From first fruits to Tarana

Between the turn of the twentieth century and the end of the colonial era the state transformed its image of the importance of Mozambique's cashew orchard and economy. António Enes's late nineteenth-century prescription for the national cashew orchard was explained by Freire de Andrade's early twentieth-century complaint. African drunkenness, he claimed ‘deprived European farmers of native labour just when they most need it…Furthermore, just when they should be planting, natives do not attend to their own crops.’ At that juncture the colonial administration focused on only one aspect of the large and complex cashew economy. Alcoholic drinks made from cashews, they claimed, not only competed with the national wine industry, but blighted agricultural production, public health and safety!

Enes called cashews that ‘damned fruit’, and short of uprooting the entire national orchard, did whatever he could to discourage its spread. His early twentieth-century colleagues followed suit. In Inhambane in 1909, a per-tree tax was levied on anyone owning more than 300 cashew trees, and the tax was doubled for anyone owning more than a thousand trees. Cashew-based alcohol production was expressly prohibited in most of the country for most of the twentieth century. The correlation of cashews, sales of illegal brews, drunkenness and worker absenteeism remained as more than a leitmotiv in colonial and missionary correspondence and reports, especially in the Native Affairs Department, the colonial bureaucracy charged with overseeing the lives and labours of the majority population.