Displaced Mozambicans in Postcolonial Tanzania: Refugee Power, Mobility, Education, and Rural Development

Description

This book follows the lives of a broad swath of Mozambican men, women, and children--refugees, asylum seekers, liberation leaders, students, migrant workers--all displaced during the war for independence from Portugal (1964-1974). Throughout the war, two distinct communities of displaced Mozambicans emerged. One, a minority of students and liberation leaders, congregated in the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam, where the Mozambican Liberation Front (FRELIMO) established a secondary school and helped students secure university scholarships abroad--often to the United States or Europe. The second community, the vast majority of Mozambicans--nearly 100,000 people--settled in one of five refugee camps established by the Tanzanian government, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and local relief agencies. In this book, Joanna Tague attends to both of these groups in equal measure by juxtaposing the exilic experiences of the educated minority with the majority of refugees settled in official camps. Read together, their lives constitute a mosaic through which to explore myriad ways in which the displaced acted as their own agents during the wars for liberation attendant to African decolonization in the mid-twentieth century. In so doing, she brings the voices of the displaced into conversation with the decolonization process in Tanzania and with the nature of international humanitarianism in the 1960s in order to recast thinking about refugeeness, mobility, and agency. The book focuses on four major themes (exilic education, transnational solidarity, official refugee settlement, and rural development) in order to explore the possibilities of power in displacement--how Africans exchanged information, built networks of solidarity, and generated individual and collective opportunity throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Chapter 1: Power in displacement Power in mobility Glossing the refugee as victim or threat: un/silencing the past Reading against the archive: echoes of “refugee” power Methodology and structure of the book Notes Chapter 2: (Re)making home in exile: Cosmopolitan activism and the pursuit of education The education of Eduardo Mondlane: from Southern Africa to the Atlantic world A 1960s liberation hub: Mozambican exiles in Dar es Salaam Refugee messaging: a June visit to Dar es Salaam Divided at unification: education and the formation of FRELIMO Love in the time of liberation: (re)making home in exile Notes Chapter 3: In the city of waiting: Mozambican refugee education in 1960s Dar es Salaam Education and exile in 1960s Dar es Salaam: precursors to the Mozambique Institute Transnational solidarity: George Houser and the American Committee on Africa Student life at the Mozambique Institute: material comfort and the tensions of international study Rupture and riots: liberation and the gradations of education in exile Notes Chapter 4: Liberation humanitarianism and nation-building: The making of Rutamba Settlement Old world refugees and the new frontier Exodus: October 1964 “The refugee”: debating definitions Creating Rutamba: quasi-state control and refugee mobilities Notes Chapter 5: Displaced agents of development: Mozambican refugees and Tanzanian nation-building projects, 1964–1975 The ambiguity of refugee identity Planning refugee settlements during liberation Infrastructure and the built environment Health and education: meeting the needs of refugees and citizens Displaced pioneers: transforming southern agriculture Development repurposed: refugee settlements as ujamaa villages Notes Conclusion Notes Index