Elusive Histories
Mozambican Migrant Laborers in Rhodesia, ca. 1900–1980
Allen F Isaacman author Barbara S Isaacman author Joy M Chadya author
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Ohio University Press
Publishing:14th Jan '25
£74.00
This title is due to be published on 14th January, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
A social history of twentieth-century Mozambican migrant laborers in Rhodesia.
Making visible the hundreds of thousands of Mozambican men and women who made their lives in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Elusive Histories offers rich insights into the social history of labor migration and the experience of racism, and it rebukes the idea that arbitrary borders determine where and how a person belongs.
At the heart of Elusive Histories is a long-neglected story of the clandestine journeys of Mozambican migrant laborers and their families to Rhodesia. Drawing from oral histories, court records, archives, newspapers, and popular magazines, the authors chronicle Mozambican migration, work experiences, and settlement in Rhodesia. Thousands of men, women, and children traveled long distances, often on foot, to reach Rhodesia. Starting with a trickle of workers seeking to avoid chibharo, a Mozambican agricultural forced-labor system, the number of migrants peaked in the 1950s.
In 1958, the Rhodesian government passed legislation to bar new Mozambican migrants from entering large cities, redirecting them toward agriculture and mining. When Black Rhodesian laborers began to complain about losing jobs to Mozambicans, the restrictions became an outright ban to prevent further migrants from entering the country.
Contrary to previous assumptions, Mozambican labor in Rhodesia was not contract labor derived from bilateral negotiations between the Mozambican colonial and Rhodesian governments. In fact, many Mozambicans who came to work and live in Rhodesia arrived as illegal migrants. The book also demystifies the widely held notion that all foreign migrant workers in Rhodesia who spoke Nyanja were Nyasalanders. Because Nyanja is widely spoken at the confluence of Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique, many Mozambicans who came to work in Rhodesia were fluent. Despite the national, racial, and cultural differences and the discrimination in job placement, promotion, and housing, Mozambican migrant laborers creatively adapted and made Rhodesia home for the duration of their lives.
A profound, sensitive examination of an overlooked corner of southern African history, Elusive Histories comprehensively redraws spatial and conceptual boundaries of southern African labor migration. Mozambican migrants’ multifaceted lives shine through obstacles of colonial racism, dangers of the bush, oppressive working conditions, and xenophobia endured in colonial Rhodesia. Once again, these authors light the way forward in African social history.
-- Teresa Barnes, author of Uprooting University Apartheid in South Africa: From Liberalism to DecolonizationIn this fascinating untold story of African agency, migrants from colonial Mozambique crossed the Zimbabwe border clandestinely, exchanging the harsh forced labor regime in Mozambique for low-wage jobs on the farms and in the mines of Zimbabwe. Based on colonial-era written records and new oral accounts, Elusive Histories sheds light on the motives and actions of historical actors who have often been cast as victims.
-- Elizabeth Schmidt, author of Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870-1939The story of Mozambican migrant workers in Rhodesia has seldom been told, despite the significant shared national boundary and mutual histories, marked by kin and ethnic connections and ongoing border crossings. The accounts told here rectify that gap by discussing the hardships of migration, menial labor, harsh living conditions, and racism, while relating how those workers built new lives, families, and communities.
-- Kathleen Sheldon, author of Pounders of Grain: A History of Women, Work, and Politics in MozambISBN: 9780821425749
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
300 pages