Age of Concrete. David Morton
This kind of dizzying growth rate since the midcentury is not uncommon for African cities, but it is a fact worth emphasizing for readers who have not themselves lived through a similar hyperexpansion from town to metropolis. We can imagine what such growth meant for those hoping to manage it or for those making a home amid what was a fierce competition for space. Into this same span of time, the people of Maputo compressed the experiences of forced labor, independence, and then civil war, as well as the traumatic results of efforts to impose first colonial capitalism, then a socialist command economy, and then the policies of structural adjustment. One way to look at these episodes is to see how they were reflected in the city’s built environment. But this approach makes it seem as if changes in the cityscape were a sideshow to the real action. Another approach, the one taken in this work, is to see how the making of the built environment shaped people’s expectations and aspirations and how people understood historical change.17 When older residents of the city speak of the more distant past, they are careful to clarify that the city they are talking about is Lourenço Marques, not Maputo. Although the main reason is to delimit the era of Portuguese rule, another motive for the distinction is that, in memory, the neighborhoods where they grew up were, by comparison to today, mato—or “bush.” When some were children, trees and other plants still marked off the boundaries of their yards, if they were marked off at all. The thought is astonishing to people as they recall it today, within a landscape of concrete. Without having moved anywhere, they occupy a different place.
THE UNPLANNED
Frantz Fanon described the typical colonial city as divided brutally in two. One part, the “white folks’ sector,” was “built to last, all stone and steel.” The other part, “the ‘native’ quarters, the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation,” was a place “that crouches and cowers, a sector on its knees, a sector that is prostrate.”18 Writing in 1961, he was justifying violent revolution. But historians of the African built environment limit themselves when they address only how cities were split unequally between colonizer and colonized and, relatedly, the role of European administrators and professional architects and planners in doing the dividing.19 European officials often put great faith in city plans. Some cities were clearly intended as demonstration models of the ruling ideology, with each race in the civilizational hierarchy slotted into its proper place on the urban map. Racial zoning, triumphal boulevards, ostentatious institutional architecture, and housing designed for African workers certainly reveal a lot about what colonial officials and design professionals thought of Europe’s place in Africa. But when scholars continually dwell on a relative handful of government officials and functionaries, it is as if everyone else in the city was a passive bystander. A dream in blueprint is assumed to have created the desired reality on the ground. Projects that impressed their designers are assumed to have impressed their African audiences. Segregation is assumed to have been complete. As Laurent Fourchard argues, if we see cities only from the commanding heights, the history of colonial cities, including South Africa’s apartheid variant, becomes little more than an uncomplicated tale of the colonizer controlling the colonized. The emphasis on schemes imposed from above, particularly on spatial planning based on race, “omits the agency of African societies, their capacity to overcome such divisions, to ignore them or even to imagine them differently.”20 Home builders in the various “native” quarters of the continent were not, as Fanon put it, prostrate. Lourenço Marques was a starkly segregated city, but it was not only segregated.
An important departure from the top-down trend is the work of Garth Myers, who, though concerned with official planning schemes in Zanzibar, also takes care to elaborate how these schemes failed over much of a century because of the continual pushback from Zanzibaris.21 Planners never appreciated people’s deep attachment to long-standing local practices of land tenure and house construction, he argues, with all the meanings for patronage and status these practices conveyed. Myers calls the Zanzibaris’ stubborn resistance “speaking with space.”22 In a similar vein, though in a very different context, Anne-Maria Makhulu calls living in the informal settlements on the outskirts of 1970s and 1980s Cape Town “activism by other means.”23 Squatters may not have been openly fighting apartheid as militants from the African National Congress (ANC) were, but they were challenging apartheid’s premise that their proper place was in a barren rural Bantustan.24 James Brennan’s work on Dar es Salaam addresses another way that politics was mediated through housing: how fraught landlord-tenant relations fed into anti–South Asian prejudice.25 These tensions helped give form, after independence, to a racialized idea of who could belong to the new Tanzanian nation. Each of these scholars reveals the overlapping strata of power cutting through urban societies. Each traces continuities between life under regimes of minority rule and under the regimes that followed. And each explores how the making of urban space constitutes a kind of multilateral politics that has not always announced itself as politics—or even in words. These are also some of the animating concerns of this book. My points of emphasis are different because Maputo’s history was different—peculiar even, owing to some of the peculiarities of Portuguese rule. Still, in the city’s subúrbios, some themes relevant to the histories of many African cities are made more salient.
In African cities, things usually did not go according to plan, but Maputo reminds us that often enough there was no operative plan to begin with—at least not the kind produced by professional urban planners. Once we move past the dispossession and displacement that gave birth to the subúrbios, we find that the suburban landscape is better understood for what authorities did not or could not do there than for the ways authorities imposed themselves. Given this history of official indifference and fecklessness, why begin with government initiatives, when the initiatives of so many households were on such obvious display? People built their own houses not only as a means of survival but also to realize their highest ambitions. And at key moments during the colonial era and since, many people in the subúrbios, rather than cowering in submission before an oppressive state, actually tried to bring government and sometimes even planners into their lives.
The subúrbios of Lourenço Marques exploded in size in the 1960s, just as unplanned settlement was booming across much of Africa and for similar reasons. Like the regimes of newly independent countries, Lisbon loosened urban influx controls in its African territories, and the appeal of cities was strong, even if in many cases this was less because of what the city offered and more because of what the countryside did not. Scholars of urbanization in Africa continue to puzzle over “informality,” a concept intended to grasp all the economic activity outside the gaze of policy makers. As a description of how people in the subúrbios actually lived their lives, the concept helps us very little; in fact, it obscures all the unwritten rules that oriented how neighbors dealt with each other.26 But the distinction made between the formal and the informal does capture a real and long-standing desire for a connection: not just by governing authorities hoping to intervene where they have yet to do so but also among ordinary people hoping that they will. Governance clearly exists at many scales and in many guises, but here I am referring to the kind that only states and municipalities, with their resources and stamp of universal legitimacy, can provide. People in the subúrbios have often yearned for this kind of governance because there is too much that they cannot do on their own or build on their own. When government is absent, it is a felt absence, not freedom. Residents have felt it when there is no active authority either willing or able to provide drinkable water, illuminate dark streets, or guarantee that people can occupy tomorrow the land they intend to build upon today. National authorities, during the colonial era and since, have felt it when, looking upon the living conditions of most residents of their capital city, they sense the emptiness of their own pretensions to leading a modernizing state. Mozambicans have had more reason than most to flee oppressive state power or to resist it.27 But much of the urban politics set in and around the capital from the 1960s through the 1980s cannot be easily described as protest or resistance or opposition to state power. Those who would govern and those who would be governed also reached desperately for one another—usually without success.
This book emphasizes episodes in which people called out for intervention, doing what they could to make their neighborhoods visible to authorities who would not see them or who convinced themselves that the subúrbios were, for the time being,