Protected villages and communal villages in the Mozambican province of Tete (1968-1982): a history of state resettlement policies, development and war

Abstract

Mozambique’s Province of Tete offers, over the last century, a good example of the negative impact of state policies on local community development. Being a region historically deprived of significant investment; Tete became, since the early days of colonialism, an area where state and local community’s economy were in direct confrontation, without the mediation of state and private plantations or order undertakings. In this context, state policies sought to achieve two main goals: on the hand the establishment of mechanisms of political and administrative control over these communities: on the other to extract local produce and producers without transforming significantly the framework in which such communities assured the production and reproduction of their lives. The analysis of this impact undertaken below is based on the concept of rural settlement patterns, in which the village represents a central role. The two processes discussed correspond to two major state attempts to alter these patterns by extinguishing community villages and resettling the rural population in villages of a new kind. Though run by two distinct states, the colonial and the independent, it is argued that both processes followed a somewhat similar path: both ignored or took little account of local perspectives; both attempted, through villagisation, to achieve local political and administrative control; both failed to base this profound change on the transformation of slash and burn agriculture which had characterized community economy until then. While the colonial state did not even attempt such transformation, the independent one did not achieve it. The result was that an already fragile rural economy was deprived of vital factors such as, internally, land or customary organization of production, and externally, access to the international market which played a fundamental role in it since early this century. Consequently, the chronic state of war experienced by the region has to be viewed in close connection with the imbalance provoked by such experiences which, far from creating development conditions, pushed the local rural economy back to dangerous levels of subsistence