Country: Mozambique

Ethnic Group: Makua/ Emakua

Date Finalized: 20 November 2020

Team: Zeenat Hammond (lead), Rebekah Kamer, Vianney Mancilla

Content Warning: forced labor

Approximate Time Period: 1700-1880

There is evidence that the Makua ethnic group of Mozambique has been subjected to forced labor. The data quality is rated a 2. 

            The Makua people are Mozambique’s largest matriarchal tribe with a total population of 7,400,000 who were one of the major victims of slave capture and export demand in Mozambique (Alpers 2001). In the 18th century, the Makua people were enslaved by Portuguese, Arabs, and the Yao people. The largest demand at the time came from the ‘Umani Arabs’ seeking slaves for domestic labor and the French who lacked plantation workers. The Yao people on the other hand targeted them to meet the slave demand of Swahili Arabs centered around Zanzibar.Even though they were peaceful, it is is noted that one of the strategies deployed by Africans and Arab slave raiders and traders was to dehumanize the Makua and Lomwe communities, by publicly stereotyping them as “barbarous and savage tribes”, which made slave buyers between 1800 and 1880 feel justified and righteous in “exploiting, civilizing” them from their barbarous ways (Allen 2003; Wikipedia, 2020).

In the nineteenth century, the Makua of Mozambique were subjected to forced labor through the Islamic networks and were transported to countries involved in the Indian Ocean exchange. After being victims of the slave raids and devastated communities, the Makua chiefs joined in on lucrative trading by becoming a supplier of slaves and raiding ethnic groups near them, selling the captured people to the same merchants and exporters.  The Makua were sent as forced emigrants (as bondage or contracted laborers) to Comoros alongside other African ethnic groups. In 1846, when the new, ruling French declared emancipation, approximately 16% (843) of the population in Mayotte was composed of Makua slaves. Under the harsh, ruling class, the Nwanzi, the Makua were forced to pay an excessive tax. Growing unrest resulted in Makua uprisings against the ruling French in Mayotte (Alpers, 2001). All these forced migrations have led Makua people to obtain a presence in many islands of the Indian Ocean such as Madagascar, the Caribbean, the United States and elsewhere.

            This is evidence of forced labor because of the deliberate cases of forced labor during the 17th-19th centuries, however, considering the limited sources and lack of information into the specific details on the Makua, the data quality is rated at a 2.

Sources

  1. Alpers, E. (2001). A Complex Relationship: Mozambique and the Comoro Islands in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Une relation complexe: Le Mozambique et les Comores aux 19e et 20e siècles). Cahiers d’études africaines, 41(161), 73-95. Retrieved from, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4393107
  2. Allen, R. B. (2003). The Mascarene slave-trade and labour migration in the Indian Ocean during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Slavery and Abolition, 24(2), 33-50.
  3. Wikipedia, (2020), “Makua People.”  Wikimedia Foundation, 29 Oct. 2020 (last updated), en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makua_people.