Age of Concrete - David Morton New African Histories

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de Lima was writing, there were indeed huts in the subúrbios of the kind one found in the countryside—but not many. An aerial survey in the mid-1960s estimated that fewer than 7 percent of the structures in the subúrbios had a circular plan, versus 88 percent of structures that were rectangular and also possessed a zinc-paneled roof.72 One is left to speculate how many of the circular huts were residences and how many were instead the consulting offices of healers (curandeiros); even today, curandeiros build conical-roofed huts in their yards, beside their houses, where they meet their patients and store their medicines. By rendering the “traditional hut” historically immutable, the historian also failed to recognize how much the changed economics of construction in the subúrbios altered the meaning of the house for the people who lived in it. In any case, a durable, zinc-paneled roof was considered by most people a more practical alternative to straw. In Lourenço Marques, the spare time and neighborly cooperation required to build a sturdy conical roof of the kind Mondlane described may have been, like reeds themselves, in shorter supply than they were in the countryside. One suspects that the fading use of conical roofs also diminished neighborly cooperation.73

      The 1969 master plan for Lourenço Marques included a study of home construction in the subúrbios. The author, a Portuguese architect, praised reeds as an urban building material. Reeds, he speculated, filtered out dust and noise but allowed air and speech to pass through, regulating the relationship between intimate home life and outdoor public life without strictly separating them. Perhaps the group feeling typical of African culture owed something to the permeability of reed walls, he continued. Concrete walls, by contrast, would impose European-type individualism and were liable to stifle African conviviality “as coercive obstacles, as exoticisms that modify people’s psychological characteristics.”74

      It is unclear whether the architect was referring to the walls between yards, the walls of houses, or both. In any case, residents of reed houses would not have seconded his rosy appraisal. Few houses were elevated above the sewage-strewn waters that frequently inundated the suburban landscape, and rot and vermin shortened the life span of reeds to a few years at most, so the material had to be constantly replaced. Reeds are also highly flammable. With almost everyone in the subúrbios cooking on open coals and lighting their rooms at night with kerosene lamps, it was common for fire to set a house alight, sometimes consuming a few dozen homes.75 The more squeezed the space, the more likely a fire.

      Contrary to the architect’s theory of reed-based ubuntu, the density of settlement kept one’s house in often uncomfortable proximity to neighbors and their latrines. People in reed houses complained of a lack of privacy.76 Clay insulation would have blunted some of the outside sounds and smells and prolonged the useful life of reed walls, but the sandy earth of the subúrbios was too loose to serve this purpose. Therefore, those seeking insulation walked with their empty petroleum cans to the mouth of the Infulene River, a few miles away, to fetch black mud. One resident of Chamanculo, Armando Guilundo, recalled that during his childhood in the 1940s and early 1950s, his mother did the fetching.77 She would make the trip to the river and back every day for a week, then spread the black mud on the floors of the house and halfway up the inside of the reed walls; when it dried, she would bring the surface to a polish with her palms. “We children would help her carry the mud, but we didn’t know how to make the walls,” he said. Cracks would appear before long, so she repeated the task two to three times a year. For all the time and resources that people invested in building, maintaining, and occasionally decorating their reed homes, all hoped to one day upgrade to something better.

      Figures 1.10 and 1.11 Site plan and reed house floor plan in Maxaquene (formerly Malhangalene), drawn by Swedish architecture student Ruth Näslund in 1976. The Malhangalene Survey: A Housing Study of an Unplanned Settlement in Maputo, Mozambique, 1976, vol. 1 (Göteborg, Sweden: Chalmers Tekniska Högskola, Arkitektur, 1977), n.p.

      Reed houses were well suited to the subúrbios in at least one respect, though. They could be dismantled and most of their materials recovered for reassembly elsewhere, a feature that took on a particular importance with the growing threat of displacement beginning in the 1950s. A 1959 chronicle in O Brado Africano entitled “Huts in the Air!” described the pitiful sight of the reeds and wood stakes of dismantled houses being carried on the shoulders of men and the heads of women.78 Their landlord has sold the lot they rented to make way for new development, and now they must go in search of another plot. They beg another landowner to allow them to settle on his property, but a few months later he sells the land out from under them. The tenants once again strike their huts, as if they were the tents of nomads, and begin their wanderings anew.

       HOUSES OF WOOD AND ZINC

      Pereira de Lima dated the beginning of the city’s “Tumultuous Age of Wood and Zinc” to the 1870s.79 Transvaal gold may have given Lourenço Marques a new reason for being, but the burgeoning port town was clad in baser metal. Zinc was what the metal panels were called, but to be more precise, they were iron or steel sheets coated with zinc to inhibit corrosion. With that said, deferring to universal practice I will simply refer to them as zinc panels or chapas, the Portuguese word for “metal sheet.” According to Pereira de Lima, chapas were first introduced to Lourenço Marques in the 1850s, just as Portugal relaxed import controls in the colony. Though the panels were used here and there as roofing, it was not until the 1870s that most Europeans and Asians in the town were living and working in wood-framed buildings with walls and roofs of corrugated zinc. The buildings mimicked the houses and commercial establishments that predominated in Johannesburg.80

      Along with quinine and railroads, though less remarked upon, the zinc panel was one of the “tools of empire” that facilitated the penetration of African societies by various European interests in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.81 Lightweight and flat, the panels could be transported easily by ship from foundries in Europe to colonial ports around the globe and then carried into hinterlands by rail, by pack animal, and on the crowns of people’s heads. Wood-framed, zinc-paneled structures required no specialized knowledge to build, allowing for the rapid construction of administrative offices, mission stations, and mining camps, and the single-family wood-and-zinc bungalow, a housing type originally developed for British settlers posted in India, was eventually packaged in kits for deployment in Melbourne, Lagos, and Kimberley. Moreover, wood-and-zinc buildings could be easily disassembled as need dictated and conveyed to another site to be rebuilt—an advantage for settler populations uncertain of where the healthiest place to build might prove to be and for prospectors unsure where they might next strike gold. Apart from the more tangible benefits of the wood-and-zinc construction method, the machine-cut wood beams and the factory-made galvanized panels also helped mark a clear distinction between “modern” colonizer and “primitive” colonized at a time when maintaining such a distinction was a matter of great concern and not a little anxiety.82 At one point, the Baldwin ironworks in England enjoyed a near monopoly on the panels distributed in Mozambique and the rest of southern Africa, and it is somehow appropriate that family scion Stanley Baldwin went on to become Britain’s prime minister during the interwar years—the zenith of its African empire.83

      From the time that the chapa came into common use in Lourenço Marques in the 1870s until independence a century later, Africans of greater means almost always lived in wood-framed, zinc-paneled houses.84 As we have seen, the changes in the Lourenço Marques building code in the 1910s and 1930s that targeted wood-and-zinc construction in the ringed area were an indirect means of pushing out the African population. In the subúrbios, people continued to build in wood and zinc, just as they had from the city’s beginnings. Zinc panels were an upgrade from reeds in that they blocked the wind and dust and did not need to be replaced every few years. Like reed houses, wood-and-zinc houses were useful in suburban conditions for the same reason they were useful in mining camps: they could be quickly disassembled. Actually, it was only because such houses were considered of “precarious” construction that the municipality allowed them to stand at all, since in the subúrbios, permanent construction was, with very few exceptions,

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