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Article ID: CBB843997575

"Não há Nada" ("There is Nothing"): Absent Headshots and Identity Documents in Independent Mozambique (April 2020)

Technology and Culture
Volume: 61
Issue: 2 supplement
Pages: S104-S134

DOI: 10.1353/tech.2020.0065

URI: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/761588

Publication Date: April 2020
Edition Details: Theme of the issue: AFricanizing the History of Technology
Language: English

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By 1983, Mozambique was seven years into independence from Portugal and at war on two fronts. Inside of Mozambique, populations confronted famine and long lines for government services. In response, the government launched Operação Produção, a program that relocated populations from overcrowded cities to the countryside in the northern province of Niassa. Two weeks into the program, state officials required people to present photo IDs. Not only did people not have the accepted forms of identification, many had never seen a headshot of themselves. Too often the literature on bureaucracy and technology undervalues the importance of photography. Similarly, photographic studies assume that photographs exist in printed form and that state governments all have the same capacities to archive and retrieve IDs. Breaking with these bodies of literature, as well as with Mozambique’s nationalist historiography, I historicize the introduction of IDs in Mozambique after independence and explain how state and non-state actors addressed photography’s absence.

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Article Laura Ann Twagira (April 2020) Introduction: Africanizing the History of Technology. Technology and Culture. unapi

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