Cattle Circulation, Beef Market Control Strategies, and African Agropastoralists in Southern Mozambique, 1900s–30s

Abstract

Abstract Focusing on the first decades of the twentieth century but acknowledging longer-term patterns of circulation, this paper discusses how cattle, historically occupying important meanings and roles in the lives of African agropastoralists, was commodified and marketed in southern Mozambique just as Lourenço Marques became the new capital of Mozambique. Highlighting the relations that consolidated between the capital and surrounding cattle-rich areas in a period marked by cattle disease but also the First World War and the Great Depression, the paper looks at the role of different agents and bodies involved in the emerging beef market. Ultimately, the paper shows how African agropastoralists, the main cattle producers in the region, resisted these conditions and tried to engage with markets on their own terms, even in the face of their dwindling control over the different factors that influenced the size and quality of their herds.