Age of Concrete

Housing and the Shape of Aspiration in the Capital of Mozambique

David Morton

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780821446751
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Age of Concrete is a history of the making of houses and homes in the subúrbios of Maputo (Lourenço Marques), Mozambique, from the late 1940s to the present. Often dismissed as undifferentiated, ahistorical "slums, " these neighborhoods are in fact an open-air archive that reveals some of people's highest aspirations. At first people built in reeds. Then they built in wood and zinc panels. And finally, even when it was illegal, they risked building in concrete block, making permanent homes in a place where their presence was often excruciatingly precarious.

Unlike many histories of the built environment in African cities, Age of Concrete focuses on ordinary homebuilders and dwellers. David Morton thus models a different way of thinking about urban politics during the era of decolonization, when one of the central dramas was the construction of the urban stage itself. It shaped how people related not only to each other but also to the colonial state and later to the independent state as it stumbled into being.

Original, deeply researched, and beautifully composed, this book speaks in innovative ways to scholarship on urban history, colonialism and decolonization, and the postcolonial state. Replete with rare photographs and other materials from private collections, Age of Concrete establishes Morton as one of a handful of scholars breaking new ground on how we understand Africa's cities.

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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: The Spaces of Lourenço Marques
• 2: The Politics of Visibility: The “City of Reeds” Debate, 1962–65
• 3: The Politics of Proximity: Clandestine Masonry House Construction in the Subúrbios, c. 1960–74
• 4: An Immovable Legacy: The Nationalization of Housing and Its Consequences, 1976–92
• 5: Planning in the Subúrbios, 1977–92
• Conclusion: Multiple Trajectories
• Glossary
• Notes
• Sources
• Index