A DICTIONARY OF MOZAMBICAN HISTORY AND SOCIETY

410pp., illus., map, paperback, Cape Town, 2022

This book, now revised and updated and co-authored with Mozambican scholar Amélia Neves de Souto, is based on Colin Darch’s Historical Dictionary of Mozambique (2019).

"Students of Southern African history, and particularly the history of Mozambique, owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Colin Darch and Amélia de Souto. The Dictionary of Mozambican History and Society is meticulously researched, carefully crafted and extremely well written. Darch and Souto’s breadth of knowledge, based on a lifetime’s work, is unparalleled. Theirs is the first book which I consult when writing about Mozambique’s past." Allen Isaacman, Regents Professor, University of Minnesota

"This concise Dictionary of Mozambican History and Society provides balanced coverage of the whole of Mozambique, with particularly strong coverage for the late 20th and 21st centuries. It has strong suits in social and political history. Most welcome are the inclusion of literary figures along with lesser known political leadership. The team of fine historians achieves the goal of bridging the divide between South African and Mozambican bibliography ..." Jeanne Marie Penvenne, Professor Emerita, Department of History, Tufts University

Colin Darch worked at universities and research centers in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Brazil and South Africa. From 1979 to 1987 he was a researcher and documentalist at the Centro de Estudos Africanos of the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo. From 1991-1992 he headed the Mozambique Project at the Centro de Estudos Afro-Asiáticos of the Universidade Cândido Mendes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He  is the author of the Mozambique volume in the World Bibliographic Series and, with David Hedges, of Samora Machel: Retórica política e independência em Moçambique (2018). A collection of his lectures in Portuguese on African topics, O continente demasiado grande, was published in Brazil in 2016. Now retired, he lives in Cape Town.

Mozambican scholar Amélia Neves de Souto was a Senior Researcher in the Centre of African Studies, Eduardo Mondlane University, and at the Aquino de Bragança Centre for Social Studies in Maputo. Her publications include Início da operação «Nó Górdio», Moçambique 1970 (2018); Moçambique, descolonização e transição para a independência: herança e memória (2015), and Memory and Identity in the History of Frelimo: Some research themes (2013).