Age of Concrete. David Morton
Lourenço Marques, despite heavy censorship, involved black residents of the caniço talking about their living conditions to a daily newspaper with a mostly white readership. Shortly afterward, African nurses at the city’s central hospital developed their own housing scheme for the subúrbios and put it before the municipality. Secret police were locking up people where there was only a whiff of dissent, and yet during a government survey of conditions at the Munhuana housing project, residents had the courage to openly and harshly criticize housing authorities. (All these episodes are addressed in chapter 2.) Even the clandestine masonry builders of the 1960s (discussed in chapter 3), though certainly eager to escape police attention, were in their own quiet way insisting that they were not temporary sojourners but integrated into city life, participants in what they considered a modernizing world.28
Scholars refer to appeals like these, in which people do things or say things that assert a right to be in the city and enjoy the benefits that permanence should entail, as acts of urban citizenship.29 There is some awkwardness in applying the term to late colonial Lourenço Marques. Most people at that time were dubious that being a Portuguese citizen afforded them much of anything. For that matter, we should be cautious in using the word state, as if there were some kind of clearly realized apparatus of functioning institutions to which people could direct their appeals. John Comaroff has said of the typical colonial state that it was “an aspiration, a work-in-progress, an intention, a phantasm-to-be-made-real. Rarely was it ever a fully actualized accomplishment.”30 In some ways, Portuguese authorities in late colonial Mozambique could make themselves felt quite sharply, but in others ways, they were barely there. The same could be said for Mozambique after independence. The Frelimo state was, in many respects, an almost fictive entity needing people to fill it with content and meaning.31
In the years under discussion here, the connections between would-be citizen and would-be state were so faint and there was so little mutual understanding of rights and responsibilities that the effort of seeking government action required a great deal of imaginative heavy lifting. After independence, for instance, as people in the subúrbios attempted to give substance to being new citizens of a new state, they did so in part by acting as if the government were intervening in their lives—executing housing policy and urbanizing neighborhoods—even as the attention of authorities was absorbed elsewhere. This notion may seem abstract for now, but the latter part of the book will develop the idea further. Chapter 4 discusses the 1976 nationalizations of the City of Cement, which triggered the spontaneous nationalizations of suburban properties. Chapter 5 explores official urban planning in suburban neighborhoods during the first decade of independence—or, rather, what looked like official planning. During the early years of Frelimo rule, what appeared to be state-led initiatives in the subúrbios were sometimes carried out by people who were simply behaving as if the state were leading them.32
Some of this fits the picture of decolonization in its narrower sense—the story of a country becoming politically independent—but all of it was part of the process of decolonization in its broadest sense—how people tried to dismantle structures of inequality, both before and after independence. For residents of Mozambique’s capital, the built environment was a medium through which this politics happened because the urban landscape was ever present and unavoidable.33 The material qualities of buildings, houses, and streets—their tangibility, their visibility, their relative fixedness—made construction a necessarily public act. The book demonstrates this dynamic at every opportunity, beginning in the first chapter with a tour of Lourenço Marques, where the density of urban space brought many different sorts of people so physically close together: Africans from around Mozambique, Europeans and South Asians from different social backgrounds, and authorities and those they attempted to govern. Lourenço Marques was defined not just by its divisions, racial and otherwise, but also by the proximities that persisted despite the divisions. The subúrbios, for example, came right up against the City of Cement. After independence, people who occupied abandoned apartments inhabited one of colonialism’s most durable legacies. And the new regime was not just a voice blaring on the radio. The new regime was many people’s landlord.
“Concrete tells us what it means to be modern,” writes architectural historian Adrian Forty. “It is not just that the lives of people in the twentieth century were transformed by, amongst other things, concrete—as they undeniably were—but that how they saw those changes was, in part, the outcome of the way they were represented in concrete.”34 When historians describe societies they know little about, usually because the societies are ancient or not European, they often resort to terms from material culture. They speak of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age, and they often struggle with a very clouded view of the choices their historical actors were capable of making. In researching this book, I had the benefit of greater personal familiarity with many of the people I would write about, and yet I was still struck by just how much a single material shaped their expectations and conditioned their possibilities. As this book intends to make clear, it was and continues to be an Age of Concrete.
CHAMANCULO UP CLOSE
Subúrbios does not carry the same meaning that suburbs does in English. In Maputo, the subúrbios have been understood as places previously beyond the reach of urban infrastructure and still largely wanting. Some might object to defining places by what they lack. But this is one of the ways that many people in Maputo understand where they live, and they call these areas what they were called by the Portuguese officials who drew the municipal boundaries more than a century ago and put the subúrbios on the far side of those boundaries. Each neighborhood, or bairro, has its own name and its own history. Because of the low-lying topography of much of the subúrbios, many neighborhood names reflect a waterlogged past. Before drainage canals were built in the 1980s, flooding and disease outbreaks were more regularly recurring calamities in the area once called Xitala Mali—meaning, in Ronga, “place of the abundant waters.”35 Munhuana means “the salty place” in Ronga, and it is so called because of the marshy land there. Lagoas, in Portuguese, means “lagoons.” The neighborhood that features most prominently in this book is Chamanculo, one of the oldest and most populous bairros in Maputo.36 It means, in Ronga, “place where the great ones bathe.” The great ones are the ancestor spirits believed to frequent a creek that once passed through the area. (The creek now only makes an appearance, never a welcome one, during heavy rains.) People have lived in Chamanculo in some numbers as long as there has been a city by the Bay of Maputo. Many of the older men who live in the neighborhood were once employed at the docks and rail facilities down the hill. The railway links Maputo to South Africa’s Rand, the economic hub of southern Africa—a connection that initially provided this port city on the Indian Ocean with much of its reason for being.
In 2011, the municipality started paving Chamanculo’s central artery, revealing some of the bairro’s deeper history to those who were unfamiliar with it. The road, named in the colonial era for a Portuguese physician, had been paved for the first time, hastily, almost a half century before, and by the 1980s, it had crumbled to dust. The new road was to be a more deliberate affair, laid with paving blocks rather than asphalt. Even before it was completed, the road was renamed for Marcelino dos Santos, Mozambique’s independence-era vice president, whose mother, over one hundred years old, still lived in a house in nearby Malanga. Because the road had to be widened from its existing footprint, a few feet or so of space had to be carved out of the houses and yards that hemmed it in on either side. As high concrete perimeter walls were peeled away, one gained a better glimpse into the larger yards where successive generations had built houses adjacent to those of their parents and grandparents. In some instances, one could see, in the cross section of a severed house partition, the rough impression left in plaster of old reed walls that had rotted away behind concrete-block walls, a kind of fossil of the not-so-distant past, before masonry construction was the norm. Homeowners affected by the new road had been indemnified for their troubles (though many said what they received was hardly enough), and at least one family’s house had