The Silenced: Women and Their Levels of Experience against Mass Violence in Mozambique during the Late Colonial Period

Generally, colonial and nationalist archives silence women in their chronicles. While Wiriyamu was exceptionally brutal in excising people from history from below as it were, the role of women in armed resistance entailing mass violence remains understudied. This paper tackles the session’s third question. In doing so, it fills the gaps in the discourse by shedding new light on the long histories of female participation in liberation historiography, which struggled for the rights of women to political agency (as the Mueda massacre reveals), and their full participation in the armed struggle, which ultimately entailed direct involvement in the Wiriyamu aftermath.