Portugal’s sovereignty over the territory became clearer. The definition of borders, traced during the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and ratified in 1891, was a result of the balance of power that emerged out of the conflicts between the main colonial actors. Portugal’s role in this new stage of colonial expansion was inevitably hampered by its structural condition. During the 1890s, unable to effectively set up a local administrative apparatus, it surrendered a great deal of the Mozambican territory to large foreign capital companies (companhias majestáticas). Controlling native labor became the main colonial goal, something that was in line with a history of occupation that had been sustained by the commercialization and exploitation of slave labor.12 A succession of labor codes (1892, 1899, 1911, and 1914) categorized the types of work to which Africans were subjected: forced, voluntary, correctional, due to vagrancy, due to law infringement. “Native” labor was regulated by institutions such as the Intendência dos Negócios Indígenas e Emigração (Superintendency of Native and Emigration Affairs), which worked in liaison with the governor general from 1903 onward and would, in 1907, become the Secretaria dos Negócios Indígenas (Office of Native Affairs). A disciplinary control model flourished, enacted by laws imposing IDs, as well as residency, labor, and travel permits, upon native people.13 Failure to abide by these procedures brought the imposition of forced-labor regimes, locally known as chibalo.14 Chibalo sustained not only state initiatives but also private enterprises, both of which benefited from the political and economic protection of the power structure. These means of recruitment were used to engage factory workers as well as the great mass of domestic servants that worked in the city center. High-ranking colonizers soon criticized the large number of male African domestic servants in Lourenço Marques as a sign of economic underdevelopment, which demonstrated the Portuguese incapacity to exploit the African working force in a rational manner.15
FIGURE 2.1 Gorjão wharf and railway lines, Lourenço Marques. The photo provides evidence of the economic role that the city had in the regional economy, led by the industrial development of South Africa. Photos mainly by H. Graumann and I. Piedade Pó, void of copyright as collective work. Scan of original book from Memórias d’África e d’Oriente, Aveiro University. Source: Wikimedia.
Beginning in the 1870s, criticism directed against Portuguese liberal legislation’s16 notion of egalitarian assimilation reflected the need for the domination stage to come to be framed by new ideological, political, and legislative instruments. Based on a set of social-Darwinist principles, the control and categorization of the native population changed the indefinite category of selvagem (savage) to the more manageable indígena (native).17 The “civilizing mission,” which ideologically justified Portugal’s presence in Africa, was based on a set of laws that distinguished the rights and duties of the indígenas from those of the “civilized.” Portugal’s colonial regime also admitted the existence of a third category of individuals, known as assimilados (assimilated), those who, having proven their adaptation to European civilization and “Portuguese culture,” began to enjoy the rights of the “civilized.” In Mozambique the first law that defined who would be classified as an indígena was published in 1894 and aimed to regulate the application of penalties of compulsory labor in public works.18 In 1909 a decree regulating land concessions introduced the “color variable,” meaning nonwhite, as a feature of the definition of indígena.19 In 1917 an edict by Mozambique’s governor general passed into law the distinction between indígena (native), não indígena (nonnative), and assimilado (assimilated).20 This edict established the prerequisites to obtain a document (alvará do assimilado) that would serve as proof of a new status. A less rigid version of this law was approved in 1927.21 Until 1961 the administrative management of the Lourenço Marques suburbs fell upon the traditional administrative authorities, divided into four hereditary ruling councils, turned into regedorias: São José (which included the areas of São José, Chamanculo, and Malanga), Munhuana (Munhuana and Zixaxa), Fumo (Fumo, Polana, Mavalane, Chitimela, and Infulene), and Malhangalene (Malhangalene, Mafalala, and Lagoas).
Portugal’s colonial system, reliant on a supposedly evolutionist conception, did little to create the economic, educational, and social conditions that would make “assimilation” possible.22 The failure of the educational system in Mozambique, which served mostly as a rhetorical trope,23 contrasted with the permanence of a colonial practice focused on the reproduction of a cheap working force. In Lourenço Marques, the social segmentation excluded indígenas from accessing cultural activities in the city; more broadly, it excluded them from any citizenship model set out by the colonial state.24 The Portuguese colonial policy delineated from the late nineteenth century onward, exacerbating nationalistic and racist conceptions, endangered the position of the local petite bourgeoisie,25 composed mostly of mestiços, who had achieved important positions within public administration and in commercial circuits from the beginning of the nineteenth century.26 Facing greater colonial repression and stronger professional competition following the growing numbers of settlers, members of this petite bourgeoisie developed a political and social protest dynamic, assuming the defense of the rights of indígenas. The Grémio Africano de Lourenço Marques (GALM), created in 1908, became the institutionalized center of these protests; its basic principles were spelled out in publications such as O africano (est. 1908) and O brado africano (est. 1918). The group around the GALM, educated and culturally identified with European colonial society, had an active role in denouncing colonial abuses, thus fighting for citizens’ right to equality, especially indígena people’s access to education and the Portuguese language as crucial instruments for their social mobility.27 Embracing the “African” cause, and influenced by the international Pan-Africanist movement, by metropolitan political associations, and by the South African political process, the GALM was very active until 1926.28 This protest was made not along anticolonial lines but rather in the name of a more humane and modern economic colonialism in which, for instance, African labor would be better handled—housed in organized compounds and in well-designed suburban neighborhoods, protected from the harm caused by wine made easily available by the metropolitan producers—instead of being used in the development of South Africa’s mining industry. As the colonial system became more repressive, a certain African elite was able to confront the colonial administration’s policies in an increasingly euphemistic register, which in many instances took on an integrationist slant (e.g., “we also deserve to be part of the Portuguese nation”).
The military dictatorship established in Portugal in 1926, which gave way in 1933 to the Estado Novo regime led by António de Oliveira Salazar (r. 1932–68), set about updating the previous legal framework of domination. Even before the military coup of May 28, 1926, João Belo’s government issued the Estatuto Político, Civil e Criminal dos Indígenas de Angola e Mozambique (Political, Civil, and Criminal Statute of Angolan and Mozambican Natives), the original basis for the indigenato system,29 fine-tuned in 1929, when the Estatuto Político, Civil e Criminal dos Indígenas (Native’s Political, Civil, and Criminal Statute) was approved. According to these statutes, civilizational status of the indígenas did not entitle them to constitutional rights, and they were thus subjected to a specific legal regime, based on their custom and usage, which the colonial administration would formalize. Portugal promised to gradually integrate indígenas through work and education. The diplomas they earned would complement the basic laws that defined the place occupied by the colonies within the Portuguese nation. The 1930 Acto Colonial (Colonial Act), as well as the 1933 Carta Orgânica do Império Colonial Português (Organic Charter of Portugal’s Colonial Empire), alongside the Reforma Administrativa Ultramarina (Overseas Administrative Reform), set up the centralizing policy imposed by the Portuguese state on its colonial domains. In 1928, reacting to the international pressure that arose after the publication of the Ross Report, in 1925, denouncing the continuation of compulsory forms of labor regimes in Portuguese colonial territories, the government approved the Código de Trabalho dos Indígenas das Colónias Portuguesas de África (Portuguese African Colonies’ Native Labor Code), which excluded forced labor.30 However, various exception clauses foresaw