Side A, Side B: How Mozambican Oral History Archives Expand Our Understanding of Legal History

When I arrived in Maputo this April for a two-month archival stay, I didn’t expect one of my biggest challenges to be figuring out how cassette tapes work. Until a few years ago, sound was not something I had seriously considered as a relevant source in my field of inquiry, colonial legal history. My engagement with audio began about four years ago, leading to last year’s documentary podcast Tramas Coloniais, which explored the history of colonialism and its normativities in Africa through interviews and oral stories. Yet cassette tapes themselves remained a distant memory, objects linked to music and homemade family radio shows. To be honest, I could hardly remember how to play, rewind, or record a tape.

As a legal historian, I am also used to working with written documents: doctrinal books, decrees, petitions, reports, codes, court transcripts. These are the materials that traditionally define the boundaries of the field. They are what legal history has largely built itself upon. But sitting in a small room at the Center for African Studies in Maputo, headphones on, I found myself listening to a different kind of legal past: spoken, translated and recorded on magnetic tape more than forty years ago.

Listening to the first cassette tapes at the Centro de Estudos Africanos from Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo. The headphones aren’t visible here, but they were there, and it took a while before they worked properly. All photos in this post were taken by me, with permission from the archive staff.

This post emerges from ongoing reflections within the Mutual Dependencies and Normative Production in Africa research group, where we explore what it means to approach law, normativity, and dependency through orality. More broadly, it challenges the disciplinary boundaries of legal history, especially in postcolonial contexts where written legal records are often incomplete, fragmented, or shaped by colonial frameworks. As I will argue, turning to oral history archives does more than uncover new historical details. It pushes us to reconsider the methods and assumptions behind how we collect, interpret, and validate historical evidence, particularly at the intersection of legal history and dependency studies.

This reconsideration is especially urgent in Africa, where the field of legal history is still developing. Traditionally, it has been dominated by written sources: official documents produced under colonial regimes, or through interactions with colonial authorities. While jurists are beginning to engage with the field, oral materials often remain on the margins, seen as supplementary rather than central. Many social historians have incorporated oral interviews and collective memory to enrich their work on legal issues (see for example Allina 2012; Sarr 2016 and Thomaz 2022), yet efforts to access African voices in the production of law still tend to focus primarily on written case files or court records.

In Mozambique, this challenge is especially acute. Colonized by Portugal in the late 15th century and brought under formal colonial administration in the late 19th century, the country gained independence only in 1975 after a decade-long liberation struggle. Portuguese colonial rule was bureaucratically dense, yet it left scattered records about everyday legal life, particularly in rural areas. And while some colonial anthropological accounts attempt to reconstruct “customary” systems, they often do so through the lens of indirect rule or development planning. As a result, we are left with a highly biased and fragmented picture of how law was actually produced.

This fragmentation is also reflected in the archive itself. Although there are collections of court cases and other legal documents that offer insights into African perceptions of law and justice, these materials are often unevenly preserved and difficult to access. Certain regions and periods (especially the pre-colonial and early colonial years) are notably underrepresented. The limited resources available for preservation and cataloguing further complicate efforts to navigate these collections.

But what happens when the legal past is remembered not through litigation, but through storytelling?

This is where the oral history archives come in. Beginning in the late 1970s, a series of oral history initiatives were launched by state institutions in newly independent Mozambique: the Centro de Estudos Africanos (CEA), the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique (AHM), and the Direção Nacional de Cultura (DNC). Although each project was coordinated independently and pursued distinct goals—some focused on documenting the liberation struggle or reconstructing precolonial political formations, while the DNC sought to encourage Mozambicans to “be interested in and become aware of the value and importance of their own culture” by recording songs, dances, rituals, and other cultural practices—they were united by a broader political vision. All were shaped by the state-building ambitions of the time, rooted in socialist ideals and committed to recovering national cultures, voices, and knowledge systems that had been marginalized under colonial rule (Fernandes, 2023).

A sample of the 350 cassette tapes found in 2016 by Carlos Fernandes, researcher at the Centro de Estudos Africanos (CEA). Carlos studies the history of the CEA itself and is currently leading a project to catalogue, preserve, and promote this archival collection.

From 1979 onward, these institutions sent teams to various parts of the country (especially the northern provinces of Cabo Delgado and Niassa, where the liberation struggle had its beginning and was more present) to record testimonies about the war for independence, social life, rituals, customary practices, and local histories. The result was a vast collection of audio material: hundreds of cassette tapes containing interviews, storytelling sessions, and reports based on recorded conversations with people who experienced colonial rule firsthand.

Cassette tapes from the oral sources section at the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique.

These materials were not designed as legal sources. Yet they contain a wealth of information about normative practices: how marriages were negotiated, how land was allocated, how disputes were resolved, how labor was organized, how power was exercised. In other words, they document the social terrain on which law, both colonial and non-colonial, was produced, resisted, and adapted.

Transcript of an interview about rain-calling rituals, which were essential for managing land, economic, and succession matters. The document is held at the archive of the Institute for Social and Cultural Research (ARPAC), which preserves the records (mainly transcripts) of the interviews conducted as part of the DNC's oral history project.

Listening to these recordings, what emerges is not only an alternative legal archive, but also a set of reflections on how people remember and narrate dependency.

Some interviews describe relations of forced labor, tax collection, and movement restrictions under Portuguese rule. Others go further back, recounting precolonial forms of subjugation: individuals given as tribute to chiefs, families marked by hereditary servitude, groups without access to land or political voice. In many cases, the categories used are not legal in a formal sense, meaning they do not correspond to western European definitions, but they clearly describe socially recognized forms of hierarchy, obligation, and unfreedom.

These fragments are especially significant in light of the conceptual framework we use at the BCDSS. If we understand dependency not only as a legal status (such as slavery or indenture) but also as a social relation (one that can be coercive, asymmetrical, and enduring) then these oral archives become vital. They reveal how dependency was structured, named, and negotiated across time periods and normative systems.

For example, in interviews collected by the team of the Historical Archive of Mozambique as part of a project on precolonial political formations, elders speak of local forms of authority and the obligations they entailed. These include tribute relationships, patron-client dynamics, and restrictions on mobility. Although these are retrospective accounts, often based on transmitted stories rather than personal experience, they reflect a shared memory of legal and social differentiation.

Such material also raises important methodological questions. Can we consider these interviews legal sources? What kind of legal history can be written from narratives shaped by oral transmission, political ideology, and memory work? And how do we, as scholars, avoid either romanticizing these accounts or dismissing them as anecdotal?

Legal history, as a field, has been slow to embrace oral histories and audio sources. In part, this is due to broader methodological concerns about reliability, verifiability, and the privileging of canonical texts. But it also reflects a deeper epistemological bias: the idea that law is best studied through writing. Even when oral history is used, particularly within civil law traditions and continental European historiographies, it tends to be limited to interviews with prominent legal figures like judges, lawyers, and prosecutors, or to recordings of courtroom proceedings and legislative sessions (Portelli, 1985). This reinforces a narrow understanding of what counts as legal memory and whose voices matter in the reconstruction of legal pasts. The assumption that legal history should be grounded primarily in written records is particularly strong in colonial and imperial contexts, where archives are often the only “official” sources of information.

Yet in postcolonial contexts like Mozambique, where multiple normative orders and oral transmission were central to how people understood and navigated law, such a narrow source base limits what legal history can say. It risks reproducing the same silences and asymmetries that structured the colonial archive in the first place.

The oral history projects initiated in the late 1970s offer a different kind of archive. They are not without problems, since interviews were shaped by state agendas, conducted under the influence of dominant political narratives, and often lack contextual documentation. But they offer access to legal consciousness, to the way law was remembered, discussed, and reinterpreted outside courtrooms or colonial offices.

Moreover, the fact that these interviews were recorded and not just transcribed adds another layer. Listening to the tapes, one hears pauses, emphases, repetitions. One hears interviewers guiding answers, or informants hesitating. These features do not make the material more “authentic,” but they remind us that legal history can be constructed not only through content, but also through form.

My time in Maputo confirmed something I had long suspected: that writing legal histories of Mozambique requires moving beyond the written colonial archive. It requires attention to sound, to voice, to memory. It requires taking seriously the oral as both method and source, not just as a supplement to documents, but as a legitimate entry point into legal-historical research. And this does not mean abandoning rigor or critical distance. It means expanding our methodological toolbox to include the kinds of materials that reflect how people actually experienced law: in conversation, in dispute, in negotiation, in recollection.

The Mozambican oral history archives, I believe, offer one path forward. They allow us to listen—to dependency, to law, to the silences and structures that formal archives often obscure. And they invite us to reconsider what counts as a legal source, and what stories legal historians are able (and willing) to tell.