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