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| Title: | Forced labour, mussoco (taxation), famine and migration in Lower Zambézia, Mozambique, 1870-1914 |
| Author: | Ishemo, Shubi L. |
| Book title: | Forced Labour and Migration: Patterns of Movement within Africa |
| Year: | 1989 |
| Pages: | 109-158 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | Mozambique Portugal |
| Subjects: | colonialism migration forced labour taxation famine |
| Abstract: | In this study, the author examines the centrality of 'mussoco' (head tax) in initiating and fuelling the process of colonial capital accumulation and its role in the reproduction of the conditions for the acquisition of labour by the colonial State, capital and latifundios (large estates) in the Lower Zambezi region of Mozambique. Mussoco, as the summation of colonial capitalist development, was the singular extra-economic mechanism which partly transformed the Zambézian peasant petty-commodity producer into a forced seller of labour power. This transformation was expressed through the payment of labour rent, rent in kind and, later, money rent. During this transition, the peasants' agricultural calendar and the entire process of production were disrupted and social conditions for the outbreak of famine were set in motion and reproduced. The process of the disruption of peasant production processes was formally institutionalized in the period after 1890. With large-scale concessions awarded to European capital, mussoco became legally linked to forced labour, and in effect all such concessions became mussoco farms. Linked to this, too, was the monopolization of trade by capital and latifundio, and the barring of intrapeasant commodity exchange. The mussoco regime and famine gave rise to internal and external migrations, which started during the 1880s and continued through the 1890s and early 20th century. Notes, ref. |