Allen F. Isaacman

Over several decades, Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara S. Isaacman have built one of the most important historical research projects on Southern Africa, and especially on the territory that today corresponds to the borders of Mozambique. Like other academics of their generation, they were involved in anti-colonial struggles and, after Mozambique's independence, maintained a collaboration with its Mozambican academic structures, teaching and training new researchers. In their works, the intensive use of oral narratives places at the center of the analysis the strategies of African populations and how they confronted the European colonial presence. Rejecting Eurocentric views of African history, they recovered the process of formation of local societies, recounting their internal fractures, their own struggles, and forms of resistance.
Allen and Barbara Isaacman also produced a detailed and unique analysis of Portuguese colonialism, referring to the forms of structuring colonial power and the role of slavery, forced labor, violence, the presence of the colonial state and its agents.