ABSTRACT
“Indolent,” “incapable,” and “incompetent” are typical of the adjectives both colonial planners and local officials used to characterize Mozambique’s African population. Peasant opposition posed a recurring challenge to the colonial-capitalist system. Thousands of rural Mozambicans compelled to work on settler farms, plantations, and state public works projects or to grow cotton and rice attempted to limit the amount of labor they provided to the colonial-capitalist system. Urban workers, like their rural counterparts, initially engaged in individual and sporadic actions to escape from or minimize the effects of the new capitalist economic order. As in other parts of Southern and Central Africa, independent churches offered another opportunity for workers and peasants to vent their hostility against the new social order and the hypocrisy of the established Christian churches. A number of miners carried home the message of Marcus Garvey, who was very popular in South Africa, and tried to organize branches of Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association in Beira and Tete.
