This book is a hugely inspiring global micro-history of a tiny village of less than a thousand people on the shores of Lake Malawi/Nyasa in western Mozambique. Based on his doctoral thesis at the University of Bern, Andreas Zeman interprets everyday life in Nkholongue and its twin village Malango from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century as a profoundly local history made by people responding to “the winds of history”, the sudden, often unpredictable and above all uncontrollable impact of events and processes on larger scales.
Written in a clear and accessible style, the book is both empirically rich and rich in theoretical and conceptual reflections – sometimes unfortunately lost in the footnotes. Drawing on twenty archives and 168 interviews about a village of less than a thousand inhabitants, the author opts for depth. On this basis, he insists on the heterogeneity, the local contingencies, and the numerous spatial reconfigurations of Nkholongue, thus rejecting the stereotype of the pristine African village. He counters naive notions of globalization as a linear process of progress. His metaphor of “the winds of history” allows him to relate phenomena at national, regional, and global levels to local challenges and opportunities.
This confrontation often leads to counterintuitive conclusions, such as people being happy with colonization and unhappy with flag independence, or people being relatively well off when Portuguese colonial rule was supposedly brutal and being exploited when colonial terror was supposedly absent. The author never claims that his study of the history of one tiny village is representative of the Lake Malawi/Nyasa region, Mozambique or Africa – on the contrary, he repeatedly stresses that he does not have the empirical basis to make such claims. Nevertheless, he demonstrates that the existing master narratives in historiography do not correspond to the historical experience in Nkholongue.
In parallel with a chronological organisation from the late nineteenth century slave trade to early twenty-first century tourism investment, Zeman re-evaluates a dominant interpretation in the historiography in each chapter. Chapter 2 (chapter 1 is the introduction) reconstructs the origin of Nkholongue in the slave trade period, while criticizing postcolonial theory for turning Africans into victims without agency. Chapter 3 interprets the Islamization of the hamlet from below, countering top-down narratives of Islamization as the decision of chiefs. Chapter 4 highlights the colonization of the area. Although the author does not deny the atrocities committed by the Portuguese Companhia do Nyassa during this period, he juxtaposes this with the exploitation of the previous period, demonstrating that what was violent oppression for some was liberation and opportunity for others. Chapter 5 turns the master narrative of Portuguese colonial history on its head by showing that the exploitation of the eastern shore of Lake Malawi/Nyasa was at its highest when Portuguese control was weak and British influence could operate freely from across the lake. In doing so, he argues against the homogenization of the colonial period and against a national or territorial reading grid.
In chapter 6, Zeman zooms in on the core of the colonial period, roughly from the 1920s to the 1950s. Empirically, this chapter deals with labour migration (people moving away from and back to Nkholongue), craft and trade on the lake, and subsistence production. The historiographical arguments in this chapter, however, are overloaded: market integration, globalization, “substantivism”, the discourse of the “traditional African village”, the linearity of historical narratives, the jumping back and forth between the 1970s and the 2020s in the references... I am afraid that the empirical strength of this chapter in demonstrating global connectedness through the lake rather than through the state is overshadowed by unnecessary historiographical battles.
Chapter 7 focuses on the period of the War of Independence. Zeman explains why the people of Nkholongue were not so negative about the Portuguese resettlement programmes: they led to improvements in food security, schooling, and health care. The author also points out that the experience of resettlement in aldeamentos (villages, settlements) led to changes in marriage patterns and building techniques, among other things. Rather than undermining grand historiographical narratives, as he attempts to do in chapters 2 and 6, it is the colonial – and in the following chapters postcolonial – history of Mozambique that he convincingly revises.
In chapter 8, the author makes it clear that Mozambique's independence was no cause for celebration for the people of Nkholongue. They were glad that the war was over, but life deteriorated economically, and the new Frelimo regime behaved as colonially as possible: it fought against religion and the belief in witchcraft, banned initiation rites, replaced “traditional” chiefs with Frelimo-appointed secretaries, and enforced its authoritarian rule by force.
Chapter 9 deals with the period of the civil war between Frelimo and Renamo, which was of a very different nature from the war of independence: less ideological, more brutal and deadly, less caring, and less concerned with winning “the people” to their cause. While Zeman makes clear the extent to which Nkholongue fell victim to brutal Renamo attacks, he also explains why Renamo won elections there after the end of the civil war. Frelimo's violent attacks on tradition and religion/Islam, economic hardship, and the question of whether the people on the lakeshore were truly Mozambican, undermined Frelimo's legitimacy.
Chapter 10 brings the monograph home: the focus on tourism infrastructure picks up on how Andreas Zeman arrived in Nkholongue in 2008 as a 19-year-old. I think everyone reads the preface to a book to situate the author, but in this case, it is a clear recommendation. The preface is excellent and has consequences that the author is aware of. He is part of the history he is writing, albeit at the very end. He was involved in the most durable investment in tourism and was present at the parables that decided who would be the next chief. Already when I read the introduction, I felt that he was too much adopting the perspective of the chief – or at least giving too much weight to the chief. The maturity – or maturing – of the author is shown by the fact that he openly addresses this question in this chapter (pp. 389–90). Who speaks for the community, and is there even a community? Finally, the ethnographic chapter 11, pondering about matrilineality, would make a good article, but does not fit into the book.
All in all, this is an excellent book. The author has chosen to look at people, at individual experiences, at the local level, and he has implemented these choices in a very convincing way. At the same time, he has made the large-scale influences the title of his book. I don't think a global readership should be interested in this tiny village for its own sake, but historians should read what the implications are for historiography if the African village is really taken seriously.