Elusive Histories: Mozambican Migrant Laborers in Rhodesia, ca. 1900–1980, by Allen F. Isaacman, Joy M. Chadya, and Barbara S. Isaacman, is a remarkable and fascinating study of African agency, focusing on the labor migration of Mozambican workers to Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) during the colonial period. This groundbreaking book sheds light on the little-known history of hundreds of thousands of Mozambican men, women, and children who migrated clandestinely to Rhodesia in search of a better life, fleeing forced labor and harsh conditions in colonial Mozambique, highlighting their agency, community building, and significant, albeit often illegal, role in the Rhodesian labor force. The book also challenges the narrative that Mozambican migration was fundamentally contract labor, while exposing the arbitrariness of the borders drawn by colonialism and, in practice, not recognized by African populations.

Based on exhaustive research of primary sources, ranging from oral testimonies collected over nearly half a century to a wide range of written records from the colonial era, including documents from the Historical Archives of Mozambique (Maputo) and the National Archives of Zimbabwe (Harare), this study fills an important gap in the social history of labor migration in Southern Africa. The origins of the volume date back to the distant 1960s, when Allen Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman were conducting research on Portuguese crown estates (prazos da coroa) in the Zambezi River valley in Mozambique. At the time, working in Portuguese and Mozambican archives, these two researchers identified relevant documentation on the “illegal” migration of Mozambicans to Rhodesia. In the following decades, they managed to gather more information through interviews with “elders.” In 1998, Allen Isaacman hired Joy Chadya, an MA student at the University of Zimbabwe, to interview Mozambicans living in that country. Three years later, now a PhD student at the University of Minnesota, Joy Chadya resumed this project, on which she worked periodically for a decade.

Joy Chadya also played a very significant role in drafting the chapters on the integration of Mozambican migrants into urban life in Rhodesia, particularly in Salisbury. In total, the three authors interviewed around 200 Mozambican migrants and some of their family members between 1968 and 2023.

Although the book covers a broad chronology, from the early twentieth century to Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, its main focus is on the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, that is, the period when the migration of Mozambican workers to Rhodesia had the greatest impact. Indeed, the Migrant Workers Act of 1948 encouraged migrants to live with their families in Rhodesia, thus triggering a massive influx of workers from neighboring colonies, including Mozambique. From 1951 onwards and throughout the 1950s, approximately 56,000 Mozambicans were entering Rhodesia every year. In 1959, there were 200,655 Mozambicans legally residing in Rhodesia, with an unknown but very high number having left Mozambique illegally, simply by “jumping” the colonial border. This migratory flow began to decline in the 1960s, largely due to the end of forced labor and forced cotton cultivation in Mozambique, which made it easier to retain labor in Mozambique, and to growing competition for work between Rhodesian and Mozambican workers in Rhodesia.

The book consists of eleven chapters that address, in a structured and in-depth manner, different dimensions of the migratory phenomenon and the lives of Mozambican migrants in Rhodesia, including the historical background of the migratory phenomenon; the political, economic, and social contexts that shaped this migratory process; the variables that most directly motivated Mozambicans to migrate to Rhodesia—namely, escape from forced labor (chibharo) and the violence of the Portuguese colonial system; the difficulties of the journey and of migrants’ integration into Rhodesian society; their resilience in the face of adversity and the vulnerable economic and social positions of migrants working both in the countryside and in Salisbury; the complexity of relationships with the host country’s population, whether with white employers or with the vast majority of African workers; family life and the challenges it faced; leisure time and forms of associative organization adopted by Mozambican migrants from different geographical and ethnolinguistic backgrounds, including their ability to create a sense of identity and group cohesion, and so on. It should be noted that the final chapters explore the impact and consequences for migrants’ lives of the profound political changes that took place in Southern Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, namely the outbreak of liberation struggles in both Mozambique and Zimbabwe and the independence of these two countries (in 1975 and 1980, respectively), as well as the challenges faced by Mozambicans in postindependence Zimbabwe. These challenges were marked by intensified anti-foreign sentiment fueled by anti-immigration policies adopted by Mugabe’s government in an attempt to gain popular support for his increasingly unpopular government due to the decline of the country’s economy after 1985.

This book therefore documents, over the long term, the characteristics of the migratory phenomenon from Mozambique to Rhodesia, as well as the lived experiences of those who settled there, allowing us to better understand their motivations, way of life, and notions of community, identity, and gender. Furthermore, the analytical framework of the work opens up new perspectives for a critical examination of issues of national memory, collective and individual identity, and feelings of belonging among migrant groups, providing conceptual tools for thinking about these issues far beyond the context of Southern Africa. It also allows us to better understand the dynamics of political exclusion in postcolonial societies, refuting the idea that nativism is an inherent part of southern African political culture. As such, it is undoubtedly a historiographical essay of the highest caliber, not only making a decisive contribution to the construction of a more structured understanding of the colonial and social history of Mozambique and Zimbabwe, but also serving as an essential reference for scholars across multiple fields.