The Mueda Massacre Retold: The ‘Matter of Return’ in Portuguese Colonial Intelligence

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In 1959 the Portuguese consul in Dar es Salaam received a written request for the collective return of Makonde migrants to northern Mozambique. This request was then made in person by leaders of mutual help associations to the administrator of the small town of Mueda, opening an incident that would culminate in the infamous massacre of 16 June 1960. The origins of that event have been buried both by the Portuguese will to deny the violence and by the heroic narrative propagated by the national liberation movement. This article delves into the records that colonial intelligence amassed around the rise of subversion in the Makonde precinct. Its objective is to produce a more complex rendering of the trajectory that led from the request itself to violent repression. Intelligence reports produced in the heat of events offer an opportunity to open up the narrative of the Mueda event, to look at it not as the starting point of a teleology of national liberation but as a moment of uncertainty and possibility generated by tentative plans for a federation of independent east African states and by the racial tensions inherent in the transition to Tanganyikan independence, and influenced in its unfolding by individual initiative, ambition, leadership conflicts, adventurism, cowardice and chance.