Research student panels (97A, 97B, 98, 99A, 99B) have been organised for Aegis and non-Aegis post-graduate students through the Interlink Programme coordinated by Prof. Alessandro Triulzi (Università L’Orientale, Naples) . The students involved are undertaking archival or field research, or are in the process of writing up dissertations, or have just completed their dissertations. Aegis is encouraging student exchanges through European Union mobility programmes (such as Erasmus/Socrates), joint training in Summer Schools where research students discuss their work with senior researchers (the last one was held in Cortona, Italy, in September 2004), and student-geared seminars and conferences. Papers have been grouped under broad themes and discussion will be chaired by research students themselves in the hope of encouraging broad student participation in the European Conference of African Studies.
This is one the student panels (see also 97A, 97B, 99A, 99B) organised for post-graduate students through the Interlink Programme supported by Aegis African Studies Centres. Panel 98 explores issues of social and economic history through the East African groundnut scheme in colonial Tanganyika, the ambiguities of Portuguese settler colonialism, transnational flows of goods and persons between Mozambique and South Africa, and long-distance trade in 19th century Tanzania.
After Brazil’s loss and a period of hesitation, Portugal turned itself to Africa. Since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Africa appears in portuguese identity discourses. Some authors stressed the idea of a special relation between the Portuguese and the natives of Africa, different from the one adopted by the North Europeans. At the same time, some politicians and ideologists proposed white settlement projects that had no success. The military occupation was only concluded in the second decade of the twentieth century. Therefore, only then it was possible to make a civil occupation and to start sending free portuguese settlers to Africa. But despite all the rhetoric around the empire, Africa was not attractive. The portuguese migration boom to Angola and Mozambique occurs only after the Second Word War, when the anticolonial movement was on the move, and is far less important that the portuguese migration to foreign countries, like Brazil and France. The white settlement projects elaborated by the Estado Novo regime in the 1950s and all the official investment in the colonies development after the beginning of the colonial wars came too late, in comparison with other colonial realities.
This paper aims to analyse Angola and Mozambique white settler societies, in social and cultural perspective, stressing the relations between colonists and African populations, by one hand; and colonists and Colonial Administration, by another hand. Finally, it also seeks to explore the ambiguities and contradictions of the Estado Novo’s regime (1933-1974) towards portuguese immigration to African colonies.
Drawing from some elements of the current debate on transnationalism in Southern Africa, this paper aims at providing a case-study and an historical perspective to the picture of Mozambique as a highly divided country still today in terms of its geo-political structures and infrastructures. In the context of a crucial central area of the country, this paper will investigate to what extent both current internal political and physical constraints and international networks developed or consolidated in the colonial past. In central Mozambique the patterns of Africans’ circulation and colonial controls in the 1940s and 1950s indicate that the international frontier was probably more permeable than the internal borders, if considered in relation to the independent movement of people and to the way transnational links developed. However, this international frontier effectively gained in value over time if considered for its impact on the migrants’ labour relations with the colonial power, and still today the extent to which the presence of an international border has become enmeshed in the social life and in the historical developments since the colonial times must not be underestimated. Furthermore, the analysis of people’s labour relations with the colonial state, coupled with an examination of their physical circulation on the territory following consolidated routs in search of the best social and economic opportunities, will show how this period of Portuguese colonialism helped to consolidate structural divisions at the very local level between the urban and the rural contexts, between the villages and the 'inland areas'.
The paper, which draws on my forthcoming Ph.D. thesis, is based on archival research in missionary and colonial archives in Europe and in Tanzania. The subject of the thesis is the analysis of the economic, political and social changes that occurred in the Tabora area, in Tanzania, after the development of the long-distance trade with the coast. One of these changes was the growth of urban settlements that were absent before. My research focuses on the historical development of the town of Tabora, from its foundation by Arab traders in 1840 ca., until 1912, when it became a proper colonial town with the direct intervention of the German colonial administration. Tabora had from its origins a dual nature, being a foreign outgrowth, an entrepôt established by coastal traders, but at the same time maintaining its domestic origins. Its growth was the result of the interaction of a double initiative: one of external Arab origin and one of internal Nyamwezi origin. The purpose of my research is to analyse large processes, such as the long-distance trade system, the interregional African trade network and the political events in Unyamwezi and to assess the significance of Tabora in them.
The paper will focus particularly on the political events in the Tabora area, i.e. the relationship between the local authorities and the coastal traders residing and trading in Tabora. From this point of view, we can assert that Nyamwezi authorities and traders played an active role in the development of long-distance trade and organized themselves to compete with coastal traders.