Dr Sandra Araújo

Spying on Muslims in Colonial Mozambique, 1964-74

The project is a scholarly monograph grounded in meticulous archival work on Portugal’s counterinsurgency that targeted Muslim communities during Mozambique’s liberation war. It tackles the role Muslims played in colonial Mozambique paying particular attention to lived realities that they as colonial subjects faced during the colonial war, and their response to Portuguese initiatives to solicit their support as a bulwark against armed nationalism. Centred in two fields of inquiry, the collapse of European imperialism in Africa and studies in counterinsurgency, the monograph has mined a trove of historical documents from the Portuguese archives. In doing so, the study combines historical and anthropological methods of inquiry, marshalling qualitative and quantitative data to evaluate Muslim communities’ responses to Portuguese counterinsurgency. The monograph offers a nuanced and non-binary assessment of Muslim responses to the colonial conflict, highlighting how complex and intersegmental these responses proved to be during the period under review. Simply put, Muslim communities’ responses were split between protagonists of Portuguese counterinsurgency in Mozambique, opponents of Portuguese conduct of the war in the colony, supporters of the national war of liberation for Mozambique, and self-preservationists, unwilling to come out in support of either party in the colonial conflict. A variety of complex reasons underpinned this reluctance, ranging from the tightly knit structure of dominant Muslim society and culture, the inefficacy of Portuguese intelligence-gathering practices, to the failure of Portuguese propaganda to co-opt influential forces and leaders of the Muslim society to assume a leading position in counterinsurgency. The monograph is uniquely positioned to make an original contribution to the literature in this field of inquiry in counterinsurgency by enhancing our understanding of the legacies of colonial security strategies in Mozambique’s colonial and post-colonial era.