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139 An “Absolute Freedom” Circumscribed and Circumvented “Employers Chosen of Their Own Free Will” A NY AFRICAN MAN BET WEEN FIFTEEN AND SI XT Y could, by law, avoid the Mozambique Company’s forced labor roundups if he found work on his own, practiced a recognized profession (for example , as a teacher or tailor), or cultivated land of a specified minimum area. Many men and older boys struggled to exercise their paper right to choose how to assign their labor power by finding wage work on their own terms before the press gangs arrived. But though the regulations of the Portuguese colonial ministry and the company governor declared that Africans had the “absolute freedom” to choose how to fulfill the legal obligation to work, the company forced Africans to exercise that “freedom” of choice. First declared in its 1899 labor code, the right was restated by Portugal in its final colonial labor code of 1928: the law did not “release them from meeting the moral obligation to work.” Though the decree acknowledged the “unity of the nature, origins, and ends of all human beings,” it did not implement it. No unemployed white man in the colonies was rounded up and marched off in a press gang. The Territory’s Voluntários: Finding “an Employer That Suits” Because colonial rulers, in general, and the Mozambique Company, in particular, assumed that Africans would not work in the absence of coercion, they employed administrative machinery backed up by violence or menace to round up the necessary workers, often to undertake tasks white farmers failed to or were unable 7 140 Slavery by Any Other Name to handle on their own. A truly free choice of employers would have meant that the company, many settlers, and other white colonists would have had to manage without captive labor. João de Oliveira Amaral, Manica’s secretary for native affairs in 1902, complained of the tactics some Africans devised to avoid long terms of service under the company’s control. Amaral considered the people of Manica “the worst of the Territory,” because they would take a job (and avoid the roundup), then leave the post to switch to another job every week or so. “A white proceeds to train a given black for seven days and on the eighth is left without him. I have done all I can to keep the Manicas for the length of the contract, but I am convinced that nothing can be done with that race of people.” A successor to Amaral in Manica, António Cardoso de Serpa, who shared Amaral’s contempt, wrote in 1921, “The so-called voluntary natives do not engage in regular work.” Cardoso de Serpa elaborated: “In fact there is a large number of natives who, when recruitment occurs in the districts, go find work as volunt ários to avoid the contract and then, once the period of recruitment has ended, continue their devotion to vagrancy.” After service as district administrator in Manica, Cardoso de Serpa served a brief stint as secretary general in 1921, in that post reading correspondence from fellow administrators throughout the territory . “Many of these voluntários constantly go about changing their residence and their employer,” he wrote, “and as soon as they face urgent work that requires a sustained effort, they move on elsewhere to find easier work or better pay.” If some, even most, white administrators saw laziness and mendacity, Africans themselves may have seen logic and strategy in their behavior. One company administrator who understood Africans’ decisions more astutely than any other in the available records was the long-serving and self-confessed “negrophile” in Moribane, José Luiz Ferreira. Ferreira’s comparative isolation in a backwater post, overseeing one of the company’s undeclared labor reserves, may have given him clearer insight than that of most of his counterparts. His district bordered Manica and Chimoio, making it a default supplier of labor conscripts for the mines and the maize farms, but, abutting Southern Rhodesia and the territory’s southern districts, the district fell within the arc of South African mine recruiters’ travels, thus providing an important work option that could save Africans from the company’s own “recruitment.” When the company raised the annual term of the forced labor contract from six months to a full year, Ferreira, in 1920, wrote to Cardoso de Serpa, then district administrator in Manica, explaining the African perspective. They could see that “to be contracted pays little, and even this little in...

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