In 1966, Manuel Belchior, a colonial administrator of educational affairs in Mozambique (and a member of the Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Política Ultramarina), published, in Lisbon, the book Fundamentos para uma política multicultural na África.

 Certainly, the multicultural trend had not yet made its triumphant entry into the field of political diversity, far less into the debates on social theory in general. In fact, what Belchior considered a multicultural policy for Africa consisted of a curious mixture of British anthropological functionalism and more or less systematic concerns relating to the “traditional” African culture, along with a good dose of lusotropicalism.

 






In this regard, his program was no different – in terms of the paternalist rhetoric – from those early formulations of Portuguese assimilationism, whose frustrating destiny was the impossibility of assimilating a large mass of African population, providing a small, more or less manageable number of assimilated Mozambicans. In September 1996, I arrived in Mozambique for the first time to carry out fieldwork in the south of the country.

 

 One of the initial goals of this work was to get in touch with a generation that had experienced a shift from the condition of indigena (native) to that of assimilado: which, as I mentioned earlier, two categories that the colonial legal system had helped to create. Thus, the goal was to observe, in loco, the consequences of the influence of the Portuguese “culture” and to investigate, by means of oral and written records, the way in which this supposed heritage shaped the identity dilemmas of contemporary Mozambique, and the way in which the assimilation policies have influenced the destiny and the lives of a wide group of people.

 

The sociopolitical context of the country at the time of my arrival could not have been better: Mozambique was finally managing to put an end to one of the longest civil wars in modern-day Africa, and the society was in a process of democratization and pacification. The wounds were still open, but there was an underlying expectation as to the possibility of a new Mozambique, and above all, a deep-felt need to talk about the past and the future.

 

 Thus, the possibility of investigating a polyphonic space was opened up to the researcher, in which different voices, many of them dissonant, clamored to be heard. In fact, one of the most unsettling, yet stimulating observations provided to me in this field was the fact that these assimilados, represented in the legal categories of the laws and in the colonial discourses as a homogenous block, in fact comprised a heterogeneous group, whose path was not governed by linear or uniform routes. In short, on one hand there were the assimilados as a legal formulation, and on the other, actual assimilados, carriers of hybrid and “multiple identities”. 


My intention here is not to focus on the process of legal construction of the assimilados, which I have already discussed elsewhere. Suffice to mention, simply, that since the first legislations on this subject, at the start of the 20th century, in successive regulations and decrees, the assimilado was characterized, in general, as an individual who, by emancipating him/herself from the uses and customs, had managed to acquire Portuguese cultural values (of which the language was one of the most important). The aim was to demonstrate through proofs – not always meticulous – how far the individual in question was emancipated from his/her system of local values, and able to convert him/ herself into a second or third category Portuguese citizen. 


Thus, the two separate categories indígena (native) and assimilado were constructed, not only in the dualistic minds of the administrators, but in the colonial laws themselves. Going beyond the ambiguities of the assimilationist plans of Portugal, and the unsteady tone that marked it (under the argument of a supposed tolerance for the “uses and customs”), I was able to identify, in the field, the way in which the classifications imposed by colonialism could be assumed by the assimilated individuals themselves, since some members of this group often incorporated colonial categories when talking about themselves, their past and their present.

 

This heterogeneous group included individuals with secondary level and/ or higher education, but the majority had reached the status of assimilados after completing only elementary education. This was the case with Fanuel, a former employee of the Imprensa Nacional, who received his primary education in the Anglican mission.

 

 In 1948, he completed fourth grade, the highest level to which those with the caderneta de indígena4 – a personal document that was carried by the indígenas (natives) - could hope to aspire. If he wanted to continue his studies, the only option open to him was the school of native teachers. Nevertheless, Fanuel decided to stay among his Anglican teachers and take a course in book binding, in which he learned to produce small textbooks in Portuguese and Changana, his mother tongue (spoken mainly in the South of the country).

 

Fanuel stated that his father had been a Bantu hunter who practiced the uses and customs – a category that the ethnographic insensitivity of the colonial administrators and jurists helped to perpetuate. Perhaps the use of this language constituted, on his part, a strategy that gave me access to his world. Or else it was simply another example of how the classificatory language of colonialism had come full circle: where the objects of this classification assumed, as their own, the categories into which they fit, making them valid forms of self-presentation.