ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 charts competing understandings of displacement along Tanzania’s southern border throughout the 1960s, when 100,000 Mozambican refugees fled the war for liberation and dispersed throughout the region. Using archival material from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Tanganyika Christian Refugee Service (TCRS), the Tanzania National Archives, as well as oral interviews with displaced Mozambicans, it argues that, prior to the rise of the International Refugee Regime, host states, aid agencies, African liberation leaders, and the displaced themselves debated, negotiated, and reformulated what it meant to be a “refugee” during decolonization. It traces the genesis and evolution of the first and largest Mozambican refugee camp in Tanzania, Rutamba, to explore the mechanisms by which state and aid officials attempted to control Mozambican mobility and how Mozambicans avoided attempts to curtail and dictate their movements. Mozambican refugees exercised considerable agency in establishing Rutamba as a home in exile, but in a context in which refugee status was continually contested, fluid, and situational.
