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Preface
- University of Virginia Press
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vii Preface Teaching English in western Kenya more than twenty years ago, I encountered for the first time a hundred-year old belief about race and work in Africa. Michael Lubale, a seventeen-year-old Kenyan, showing me the building site for his future house, explained that he would soon reach the age to move out of the dwelling he shared with his younger brothers and into his own on the family compound. I offered to lend a hand in construction, and with a mischievous smile, Michael looked at me and asked, “Can mzungu dig?” I soon learned that, notwithstanding the smile he flashed, his question was a sober one, for I lacked the knowledge and ability to engage competently in many tasks that might be called “unskilled” labor, including the vital matter of hauling water. I still like to think Michael’s question reflected his general beliefs of wazungu (Kiswahili for non-Africans or, sometimes, whites in particular), rather than a specific assessment of my capabilities . Since then, as the focus of my scholarly work shifted from the present to the past, I have come to understand how attitude as much as ability figures in the history of work in twentieth-century colonial Africa. Europeans believed, or at least claimed to believe, that physical labor in tropical climes was beyond their capacity, one justification for having Africans take on, almost in its entirety, the physical task of transforming the continent into an outpost of empire. Over the past twenty years I have continued to observe Africans’ skepticism, sometimes well founded, about whites’ capacity for manual labor. I hope the story told here goes a little way toward answering Michael’s question. viii Preface I could not have learned this story or written this book without the extensive documentation from the Mozambique Company’s long-lost archives, held in Maputo at the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique. The company archives— generated by the private chartered company that governed the central Mozambican provinces of Manica and Sofala with near sovereign authority from 1892 to 1942—countless stacks of files with millions of pages, documenting Portugal’s initial conquest, its policies, and its mundane daily operations, spent the decades after 1942 in a mysterious limbo. When the company’s charter ended that year, the archives were packed into zinc-lined wooden crates and stored in a warehouse at the Indian Ocean port of Beira to await the sea voyage to Portugal. For reasons unknown, the crates remained in that port warehouse for the next thirtyfive years, lost and, mostly, forgotten. Mostly forgotten, but not entirely. In 1969, Alexandre Lobato, a historian of the colonial period and director of the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique, journeyed to Beira from the colony’s southern capital in search of information on the missing archives’ passage to Portugal. The company ’s Lisbon administration claimed never to have received the wooden crates. When Lobato searched the old customs registers for the name of the ship on which the crates were to have sailed, he discovered that some company crates, contents unspecified, had remained in a Beira warehouse for a number of years before removal to another location. The site was unspecified. Not until a 1974 coup in Lisbon ended Portugal’s dictatorship and brought independence to Mozambique was the mystery solved. As the director of the archives, Maria Inês Nogueira da Costa, later described it, archival staff dispatched on a hunt in 1977 had “ransacked older buildings and warehouses in Beira, without uncovering any leads,” then returned, in search of new clues, to the headquarter buildings of Beira’s Civil Administration, which the Mozambique Company had built and transferred to the colonial state. There they found several locked outbuildings locals said had been shut up for years, their contents and the whereabouts of the keys unknown. They forced open the locked doors, and there were the long-lost archives. The director of the archives, faced with the formidable task of tabulating, logging , and organizing the contents of several thousand boxes to create an inventory , placed the material under embargo until that work could be accomplished. A foreign scholar in Mozambique at the time, hoping to conduct research on the company, was denied access and could report only on “reputedly extensive” holdings. A Mozambican student who wrote an unpublished master’s thesis on the company in the 1980s had only partial scattershot access to the archives. Not until the mid-1990s, when my own research...