Abstract
Zachary Kagan Guthrie’s meticulously researched book, Bound for Work, explores labor and migration histories in 1940s and 1950s central Mozambique. Focusing on state-mandated, forced work, known as chibalo, the book examines its coercive politics and practices for colonial enterprise. Within a central Mozambican context of low population density and high labor demands, forced migration and work were linchpins of the colonial economy. Controlling Mozambicans’ movement was, thus, important for colonial administrators and private companies to ensure a steady labor supply, for régulos or “traditional” authorities to maintain their Portuguese-mandated power, and for Mozambican men themselves to protect their and their families’ survival. By analyzing individuals’ multiple migrations, especially in its first half, Bound for Work links these migration paths together to elucidate “how workers navigated the possibilities and limitations of labor within late-colonial capitalism” (2). In doing so, it shifts scholarly focus away from colonial and company records and toward men’s recounting of their own lives. Based on interviews with over 175 individuals and archival research in Mozambique and Portugal, the book illuminates the direct and structural brutalities of Portuguese and colonial rule in Africa and its inherently fragmented nature.
The book spans the period between forced labor’s reintroduction in the early 1940s, which was technically illegal under Portuguese metropolitan law, and its repeal in 1961. It consists of six chapters broadly organized into two sections. The first half analyzes men’s migration choices and their social ramifications under Portugal’s “moral imperative” to engage in market-oriented work, this injunction justifying the state’s requirement for African men to be “contracted” into forced migration and labor conscription. Chapter One addresses how colonial administrators and régulos produced a guaranteed labor pool for agricultural and other capitalist-oriented companies, making male forced movement and migration a violent and fundamental part of Mozambican life under colonial rule. The chapter also demonstrates how colonized subjects used mobility to bypass colonial subjugation, by escaping, for example, to other regions to search for non-chibalo work. Chapter Two addresses Mozambican men’s variegated labor strategies and the “jagged” migration paths they followed before, after, or between chibalo “contracts.” Kagan Guthrie argues that men made migration and employment choices within limited options, based on skills they hoped to accrue, on what was simply available in the colony and regionally, and on ties to family and home. Chapter Three discusses how masculine identity came to be associated with migration and work while female labor became increasingly tethered to native reserves.
The book’s latter half analyzes the contradictory policies and practices of forced migration administration. Chapters Four and Five deconstruct the idea that Portugal and its agents had a unified approach to this system, and the book’s force comes especially through in these chapters. Highlighting state actors’ inability to manage territories (Chapter Four), their manipulation of metropolitan law to ensure labor (Chapter Five), and Africans’ enduring strategies to negotiate chibalo, the book deftly demonstrates how fragmentary colonial administration and rule truly were. Chapter Four, for example, is incisive about the making and unmaking of colonial territory, particularly in how local practice blurred the assumed solidity of colonial cartography and jurisdictional lines. Chapter Six scales out to a regional and continental perspective, contextualizing how Portuguese policy shifted in response to African independence movements and contributed to the end of forced migration and labor in the early 1960s.
One of the book’s primary strengths is demonstrating how a powerful but uneven network of legislation, administration, and private ventures created deeply ingrained patterns of everyday life centered around migration. Near-constant movement to procure work became fundamental to practices and senses of masculinity, and the idea of “work” came to be more and more associated with remunerated, capitalist-oriented labor. The book meditates on how Mozambican men attempted to mediate forced migration and work, in order to gain measures of dignity and maintain social ties. This discussion is relevant to continuing national and regional labor migration patterns today, particularly in how adult masculinity remains associated with leaving home to labor elsewhere.
At the same time, I do wish the book had expanded on what “labor” and “work” actually mean, particularly in a Mozambican context. The book uses “labor” as a stand-in for capitalist-oriented work, rather than a more expansive understanding of the term as any kind of work — an argument that feminist scholars especially (and within Mozambican labor history, e.g. Sheldon, 2002; Gengenbach, 2005; Penvenne, 2015) have explored in substantial and nuanced ways. The book addresses questions of labor and gender in intriguing ways, especially in the methodology discussion and in Chapter Three’s focus on affective ties and gendered associations of “home” (feminized) versus faraway “work” (masculinized). But I also look forward to how scholars might generatively engage Bound for Work even further to continue to decenter the idea of workers as only men and work as only done by men and to expand these categories’ bounds. Framing work as not only capitalist oriented labor would push, for example, against the colonial conceit that Africans were not working before Portugal decreed a “moral obligation” to do so. From this perspective, chibalo did not simply control men’s labor and movement. It also reworked European racial, capitalist, and masculinized ideas, practices, and spaces of hierarchized subjectivity, as tactics of colonial subjugation. Forced migration manipulated the uneven intertwining of race, gender, ethnicity, work, and geographical location, with the aims of devaluing Mozambican lives, of siphoning away human-produced value for uneven capitalist accumulation, and of ingraining spatial destabilization as fundamental to Mozambican experience, which undercut longer-term anti-colonial movement-building. It simultaneously centered this constant movement as a fundamental part of Mozambican (men’s) senses of self.
This fine-grained, thoughtful, and deeply researched book will be immediately useful to any scholar of forced labor, Southern African migration and political economy, or Portuguese colonial and contemporary Africa. Bound for Work joins other foundational scholarship that excavates the histories of Southern African migration, African life-making choices, labor coercion, and colonial capitalism which underpin Mozambican and Southern African migration today. It also opens space to further reflect on race and colonial power, contributing to a valuable critical tradition of making clear the disruptions, contradictions, and failures of a racial colonial state and its devaluing of black life. This work is salient today in Mozambique, as well as globally, with various state turns toward legal exceptionalism to pursue racialized uneven accumulation. This expands the book’s potential readership to critical scholars and policymakers concerned with not only Southern Africa and the continent but beyond