Becoming Humanitarian, Creating Differences: A Comparison of Urban and Rural Mozambican Refugee Camps in Tanzania, 1964–75

Despite the vast research on the establishment of refugee camps in Africa throughout the twentieth century, little is known about camps created without assistance from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The international political climate of the 1960s often prevented the agency from assisting refugees involved in anti-colonial liberation movements. As a result, it was often small, private organizations that made refugee populations visible to the world, established camps, and provided them with food, shelter, clothing, medicine, and education. From 1964 to 1975, Mozambique’s liberation movement (Frelimo) waged a bitter war for independence against Portugal. As many as 100,000 Mozambican refugees fled to neighboring Tanzania. Two organizations were central in assisting this refugee population: the American Committee on Africa (ACOA) and the Mozambique Institute. The ACOA had been a labor organization in the United States in the 1950s; the Mozambique Institute had been an educational center in Dar es Salaam. Neither was originally concerned with humanitarian relief, but their letters and annual reports illustrate that the war prompted each to become a humanitarian aid agency. This paper will analyze the experiences of Mozambican refugees in the urban and rural camps set up by these organizations. It will argue that the activities of “daily life” were constructed differently for refugees in urban and rural spaces, which exacerbated socio-economic differences among this particular refugee population. It will also address questions such as: How did Frelimo’s socialist ideology influence relief efforts by the ACOA and the Mozambique Institute? How did Frelimo disseminate information in and operate out of each type of camp? Finally, in what ways did Frelimo and Mozambican refugees influence nation-building schemes in newly-independent Tanzania?