Reinvestment, Resource “Rushes,” and the Inalienability of Place: Land’s Active Layerings in Mozambique

Abstract

For industry proponents, the Xinavane Sugar Mill, Mozambique’s largest sugar estate, has been rehabilitated from postconflict subsistence farming to agroindustrial productivity. Such investment-oriented narratives seek to erase earlier land dispossessions and uneven accumulation. Drawing ethnographic research together with Mozambican Land Cadaster and archival documents, this article rethinks land and place to challenge the global resource “rush” literatures, taking seriously the layers of investment, disinvestment, and reinvestment that enable contemporary financial flows. The article argues to understand land in its historical layerings, to examine how colonial legacy in southern Africa configures land use today. Analyzing three waves of Xinavanian investment, the article examines dispossession, contestation, and plantation expansions and contractions, to yield two key interventions. First, rather than providing mere background to today’s investment and land transformations, Xinavane’s historical layers actively produce the possibilities and limits for making land an investable commodity. Second, through fictions of capitalist success wrought by land and labor control, capitalist state–private efforts have sought to alienate Xinavane. This has been a repeated attempt to resignify Xinavane from being a deeply rooted, heterogeneous African place, to a space of capitalist industrial placelessness. Residents assert, however, that Xinavane cannot be rent from its multivalent meanings and social fabrics, disrupting these capitalist-centric fictions. Xinavanians maintain that land, and place, are in fact inalienable.

很多看好行业发展的人士认为, 莫桑比克最大的糖厂Xinavane糖厂已摆脱了冲突后勉强维续的状态, 其农工业生产力得到了恢复。但这种观点更多地是以吸引投资为目的, 其试图抹杀之前强占土地和不公平资本累积的历史。本文将人种学研究和莫桑比克的土地清册及档案文件相结合, 对土地和位置进行了重新思考, 对全球资源“热”的相关文献提出了质疑, 同时认真审视了推动当代资金流动的投资、撤资和再投资层面。本文认为, 应该了解土地的历史分层情况, 以研究非洲南部的殖民遗产如何影响现在的土地配置。本文分析了对Xinavane的三次投资浪潮, 探讨了相关的强占、争议和种植业的扩张及收缩, 得出两项关键的干预措施。其一, Xinavane的历史层级不只是现在投资和土地改革的历史背景, 也是土地成为可投资商品的主动参与因素, 同时也为其带来诸多限制。其二, 资本主义国有-私有企业虚构了在土地和劳动力控制方面取得了的成功, 试图以此隔绝Xinavane。Xinavane原本是一个深植于地方的多样化非洲地点, 但他们的行为多次试图改变其定义, 将其视为一个没有地方性的资本主义工业地点。但是, 当地居民坚持认为不应该改变Xinavane的多重意义和社会结构, 粉碎了这些以资本主义为核心的虚构表述。Xinavane人认为事实上土地和位置之间的关系是不可分割的。

Para los defensores de la industrialización, el Ingenio Azucarero de Xinavane, la hacienda azucarera más grande de Mozambique, ha sido rehabilitada desde el posconflicto de su condición de establecimiento agrícola de subsistencia a otra de productividad agroindustrial. Tales narrativas orientadas a la inversión buscan borrar anteriores desposesiones de la tierra y desigual acumulación. Aunando investigación etnográfica junto con datos del Catastro de la Tierra de Mozambique y documentos de archivo, este artículo repiensa la tierra y el lugar para retar las literaturas de “estampida” sobre los recursos globales, tomando bien en serio la estratificación de inversión, desinversión y reinversión que activa los flujos financieros contemporáneos. El artículo argumenta en pro de entender la tierra en sus estratificaciones históricas, para examinar cómo el legado colonial configura el uso de la tierra en el África meridional en la actualidad. Analizando tres oleadas de inversión xinavaniana, el artículo examina las expansiones y contracciones de la desposesión, la contestación y la plantación, para producir dos intervenciones claves. Primera, más que proveer un simple antecedente a las inversiones y transformaciones de la tierra en la actualidad, los estratos históricos de Xinavane activamente generan posibilidades y limitaciones para hacer de la tierra un bien susceptible de recibir inversiones. Segunda, a través de las ficciones del éxito capitalista forjado mediante el control de la tierra y el trabajo, los esfuerzos del capitalista privado han buscado alienar Xinavane. Este ha sido un intento repetido para darle una nueva significación a Xinavane, pasando de ser un lugar africano profundamente arraigado y heterogéneo, a un espacio industrial capitalista carente de toda identidad y pertenencia lugareña. Con todo, los residentes insisten en que Xinavane no puede alquilar sus significaciones multivalentes y su tejido social, poniendo fin a estas ficciones centradas en el capitalismo.

Key Words:

• land
• Mozambique
• place
• postcoloniality
• resource “rushes,” southern Africa

关键词:

• 土地
• 莫桑比克
• 地方
• 后殖民
• 资源“热”
• 非洲南部。

Palabras clave:

• África meridional
• “estampida” de recursos
• lugar
• Mozambique
• poscolonialidad
• tierra

Acknowledgments

I thank my interlocutors in Xinavane for their generosity in time and thought, José Cláudio Mandlate, Carlos Fernandes, and Eduardo Mondlane University’s Center for African Studies Seminar participants for helpful comments, and Sónia Bila for 2018 research assistance and translation between Shangaan and Portuguese. Siân Butcher, Peg Cronin, Francis Massé, Karen Morin, and Allen Tran provided writing insights and support. I thank Rebecca Barney and Kate Carlson at the University of Minnesota U-Spatial (uspatial.umn.edu) and Janine Glathar at Bucknell University Digital Pedagogy and Scholarship for GIS assistance, and the article’s two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 All names are changed. The author conducted all Portuguese interviews and translations.

2 Xinavane or Mozambique cannot represent the continent’s heterogeneity. However, I draw on Mozambican interlocutors’ language to highlight distinctions between European (and white) and Mozambican approaches to Xinavane land and place.

3 Tombo Nacional de Terras of the Direcção Nacional de Terras e Florestas.

4 See Cosgrove and Daniels (1988) on landscape iconography. Geographical scholarship on history and landscape is vast; a detailed review is outside this article’s scope. For overviews and new directions see Ogborn (1999), Matless (2003), Heffernan (2009), Wylie (2011), and Morrissey et al. (2014). More recent southern African historical geography includes Journal of Southern African Studies and Journal of Historical Geography special issues on place and identity (Lester 2003) and environmentalism and tourism (McGregor 2005).

5 Space prevents an overview of the rich scholarship on enclosures and the commons. See Thompson (1993), Jeffrey, McFarlane, and Vasudevan (2012), Sevilla-Buitrago (2015), Amin and Howell (2016), and McDonagh and Griffin (2016).

6 Mollett engaged Stoler’s history “as recursion,” how it “folds back on itself” (Van Sant et al. 2020).

7 The resource rush and land grab literatures are an enormous and changing area of study and cannot be fully encapsulated in this article. I reference framing articles in the Journal of Peasant Studies and Third World Quarterly and discussions they have spurred since the 2000s. For historical overviews of African land enclosure, see Baglioni and Gibbon (2013) and Alden Wily (2012).

8 A discussion of assemblage theory is beyond this article’s scope, but Li appeared not to differentiate between Deleuze’s agencement—or assemblage, the cohering of heterogeneous parts—and Foucault’s dispositif—or apparatus, emphasizing governance, the inducement of certain behaviors (Legg 2011). Instead, Li appeared to describe both aspects, of ad hoc conjunctures—contingent and contradictory aggregations of factors, processes, and actors—and how they produce directive systems of practices.

9 Although Massey focused on Britain and industrialized locales.

10 Recent critical agrarian studies and agrarian political economy scholarship identifies spatiality, history, and marginalization as important focus areas (Fairbairn et al. 2014; Edelman and Wolford 2017).

11 Portugal required native Mozambican men to engage in forced labor; post-1962 labor was coerced extrajudicially (Kagan-Guthrie 2018).

12 These were Machambutana, Machambiana, Chianissane, Ilha Mariana, Buna, Conzuene, Movana, and Chibanza. Colonial administrators appointed régulos based on orientation toward occupation or traditional jurisdiction over an area. Fairbairn (2013) and Myers (1994) discussed the politics of régulos’ support of colonial and contemporary state administration.

13 Communities evicted in 1953 remain in those areas. “In that zone there they are truly in the bush!” (Interview with Senhor Andréas 31 January 2014).

14 The Mill also pays farmers to grow cane on their own land. In 2017 outgrowers produced 30 percent of the Mill’s cane (Mandamule 2018). The program has incentivized cane-growing in former native reserve lands (Jelsma, Bolding, and Slingerland 2010; Interview with management representative 27 February 2014; Interview with area village representative 27 June 2018). An administrator reported these families receive little payment and later lack sufficient food (Interview with community representative 3 21 June 2018).

15 For example, the Mill contributes an animal for slaughter each year to régulos for harvest commencement ceremonies (Interview with area village representative 27 June 2018).

16 This is not particular to Xinavane or today. Myers (1994) addressed resistance to land takeover in the immediate postconflict period.

17 Contemporary removals have been compensated, although residents report amounts less than the land’s value (File 30; O’Laughlin 2016). This is akin to what Milgroom and Spierenburg (2008) explored as “induced volition” relating to “voluntary” resettlement in Massingir.

Additional information

Funding

I gratefully acknowledge the support of a Fulbright Institute of International Education Fellowship; University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts, Community of Scholars Program, and MacArthur/Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change Fellowships; and Bucknell University International Research and Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Scholarly Development Grants.

Notes on contributors

Alicia Hayashi Lazzarini

ALICIA HAYASHI LAZZARINI is an LSE Fellow in Human Geography in the Department of Geography and Environment at The London School of Economics and Political Science, London WC2A 2AE, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include contemporary and colonial capitalist investment and issues of uneven development, postcoloniality, and race, particularly in Africa.