Bound for Work: Labor, Mobility, and Colonial Rule in Central Mozambique, 1940-1965

By Zachary Kagan Guthrie

Diverging from the studies of southern African migrant labor that focus on particular workplaces and points of origin, Bound for Work looks at the multitude of forms and locales of migrant labor that individuals—under more or less coercive circumstances—engaged in over the course of their lives. Tracing Mozambican workers as they moved between different types of labor across Mozambique, Rhodesia, and South Africa, Zachary Kagan Guthrie places the multiple venues of labor in a single historical frame, expanding the regional historiography beyond the long shadow cast by the apartheid state while simultaneously exploring the continuities and fractures between South Africa, southern Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Kagan Guthrie’s holistic approach to migrant labor yields several important conclusions. First, he highlights the importance of workers’ choices, explaining not just why people moved but why they moved in the ways they did: how they calculated the benefits of one destination over another, and how they decided when circumstances made it necessary to move again. Second, his attention to mobility gives a much clearer view of the mechanisms of power available to colonial authorities, as well as the limits to their effectiveness. Finally, Kagan Guthrie suggests a new explanation for the divergent trajectories of southern and sub-Saharan Africa in the aftermath of World War II.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Oct 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9780813941554

Book preview

Reconsiderations in Southern African History

Richard Elphick, Editor

Bound for Work

Labor, Mobility, and Colonial Rule in Central Mozambique, 1940–1965

Zachary Kagan Guthrie

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2018 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

First published 2018

ISBN 978-0-8139-4154-7 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8139-4155-4 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

Cover photo: Railway station in Mozambique. (Image courtesy Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Forced Labor and Forced Movement in Central Mozambique: Contract Labor and Colonial Rule, 1890–1960

2. The Fruits of Their Labors: Mobile Workers from Central Mozambique, 1942–1961

3. The Ties That Bind: Gender, Labor Mobility, and Social Conflict

4. Colonialism and Its Forms of Control: Labor, Local Authority, and the Colonial State

5. Imaginary Laws and Colonial Realities: Labor Mobility and the Fractures of the Colonial State

6. New Horizons: Labor and Reform, Change and Continuity, 1945–1965

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I love writing acknowledgments. They are such a wonderful opportunity to thank so many people for their contributions to what is misleadingly presented to the world as an individual achievement. This is why the acknowledgments to my dissertation ran to twelve pages. I don’t think I can do that again, but I do want to try to thank the many people who have had a role in producing this book.

First and foremost, I offer my profound thanks to the many people in Mozambique and Portugal who graciously assisted me in conducting my research. In Lisbon, Paulo Tremoceiro, Gerhard Seibert, Alexander Keese, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, and Bárbara Direito were helpful and friendly guides to the archives. In Mozambique, I am deeply indebted to the staff of the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique, particularly the director, Joel das Neves Tembe, and the dedicated archivists who cheerfully tolerated my constant requests to dredge up hundreds of boxes, including Alberto Calbe Jaime, Abel Pelembe, Jorgé Titos Langa, Jaime Mondlane, Zeca Ponde, Maria da Conceição João, Jorgé Mahamane, and Arquimedes Gabriel Cuinhane. Arlindo Chilundo, António Sopa, and Gerhard Liesegang were helpful in pointing me in the right direction. In Manica and Sofala, I received vital assistance from Elias Malengua Dzivane, Chica Covele, João Diamantino Joaquim, Jacob Samuel José Sendela, and Danilo de Jesus Picardo. I would also like to thank Agnecia Raquel Samuel Guirruta, Hélio Bento Mangue, Zacarias Domingos Muconhola, and António Luís Chipanembe for helping to transcribe the interviews. In addition to his work as a research assistant, Narciso Manecas Gastene has been a teacher, a guide, a partner, and a friend, and his importance to this project is difficult to overstate.

I am also grateful for the numerous institutions that generously financed my research. My initial research in Mozambique was funded by the Princeton University Department of History and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Subsequent research in Lisbon was made possible thanks to a grant from the Fundação Luso-Americana. Finally, the College of Liberal Arts of the University of Mississippi and the Arch Dalrymple III Fund supported further research trips to Mozambique, and the Dalrymple Fund helped defray some of the production costs.

I am indebted to many, many scholars and friends whose intellectual labors have consistently helped sharpen and strengthen my ideas. The list of people whose questions and comments have driven my writing is far too long to put into an acknowledgments section, so I will shorten it by thanking colleagues for the feedback I have received on this project through various conferences and workshops at the Princeton University African History Seminar, the Princeton University Colonialism and Imperialism Workshop, the New England Workshop on Southern Africa, the New York Area African Studies workshop, the African Studies Association conference, Humboldt University Berlin Re:Work conferences on work and lifecycle and forced labor, and the University of Mississippi History Department colloquium. I am especially thankful for the mentors and friends who helped guide this project in its earlier stages as a doctoral dissertation and its later stages as a book. Bhavani Raman and Gyan Prakash helped break open my intellectual horizons. Michelle Bourbonniere, Nathan Fonder, and Alden Young were part of a highly productive writing group. Paul Ocobock, Marcia Schenck, Morgan Robinson, Kimberly Worthington, Elisa Prosperetti, Alden Young, Robert Tignor, Nathan Fonder, Rachel Kantrowitz, Charlotte Walker-Said, and Michelle Bourbonniere all helped nurture a vibrant intellectual community of scholars at Princeton studying the history of Africa. Mariana Candido has always provided amazingly trenchant advice on matters both personal and professional. Emmanuel Kreike has always been exceedingly generous with his time and his support, and his warmth as a scholar and an advisor has given me a model that I hope someday to emulate. At the University of Virginia Press, Dick Holway, Ellen Satrom, Nicholas Rich, and Mark Mones have patiently helped guide this book toward production, while Nat Case made some great maps, Eric Newman and Whit Barringer provided expert copyediting, and Ina Gravitz produced the index. Rick Elphick’s advice on my undergraduate thesis had a profound influence on my early development as a scholar; it is tremendously gratifying to have the opportunity to bring full circle the first phase of my academic life by working with him on this book. I am deeply grateful for his encouragement and support as a teacher and editor over the past fourteen (!) years.

I have been fortunate to become part of a supportive group of historians studying Mozambique; their social and professional assistance has helped shape my research and refine my arguments. It’s been great to work alongside Heidi Gengenbach, Todd Cleveland, Eric Morier-Genoud, Michael Panzer, Betty Banks, Justin Pearce, Denise Malauene, Benedito Machava, Lilly Havstad, Drew Thompson, Allen Isaacman, Kathleen Sheldon, Jeanne Penvenne, Ruth Castel-Branco, Alicia Lazzarini, and Marcia Schenck. I am particularly indebted to David Morton and Eric Allina. Dave’s advice, reassurance, and friendship were particularly important when I was in Maputo. They’ve continued to be important since then, as has his expert ability to edit my hazy and unfocused prose. Eric’s generosity as both a mentor and a friend has been limitless. Having spent dozens of hours together on three continents and traded thousands of e-mails over the past decade, I can’t say enough about the ways he has helped me to navigate work, life, and everything in between.

Thanking nonacademic friends in the acknowledgments section of a specialized historical monograph is perhaps uncommon (maybe? I’m not sure) given that it’s not really their scene. But I don’t care, because I consider myself very fortunate to have maintained friendships with people who don’t know or care that much about what I do for a living. I’ve shared lots of lovely moments with Senadhi Parakrama, Flora Chan, Ian Hebert, Krista Vogt, Sam Cohen, Annie Dow, Jonathan Parnes, Ali Chrisler, Ben Wiseman, Kate Dumouchel, Ethan Schiffres, Allie Ganz, Jonathan Cohen, Stephanie Roos, Aaron Pearl, Craig Wasserstrom, Nick Velez, Mncedisi (Junior) Jekwa, Dilshad Tung, Juliana Soares Linn, Stacey Litner, Elizabeth Chuck, Scott Clarkson, Kevin Egolf, Megan Ridley-Kaye, and Lauren Hoshibata. Whether it’s discussions about politics, food, sports, travel, life, or anything else that isn’t history, their friendship has helped me remember that there’s more to life than the nerdy things I do for my job, and I’m thankful for that.

Of course, I’m also thankful for friends who are part of the history-nerd community. I was fortunate to spend time in Princeton with Valeria Lopez Fadul, Seiji Shirane, Jenna Phillips, James and Jessica Pickett, Evan Hepler-Smith, Molly Lester, Chris Florio, Ben Gross, Annie Twitty, Jamie Kreiner, Chris Shannon, Willy Deringer, Paul Davis, Saarah Jappie, Joel Suarez, Elisa Flores, Henry Cowles, Anna Bonnell-Friedin, Padraic Scanlan, Catherine Evans, Hannah-Louise Clark, Nathan Fonder, Radha Kumar, Sarah Milov, and Kyrill Kunakovich. I was doubly fortunate to have a community of Princeton friends who study African history—Paul Ocobock, Alden Young, Marcia Schenck, Morgan Robinson, Kimberly Worthington, and Elisa Prosperetti—and who created a super-fun yet intellectually nourishing community. I am grateful to all of them for doing so much to enliven my time in that excessively posh and weirdly sterile Gothic wonderland.

In Mississippi, I have had the pleasure to join a department that has been, for lack of a more scholarly term, pretty awesome. My colleagues and friends—Jesse Cromwell, Laura Martin, Oliver Dinius, Chiarella Esposito, Les Field, Josh First, Amy Fluker, Shennette Garrett-Scott, Sue Grayzel, Darren Grem, April Holm, Joshua Howard, Vivian Ibrahim, Frances Kneupper, Theresa Levitt, Alexandra Lindgren-Gibson, Kelly Brown Houston, John Neff, John Ondrovcik, Melissa Gazo Ondrovcik, Ted Ownby, Elizabeth Payne, Paul Polgar, Valerie Guinn Polgar, Chuck Ross, Bashir Salau, Sheila Skemp, Susan Gaunt Stearns, Antoinette Sutto, Nicolas Trépanier, Ann Tucker, Joe Ward, Jeff Watt, and Noell Howell Wilson—have been great sources of advice and support. I am especially grateful to Jessie Wilkerson, Brian Sherry, Marc Lerner, Nina Rifkind, Becky Marchiel, Peter Thilly, Annie Twitty, Jonathan Gienapp, Jarod Roll, Rhiannon Stephens, Mikaëla Adams, and David Fragoso Gonzalez for all they’ve done to make Mississippi my home. It’s really fantastic to be in a department with colleagues you actually want to hang out with, and I feel very lucky that I emerged from the academia lottery working in such a department.

My deepest gratitude is to my family for their unwavering support throughout this very long process. My in-laws Po Sun, Patricia, Clara, Sonja, and Preston Lee have accepted me into their family and wholeheartedly supported our migrations from D.C. to New Jersey to Mozambique to Mississippi. My nephews, Jamison and Silas, taught me the joys of life’s simpler things. My step-family, Nancy Alfano, Brendan Herbert, Alex Adams, and Duane, Arissa, and Jesse Mueller, have shared the pain of many crushing D.C. sports catastrophes. My extended family—Kenny and Melissa Kagan, Elisabeth Lanier, Patti and Taza Guthrie, and Brendan Nuriddin—have always cheered me along the way. My grandfather Murray Kagan may be the person who took the greatest pride in my accomplishments. I wish he had lived to see this book come into print, and I hope to live up to the example he set for me in life. My stepfather, Curt Mueller, and my sister-in-law, Veronika Pasynkova, have provided helpfully sympathetic ears developed from their own experiences in the academic trenches. My father, Fred Guthrie, first sparked and cultivated my interest in history as a child. He also did more than anyone to shape my writing style and my sense of humor, both essential qualities in this line of work. My mother, Barbara Kagan, taught me how to edit, how to keep perspective on things, and how to persevere—equally essential qualities in surviving academia. She has been a paragon of social consciousness and a bedrock of emotional support. One of the best things to happen over the ten years I’ve been working my way through this process has been watching my brother, Benjamin Kagan Guthrie, make his way in the world as a nice and funny and generally great person. His wise counsel has been supremely appreciated, and I feel grateful to have a brother whom I genuinely admire.

As I was writing these acknowledgments, I was telling Hanna Lee about my worries of constantly repeating complimentary adjectives to the point of overuse. She quickly rattled off a number of potential options for expanding my vocabulary of gratitude, including indispensable, invaluable, essential, amazing, fantastic, effervescent, fantabulous, supercalifragilistic, and others I didn’t write down quickly enough. All of these accurately describe my feelings about her, and yet even when they are strung together, I am not sure they fully convey how much I love and appreciate her, and how much her love means to me. Willa has made the past six months of my life, and the first six months of her life, a blissful blur of snuggling and cuddling, and I look forward to much more over the weeks and months and years to come. It’s the greatest joy of my life to be able to share it—and this—with them.

Introduction

In 1940, sub-Saharan Africa was still reemerging from the Great Depression and firmly in the grip of colonial rule. By 1960, it had enjoyed two decades of economic growth and seen nearly twenty countries become independent, with many more soon to follow. Yet in southern Africa, the 1940s and 1950s brought a dramatically different history. In eastern and western Africa, postwar economic growth helped change how European officials viewed and used African workers—changes which allowed workers to pose escalating demands for reforms that eventually culminated in independence. Similar patterns of economic growth, political mobilization, and imperial reform occurred in southern Africa; nonetheless, colonial power over labor and society remained just as firmly entrenched in 1960 as it had been two decades earlier.

The history of labor in postwar southern Africa is the overarching subject of this book, which examines labor mobility in central Mozambique during the 1940s and 1950s, a time when labor offered important opportunities and presented significant risks. A prolonged economic boom brought labor scarcity across the region, opening national and international borders to workers who wished to cross them, allowing them to find jobs in most any industry they wanted to go to—particularly in central Mozambique, which had an especially low population density and an especially high concentration of colonial employers. At the same time, these possibilities coexisted with the pronounced threat of forced labor, which Portuguese authorities had reintroduced in the early 1940s, reflecting their determination to control the changing colonial economy.

This book links these histories by adopting a framework of labor mobility and argues that this framework allows us to better understand how workers navigated the possibilities and limitations of labor within late-colonial capitalism. A brief retelling of the life history of a man named Musa Amusa helps illustrate what the otherwise abstract term of labor mobility is meant to convey. Amusa lives on the outskirts of Beira, central Mozambique’s largest city, and is one of the more than 175 individuals I interviewed in the course of researching this book. Born in the 1930s in Mutarara, a rural district along the Zambeze River, he went west on foot to neighboring Southern Rhodesia in the 1940s, where he found work in a textile factory. He liked working in Rhodesia, where he earned considerably higher wages than he would have in Mozambique, but the tug of filial ties led him to return home. This was a risky decision, because of the threat of forced labor, but Amusa opted to return home anyway. A few months later, he was conscripted into a six-month stint of forced labor at a sugar plantation in Buzi district, several hundred kilometers away from his home in Mutarara. After he finished his six months in Buzi, he went back to the textile factory in Rhodesia. During subsequent years, he continued to make visits home to see his parents, to get married, and to spend time with his wife and children. Most of these visits were uneventful, but during one of them he was again caught for forced labor and sent to the coal mines in Moatize district, far in northwestern Tete Province. He again served out the six months, but this time, when he reentered migrant labor, he stayed in Mozambique and went to Beira, where he worked in another textile factory. Eventually his wife moved to Beira, and there they stayed, up until the present day.¹

Scholars have written many excellent histories of migrant labor, urban migration, and forced labor—of the individual strands that constituted Amusa’s working life. But none of these studies fully captures the experiences of someone like Amusa, who was never confined to one type of labor, or to one occupation, or to one destination. Most men in central Mozambique during the 1940s and 1950s shared Amusa’s experience, engaging in many different types of labor, using many different migratory routes.² They migrated to Southern Rhodesia or South Africa, where the jobs offered higher pay and better treatment; they migrated to Beira, to start a new life in the city; they migrated to work for large rural employers, to remain closer to their families; and they migrated under duress, under the compulsion of colonial authorities. Above all, they moved repeatedly between these different kinds of migrant labor, sometimes forced, sometimes voluntary, to different locations across central Mozambique and southern Africa. Understanding the lives of workers like Musa Amusa and his compatriots thus requires linking together these disparate, but related, histories. A history of labor mobility makes it possible to do so.

Map 1. Central Mozambique

Map 2. Southern Africa

At its most elementary level, writing the history of labor mobility means examining how workers moved, or were moved, from one location, one job, and one type of labor to another.³ But by taking seriously the capacity of workers to move, and the processes by which they did so, this approach offers a significant methodological departure from the typical model of labor history. Most labor histories are organized around the worksite, reflecting deeply rooted assumptions that labor is performed by a distinct class of wage-earning individuals fully embedded within a broader capitalist system.⁴ This assumption does not reflect the reality of work in colonial Africa, or much of the rest of the Global South, where wage labor was (and remains) a highly contingent process.⁵ Studying the contingencies of mobility makes it possible to examine the contingencies of labor. It also offers a methodological approach that extends the history of workers beyond their activities while at work, to encompass the complex processes through which they moved into and out of specific jobs. This methodology, in turn, provides important insights into the broader worlds of colonial rule and of individual workers’ lives.

This approach builds upon, and shares some commonalities with, the robust historical scholarship on migrant labor in colonial Africa.⁶ This scholarship has done a great deal to elucidate the importance of labor within the colonial encounter, as well as to expose the limitations of examining labor through the lens of an archetypal working class. Nonetheless, there is an important methodological distinction between studying mobility and studying migration, in that histories of migrant labor examine its singular examples—whether one point of origin, one destination, or one circuit of migrant labor—in order to detail more clearly how a particular variety of migrant labor changed over time. By isolating one particular type of migration as an object of study, such histories necessarily approach their subject as an already-consummated social fact. In the process, they inadvertently portray migrant labor as a kind of tunnel between fixed points of work and home, obscuring questions about what happened in between.⁷ In contrast, this book treats migration as an open-ended process—as a set of plural possibilities, rather than a singular pathway. Thus, rather than retelling the history of a particular type of migration, the book uses a roving lens to observe workers as they moved between migrant labor’s multiple circuits.⁸ This approach makes it possible to recover the spatial contingency inherent within migrant labor and analyze the messy processes by which migrant workers ended up in specific jobs.⁹

Labor mobility, as it is defined in this book, is thus both a subject and a method of inquiry. As a subject, labor mobility allows us to better understand how migrant workers experienced wage labor, and how they utilized it to their advantage, by moving between different types of employment in order to maximize labor’s possibilities and limit its burdens.¹⁰ It also illuminates the array of shifting connections that workers forged between the different corners of the colonial economy. As a methodology, studying labor mobility makes it possible to investigate the full array of workers’ histories under colonial rule, beyond the boundaries of labor itself. Examining how the latent possibilities of migrant labor became the lived realities of individual workers reveals many different histories, from the gendered dynamics of colonial society to the mechanisms of power employed by the colonial state. Workers’ mobility was an immensely important and fiercely contested aspect of their labor: For workers and their families, local chiefs and colonial officials, controlling workers’ mobility was crucial if they were to take advantage of the labor that it made possible. This book unveils these otherwise obscured struggles, providing a new vantage point through which to question how labor was utilized, how it was controlled, and how it connected the lives of individual workers with the colonial policies that governed them.

Mobility, Forced Labor, and Migrant Labor

In focusing on labor mobility, this book contributes to several distinct historiographies. The first is the history of forced labor, the subject of chapter 1. Forced labor was a common fate for workers like Amusa during the 1940s and 1950s, when it was known as the contrato, or contract—a word that appears frequently in the pages that follow.¹¹ The contrato had a long genealogy in Portugal’s African empire, dating from the end of slavery, when former slaves were automatically contracted to their former owners. In the 1940s and 1950s, the contrato was imposed under a 1942 decree, issued by the Governor-General, that reversed a previous ban on forced labor by requiring every African man to work six months of wage labor per year. This decree was not repealed until 1961. During the two decades that it was in effect, the Portuguese state conscripted hundreds of thousands of workers into contrato, which required them to spend six months working for Mozambique’s largest employers, performing difficult tasks while earning meager wages.

There is a rich literature on forced labor in the Portuguese empire.¹² Forced labor was widespread across colonial Africa, particularly following the abolition of slavery, but its brutality and longevity within the Portuguese empire have made Lusophone Africa the center of forced labor historiography.¹³ This literature has particularly highlighted the ruthless tactics used to impose forced labor, from the police raids that dragged people from their homes, to the physical and corporal abuse at the worksite, to the severe retaliations against anyone who fled. Yet as I began to interview people about their experiences with forced labor, I found that their experiences encompassed a number of different forms of compulsion, beyond the violence highlighted by existing accounts. To be certain, there is no question that labor coercion in the Portuguese colonies was extraordinarily harsh, to the point that many of its victims compared it to slavery.¹⁴ At the same time, Portuguese authorities also relied upon less forceful mechanisms of power and control. Many workers described going into contrato several times, through a range of variably coercive methods: sometimes, they were abducted by the police; sometimes, they were conscripted by local chiefs; and sometimes, they opted to enter the contrato willingly, usually as a means of earning a quick signing bonus. These seemingly distinct experiences were united by what happened next. All workers who entered the contrato, whether voluntarily or under duress, were dispatched by colonial officials to their places of employment. In the process, contrato workers became forced workers, as they could no longer control where they worked, nor the job they performed, nor the wages they earned.¹⁵ All of these were instead determined by the colonial authorities who had sent them.

Mobility was thus an important dimension through which labor was contested and controlled.¹⁶ Forced movement was essential in imposing forced labor: Workers who were sent to work through the contrato system, even otherwise voluntary ones, were channeled to specific employers whom they had not chosen and jobs they would not otherwise have accepted. In contrast, workers who were not confined within the contrato system, and who traveled to work under their own auspices, could choose to enter specific jobs in specific places.¹⁷ They could also leave jobs that were no longer advantageous to their circumstances. Migrant workers had the effective autonomy to enter or leave work as they wished; contrato workers did not.¹⁸ While forced movement was a comparatively subtle mechanism of colonial power, it played a ubiquitous and essential role in imprinting forced labor.¹⁹ Examining this role offers an important conceptual contribution to the ongoing efforts by historians, particularly those in the emerging field of global labor history, to study the division between free and forced labor.²⁰ It also contributes to the study of mobility and its uses in colonial Africa. Numerous scholars have explained how Africans used their mobility to evade or negotiate colonial impositions.²¹ Nonetheless, mobility was a tool available to both colonizer and colonized—it was not just a method of circumventing colonial power, but also a method of reproducing it.²²

The book’s second chapter examines how workers used their mobility to navigate the world of migrant wage labor. This approach engages a different set of inquiries about migrant labor, building upon earlier questions that have effectively been answered by existing studies. Historians of migrant labor have generally investigated how migrant labor changed over time, which has in turn led them to focus upon retracing migrant labor’s causes: the social, historical, and individual circumstances that led African workers to enter into migrant labor, the push and pull factors that persuaded them to leave their homes to seek work elsewhere.²³ My initial interviews with former workers followed this line of questioning, focusing on the reasons that they took up migrant work. Their motivations—evading forced labor, earning money to pay taxes, accumulating the wealth necessary to marry and establish an independent household, learning new skills, and visiting new places—will be familiar to anyone acquainted with the history of migrant labor in colonial Africa. The question was not particularly interesting to the people I interviewed; they did not consider going into migrant labor a noteworthy decision, but instead a necessary and prosaic part of life under colonial rule. Nor is this surprising, because by the 1940s and 1950s, migrant labor had played a foundational role in the regional economy for more than half a century.

More interesting than people’s entry into wage labor were the varied working lives they pursued after they did so. The jagged paths taken by migrants offer several essential insights into migrant labor in colonial Africa. The first is that migrant labor was not a single activity, undertaken to pursue a single goal. Instead, it was a choice between many different options, each offering different benefits and imposing different burdens.²⁴ Crossing the border into South Africa had a very different impact on a person’s life than migrating to Beira or picking up work on a sugar plantation, making the decision of where to work an essential aspect of the migrant labor experience. For that reason, examining labor mobility provides a much more complete picture of the myriad ways in which workers conceptualized and utilized their labor. In particular, examining how workers alternated between different types of migrant labor shows a broader array of motivations than the ones conventionally examined by historians. Migrants were not simply orbiting capitalism’s gravitational pull and taking whatever job offered them the highest wages, nor were they seeking whatever employment would best shield them from the colonial state, nor were they pursuing only the most socially and culturally valorized types of work. To be sure, all of these motivations were important. Nonetheless, labor was mediated by other factors—particularly workers’ affective ties to their wives, their siblings, their parents, and their families.²⁵

The argument that African workers were not always and only concerned with the conditions of their labor but were also motivated by personal considerations of love and belonging may not seem surprising. Nonetheless, the importance of affect has yet to be investigated by historians of labor.²⁶ This is an important oversight; understanding the realities of migrant labor history requires engaging with the broad spectrum of competing desires that shaped how workers engaged with work, beyond the material considerations conventionally privileged by labor historians.²⁷ Workers wanted to earn more money, but they also wanted to be with their families. They wanted to get better jobs, but they also wanted to be closer to home. They wanted to accumulate the resources to pay marriage dowry, but they also wanted to be with their wives after they married.

Studying labor mobility thus broadens our understanding of what labor meant to the workers who undertook it. It also helps explain otherwise unexpected decisions: workers who left high-paying jobs to take lower-paid work closer to home; workers who returned to Mozambique from working abroad, despite the risk of forced labor; workers who repeatedly cycled between different jobs in different locations, rather than advancing through the ranks of one employer. Finally, it allows us to both humanize and analyze migrant labor, showing how workers integrated material incentives and