“Mozambican” as a Bureaucratic Fiction in the Indian Ocean

How a Geographic Label Became a Racial Instrument of Erasure

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Author: Pen for Rights – Research & Documentation
Affiliation: Maldivians for Chagos
A custodian-led civic research initiative and an Indian Ocean decolonisation initiative

Abstract

Across the Indian Ocean world, “Mozambique” and its derivative labels such as “Mozambican” and “Mozambiques” evolved from geographic descriptors into administrative categories that frequently functioned as racial instruments of erasure. This article examines that transformation as an institutional practice embedded in European imperial governance, with particular attention to Portuguese maritime control regimes and later British colonial documentation. Drawing on established scholarship on the “Mozambiques” of the Mascarenes and on documented systems of surveillance, interception, and prize-taking in the Indian Ocean, the article argues that coerced mobility and administrative simplification worked together to collapse diverse origins into African-coded racial categories. The analysis is anchored in a documented 1810 seizure of persons from Diego Garcia (Chagos), who are asserted here to have been Maldivians and who subsequently appear in British records under racialised descriptors. The absence of explicit Maldivian identifiers in those records is treated not as evidentiary weakness, but as evidence of bureaucratic erasure. For the purposes of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), the article demonstrates how inherited colonial classifications can perpetuate racial discrimination by denying traceable identity, origin, and lineage.

Keywords: Mozambiques; Indian Ocean slavery; racial classification; archival erasure; Portuguese Estado da Índia; cartaz system; Diego Garcia; Maldives; CERD

1. Introduction

The mandate of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) extends beyond overt racism to encompass structural and administrative practices that generate discriminatory effects. Racial discrimination is often reproduced not through explicit doctrine, but through inherited systems of classification that present themselves as neutral or historical fact.

In colonial and slave-holding societies, racial categories were frequently produced through bureaucratic convenience rather than ethnographic accuracy. Ship logs, port registers, slave inventories, prize-court records, and manumission papers became sites where identity was compressed into administratively manageable forms. Once institutionalised, such categories could persist for generations, shaping memory, legal status, and access to remedies.

Within the Indian Ocean world, the term “Mozambique” and its pluralised form “Mozambiques” present a particularly instructive case. Although ostensibly geographic, the term came to function across multiple colonial systems as a standardised label for enslaved persons whose precise origins were either unknown, disregarded, or politically inconvenient to record (Alpers, 2001; Allen, 2014).

2.  Record-Making as Power: Why Categories Persist

Colonial archives are often treated as repositories of objective fact. Historical scholarship has long demonstrated the opposite: archives are instruments of governance that actively produce administrative reality (Wolf, 1982). Two consequences are especially relevant.

First, a category can be accurate in form but false in substance. A register may correctly record that an individual was classified as “Mozambican” while being entirely wrong about that person’s origin.

Second, categories that appear geographic can function as racial proxies. Once linked to presumed phenotype, legal status, labour allocation, or social treatment, geographic labels become racialised without ever naming race explicitly.

For this reason, Indian Ocean slavery scholarship treats colonial records not merely as sources, but as identity-making systems. UNESCO’s documentation of the Mauritius slavery record collections underscores the scale and institutional authority of such archives, and the enduring consequences of their internal classificatory logics for descendant communities (UNESCO, 2023).

3.  From “Mozambique” to “Mozambiques”: How a Place Became a People

3.1.  “Mozambiques” as a Constructed Identity in the Mascarenes

In the scholarship on slavery in Mauritius and the wider Mascarene region, “Mozambiques” is not treated as a neutral place name. Edward A. Alpers has shown that the term functioned as a diasporic identity produced under conditions of enslavement, displacement, and administrative categorisation, rather than as a reliable indicator of origin (Alpers, 2001).

In this framework, “Mozambique” is something one became through colonial documentation. Subsequent scholarship has reinforced this interpretation, demonstrating how the label aggregated people from diverse regions into a single African-coded category that carried social and legal consequences long after emancipation (Allen, 2014).

For CERD purposes, the significance is clear: forced classification is not neutral. When a label becomes a default container for the enslaved, it erases diversity of origin and obstructs recognition of specific communities.

3.2.  Portuguese Maritime Coercion and the Conditions for Misclassification

Administrative categories gain power when backed by coercive force. Portuguese expansion in the Indian Ocean combined commercial ambition with naval policing, surveillance, and interception. A central mechanism was the cartaz system, which authorised movement and rendered ships without passes subject to seizure.

Historical accounts of Portuguese policy in the early sixteenth century describe systematic efforts by the Estado da Índia to control navigation through the Maldives corridor and the Bay of Bengal, including the forcible seizure of vessels and the treatment of ships and crews as “prizes” (Bhattacharyya, 1996). Such seizures were not incidental; they were integral to imperial strategy.

De Silva’s edited translations of Portuguese texts confirm that the Maldives occupied a strategic position in Portuguese maritime imagination, framed through language of supervision, warning, and subordination (de Silva, 2009). These practices created precisely the conditions under which persons removed from ships or islands entered colonial custody and were redocumented under simplified categories; in such systems, classification followed capture (de Silva, 2009).

4.  “Mozambican” as Erasure Across Systems

4.1.  What Is Evidenced

Based on established scholarship, the following propositions are well supported:

• “Mozambiques” functioned as a historically constructed identity category in Mauritius and the Mascarenes, not merely as a geographic descriptor (Alpers, 2001; Allen, 2014).
• European control of Indian Ocean navigation relied on interception, pass systems, and prize-taking, including in routes connected to the Maldives, generating conditions for removal and reclassification of persons (Bhattacharyya, 1996; de Silva, 2009).
• Large, state-custodied slavery archives institutionalised classificatory systems whose effects continue to shape identity, memory, and claims-making (UNESCO, 2023).

4.2.  The 1810 Diego Garcia Seizure and Maldivian Identity

In 1810, British forces removed a population from Diego Garcia (Chagos), an island that formed part of the Maldivian sovereign and demographic space at the time. The individuals seized are asserted here to have been Maldivians. Their subsequent appearance in British records under racialised descriptors reflects not their origin, but the operation of imperial slave-taxonomy systems that reassigned identity based on racial presumption and administrative convenience.

The absence of explicit Maldivian identifiers in those records does not weaken this conclusion. On the contrary, it is consistent with well-documented colonial practices of erasure, in which island and Asian identities were systematically suppressed in favour of African-coded categories.

5. Implications for CERD

The discriminatory harm at issue is not confined to the past. It persists when modern institutions rely on colonial-era labels as if they were accurate ethnonyms. “Mozambican” becomes a racial instrument of discrimination when it:

• Denies communities traceable identity, including origin, language, and kinship.
• Collapses diverse peoples into a single racialised type, excluding them from recognition and remedy.
• Creates archival proof barriers, whereby descendants are told they lack evidence precisely because the system was designed to erase it.

This pattern aligns with CERD’s understanding of discrimination reproduced through administrative inheritance, where the archive itself becomes a technology of inequality.

6. What Must Be Proven Next: An Evidence Roadmap

For an Early Warning or Urgent Action procedure, the evidentiary task is narrow and document led. Priority should be given to:

1. Mauritius National Archives slavery records (1721–1892), with targeted searches for Maldivian markers alongside “Mozambiques” (UNESCO, 2023).
2. Portuguese Estado da Índia correspondence and voyage narratives, using de Silva’s corpus to guide archival retrieval (de Silva, 2009).
3. Prize-court and admiralty records connected to Diego Garcia removals, where reclassification is most likely to be documented.

A single primary entry linking a Maldivian origin marker to later racial reclassification would be sufficient to move from structural demonstration to direct proof.

7.  Conclusion

“Mozambican” is not inherently false. However, the combination of established scholarship on the “Mozambiques” of the Mascarenes and documented coercive maritime regimes in the Indian Ocean supports a defensible conclusion: colonial documentation systems routinely converted uncertainty and force into stable racial categories that erased specific origins. The harm persists when those categories govern recognition today.

For CERD purposes, the issue is not conjecture but structural discrimination. The appropriate response is targeted archival review, not dismissal based on the very silences produced by colonial bureaucracy.

References

Allen, R. B. (2014). European slave trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

Alpers, E. A. (2001). Becoming “Mozambique”: Diaspora and identity in Mauritius. In V. Teelock & E. A. Alpers (Eds.), History, memory and identity (pp. 117–155). Port Louis: Nelson Mandela Centre for African Culture & University of Mauritius.

Bhattacharyya, R. (1996). Portuguese maritime expansion in the Bay of Bengal in the early sixteenth century. In Proceedings of the Indian History Congress (57th Session). New Delhi: Indian History Congress.

de Silva, C. R. (Ed.). (2009). Portuguese encounters with Sri Lanka and the Maldives: Translated texts from the Age of the Discoveries. Farnham: Ashgate.

UNESCO. (2023). The Slave Trade and Slavery Records in Mauritius (1721–1892). Memory of the World Register.

Wolf, E. R. (1982). Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of California Press.