ABSTRACT

This chapter examines late colonialism in Mozambique as a settler colonial situation. It analyses Portuguese theories and practices of white settlement in relation to broader transnational conversations about the possibility of multiracial cooperation in the eve of African decolonisation. It argues that white settlement projects were predicated not only on political designs to perpetuate colonial sovereignty, but also on a racialised understanding of colonial development, according to which “the white” featured as a precondition to “modern civilisation”. Against this background, the chapter explores the anxieties, contradictions, and tensions underlying the colonial imaginations of the “poor white” problem in Mozambique. While rural white poverty was not at odds with the politically and morally conservative nature the Portuguese regime at home, “poor whites” were out of place in Mozambican settler society. The chapter surveys various expressions of local discontent with Portugal’s settlement policy, in which the “poor white” emerges as a symbol of metropolitan misgovern and as a potentially disruptive element to settler colonial race relations, often seen in comparison to apartheid South Africa. The chapter concludes that Lisbon’s settler colonialism ultimately undermined the precarious credibility of multiracialism as a viable alternative to decolonisation.