The long journey from ‘Indigenous’ to citizen in Mozambique

The essay traces how Portugal's colonial administration in Mozambique used the legal category 'Indigenous' to sort the African population out of citizenship, education, and land rights for roughly seven decades.

Portugal abolished the status formally in 1961, folding colonial subjects into notional Portuguese citizenship, though the social and economic structures built on top of that category persisted unchanged.

Independence in 1975 finally made the African majority sovereign citizens of their own state, called Mozambican rather than Indigenous, but the piece notes that legal equality and economic equality arrived on very different schedules.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.