Migrant Workers and State Boundaries. Reflections on the Transnational Debate from the Colonial Past in Mozambique

Current socioeconomic patterns in central Mozambique call for an analysis of the historical process that developed or consolidated them in the past. In this regard, Salazar’s phase of colonial rule plays an important role, given the way in which it both consolidated and altered past trends regarding people’s relations with the state and the territory. In Beira District the lack of real rights to mobility, coupled with the enforcement of the forced-labour regime, the recruitment system, and taxation, eventually fostered socioeconomic distortions of labour relations between the majority of the African workforce and the colonial state. The imbalances in the political economy of the district differentiated the territory into labour reserves and centres of production; furthermore, the pass-system – the caderneta indígenas - and the system of labour reserves, though not completely effective, reinforced internal boundaries between the circunscrições and obstructed the circulation of Mozambican workers. On the other hand, it must be recognized that in general all Mozambicans workers experienced the same kind of labour relations throughout the territory, shaped by the forced-labour system of Portuguese colonialism. On the contrary, regarding emigration abroad, apparently Mozambican migrants easily avoided colonial controls to cross the international border, but experienced completely different labour and social relations in Southern Rhodesia or South Africa. This study challenges the dichotomy between those positions stressing how borders were eroded by African migrants and those positions sustaining the importance of these borders. The patterns of Africans’ circulation and colonial controls in Beira District in the 1940s and 1950s show borders, internal and external, as hard and constraining as well as porous, depending on the local context and on which element involved in the migration process we want to emphasise.