The Laws of Exception

Members of the black elite were not solely concerned with their own social position, at least initially. While many blacks in Lourenço Marques may have understood that each law of exception, each tendency to treat and perceive black people as inferior, contributed to a pattern of domination which would have an impact seemingly out of all proportion to the sum of its parts, their feelings were not recorded. Contributors to the Grêmio's newspapers, however, realized that, if such a pattern were allowed to proceed unchallenged, racist laws would soon appear colour-blind. The elite may not have suffered directly from increased oppression of common black labourers in Lourenço Marques in the period prior to World War I, but they nonetheless recognized that such practices nourished the ideological basis which could gradually combine with the growing demand for cheap controlled labour and efforts by Portuguese whites to stake out and protect profitable and privileged positions, to relegate all blacks to subordinate status. Such a process could proceed piecemeal, but crisis quickened its pace, as in the case, in 1907, of the plague's being used to justify the disposal of a considerable amount of black-owned property. The elite recognized that cardinal aspects of accumulating and reproducing capital, such as acquiring profitable and secure land tenure, access to employment, training, investment and business opportunities were all at stake. The ideological justification, which was argued largely in cultural concepts, and the formal and informal engineering of the subordinate categories of indígena and assimilado comprised a whole. The elite recognized the unity from the outset.

The labour demands of the maturing capitalist economy encouraged Portugal to turn away from simply commandeering labour towards a more systematic structural exploitation of labour along the lines pursued by other contemporary colonial powers. That process, however, necessitated that Portugal formulate appropriate legislation so as not to have it 'improperly interpreted' as slavery. Hay and Wright observe that the relationship between legislation and practice can be viewed from polar perspectives: 'On the one hand, law can be seen as a reflection of norms, customs, and rules through which society regulates itself; on the other hand, law may be viewed as directing social behaviour.'^[88] Had Portugal instituted legislation which genuinely reflected the norms, customs and rules of its early twentieth century colonial society it would not have been internationally acceptable. Portugal was chronically embarrassed by the gap between internationally acceptable legislation and the continuing slave-like labour conditions existing in its colonies. In 1902, for example, the Governor of Lourenço Marques District asked the Governor General that the 'very old custom' of having town

police arrest local Africans for disobedience, disorderly conduct and drunkenness, for summary sentencing to prison labour on state and municipal works, be reflected in a proper law.^[89]

The black elite attacked such attempts to give legislative legitimacy to contemporary abuses and efforts to mould future social conditions in such a way as to confirm and reproduce specifically racist forms of domination. While a great many challenges appeared in the pages of O Africano and O Brado Africano, protests against the abuse of black workers and against the laws which, by placing blacks in exceptional legal circumstances, invited such abuse were the most prominent. The abolition of black labour conscription (chibaro or shibalo ) and the end of all laws of exception were principal themes up to the mid-1930s.^[90]

In the early twentieth century efforts to generate cheap controlled labour in Lourenço Marques consisted mostly of rounding up Africans who drank too much alcohol, wore too few clothes, or happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—those snared through 'old customs'. The elite focused on the underlying processes illustrating their lucid perception of the developing modes of domination.^[91] They identified the crucially important process of creating criminals: the state profited from the proliferation of cantinas selling cheap Portuguese wines to Africans through revenue from licensing, fees and fines paid by drunks and also from the steady supply of unpaid prison labourers arrested for drunken and disorderly conduct and then set to work on urban sanitation projects, construction and roadwork. Blacks were not trained or hired, but criminalized and thus forced to work in disadvantaged circumstances by a process which did not apply to whites. The facts that violence bred of alcohol abuse ravaged black neighbourhoods and that white drunks were not arrested, but escorted home to sober up, were pointedly noted as well.^[92]

In 1904 the first attempt was made to mesh custom and aspirations regarding black labour in town in a proper law. The Regulamento de Serviçais e Trabalhadores Indígenas of 9 September 1904 was intended to organize the registration and identification of black domestics and day labourers in town through a pass system which would simultaneously facilitate tighter enforcement of municipal vagrancy statutes. This law posed the first direct legal threat to the mobility of black volunteer workers in town. As criminals, blacks were not only to be compelled to labour—'civilized' to their moral obligation to work as it were—but now even as volunteers they were to be forced to work in disadvantaged circumstances.^[93]

The Regulamento's impact on the black working population as a whole was blunted, however, by its uneven and halting application. The town's rudimentary administrative and police forces were simply not yet equal to the task of enforcing the legislation except to seek to regularize the supply of day labour to the port.^[94] While the law was important for its harassment of workers, keeping them insecure and vulnerable, by 1911 the town's principal employers were clamouring for more effective legislation.^[95]

The black elite's press quickly recognized the Regulamento's important ancillary purpose. The revenues generated by the schedule of fees and fines were seen as necessary to finance extension of both the police and administrative forces which could then be used to implement firmer laws. The oppressed were being forced to pay their oppressor's salary and to contribute to the development of a more effective system of labour coercion.^[96] The process was already under way with regard to municipal fines for drunkenness: between 1906 and 1909, for example, between 43 per cent and 53 per cent of the municipal police budget was funded by fines for drunkenness paid by Africans.^[97] In the first years of its

implementation, the Regulamento had cost the state money, but by 1908 the police had become more interested in the law's potential for yielding revenue than in its utility in labour control. That year the Regulamento began to pay its own way. By 1909 it was generating a surplus.^[98]O Africano correctly saw this and later control regulations as serving largely to finance the burgeoning state bureaucracy, referring to their implementation as the 'caça da quinhenta', the hunt for the fifty centavo registration fee.^[99]

By the period between 1913 and 1917, however, discriminatory controls over labour and over social and professional mobility moved threateningly closer to the elite itself. Legislation promulgated in this period, while still not evenly or effectively implemented, no longer limited its scope to domestics and dock workers, but encompassed urban blacks as a whole. Individuals within the black elite were still commonly exempted from the principal constraints of the new legislation by virtue of their class status as property holders, merchants, civil servants, office and commercial employees, typesetters, headmen, and educated people, but they nonetheless had to be specifically exempted from the legislative constraints. They found themselves lumped with so-called 'natives' on the basis of their race, and therefore formally shared their status as an exceptional community. Through the exemption process the elite could secure a special badge, but they were nonetheless required to wear that badge.^[100]

The new legislation brought about a subtle but important shift in emphasis, a shift which demonstrated the progressive weakening of the elite's position. The press continued to contest the basic premise of racist exception, but with the spread of discrimination at many levels and the enhanced bite of the new measures there was increasing practical concern with just who was an indígena, and therefore legally subject to the more rigorous controls, and who was not an indígena, and therefore legally eligible for the privileges of citizenship. At one level this shift signalled the beginning of the end: part of the basic premise was conceded or compromised in the shift of focus to within the designated exceptional community. It became more difficult for the black elite to identify with persons of like cultural orientation regardless of race. Whites, regardless of class, nationality, or cultural orientation had no need to concern themselves with the possibility of being incorporated into the exceptional community. Blacks, regardless of class or nationality, increasingly had to come to terms with discrimination in one way or another. The change forced the elite to turn its attention from broader concerns and thereby sabotaged their attempts to challenge changes in policy on the grounds of principle.