Women, Migration and the Cashew Economy in Southern Mozambique, 1945–1975

Penvenne’s book illuminates the important role that women played in the rise of a vibrant colonial cashew economy in Lourenço Marques (Maputo, Mozambique) from 1945 to 1975. It moves away from the orthodox male-dominated history of labour migration within a colonial economy and chronicles a nuanced gendered history of the cashew economy when Mozambique became the world’s largest combined producer of raw and processed cashew nuts. Faced with an androcentric published and colonial archival record, Penvenne engages ethnographic oral histories (life histories and songs) of three generations of Mozambican women who migrated to Maputo to toil in cashew factories (constituting about 80 per cent of the factory workers) to showcase urban African women’s agency and productivity. Women actually abandoned their traditional farming (the communal hoe) to join or embrace the lucrative cashew economy or what they called “the hoe of the city” (p. 1).