ABSTRACT
In this article, which is the result of historical and ethnographic research, I present some Portuguese and foreign colonial archives in which concerns the past (homo)sexual lives of men from southern Mozambique. By bringing such data, ranging from travel literature to the official bulletins of the Province, I argue for the scarcity of records on homoeroticism in the colonial history of Mozambique until the 20th century. When analyzing marriages between Mozambican men in South African mines, as well as unpublished Mozambican processes regarding the penalization of homosexual practices in the late colonial period, I argue that the silence about sexuality attributed to Bantus in this region can be also the effect of the Portuguese colonizer’s decency, even though the Portuguese were the responsible for establishing in Mozambique a new category: “homosexuality”.
Keywords:
gender; sexuality; history of Mozambique; Colonial Mozambique