African historiography has over the past decade begun to pay increasing attention to photographs as a source for African history. A growing body of work has raised a number of methodological and theoretical questions about how scholars can and should work with images. From their experience with written documents, historians are aware of the ideologically charged conditions under which colonial knowledge was produced. This awareness has armed scholars with a skepticism to look beyond the image itself and examine the physical and technological environment in which photographers worked. Posed studio shots that create “natural” settings and post-event retouching are only some of the practices photographers used to endow their images with a greater semblance of accuracy.Andrew Roberts and David Killingray's “outline” of photography in Africa charts the development of photographic techniques and how their use created specific kinds of images of Africa; Virginia-Lee Webb emphasizes photographers' manipulation of not only their subjects, but also the environment in which they were photographed. What this work has produced is an oft-spoken axiom that photographic images of Africa (or any other place) ought not be taken at face value. This axiom has guided a significant amount of scholarship, although Beatrix Heintze wisely cautions against overinterpretation.Scholars who work with written documentary evidence from the colonial period have well established the ways in which administrators, missionaries, and other Europeans represented Africans as an “other,” as they sought to create cultural and social distance between themselves and Africans. Still other scholars have combined written and oral materials to show how Africans established their own identities and interpreted colonial discourses to create alternative, liberating discursive spaces.
This article examines how administrators in Mozambique engaged in the international debate over labor practices in colonial Africa. Although they worked within a regime of legalized forced labor, some expressed ambivalence over their position, criticizing both the principle and the practice of forced labor. These "men in the middle" held mindsets shaped both by awareness of the broader debate over what forms of labor were acceptable in "modern" empires and by interactions with the Africans over whom they ruled. The article tracks the evolving debate around African labor rights from the 1920s to the 1940s, following discussions within the League of Nations, between Portuguese government departments, and across levels of administrative hierarchy within Mozambique.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.