Mozambican Police Interviews: the interaction between official language and legal pluralism

Concerns about access to justice and procedural fairness in Mozambique have been expressed in the literature over many decades. This prior research has identified the tendency for poor Mozambicans to be targeted by police and prosecuted for minor crimes while “wealth and a high-status position seem to correspond to prosecution being less likely to occur” (Bertelsen & Chauque, 2015:3). In this chapter, we present findings from a study of police interviews undertaken in high crime neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Mozambique’s capital city, Maputo. Specifically, we focus on the narrative turns of suspects who have the difficult task of effecting a defence through a second language. For many suspects whom we observed in Maputo, the challenges of being interviewed by police and the difficulties of navigating the complex Mozambican legal system are compounded by their lack of proficiency in Portuguese, the official state language.