Kathleen Sheldon

Cape Verdean and Mozambican Women's Literature: Liberating the National and Seizing the Intimate

Abstract: In Mozambique and Cape Verde, writing in Portuguese by African women has directly engaged political reconstruction by denouncing colonial oppression and embracing national freedom. This article addresses the recent history of Lusophone African womens fiction, which has been pivotal in inscribing the intimate arena of sexuality and motherhood into power relations and has also revealed ways in which the domain of violence intersects with private lives. By focusing on two novels that exemplify this trend, this article demonstrates links between the political and the intimate. It also shows how Lusophone African authors contribute to healing social conflict through their narratives, and draws some conclusions about gender relations in the Lusophone African experience and across the continent.

Outras Vozes : Women's Writings in Lusophone Africa

In this paper we examine the development of womens studies in the Portuguese-speaking African countries of Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and Sao Tome e Principe. There are notable variations between these nations, as Mozambique has had a strong Gender Studies unit at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane that has supported a range of research projects and publications on women and the law, womens history, and related topics. The other countries have also produced important studies, often focusing on womens experiences in the anti-colonial liberation struggle, and on more recent issues such as womens legal position. The paper draws out the commonalities and differences in approaches to womens studies by providing an overview of the relevant publications over the past thirty years.

Introduction: Forty Years of African Women's Studies

African Studies Review , Volume 58, Number 3 (December 2015), pp. 93– 95 Kathleen Sheldon is an independent historian with a research affiliation at the University of California, Los Angeles, Center for the Study of Women. She has published primarily on African women’s history and the history of Mozambique, including Pounders of Grain: A History of Women, Work, and Politics in Mozambique (Heinemann, 2002) and Historical Dictionary of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa (Scarecrow, 2005; 2nd edition, in press). Her recent articles include “Cape Verdean and Mozambican Women’s Literature: Liberating the National and Seizing the Intimate” (with Isabel Fêo P. B. Rodrigues, African Studies Review 53 [3], 2010) and “Creating an Archive of Working Women’s Oral Histories in Beira, Mozambique,” in Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources , edited by Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry J. Katz, and Mary Elizabeth Perry (University of Illinois Press, 2010). She is on the editorial boards of the Dictionary of African Biography and the online resource “Oxford Bibliographies in African Studies.” She is also a senior editor for a new online resource, “Oxford Research Encyclopedia in African History.” E-mail: ksheldon@ucla.edu Judith Van Allen is a senior fellow at the Institute for African Development, Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell University. She helped initiate feminist African women’s studies in North America in the early 1970s, starting with the publication of “Sitting on a Man: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women” ( Canadian Journal of African Studies 6 [2], 1972). Her work has focused on the political economy of women’s political mobilization, and her current research is concerned with the problematics of rights claims for addressing gender justice within the political economies of southern Africa. She has been a long-time activist in the African Studies Association Women’s Caucus, serving as co-convener in 2014 and 2015. E-mail: jv43@cornell.edu

A History of Mozambique

This is the first history of Mozambique from the 15th century to the present. The Mozambican people have had contact with Muslim and European traders for nearly 1000 years, and their history is given a unity by the influence of commerce and seaborne trade. Indeed Mozambique itself consists of a series of ancient sea and river ports with their commercial hinterlands. Through 21 chapters the book traces two major themes: the gradual development of forms of overall political control - by the Karanga and Maravi ruling dynasties, Afro-Portuguese feudal families, the Nguni military monarchies and the chiefs and sheikhs who ran the slave trade - and the periodic crises that led to disintegration and social dislocation. Disintegration, often associated with drought and ecological disaster, led to a recurring pattern of banditry, and the breakdown of society into warring factions. Although its frontiers were drawn in 1891, Mozambique did not become a unified state till the 1930s, and many of these themes continued during the colonial era, the large concession companies taking over from Nguni and Afro-Portuguese chiefs in providing a form of feudal political control. Under the Portuguese colonial administration Mozambique provided railway and port facilities for South and Central Africa while large areas became in effect labour reserves. A thriving plantation economy also developed, the country becoming a leading producer of cash crops. An extended final chapter looks at Mozambique since independence, when the countrys development fell victim to South Africas attempts to destabilise its neighbours, and its fragile institutions were broken down once again by banditry and drought.

Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860-1910

From 1860 to 1910, Mozambican workers travelled to the sugar plantations, diamond fields and gold mines of South Africa. Through their encounter with other blacks, a new and dynamic culture emerged. This book provides a history of the making of that culture. By using a wide range of materials drawn from Portuguese, French, English and Afrikaans sources, this book provides a narrative of the day-to-day life of the migrants as they travelled to work and lived out their daily existence far from home. The author focuses on several traditional themes: the causes and consequences of migrant labour; the social history of the migrants; and their changing relations with employers and the state. There is also a discussion of the manner in which workers constructed new ways of seeing themselves and others through innovative rituals, traditions and beliefs. Culture, identity and interpretation are central themes in this book; the practices of leisure are discussed as thoroughly as work, portraying workers as not mere units of suffering, but human beings attempting to deal with exploitative situations in culturally creative ways.