ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the impacts of ProSAVANA, a controversial trilateral development project. It examines ways in which power inequalities with colonial genealogies can be (re)produced through the performance and practices of development cooperation, and through the very process of researching them. In the postwar neoliberal era, development cooperation was increasingly delivered by non-governmental organizations, sometimes in partnership with government departments, and often represented by Mozambican nationals. Bairro people’s framing of Maputo-based Mozambicans as akhunya was part of a wider narrative about southern Mozambique and central government, and their distance from and otherness to Makhuwa peasants. In everyday Makhuwa discourse, people articulated race in terms of power, positionality and being an outsider, as well as through skin colour. The ways in which research models and methods can reinforce structural inequalities have been thoroughly critiqued, especially by feminist and anti-colonial scholars.
