Slavery by Any Other Name: African Life under Company Rule in Colonial Mozambique

8. Upward Mobility: “Improvement of One’s Social Condition”

158 Upward Mobility “Improvement of One’s Social Condition” T HE IMPRINT OF SALAZARISMO, THE NAME BY WHICH dictator António Salazar’s ruling ideology became known, was evident as early as 1930, when he added the post of minister of the colonies to his powerful primary role as minister of finance. The Colonial Act of that year, the foundational document for his management of the empire, asserted that part of the “organic essence of the Portuguese nation in fulfilling its historic role is to occupy and colonize overseas domains and to civilize the populations there, exercising as well the moral influence to which it is linked by the inheritance of the East.” For Salazar’s Portugal, civilizing Africans and exerting a “moral influence” were intimately linked to the trinity of “God, country, work” to which all of its subjects were bound. Portugal, along with the rest of Europe’s colonial powers, was preparing to strut at the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris, due to open in 1931. Planning began in Portugal and throughout Mozambique several years earlier, so that exhibits of the colony’s agricultural, industrial, and engineering accomplishments “might correspond to the grandeur of its resources,” as the governor-general put it in 1928. Mozambique’s planners were charged to present to the pan-European and worldwide audience the state of the “physical, moral, intellectual, and social development of the natives.” In the Mozambique Company’s territory, from the governor down to the lowest district secretary, officials strove to fulfill Lisbon’s call for “a complete demonstration of the civilizing work, both past and in progress .” 8 Upward Mobility 159 To accompany its exhibits in Paris, the company sent a slim pamphlet on the territory’s history, tellingly subtitled Conquest and Occupation, closing with a declaration of Portugal’s “Accomplishment of a Historic Obligation.” In the four centuries since Portugal had reached the East African coast, so the pamphlet boasted, no enemy—neither the “unhealthy climate” nor the “rebellious and bloodthirsty nature” of the region’s inhabitants—had kept the Portuguese from maintaining their place. “Recalling the glory and the sacrifices of past generations , the Portuguese now, possessed by the spirit of the times and aware of their responsibilities, search without cease to fulfill a mission born of civilization.” The development of Manica and Sofala, “undertaken for the most part during the last thirty years, is irrefutable proof that Portugal has not forgotten the obligations imposed by its history.” António Cardoso de Serpa, as director of native affairs, drafted the company’s monograph on “native policy,” one of a dozen short publications sent to Paris to accompany scale models, agricultural samples, and art work from the territory. In it, he wrote that “the conditions of native life in the Territory are the most fortunate and favorable to the progress of the indigenous population. The company had progressively established complete control over all the territory, liberating the natives from the raiding, internecine warring, and atrocities practiced under the absolutist rule of the original native authorities, conditions which had been for centuries the normal state of human existence throughout Africa.” Company policy, based on “modern colonial science,” aimed to improve the “material and moral conditions of native life, bringing them to evolve within the limits of their rudimentary civilization, so that they might gradually and smoothly bring about the transformation of their particular customs and practices.” Africans thus “transformed”—who could speak, read, and write Portuguese; who ate with cutlery at a table; and who dressed in Western clothing and slept on a mattress—were “considered assimilados [assimilated] and, as such, were subject to the same laws and regulations as those in place for Europeans.” Cardoso de Serpa described company policy as one of “cooperation,” most especially with those Africans who by “example and customs distinguish themselves from the rest of the black race.” Education and the “Fuel of Social Evolution” In 1926, when the company sensed incipient international criticism of colonial forced labor practices and abandoned its labor recruitment monopoly, it abolished its native labor department and reallocated its functions. Henceforth, district officials were to recruit workers to meet the company’s labor needs; a new 160 Slavery by Any Other Name private labor association would attend to private employers’ demands. The labor department had collected demographic and other data on the African population ; now, this and other work were delegated to the company’s new...