Jeanne Marie Penvenne. Women, Migration, and the Cashew Economy in Southern Mozambique, 1945–1975

Jeanne Marie Penvenne’s Women, Migration and the Cashew Economy in Southern Mozambique, 1945–1975 builds on her research into the lives of urban workers in the port and railway sectors in the capital city of Lourenço Marques (renamed Maputo at independence in 1975). Penvenne’s initial research focused on male laborers. However, after a disturbing encounter with some angry Mozambique women questioning why their lives and experiences did not appear in her research, Penvenne decided to develop a major project on women in Lourenço Marques’s urban workforce, particularly during the final years of colonial rule from 1960 to 1975. She discovered that records on women’s employment in Lourenço Marques in this period were sparse and incomplete. It became clear that the cashew-shelling industry (caju industrial) labor force, which was predominantly female, was the best site for investigating women’s labor in the capital city. Given the limitation of formal records, Penvenne focused on interviews, speaking to over one hundred women and seven men. Most interviews centered on employees of the Chamanculo factory, which was the oldest factory with the most retirees available for interviews. The interviews were carried out in 1993 with former employees who had experienced independence, internal conflicts, and increasing poverty. The interviewees’ struggles with poverty and insecurity no doubt affected their recollections of working in the cashew industry—a factor Penvenne incorporates into her analysis.

Ancient history · Capital (architecture) · Cashew nut · Colonial rule · Colonialism · Economic growth · Economics · Economy · Factory (object-oriented programming) · Geography · Independence (probability theory) · Political science · Poverty · Socioeconomics · Sociology · Workforce · African history and culture studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law