Christian missionary work in Angola and Mozambique during the colonial and postcolonial eras was shaped by a complex of factors related to religion, education, and politics. Missionaries’ networks of local support played an outstanding role in their humanitarian work, particularly in the 20th and 21st centuries.
By the end of the 19th century, Catholic and Protestant missions had established themselves in Angola and Mozambique. Until 1974, Protestants had a tense relationship with the Portuguese authorities, as they were suspected of serving the political interests of some European countries against Portugal, and later of supporting African opposition to colonial domination. Unlike the Protestants, the Catholic Church enjoyed a close collaboration with the ruling regime. Under the Concordat and the Missionary Accord of 1940 and the Missionary Statute of 1941, which were agreed between the Vatican and Portugal, Catholic missions enjoyed a privileged position to the detriment of Protestants, whose activities were severely restricted.
The years that followed the independences of Angola and Mozambique in 1975 were characterized by open hostility to religion, aggravated by the nationalization of missions’ assets and properties in both countries. Mission activities related to education and health became hard to carry out. With the civil wars in Angola and Mozambique, warfare and dislocation gave a new social role to the churches. Between the mid-1980s and 1990 the first signs of new policies emerged. While in Angola the relationship between church and state was marked by ambiguity and mistrust, cooperation and collaboration prevailed in Mozambique, where the 1980s saw a rapprochement and constructive dialogue between the two institutions. This was sealed by the roles both Protestants and Catholics played in the peace and democratization processes.
The political opening that characterized the 1990s and 2000s brought significant changes for both countries including the presence in the public space of new churches, especially those of Pentecostal denominations. The new sociopolitical contexts in Angola and Mozambique between the late 20th and early 21st centuries shaped the new roles of the missions, which remain more focused on social, rather than political, activities.
Article
Teresa Cruz e Silva
Article
Mustafah Dhada
The Wiriyamu massacre was a case of structurally determined mass violence in Portugal’s colonial wars, not unlike similar massacres during wars of suppression by colonial and White settler powers in Africa. On December 16, 1972, a young captain in the Portuguese colonial army in Mozambique was summoned to the regional headquarters in Tete, then undergoing insurgency. He arrived at the headquarters at 6:30 am and was told to execute Operation Marosca—eradicate insurgents in five villages in Wiriyamu. Wiriyamu’s periphery was then bombed to soften it, after which he and his commando units moved in to demolish the five villages. Three hundred and eighty-five named civilians died in the process. Excluded from this figure are the victims of police torture and the three-day hunt that followed the massacre. There were no insurgent casualties on record.
The massacre would have been lost to recorded history had it not been for the role data-collectors, report-smuggling priests, and fact-checking journalists played in producing a list of the dead, mounting a concerted effort to verify and then publicize the massacre, and engaging in a daring rendition of an eye-witness survivor. On July 10, 1973, 206 days after the event, they succeeded to place their story on the front page of The Times. Five days later, the Sunday Times’ Insight Team followed suit with an extensive background coverage of the affair.
The Caetano-led Portuguese regime denied the carnage with counter-narratives and protestors on hire. Nine months after the revelations, however, the Portuguese military ousted Caetano. The new regime acknowledged the veracity of The Times’ reports on Wiriyamu. By then, the United Nations had documented the event, publishing it in a report seven months after the coup, on November 22, 1974. That is how the Wiriyamu massacre happened, and how Wiriyamu the narrative, was revealed, denied, contested as recently as 2012 and reaffirmed in three scholarly texts.
Article
Antoinette Errante and Jessica Jorge
By the time António de Oliveira Salazar pressed for mass schooling to “make Portugal rise again” in the late 1930s, a variety of educational and socialization contexts existed in a loose and often contentious manner in Mozambique. Indigenous educational practices of African societies across the territory prepared the next generation to take their place within their communities. As Arabs established a commercial presence along Mozambique’s northern coast from the 9th century onward, Arabic literacy and adoption of the Arabic alphabet for written representation of Indigenous languages gave rise to a growing network of Qur’anic schools. In the 19th century, Protestant, Catholic, and lay mission schools as well as government schools joined these sites of learning.
Europe’s “scramble for Africa” intensified Portugal’s interest in “Portugalizing” colonial educational endeavors and marginalizing sites of learning it deemed a threat to this project. By 1930, Portugal established a dual educational system in Mozambique that supported the legal distinction it created between Portuguese and “assimilated” Africans (official schools, or escolas oficiais) and “Indigenous” Africans (rudimentary schools, or escolas rudimentares). In 1933, under the regime he christened the Estado Novo (New State), Salazar institutionalized the role of schools in his imperialist ambitions by applying the Carneiro-Pacheco educational reforms of 1936–1940 throughout the Portuguese colonial empire. The dual educational system as well as the legal distinction between “Portuguese” and “Indigenous” were designed to funnel most Africans into forced labor schemes from which the regime profited.
In 1940, the Estado Novo signed the Missionary Accord, which placed exclusive responsibility for rudimentary education with the Catholic Church in an effort to curb Indigenous, Protestant, and Islamic educational activities that the regime considered “denationalizing.” While the accord hampered expansion of Protestant schools, Portugal’s weak administrative capacities and support of Catholic missions as well as Mozambicans’ association of Catholicism with compulsory labor practices enabled Indigenous educational practices, Protestant missions, and Qur’anic schools to continue to exert influence.
By the early 1960s, groups pressing for decolonization coalesced around the Mozambican Liberation Front (FRELIMO, or Frente de Libertação de Moçambique). As FRELIMO liberated zones in the northern and central parts of the country, it established primary schools and literacy campaigns in an effort to create the cultural, social, and political transformation that liberated the “New Man” (Homem Novo) from a colonial mentality as well as what FRELIMO perceived to be obscurantist Indigenous and religious cultural traditions. FRELIMO established secondary schools and training centers in Tanzania to support the education of the very brightest.
FRELIMO generalized the educational model used in the liberated zones after Mozambique won its independence in 1975. While in the early years the country expanded the school network and raised literacy rates from 2 to 40 percent, the country’s educational legacy proved challenging. With the Portuguese exodus, the country lost 95 percent of its skilled workforce. The government’s attempts to rapidly train a teaching force sacrificed quality, and teachers did not have the training to impart the Marxist-Leninist pedagogy that FRELIMO had envisioned. Internal disputes and tensions as well as destabilization campaigns mounted by neighboring White minority governments, which gave rise to RENAMO (Resistencia Nacional de Mozambique), further eroded FRELIMO’s postrevolutionary gains.
In 1992, FRELIMO and RENAMO signed peace accords and moved toward a multiparty democracy. Since then, the education sector has focused on postwar reconstruction and democratization, improved teacher training, and improved retention rates for girls, the latter reflecting some of the ongoing conflicts between Indigenous educational practices and values, and mass schooling.
Article
Corinna Jentzsch
The history of independent Mozambique is a history of war and peace, and it is closely intertwined with the history of the main opposition movement Renamo (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana), which formed as an armed movement and transitioned into a political party. Mozambique gained independence from Portuguese colonial rule in 1975 after a ten-year liberation struggle. The main liberation movement Frelimo (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) became the ruling party and introduced far-reaching social, economic, and political reforms. These reforms generated discontent, which contributed to the formation of opposition movements in the center of the country. From the late 1970s onwards, an armed movement, later known as Renamo, gained ground in central Mozambique and fought a guerrilla war against the Mozambican government. Renamo received support from Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) and apartheid South Africa who sought to undermine Frelimo aid to liberation movements in their respective countries. It was only in 1992 that Renamo and Frelimo reached a settlement with the help of international mediators, with a path to multiparty elections in 1994. Since then, Renamo has participated in elections as a political party but has never won a majority in parliament nor was it able to claim the presidency. Political conflict between Frelimo and Renamo has never subsided, with Renamo regularly protesting election results and alleging fraud. Tensions escalated in 2013 and led to low-level conflict in the central region. A ceasefire agreement in 2014 and a unilateral truce by Renamo in December 2016 ended that conflict, but a peace accord was only struck after Afonso Dhlakama—president of Renamo—died of natural causes in 2018. Since then, tensions have remained due to armed activity by a Renamo breakaway movement and a slow demobilization process, and peace remains precarious. Renamo’s transition from an armed movement into a political movement, similarly to Mozambique’s transition from war to peace, has not yet fully materialized.
Article
Zachary Kagan Guthrie
Forced labor was central to the modern history of the Portuguese empire. It was widely imposed across Angola, Mozambique, São Tomé, and Guinea after the imposition of Portuguese colonial rule in the late 19th century and persisted within the Portuguese empire for decades after it had been abolished by other European powers. The brutal violence and far-reaching social disruption created by forced labor had a profound impact on colonized communities. It was one of the most important ways that individual subjects interacted with the Portuguese colonial state. Forced labor was also fundamental in structuring the economic, political, social, and ideological contours of the Portuguese empire: the colonial economy was deeply dependent on the exploitation facilitated by forced labor, and both the operations of the Portuguese colonial administration and the justification for its existence were closely intertwined with conscripting forced workers. Finally, the prevalence of forced labor in the Portuguese empire precipitated recurring international scandals, which did a great deal to define Portuguese colonialism in the eyes of the world. Studying forced labor has therefore become an important methodology for understanding the depredations of Portuguese colonial rule, its impact on the lives of the people it governed, and the economic and political organization of the Portuguese empire.
Article
Hilary Owen
Noémia de Sousa (1926–2002) is traditionally designated as the founding mother of Mozambican national poetry. She was the only woman poet in Mozambique to play a major role in shaping the cultural imaginary of the Portuguese African nationalisms that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s. Her early life as a woman of mixed African, European, and Goan racial heritage, and the education this racial status afforded her, drew her into writing and journalism in opposition to the colonial regime of the Portuguese New State. Her first and only poetry collection, Sangue Negro (Black blood), was completed and circulated clandestinely in 1951. She was subsequently exiled to Lisbon, and from there to Paris, returning to Portugal in 1973, shortly before the April 1974 Revolution. The contents of Sangue Negro were circulated, in the original and in translation, largely through specific selected poems in African nationalist anthologies. Divided into five sections, the poems of Sangue Negro mix oral and literary tropes and influences. They deal with issues of racial hybridity and colonial assimilation, African American and Pan-Africanist influences in Mozambique, Portuguese Neorealism and Marxist resistance, autobiographical memories and testimonies, and the specificity of women’s political voice. The literary establishment’s reception of de Sousa in 1960s Mozambique was generally dismissive. Her work was also afforded relatively minor status in foundational anglophone accounts of the Lusophone African canon, such as those by Russel Hamilton and Patrick Chabal. The Marxist sociologist critic, Alfredo Margarido was an important exception in this regard and an early champion of her work. In the 1990s, de Sousa was progressively validated and incorporated into the canonization of black, Pan-Africanist, and Negritudinist writers by critics such as Pires Laranjeira in Portugal. Since the 1990s she has received more in-depth, gender-informed attention in Mozambique, Portugal, Brazil, the United States, and the United Kingdom, consolidating her international status as a pioneering woman’s voice in Africa’s literary history of national liberation struggle. Her poetry collection Sangue Negro was reprinted by the Mozambican Writers’ Association (AEMO) in a new edition in 2001, for the first time since the 1951 original.
Article
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.
Article
David Morton
Maputo (Lourenço Marques until 1976) is the capital of Mozambique and one of the busiest port cities on the east coast of Africa. The Bay of Lourenço Marques had already been a source of ivory for the Indian Ocean world and Europe for centuries when, in the late 18th century, Portugal established a permanent garrison there, among the Mpfumo and other Xi-ronga-speaking clans. From 1898 until independence in 1975, the fort-turned-city was the administrative headquarters of Portugal’s territory of Mozambique, a home to many Portuguese settlers, and a stark example of racialized exploitation and urban segregation under colonial rule. It was also the principal transit hub for hundreds of thousands of southern Mozambican men recruited to labor in neighboring South Africa. Following independence, the city became a laboratory of revolutionary socialist experimentation as well as an overcrowded safe haven for refugees of Mozambique’s long and terrible civil war. Despite closer historical ties to South Africa than to most of Mozambique, Maputo is the country’s economic center and its gateway for foreign investment. According to 2017 census figures, the metropolitan population exceeded 2.5 million, making it one of the larger urban areas in southern Africa.
Article
Nuno Domingos
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the game of football has spread across the territories of the Portuguese colonial empire in Africa—Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe—quickly becoming part of the daily life of main colonial cities. It was introduced by Portuguese settlers and by individuals of other nationalities; in particular, members of the English business diaspora. Religious missions and schools as well as migrant individuals from trade and labor networks were all agents in the expansion of the game which, since the first decades of the century, has become integrated into the leisure practices of different imperial territories through the formation of clubs, associations, and tournaments. Sports associations were the most mobilizing form of its integration in the Portuguese colonial empire. This network became more extensive in colonies that were significantly urbanized, more populated, had more dynamic economies, and that had more settlers, who increasingly became fans of the game and followed competitions in the newspapers and on the radio. The institutionalization of the game incorporated the discriminatory structure of the Portuguese colonial system. The logic behind official sports policies created by the Estado Novo regime (1933–1974), which until the early 1960s did not include natives (indígenas), was thus applied. And yet, Africans soon took over the game, creating their own clubs and competitions. Resistance to Portuguese colonialism forced political changes, which resulted in a war fought on three different fronts, but also in a gradual abandonment of official policies of racial discrimination. In the colonial football sphere, this opening, combined with the development of a professional market, led to the movement of African players first to colonial clubs, and then to metropolitan clubs, and even to the national team. The fame and talent of these players, especially Eusébio da Silva Ferreira, ultimately helped in disseminating official government propaganda of a multiracial empire.
Article
Andrea Marzano, Marcelo Bittencourt, and Victor Melo
Only in the 21st century has sport become part of the research horizon in the history of the Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa. “Modern” sporting practices accompanied the colonial expansion process from the very beginning. In the second half of the 19th century, evidence can be found of sport in Portuguese colonial areas. This presence, to a certain extent premature, led to the transformation of different types of sports into proof of the level of civilization of the Africans practicing them. Sporting practice was thus part of the strategies some Africans used to demarcate themselves from the majority of natives in those regions. This minority of Africans sought to escape the different forms of compulsory labor in the region as a means to be recognized as civilized.
The expansion of Portuguese colonial domination was accompanied by the introduction of various sporting practices, justified by governmental authorities as a form of disciplining bodies, improving health conditions, and controlling workers’ free time. However, the colonial project for sport was appropriated and transformed by Africans. With the institutionalization of sport, the colonial powers sought to expand their control and domination, but in many cases they created resistance and new forms of social participation. In the post-World War II period, and especially from the 1950s onward, the increasing international distaste colonialism led Portuguese authorities, among other strategies, to attempt to use sport to attract the support of African populations.
Due to its popularity, sport can be understood as a “window” for understanding the historic process and social dynamics of the colonial period, as well as during the anticolonial struggle and postcolonial times in Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe.
Article
Pedro Aires Oliveira
The dissolution of Portugal’s African empire took place in the mid-1970s, a decade after the dismantling of similar imperial formations across Europe. Contrary to other European metropoles, Portuguese rulers were unwilling to meet the demands for self-determination in their dependencies, and thus mobilized considerable resources for a long, drawn-out conflict in Angola, Guinea, and Mozambique from 1961 to 1974. Several factors can explain Lisbon’s refusal to come to terms with the “winds of change” that had swept Africa since the late 1950s, from the belief of its decision-makers that Portugal lacked the means to conduct a successful “exit strategy” (akin to the “neocolonial” approach followed by the British, the French, or the Belgians), to the dictatorial nature of Salazar’s “New State,” which prevented a free and open debate on the costs of upholding an empire against the anti-colonial consensus that had prevailed in the United Nations since the early 1960s.
Taking advantage of its Cold War alliances (as well as secret pacts with Rhodesia and South Africa), Portugal was long able to accommodate the armed insurgencies that erupted in three of its colonies, thereby containing external pressures to decolonize. Through an approach that combined classic “divide and rule” tactics, schemes for population control, and developmental efforts, Portugal’s African empire was able to soldier on for longer than many observers expected. But this uncompromising stance came with a price: the armed forces’ dissatisfaction with a stalemate that had no end in sight. In April 1974, a military coup d’etat put an end to five decades of authoritarianism in the metropole and cleared the way for transfer of power arrangements in the five lusophone African territories. The outcome, though, would be an extremely disorderly transition, in which the political inexperience of the new elites in Lisbon, the die-hard attitude of groups of white settlers, the divisions among the African nationalists, and the meddling of foreign powers all played critical roles.
Article
Emmanuel Sithole
Ndau people (popularly identified as VaNdau) possess a rich but largely under-recorded history. Notwithstanding that the etymology of “Ndau” as a collective ethnic term is the subject for much debate, some documental archives suggest that the ancestors of Ndau people arrived in a series of migrations and settled in the areas between the Pungwe and Save rivers during the early centuries. The existing archaeological and historical evidence attests that there were interethnic and interracial contact between “Mandowa” (local Indigenous people) and Swahili and Muslim merchants at Sofala Bay during the 8th century. They had trade networks that were developed several centuries before Portuguese traders’ arrival, settlement, and control of the trading of gold, ivory, and, much later, slaves in that part of the East African region. Early Portuguese explorers and writers, some of whom had intermarried with Mandowa women, realized that VaNdau had developed political, linguistic, social, and cultural identities in the 16th century. As reported in early Portuguese literature, VaNdau shared kinship ties, similar social and cultural beliefs, and spoke the same language (albeit with several regional varieties) that helped in the negotiation and assertion of a collective sense of Ndauness across centuries. Ndau identity became even more asserted and concretized during the 19th century when VaNdau were exposed to extreme persecution at the hands of their Gaza Nguni conquerors. Forced conscription of VaNdau into Gaza Nguni social and military ranks, however, resulted in a renegotiation of the nature and meaning of an Ndau identity. Interethnic marriage with Gaza Nguni warriors culminated in the emergence of a dual Ndau and Gaza identity represented by a permanent accommodation of Gaza Nguni clan names, among other cultural and linguistic elements among VaNdau in the late 19th century. Meanwhile, White colonial and missionary (mainly American Board Mission) activity exerted significant influence on the cultural, social, religious, and political aspects of Ndau society in the 20th century. Colonial and postindependent policies in education, media, and the greater society encouraged the assimilation of Ndau people into a newly created linguistic Shona identity in Zimbabwe. From 1931, young Ndau speakers began to gradually accept Shona as their primary identity. However, Ndau’s constitutional recognition as a separate official language in 2013 contributed toward the reclamation of the ChiNdau identity in Zimbabwe, especially across virtual platforms such as Facebook and other social networking sites. Thousands of Ndau-speaking people converge on virtual platforms such as Rekete Chindau—Leave a Legacy to reassert and reshape their identity through speaking and writing about it in Zimbabwe.
Article
Corrado Tornimbeni
Nationalism in Mozambique was characterized by a plurality of leaders who competed for influence both within and outside the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO). Each of them tried to gain political support at a continental and international level, and, eventually, the leadership that rose to power within FRELIMO by the end of the 1960s and early 1970s prevailed over other components of Mozambican nationalism both on the field of the liberation war and at the diplomatic level. This leadership was highly cosmopolitan and implemented a vibrant diplomacy within the mechanisms of the Cold War worldwide.
FRELIMO was supported by newly independent African governments that were active in promoting the independence of African people in countries still under colonial rule (e.g., Tanzania, Algeria, Zambia), and then by governments from the Eastern bloc of the Cold War as well as by solidarity committees in the West (e.g., United States, Sweden and Nordic countries, United Kingdom, Italy). Within these contexts, FRELIMO secured a key political legitimacy as the genuine liberation movement of Mozambique, joined by other movements of the Portuguese colonies, South Africa, Namibia, and Southern Rhodesia—and opposed by a rival group of liberation movements from those countries. This status was also recognized among such important international organizations as Conferência das Organizações Nacionalistas das Colónias Portuguesas (CONCP), Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO), World Peace Council (WPC), Organisation of African Unity (OAU), and, eventually, the UN. Probably, the networks of solidarity with FRELIMO that developed in the West played a key role in the defeat of the Portuguese regime and in establishing the independence of Mozambique, since a number of Western European countries were formally allied with Portugal within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance.
Article
Bill Freund
This paper concerns the long-term evolution of labor in East Africa up to the twenty-first century. While it considers the classic themes of labor history, trade unions, strikes and politics, it is concerned with the broader question of how people relate to their environment, how their work is organized and what the economic consequences are. Taking 1500 as a bottom line, it proceeds to look at changes before and with the coming of imperialism and colonialism and the contradictions of colonial labor policy. It also considers how labor conditions have altered since independence. Mau Mau in Kenya and the institution of villagization in Tanzania, which both shed a light on labor conditions, receive particular attention. Since the majority of the population even in the twenty-first century are rural dwellers, there is much concern with agricultural and pastoral activities. If the greatest concentration is on Tanzania and Kenya, East Africa is defined broadly in part for purposes of comparison.
