Bound for Work by Zachary Kagan Guthrie

Author:Zachary Kagan Guthrie [Guthrie, Zachary Kagan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Africa, South Africa
ISBN: 9780813941554
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2018-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

“We Can Legitimately Call It an Exodus”: The Law and the Border

Both forced labor and voluntário labor operated outside of the legal system, creating a vacuum that allowed administrators and workers to exercise their autonomy free of judicial constraint. The same dynamics shaped the third major variety of labor, migrant labor abroad. Thousands of workers pursued employment in Rhodesia and South Africa, but virtually all of them were doing so illegally. “Clandestine migration” into neighboring territories—that is, emigrating without administrative approval—was a criminal offense. Since central Mozambique’s administrators took a dim view of international migration, declaring it a threat to the region’s economic viability, obtaining approval to emigrate was exceedingly rare, and labor migration abroad consequently illegal.46

Portuguese officials frequently vowed to enforce the law and crack down upon “clandestine migration” from central Mozambique, starting shortly after taking power in 1942, when the Governor-General called for the “total extirpation of this cancer, which is so noxious for the Colony’s economy,” and continuing throughout the 1940s and 1950s, fueled by a mixture of economic, political, and ideological apprehensions.47 Economically, Portuguese authorities worried that uncontrolled emigration would imperil the viability of colonial businesses by further exacerbating the gap between the region’s low population density and high concentration of employers.48 Emigrants abroad were a political problem as well, as their ability to leave Mozambique “without any type of documentation” created “an administrative disruption” that prevented Portuguese authorities from properly governing the subjects nominally under their control.49 Finally, emigrants presented an implicit challenge to the nationalist vision of the colonies propagated by the Estado Novo; the administrator of Tete, for example, insisted that Portugal’s colonial subjects had to “work within this country, which is ours, and which was left by our predecessors with incalculable sacrifice,” making anyone who worked abroad guilty of “the crime of lese Patria”—high treason.50

Administrators pursued both legal and illegal measures to keep would-be migrants from crossing the border. Some agreed to ignore the pass laws by allowing workers to take whatever jobs they wanted, so as to keep them within Mozambique’s borders.51 In regions where the border was so weakly enforced as to be essentially unmarked, administrators promised to make clearer the lines of Portuguese rule; one particularly aggressive administrator, for example, vowed to demarcate the border by “notifying the neighboring [British] authorities on my first visit to these Portuguese territories that I would knock down the first native who disrespected me.”52 New administrative posts were established along the border, and across known migration routes, with the objective of strengthening border enforcement, while administrators were ordered to destroy roads that were used predominantly by migrants.53 Anyone suspected of fomenting or facilitating emigration was harshly punished, usually with lengthy prison sentences into forced labor exile on São Tomé.54 The provincial Governor even proposed establishing a secret police force with the sole purpose of infiltrating and detaining groups of would-be migrants.55

Administrative policy notwithstanding, the enduring material realities of Portuguese colonial rule rendered the intermittent attempts to enforce migration laws almost entirely ineffective. The

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