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Age of Concrete. David Morton
Читать онлайн.Название Age of Concrete
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780821446751
Автор произведения David Morton
Серия New African Histories
Издательство Ingram
Without a doubt, it ought not pass through the head of a legislator to establish a model neighborhood for natives at the very edge of an area that is systematically doomed in terms of the city’s public hygiene and sanitary precaution in general; for the precise reason that it must be a model neighborhood it must not be built on the site indicated in the plan.128
For the sake of African and European alike, he counseled moving the prospective bairro to a location farther away. A second emphatic opinion followed a month later, in which the director attested to firsthand knowledge of native housing projects in the English and French colonies of West Africa; he said he had never seen a project as “unfortunate” as what was planned for Lourenço Marques.129 The housing commission, however, disagreed with the health official’s negative assessment.130 The commission’s president pointed to several factors in favor of the chosen site, including the low cost of acquiring the land.
Meanwhile, the chief engineer of the regional public works department raged that the houses of the complex were designed without thought to the climate.131 They lacked verandas, and instead of peaked roofs that would help alleviate indoor heat, architects had, apparently for stylistic reasons, opted for flat roofs of reinforced concrete as if Mozambique were “Scandinavia, Greenland, Canada, etc.” Putting people accustomed to living in straw huts in such ovenlike houses was “an extremely grave error,” the engineer contended, as it would compel them to seek refuge at cantinas and other places where they would “create disturbances, etc., etc.” He blamed the influence of South Africa for the flat roofs, an invasive species of construction that, to his chagrin, had already become popular in the European quarters of Lourenço Marques.
During the bairro’s first phase of construction, between 1940 and 1943, almost four hundred units were built, the majority of them with only one room. Each unit had its own narrow yard, and the yards were arranged along streets in half circles around a central plaza, where a police post and the bairro management office were located. Each property was supplied with piped water and electricity, but use was restricted to certain hours of the morning (for water) or evening (for electricity).132 In terms of space, the houses were no upgrade from the suburban norm. Rooms were about 120 square feet, smaller than many reed houses in the vicinity. Nonetheless, the neighborhood initially proved attractive enough that people who were not designated natives—that is, people of mixed race and people with assimilado status—occupied many of the units.133 Presumably, they did so either through the exchange of favors, as was so common within the municipal apparatus, or by illegally subletting from original tenants.
In his report for 1946, the administrator of the concelho harshly criticized the results of the completed development. At enormous expense, the Bairro Indígena da Munhuana only housed some three thousand people, and of these, perhaps not even half were the indígenas it was intended for. “It is possible,” he remarked, “that whoever authorized and outlined this type of housing was possessed of the best of intentions, thinking to give maximum comfort to the native population of the city. Unfortunately this goal was not reached and the problem of housing the great mass of the native population of Lourenço Marques remains unresolved.”134 The Bairro Indígena was “far, very far indeed from meeting needs,” wrote the head of Mozambique’s office of native affairs in 1951.135 Munhuana “seems to us a drop of water in the ocean.” He added that he regretted the municipality had carried out its plans without regard to social welfare and the “customs and traditions” of the natives. “This is not just a matter of building houses,” he argued.136
In historian L. Lloys Frates’s view, the radial plan of the neighborhood demonstrated the panoptic ideal of centralized spatial control, the kind one finds in many prison plans, where everyone and everything can theoretically be monitored at all times.137 The police station in the Bairro Indígena featured a turret, for instance; a police officer, if he could maintain the attention needed for it, could surveil activity across the spacious central plaza. Because the turret was located at the edge of the plaza, however, rather than at its center, one could not see what was happening at ground level in most of the neighborhood. Perhaps more significant than the turret were the low perimeter walls of every yard, which rose no higher than a person’s waist. Clearly, someone intended to keep track of the tenants in this bairro; each unit was given a number and was located on a street with a name, and each tenant established a record with the municipality (that is, the landlord) regarding his or her payment or nonpayment of a monthly rent.
Just about all government initiatives of the time, including forced labor, carried with them the pretension of “civilizing” the natives, and the Bairro Indígena was no exception. Rosa Candla was one of the first residents of the bairro.138 Born in a rural district, she was orphaned at a young age, and in the early 1940s while she was in her teens, a Portuguese couple drove her to Lourenço Marques so she could try her luck in the city. She was taken in by a railroad worker who had just acquired a house in the Bairro Indígena. They lived together for more than sixty years in a two-room unit near the police post. In a 2009 interview, Candla could not recall much about her life in the neighborhood during the colonial era, but she did relate one story that for her encapsulated the nuisance of living in such close proximity to authorities. Like most of the women in the neighborhood, Candla did her shopping at the nearby Xipamanine market. If she passed the police post with her groceries balanced on her head, the officer on duty would order her to remove her bundles and carry them in her hands at her sides, which presumably was the proper comportment of a civilized Portuguese.139
THE PORTUGUESE YARD
For untold numbers of young men and women from southern Mozambique, the daylong bus trip to Lourenço Marques marked their initiation into city life, well before buildings of the City of Cement or its subúrbios came into view. In the rural areas farther north of the city, many young men migrated to the Rand to work on the mines. But during the last decades of Portuguese rule, the Mozambican capital was the destination of younger brothers and sisters, the more desperate, and tradespeople such as carpenters and stonemasons seeking to establish themselves where there was consistent construction work. For most of the younger passengers, the bus ride was the first time they traveled faster than they could run. They often boarded the bus without a single escudo, without shoes, and without food, and unlike those headed for the mines of “John,”—Johannesburg—most had only a vague sense of where they would stay when they arrived in the city. Many were quite young, preteens and adolescents. Much of what they knew of Lourenço Marques was what they heard on the bus.
A tangle of reasons justified the exodus of these young migrants. Added to forced labor and forced cultivation there were now the perpetual dislocations to make way for Portuguese plantations and other agricultural schemes. One earned only a trickle of cash in the city, but in the countryside, one earned it in dribs and drabs if at all. Still, few Mozambicans cultivated an image of Lourenço Marques as a final destination, a place to build a life and family and to thrive. At best, the city was considered a short- or medium-term measure and a temporary refuge. As soon as they had earned some cash and once the crisis at home had passed, they would return. This, at least, was their thinking when they first came to the city.140
A fictional account serialized in O Brado Africano in 1959 and 1960 tells the story of Moleque Salomone, a boy from the countryside who tires of laboring in the fields of his Catholic mission school and seeks escape.141 At the local cantina, he is recruited to work in the home of a Portuguese family in Lourenço Marques. The boy thinks he is twelve years old. The recruiter decides he looks more like fourteen. Salomone discusses his fate with the old miner sharing his seat on the bus to the city. As the landscape rushes past him for the first time, the boy confesses his torn feelings. “No one obligated me to go to the city, but I also didn’t abandon home because I wanted to.”142 The miner listens and shares his own misgivings of a life lived mostly away from home. But he offers the boy no consolation. When they