Reinvestment, Resource “Rushes,” and the Inalienability of Place: Land’s Active Layerings in Mozambique

For industry proponents, the Xinavane Sugar Mill, Mozambique’s largest sugar estate, has been rehabilitated from postconflict subsistence farming to agroindustrial productivity. Such investment-oriented narratives seek to erase earlier land dispossessions and uneven accumulation. Drawing ethnographic research together with Mozambican Land Cadaster and archival documents, this article rethinks land and place to challenge the global resource “rush” literatures, taking seriously the layers of investment, disinvestment, and reinvestment that enable contemporary financial flows. The article argues to understand land in its historical layerings, to examine how colonial legacy in southern Africa configures land use today. Analyzing three waves of Xinavanian investment, the article examines dispossession, contestation, and plantation expansions and contractions, to yield two key interventions. First, rather than providing mere background to today’s investment and land transformations, Xinavane’s historical layers actively produce the possibilities and limits for making land an investable commodity. Second, through fictions of capitalist success wrought by land and labor control, capitalist state–private efforts have sought to alienate Xinavane. This has been a repeated attempt to resignify Xinavane from being a deeply rooted, heterogeneous African place, to a space of capitalist industrial placelessness. Residents assert, however, that Xinavane cannot be rent from its multivalent meanings and social fabrics, disrupting these capitalist-centric fictions. Xinavanians maintain that land, and place, are in fact inalienable.