From to the s the Portuguese colony of Mozambique developed as a number of institutionally and economically separate regions. The rule of concession companies and the economic ties that developed with neighbouring British colonies meant that internal relations between region and region were often non-existent.
These differences were reflected in the internal colonial division of labour between the different economic interests, in the different patterns of employment and treatment of the African workers and in the different way Africans were contracted for labour in the colonial enterprises. The north, the centre, and the south of the country are still as disconnected from each other as they were during the first half of the twentieth century.
On the other hand, the same areas are structurally and culturally linked to neighbouring territories, which form part of other states, through what are now called "transnational social networks". Adding to the complexity of this picture, the Mozambican state has also inherited smaller but equally significant internal divisions within each Province, if not within each District, of the country. This analysis, based on the study of labour migration in the s and s in the old District of Beira corresponding now approximately to the Provinces of Manica and Sofala will consider how three key factors contributed to, or reflected, the socio-economic differentiation of the territory: the formation of labour-reserve areas, the labour recruitment process and the working conditions in the colonial enterprises, and the structure of internal and outward migration.
In the extreme south Delagoa Bay was situated on a small peninsula surrounded on three sides by the South African Republic soon to become the British colony of Transvaal , Swaziland and the sea. Portuguese control of the Zambesi valley penetrated three hundred miles into British Africa while the southern portion of Nyasaland was a narrow salient thrust into Mozambique. The new frontiers sliced through regions, which were distinct geographically and which, over time, had acquired cultural, economic and political cohesion 1.
Moreover Mozambique included the lower reaches of all the major rivers of central and eastern Africa from the Rovuma in the north to the Zambesi, Sabi and Limpopo in the centre and south.
