Queer Mozambique

From the Mines to the Manas

Agnaldo Bata, Nicola Biasio, Maria Judite Chipenembe, Gustavo Gomes da Costa, Ditte Haarløv Johnsen, Daria Trentini, Matthew Waites, Agostão José Zitha, Francisco P V Miguel, Marc Epprecht, Danilo da Silva, Francisco Miguel, Marc Epprecht

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781997461074
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Postcolonial Mozambique decriminalized homosexual acts in 2015. This legal reform was not a response to litigation or public pressure, but came from a parliamentary initiative and lobbying by a few organizations. Subsequent public opinion polls show that Mozambique is an outlier in Africa in its relatively tolerant behaviors and attitudes toward non-heterosexual relationships.

What are the cultural and historical specificities toward gender and sexual dissidence in Mozambique that might explain its distinctive path, and what can we learn from them? Queer Mozambique provides a lively response to these questions.

Contributors employ different modes and styles ranging from photographs to storytelling to text interpretation to tell stories of Mozambique's distinctive cultures of sexual and gender dissent and fluidity, from the South African mine compounds of the late nineteenth century to the current LGBTIQ+ movement and the formation of new sexual and gender identities, such as those of the manas trans women.

The first book in English on queer issues in a Portuguese-speaking African country, Queer Mozambique not only assembles and interprets empirical evidence for the Anglophone reader, but also brings new debates and theories from the Global South. It aims at a truly global dialogue between international and Mozambican scholars of queer studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the book
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• FOREWORD From silence to documentation: A personal journey through Mozambique’s queer histories
• INTRODUCTION Marc Epprecht and Francisco Miguel
• CHAPTER 1 A century of writing on queer lives in Mozambique: Towards an understanding of tolerance
• CHAPTER 2 Mozambican men’s and boys’ sexual relationships in the migrant labour system in South Africa and Zimbabwe, c. 1860s–1950s
• CHAPTER 3 Legal regulation of non-heteronormative sexualities and genders in Mozambique
• CHAPTER 4 Queer memories: An implicated (literary) archive of the colonial war in Mozambique
• CHAPTER 5 The modernity of tradition: Gay healers and matriliny in northern Mozambique
• CHAPTER 6 The changing lexicons of homosexuality and gender identity in southern Mozambique
• CHAPTER 7 ‘We must stop using the Bible as a knife’: Creating religious safe spaces for LGBTQI+ people of faith in Mozambique
• CHAPTER 8 Manas
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX