Pre-flight background

The history of Mozambique is the subject of many scholarly works, and is very complex. Two of the many themes which can be identified in these histories, and which are considered relevant in providing a brief historical context for contemporary patterns of flight from and return to Mozambique, are migration and geographical differentiation. Attention here is particularly focused upon the Province of Niassa (Figure 5.1.), which was the Province of origin of the vast majority of my respondents, and the above comments notwithstanding, it is worth noting that this particular province is virtually unstudied.

Since the 18th Century, by which period the Portuguese had gained sufficient military control in Mozambique to control trade, the populations of Mozambique have been subject to numerous waves of migration, both forced and voluntary and internal and external. Perhaps the first recorded of such migrations were those related with the slave trade. By the turn of the 19th Century higher profits were to be made from the expanding slave trade in Eastern Africa than from ivory and gold which had previously dominated trade in Portuguese Mozambique (Kibreab, 1985). It is estimated that by the 1820’s, some 30,000 slaves per year were being exported from Mozambique (Alpen, 1982). By

F igure 5.1 A P ro v in c ia l M ap of M o z a m b iq u e km 400 miles _{2 5 0} T A N Z A N IA CABO DELGADO NIASSA M A L A W I / 1 Z A M B I A NAMPULA TETE ! j ZAMBEZIA SOFALA Z IM B A B W E MANICA I M o z a m b i q u e C h a n n e l INHAMBANE GAZA S O U T H A F R IC A Maputo: iM A B U T O :

the end of the century British anti-slavery patrols had succeeded in reducing the slave trade significantly. With fewer slaves and less exports from ivory, trade in Mozambique shifted to agricultural products.

However, the Portuguese had capital sufficient only to exploit Mozambique at a minimal level, and as a result leased land and people in Mozambique to foreign capitalists. By 1891 one-third of the country was leased to two chartered companies; the Mozambique Company took present-day Manica and Sofala Provinces, while the Niassa Company leased Niassa and Cabo Delgado (Vail and White, 1980). Forced labour was introduced, along with a head tax. These highly unpopular regulations created two waves of migration: firstly, the chartered companies re-located workers within their huge chartered areas (Vail and White, 1978); secondly, many Mozambicans escaped to Malawi (White, 1989). The advent of the chartered companies also coincided with the appearance of large-scale mining in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. By the time Salazar came to power in Portugal in 1926, some 500,000 Mozambicans were working outside the country (First, 1983).

Salazar tried to make more effective use of Portugal’s colonies. The Niassa Company charter was not renewed in 1928, and prazos (land grants) were ended in 1930. However with 500,000 men working abroad, and weak Portuguese capital demanding more cheap labour, the only alternative was to increase the exploitation of labour. The new forced labour scheme (chibalo), saw huge proportions of the remaining population relocated to work on plantations or infrastructural projects (da Silva, 1992). Portugal’s exploitation continued throughout their presence as colonial power, and it was against this backcloth that FRELIMO was founded in 1962.

Between 1964, when FRELIMO launched its initial forays into Mozambique, until 25 June 1975 when Independence was won, uncounted thousands of Mozambicans fled, to Malawi and Tanzania, as refugees from the war. Population relocation also continued under FRELIMO rule, even before the contemporary flight. One cause was FRELIMO’s villagisation programme. This programme emerged from a socialist doctrine which saw communal villages as the backbone of rural development and involved concentrating the dispersed rural population in to communal settlements. Since Independence, 1350

communal villages have been created, involving 1.8 million inhabitants, or 14% of the total population (Hanlon, 1990). A second cause was FRELIMO's ’re-education camps’. These were basically detention centres for political opponents rounded up principally in the urban centres. Estimates of detainees in these camps vary wildly, from 10,000 to 300,000 (Finnegan, 1992).

The impact of all of these historical trends has varied across Mozambique. Only between 1941 and 1974 was Mozambique governed by the Portuguese as a single administrative unit with a national economy; and since 1975 FRELIMO have never had the capital, infrastructure or ’breathing-space’ to apply their policies nationwide.

Patterns of migration have played an important role in shaping the characteristics of economy and society in Niassa Province. Slave traders found an ally in the dominant Yao tribe. Between them, they largely de-populated present day Niassa and Cabo Delgado Provinces (Finnegan, 1992). Many Yao themselves then fled to Malawi when confronted with the forced labour regulations and head tax imposed by the Niassa Company (Boeder, 1984). Indeed, the absolute shortage of population available for exploitation by the Niassa Company is in part explanation for the demise of its charter 13 years before that of the charter of the Mozambique Company. Under Salazar, Niassa and Cabo Delgado were basically ignored, and left to become economic backwaters. Indeed responsibility for education and health in northern Niassa was assumed by the Anglican mission in Messumba and the Roman Catholic mission j n Cobue (Paul, 1975).

FRELIMO began its assault on Mozambique from bases in Tanzania, and thus had arrived in the two northern provinces of Niassa and Cabo Delgado by 1965 (Paul, 1975), and by 1966 was describing the provinces as ’liberated areas’ (Museveni, 1972). This description is probably a misnomer: Paul (1975) provided eye-witness accounts of atrocities committed by both FRELIMO and Portuguese troops between 1964 and 1967. By July 1965 the whole of northern Niassa was deserted, the population having fled to Malawi and Tanzania. Thus flight from Niassa to Malawi was not a new phenomenon in recent decades.

considered a function of the weakness of FRELIMO (O’Meara, 1991; Saul, 1991; Wuyts, 1985; Young, 1988), compounded of course by the war, in the northern provinces underdevelopment has largely been a result of their marginalisation by FRELIMO^ They are the provinces most untouched by economic restructuring under the Ten-Year Plan and Economic Recovery programme: there has been no new infrastructure built there since Independence, and high profile social policies such as health care and the ’emancipation’ of women (Kruks and Wisner, 1984) have similarly hardly been introduced. In some areas in Niassa FRELIMO has imposed superficial changes upon the social organisation of communities, electing its own village chairmen to replace traditional village chiefs, nevertheless the population of the Province remains largely non-politicised. Perhaps the only significant impact which FRELIMO did have was the creation of one of Mozambique’s largest ’re-education camps’ (as well as several others) in Niassa.

Nevertheless, the population of Niassa was largely rural, with people inhabiting the following typology of villages: traditional villages; communal villages created to house workers on state farms; villages built to house repatriates from Tanzania and Malawi who returned after Independence; converted ’aldeamentos’ (fortified villages created by the Portuguese to keep peasants away from the influence of FRELIMO); ’re-education camps’, and the Messumba mission at Cobue, which covered some 35 hectares during the 1960 s, and was described by visitors as a town (Paul, 1975).

The vast majority of villages had no more than 100 houses (perhaps 500 people). The economy was almost entirely subsistence, although surplus was sold in local District Centres, or to AGRICOM, the state marketing corporation. Some were administered by traditional chiefs, some by FRELIMO’s village chairmen, and in some both existed. Where the latter occurred, the role of the chief was traditional, for example to oversee ceremonies and settle local disputes, and the role of the chairman was official, for example to collect taxes. This administrative system was greatly complicated by the relationships and division of responsibility between sub-chiefs, local chiefs and paramount chiefs.

* There is no documentation o f the impact o f FRELIMO’s post-Independence policies in Niassa available, and so the follow ing brief summary is based upon my own observations and interviews with refugees in Malawi and in Mozambique.