Resistance and the Social History of Africa (New Topics and Historians‪)‬

In late 1926, African workers fled from their positions as field hands on Portuguese-run maize farms in the central Mozambican districts of Manica and Chimoio. The workers, all male, were coerced recruits brought from Chemba, a Zambezi valley district. The precise circumstances of their recruitment are not clear. The colonial administration in central Mozambique had recently overhauled its labor recruitment practices after facing criticism in the League of Nations in 1925. These changes notwithstanding, it is unlikely that recruitment took place in an atmosphere free from coercion. Nearly two-hundred of the Chemba recruits had fled by April 1927, most within two or three months of beginning work on the farms, while some took to their heels immediately upon their arrival. (1) The maize farms had a terrible reputation among workers from as early as 1908, when Zambezi valley recruits declared they "would prefer to eat roots and wild fruits than to go to ... Manica where they would die." (2) Labor recruits there could expect long hours of heavy manual labor, inadequate meal rations, wage arrears or non-payment, poor housing, and a fierce daily regime governed by verbal and physical abuse. Such work conditions routinely violated labor laws, but authorities rarely responded to workers' charges with effective action. Little wonder, then, that the field workers fled; their decision to do so scarcely requires explanation. Labor contracts had a fixed term, in this case one year, and there were few if any workers who would have stayed at the job had it not been for the overall system of coercion that existed in colonial Mozambique. Police often accompanied recruiters, local African authorities assisted in the identification of potential recruits, and those who initially avoided recruitment sometimes turned themselves in to ransom a relative who had been seized in retaliation. (3) The director of the private recruiting agency that had delivered the workers to the maize farms in 1927 was--if not surprised--close to panic at the scale of worker flight. His agency had paid advances to the workers as part of the recruitment contract and covered the costs of transportation from Chemba, several hundred kilometers from Manica and Chimoio. The workers had fled so early in the term of recruitment that they had not yet worked off the advances they earned; the recruitment agency faced serious losses, amounting to five percent of its capital. (4)