On April 16th, 2021, The Center for African Studies hosted its weekly Baraza entitled, “Servers, Safaris, and Social Ascension: African Labor in the Tourism Industry of Colonial Mozambique, 1890-1975”. The presentation was given by Dr. Todd Cleveland, associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas. His publications include: Following the Ball: The Migration of African Soccer Players across the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1949-1975 (2017); Diamonds in the Rough: Corporate Paternalism and African Professionalism on the Mines of Colonial Angola, 1917-1975 (2015); and Stones of Contention: A History of Africa’s Diamonds (2014).
Dr. Cleveland’s talk was centered on his forthcoming book about tourism and colonial Mozambique. This work started 5 years ago when he had traveled to Mozambique and Portugal interviewing tourists and most importantly laborers in the industry. He started the presentation with the lyrics of a song written and performed by Bob Dylan, titled Mozambique.
The audience listened to Dr. Cleveland share the history of July 16th, 1955 –the day the Bishop from Portugal oversaw the inauguration of the Grand Hotel as a resplendent event in Mozambique. The Governor-General of this Portuguese colony, Gabriel Mauricio, boasted this hotel as the “Pride of Africa”. This hotel held a place of honor to the Portuguese colonizers. On that day the unrecognized efforts, salutations of the hundreds of African laborers were absent. Dr. Cleveland shared an image where he described the ways in which the assembled guests dismissed these workers as mere fixtures and discernible from the furniture or other décor.
Dr. Cleveland shared from his interviews with staff who stated the tangible benefits that this industry offered. The ability to afford certain goods, build a home and many other attributes afforded by this employment. Many indigenous laborers in their colony’s tourism industry realized social mobility via both the steady wages that they earned and their daily interactions with discerning clientele.
The forthcoming book constructs a history of tourism in colonial Mozambique via these extended examinations of these interconnected mobilities. Dr. Cleveland defined this term as the abilities and the ways that were changed over time leading up to independence Mozambican independence in 1975. African workers in the tourism industry were actively forging new relations with friends, family members, coworkers, neighbors. The book underscores the interdependence of these otherwise disparate populations, on one hand, the experience of foreign tourists in the colony and on the other, the lived experiences of indigenous laborers who facilitated and gave service. Dr. Cleveland’s talk highlighted the vital contributions that both groups made to the development of tourism and Bob Dylan’s magical land of Mozambique.
From here Dr. Cleveland transitioned to the topic of the National Park in central Mozambique and other touristic destinations. Mozambique served as a labor pool of young men for the South African mines, often so that they could satisfy forced labor requirements. The talk transitioned to the hunting reserves to the National Park. These hunting reserves provided sanctuary for the region’s fauna and consequently attracted 10s of thousands of visitors each year. The audience heard the history of Mozambique a bit more after the war of independence and its impact on tourism. Portugal’s touristic and political aims became deeply intertwined over time.
Dr. Cleveland’s book attempts to reconstruct the code development of African laborers and foreign visitors of the tourism industry in colonial Mozambique that ironically prompted many guests to “forget that they were in Africa”. He contends that the successful transformation of the colony into one of the most visited on the continent was attributable to tourists. Experiential detachment from the “authentic Africa” that so many other destinations strove to manufacture and their encounter with a no less real yet a highly divergent variety of Africa.
The book constitutes the initial academic engagement with African men and women. Children who shaped an industry that grew in both economic and political importance to Portugal as international pressure to relinquish its colonial empire begins to pick up in the 1960s, of course, and on into the early 1970s. Dr. Cleveland argued that in order to establish the oppressive nature of colonial regimes, and correspondingly, the creative ways that Africans negotiated them, the first generation of scholars interested in labor history on the continent gravitated towards spaces and instances of contention between indigenous workers and European capital. This insight took researchers to the mines.
For Dr. Cleveland in an effort to continue to highlight African agency, creativity, and resourcefulness, this durable framework also manifests in the Mozambican labor historiography, upon which this study and his book builds and engages with. Daily exposure to an eventual proficiency in European Languages and customs facilitated further ascension for indigenous persons. Dr. Cleveland hopes his book features an analytical utility that transcends Africa’s borders.
And so finally Dr. Cleveland shared that the book aims to contribute to the analysis of the Portuguese Empire by considering the roles that touristic investment and revenue played in the perpetuation of the Portuguese Empire. European governments allocated funds for both touristic infrastructure and promotion in their African colonies to varying degrees and derived financial benefits from these investments. This book aims to generate a holistic reconstruction of the history of tourism in colonial Mozambique. By exploring the ways that African workers capitalized on opportunities within the industry, the book strives to prompt reconsiderations of indigenous labor and social mobility in colonial Africa while also opening up new ways of thinking more broadly about how tourism shapes.
Written by: Karen Awura-Adjoa Ronke Coker