Ebook: Displaced Mozambicans in Postcolonial Tanzania: Refugee Power, Mobility, Education, and Rural Development

This book follows the lives of a broad swath of Mozambican men, women, and children--refugees, asylum seekers, liberation leaders, students, migrant workers--all displaced during the war for independence from Portugal (1964-1974). Throughout the war, two distinct communities of displaced Mozambicans emerged. One, a minority of students and liberation leaders, congregated in the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam, where the Mozambican Liberation Front (FRELIMO) established a secondary school and helped students secure university scholarships abroad--often to the United States or Europe. The second community, the vast majority of Mozambicans--nearly 100,000 people--settled in one of five refugee camps established by the Tanzanian government, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and local relief agencies.



In this book, Joanna Tague attends to both of these groups in equal measure by juxtaposing the exilic experiences of the educated minority with the majority of refugees settled in official camps. Read together, their lives constitute a mosaic through which to explore myriad ways in which the displaced acted as their own agents during the wars for liberation attendant to African decolonization in the mid-twentieth century. In so doing, she brings the voices of the displaced into conversation with the decolonization process in Tanzania and with the nature of international humanitarianism in the 1960s in order to recast thinking about refugeeness, mobility, and agency. The book focuses on four major themes (exilic education, transnational solidarity, official refugee settlement, and rural development) in order to explore the possibilities of power in displacement--how Africans exchanged information, built networks of solidarity, and generated individual and collective opportunity throughout the 1960s and 1970s.