The inhabitants of late colonial Mozambique's Manica e Sofala District suffered one of the most rigid variants of Portuguese forced labour practices. As Zachary Kagan Guthrie shows in his book, Bound for Work: Labor, Mobility, and Colonial Rule in Central Mozambique, 1940–1965, forced recruitment, which had been common under concession rule in the district before 1942, remained an essential experience after the termination of the company's charter and into the 1960s. (Eric Allina's findings on the earlier period serve as the starting point for Kagan Guthrie's interpretation.)Footnote ¹ The continuous role of forced labour in that mid-century period has been pointed to in earlier work, especially by Corrado Tornimbeni.Footnote ² But Kagan Guthrie explains the inner workings of the system while furthermore conveying how forced labour affected the life options and migration choices of young men and the impact of those processes on women and family constellations. The author uses no fewer than 175 interviews to shed light on the individual trajectories of both men who migrated and women whose lives were affected by their husbands’ temporary absences.

In this study, Kagan Guthrie manages to clarify important policy contradictions and moments of transformation. For his region of analysis, he shows that the Second World War produced something of a worldwide smokescreen for colonial powers. At that time, the Portuguese in Mozambique reinterpreted the (initially vague) six-month work obligation for able-bodied men, which allowed administrators to forcibly recruit colonial subjects and send them into underpaid private contracts under drastically bad conditions (a practice called contrato in that part of the Portuguese empire), even though this practice remained technically illegal (27–30; 107). Male inhabitants of the region then typically were restricted to one of three choices: volunteer with the same employers, thereby obtaining somewhat better contract conditions; migrate into the city of Beira, where the urban setting and settler colonialism guaranteed job options with much higher wages; or leave Mozambique and live as migrant workers in (Southern) Rhodesia and even in South Africa, profiting from comparably excellent payments. Frequently, individual men used all three of these options over the course of their lifetime (Chapter Two). But the desire of these migrants to reunite with their wives and families frequently propelled them to return to their regions of origin (73–8). Once there, they could suffer the vengeful tactics of local administrators, chiefs, and ‘native constables’ (cipais), who often immediately sent them back into a cycle of forced recruitment and six-month contracts (120–1). However, the author demonstrates that except during such brutal recruitment moments, the colonial state exerted fragile control over outmigrants: those individuals who were not under labour contracts the administration had enforced managed to move and migrate relatively freely, against administrators’ fantasies of control and in spite of seemingly rigid pass laws. Kagan Guthrie also illustrates the limits of Portuguese reforms of the practices in the 1950s (111–2). Even the formal abolition of forced labour in 1961 did not eliminate forced recruitment, but rather shifted it (again) into the hands of chiefs and private recruiters, who worked in close alliance with one another (145–7).

This book offers clear positions and convincing and sound interpretations. Some critical remarks are nevertheless appropriate. First, this study is very focused on processes and features a number of short discussions of individual experiences. Although the paths of some migrant workers are highlighted, readers obtain little context for those narratives. It would have been advantageous for Kagan Guthrie to offer more information on the socioeconomic situation of Manica e Sofala under the Portuguese late colonial state. While such analysis might have required another chapter and made the book longer, it would have been immensely helpful.

Second, although Kagan Guthrie is more precise about the process of forced recruitment than most other studies, the practice still comes across very schematically. It remains unclear where there was room for manoeuvre or when exceptions were made. The author notes that individuals practicing cotton agriculture could be spared from recruitment for the contrato; one might wonder if those exemptions were typical for successful peasants who participated in export agriculture (which was not wage labour) as suggested by earlier research by Tornimbeni and Malyn Newitt (64).Footnote ³ It is also not clear whether workers who engaged themselves for six months as voluntários in the district could still be coerced into the contrato in the same year: did the arbitrary and illegal application of the decrees on labour recruitment facilitate that degree of exploitation? Additionally, it is possible that the image that emerges here of chiefs (the régulos), united in their heavy-handed effort to recruit labour, is overgeneralized. It seems likely that chiefs probably took various approaches to their roles, as they might have wanted to avoid local resistance or mass flight by acting more benevolently towards the residents of their regulados. Similarly, the rather laconic description of chiefs partnering with private recruiters after 1961 is not very differentiated. One might again doubt that uniformity characterized those relationships or processes. (Furthermore, by 2011, the year in which the interviews were conducted, chiefs who had been targeted by post-independence propaganda may have been established in local memories as despots — a simplified depiction that glossed over a more complicated and variegated history) (93–6).

Third, the analysis in Chapter Six of colonial reforms after the Second World War makes important claims about historical continuities, but here again, the case may be overstated. It is certainly plausible that officials on the local level were reluctant to implement reformist policies that came down from above, and the persistent alliances between chiefs and local recruiters after 1961 serve as proof that reforms were not implemented. However, Kagan Guthrie could have said more about these complex details and about resistance to change; moreover, his sources are clustered in the late 1940s. In the 1950s, one might expect that even weak reforms led to some timid first results. Interestingly, José Diogo Ferreira Martins, who is discussed in this book as a conservative anti-reformer serving as district governor of Manica e Sofala in 1950, reappeared in Angola by 1960 as one of the most important administrative inspectors, verbally flagellating the defenders of forced labour and violently denouncing systems analogous to the Mozambican contrato (133).Footnote ⁴ The transformations in Martins’ career suggest that more could be said about the possibilities for individual change.

These points notwithstanding, by working in the (slowly) expanding field of study that brings together consideration of forced labour and migrant labour, Kagan Guthrie offers one of the sharpest and clearest interpretations of a forced labour system and its effects on the choices available to local individuals. Bringing in categories such as affect and the importance of home to explain such choices makes the analysis only stronger. Scholars of labour history, including that of coerced labour, in Africa and beyond, will certainly need to read and learn from this book.