisheries by Cape Town merchants drying barrracouta (snoek) for export to ration indentured Indian labor on the sugar plantations of the southwest Indian Ocean and canning rock lobster to feed the urban bourgeoisies of Europe. The mineral revolution in the final quarter of the 19th century created an expanded southern African demand for fish in the new mining centers of the subcontinent, prompting the colonial state to pioneer the demersal fisheries of the Agulhas current, which were monopolized for the first half of the 20th century by British-owned steam trawlers. The motorization of rock lobster fishing in the same period created widespread poverty in the inshore subsistence fisheries. This became an increasingly politicized issue as Afrikaner nationalists laid blame on the British monopoly over the national fish market. Proposed state nationalization of the demersal fishery and reorganization of the inshore fisheries into cooperatives was defeated in 1944 in favor of state financing of private capital through the provision of research, infrastructure, and finance. Afrikaner nationalists after 1948 utilized the latter to engineer the rapid industrialization of the pelagic inshore fisheries and concomitant rise of Afrikaner capital. Falling inshore catches and increasing foreign competition in the demersal fishery led to a crisis in the 1960s that was resolved through the creation and strict conservation of an exclusive economic zone south of the Orange River coupled with the looting of the Namibian colony’s fish resources. The postcolonial states in Namibia (1990) and South Africa (1994) thus inherited severely depleted fisheries resources dominated by white capital and superintended by neoliberal states, severely constraining black capital formation. Both consequently satisfied themselves with blackening the white monopolies and defending their exclusive resource access against escalating insurgencies from the excluded black underclass.
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The Minibus-Taxi Industry in South Africa
Timothy Gibbs and Ofentse Mokwena
South Africa’s barely regulated, murderously competitive, contemporary minibus-taxi industry dates to the turn of the 1980s. It is synonymous with the sixteen-seat (latterly twenty-two- and thirty-two-seat) minibuses, which forced their way onto bus routes and soon displaced government-subsidized public transport services. Nonetheless, the minibus-taxi industry traces its roots to the Black-owned informal transportation sector that first developed on the fringes of South Africa’s segregated cities in the early decades of the 20th century. Heroic stories of these pioneering guerrilla entrepreneurs—who successfully ran unlicensed “pirate” transport operations, while dodging the heavy hand of state regulation and White racism—remain potent memories in parts of South Africa. Academics might pay more attention to the tangled relationship between patterns of urban change, racial segregation, political economy, and public-transport provision. In one sense, South Africa’s minibus-taxi sector shares striking parallels to Kenya’s matatus and Tanzania’s daladalas. At the same time, the distinctive history of South Africa’s minibus-taxi sector is perhaps best understood when placed into the longue durée of urban segregation and transport apartheid, which shares many similarities with the more tightly planned, racially segregated cities of the Americas.
Article
Pepetela
Alexandra Santos
Pepetela (b. 1941) is one of the most awarded Angolan writers and a successful creator of the myths and epics sustaining Angolan identity in the symbolic domain. He has played many roles throughout his life, from revolutionary socialism ideologist to guerrilla fighter, government member, university professor, and civic activist. Most notably, he is a prolific writer; his dozens of novels, chronicles, plays, and fables constitute an incomparable testimony to 20th-century Angola. His writing articulates a strong sociological awareness with a world vision that feeds on the ideological currents of nationalism and socialism. This surprising junction makes the basis for literary works in which the struggle for independence, the construction of the Angolan nation, the socialist revolution, and social analysis assume great relevance, as does the quest for the symbolic roots of national identity. Pepetela has been the most thorough explorer of Angolan historical sources and autochthonous myths, from which he assembled narratives that are considered foundational to the nation. His work is the object of numerous academic essays in several languages. Just as importantly, he is a favorite among readers worldwide.
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Runaway Communities in Central and South Africa
Crislayne Alfagali
The formation of fugitive communities in Central and Southern Africa is a recent historiographical topic. The lives and trajectories of fugitives have undoubtedly received much more attention in studies of the African presence in the Americas. Focusing on Africa is to return to the perspective that resistance to slavery, forced labor, and colonialism began on the continent. It is getting to know the local dynamics and the history of a continent in constant transformation. In particular, as it pertains to the regions of Central and Southern Africa, it resumes debates over the so-called precolonial period given that covered highlights of colonial occupation and exploration long before the Berlin Conference. Stories about escapes that led to the formation of runaway communities are referred to in a variety of ways—cipaka, mocambos, muttolo, quilombos, ocilombo, drosters, musitu—were privileged, with special attention to the political, economic, and cultural relationships that shaped the experience of those who chose or were forced to leave their home communities. Highlighting a diversity of experiences, gender differences, legal statuses (free, freed, enslaved), ethnic and identity formations, religious and political values, and situations of forced labor and exile (servants, soldiers, exiles, and convicts in general) are investigated.
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Technological Change in Late 19th-Century South Africa
William Storey
Societies and technologies were deeply intertwined in the history of late 19th-century South Africa. The late 19th century saw the significant development of capitalist agriculture, together with the expansion of mining. The technological side of farming and mining had a significant influence on social and political development. Meanwhile, as in many other colonial outposts, local innovators and entrepreneurs played significant roles in business as well as government. Technological developments were not simply imported or imposed from Great Britain. Everyday technologies, ranging from firearms to clothing, were the subjects of extensive debate across southern Africa’s different cultures.
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The Copperbelt of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo
Iva Peša
The Central African Copperbelt, a region which straddles the boundary between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia, holds exceptionally rich and high-grade copper deposits. These deposits have been worked from as early as the 6th century ce. Still, the commencement of large-scale industrial resource extraction at the start of the 20th century, spurred by imperial rivalry between Belgian and British interests, initiated fundamental processes of change. The Copperbelt urbanized rapidly, as the mines attracted thousands of migrant workers from hundreds of miles away. The social, cultural, economic, and political lives of these new urbanites have attracted much attention from colonial administrators and mining officials, as well as from generations of social scientists and historians. These observers have tended to depict the Copperbelt’s history in terms of stark dichotomies, as part of a transition from rural to urban; from subsistence agriculture to industrial wage labor; from extended kinship to nuclear families; or even from “tradition” to “modernity.” The protracted economic crisis which held the Copperbelt in its sway between 1975 and 2000 painfully revealed the boom-and-bust nature of copper mining. This period of “decline” made scholars question earlier modernization frameworks. Examples showing how kinship ties have been creatively reworked, how gender roles have constantly been subject to negotiation, and how economic precarity was part of urban life throughout the 20th century, suggest that Copperbelt scholarship should abandon narratives of “transformation” and exceptionalism. The Central African Copperbelt, instead, exemplifies African history’s rich complexity.
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The History of Migrant Labor in South Africa (1800–2014)
Peter Delius
A pervasive system of migrant labor played a fundamental part in shaping the past and present of South Africa’s economy and society and has left indelible marks on the wider region. South Africa was long infamous for its entrenched system of racial discrimination. But it is also unique in the extent to which urbanization, industrialization, and rural transformation have been molded by migrant labor. Migrancy and racism fed off each other for over a century, shaping the lives and deaths of millions of people.
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The History of the Soga Family, Race, and Identity in South Africa in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries
Natasha Erlank
The history of African Christianity in South Africa in the 19th century would be incomplete without a discussion of Tiyo Soga, the first Xhosa man to be ordained a minister in South Africa. His work as a preacher and translator was key to the spread of African indigenous Christianity in the Cape. In 1866 he completed his translation of The Pilgrim’s Progress into Xhosa, a book that had a greater impact than the Bible on how many Africans learned about Christianity. Less well known is the history of his family, including his parents, his wife, his children, and his grandchildren. While it is possible to reconstruct lives of some of the Soga men, it is difficult to uncover the lives of the women. Tiyo Soga and his wife, Janet Burnside, had seven children, and the four sons (William Anderson, John Henderson, Jotello Festiri, and Allan Kirkland) became prominent figures in Eastern Cape and South African history. The daughters, Isabella, Frances, and Jessie, had less prominent careers. African Christianity was important for all of them, and the sons pursued careers as a doctor, a historian, a veterinarian, and a journalist. The third son, A.K. Soga, was important as both a journalist and an African nationalist.
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Violence in the South African Transition
Laura Evans
South Africa’s negotiated transition (1990–1994), while often heralded as a “miracle,” was accompanied by a dramatic escalation of politically related violence in which more than fifteen thousand people died. A sober assessment of these years reveals that such violence was a central dynamic of the transition and its politics. The epicenters of violence were in Gauteng (then known as the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vaal, or PWV) and KwaZulu-Natal (then the province of Natal and the KwaZulu bantustan). Although patterns of conflict were locally and historically specific, being connected to conflicts over scarce resources, in these regions a war between Inkatha (supported by the state) and comrades aligned to the African National Congress and United Democratic Front (ANC, UDF; the dominant strand of the liberation movement) emerged as the central fault line of the violence. State-sponsored violence—much of which took place under the veil of private companies, covert operations, and bantustan regimes—played a central role in precipitating and aggravating political competition and violence, and the white-minority National Party (NP) regime, still in power, was thereby responsible for much of the violence of the period. It is also widely held that, whatever he claimed, the government of F. W. De Klerk had extensive knowledge of the “third force” covert operations that were waging violent attacks and fueling the conflict. Both the NP and the ANC, while publicly eschewing violent methods, used violence as a key element of their political strategy during the period of negotiations, even if they were not always able to control it. While the ANC’s role in aggravating the violence of this period has often been underplayed, historiography from the last decade has amended this perception.
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Women in Mozambique
Liazzat J. K. Bonate and Jonna Katto
Mozambique is divided into matrilineal north and patrilineal south, while the central part of the country has a mixture of the two. Both types of kinship organization have important implications for the situation of women. Women in matrilineal societies could access land and political and decision-making power. They had their own property and their children belonged to their matrikin. In patrilineal societies, women depended on their husbands and their kin groups in order to access farmland. Children and property belonged to the husband’s clan.
During the colonial period (c. 1890–1975), women’s position in Mozambique was affected by the Indigenato regime (1917–1961). The native African population (classified as indígenas) were denied the rights of Portuguese citizenship and placed under the jurisdiction of local “traditional habits and customs” administered by the appointed chiefs. Despite the fact that Portuguese citizenship was extended to all independent of creed and race by the 1961 Overseas Administrative Reform, most rural African areas remained within the Indigenato regime until the end of colonialism in 1974. Portuguese colonialism adopted an assimilationist and “civilizing” stance and tried to domesticate African women and impose a patriarchal Christian model of family and gender relations.
Women were active in the independence struggle and liberation war (1964–1974), contributing greatly to ending colonialism in Mozambique. In 1973, Frelimo launched a nationwide women’s organization, Organização da Mulher Moçambicana (Organization of Mozambican Women, OMM). Although women were encouraged to work for wages in the first decade after independence, they remained largely limited to the subsistence economy, especially in rural areas. The OMM upheld the party line describing women as “natural” caregivers. Only with the political and economic liberalizations of the 1990s were many women able to access new opportunities. The merging of various women’s organizations working in the country during this period helped to consolidate decades-long efforts to expand women’s political and legal rights in independent Mozambique. In the early 2000s, these efforts led to the reform of the family law, which was crucial for the improvement of women’s rights and conditions in Mozambique.