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

2. From Law to Practice: “Certain Excesses of Severity”

46 From Law to Practice “Certain Excesses of Severity” T O WA R D T H E E N D O F M AY     , A M O Z A M B I C A N named Massungue advised seven African contract laborers, most likely destined for assignment to Portuguese-run maize farms along the rail line through central Mozambique westward from the coast to then British-ruled Southern Rhodesia. Massungue told the men they could expect the “worst possible treatment” from the labor agent who had sought them out: he would “punish them violently with his own hands,” and the rations they would receive would be insufficient for nourishment. The agent, Massungue warned, “sold blacks as if they were chickens and goats.” The agent in question disputed these accusations, complaining bitterly of Massungue’s “propaganda,” charging it had led many laborers to flee, including those he had just rounded up after hunting for twenty-one days in a vast region. Yet only months earlier he had acknowledged bad treatment; he had written to an employer, “I hope also that on your part you might stop beating our workers which, as you know, is expressly prohibited, leaving you subject to a fine, which could become disagreeable.” Although Portugal’s colonial labor law prohibited employers from administering corporal punishment and prescribed, in minute detail, the amount and variety of food that must be provided, colonial administrators rarely enforced these rules. Vulnerable Africans workers were left with no forum for appeal or protest. To suffer beatings without recourse and to be forced to forage for sustenance, as were many contract workers, were acutely humiliating, reflecting another di2 From Law to Practice 47 mension, dishonor, of Massungue’s warning. Though his words may have been well meant, they were also insulting. When Massungue spoke of chicken and goats, small stock, rather than cattle, which represented true wealth, his warning was doubly demeaning. Chicken and goats were not valuable; they were eaten, rather than used to reproduce wealth. Consumed and used up, they are expendable . As sweeping as Portugal’s legal framework for forced labor was, the gap between law and forced labor practices in Mozambique was vast. One settler had commented, earlier in the nineteenth century, on the persistence of slave trading in Mozambique, after Portugal’s prohibition of the trade in 1836: “These Lisbonborn laws are very stringent, but somehow, possibly from the heat of the climate, here they lose all their force.” At the local level, however, the effect was frequently reversed; the Mozambique Company’s administrators established some labor practices that went far beyond what the law permitted. The territory’s enormous demand for African labor, employers’ unwillingness to pay wages sufficient to draw voluntary workers, the company’s political and financial investment in concession-holders’ success, and the near-total autonomy of local administrators all meant that there was little to stand in the way of pervasive enslavement of the African population. Many of the company labor law’s legal provisions—among them, proscribing corporal punishment, limiting the workday from “sun to sun,” or requiring employers to supply meals containing meat or fish, and mandating exclusion of women, young boys (under fifteen), and elderly men (over sixty) from compulsory labor—were honored mainly in the breach. Company “Recruitment”: An “Unjust and Degrading System” With a conscription monopoly in central Mozambique through the first three decades of the Mozambique Company’s rule from 1892 until 1926, its officials continually refined their efforts to deploy the power of the bureaucratically organized state administration to reduce Africans’ autonomy. The period of labor enslavement slowly increased over the years. The Mozambique Company’s 1900 labor regulations, developed specifically for Manica, where demand for African laborers was highest, defined as a vagrant any African who “did not have an employer or who did not want to sign up for work,” a definition that called in question how faithfully the law’s exemptions were respected. Those selected were taken under guard, sometimes tied together by the neck in groups of four in a practice reminiscent of slaving days past. They trudged perhaps many miles from their homes to a compound to wait assignment, either for service to the company itself or frequently for service with the settler maize farmers and miners in Manica. 48 Slavery by Any Other Name The district administrator there, commenting, in 1911, on what Africans faced as company conscripts, most...