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 Periodical article |
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| Title: | Class and the Customary: The Ambiguous Legacy of the 'Indigenato' in Mozambique |
| Author: | O'Laughlin, Bridget |
| Year: | 2000 |
| Periodical: | African Affairs: The Journal of the Royal African Society |
| Volume: | 99 |
| Issue: | 394 |
| Period: | January |
| Pages: | 5-42 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | Mozambique Portugal |
| Subjects: | social classes colonialism indirect rule Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) History and Exploration Politics and Government |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/723545 |
| Abstract: | This article looks at the making of the 'Indigenato', the set of institutions that defined the difference between settler citizen and native subject ('indígena') in colonial Mozambique, and considers its legacy for postcolonial politics. The 'Indigenato' was a dualistic system of local government under which Mozambican subjects were governed by chiefs and Portuguese citizens by administrators, with a correspondingly dualistic legal system and systems of land tenure and labour regulation. The article argues that approaches to the democratization of local governance in rural areas today must recognize that the customary authorities were shaped by a colonial State that was bifurcated in conception but imperfectly so in practice. The dualisms of the 'Indigenato' were continually violated by crosscutting contradictions of class in the world it interpreted and shaped. An enduring part of the legacy of the 'Indigenato' is a real but ideologically misleading effect: the dualistic opposition of tradition and modernity. This image compromised Frelimo's attempt to construct a unitary socialist society at independence and recurs in contemporary debate in Mozambique over democratization and local governance. Notes, ref., sum. (Response by Mahmood Mamdani, p. 43-46.) |
