«In Mozambique, we didn't have apartheid», Identity constructions on inter-ethnic relations during the «Third Portuguese Empire»

Abstract

Based on a series of memories of Hindu Indians who lived in Mozambique in the last decades of the Portuguese colonial administration, regarding the relations they established with a triple «other» — the colonial State and the Portuguese, the indigenous population and other groups of Indians —, the present article is an attempt to contribute to an area that has received virtually no attention, that of the study of identity productions relating to inter-ethnic and inter-racial relations in Mozambique in the colonial period. The analysis of the imagined constructions of Hindu Indians reveals that present identity experiences interact with the colonial memory and that interpretations of the past are a strong source of imaginary material for the postcolonial construction of power dynamics.

Keywords

• Mozambique
• social memory
• Indian
• inter-ethnic relations
• colonial administration