Mozambican women and the cashew economy

In the early 1970s at the close of its colonial era, Mozambique was a global leader in cashew production. The Portuguese colony's cashew processing industry was inaugurated in the 1950s and by the 1970s it accounted for the largest share of the world's production of raw cashew nuts and the country's foreign exchange earnings. The cashew economy was big and important. At almost every stage, from planting to exporting cashews, the industry rested fundamentally on the work of Mozambican women. The women who sustained the factories of the emergent cashew industry put aside their usual work implement, the hoe they used to till their family fields, to embrace what they called ‘the hoe of the city’. Celeste Mpandane explained: ‘Axikomu xa lomu i kutihra – The hoe of the city is a job.’ Jobs for women in Mozambique's cashew shelling factories became a beacon; fueling urban migration by Southern Mozambican women who wanted or needed to turn in their field hoe for a job. Although it is irrefutably true that the entire cashew processing industry depended upon the labour of African women, the raft of colonial era press, scientific and business literature about the promising industry made virtually no mention of the labour force in this labour intensive industry, and the handful of articles that mentioned the women portrayed them as a constraint on production rather than the backbone of the industry. This is the history of the most successful industry in the late colonial era. It was reconstructed through an extensive oral history project anchored among three generations of women who comprised the great majority of the cashew industry's workforce from the late 1940s through to independence in 1975. It also draws touchstone concepts from four popular songs performed by women of Southern Mozambique. Each song captures themes and images that run through narratives and the following chapters.

The colonial era's print media may have failed to acknowledge Mozambican women when charting the spectacular growth of the era's signature cashew industry, but the women whose narratives comprise the basis of this study claimed their due. Rosa Joaquim Tembe was among the original cohort of workers at what became the colony's largest cashew processing factory, Cajú Industrial de Moçambique, in the Chamanculo neighbourhood of Mozambique's capital city, Lourenço Marques.