Lilly Havstad
(Boston University)

This seminar will consider post-World War II reforms of the legal process of assimilation of Africans in Mozambique in an effort to generate discussion and debate surrounding the political imaginations and possibilities for social reforms, development, and decolonization in 1950s Mozambique. Records of the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique (Maputo) reveal that the process of assimilation accelerated during the 1950s as the language changed during this period from application for "assimilation" to application for Portuguese "citizenship." These transformations are situated in the context of the creation of the Ministry of the Ultramar that re-branded Portugal's African colonies as "Overseas Provinces" in 1951 and the decision to abandon the Indigenato system in 1961, declaring all residents of the Provinces as Portuguese citizens. This presentation will provoke discussion about Portugal's failed integrationist efforts to answer the "overseas question" and the implications for how we might (re)consider paths of Portuguese decolonization undetermined by nationalist campaigns in the decades that follow by drawing on public discourses among African intellectuals and colonial officials in Mozambique's capital, Lourenço Marques.