Facing rural guerrilla movements, both the Portuguese colonial state and the Rhodesian government adopted the counter-insurgency doctrine of separating populations from insurgents by physical concentration. In Mozambique from 1968 the Portuguese army moved roughly a million people into aldeamentos - fenced villages under military or militia guard, with curfews and controlled movement - concentrated in Tete, Cabo Delgado and Niassa, and pursued a similar policy in Angola and Guinea-Bissau; the programme was accompanied by free-fire zones outside the perimeters and by the destruction of abandoned settlements. Rhodesia began its Protected Villages programme in 1973-74 in the Chiweshe and Madziwa tribal trust lands, and by 1978 official figures record about 580,000 people in some 230 protected villages, with residents subject to curfew, searches, restrictions on food carried outside the fence, and communal fines. Conditions in both systems were widely reported as poor, with crowding, distance from fields, loss of livestock and rising malnutrition and mortality; both governments presented the settlements as protective and as development schemes. The systems ended with Mozambican independence in 1975 and with the Lancaster House settlement in Rhodesia in 1979, and displaced populations largely dispersed back to their land, in Mozambique into the further upheaval of the post-independence civil war.
Portuguese colonial forces and the Rhodesian government concentrated rural African populations into guarded settlements to separate them from guerrilla movements
The 1970 Portuguese overseas censuses recorded about 8.2 million in Mozambique and 5.7 million in Angola, and Rhodesia's 1969 census about 4.85 million Africans — roughly 18 million in total, the large majority rural. The resettlement programmes are documented in Portuguese military records for the aldeamentos and in Rhodesian administrative records for the protected villages, but the counts were kept for security rather than statistical purposes and vary between sources.
No defensible range for deaths caused by the resettlement itself. Contemporary reporting and later studies describe raised mortality from malnutrition, crowding and loss of access to fields in both systems, and killings occurred in the free-fire zones outside the perimeters, most notoriously the Portuguese army massacre at Wiriyamu in Mozambique in December 1972; no mortality data were collected.
Contemporary reporting by missionaries and journalists, and later historical studies of both programmes, documented confinement under curfew and guard, the burning of abandoned villages, compulsory labour on perimeter works, and food control used as a weapon.
Mozambique, Zimbabwe