‘Açúcar nem Sempre Doce’: Reinvestment, Land, and Gendered Labor in a ‘New’ Mozambique

Abstract

“'Açucar nem Sempre Doce': Reinvestment, Land, and Gendered Labor in a 'New' Mozambique” analyzes contemporary investment in Mozambique, Southern Africa. Capitalizing on the idea of the continent as ‘rising’ and a ‘last frontier’ of investment, after 16 years of civil conflict Mozambique has sought international financing to rehabilitate the nation’s sugar industry. The Xinavane Sugar Mill, a former colonial estate and today’s largest sugar producer, has played a crucial role in this effort. While lauded for its reinvestment success, the dissertation asks what the ‘re’ in Xinavane’s rehabilitation signifies, and its importance to understanding the contemporary nation. Utilizing multi-sited ethnographic and archival research, the dissertation interrogates codifications of social difference through land dispossession, forced labor migrations, and spatial divisions of raced and gendered labor in the production of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ space. Enrolling Xinavane as an entry point to explore colonial legacy in the increasingly investment oriented nation, the dissertation argues that sugar’s rehabilitation draws centrally on, and reformulates, violent forms of colonial industry and rule. Ultimately, the dissertation investigates how space and place are produced in African historical specificity, and how social inequality is reconfigured in active relationship to it.