From Murraça with Love: Catholicism, Africanism, and Revolution in a Very Short Twentieth Century

The paper examines the mission station of Murraça opened and run by the Catholic White Fathers in central Mozambique in the early 20th Century. It investigates how missionaries built the mission station, physically and symbolically in an area dominated by non-Christians. It looks at how compromises developed over time, in relation to the use of the mission station as well as the adherence to the Catholic faith. I finally explore how these compromises resulted in a particular form of Catholicism, a new local elite and a revisited local African identity. This is situated, and contrasted, in relation to other Catholic congregations in the diocese and in Mozambique overall.