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Football and the Moral Economy of the Lourenço Marques Suburbs

VISIONS OF THE SUBURBS

The suburbs of the capital of Mozambique, where football was played from at least the early years of the twentieth century, were represented in various ways. The epic narratives of conquest, focused on the agency of the colonizer, did not take them as an object except as an informal space that was somewhere beyond the bounds of the real city and where African political structures, almost always thought of as the enemy, organized.¹ Later, the propagandistic and touristic lusotropicalism would represent the capital of Mozambique as a natural and cultural paradise. While for the most part the suburbs were overlooked in these representations, it sometimes appeared in the form of a folklorized space. In the same period, developmentalist economic discourse projected a modern and productive future for the city. However, unlike lusotropicalism, modernizing discourse was a response to a more pressing will to intervene, grounded in the old goal of economic exploitation, but now renewed by the science of productivity. The modernizing sectors, increasingly active in the colonial field of power, demanded a more qualified labor force, state investment, and a new social contract. While lusotropicalism imagined a culturally harmonious society managed by a mechanic solidarity, in the Durkheimian sense, the discourse of modernization deemed this organicity, supported by indigenato, unreliable. It was urgent, rather, to create other forms of social cohesion, grounded in a labor interdependence that could sidestep class or race consciousness. In this sense, the critical discourse of modernization, while it did not cross swords with the lusotropicalist façade, considered the suburb an unbalanced space that state planning should redress. The modernizing diagnostic, which was quite critical toward suburban society, in the end explained the origin of the problem in terms of a cultural adaptation, or lack thereof, to modernity. And yet the economic backwardness of the suburbs was the ground on which the local colonial field of power was built, to the benefit of a wide set of interests. The analysis of the dissemination of the game of football in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques allows us to generate an alternative representation of this peripheral space.

Colonial Pastorals

In 1971 a promotional book on Mozambique written by the colonial historian Oliveira Boléo and edited by the Agência Geral do Ultramar portrayed Lourenço Marques as

a beautiful seaside city with wide avenues with plenty of trees, with beautiful gardens, hotels, theaters and cinemas, museums, monuments, viewpoints, bullfight arenas, swimming pools, fields for the practice of various sports, a hippodrome, libraries and archives, an international airport, in short, a modern cosmopolitan city, where black, white, yellow, and brown and mixed [mistos] mingle in the streets, always visited by numerous foreigners. . . . The public health, welfare, and school services are exemplary.²

After the Angolan war broke out, in 1961, the Portuguese state reinforced the idyllic representation of colonial societies as a harmonious blend of progress and cultural diversity. From academic works to profusely illustrated touristic brochures, from the commission of films to the production of newsreels that were screened before commercial feature films in both the metropole and the colonies, a variety of media were used to publicize an African pastoral. Lourenço Marques was often represented in line within the frame of this benign version of colonialism.³ The publication, in 1966, in both Portuguese and English, of the autobiography of the great Mozambican player Eusébio da Silva Ferreira, in the wake of his extraordinary performances in the World Cup in England that same year, is an example of the wide variety of ways of producing this banal lusotropicalism. In its very first pages, we are introduced to a zealous, well-behaved African student, properly brought up by his mother, Elisa; he was a man who learned to play football in the humble, yet dignified, harmonious, colorful, exotic, and traditional environment of the suburbs of Lourenço Marques.⁴

In 1968, Os Africanos de Lourenço Marques, a monograph about the city by colonial anthropologist António Rita-Ferreira, had painted a scenario that was strikingly different from these lusotropicalist pastorals. Mozambique’s capital was not a harmonious space. It was structurally divided, and existential insecurity defined the urban experience of the large periphery.⁵ According to this account, most suburban inhabitants lived with an uncertainty about remaining at their current address. The occupation of private lands, which they rented, exposed them to cursory evictions. Heavily policed and removed from easy access to civil courts, their means of protest seemed narrow. Besides the recurrent floods, which affected a large portion of the constructions in the periphery, in the reed world fires spread quickly and easily, started by candles, oil or petrol lamps, and bonfires.⁶ Other natural dangers, such as falling tree limbs lightning, or landslides, further increased the risk of this arduous everyday existence. Besides being exposed to natural disasters, the suburbs were also the laboratory for a host of human phenomena. According to the monograph’s author, the loosening of the grip once exerted by the family and the tribe⁷ explained the moral dissolution brought by prostitution, alcoholism, corruption, gambling, illegitimate offspring, crimes against property and persons, and the abandonment of one’s home and children.⁸ The suburban population was terrorized daily by gangs of criminals, most of them young: it was estimated that 80 to 90 percent of cases of crime prevention presented before the juvenile court involved African youngsters in the suburbs.⁹ Thefts and robbery of homes and shops, made easier by poor construction materials and the absence of public lighting, became commonplace, as did physical assaults.¹⁰ Given the absence of institutionalized means of punishment, public lynchings were common.¹¹

Local diets, heavily based on the consumption of corn, sorghum, cassava, and sweet potato, encouraged malnutrition. The lack of vegetables and fruit meant a poorer diet when compared to rural consumption habits.¹² Only 13 percent of Rita-Fereira’s interviewees had three meals a day, 76 percent had two, and 11 percent ate only one; 83 percent claimed to eat less than they needed, and only 3 percent consumed at least a kilogram of meat in a week. The wage workers’ dependent family members found themselves in an even more precarious situation.¹³ In a suburban neighborhood 99 percent of the population did not have electricity and 89 percent had no running water; 99 percent had set up their kitchen on the porch, 76 percent used a latrine in their backyard, and fewer than 4 percent had a septic tank.¹⁴ Stagnant water, where children often played, teemed with rats, mosquitoes, and all kinds of diseases.¹⁵ Respiratory problems and intoxications flourished. To fight an ever-growing number of afflictions, suburban dwellers resorted to traditional medicine. In 1964 seven times as many Africans died as Europeans, although the two populational universes were about the same size.¹⁶

Rita-Ferreira’s impressive account was not propagandistic as such, but neither did it offer any anticolonial invective. On the contrary, his report emerged from within the colonial scientific vanguard. But unlike Oliveira Boléo’s lusotropicalist pastoral, for the anthropologist and civil servant the suburb was primarily an economic and political issue, and its populations were conceived as economic and political agents. The critical description of life in the city’s outskirts responded to problems raised by modern developmentalist projects, which demanded the fixation and qualification of the labor force, and by their interchange with the consolidation of political management at a time when the war had spread. The quick turnover of workers in Lourenço Marques’s labor market harmed economic activities that required a greater degree of worker specialization and for which a training period was necessary.¹⁷ Malnourishment led to exhaustion and a weak psychomotor activity.¹⁸ Between 60 and 75 percent of the budget of the individuals interviewed by Rita-Ferreira was spent on food;¹⁹ nonindígena families of Lourenço Marques put aside nearly 34 percent of their budgets for that same purpose, close to the average percentage (30) in developed countries.²⁰ Complaints by some economic sectors on the feebleness of the local “human capital” were related by Rita-Ferreira and would be heard further on.²¹

Workers’ dependence on their extended families as a social and economic support network brought along a set of obligations inherent in gift economies grounded in kinship (attending family rituals—weddings, christenings, funerals; assisting the sick and minors; lending a hand in building a house). Such obligations collided with the schedules imposed by work regimes, generating situations of recurrent absenteeism and quick turnover that reduced productivity. The uncertain and dangerous conditions of this urban labor market, inadequate for individuals to plan their futures, left open the option of returning to the safer and more stable environment of the countryside.²² When he published Os Africanos de Lourenço Marques, Rita-Ferreira registered the existence in the suburbs of what he called a “cultural hiatus.”²³ In Lourenço Marques there grew a structurally young population, educated in the city and freer from its ties with rural society, managing their own movements and desires: “many urbanized Africans live in marginal and transitional areas, and even immoral and broken, environments where there are no new values to take over from the old ones.”²⁴ Empirical evidence clearly demonstrated how the suburban social contract was not a reliable framework for regulating the production and preservation of social peace.

These studies acknowledge that the colonial state’s incapacity to fill this void could lead to the emergence of a dangerous national consciousness.²⁵ Even if South African labor agencies continued to operate in Lourenço Marques, unemployment among young educated Africans grew, and with it a resentment of the lack of opportunities, which made them potentially dangerous in the eyes of the colonial apparatus.²⁶ Their position within the social structure, their educational level, and their contact with sources of information made them more sensitive to discriminatory processes, which persisted well after the end of the indigenato.²⁷ The situation of racial conflict in neighboring South Africa made these fears all the more vivid. Such dangers were enhanced by continuous discrimination. In 1967, out of the 1,069 marriages celebrated in the city, only 52 joined people of different ethnic groups; only one involved a white person and a black; and 21 joined whites and mixed-race people.²⁸ In that same year, of 5,499 births, 522 resulted from “mixed” relationships, and 254 were illegitimate children.²⁹ In 1968, 8.3 percent of the city’s population was the result of a “racial mix” and the trend seemed to point toward a decrease in these numbers.³⁰

The biographical memories of former football players who were born out of relations between Western men, mostly Portuguese, and African women, bear clear testimony to this basic inequality. Mário Wilson talked about the origins of his privileged situation:

My grandfather was an American, Wilson, who snatched a black woman, just because he wanted his problems sorted out. He crossed over to the other side of Lourenço Marques, Catembe, and on one of his walks he spotted the daughter of a régulo that had the shapely body he was looking for, and he said, “That one’s mine.” He crossed the river again, back to Lourenço Marques, and made her his wife. Because he was an American he might well have been racist through and through, but he still had child after child, six children, and he raised every one of them simply because he could afford it, [and] sent them over to study in South Africa. The two eldest sons were sent to boarding school straightaway. . . . Across the whole of Africa, all the Mandelas were born among the African elite. The African part had their own culture, their social gatherings and festivities, their sporting representations, but all of these things were marked by racism, a rejection that individuals themselves internalized and accepted as natural.

The story of Hilário da Conceição (b. 1939), a Portuguese international raised in Mafalala who played for Sporting de Lisboa, is rather different. He thinks of himself as a “second-rate mulatto,” the typical condition of children not recognized by their white fathers:

My mother is a Chopi, tribal, one of those that have tattoos on their faces and belly. . . . I never knew my father. My mother came from Manhiça to the city. . . . she was a very pretty and sweet girl and she didn’t know anyone there. . . . To this day I don’t know who my father was. That happened sometimes, you know? In this kind of relationship, the father was almost always Portuguese, and then he’d take off. And why did he take off? Because often the Portuguese would go from Portugal to Mozambique but had a wife back home, or else the wife was here and they had children, a married life, but they had fun with the African women. But then when there was some responsibility . . . if they had got a woman they were seeing pregnant, then they’d cut and run.

Rita-Ferreira’s research also demonstrated how the indigenato was still operational after its legal end.³¹ Although the administrative division of Lourenço Marques approved in 1969³² did not make any reference to traditional powers, the state continued to delegate certain functions to it.³³ Beyond the day-to-day management, the state delegated a host of official duties to these authorities: information on local issues, resolution of cases of private law, and identification of individuals wanted by the law.³⁴ Reports on the “social situation” sent by the local Portuguese governors to the SCCIM in 1965, which were based on a centralized inquiry, revealed how traditional authorities were chosen, co-opted, and permanently surveyed long after the indigenato was abolished.³⁵ The transference of Africans, in 1969, into the framework of common law did not solve the problems of a population that for the most part remained unregistered or unidentified by the administration³⁶ and that lacked the educational, financial, and bureaucratic means to access justice or file complaints about urgent matters: property rights, rent disputes, labor law issues, and questions of social rights or family law. The construction of provisional shelters and houses in the suburbs also depended on the acquiescence of traditional administrators.³⁷ The suburb dweller continued to be subjected to institutions that were increasingly inadequate to handle the disputes that emerged out of the everyday urban experience. Given the legal vacuum and the frail legitimacy of the traditional institutions in the resolution of conflicts and problems, suburb dwellers increasingly resorted to the services of the emergent “witchcraft market” as a means of defending their rights. Many of these practices broke with the standards of the weakened customary law. The need for protection was consistently invoked by former football players when they mentioned witchcraft. Daniel Matavela (b. 1952), one of the first black players to play in the Mozambican branch of the Portuguese football club Académica de Coimbra, in 1968, noted,

Each people have their own ways. The African is superstitious. Religion tried to educate us, so that we would stay clear of witchcraft, but it’s just a reality. In Africa people live in backyards, not apartment blocks. There are a number of ways to protect your backyard. The Portuguese and the European did not take kindly to it: “you and your superstitions.” I don’t believe it myself . . . in fact I don’t like witchcraft, but the fact is it exists.

Legislative changes, such as the end of indigenato, were of little use without a new urban social contract shaped by a more detailed and modern state intervention. While in the metropole there was on ongoing debate about a reformation of corporatism, a model that was not efficient within the framework of postwar economic projects, in the colonial context a segregated corporatism proved even more obsolete.³⁸ Outside the corporative system, indígenas were excluded from the legal framework for labor relations, passed in 1956.³⁹ According to the 1962 Rural Labour Code, only individuals considered urban workers, who were mostly white, could join unions. After the end of indigenato, the unionization of Africans was still extremely low.⁴⁰

Other colonial powers addressed the urban question in Africa much earlier.⁴¹ National and international institutions⁴² shared policies and techniques and promoted empirical studies that aimed to back social policies usually announced under the banner of “social promotion” or “rural welfare” when aimed at the placement of rural populations.⁴³ In the Portuguese context, concerns with detribalization—the social integration of the urban, “evolved” indígena, the monetization of exchanges, the loss of traditional community bonds, the stabilization of the labor force, the dangers of proletarianization in the wake of state and private investment⁴⁴—were recognized by state colonialists such as Marcelo Caetano, Joaquim Silva Cunha, and Adriano Moreira.⁴⁵ But in the colonial terrain, urban management continued to depend mainly on the old methods of co-optation, violence, intimidation, and surveillance.⁴⁶ Organized by Adriano Moreira in 1956, the Centro de Estudos Políticos e Sociais (Center for Political and Social Studies) was the most serious effort toward modernizing the official social-management structure.⁴⁷

Late empirical diagnoses of the urban situation in Lourenço Marques like Rita-Ferreira’s monograph should not damage the lusotropicalist narrative, which was increasingly promoted by state agencies and occupied with political propaganda and with the affluent local tourism industry. Suburban misery, it was argued, did not result from Portugal’s colonial action but was the outcome of an unbalanced modernity that promoted cultural isolation and self-exclusion.⁴⁸ The urban segmentation was kept because “so many evolved and highly paid Africans” would not trade “the ease, conviviality and prestige they enjoyed in the suburbs for the restrictions, impersonality and anonymity that they would experience in the large and modern apartment buildings.”⁴⁹ The euphemization of discrimination by way of paying compliments to a suburban culture supposedly prone to isolation, did little, however, to tackle the problem of the labor force’s productivity or political and social unrest.

Progressively inoperative, the suburban social contract, which established a set of minimal principles of sociability and conviviality among groups with diverse backgrounds and habits, was seen in the eyes of the modern planner as a space of marginalities, fostered by a cultural and social anomie that for a long time proved useful to the colonial-exploitation model promoted in the region: that contract benefited suburban land proprietors and homeowners, private and public businesses that exploited the permanent stock of African workers, as well as the vast number of settler families that could easily have had in their houses and commercial spaces a large number of domestic servants.⁵⁰ Despite the existence of distinct strategies to face the urban malaise, which expressed how state institutions were permeated by different rationalities, urban plans, as well as the few concrete interventions in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques, in fact increased the policy of social separation. This situation facilitated the persistence of a cheap reproduction of the labor force, based on a policy of high taxation, low salaries, and reduction of the managing costs of the suburban space: it was up to Africans to build their own existential territory and their social welfare networks. Suburban football grew out of this forced autonomy.

Housing, Work, and the Creation of “Suburban Autonomy”

The aim to organize indígena neighborhoods in the periphery of Lourenço Marques, already present in the plan devised by Araújo in the early twentieth century, would only be achieved later. The nearby experience of South African compounds were the inspiration behind the plans in the capital of Mozambique. In 1916 a committee put together by the Câmara do Comércio (Chamber of Commerce) and by the Administração do Concelho do Porto e Caminhos de Ferro (Port and Railway Council Administration)⁵¹ visited Durban to assess the municipal housing experience and the workers’ food regime, so as to apply a similar system to the four thousand indígenas that worked in the port of Lourenço Marques.⁵² Between 1918 and 1921, near the market of Xipamanine, the administration built a small social-housing project. The high cost of rents meant the thirty-three brick houses ended up in the hands of the black and mestiço bourgeoisie.⁵³ The journalist João Albasini visited the neighborhood in 1921 and painted a dark picture: it had no running water, electric lights, sewage system, or roadways and had only a single cesspit.⁵⁴ In 1922 a decree authorized the government of the colony to take out a loan for the construction of hostels or indígena neighborhoods.⁵⁵

The 1922 police regulations for servants and indígena workers, besides imposing a mechanism of registration, identification, and permanence and contract authorization, forced these Africans to settle into hostels.⁵⁶ The capital for the construction of these facilities, gathered through a fund financed by the compulsory registration of Africans arriving in the city, ended up being diverted to indígena-labor inspection services.⁵⁷ Large companies that hired and transported workers to South Africa, as the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association, the Railways, and Delagoa Bay, built provisional neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city to accommodate migrant workers.⁵⁸ A 1926 ordinance required all male indígenas over fourteen to carry an identification and job carnet: the labor contract determined not only the permanence but also compelled holders to have a place of residence.⁵⁹ It was only at the end of the 1930s that the fund for the construction of houses for the indígenas was reestablished. Using cautious language, the discourse of the Law by Decree of 1938, which regulated the construction of new indígena neighborhoods, suggested an interest in separating populations under the pretext of a controlled adaptation to urban space.⁶⁰ In 1939 the first expropriations took place, close to Angola Avenue. In 1940, after the areas destined for indígena neighborhoods had been established,⁶¹ the first houses of the neighborhood of Munhuana began to be built. Justified by matters of “health, public order, and morality,” the project, inaugurated in 1942 and whose responsibility fell on the Repartição Técnica (Technical Division) of the Câmara de Lourenço Marques (Lourenço Marques Municipality), was inspired by South African models.⁶²

FIGURE 3.1. Munhuana’s native neighborhood—crematorium. Author: A. W. Bayly and Co. Source: Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino.

The 1942 Regulamento de Identificação Indígena (Indígenas’ Identification Regulations) and the 1944 Regulamentos dos Serviçais Indígenas (Indígena Servants’ Regulations) maintained the existing mechanisms of control over permanence and mobility, under penalty of correctional labor.⁶³ Forced labor was applied to other misdemeanors: change of job without prior consent, self-employment without permission, casual unregistered work, absence from the municipal area without prior authorization, instigation of colleagues to give up their occupations, failure to register within three days after your arrival.⁶⁴ By the end of the 1950s, fines began to replace forced labor,⁶⁵ and before the end of the indigenato regime, the new identification regulations issued an identity card to “evolved” indígenas who showed good behavior, which afforded them a greater degree of mobility.⁶⁶

The logic of social closure continued to define the city’s growth plans developed by the Gabinete de Urbanização Colonial (Office for Colonial Urbanization)⁶⁷ in the early 1950s. Plano Aguiar (1952–55), devised in 1947 by the architect João Aguiar for the Gabinete de Urbanização, foresaw the organization of various indígena neighborhoods, which included a set of public facilities. It separated these neighborhoods from the cement city, and proposed an intermediate landscaped area that would operate as both a physical and a social buffer.⁶⁸ The project did not come to fruition, but Plano Aguiar continued, up to 1969, to direct the city’s growth. Aguiar, head of the Gabinete de Urbanização, was responsible for the elaboration of the planos de urbanização (urbanization plans) of numerous cities in Portuguese colonial Africa. As registered in one of the key documents that defined Portuguese colonial urban policies, the land use in these projects stressed the fundamental distinction between the spaces for Europeans and those for indígenas, even though the distinction between the two was now more subtle.⁶⁹ Aguiar defended ethnic discrimination among the indígena population and, even within the European population, he distinguished among the various types of Europeans, from colonial clerks to the poorer settlers, whom he in fact called settler-workers (colonos-trabalhadores).⁷⁰

When, in 1958, the Fundo para a Construção de Casas Destinadas à População Indígena (Fund for the Construction of Houses Destined for the Indígena Population) was created, urbanization plans gave priority to the construction of public facilities, schools, sports fields, gardens. In 1961, in the newspaper Notícias, José Craveirinha protested against a form of urban planning that worked against the integration of the indígena.⁷¹ He felt the policy of promoting neighborhoods that “represented clusters of stability for intrinsically tribal cultural forms,” was only attenuated by the presence of poor settlers: “the precarious houses of the so-called ‘reed-and-tin neighborhood’ in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques are not an asocial sign of local exoticism but rather a universal particularism of the large populational clusters, nor are these neighborhoods we speak of destined solely for African residents since many metropolitan families live there.”⁷²

Several suburban players spoke of this poor milieu, where a few whites stood out among the local population. Hilário called them “black-whites”:

Poverty was normal, we had our wood-and-zinc houses, ate flour and rice and fish and prawns . . . that’s what was available, in nature. I mean, misery did not get to the point where, how can I put it, we would starve. No, we lived within our means. . . . In the suburbs there were people with very diverse origins, some came from Zambezia, others from Manhiça, others yet from Inhambane, and there were also different religions; there were Muslims . . . it was a rather diverse world in that sense . . . there were bricklayers, carpenters, fishermen, mechanics, a little bit of everything. . . . Then there were mulattoes who lived in the city. First-class mulattoes . . . There were very few whites in the suburbs. The tradesmen owned the place, the shops, the canteens, they had daily contact with lots of African people. I mean, they were black-whites. . . . In the neighborhood schools there were no whites; a mulatto might possibly go to a white school, but not the blacks.

Mário Wilson’s description shows football as a particular laboratory of the wider urban situation:

There were very few spaces where whites and blacks could play football together, only in what we used to call friendly matches, in neighborhoods where, given the scarcity of players, Europeans and non-Europeans had to mix, driven by their passion for football, by its magic, and so kids would play with each other. . . . It was only the poorest among the Portuguese that would do it . . . there was this coincidence, the fact that it was only the poorest, because the elite were channeled onto other neighborhoods . . . the poor Portuguese were a decadent bunch, because they came from less well-to-do families, and less exclusive places, and so they had no choice, they had to play and embrace whatever pleasures came their way.

Approved in 1962, the Código do Trabalho Rural (Rural Labour Code)⁷³—which, in accordance with postindigenato policies, did not establish any form of “cultural” or “ethnic” distinction among workers—aimed at accommodating “economically fragile workers.” These terms, used to designate the individual’s position within the economic system, replaced culturalist and racialist classifications, all the while avoiding the politicized language of class. Among those deemed “economically fragile” were workers classified as “rural”⁷⁴ but also all those who, performing a variety of activities, were classified as unskilled, their work reduced to “simple labor services.” This last category included many workers that lived on the periphery of cities; these workers, as well as those in “domestic service” and those involved in “labor relations established between labor providers and people in their families” (both falling outside of the scope of the code), made up a large portion of the urban working population—African for the most part.⁷⁵ This law further established the difference between permanent and casual workers. The latter were workers “hired for the day, week or month, with no continuous or long-term prospects and whose habitual residence is located in the vicinity of the workplace.” By putting an end to racial distinctions, the transformation of the legal apparatus would reclassify social categories, bringing to the fore the contrast between the qualified, permanent, unionized worker, almost always white, and the “economically fragile,” temporary, and unqualified worker, almost always black.⁷⁶ Allowing for a new representation of society, the “disappearance of the indígenas” and the emergence of the “worker” was signaled by the creation of the Instituto do Trabalho Previdência e Acção Social (Institute of Work Welfare and Social Action) and by the elimination of the Direcção dos Serviços dos Negócios Indígenas (Head Office of Native Affairs).⁷⁷ These shifts in labor legislation tried to reconcile the need to adjust to the political changes brought by the end of the indigenato system and the desire of certain economic sectors, namely industries with a presence in urban areas, for more flexible labor regulations.⁷⁸

Urban Plans for Economic Fragile Workers

Once indigenato was over, the indígena housing construction fund became, in 1962, the Junta dos Bairros e Casas Populares (Popular-Neighborhoods and -Houses Board). In 1963, in an article titled “The Sick City,” architect Pancho Guedes spoke of the drama of the “reed belt,” which bordered “another city where more people live than all the people in the city—the city of the poor, of servants and manservants.”⁷⁹ These people lived far from the center, in dire hygienic conditions and in precarious and unsound houses where children starved. Then, he pointed his finger at the way in which the cement city had swollen, the lack of planning and the proliferation of real estate businesses, thus proposing the creation of a construction plan aimed at bringing these two cities closer together and reaching “a genuine social integration—or are the ‘blacks’ fit only to stand in kitchens and lobbies?”⁸⁰

“There were lots of people who came into the city from the countryside,” says Matine (b. 1947), raised in Chamanculo, a black athlete who moved to Lisbon’s Benfica in the 1960s. “I remember all too well that to the south of the Save, the Save river, everyone went in search of a livelihood in Lourenço Marques. Most of them would find a job sooner or later. They had their homes and started living in those suburbs, had their jobs.”

According to Hilário,

The worst thing that happened was that when the colonial war broke out people who lived in the countryside fled to the city, empty-handed, and had no place to live, so they took over any land they could grab and built their shacks there, with no sanitation. The empty spaces where we played football were gone. Then the war pushed people out of the countryside and that was it. Whatever space was there in between the shacks or the houses, we used it to play football, even if it was five-a-side, or six-a-side, and in the larger spaces we would play eleven versus eleven. Gradually that [football games] faded away.

In 1963 in Lourenço Marques a working group was put together to think and offer solutions for the problem of the city’s suburbs. Led by the psychiatrist Sousa Sobrinho, the so-called Grupo Central de Trabalhos (Central Working Group) gathered technicians and suburban inhabitants, namely a group of nurses that were part of the Caixa de Socorros dos Enfermeiros Nativos (Native Nurses’ Assistance Body).⁸¹ A series of meetings, accompanied by the press and the information services, resulted in the elaboration, in early 1964, of a survey that was then handed to the Câmara Municipal de Lourenço Marques (Lourenço Marques Municipality), which the group accused of inaction. The misery in these spaces, which were home to 150,000 to 200,000 people and were “incompatible with the most rudimentary concepts of housing hygiene,”⁸² reinforced the effects of insalubrity caused by the recurrent floods (“breeding ground for mosquitoes,” “municipal dung heap”) and epidemic diseases (such as hepatitis). In the “reed” there was only one first-aid post, and there was no post office or gardens, playgrounds, roadways, electricity, or sewers.⁸³ Unhappy with the response on the part of the municipality, the working group carried out a vast urban renewal study entitled “Housing Problem among the Economically Fragile,” grounded in the application of the public right of expropriation and in the construction of various sorts of housing projects.⁸⁴ Concerned with the living conditions of the African population, the group reproduced modernization’s purifying logic, representing the suburbs as an abscess that needed to be lanced.⁸⁵ At the same time that it claimed to be the most intelligent intervention from the point of view of colonial interests⁸⁶—undertaken in the name of a harmonious cultural coexistence necessary to avoid possible political and social dangers⁸⁷—the plan was justified by the need to integrate the suburban populations into the city, to regulate the entry of “rurals,” all the while avoiding segregation.⁸⁸ In this plan, the African population’s access to private property was seen as an important instrument of social stabilization.⁸⁹ Revealing the existence of a small public space where housing in Lourenço Marques could be discussed, this rift served as proof of the lack of interest on the part of state authorities. Accordingly, the signatories suggested that the necessary process of expropriations and urban renewal did not move forward simply because they threatened the revenue of the owners of suburban plots.⁹⁰

The intervention of the Câmara Municipal of Lourenço Marques during this period was intentionally feeble, despite the late effort to organize garbage collection, install drinking fountains, and a sewage system.⁹¹ The creation, in 1964, of the Gabinete de Urbanização da Câmara de Lourenço Marques (Lourenço Marques City Hall Urbanization Office), constituted a reaction to this state of affairs. Then, official urbanism finally attempted to promote new urban-planning methods, articulating them with the principles underpinning the lusotropicalist inversion of the Portuguese colonial ideology, embodied, in the particular case of the organization of the populations, in the defense of multiracial settlement.⁹² The prophylactic action of modern urbanism, as it faced these social management problems, had been developed in Lisbon by the Direcção dos Serviços de Urbanismo e Habitação do Ministério do Ultramar (Overseas Ministry’s Head Office of Urbanism and Housing Services).⁹³ The elaboration of new studies, such as the 1966 Plano Regulador de Ocupação do Solo de Lourenço Marques (Regulatory Plan for Land Occupation in Lourenço Marques), yielded no practical results. The failure of official urbanism was more acutely felt during this period, when large-scale economic projects and the need for political regulation lacked effective methods for the management of the working populations. After the construction of the Munhuana neighborhood, only a four-story block was inaugurated in that same site, two blocks (thirty-two households) in the Malhangalene neighborhood and four hundred houses in the industrial zones of Matola and Machava. Given the rate at which the population was growing, these efforts fell short of the mark.⁹⁴ Urbanism’s adaptation to the fresh face of Portuguese postindigenato colonialism was still far removed from any de facto inscription in the suburb, even if the Lourenço Marques city council had indeed shouldered some of the responsibility for some new infrastructures.

In 1969 the Gabinete de Urbanização e Habitação da Região de Lourenço Marques (Office of Urbanization and Housing for the Region of Lourenço Marques) is created, reporting directly to the General Government. New technical studies are then carried out.⁹⁵ Based on the results of preliminary inquests conducted by the General Government in the reed, the decree that created this office made this new entity responsible for “vast urban renewal operations” whose “key goal was to improve the conditions of the interested populations and provide them with the necessary collective facilities, thus avoiding, whenever possible, any major displacements of the current dwellers.” It was crucial to find a permanent address for those who came to Lourenço Marques every year looking for work, lured by the “strong magnetism of the city, by the port-railway complex and by the industrial centers of Lourenço Marques’s neighboring regions.” This required the construction of new “urban structural units” that would cater efficiently to the clusters of productive activity, and where several categories of the population would live, with no “inconvenient social segregation.”⁹⁶ Devised by the engineer Mário de Azevedo, the new Plano de Urbanização (Urbanization Plan), approved by the Lourenço Marques Municipality only near the end of 1972,⁹⁷ sought to achieve the stated goals. This plan already incorporated the concern for a more efficient integration of the peripheral city, in a convergence between social concerns and modern theories of neighborhood urbanism.⁹⁸ “Caniço” was now promoted to a “traditional housing area,” where precarious, “spontaneous,” “undisciplined” dwellings were located, and where the “economically fragile” populations lived.⁹⁹ Urban renovation in Lourenço Marques, an urgent matter for political and labor management, now also piqued the interest of a host of investors. The hypothetical construction of satellite cities and the elimination of the reed, as defended in a 1969 study,¹⁰⁰ created an extraordinary business opportunity. While fixation of the labor force was among the incontrovertible goals of these plans, there was no agreement as to the way it was to be achieved.¹⁰¹ The organization of the Plano de Beneficiação da Área Suburbana de Lourenço Marques (Plan for the Improvement of the Suburban Area of Lourenço Marques), in 1971, just before independence, would become the most ambitious intervention project. It was, however, much too late.¹⁰² In the 1970s the growth of the cement city, which spread toward the industrial areas of Matola and Machava, triggered a wave of evictions.¹⁰³ The process was over in a short time and the compensations offered to tenants were meager. While modernizing diagnoses defended state intervention to address the problem of the suburbs, the history of the construction of the periphery of Lourenço Marques demonstrated the active role of state institutions in the creating the problem in the first place.

The Suburban Moral Economy