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Land Expropriation

Elaine A. Frielander

• City University of New York

“Mozambican Nationalist Resistance: 1920–1949.” Civilisations (Belgium) 3 (1977): 332–344.

Mozambique, one of Portugal's former African colonies, illustrates how foreign state imperialism intertwined with the indigenous state ruling elite, to economically subjugate a native population.

In Mozambique, nationalist resistance had a long history before the founding of FRELIMO in 1960. Particularly revealing is the period of Mozambican nationalist struggle from 1920 through the 1940s. During these years the ruling class of European settlers suppressed all nationalist challenges to the colonial system. The ruling class promoted dissension within the movement and censored the nationalist press. To control natives, the state achieved a pattern of oppression that linked a politics of native disenfranchisement with economic regulation and land expropriation.

For many years prior to 1935, the colonial government in Mozambique enjoyed virtual self-rule without interference from the Portuguese metropolitan government. The colonial government, however, was a government by and for the European settler population which deprived virtually the entire native population of their political rights.

This governmental political oppression rapidly translated itself into economic exploitation. One example is the “shibalo”—essentially a system of slave labor—a system which conscripted blacks, officially classified as idle, to work as the government directed for six months of the year with little or no compensation. This system was a major source of the cheap labor which was necessary to maintain the profitability of the European-owned plantations.

Another aspect of the economic exploitation of the native population derived from Mozambique's relationship with South Africa. Southern Mozambique was a major source of cheap labor for the mining industry of the Transvaal, and was the major transit route connecting Transvaal to the sea. The Rand Mines paid the Mozambican government in gold for its laborers. On returning to Mozambique, native laborers were paid in less valuable Portuguese escudos from which their hut tax had been subtracted. This hut tax and other revenues derived from the Transvaal trade were the major economic resources of the colonial government. Compulsory payment of the hut tax thus subsidized the European settlers' expropriation of native lands. The process, in turn, had created the class dependent upon migrant labor in the Transvaal by destroying their economic position in their own native land.

After 1935, the metropolitan government exercised tighter control over colonial affairs, but this served only to reinforce the policies that promoted the settler interests. From 1920 to 1949, native opposition to these policies was expressed in legal channels: demands for political rights for blacks and for equality before the law. Increasingly fierce repression of these movements forced them to disband or to stifle their political demands. By the late forties all overt expressions of opposition had been restricted to artistic and cultural channels.