“É Pena Seres Mulato!”: Ensaio sobre relações raciais

• Main Author: Gabriel Mithá Ribeiro
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Instituto Universitário de Lisboa 2012-06-01
• Series: Cadernos de Estudos Africanos
• Subjects: miscegenation; Mozambique; mulatto; black people; racism; social representations
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/cea/583

This text examines the racialization of Mozambican society around the social boundaries between the overwhelming black majority and the mestizo/”mulatto” minority. This phenomenon varies between mutual acceptance (neutral meaning) and mutually derogatory stereotypes (negative meaning). Certain negative stereotypes associated with the figure of the ”mulatto” include, “the mulatto has no national flag” (which dates from the transition to Mozambique’s independence, 1974-75) and “the mulatto is a mechanic or a thief” (which dates from the first half of the 1990s, during the transition from a wartime one-party state to a post-conflict multiparty system). In this paper, I will propose that the symbolic instrumentalization of the ”mulatto” minority has been useful to tame the anxieties of the black majority.