Legacies of nature conservation and land tenure in Mozambique

When Mozambique was a Portuguese colony, the Portuguese crown sought to “modernize” black people through Christianity, science and xibalo (forced labour).[1] In this period, the land belonged to the Portuguese crown and black people could own small parcels of land to ensure the reproduction of labour, through what became known as terras indigenas or “indigenous lands”.[2] António Enes, the first commissioner in colonial Mozambique and the architect of the colonial administrative system, proposed that “the state allows black inhabitants of Mozambique Province to occupy and use temporarily, land parcels which belong to the state [Portuguese Crown]”.[3] However, the houses were to be precariously built, and the parcels of land were limited to five hectares; for this, they would also pay a hut tax (or imposto de palhota in Portuguese), locally called mussoco.[4] According to this proposal, “the régulos and other traditional chiefs did not have any rights to property over the lands on which they exercised political authority if they are not acquired by state concession or any other judicial title, and they cannot dispose of them”.[5] This proposal constructed these indigenous lands as terra nullius, and inscribed racial divides on space as well as hierarchies of life forms.

After the Berlin Conference divided Africa among European colonial powers in 1880, Portugal was forced to carry out the effective occupation of their colonies. Mozambican lands had also interested other colonizers, for example, Great Britain, mostly in the South of Mozambique. Portugal was an underdeveloped colonial power compared to its peers, so it lacked means to effectively occupy the colonial lands. This made the Portuguese colonial state fear a possible “denaturalization” of people in Mozambique. Consequently, the colonial government took stronger measures to make sure land concessions could only be granted through formal laws with the participation of the state.[6] In the 1880s and 1900s, the colonial government rented out most lands in the North and Central Mozambique to private plantation companies to ensure a profit and effective control of people and land, after the failure of the prazos, which are considered the first form of Portuguese colonial occupation of Mozambique in the 1600s.

The prazos were traders of Indian and Portuguese descent who rented land from the Portuguese crown for three generations and later they started marrying local women and becoming attached to local modes of living and some became independent. After the prazos were discontinued in 1832 and 1854, some of them became military states of the Zambezi Valley specialized in the commerce of slaves, even after slavery was abolished in 1836 and later in 1852. The colonial government started privileging private companies to explore the land and the people which were classified in chartered companies and leasing companies. The majestic companies were responsible for ensuring effective control of people and land, fending off resistance from the military states as well as local states, collect taxes and “civilize” indigenous people through Christianity and xibalo (forced labor)[7]. The process of fending off resistance from the military states and local kingdoms was known as “conquer and pacification campaigns”. Chartered companies’ rights to explore the land and people were granted directly by the Portuguese king and they could sublet the land to leasing companies. Chartered companies were considered states within a state. In Lugela, where Mount Mabo is located, the leasing companies included Societé du Madal (henceforth Madal), Chá Tacuane, Chá Palmira, Boror Company, Agricultural Company of Lugela[8]. These companies did not have the same privileges as chartered companies. They rented the land from the colonial state or chartered companies.

As decreed at the height of the colonial period, the land was organized as private property, unoccupied territories and public or state property.[9] Most lands that were occupied by villagers fell under the category of unoccupied territories since they did not possess a land title, hence constructed as terra nullius. Conservation areas were solely state property created at first to entertain white settlers.[10] They were enacted by a growing international conservationist movement, which was born and modelled around the American Yosemite and Yellowstone National Park protection approach[11] that was not exempt from violence and expulsions.

In Yellowstone, in 1863, forced evictions killed 300 Shoshone in one day.[12] For Yosemite, Lafayet Bunnel gives a vivid image of forced evictions: “what is now known as the Yosemite Valley. While entering it, I saw at a glance that the reality of my sublime vision at Ridley’s ferry, forty miles away, was before me. The locality of the mysterious cliff was there revealed—its proportions enlarged and perfected. The discovery of this remarkable region was an event intimately connected with the history of the early settlement of that portion of California. During 1850, the Indians in Mariposa county, which at that date included all the territory south of the divide of the Tuolumne and Merced rivers within the valley proper of the San Joaquin, became troublesome to the miners and settlers. Their depredations and murderous assaults were continued until the arrival of the United States Indian commissioners, in 1851, when the general government assumed control over them. Through the management of the commissioners, treaties were made, and many of these Indians were transferred to locations reserved for their special occupancy.”[13]

In Mozambique, the first conservation area was created in the 1960s. Ivory and minerals had brought many traders from Asia and Europe and had proven a lucrative business for the Portuguese government so much that the government slowly enacted laws to stop local hunters from partaking in hunting.[14] Game hunting was booming in this period and this required strong legislation to ensure a profit and stop possible animal and profit loss.[15] Only licensed hunters could hunt during this period,[16] and indigenous peoples found violating these regulations should be arrested and taken to the administration.[17]

In the 1960s, the colonial state sought to extend and tighten its grip on Mozambican lands and people in the context of a growing armed liberation struggle headed by FRELIMO, a movement that evolved into a political party in post-independence Mozambique. Oral histories in Lugela show that some of the villagers who lived close to the mountain were forced out and obliged to settle in areas where the colonial administrative apparatus could easily have better access and control of the people and land. This relocation of villagers happened, for example, with the povoados of Nvava and Nangaze, where I carried out my fieldwork.

After Mozambique attained its independence in 1975, FRELIMO adhered to socialism after the movement’s Third Congress in 1977, headed by President Samora Machel who nationalized all land and natural resources in it. The task of the socialist state was to ensure progress by “engineering” a Homem Novo (New Man) through science. The government of Samora Machel privileged science and modernity as the only legitimate modes of organizing the country. The socialist president sought to “kill” tribalism to build a nation. The socialist state portrayed traditional structures and practices, including the management of land through local modes of living as colonial imprints or divisive, a stance that Filho called “modernist Marxism”.[18] This Homem Novo was constructed as a collectivized and rational individual, who abandons their tribes to build a socialist nation. Anything opposed to this ideal was considered a bourgeois, corrupt, colonial agent or enemy from within or without, who needed to be sent to re-education camps.

The land was a factor of production and was to be explored through what became known as aldeias comunais (communal villages), a process James Scott called “villagization”.[19] Collective farms were based on heavily mechanized equipment for state farms, generally producing a single crop for domestic consumption as well as export crops in aldeias comunais,[20] which continued with the colonial idea of converting villagers, portrayed as backward, incapable and ineffective that required conversion to modernity. Communal villages were inspired by the experiences in zonas libertadas (literally, liberated zones) and sought to “organize the people” who lived in an isolated and dispersed manner, and to create a “New Man”: Portuguese-speaking, not superstitious, not religious, not alcoholic, not polygamous, and inhabiting a communal village”.[21]

A year after independence, a civil war broke out in Mozambique. RENAMO (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana), a national movement that was created with assistance from the apartheid Rhodesian government to destabilize the FRELIMO government, made alliances with the marginalized local leaders in rural areas. According to Sergio Chichava, by 1980 there were one thousand communal villages housing 1.3 million villagers, the equivalent of 15% of the rural population, in Mozambique. However, in Zambézia province, there were no communal villages.[22] FRELIMO did not have much support from people in this province, so much that the Revolutionary Party of Mozambique (PRM), a Zambezian group opposing FRELIMO from Southern Malawi, formed by Amós Sumane, Bernardo A. Gimo, Matius Ntenda and A. Njanje, on June 06, 1976[23] and when RENAMO penetrated in the region in 1982, they had support from PRM.[24]

In Zambézia Province, villagers resisted emphatically communal villages despite punishment from FRELIMO through “re-education camps”.[25] When PRM entered Zambézia, among its principal targets were the communal villages. For example, on September 20, 1982, PRM burnt down the only communal village existing in Mwabanama, in the Lugela district.[26] This might be behind the fact that during my stay from June 2016 to April 2018 in Nangaze, which is part of Mwabanama Administrative Post, I never heard of aldeias comunais, a result of this resistance of being incorporated into a progressive, modernist and homogenizing policies enacted by the socialist FRELIMO. This link to RENAMO turned Lugela into an intense battlefield between RENAMO and FRELIMO.

Relative to land property, the socialist government recognized only collective and private property through land-use titles, ignoring local modes of living which based their relations to land through kinship and spirits, which fell again under superstition and backwardness in the new regime. These policies, some scholars claim, were behind the popularity of RENAMO. Local leaders who felt abandoned by FRELIMO government allied to this movement in a civil war[27] that started in 1976 and ended in 1992.[28] During the socialist period, conservation areas were not a priority, since the socialist government portrayed them as spaces of consumerism and for colonialists. In this period, conservation areas were still state property.

The civil war had driven villagers, FRELIMO and RENAMO armies into conservation areas and forests and mountains in search of proceeds, protein, and protection.[29] In the Lugela District, local accounts show that most villagers fled to Mount Mabo where they lived even more intimately with the mountain for nearly a decade (1984-1992). During this period, villagers’ livelihoods were based on small-scale farming and the trade of bushmeat with axes, clothes, salt, oil, hygiene products and other goods that had been difficult to get or produce during the civil war. During the socialist period, development was predicated on the New Man transforming and taming the forces of nature to ensure collective agricultural production.

In 1987, the Mozambican socialist state made a U-turn towards capitalism, after the death of Samora Machel in 1986. In this period, the IMF and World Bank forced the country into opening its economy to private forces, including the privatization of land in Mozambique. However, land and conservation areas were still state property. Both land ownership and conservation areas required a DUAT – Documento de Uso e Aproveitamento da Terra (Land Use Titles). In this period, the country’s economy and social fabric were shattered. Private forces started taking a leading role in the management of public assets including the management of some conservation areas. This was also the period in which there was a rise of assistance development from western organizations, namely Save the Children and World Vision. Calamities like droughts alongside civil war had devastated much of the agricultural production of the countries.

With the rise of Joaquim Chissano to the presidency of Mozambique, in 1986, the state narrative shifted to embracing (cultural) diversity. In the 1990s, three significant shifts in Mozambican history occurred: the first was the end of the Civil War in 1992; second, the enactment of the new constitution based on liberal democratic ideals and universal suffrage, and the third, the first general presidential election in 1994. In this period, there was a strong public debate about the role of Mozambican cultures and traditions in the development of the country and peace. For example, in 1993, there was the first National Conference on Culture; in this conference, the tradition was portrayed as “museum artefacts”, which needed to be valued, preserved, and above all used to promote the development and solidify the national unity.[30]

In this period, the existence of other worlds was officially acknowledged for the first time in Mozambican public life. One of the changes, in terms of land ownership, was the legal recognition of local modes of living, or as the legal documents call it, “tradition”. Furthermore, occupancy of land for more than ten years was also recognized as a legitimate way of owning land, however, in all cases, only a DUAT provided secure land ownership. In this period, there was also a global narrative of including villagers in the management of conservation areas as well as the decentralization of public administration.

In the 2000s, climate change and wildlife protection debates gained a wider and deeper currency on environmental legislation and policies in the country alongside the neoliberalization process. Concurrently, it was the period in which President Armando Guebuza rose to power in 2005. His policies gravitated around the entrepreneurship and extractive industry as the basis for the economic development of the country. In this period, new conservation areas were created as well as relaxation of national borders to create transfrontier conservation areas.[31] This was also the period in which the private, public and community partnerships in nature conservation started being heavily promoted. Furthermore, the growing global networks of poaching and illegal logging with pernicious effects on forests and wildlife sounded the alarm about the need to protect wildlife and biodiversity. The participation of villagers in natural resources management became the mantra of conservationists and policy-makers, with these actors suggesting that the villagers should be taught about the value of protecting their nature. There was also demand for the conservation areas becoming more profitable to state and private forces to ensure economic development.[32] Displacements and conflicts between villagers and conservation area managers intensified in this period.[33]

The connection of profit-making and growing global networks of poaching and logging shifted significantly the geography of conservation in the region, including Mozambique, leading to increased “forced separations”,[34] to use Lesley Green’s words, of villagers and their natures, increased securitization and militarization of conservation areas and the resulting necropolitics,[35] or legitimization of killings of “poachers”, amounting to what Büscher and Ramutsindela called green violence, which includes “symbolic, discursive, social, and other forms of violence” in the name of nature conservation.[36]

This kind of violent conservation has become the norm of how conservationists, state, and private forces control people, land and biodiversity in the present; this normalization of “green violence”, due to pragmatic approaches of government and market forces becomes the “default setting” of conservation in the country, which requires a separation of villagers and their nature. For example, Julieta Lichunge, a Community Development Official working at the National Administration of Conservation Areas (ANAC), a parastatal agency responsible for managing conservation areas, notes that the presence of villagers inside conservation areas is still framed as a “problem”[37] that unsettles park manager’s, markets’ and states’ biopolitical interventions to create a “desired state” of wilderness – a terra nullius.

Four aspects are worth highlighting in this short history of land ownership and conservation legislation in Mozambique. First, an authoritarian approach to science has been favored by the colonialist, socialist and neoliberal state in Mozambique as the legitimate mode of knowing and relating to nature, which favored the separation of nature to society and constructed the Man as the manager or owner of nature through legal property relations, in disregard to other worlds (or worldings). Second, the increased intersection of capital and conservation has led to intensified green violence, which intensified even more in the context of growing global networks of poaching and logging, further marginalizing local worlds. Third, since colonial period, nature has been framed as an inert object, a resource, an asset to be explored or protected, but not as an agent that constitutes life and death in complex relations with humans and other life forms. Fourth, all the above-mentioned aspects highlight that the precarious conditions of villagers and local knowledges were not a by-product of governance but a direct effect of policies that were headed towards a “single-reality doctrine”[38], a stance that is still reproduced despite the global and local call to include villagers in decision-making processes.

[1] For more details about xibalo read Arianna Planey, a short overview of Chibalo (forced labour) in Mozambique 1938-1961, accessed April 21, 2019, available ate https://arriannaplaney.wordpress.com/2010/08/01/a-short-overview-of-chibalo-forced-labor-in-colonial-mozambique-1938-1961/

[2] Read Negrão, J. 2001. A indispensável terra africana para aumento da riqueza dos pobres. http://www.ces.uc.pt/publicacoes/oficina/ficheiros/179.pdf. Accessed on June 4, 2017 and Direito, B. 2013. Land and colonialism in Mozambique: policies and practice in Inhambane, c.1900 – c.1940. Journal of Southern African Studies 39(2) 353–369.

[3] Enes, A. 1893. Moçambique: relatório apresentado ao Governo. Lisboa: Divisão de Publicações e Biblioteca - Agência Geral das Colónias, at 532

[4] Enes 1893, at 532. Mussoco was a local way of people paying their tribute to the ruler of the territory, this was done in agricultural products or meat. All kingdoms from the area charged this from their people. When Portuguese settlers came, they captured this system and imposed the hut tax as a mode of controlling inhabitants and colonized kingdoms. Taxation was a mode of enforcing colonial state presence in these kingdoms.

[5] Enes 1893, at 523

[6] Direito, B. 2013. Land and colonialism in Mozambique: policies and practice in Inhambane, c.1900 – c.1940. Journal of Southern African Studies 39(2) 353–369

[7] For more details visit https://arriannaplaney.wordpress.com/2010/08/01/a-short-overview-of-chibalo-forced-labor-in-colonial-mozambique-1938-1961/, accessed March 12, 2019

[8] For more details visit http://www.portaldogoverno.gov.mz/por/Moçambique/Historia-de-Moçambique/Penetracao-Colonial, accessed March 12, 2019

[9] Ministério do Ultramar - Gabinete do Ministro, Diario do Governo. Decree no. 43894 of 6 of September 1961, Série I de 1961-09-06: article 2, available at https://dre.tretas.org/dre/266299/decreto-43894-de-6-de-setembro

[10] Gonçalves, C. 2002. Recordando caçadores guias que fizeram história. http://faunabraviadeMoçambique.blogspot.com/. Accessed on February 6, 2017.

[11] Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008, at 115

[12] Marvier, M, Kareiva,P and Lalasz, R. 2011, Allen, C. 2005. Zacheas Var Ornun petition for indemnity. Oregon Historical Society. Accessed July 31, 2019, available at https://oregonhistoryproject.org/articles/historical-records/zacheas-van-ornum-petition-for-indemnity/#.XUGYvPZuJPY

[13] Bunnel, L. 1892. The discovery of the Yosemite. Accessed June 05, 2019, available at http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/discovery_of_the_yosemite/, introduction

[14] Coelho, M. 2015. PhD Thesis. Maphisa and sportsmen: a caça e os caçadores no Sul de Moçambique sob o domínio do colonialismo – C.1895-1930. Brazil: Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas

[15] Gonçalves 2002, Coelho 2015

[16] Coelho 2015

[17] Ministério do Ultramar - Gabinete do Ministro, Diario do Governo, Decree nr. 40040, of January 20, 1955, article 51, number 5

[18] Filho, A. 1997. The political economy of agrarian transition in Mozambique. Journal of Contemporary African Studies. 15(2) 191-218

[19] Scott, J. 1998. Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed? New Haven and London: Yale University Press

[20] Filho, A. 1997. The political economy of agrarian transition in Mozambique. Journal of Contemporary African Studies. 15(2) 191-218 at 199

[21] Chichava, S. 2013. They can kill us but we won’t go to the communal villages!” Peasants and the policy of “socialization of the countryside” in Zambézia. Kronos. 39, pp: 112 – 130 at 39

[22] Chichava and Legg 2013

[23] Robinson, D. 2006. PhD Thesis. Curse on the Land: A History of the Mozambican Civil War. Australia: University of Western Australia, at 109

[24] Chichava and Legg 2013, at 114

[25] These camps emerged firstly as spaces for urban prostitutes in the 1970s. These places shifted to also accommodate individuals who were considered anti-social, marginal to society or anti-revolution, for more details see http://www.mozambiquehistory.net/reeducation.php

[26] Chichava and Legg 2013, at 123

[27] Depending on the ideological inclination of the scholars and authors this is also called a destabilization war, which means it was a war that was started by the apartheid regime to fragilize FRELIMO who was aiding ZANU PF and ANC to fight against the regime. Other scholars claim that it was a civil war or internal war which was caused by dissatisfied local leaders who felt betrayed and ignored by the socialist government. Others claim that the destabilization process would not have gained traction if there was no dissatisfaction in rural areas. In this thesis, I ally with this stance.

[28] For more details read, Geffray, C. 1990. La cause des armes au Mozambique: anthropologie d’une guerre civile. Editions Karthala, Robinson, D. 2006. PhD Thesis. Curse on the Land: A History of the Mozambican Civil War. University of Western Australia, Australia, and Chichava 2013

[29] Gorongosa National Park was severely damaged during the civil war. RENAMO base was in the park. In Lugela most villagers fled to Mount Mabo for protection when civil war broke out. Límbue was RENAMO’s base and Lugela District was FRELIMO’s base.

[30] For more details read Ministério da Educação e Cultura (2009) II Conferência Nacional Sobre a Cultura: cultura Moçambicana Chave para o Desenvolvimento Sustentável – Recomendações Gerais da I Conferência Nacional Sobre a Cultura

[31] Ramutsindela, M. 2007. Transfrontier conservation in Africa: at the confluence of capital, Politics and Nature. CABI

[32] USAID. 2014. Planeamento estratégico ANAC (Agência Nacional de Gestão de Áreas de Conservação). Terms of Reference. Accessed on June 14, 2017, available at http://www.speed-program.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ANAC-Strategic-Development-Plan-ToR-Tomas-Port.pdf, at 2

[33] For case studies read Ramutsindela, M. 2005. Parks and people in postcolonial societies: experience in southern Africa. Springer: Netherlands, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jun/27/mozambique-conservation, Witter, R. 2013. Elephant-induced displacement and the power of choice: moral narratives about resettlement in Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park. Conservation and Society. 1(11) 406–19, Lunstrum, E. 2013. Articulated sovereignty: extending Mozambican state power through the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. Political Geographic 1(33) 1–11, Lunstrum, E. 2014. Green militarization: anti-poaching efforts and the spatial contours of Kruger National Park." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104 (4) 816-832, Diallo, R. 2015. Conservation philanthropy and the shadow of state power in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique. Conservat Soc. 13, 19-128, Schuetze, C. 2015. Narrative fortresses: crisis narratives and conflict in the conservation of Mount Gorongosa, Mozambique. Conservation and Society 3(2) 141–153, Walker, M. 2015. Producing Gorongosa: space and the environmental politics of degradation in Mozambique. Conservation and Society. 13(2) 129-140 Massé, F. 2016. The political ecology of human-wildlife conflict: producing wilderness, insecurity, and displacement in the Limpopo National Park. Conservation and Society 14(2) 100–111

[34] Green, L. 2016. Reclaiming Earth: soil, death and birth in Southern African ecologies. Talk presented at the Postcolonial Anthropocene Panel II: pidgins, power and contaminated survival. AAA, November 16, 2016

[35] Mbembe, A. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15(1) 11-40

[36] Büscher 2018, at 162

[37] Julieta Lichunge, Maputo, pers.comm., May 9, 2018

[38] Law 2011