Portuguese Mozambique - Society

Society

The establishment of a dual, racialized civil society was formally recognized in Estatuto do Indigenato (The Statute of Indigenous Populations) adopted in 1929, and was based in the subjective concept of civilization versus tribalism. Portugal's colonial authorities were totally committed to develop a fully multiethnic "civilized" society in its African colonies, but that goal or "civilizing mission", would only be achieved after a period of Europeanization or enculturation of the native black tribes and ethnocultural groups. It was a policy which had already been stimulated in the former Portuguese colony of Brazil and in Portuguese Angola. The Estatuto established a distinction between the "colonial citizens", subject to the Portuguese laws and entitled to all citizenship rights and duties effective in the "metropole", and the indigenas (natives), subjected to colonial legislation and, in their daily lives, to their customary, tribal native laws. Between the two groups there was a third small group, the assimilados, comprising native blacks, mulatos, Asians, and mixed-race people, who had at least some formal education, were not subjected to paid forced labor, were entitled to some citizenship rights, and held a special identification card that differed from the one imposed on the immense mass of the African population (the indigenas), a card that the colonial authorities conceived of as a means of controlling the movements of forced labor (CEA 1998). The indigenas were subject to the traditional authorities, who were gradually integrated into the colonial administration and charged with solving disputes, managing the access to land, and guaranteeing the flows of workforce and the payment of taxes. As several authors have pointed out (Mamdani 1996; Gentili 1999; O'Laughlin 2000), the Indigenato regime was the political system that subordinated the immense majority of Mozambicans to local authorities entrusted with governing, in collaboration with the lowest echelon of the colonial administration, the "native" communities described as tribes and assumed to have a common ancestry, language, and culture. The colonial use of traditional law and structures of power was thus an integral part of the process of colonial domination (Young 1994; Penvenne 1995; O'Laughlin 2000) obsessed with the maximization of economic development and growth through the use of idle or unproductive African workforce.

In the 1940s, the integration of traditional authorities into the colonial administration was deepened, a level of social integration, miscegenation and social promotion based in skill and human qualities of each individual, rather than in the ethnic background, which was coined lusotropicalismo and had been a major feature of the Portuguese Empire throughout history. The Portuguese colony was divided into concelhos (municipalities), in urban areas, governed by colonial and metropolitan legislation, and circunscrições (localities), in rural areas. The circunscrições were led by a colonial administrator and divided into regedorias (subdivisions of circunscrições), headed by régules (tribal chieftains), the embodiment of traditional authorities. Provincial Portuguese Decree No. 5.639, of July 29, 1944, attributed to régulos and their assistants, the cabos de terra, the status of auxiliares da administração (administrative assistants). Gradually, these "traditional" titles lost some of their content, and the régulos and cabos de terra came to be viewed as an effective part of the colonial state, remunerated for their participation in the collection of taxes, recruitment of the labor force, and agricultural production in the area under their control. Within the areas of their jurisdiction, the régulos and cabos de terra also controlled the distribution of land and settled conflicts according to customary norms (Geffray 1990; Alexander 1994; Dinerman 1999). To exercise their power, the régulos and cabos de terra had their own police force. This system of indirect rule illustrates what the disjunction between political and administrative control. In major urban areas, most notoriously the cosmopolitan provincial ports of Lourenço Marques and Beira, racial integration and socioeconomic opportunities for all kind of skilled citizens were already very deep. It continued after the Indigenato system was abolished in the early 1960s after the Portuguese colony of Mozambique has been rebranded the Overseas Province of Mozambique in the 1950s. From then on, all Africans were considered Portuguese citizens, and racial discrimination became a sociological rather than a legal feature of colonial society. The rule of traditional authorities was indeed integrated more than before in the colonial administration.

Ethnic African inhabitants of the Portuguese overseas provinces were ultimately supposed to become full citizens with full political rights through a long development process. To that end, by the 1960s and 1970s, segregation in Mozambique was minimal compared to that in neighbouring South Africa.