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Chapter 1

THE SPACES OF LOURENÇO MARQUES

IN THE months before and after the arrival of independence in June 1975, many of the people living in Lourenço Marques’s City of Cement packed up what belongings they could and left Mozambique for Portugal, South Africa, and Rhodesia. Once-busy avenues were now quiet, and many apartment towers stood nearly empty; they stayed that way until early 1976, when Frelimo nationalized abandoned housing and rental units in cities of cement throughout the country. President Samora Machel announced the new policy on February 3, the first Heroes Day celebrated in independent Mozambique, at a plaza at the edge of the subúrbios. Lourenço Marques had “died” at 9:35 that morning, he declared at the beginning of his speech, and the city had been renamed Maputo.¹ Its City of Cement—or at least most of it—now belonged to the Mozambicans whose labor had been exploited to finance and build it, and the president led his listeners, rhetorically, on a tour of the people’s new possession.

He first walked them from the subúrbios up the slope of Alto Maé. This was a neighborhood just inside the City of Cement and home to many people he called the intermediaries of colonialism, by which he meant people of mixed racial backgrounds. Then, he pointed out how, as one got closer to the city’s poshest neighborhoods, they got progressively whiter. If one headed in a different direction from Alto Maé, one encountered the blocks where Indians lived, where Pakistanis lived, and where the small Chinese community lived. Even absent much of its preindependence European population, Maputo remained Lourenço Marques in its bones. “It is a form of apartheid,” Machel said, “like in South Africa.” He elaborated: “We have to face the reality of our country. It was colonialism that created all of this . . . our lives reflect at the present moment the structures of colonialism.”²

Many in the crowd knew the route well. Each morning, they trudged up to the City of Cement for work, and each evening, they went back down the slope to home, to the cantina, or to prayer. Young Naftal, the protagonist of Lília Momplé’s short story “Caniço,” written in the 1980s about Lourenço Marques in the 1940s, rushes up the slope from the caniço to work as a domestic servant in a Portuguese household.³ Momplé, who once was a social worker in the subúrbios, portrays Naftal’s neighborhood as a place of garbage heaps, swarming flies, and children whose faces are swollen from malnutrition. On his walk to town, houses of reeds give way to the modest wood-and-zinc houses of Indians and mestiços (people of mixed race), with some concrete-block houses mixed in. Farther on, the wood-and-zinc houses thin out, and the streetscape is all concrete and greenery where “the pleasant scent of the gardens and acacia trees in flower replaces the stink of misery.”⁴ The passage through the city strikes Naftal as a forward progress through time. He gloomily reflects that the caniço is sinking further into the past.

During the independence era, it was tempting to characterize Lourenço Marques as an apartheid city, as Machel did. The colonial regime, a Mozambique-based Portuguese architect told a reporter in late 1974, sought to “maintain the population divided by economic ‘apartheid,’” but it had gone about it with more cunning than the regime in South Africa had; the Portuguese had been “less overt and thus less scandalous.”⁵ All urban policy, the architect continued, had been geared toward housing a “colonial bourgeoisie” in the towers of the City of Cement and keeping everyone else in the caniço, “where in deplorable living conditions the great mass of workers is heaped.” Comparing the Mozambican capital to South African cities targeted what had been a mainstay of Portuguese propaganda. For decades, Portugal insisted that its laws were color-blind. In the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when other European colonial powers were withdrawing from Africa, Lisbon held fast, arguing that during half a millennium as colonizers, the Portuguese had established they were historically exceptional, unique in their aptitude for absorbing other peoples into European civilization.⁶ Johannesburg served as a convenient foil. Roughly 300 miles away, the apartheid metropolis, shaped by a proudly unbending racism, was an example of what Lourenço Marques was not. In revised histories of the Portuguese era that emerged once that era was ending, Johannesburg typified what Lourenço Marques, essentially, always had been.⁷

Mozambique’s capital in the decades after World War II was, in many respects, a dual city. The paved street grid, energy grid, sewage lines, municipal trash disposal, and piped water all more or less ended at the curve of Avenida Caldas Xavier, and beyond it sprawled predominantly African neighborhoods of twisting dust lanes (Figure 1.2). At night, the difference assumed other dimensions. Crossing the narrow threshold from one side of the curve to the other, wrote journalist and poet José Craveirinha in 1955, one departed a visible world, lit by street lamps, and entered a darkness where sounds replaced sight: “Loose sand creaks underfoot, and feet gain the supernatural intuition of the blind, and guiding one through the roads are the chirps of bats, the trilling of crickets, and the ruffling of anonymous wings.”⁸ Authorities essentially prevented foreign researchers from working in the subúrbios and censored images of African neighborhoods because they acknowledged, if only to each other, that the caniço undercut Portugal’s claims to being a racial paradise.⁹ The subúrbios were what they were because of policies and practices throughout the colonial era that suppressed African wages, combined with a generalized neglect of African welfare.¹⁰ Until 1961, nearly all black Mozambican men were subject to a brutal system of forced labor that dated from the late nineteenth century. Yet according to Portuguese propagandists, it was not discrimination and wage suppression and government neglect that kept Africans in poor conditions but rather primitive job skills: given time and the proper tutelage, Africans, too, would evolve and learn to take an equal part in the economy. As he visited Mozambique in 1956, the president of Portugal, a figurehead of the Salazar regime, told a French reporter that the Portuguese did not have a “racial problem.”¹¹ “No distinctions whatsoever are made between whites and blacks,” he said, “except in respect to the degree of civilization reached by Africans, and in this area we give them all the encouragement possible for them to elevate themselves.” Even in the 1960s, when the forced-labor regime had been officially abolished and the job prospects for many in the subúrbios significantly improved, most Africans could not afford to live in the City of Cement, and landlords tended to refuse the black Mozambicans who could.¹² Meanwhile, with the explosive growth of the subúrbios, conditions there in many ways got worse.

Although white supremacy structured the economy and how and where people lived in Lourenço Marques, the state did not make residential segregation by race a primary objective. Unlike in South Africa, Rhodesia, and colonial Kenya, there were no wide “buffer zones” to maintain great distances between predominantly African neighborhoods and predominantly European neighborhoods. The relative compactness of the city is evident in Momplé’s story and even in Machel’s words on Heroes Day. People in Lourenço Marques walked. There had been streetcars since the first decade of the twentieth century, and later, there were bus lines on the few roads that passed through the subúrbios. At least until the middle to late 1960s, however, the most common means of travel was on foot. One reason was that for many years, bus drivers refused to let people board without shoes, a restriction that barred many women.¹³ Another was the relative proximity of homes, workplaces, markets, and churches and mosques, which meant a bus fare was often an unnecessary extravagance. Less than 3 miles separated the most populous neighborhoods of the subúrbios from the most exclusive neighborhoods of the City of Cement, and most of the city lay somewhere in between. The heart of Chamanculo, Lourenço Marques’s largest African neighborhood, was situated a mile or so above the port and its rail facilities, the city’s largest employers, and just past the rail station was the downtown commercial district, the baixa. Sailors on shore leave often walked up the hill from the port to the compounds where sex workers lived in the dense bairros of Malanga, Mafalala, and Lagoas—and beyond Lagoas, one reached sparsely populated areas that were just barely considered Lourenço Marques.

Given the various proximities, the South African urban planner probably would have found Lourenço Marques as exotic as the South African tourist did.¹⁴ Unlike in South Africa, the displacement of Africans in Mozambique’s capital occurred as the City of Cement expanded, rather than to realize theories of racial “separate development.” People in the subúrbios were more or less on their own, and the limited number of housing units built for Africans in Mozambique by the government or by religious charities during the entire period of colonial rule probably amounted to less than a single neighborhood in Soweto.¹⁵ In the 1950s, several thousand poor and working-class whites lived in the Lourenço Marques subúrbios, often side by side with African neighbors and often with African companions. The cities of Portuguese Africa can certainly be understood as variations on an apartheid theme, but we could just as easily consider the personal intimacies that persisted despite segregation, as well as the separations maintained in tight quarters.

Figure 1.2 The curve where city meets subúrbios, 1969. (MITADER)

This chapter demonstrates the place of the built environment in people’s lives during the decades after World War II, materially and symbolically: how urban space, at its many scales, did not simply reflect relations among city dwellers but also conditioned them. Perhaps all too typical of histories of the colonial era, the first part of the narrative emphasizes Portuguese initiatives and how Africans were compelled to respond to them. Even while attempting to center the subúrbios in the story of mid-twentieth-century Lourenço Marques, one cannot help but see them as the outcome of the colonial conquests of an earlier period. The tour hastens through previous centuries before lingering in the 1950s. Much of what is said here also applies to the 1960s and early 1970s, but the specificities of urban life during the last fifteen years of Portuguese rule are discussed in chapters that follow.

INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS

The Portuguese were not the only Europeans to show interest in what they later called the Bay of Lourenço Marques, but they were the first (in the early 1500s) and the most persistent.¹⁶ The bay and the estuary that fed into it gave access to sources of ivory, gold, and slaves in the southeast African interior; the name given to the bay derived from a Portuguese ivory trader, allegedly the first European to exploit the area.¹⁷ For centuries, the Portuguese at Lourenço Marques never numbered more than a few dozen, and malaria tended to reduce the settlement to a handful until more troops could be ordered to repopulate the small garrison and more civilians could be compelled to join them.¹⁸ From the late eighteenth century onward, the Portuguese military post and its adjoining settlement were located on the north shore of the estuary where it opened onto the bay, on a sandy spit of land described by historian Alfredo Pereira de Lima as less than a mile long and a quarter mile wide and “almost drowned by pestilential swamp.”¹⁹ The construction in the mid-nineteenth century of a stone-and-lime wall along the north side of the settlement helped stave off raids from that direction, but it did nothing to protect against mosquitoes. Beyond the marsh and on slightly higher ground were the scattered homesteads of people loyal to the Mpfumu chief, and on the south side of the estuary was the closely linked Tembe clan.²⁰ The longtime inhabitants of the areas around the bay spoke Ronga, and they called the Portuguese settlement Xilunguíne, meaning “place of the white men.” Throughout the nineteenth century, the vast majority of Xilunguíne’s residents were not whites but rather Asians, African traders and slaves, and people who claimed diverse origins.²¹

Beset by disease, the settlement was, for most of its early history, a precarious place to be for virtually everyone who lived there. Considering the unsanitary conditions and the tumbledown state of most housing, it is no exaggeration to say that the first slum of Lourenço Marques was the settlement itself. Signs of vigor resulted from the growth of Boer settlement in South Africa’s interior from the 1830s onward, together with the spike in the overall European population of the hinterland following the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley in the 1860s. Lourenço Marques was the closest seaport to Pretoria, and for the Boers it had the added advantage of being controlled by a power other than Britain. In 1876, shortly after Portugal successfully fended off a British attempt to claim part of the bay, the military post was elevated to the status of a town. One year later, a team of engineers arrived from Portugal to begin draining the swamps that surrounded the settlement on most sides, and they were celebrated as conquering heroes. These two linked developments—the resolution of Portugal’s sovereignty over the bay and the infrastructural upgrades—allowed Lourenço Marques to expand in pace with growth in South Africa.

The rooting of the Portuguese settlement also coincided with the abolition of slavery in Mozambique in the 1870s, after which the town would become a showcase for how labor could continue to be exploited under different guises. Forced African labor dug the earth and hauled the rocks to fill the swamps surrounding Lourenço Marques. But according to Jeanne Penvenne, the public works projects that made the vicinity of the fort more tolerable for habitation simultaneously made life less tolerable farther afield.²² The dirt for fill was excavated from nearby areas of established African settlement, thus displacing homesteads, and after the work was done, the empty pits became ponds of stagnant water and breeding grounds for malarial mosquitoes. In other words, infrastructural improvements displaced disease conditions from the growing town to the areas that were now on the town’s outskirts. Just as significant to the future of African life in Lourenço Marques was a fire that swept through the Portuguese settlement in 1875. The fire was the latest in a series, and because it had been fed by reed-walled, thatched-roof structures, construction in reed and straw was prohibited. In turn, that presumably pushed much of the African population beyond the bounds of the town’s perimeter wall.

With the opening of the goldfields in the Transvaal in the 1880s, the town came more fully under the glare of global capitalism. In 1887, the year the town was elevated to a city, the colony’s chief engineer gave Lourenço Marques its first significant urban plan—essentially, a Cartesian grid imposed on a non-Cartesian landscape.²³ As Valdemir Zamparoni observes, it might have been easier to simply move the settlement to a more salubrious spot as some advocated, but the impulse to force nature to submit before man and technology overwhelmed pragmatism.²⁴ Surveyors marked out the straight lines of future growth, and street signs appeared for streets that did not yet exist. Over the next decade, Portugal’s relationship to Mozambique and to the people who lived there changed rapidly and radically, as did the relationship of Lourenço Marques to the rest of the colony. What was known as Portuguese East Africa had been limited mostly to trading outposts on the coast and to posts and plantations along the Zambezi River; only in 1891 were Mozambique’s borders with British Africa agreed upon. Now, by the terms of the Berlin Conference, Portugal sought “effective occupation.”²⁵ In 1895, the Transvaal railway was completed, and in recognition of the city’s centrality to Mozambique’s economic prospects, the colony’s capital was soon moved to Lourenço Marques from the Island of Mozambique, the sleepy former slaving port off the colony’s north coast.²⁶ By 1897, Portuguese forces and their local allies had destroyed southern Mozambique’s Gaza state, consolidating Portugal’s control over the territory. Much of Mozambique was then parceled up and leased to concessionaires to administer and exploit, but the region south of the Save River, including Lourenço Marques, fell under Portugal’s direct governance.

For administrative purposes, two concentric arcs were drawn on the chart of Lourenço Marques, relative to a point near its port.²⁷ The outer arc, with a radius of 7 kilometers, defined the concelho within it—that is, the principal administrative unit governing everyday life in the Portuguese settlement and its near vicinity. The inner arc, with a tight radius of approximately 2 kilometers, defined much of the northerly limit of the municipality, which would administer specifically urban services such as transit, trash removal, road construction, and building permits.²⁸ At some point (it is unclear exactly when), barbed wire was installed along the municipal boundary.²⁹ This line later became the route of the Ring Road, and sometime thereafter, the main segment of it was renamed Avenida Caldas Xavier. The area inside this curve was initially known as the ringed area. Beyond the curve, most of the responsibility of municipal authorities ended and the subúrbios began.

The full significance of the term subúrbio in the Portuguese planning tradition remains vague. In nineteenth-century Portugal, it was used colloquially to refer to new industrial areas surrounding Lisbon and to describe outer housing districts, some of them wealthy, some of them poor—just as the various derivations of the word were used in other parts of Europe and in North America.³⁰ There are some indications that the designation acquired a more precise meaning in Portugal’s colonies, perhaps for the first time in Lourenço Marques in 1903 when areas between the arc of the municipality and the arc of the concelho were specifically identified, in a legal decree, as “subúrbios.”³¹ Doing so was part of an ongoing attempt to discipline the sell-off of land there, which for decades had been marked by landgrabs, giveaways, and corruption.³² In Europe and North America, suburbs were unanticipated expansions of established cities. In many cases, they were seen negatively, as outside the reach of governmental authority and prejudicial to the development of the city itself. In Lourenço Marques, however, the making of a place called the subúrbios followed closely upon the making of a place called the city, in anticipation of the city’s eventual expansion.³³ These areas were not urbanized yet—nor, for that matter, was most of the municipality itself—but they would be, eventually.

Crystallizing Portugal’s renewed efforts at empire was the indigenato.³⁴ Instituted in 1899, with many revisions thereafter, this was the legal apparatus upon which rested Mozambique’s system of forced labor. Basically, all “native” (indígena) men not engaged in formal employment had a “moral and legal obligation” to labor for the government or for a private designee of the government for up to six months at a time. Since farming one’s own fields did not count as a formal job, most Mozambican men were vulnerable to impressment—and when authorities felt moved to, women, children, and the elderly were forced to labor, too. Chibalo, as this kind of labor was called in southern Mozambique, paid meager wages (if any at all) and often lasted more than the statutory six months. It could also be levied as punishment for not paying hut taxes or for the most trivial offenses, real or imagined. Beyond that, it imposed hardships not just on the men who were forced into backbreaking, sometimes fatal work but also on the families they left behind. Chibalo was one of cruelest facts of Mozambican life, along with forced crop cultivation, which was instituted in the 1930s.³⁵ Both were legally abolished in the early 1960s, though various forms of coerced labor nonetheless persisted in many parts of Mozambique.³⁶

Figure 1.3 The subúrbios, 1978–79. (Barry Pinsky)

Figure 1.4 Mavalane, 1980s. (CDFF)

Many scholars have plumbed the depths of chibalo, and the subject of forced labor will not be expanded upon here. Penvenne produced the authoritative account of how the indigenato functioned in Lourenço Marques, where chibalo labor built nearly all of the city’s public works projects, including the cathedral that was erected in the 1940s by crews of men who were chained together as they worked.³⁷ A few aspects of the indigenato, however, deserve to be highlighted here.

The indigenato redefined citizenship within Mozambique, creating a legal distinction between so-called natives and nonnatives. Europeans, Asians, and many people of mixed race were considered nonnatives, or “civilized,” and were conferred the rights of Portuguese citizenship at birth. But black Mozambicans—the vast majority of the population—were deemed natives unless they could prove themselves sufficiently “evolved” to be considered Portuguese. Those hoping to shed their native status had to read and write in Portuguese, earn a reasonable wage in a formal job, dress the way a Portuguese was expected to dress, eat what a Portuguese did, and eat it with a knife and fork. He or she had to speak Portuguese in the house, and the house at the very least had to be of wood-and-zinc construction, rather than reeds. The rules could be vague and were revised many times over the years, and the application of the law was particularly murky when it came to women and to the mixed-race children of “civilized” fathers who did not acknowledge parentage.³⁸ At some point after one successfully applied for citizenship, an inspector would visit one’s household to verify that standards were being upheld. Over the decades, the African press frequently decried the double standard that did not require the many illiterate whites in Mozambique to pass a test to obtain citizenship. The deliberately rudimentary education provided to black Mozambicans ensured there was only a tiny pool of potential applicants. For black Mozambicans, becoming assimilated (assimilado) was usually necessary for pursuing more advanced educational opportunities and climbing higher up the job ladder.³⁹ Nonetheless, having to discard as inferior one’s African identity was a humiliating experience for many, and some who met the requirements for assimilation refused to go through with it.⁴⁰

Figure 1.5 Pushing a truck through suburban roads, 1971. (Notícias archive)

Much like France and the évolués (evolved ones) of its empire, Portugal trumpeted the existence of assimilados to show its critics that its native policies were not racist, since they demonstrated that anyone, no matter the color of their skin, could become Portuguese.⁴¹ Yet the number of assimilados was alone sufficient to refute that claim: by the abolition of the system in the early 1960s, there were perhaps only five thousand people with assimilado status in the entire territory, considerably less than 1 percent of the total African population.⁴² Still, however miniscule the number of people classified as assimilado may have been in Mozambique during the reign of the indigenato, they were nonetheless a recognizable segment of the population of Lourenço Marques. Following the abolition of the indigenato, the word assimilado continued to refer in common parlance to any black Mozambican who had acquired a certain level of formal education and secured a modestly paying job, such as clerk, office assistant, schoolteacher, bookkeeper, interpreter, or nurse—the highest positions to which a black Mozambican could realistically aspire during the colonial era.⁴³ In the years after independence, to have been assimilado carried with it the unjust stigma of having purportedly approximated oneself too closely to the colono (the Portuguese settler) and benefited from the impoverishment of one’s Mozambican brothers and sisters.⁴⁴

Figure 1.6 A water fountain in the subúrbios, undated. (AHM, icon 4621)

As Penvenne has illustrated, there had always been a number of more privileged Africans in the city during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not a few of them highly visible figures in local affairs.⁴⁵ They were traders, elephant hunters, labor recruiters, journalists, and intellectuals, many with some combination of African, European, and Asian parentage. Their cultural and linguistic fluency—the ability to make connections between different groups of people and different spheres of urban and rural life—was a point of pride and often a source of profit. On paper, however, the indigenato pigeonholed more-privileged blacks into the single, distinct category assimilado, while hiving off those Africans with a more diverse racial background (called mestiços, mulatos, or mistos) as if they were a separate and identifiable community. The law flattened, conceptually, the myriad interests that collided daily in a place that still retained many of the characteristics of an unruly frontier town. The assimilado, the black Mozambican who had supposedly abandoned an African self in exchange for European status, was, in more than one sense, a Portuguese invention.⁴⁶

The indigenato altered the lives even of those not directly taken for chibalo. The system institutionalized the debasement of all African labor so that it was cheap and more easily controlled. Natives who were engaged in waged labor and even Africans who held citizenship saw their roles diminished at the port, the railway, and the municipality—the city’s largest employers. At the low end of the wage spectrum, African earning power was undermined by chibalo; the threat of it sent men to the city looking for any formal work they could find. And the earnings of those in better positions were eroded by the fitful though continual growth of the Portuguese population, as whites benefited from job preferences.⁴⁷

Until the 1960s, natives carried a pass that showed they had been granted an administrator’s permission to be in Lourenço Marques, and this permission was tied to the securing of a job. People in the subúrbios lived in fear of police raids. Those caught without a pass were subjected to vicious whippings or chibalo or both, and women, for whom formal work was much harder to come by, tended to live a particularly fugitive existence.⁴⁸ Assimilados, too, were stopped and ordered to produce documentation; they had to show they were not natives.⁴⁹ The right of all black Mozambicans, whether citizens or not, to simply walk the streets of Lourenço Marques or even the dirt tracks of the subúrbios was made contingent. One did not belong unless one proved otherwise.

The logic of the subúrbios and the logic of the indigenato, though initially articulated at roughly the same time, were not perfectly synced. The subúrbios were where the promise of municipal infrastructure ended; the boundary line that marked the frontier was drawn with a vision in mind of the European metropolis that some hoped would soon emerge within the curve’s embrace. Ill-defined parts of the subúrbios were called native reserves, but in practice, these were not like the native reserves of South Africa and neighboring British colonies, that is, areas where all black Africans not residing at their places of employment had to live and where only Africans could live. As natives, most people living in the subúrbios were subject to the ostensibly customary authority of a Portuguese-appointed hereditary leader, or régulo (discussed in the following chapter), just as they would be in the countryside. But the word subúrbio in itself conveyed no precise legal implications relative to either race or citizenship. Officially speaking, one did not have to be native or black to live in the subúrbios, and one did not have to be white to live within the curve of the ringed area.

Thoroughgoing segregation was achieved nonetheless, testament to the power of racialized labor exploitation and restrictive ownership laws, as well as ever-more exacting building codes that excluded most Africans from a city being remade in concrete.⁵⁰ In the early twentieth century, natives who already claimed property within Lourenço Marques proper were allowed to keep it so long as they could establish proof of possession, but few could assemble the paperwork demanded by the municipal bureaucracy to do so. Those who could were limited to 400 square meters (less than one-tenth of an acre), enough space for a house and a small yard.⁵¹ Also in the first decade of the century, municipal authorities indulged in what became a recurring compulsion to modernize the face of the city, and such initiatives usually resulted in the demolition of houses that did not belong to whites. As nearly everywhere in the colonial world, fear of the plague had justified the destruction of a number of houses belonging to Africans and Asians, in the city and the subúrbios; the rules exempted white-owned homes from health standards.⁵² One health official described the capital in 1910 as having the “mean aspect of a city of tin,” referring to a shantytown, and that year, citing sanitation concerns, the municipality decreed that all new construction within city limits had to be built in masonry.⁵³ The order confined to the subúrbios the new builders who could afford no more than wood and zinc. In 1932, costly bureaucratic procedures that were imposed on those who wanted to expand, renovate, or simply paint their existing houses made maintaining one of the aging wood-and-zinc homes in the city that much more onerous. Houses constructed of wood and zinc within the ringed area, furthermore, were assessed a building tax at a higher rate than those made of concrete block.⁵⁴ Because of the suppression of African wages by the indigenato and the inflow of whites from the metropole, Africans could not maintain a hold within the city.

In 1938, the governor-general marked out native reserves at some distance from the city, in which all natives had to reside unless they were living in an employer’s compound or home.⁵⁵ Those houses remaining in newly designated native-free areas of the subúrbios would be destroyed. The draconian law would have been of a piece with South African–style segregation if it had been implemented. According to Penvenne, Portugal’s colonial minister scuttled the plan, arguing that it violated the principles of nonracialism.⁵⁶ By then, there were very few black Mozambicans within the city proper who were not also living with their employers as domestic servants. Most had long since been pushed to the subúrbios. Those who were from Lourenço Marques and belonged to the original Ronga-speaking clans had already been squeezed off their land by arbitrary removals and stricter building codes.⁵⁷

The displacement of Africans from the area where most whites lived had proceeded incrementally, though nonetheless inexorably. By 1960, the subúrbios were also home to two-thirds of the mixed-race population, somewhat more than one thousand people of Asian (mostly South Asian) background, and more than nine thousand whites—almost a quarter of the city’s European population at the time.⁵⁸ Many of these suburban whites lived in concrete neighborhoods that had eaten into the subúrbios, displacing the people who had lived there, so even though their title deeds said “subúrbio,” the neighborhood often had some degree of urban infrastructure. But other whites, mostly men, lived in the cantinas—general stores that doubled as bars—that they ran in the heart of the subúrbios or in wood-and-zinc houses just at the edge of the city proper, often with African partners. There were also white men who kept two households—one with an African companion and one with a white and legally recognized spouse in town or in Portugal. Alto Maé, a neighborhood just inside the curve, was somewhat comparable in its demographics to the suburban neighborhoods just outside the curve, though more prosperous relatively speaking. In the meantime, the curve itself had become a nexus for prostitution in a port city notorious for it. The borderlands where city met subúrbio represented the real diversity, in all respects, of the Portuguese Empire, though it was not the kind of racial pluralism that Lisbon image-makers were eager to promote.

In the 1950s, pushed by hut taxes, forced crop cultivation, chibalo, and land dispossession and pulled by Lourenço Marques’s economic growth, more and more people from the countryside went to the capital seeking employment. At the same time, the immigration of Portuguese to the city, many themselves fleeing destitution in Portugal, was climbing apace. Between 1940 and 1960, the total population of both city and subúrbios almost tripled, to about 178,500 people, with the African population consistently accounting for about two-thirds of the population (though Africans were likely undercounted).⁵⁹ The influx of Portuguese immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s brought city development flush against the caniço.

This is when the ringed area truly became the City of Cement—more completely concrete and nearly universally thought of as “the white city” despite the enduring diversity of some neighborhoods.⁶⁰ Mestiço men and well-dressed black men (that is, assimilados) could be seen in restaurants, bars, the cinema, and shops. But most establishments in the City of Cement did not welcome black Mozambicans, most of whom could not afford to shop there in any case.⁶¹ When residents of the subúrbios went to the City of Cement, it was to work, and when they clocked out, they were subject to a 9:00 p.m. curfew.⁶² In any encounter or near encounter with whites, one was expected to show what was considered proper deference. Failure to step off the sidewalk to make way, to humbly lower one’s gaze, or to stand up and remove one’s cap in the presence of a police officer could result in a beating. Employers could request that police punish their employees for absences and perceived misdeeds. Until the early 1960s, labor relations throughout Mozambique were based on a credible threat of violence. In the City of Cement, it could often seem just around the corner.

THE REED HOUSE

For Mozambicans, the reed house was long the mark of poverty and squalor, as well as the precariousness of urban life in general, and it still is. This had less to do with the material itself than with where it was put to use. In the countryside of southern Mozambique, for instance, a reed house was nothing to be ashamed of. A rural house was circular in plan and walled either with wattle and daub or with caniço, a tall, fairly rigid reed that grew in relative abundance by the region’s waterways.⁶³ Adequately sized tree branches were freely available to serve as pillars and stays. Sources of clay were available, too, and often pillaged from anthills; the material was used to coat the inside and outside of reed walls, insulating huts against wind, insects, and rot. Houses were reasonably well ventilated. Fabrication of the roof was a communal affair. Neighbors joined in to bundle the straw tightly together and affix it to a conical roof structure; then, the cone was lifted onto their heads and conveyed to the hut, to be followed by a celebration.⁶⁴ A hut was customarily destroyed when its resident died, but the roof structure was preserved and used to shelter a succession of new huts. In the 1940s, years before he became Frelimo’s founding president, Eduardo Mondlane provided descriptions of his childhood in rural southern Mozambique to his former teacher, Swiss missionary André-Daniel Clerc. In the resulting novel, Chitlangou, Son of a Chief (1950), the young protagonist recalls lying on the floor of his hut and looking up with admiration not at the stars but at the spiraling interior structure of the roof, a “venerable smoke-blackened cone” that had sheltered several generations of his family.⁶⁵ He remarks, “I have often marveled at the skill of the men of my people: from a bundle of sticks, a heap of branches, they have fashioned this covering, in a single piece, which faces all horizons and resists the four winds of heaven.” In Chitlangou’s meditation on roof structure, Mondlane and Clerc were perhaps offering a subtle interpretation of the Mozambican character: “These supple interlaced twigs form a cable which, in its patient itinerary, unites the center to the circumference.”

Figure 1.7 Polana Caniço, 1988. (Carlos Cardoso / CDFF)

Figure 1.8 Polana Caniço, 1987. (CDFF)

Figure 1.9 Cement mix was often used to plaster reed houses. Maxaquene, late 1970s. (Eva Sävfors)

Holes were dug in the ground by hand for the placing of pillars. Parallel stays were fixed horizontally to the pillars at two or three points on both the interior and exterior of the pillars, and they were tied in place with plant fibers. Reeds were then slipped into the gap between the parallel stays. Men—when there were men around to volunteer their labor—tended to do much of the construction work, but not exclusively. Most people knew how to build such a house, and most of them contributed at some point or another to the construction of one. The only significant cost to the home dweller in the countryside, other than the time spent locating materials, was in the preparation of brew for the party that followed the placing of the roof.

By the 1950s, however, the immediate surrounds of the Bay of Lourenço Marques had been stripped of much of their naturally occurring supplies of building materials, and so, unlike in the countryside, building a reed house in Lourenço Marques was a costly affair.⁶⁶ Contrary to the popular image of patchwork shantytowns improvised from scavenged waste, the materials for the typical reed house were paid for in cash at markets throughout the subúrbios. Reed bundles and tree branches were trucked in from the countryside or arrived by rail from the Incomati valley to the north, where there were even caniço plantations.⁶⁷ (In the 1960s, materials for reed construction may have been the principal cargo of trains on the Manhiça line.)⁶⁸ Horizontal wood stays were either rough-edged scrap from the lumberyard and cheap or machine-cut, slightly more elegant, and pricey. For fasteners, wire and nails substituted for plant fibers. Corrugated metal panels were imported from Europe or South Africa until sometime after World War II, when local factories entered into production of some materials as well. The hardy, practical corrugated metal panel, called a chapa in Portuguese, could last for decades, and it changed construction patterns utterly: by the 1950s, most houses in the subúrbios were built rectangular in plan to accommodate the panel dimensions.⁶⁹ (There is a further discussion of the chapa later in this chapter.) The houses varied in size, but many were about 260 square feet, twice as long as they were wide, and sheltered two rooms.⁷⁰ The width of the house was slightly more narrow than the width of the metal panel, to allow for a slight roof incline and eave.

In 1968, Alfredo Pereira de Lima authored a brief history of the progress of the city’s European settlement by chronicling its changing building types. In the early nineteenth century, he wrote, the lack of good quality wood compelled the handful of pioneers who lived outside the fort’s walls to build “African cabanas (of the hut type) covered in straw, subjecting themselves to the greatest discomforts.”⁷¹ Examples of that type of hut, he continued, were still in evidence, “almost without alterations,” in the subúrbios of Lourenço Marques. At the time Pereira de Lima was writing, there were indeed huts in the subúrbios of the kind one found in the countryside—but not many. An aerial survey in the mid-1960s estimated that fewer than 7 percent of the structures in the subúrbios had a circular plan, versus 88 percent of structures that were rectangular and also possessed a zinc-paneled roof.⁷² One is left to speculate how many of the circular huts were residences and how many were instead the consulting offices of healers (curandeiros); even today, curandeiros build conical-roofed huts in their yards, beside their houses, where they meet their patients and store their medicines. By rendering the “traditional hut” historically immutable, the historian also failed to recognize how much the changed economics of construction in the subúrbios altered the meaning of the house for the people who lived in it. In any case, a durable, zinc-paneled roof was considered by most people a more practical alternative to straw. In Lourenço Marques, the spare time and neighborly cooperation required to build a sturdy conical roof of the kind Mondlane described may have been, like reeds themselves, in shorter supply than they were in the countryside. One suspects that the fading use of conical roofs also diminished neighborly cooperation.⁷³

The 1969 master plan for Lourenço Marques included a study of home construction in the subúrbios. The author, a Portuguese architect, praised reeds as an urban building material. Reeds, he speculated, filtered out dust and noise but allowed air and speech to pass through, regulating the relationship between intimate home life and outdoor public life without strictly separating them. Perhaps the group feeling typical of African culture owed something to the permeability of reed walls, he continued. Concrete walls, by contrast, would impose European-type individualism and were liable to stifle African conviviality “as coercive obstacles, as exoticisms that modify people’s psychological characteristics.”⁷⁴

It is unclear whether the architect was referring to the walls between yards, the walls of houses, or both. In any case, residents of reed houses would not have seconded his rosy appraisal. Few houses were elevated above the sewage-strewn waters that frequently inundated the suburban landscape, and rot and vermin shortened the life span of reeds to a few years at most, so the material had to be constantly replaced. Reeds are also highly flammable. With almost everyone in the subúrbios cooking on open coals and lighting their rooms at night with kerosene lamps, it was common for fire to set a house alight, sometimes consuming a few dozen homes.⁷⁵ The more squeezed the space, the more likely a fire.

Contrary to the architect’s theory of reed-based ubuntu, the density of settlement kept one’s house in often uncomfortable proximity to neighbors and their latrines. People in reed houses complained of a lack of privacy.⁷⁶ Clay insulation would have blunted some of the outside sounds and smells and prolonged the useful life of reed walls, but the sandy earth of the subúrbios was too loose to serve this purpose. Therefore, those seeking insulation walked with their empty petroleum cans to the mouth of the Infulene River, a few miles away, to fetch black mud. One resident of Chamanculo, Armando Guilundo, recalled that during his childhood in the 1940s and early 1950s, his mother did the fetching.⁷⁷ She would make the trip to the river and back every day for a week, then spread the black mud on the floors of the house and halfway up the inside of the reed walls; when it dried, she would bring the surface to a polish with her palms. “We children would help her carry the mud, but we didn’t know how to make the walls,” he said. Cracks would appear before long, so she repeated the task two to three times a year. For all the time and resources that people invested in building, maintaining, and occasionally decorating their reed homes, all hoped to one day upgrade to something better.

Figures 1.10 and 1.11 Site plan and reed house floor plan in Maxaquene (formerly Malhangalene), drawn by Swedish architecture student Ruth Näslund in 1976. The Malhangalene Survey: A Housing Study of an Unplanned Settlement in Maputo, Mozambique, 1976, vol. 1 (Göteborg, Sweden: Chalmers Tekniska Högskola, Arkitektur, 1977), n.p.

Reed houses were well suited to the subúrbios in at least one respect, though. They could be dismantled and most of their materials recovered for reassembly elsewhere, a feature that took on a particular importance with the growing threat of displacement beginning in the 1950s. A 1959 chronicle in O Brado Africano entitled “Huts in the Air!” described the pitiful sight of the reeds and wood stakes of dismantled houses being carried on the shoulders of men and the heads of women.⁷⁸ Their landlord has sold the lot they rented to make way for new development, and now they must go in search of another plot. They beg another landowner to allow them to settle on his property, but a few months later he sells the land out from under them. The tenants once again strike their huts, as if they were the tents of nomads, and begin their wanderings anew.

HOUSES OF WOOD AND ZINC

Pereira de Lima dated the beginning of the city’s “Tumultuous Age of Wood and Zinc” to the 1870s.⁷⁹ Transvaal gold may have given Lourenço Marques a new reason for being, but the burgeoning port town was clad in baser metal. Zinc was what the metal panels were called, but to be more precise, they were iron or steel sheets coated with zinc to inhibit corrosion. With that said, deferring to universal practice I will simply refer to them as zinc panels or chapas, the Portuguese word for “metal sheet.” According to Pereira de Lima, chapas were first introduced to Lourenço Marques in the 1850s, just as Portugal relaxed import controls in the colony. Though the panels were used here and there as roofing, it was not until the 1870s that most Europeans and Asians in the town were living and working in wood-framed buildings with walls and roofs of corrugated zinc. The buildings mimicked the houses and commercial establishments that predominated in Johannesburg.⁸⁰

Along with quinine and railroads, though less remarked upon, the zinc panel was one of the “tools of empire” that facilitated the penetration of African societies by various European interests in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁸¹ Lightweight and flat, the panels could be transported easily by ship from foundries in Europe to colonial ports around the globe and then carried into hinterlands by rail, by pack animal, and on the crowns of people’s heads. Wood-framed, zinc-paneled structures required no specialized knowledge to build, allowing for the rapid construction of administrative offices, mission stations, and mining camps, and the single-family wood-and-zinc bungalow, a housing type originally developed for British settlers posted in India, was eventually packaged in kits for deployment in Melbourne, Lagos, and Kimberley. Moreover, wood-and-zinc buildings could be easily disassembled as need dictated and conveyed to another site to be rebuilt—an advantage for settler populations uncertain of where the healthiest place to build might prove to be and for prospectors unsure where they might next strike gold. Apart from the more tangible benefits of the wood-and-zinc construction method, the machine-cut wood beams and the factory-made galvanized panels also helped mark a clear distinction between “modern” colonizer and “primitive” colonized at a time when maintaining such a distinction was a matter of great concern and not a little anxiety.⁸² At one point, the Baldwin ironworks in England enjoyed a near monopoly on the panels distributed in Mozambique and the rest of southern Africa, and it is somehow appropriate that family scion Stanley Baldwin went on to become Britain’s prime minister during the interwar years—the zenith of its African empire.⁸³

From the time that the chapa came into common use in Lourenço Marques in the 1870s until independence a century later, Africans of greater means almost always lived in wood-framed, zinc-paneled houses.⁸⁴ As we have seen, the changes in the Lourenço Marques building code in the 1910s and 1930s that targeted wood-and-zinc construction in the ringed area were an indirect means of pushing out the African population. In the subúrbios, people continued to build in wood and zinc, just as they had from the city’s beginnings. Zinc panels were an upgrade from reeds in that they blocked the wind and dust and did not need to be replaced every few years. Like reed houses, wood-and-zinc houses were useful in suburban conditions for the same reason they were useful in mining camps: they could be quickly disassembled. Actually, it was only because such houses were considered of “precarious” construction that the municipality allowed them to stand at all, since in the subúrbios, permanent construction was, with very few exceptions, prohibited.⁸⁵

Figure 1.12 The Guambe house, built in Chamanculo in the 1930s, in 2011. (David Morton)

Figure 1.13 Jochua Guambe (just right of center) and his family, early 1950s. (Castigo Guambe)

Figure 1.14 The Tembe house, built in Chamanculo in the early 1960s, in 2012. (David Morton)

Figure 1.15 Firewood for sale, Minkadjuíne, 1987. (CDFF)

While zinc was relatively durable, it was terrible at regulating the ambient temperature. It magnified outdoor heat, turning rooms into ovens, and it did nothing to insulate against the cold other than fending off the wind. A zinc roof, whether it topped a wood-and-zinc house or a reed house, leaked where nails secured the panels to joists. At night, there was a drizzle indoors even when it was not raining outdoors because moisture would rise from sleeping bodies, condense on the roof panels, and then fall as cold droplets. Zinc-paneled walls did not have to be frequently replaced as reed walls did, but termites fed on wood pillars and rafters, limiting their useful life. For those who could afford it, a common solution was to elevate the house on a concrete plinth, which also elevated it above the frequent water inundations. The low-end wood-and-zinc house was like a simple shed, with a roof inclined in a single direction. The first time the house was expanded in size, a roof incline was added in the direction opposite to the first, just as with the reed house. From the standpoint of status, this second incline was what began to distinguish the house from its neighbors; in fact, such a double incline defined the house. One sought to live in a house of duas águas—“two gradients”—to drain off rainwater in opposite directions.⁸⁶

Going from a house of two gradients to the embellishments that truly distinguished a wood-and-zinc house was a leap that few could make. The finest houses of wood and zinc, called chalés, featured semienclosed verandas, many gables, and large pigeon coops on the outside (baby pigeons were a Portuguese delicacy) and floors of Oregon pine, false ceilings, and many rooms on the inside.⁸⁷ A false ceiling regulated the indoor climate. It caught leaks from above, stopped moisture rising from below, and most importantly formed an attic buffer space that kept hot air from reaching living areas. The higher the roof, the more it drew off heat from below. More zinc panels and more wood were required, so these high-peaked roofs (high, that is, against the low-slung norm of the subúrbios) advertised from some distance away the relative wealth of the people they sheltered. The finest wood-and-zinc houses, perched on concrete plinths and reaching almost to treetops, gave neighborhoods the barest hint of a skyline. The scale was deceiving. Even in the largest houses of the subúrbios, all living quarters were located on a single floor.

Despite the exigencies of the building code, there were still some four hundred houses of wood and zinc within the City of Cement in 1950. One displeased engineer called them “genuine crimes, genuine matchboxes, authentic abortions.”⁸⁸ At a forum in 1949 on problems facing the municipality, an official called them “obsolete vestiges of the heroic epoch of occupation, almost all of them nests of illness, giving to certain streets the lamentable aspect of shantytowns.”⁸⁹ He hoped they could be demolished in short order. When they were torn down, the panels often got sold to people in the subúrbios, who used them to build houses that were a mark of relative status. Because the wood-and-zinc houses required greater resources to build, popular memory tends to recall them as out of reach for all but assimilados and mestiços.⁹⁰ But this was not the case. Even some of the larger houses were built by people whom no one would consider, by any definition, assimilado. Jochua Guambe, born in rural Inhambane, went to Lourenço Marques in the early 1900s to avoid paying the newly imposed hut tax.⁹¹ He did not work in the city, and he never had need to learn Portuguese. Earning his living as a hunter, he would bag game in Inhambane and then travel to South Africa, mostly on foot, to sell animal skins and claws at a market in Durban. Lourenço Marques was merely a convenient base of operations between his sources of supply and places of demand, and later, the city’s subúrbios became the site of Guambe’s small real estate empire. In the 1930s, he built a house of wood and zinc for his family, on one of about two dozen lots of property he eventually purchased in Chamanculo. It had the features common to the houses of the suburban elite: a semienclosed veranda, a concrete plinth, a false ceiling, and a pigeon coop perched beside the roof. The house was L-shaped, rather than a conventional rectangle, so instead of two roof inclines, there were four, giving the roof a more complicated profile and a more South African appearance than the more common duas águas. There were two bedrooms, one for himself and one for his sons.

“If you had a house like this, it was a symbol of the fact that you owned land,” said Castigo Guambe, Jochua’s youngest son. “It wasn’t just anybody who owned land.” With his native status, Jochua Guambe could not actually be a landowner in the eyes of Portuguese law.⁹² But his eldest son, Júlio, who worked in a shoe store downtown, had legally assimilated, and he vouched for his father on titling documents. When Jochua Guambe died in the 1960s, he left his properties and the family house to Júlio, and when Júlio died in the 1980s, the house passed to Castigo, who still lives there today. Guambe replaces the wood-slat interior walls when they rot, and he repaints the exterior zinc panels green when they fade. Recently, he had to cut down the sick mango tree that grew beside the house, the last survivor of the many that his father had once planted in the yard. It was the tree where his father invited the curandeiras of the neighborhood to perform ancestral ceremonies, a practice Castigo continued for years. Studding the trunk were the heads of rusted nails that had secured the drying skins of slaughtered goats for the better part of a century.

House construction stretched the resources even of so-called assimilados. Alsene Cumbana, who had assimilated status, held many jobs over the years—as a deliveryman for a bakery, as a veterinary worker—and when he went to Lourenço Marques in 1947, he was able to buy a simple, two-room house of wood and zinc.⁹³ A few years later, he married. But as the family grew, eventually including nine children, and as they took in Cumbana’s older brother, a miner who had lost the use of his legs, they could not afford to expand the house solely on one salary. Eurica Cumbana, Alsene’s wife, worked the family’s garden plot in the nearby countryside, did all the food preparation and cleaning, and was responsible for raising the children, but now she asked her husband to buy firewood and charcoal for her to resell in front of the house. “She would split the wood herself,” said Elizabeth Cumbana, her daughter, who still lived in the house in 2011. “She wouldn’t even get someone to help her do it, because she said that it would be like giving money away.” The house’s two rooms eventually became five. Eurica told her daughter: “This house grew because I always sacrificed myself for it to grow.” Many women in the subúrbios financed house construction through the selling of charcoal, produce, and traditional brews.⁹⁴ They also supported each other’s projects by participating in lending clubs, called xitique.⁹⁵

It will be recalled that the word assimilado took on meanings beyond its legal definition and applied colloquially to black Mozambicans of some means. It is likely that some people were thought of as assimilado just because they lived in a house of wood and zinc. That is, the house made the assimilado, rather than the other way around. In the 1930s while working at the counter of a building materials store downtown, Salvador Simão Hunguana built a house in Malhangalene, a lightly populated, almost rural neighborhood north of the city.⁹⁶ The house he built was particularly distinguished for the area, having eight rooms and being surrounded by a large citrus grove. Working at the materials store no doubt helped Hunguana with supplies. When his assimilado friends pulled strings to get assimilated status for him as well, his house—just as impressive if not more so than some of the Portuguese-owned homes in the vicinity—allowed him to overcome his shortcomings in regard to other legal requirements. Somewhat indirectly, housing was destiny. Hunguana’s children were able to enter government schools and eventually acquire higher-paying jobs because of the house their father had built.

By the 1960s, wood-and-zinc construction predominated in the parts of the subúrbios closest to the city.⁹⁷ But in the years following independence, when enforcement of the masonry ban was greatly relaxed, new construction in wood and zinc came to an abrupt halt. Regardless of whatever prestige and comfort it afforded over the reed-built house, the wood-and-zinc house could not compete in either prestige or comfort—or in cost—with construction in concrete block.

CANTINAS

José da Costa shipped off for Mozambique as a young Portuguese army conscript in the 1940s, and upon his discharge a few years later, unexcited about a return to village life in Portugal, he decided to stay in Lourenço Marques.⁹⁸ On his own and barely literate, da Costa had few prospects. He took a job as the assistant to a stonemason. Then, he met an enterprising African woman named Glória da Conceiçao Nhambirre. She convinced him to borrow a truck so they could go into business transporting firewood from the countryside. They sold their wood bundles at a stand in Chamanculo, and they lived together in the reed house of her family nearby. Nhambirre possessed the acumen, nimbleness, and entrepreneurial drive that da Costa, as he unabashedly told others, completely lacked. But from birth, da Costa had an important qualification that Nhambirre did not. He was Portuguese and thus could sign official documents and own a business. After a few years of selling firewood, the couple built a cantina.

By the mid-1960s, there were hundreds of cantinas in the subúrbios, about one for every five hundred to six hundred people.⁹⁹ The cantina was a commercial and social hub of everyday suburban life, a cross between a general store and a bar, and with few exceptions, it was the only authorized business in the subúrbios. To say it catered to people’s day-to-day needs is to understate just how much people depended on it. At six in the morning, the first customers of the day filed in, sullen men often on their way to the docks, with an escudo and a half in hand for a roll of bread. Throughout the day, women or their children appeared at the counter with small change to buy a few tablespoons of cooking oil or a cup of rice. Over the years, the municipality installed public fountains here and there in the subúrbios, but they fell far short of demand. The long lines and (for many) the long distance to fetch fountain water were enough to persuade people with a few more cents at their disposal to fill their empty oil cans at the nearest cantina spigot and pay for the privilege. Perhaps the most lucrative time of the day for a cantina proprietor (cantineiro) was when men returned from work and gathered to drink. Cantinas were where those with native status could legally purchase alcohol, and from the late nineteenth century onward, they were essential to Lisbon’s strategies for making the colonies a profitable market for (cheap) Portuguese wine.¹⁰⁰

Figure 1.16 João da Costa, a.k.a. “Xibinhana,” pours a drink at his Chamanculo cantina, 1960s. (Sérgio da Costa)

The cantina was a masonry structure of impressive size—impressive, that is, only because there was nothing around to compete with it. Older cantinas, like the many built in the 1930s, had high-peaked roofs and wide pediments supported by fluted iron columns so that the entrance was like a cut-rate Roman temple portico.¹⁰¹ Cantinas tended to be elevated well above the rainy season high-water mark, and their wide verandas gave clear views of the street life passing by. Even after business hours, when tables were put away, cantina verandas were a place for men to congregate away from home. For many women, the cantina was a necessary stop during the workday; for many men, the cantina was a place to relax.

Figure 1.17 Dinis Marques and the da Costa children, behind the Xibinhana cantina, mid-1960s. (Dinis Marques)

Fines for public drunkenness were once the local administration’s most significant source of revenue, according to Penvenne.¹⁰² Many employers, meanwhile, had long identified cantinas as a threat to a healthy, well-disciplined workforce, and in the 1950s, hours were restricted.¹⁰³ African men were said to be spending too much of their earnings getting drunk rather than sustaining their families. Cantineiros locked up in the evening, but customers knew they could enter through the yard at the “horse door,” a rear entrance so called because during their nightly patrols, mounted police would also sometimes show up there.¹⁰⁴ Usually, though, an officer could be easily bought off with a beer. Perhaps as a result of the new rules, cantinas built in the 1960s minimized outdoor space. The newer cantinas lacked verandas to command the streetscape. They were turned inward.

A serialized short story that appeared in 1960 in O Brado Africano, a newspaper for African readers, was written as a defense of rule-breaking cantineiros and their clientele. The economics of poverty, argues the fictional Chinese cantineiro of the story, require people to make their purchases whenever they get hold of a little cash, a happenstance that follows its own clock. The African customer, he adds,

likes to converse a little, together with friends someplace, let’s say a public place, just as whites do, and this place, similar to the clubs of white people, can only be a cantina… there he feels the pleasure in passing a few convivial hours outside work, wooing women, listening to the radio, hearing the latest news in a different way than he was used to in the bush. And what would be the ideal place for this mutual companionship? Obviously the cantina!¹⁰⁵

The cantina was perhaps the only place where non-Africans were compelled to cater to the pleasure of Africans, in part because of competition among cantineiros.¹⁰⁶ At the same time, the cantineiro was often seen as a parasitic figure who schemed for ways to cheat his clientele. He was often so out of his element and reliant on an African employee or companion to communicate with customers that he became a target of ridicule. It was an unequal struggle, but the clientele made ample use of the power to name. Penvenne writes of the generic cantineiro moniker: mumaji, which was indirectly derived from the Portuguese phrase meaning “want more?”—the badgering question of a cantineiro seeking to run up a customer’s tab.¹⁰⁷ Residents of the subúrbios also categorized individual cantineiros according to an elaborate and uncharitable taxonomy. José da Costa was a fixed, ornery presence behind his cantina counter, and his dog Lisboa (Lisbon) was always seen dozing at the foot of his stool. The similarities between da Costa’s snarling features and those of his dog earned him the nickname Xibinhana, which in Ronga means “bulldog,” a name that stuck precisely because he hated it. Da Costa and Nhambirre never gave their cantina a name, but everyone called it Xibinhana. Another cantina in Chamanculo, the only one with two levels, was unofficially called Ximajana—meaning “short one”—because of the small-statured Portuguese who owned it. Another cantina was Zestapor, a corruption of José está porco—“José is piggish”—because of its owner’s generally unhygienic appearance, his practice of storing pig feed in his truck, and his habit of brushing his teeth in the same sink where customers washed their hands. The cantineiro just a hundred feet or so away was nicknamed Agarragajo—“Getthatguy.” That is what he would yell from the cantina’s steps when a customer slipped away without paying, which apparently occurred with some frequency.¹⁰⁸ In a place without addresses and with few official street names, the local cantina became the most obvious landmark when giving directions to one’s house, and it lent its name to the immediate area of the neighborhood.¹⁰⁹

COMPOUNDS

In a more distant part of Chamanculo, about halfway between the City of Cement and the campus of the São José de Lhanguene Mission, is what must be the largest pigeon coop in Maputo. Most of the larger houses of wood and zinc feature a coop somewhere on the roof or in the yard. This particular one is more like a pigeon apartment block. It features some four hundred separate holes for pigeons to roost, and it rivals in size the elegant wood-and-zinc house beside which it stands. The house was built in the 1920s by a Goan man named José Araújo, but the pigeon coop—expanded several times over the years—was the work of his son António.¹¹⁰

António Araújo, whose mother was Ronga, worked for years as a truck driver for the municipality, and as a younger man he sidelined as a journalist for O Brado Africano. In the 1960s, he became an entrepreneur. Calling on his connections in the city government, he was able to open a bar and dance club directly adjacent to his house, and because it was 1962, he called the place Twist Bar. His wife, his brother, and his sons took turns behind the counter and in the kitchen while he was occupied with his other business affairs. One of those businesses, a housing compound built at the other end of his property, was meant to target the clientele coming through the bar doors. With dozens of one-room units, it may have been the largest compound in Chamanculo.¹¹¹

The English word compound, when referring to housing, possesses a surprising history. It has nothing to do with a being a mixture of elements, as in a chemical compound or a composition, but probably derives from the Malay word kampong, which means “village.”¹¹² The word’s almost bucolic origins speak to the radical transformations to which the age of empire subjected it: compounds were what the British called the earliest colonial housing clusters in Southeast Asia—enclosures for European residences and factories. Later, the miserable, fenced-in dormitories where miners were housed on South Africa’s Rand were called compounds, and when larger employers in Lourenço Marques built worker housing, often big sheds to shelter hundreds of people under one roof, compound became componde.¹¹³ In the first decades of the twentieth century, conditions at these various dormitories in Lourenço Marques were considered scandalously abysmal, even by the low standards inherent to a system of forced labor.¹¹⁴ Neither authorities nor employers showed any sustained interest in financing a housing solution, either through paying higher wages or building livable homes. They were not eager, furthermore, to make permanent a workforce that it usually suited them to treat as transient.

In the 1950s, workers migrating to the city who did not have family to stay with and could not afford to build or rent a reed house of their own had no choice but to live in a compound. The typical compound featured a series of discrete units arranged in long rows on either side of a narrow yard.¹¹⁵ It was usually of wood-and-zinc construction (and therefore extremely hot), and rooms were often windowless and airless, with the door to the yard being the only opening. Packing people in so close together, it was more pigeon coop than barracks. The average room was less than 100 square feet, smaller than a room in the typical reed house.¹¹⁶ And people often tried to squeeze many to a room. At Araújo’s complex, four pit latrines served several hundred tenants, and the tenants were expected to maintain the facilities themselves. The landlord did give them free use of a water spigot in the yard, however.

Figure 1.18 A compound in Xipamanine, 1978. (Notícias archive)

Araújo made no secret of his business plan. It was the same as that of many cantina owners in the subúrbios: build a compound in the backyard to house sex workers who would cater to the bar’s clientele.¹¹⁷ But even though compounds were often stuck with the reputation of brothels, they were not brothels in the strict sense of being dedicated solely to prostitution.¹¹⁸ Not only sex workers lived there, and moreover, sex work was only one of a number of strategies that many of the compound’s young women and girls (and some boys), usually new to the city, were compelled to pursue. To live in a compound was to live in the slums of the subúrbios, and some homeowners and residents of longer standing in the bairros looked down their noses at their compound-dwelling neighbors. The especially rank conditions of most compounds contributed to the snobbery, as did ethnic chauvinism. To some native Maronga, the speakers of Chopi, Tonga, Tswa, and Changana arriving from farther north were unsophisticated country folk at best, unattached and potentially dangerous criminals at worst. That many of the so-called foreigners who lived in the compounds did so as a temporary strategy to accrue savings before returning to the countryside did little to alter the general perception of their rootlessness.

Until the late 1960s, rent in a compound could be very low if one shared a single unit with many others—some 100 to 150 escudos per unit. But when rents skyrocketed in Lourenço Marques and its subúrbios, compound living ceased to be the relative bargain it had once been.¹¹⁹ In 1971, rent for a single unit could be as high as 500 escudos per month if the compound had a water spigot and illumination. This was more than the rent for an average two-room reed house.

“The compounds exist,” argued Tempo magazine in 1972, “not for the benefit of the residents, who don’t even realize that it would be less harmful to live in houses of reeds—but rather because of attitudes dedicated to exploitation.”¹²⁰

THE BAIRRO INDÍGENA

For years, the municipal government made repeated half gestures at the housing problem, always with meager results. In 1913, legislation compelling natives to register with authorities for the purposes of eventual labor impressment also mandated that the municipality dedicate a certain proportion of registration fees to the construction of formal housing for Africans.¹²¹ But over the next two decades, all that the municipality could show for its efforts was a cluster of thirty-three concrete-block houses near the market in Xipamanine, intended for “natives” who worked low-paying jobs for the municipality and the railroad. The houses lacked both piped water and electricity, though at least they were built in solid materials. The city charged a rent so high that few people with native status could afford to live there.¹²²

In the mid-1930s, an additional source of funding for native housing was identified: indemnification funds resulting from Mozambicans who had died in the mines of South Africa.¹²³ These funds had accrued for years, unspent, and the South African Chamber of Mines suggested to the Portuguese that they be used on something to benefit Mozambique’s African population. The governor-general of Mozambique revived the long-neglected order to build native housing, and he made the municipality of Lourenço Marques responsible for building it. The city was charged with building “a neighborhood that will come to serve as a model for others and to which can be transferred a part of the native population that currently lives, in the subúrbios of the city, in buildings of unpleasant aspect and devoid of the most basic hygienic conditions.”¹²⁴

Figure 1.19 The Bairro Indígena, 1940s. (AHM, icon 42)

The project, which broke ground in the early 1940s, was called the Bairro Indígena da Munhuana (“the native neighborhood of Munhuana”). It was the colony’s first government-led housing development of any size intended for African residents. Other large, government-subsidized projects were under way by the 1960s, in the outlying areas of Matola and Machava and in other parts of Mozambique. But the Bairro Indígena was far more prominently located, and because it stood as the lone public housing intervention of any significance in Lourenço Marques for decades, it took on a symbolic value beyond the numbers it housed—for residents of the subúrbios, for colonial officials, and even for Frelimo both during and after independence. In the 1960s when the legal reforms of the time purged the term indígena from official communications, the name of the neighborhood was changed first to Bairro do Ultramar—ultramar (overseas) was how Portugal referred collectively to its territories in Africa and Asia—and then to the Bairro Popular da Munhuana. Yet even today, a half century after the name change, few call it anything other than the Bairro Indígena.

The 22-hectare site selected for the complex was located along a route that connected the City of Cement with the city’s airstrip, and if the project was indeed a superficial gesture—a Potemkin village only “for the English to see,” as the expression went—then it made sense to put it there, where many visiting VIPs entered the colonial capital.¹²⁵ At the same time, the location was near some of the densest suburban neighborhoods.¹²⁶ But there was a good reason the site was not so populous itself. It was a low-lying area that frequently was as inundated as the pestilential ponds that bordered it to the east and west. Reviewing the plan for the complex in 1939, the colony’s health director issued dire warnings to Lourenço Marques officials. Prevailing winds passing over the ponds already rendered the site “one of the regions of greatest maleficent influence on the city,” he wrote.¹²⁷ Locating a housing project in that part of the subúrbios would dangerously aggravate the malaria problem for Europeans downwind, in the City of Cement:

Without a doubt, it ought not pass through the head of a legislator to establish a model neighborhood for natives at the very edge of an area that is systematically doomed in terms of the city’s public hygiene and sanitary precaution in general; for the precise reason that it must be a model neighborhood it must not be built on the site indicated in the plan.¹²⁸

For the sake of African and European alike, he counseled moving the prospective bairro to a location farther away. A second emphatic opinion followed a month later, in which the director attested to firsthand knowledge of native housing projects in the English and French colonies of West Africa; he said he had never seen a project as “unfortunate” as what was planned for Lourenço Marques.¹²⁹ The housing commission, however, disagreed with the health official’s negative assessment.¹³⁰ The commission’s president pointed to several factors in favor of the chosen site, including the low cost of acquiring the land.

Meanwhile, the chief engineer of the regional public works department raged that the houses of the complex were designed without thought to the climate.¹³¹ They lacked verandas, and instead of peaked roofs that would help alleviate indoor heat, architects had, apparently for stylistic reasons, opted for flat roofs of reinforced concrete as if Mozambique were “Scandinavia, Greenland, Canada, etc.” Putting people accustomed to living in straw huts in such ovenlike houses was “an extremely grave error,” the engineer contended, as it would compel them to seek refuge at cantinas and other places where they would “create disturbances, etc., etc.” He blamed the influence of South Africa for the flat roofs, an invasive species of construction that, to his chagrin, had already become popular in the European quarters of Lourenço Marques.

During the bairro’s first phase of construction, between 1940 and 1943, almost four hundred units were built, the majority of them with only one room. Each unit had its own narrow yard, and the yards were arranged along streets in half circles around a central plaza, where a police post and the bairro management office were located. Each property was supplied with piped water and electricity, but use was restricted to certain hours of the morning (for water) or evening (for electricity).¹³² In terms of space, the houses were no upgrade from the suburban norm. Rooms were about 120 square feet, smaller than many reed houses in the vicinity. Nonetheless, the neighborhood initially proved attractive enough that people who were not designated natives—that is, people of mixed race and people with assimilado status—occupied many of the units.¹³³ Presumably, they did so either through the exchange of favors, as was so common within the municipal apparatus, or by illegally subletting from original tenants.

In his report for 1946, the administrator of the concelho harshly criticized the results of the completed development. At enormous expense, the Bairro Indígena da Munhuana only housed some three thousand people, and of these, perhaps not even half were the indígenas it was intended for. “It is possible,” he remarked, “that whoever authorized and outlined this type of housing was possessed of the best of intentions, thinking to give maximum comfort to the native population of the city. Unfortunately this goal was not reached and the problem of housing the great mass of the native population of Lourenço Marques remains unresolved.”¹³⁴ The Bairro Indígena was “far, very far indeed from meeting needs,” wrote the head of Mozambique’s office of native affairs in 1951.¹³⁵ Munhuana “seems to us a drop of water in the ocean.” He added that he regretted the municipality had carried out its plans without regard to social welfare and the “customs and traditions” of the natives. “This is not just a matter of building houses,” he argued.¹³⁶

In historian L. Lloys Frates’s view, the radial plan of the neighborhood demonstrated the panoptic ideal of centralized spatial control, the kind one finds in many prison plans, where everyone and everything can theoretically be monitored at all times.¹³⁷ The police station in the Bairro Indígena featured a turret, for instance; a police officer, if he could maintain the attention needed for it, could surveil activity across the spacious central plaza. Because the turret was located at the edge of the plaza, however, rather than at its center, one could not see what was happening at ground level in most of the neighborhood. Perhaps more significant than the turret were the low perimeter walls of every yard, which rose no higher than a person’s waist. Clearly, someone intended to keep track of the tenants in this bairro; each unit was given a number and was located on a street with a name, and each tenant established a record with the municipality (that is, the landlord) regarding his or her payment or nonpayment of a monthly rent.

Just about all government initiatives of the time, including forced labor, carried with them the pretension of “civilizing” the natives, and the Bairro Indígena was no exception. Rosa Candla was one of the first residents of the bairro.¹³⁸ Born in a rural district, she was orphaned at a young age, and in the early 1940s while she was in her teens, a Portuguese couple drove her to Lourenço Marques so she could try her luck in the city. She was taken in by a railroad worker who had just acquired a house in the Bairro Indígena. They lived together for more than sixty years in a two-room unit near the police post. In a 2009 interview, Candla could not recall much about her life in the neighborhood during the colonial era, but she did relate one story that for her encapsulated the nuisance of living in such close proximity to authorities. Like most of the women in the neighborhood, Candla did her shopping at the nearby Xipamanine market. If she passed the police post with her groceries balanced on her head, the officer on duty would order her to remove her bundles and carry them in her hands at her sides, which presumably was the proper comportment of a civilized Portuguese.¹³⁹

THE PORTUGUESE YARD

For untold numbers of young men and women from southern Mozambique, the daylong bus trip to Lourenço Marques marked their initiation into city life, well before buildings of the City of Cement or its subúrbios came into view. In the rural areas farther north of the city, many young men migrated to the Rand to work on the mines. But during the last decades of Portuguese rule, the Mozambican capital was the destination of younger brothers and sisters, the more desperate, and tradespeople such as carpenters and stonemasons seeking to establish themselves where there was consistent construction work. For most of the younger passengers, the bus ride was the first time they traveled faster than they could run. They often boarded the bus without a single escudo, without shoes, and without food, and unlike those headed for the mines of “John,”—Johannesburg—most had only a vague sense of where they would stay when they arrived in the city. Many were quite young, preteens and adolescents. Much of what they knew of Lourenço Marques was what they heard on the bus.

A tangle of reasons justified the exodus of these young migrants. Added to forced labor and forced cultivation there were now the perpetual dislocations to make way for Portuguese plantations and other agricultural schemes. One earned only a trickle of cash in the city, but in the countryside, one earned it in dribs and drabs if at all. Still, few Mozambicans cultivated an image of Lourenço Marques as a final destination, a place to build a life and family and to thrive. At best, the city was considered a short- or medium-term measure and a temporary refuge. As soon as they had earned some cash and once the crisis at home had passed, they would return. This, at least, was their thinking when they first came to the city.¹⁴⁰

A fictional account serialized in O Brado Africano in 1959 and 1960 tells the story of Moleque Salomone, a boy from the countryside who tires of laboring in the fields of his Catholic mission school and seeks escape.¹⁴¹ At the local cantina, he is recruited to work in the home of a Portuguese family in Lourenço Marques. The boy thinks he is twelve years old. The recruiter decides he looks more like fourteen. Salomone discusses his fate with the old miner sharing his seat on the bus to the city. As the landscape rushes past him for the first time, the boy confesses his torn feelings. “No one obligated me to go to the city, but I also didn’t abandon home because I wanted to.”¹⁴² The miner listens and shares his own misgivings of a life lived mostly away from home. But he offers the boy no consolation. When they arrive at the bus station in Lourenço Marques, the miner has only ominous counsel for him.

Here, life in the city is different than life in the bush. Here no one knows you and you don’t know anyone. You’ll get to know one person or another, but it won’t do you any good. Here you live like a leaf carried from the ground by the wind and that twists in the air without knowing where it’s going to fall. The life of a servant is the life of a leaf dragged by the wind. Understand?¹⁴³

He advises Salomone to forget about home; the memory will only distract him from doing a good job. And when he is older, he will realize his mistake in having chosen the urban life, but he will be unable to return home.

Because of the late hour, Salomone must spend the night on the concrete patio of a cantina near the bus stop with other young servant recruits. In the morning, Portuguese men come to claim the boys they signed up to employ. The first building in the City of Cement that Salomone will come to know is the office of the concelho administration, where he will sign the contract that binds him to a Portuguese family for the year. Then, he will be introduced to the family’s quintal (yard), his new home.

The demand for young male servants grew fierce with the growth of the city’s white population.¹⁴⁴ They came cheap, and they were pliable, divorced from family and most other social connections and possible complications. As Penvenne points out, they were preferred to female servants because Portuguese women feared African women would be sexual prey for their husbands, and many African women tried to avoid this type of work in part because they feared the same thing.¹⁴⁵ A young male servant cooked the family breakfast, washed the dishes, made up the beds, fed the dog, and swept the floors. He occupied the very bottom rank, below the cook and the launderer. The cook and launderer usually lived in the subúrbios and walked to work, but the moleque, or “kid,” as the servant was called, lived on site, occupying a single-room, windowless unit in the yard, usually part of a larger concrete-block structure that was also used for storage. He typically slept on a reed mat. During the day, all servants shared the yard, where most cooking and the washing of clothes took place. Homeowners themselves barely saw the yard, except perhaps when spying it from a window above.

Servants called the head of household patrão—a word that combines the senses of the English words boss and patron. The young servant’s daily life was circumscribed by the concrete walls of the yard and the house it served, and so, life stirring beyond the property’s boundaries was usually glimpsed only a few hours per week. He could grow quite close to the people he served, and depending on how young he was and the sentiments of his employers, he might essentially be raised by them. But his utter dependence on his patrões and his near confinement to their home also left him vulnerable to violent whim. Swift and frequent punishment was levied on servants for lax work, alleged theft, or perceived cheekiness. If the man of the house did not beat the servant himself, he dragged him to the police station to have the police administer the beating.¹⁴⁶ The instrument of choice was a wooden paddle. The palmatória, so called because it was whipped against upturned palms, became a kind of emblem of the arbitrariness and brutality of Portuguese rule, long after its use was curtailed in the late 1950s. The servant’s only real protection from an abusive patrão was the one-year contract—if he could bear the situation that long—coupled with a fluid market for servants that left few adolescent boys unengaged for more than a few days.

Adriano Matate arrived in Lourenço Marques in 1950 from rural Gaza; since he could go no further in school, he needed to secure a job to avoid chibalo.¹⁴⁷ He found quick employment in the yard of a Portuguese family. He was sixteen and made 80 escudos per month, a pittance. “They called us moleque,” he recalled years later. “Not ‘servant,’ not ‘workman.’ They called us ‘moleque.’ You see how it was?” His schedule was simple. When he was not working or sleeping, he was at church. He left the property to pray twice a week, on Thursday nights and on Sunday afternoons. Once, his patrão was away for a week or so. During his absence, police appeared at the home to question Matate. The wife of his employer had reported him because surely only a thief, she told them, would be slipping out of the yard every night. The police searched Matate’s small room and then took him to the station, all the while indicating to him that they did not truly consider him a suspect in any crime. Unfortunately for Matate, he was detained at a time when local administrators were being pressured by Lisbon to fill labor quotas for the cocoa plantations of São Tomé.¹⁴⁸ Within days, he and his cellmates were on a ship for the remote island colony. Matate was told his sentence was nine years. His exile lasted twelve.

For many young men working and living in backyards in the City of Cement, Sunday afternoon was spent in the subúrbios. Out of sight of patrões and mostly out of sight of police, the bairros were a place to let off steam. Residents of Chamanculo recall that during the colonial era, Sunday was actually the most dangerous day of the week. The adolescent servants dressed themselves up in their most stylish clothes and formed temporary gangs of convenience, roaming suburban lanes in search of other gangs to fight or innocents to rough up. One postindependence novelist, writing in 1985 about the subúrbios in the 1960s, recalled the tranquility that prevailed midweek compared to the weekend, when “fearsome bandits with white trousers” appeared in the neighborhood, “a harmonica on their greedy lips and sugarcane in hand, disemboweling anyone who crossed their path, venting their frustrations and suppressed desires for revenge against the patrões who humiliated them from Monday morning to late Sunday afternoon.”¹⁴⁹

* * *

When scholars began in earnest to explore African urban history, they appreciated that what made a city fundamentally different from the countryside—what made it worthy of study in its own right—was its greater diversity within closer confines.¹⁵⁰ People lived side by side with others of different backgrounds and beliefs. They socialized in ways that were entirely new to them.¹⁵¹ Some tinkered with nationalist ideas. Labor struggles took on a certain edge.¹⁵² New forms of autonomy—cultural, economic, political—emerged among women and men as they found common ground under trying circumstances.¹⁵³ In the subúrbios of Lourenço Marques during the last decades of Portuguese rule, women factory workers banded together for mutual support; men shut out of the whites-only football league formed their own; and musicians from around southern Mozambique created a unique style of guitar-driven dance music, marrabenta.¹⁵⁴

Though the social and economic distances between them were usually enormous, Africans of various backgrounds in Lourenço Marques also lived in close proximity to Europeans and people of South Asian descent—mostly as employees. But in many cases, they also met as companions and fellow worshippers and neighbors. Segregationist schemes in cities throughout colonial Africa were halfhearted and incomplete.¹⁵⁵ Even apartheid South Africa, taken as the archetype of racial planning, had its gray zones and people living illegally in outbuildings in white areas; moreover, South African segregation makes no sense without the history of racial proximity and intimacy that it attempted to put an end to.¹⁵⁶ It may seem remarkable that people in Lourenço Marques’s City of Cement could be so blind to conditions in subúrbios that were such a short walk away. Then again, ignorance took a great deal of effort.

Figure 1.20 Lídia Manhiça Muhale, Chamanculo, 2011. Muhale and her husband, Filipe Muhale, built their wood-and-zinc house in the 1960s, eventually adding rooms in concrete block to accommodate a growing household. (David Morton)

Figure 2.1 View of the City of Cement from the caniço, 1960s. (Ricardo Rangel/CDFF)