Mozambique's Colonial Roots

A couple of days before our departure, I was handed a book written by William Finnegan called A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique. It was given to me by a member of OMS’ board of directors – he was given it as a Father’s Day present this year, but thought my need for it was more pressing than his own.

It has proven to be an insightful account of Mozambique’s history, so I thought that I'd share some of it with you to provide a brief glimpse into the country that Laura and I will call home for the next 11 months or so.

Mozambique was, for many centuries until 1974, a colony of Portugal. To this day, it is strongly influenced – both positively and negatively – by this heritage. Finnegan writes:

The fact that some people scarcely realize they live in a country called Mozambique is, in light of the region’s colonial experience, unsurprising. Portugal, which declared the place an administrative unit to begin with, never had the wherewithal to turn it into anything of the kind.

The thought of living within a country’s boundaries without knowing anything of its governance – or even of the existence of a higher order of governance beyond one's own village – is astounding to me.

Throughout centuries of colonial rule, Mozambique was plundered for its gold, its ivory, and – most devastatingly – its labour:

In the nineteenth century, [the major international trade] was in slaves. Powerful slave-raiding states grew up, and the entire northern half of Mozambique was impoverished and almost depopulated as more than a million people were captured, sold, and shipped to Brazil, the United States, and the Caribbean islands.

Many of those who were fortunate enough to not have been kidnapped and sold into slavery were unable to benefit from their own labour nonetheless:

The South Africans agreed to pay part of the wages of Mozambican mineworkers directly to the Portuguese in gold. Since an average of 80,000 Mozambicans were working legally in the mines after 1910, these remittances became the mainstay of the colonial government’s budget.

This is Mozambique’s sad history of abuse, even before the nearly 30 years of war are taken into account (from 1964 to 1992 -- see The Scars Must Be Deep). As one BBC correspondent noted, “Mozambique is one of the poorest countries in Africa not because it lacks natural resources, nor because Portugal left it undeveloped, but rather because Portugal actively underdeveloped it.”

I’m hoping to hear stories from those who have actually lived some of the more recent of the country’s fascinating history to see glimpses of how it impacts their present lives.

All quotations are from William Finnegan, A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).