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Accepted Paper:
The climate of southern Mozambique in different nineteenth century documentary sources
Bárbara Direito
(Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e da Tecnologia, NOVA FCT, Portugal)
This paper interrogates the relationships between ‘Western’ and local weather and climate knowledges and material practices in nineteenth century Southern Mozambique drawing on a set of diaries, memoirs, and reports.
Paper long abstract:
This paper interrogates the relationships between ‘Western’ and local weather and climate knowledges and material practices in nineteenth century Southern Mozambique. It draws on a set of diaries, memoirs, and reports written by different observers, found mostly in Portuguese archives and libraries, to examine how the region’s climate, prone to drought and irregular rainfall, was framed by these observers and how their views were shaped by African informants and by different local social and agricultural knowledges and practices. Introducing a transimperial dimension, this paper also seeks to compare these views with climate-related views drawn from sources focusing on the neighbouring regions of Zululand and the Transvaal (present-day KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga, in South Africa), which have been the subject of several scholarly works in recent years.