Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the contradictory imaginaries of wellbeing, growth and emancipation mobilised by the new extraction initiatives in the new resource frontier of Cabo Delgado, Mozambique

Paper long abstract:

In Mozambique, the end of the civil war in 1992 triggered twenty years of sustained growth, which has recently come to a break following the revelation of the so-called divida occulta (‘hidden debt’), over two billion dollars of public loans hidden by the government to public opinion and the international community. In order to face the ensuing economic crisis, the government has further relied on extractive economy, endorsing initiatives on different scales: on the one hand, small and localized mining licenses, granted mainly to national investors, that have in fact boosted the so-called “garimpo” (self-made mining); on the other hand, large and ambitious projects, entrusted to foreign companies, called upon to provide know-how, technologies and capital. However, in the most affected areas, located primarily in the north of the country, this new extractive impulse has produced environmental and social disruption, also due to the consequences of land- and water-grabbing on the local population. As a result, a new conflict broke out in the province of Cabo Delgado, whose protagonists are groups of insurgents who justify violent actions through the language of radical Islamism. Based on my fieldwork in the area since 2017, this contribution presents some cases of extractive projects (including the large-scale initiatives of Eni and Total in Cabo Delgado) to discuss the contradictory imaginaries of wellbeing, growth, and emancipation that they produce: hopes for self-entrepreneurial success in transnational markets among small local investors; search for imported capital, technologies and manpower among the country’s elite; forms of struggle moulded upon the trans-local grammar of radical Islam among the disenfranchised youth.