Paper short abstract:

The Mozambique–Malawi border has been the setting of intense labour exchanges since the abolition of chibalo. This paper situates these regional dynamics within the broader context of the Southern Africa labor migration system and in relation to local trajectories of accumulation and agrarian change.

Paper long abstract:

Understanding the dynamics underlying the development and retreat of the Southern Africa labour migration system requires long-run and region-wide reconstruction of the ways capital relied for its reproduction on certain patterns of incorporation of migrant labour but also of its impact on the organization of production and reproduction in specific areas of smallholder farming where migrant labourers came from. The Angonia plateau in central Mozambique is a case in point. Angonia has been shaped by a labour flux that advanced, retreated and reversed the logic of who goes where for wages, since chibalo was abolished in 1964. This flux has variously involved Mozambicans and Malawians nowadays employed inwardly in the flourishing and labour-intensive tobacco sector, but otherwise found in mines and plantations from the Zambian copperbelt to Sofala, from the Witwatersrand to Kasungu. This flux has been reconfigured in processes of profound societal disruption, such as the long Mozambican civil war that during a decade expelled over 90% of the district's population to Malawi.

This paper considers what the case of Angonia has to offer to understanding the evolution of the regional system and conversely explores the impact of labour migration inwards and outwards, on the local forms of household accumulation, land use and transfer and labour mobilization along cleavages of gender, cohort, and class. Supporting evidence stems from the researcher's recent fieldwork in Angonia and from an exhaustive review of the historical literature.