Race and Migration in Mozambique

Over three years, I gathered oral narratives and analysed post-colonial theory to deconstruct the role non-binary groups played in defining and disputing Mozambican identity over the twentieth century. I found that mixed-race Mozambicans have a few, famous civil rights icons, like Noémia de Sousa and Joao Albazine, who used their privileged ethnic identity to politicize inequality. These examples were used to craft generalizations that all mixed-race people are political allies and that all Indo-Mozambicans are disinterested in politics altogether. Both assumptions are historically inaccurate. Moreover, non-binary groups are often overlapping, and they experience a diversity of experience among them. Indo-Mozambicans of mixed-race (mestiços) for example, have been mislabelled with migratory and economic privileges on par with those of mixed-race persons with white parentage (mulatos). Mestiços do not typically have a connection to their Indian or Pakistani fatherland and, thus, are not transnational migrants; whereas mulatos tend to retain their strong familial connections to European homelands and they use their migratory privileges to travel fluidly. Such faulty stereotypes force non-binary groups to defend their national belonging by competing against one another, rather than joining forces to dismantle the persistent narratives of distrust that have haunted them since the colonial era.

The overlapping and albeit incomplete racial paradigms from the Americas do not capture the full truth of Mozambican race relations, but they are good place to begin this conversation. I understand Mozambique’s racial context to be a hybrid of what Juan F. Perea describes as the US black/white binary and what Gilberto Freyre has called Brazil’s Racial Paradise. The former is summarized as a racial hierarchy that largely excludes non-black people of colour and depicts a linear racial antagonism between black and white people. In the US, white identity expanded over the twentieth century to include immigrants, like Italians, Irish, Jews, and Latin Americans. Black identity in the US, however, has been more monolithic. The one-drop rule ensured any person with any African ancestry (even ‘one drop’ of black blood) was legally labelled and racially categorized as black (and socially inferior to whites). This label was applied to descendants of slaves, free blacks, and new immigrants alike. This static paradigm on blackness reduced the complexities of US race relations to a linear and dichotomous spectrum between black and white races, suppressing the diversity among blacks and introducing the phenomenon of passing, whereby some light-skinned black people denied their ancestry in order to live as white. Furthermore, by labelling different mixtures of ancestry as simply black, US understandings of race have only recently begun to fully confront racism against non-black people of colour and black/brown immigrants. In contrast to the US paradigm, Brazil has a highly nuanced colour, rather than racial, spectrum.