Age of Concrete - David Morton New African Histories

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And in the accounts men gave, they tended to exclude the role of women, often a primary role, in the financing of construction—as the significant participation of single women in the colonial-era rental industry helps to make evident. This is to say nothing of the general silencing of the role of women in the construction process itself, as well as in the ongoing maintenance of a house.

      This book is mostly about the relationship of a household to its neighborhood, to the rest of the city, and to a state-in-formation. And though I attempt when possible to reveal the internal dynamics of households—much as the best urban ethnographic work does—this is not my emphasis. As anthropologist Karen Tranberg Hansen writes, the intimate spaces of houses are sites of conflict, and a house that for one member of a household signals a great achievement may be for other members of the household the product of their exploitation or unrewarded sacrifices.46 Nor was I able to explore as deeply as I had hoped to the living arrangements to which stigma was attached. A number of compounds in the colonial era, for example, were largely inhabited by women who relied on sex work, in whole or in part, for their income—and decades later, women were hesitant to even acknowledge that they once lived in a compound, whether or not they engaged in sex work. Furthermore, that many of the cases discussed in this book involve a married man and woman ought not lead the reader to assume that this was the composition of most households.

      The consequences of not fully examining household dynamics for a project that attempts to explore the politics of housing are steep, since such dynamics are ultimately inseparable from such politics. At the same time, although this book argues that the spaces of the city are more than just the background to other dramas, it must be acknowledged that often and, in fact, usually in the course of daily life, they are mere background. Moreover, the background for many extends well beyond Maputo. People in the city have long maintained ties to rural homesteads, and many women in Maputo (and not a few men) travel to fields (machambas) not far from the city. This fact would be more significant, however, for a work that examines labor and livelihoods, which this book does only minimally. Nor can the book escape the choice of the neighborhood where most research took place. Because Chamanculo is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Maputo, with some of the city’s longest-rooted families, its dynamics are quite different from those in neighborhoods to the north of the city, where very few people lived before the 1960s. People in Maputo’s oldest neighborhoods have had a markedly different experience of colonial rule and independence than, say, people who arrived in the city as refugees of the civil war in the 1980s. And Chamanculo, where Presbyterians associated with the Swiss Mission had a significant presence, developed somewhat different types of social networks than, for instance, the nearby neighborhood of Mafalala, with its significant Muslim presence.

      * * *

      Though the chapters are organized in rough chronological order, each is thematically distinct, leading to significant chronological overlap. I have tried to avoid forcing a master narrative upon life in Mozambique’s capital; instead, I make use of many smaller narratives, an approach that might be dismissed as storytelling in some quarters. The object here is to reveal the palette of options available to people in history and the invisible frame of constraint—not to establish what the norms and possibilities definitively were (as if this were even doable) but rather to feel for their contours. To relate the histories of individuals with the details of their lives left in is not for the purposes of making dry history more “accessible.” The stories are the evidence.

      Figure 1.1 The archbishop of Lourenço Marques surveys the Bairro Indígena after a tropical storm, 1966. (Paróquia São Joaquim da Munhuana)

       Chapter 1

       THE SPACES OF LOURENÇO MARQUES

      IN THE months before and after the arrival of independence in June 1975, many of the people living in Lourenço Marques’s City of Cement packed up what belongings they could and left Mozambique for Portugal, South Africa, and Rhodesia. Once-busy avenues were now quiet, and many apartment towers stood nearly empty; they stayed that way until early 1976, when Frelimo nationalized abandoned housing and rental units in cities of cement throughout the country. President Samora Machel announced the new policy on February 3, the first Heroes Day celebrated in independent Mozambique, at a plaza at the edge of the subúrbios. Lourenço Marques had “died” at 9:35 that morning, he declared at the beginning of his speech, and the city had been renamed Maputo.1 Its City of Cement—or at least most of it—now belonged to the Mozambicans whose labor had been exploited to finance and build it, and the president led his listeners, rhetorically, on a tour of the people’s new possession.

      He first walked them from the subúrbios up the slope of Alto Maé. This was a neighborhood just inside the City of Cement and home to many people he called the intermediaries of colonialism, by which he meant people of mixed racial backgrounds. Then, he pointed out how, as one got closer to the city’s poshest neighborhoods, they got progressively whiter. If one headed in a different direction from Alto Maé, one encountered the blocks where Indians lived, where Pakistanis lived, and where the small Chinese community lived. Even absent much of its preindependence European population, Maputo remained Lourenço Marques in its bones. “It is a form of apartheid,” Machel said, “like in South Africa.” He elaborated: “We have to face the reality of our country. It was colonialism that created all of this . . . our lives reflect at the present moment the structures of colonialism.”2

      Many in the crowd knew the route well. Each morning, they trudged up to the City of Cement for work, and each evening, they went back down the slope to home, to the cantina, or to prayer. Young Naftal, the protagonist of Lília Momplé’s short story “Caniço,” written in the 1980s about Lourenço Marques in the 1940s, rushes up the slope from the caniço to work as a domestic servant in a Portuguese household.3 Momplé, who once was a social worker in the subúrbios, portrays Naftal’s neighborhood as a place of garbage heaps, swarming flies, and children whose faces are swollen from malnutrition. On his walk to town, houses of reeds give way to the modest wood-and-zinc houses of Indians and mestiços (people of mixed race), with some concrete-block houses mixed in. Farther on, the wood-and-zinc houses thin out, and the streetscape is all concrete and greenery where “the pleasant scent of the gardens and acacia trees in flower replaces the stink of misery.”4 The passage through the city strikes Naftal as a forward progress through time. He gloomily reflects that the caniço is sinking further into the past.

      During the independence era, it was tempting to characterize Lourenço Marques as an apartheid city, as Machel did. The colonial regime, a Mozambique-based Portuguese architect told a reporter in late 1974, sought to “maintain the population divided by economic ‘apartheid,’” but it had gone about it with more cunning than the regime in South Africa had; the Portuguese had been “less overt and thus less scandalous.”5 All urban policy, the architect continued, had been geared toward housing a “colonial bourgeoisie” in the towers of the City of Cement and keeping everyone else in the caniço, “where in deplorable living conditions the great mass of workers is heaped.” Comparing the Mozambican capital to South African cities targeted what had been a mainstay of Portuguese propaganda. For decades, Portugal insisted that its laws were color-blind. In the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when other European colonial powers were withdrawing from Africa, Lisbon held fast, arguing that during half a millennium as colonizers, the Portuguese had established they were historically exceptional, unique in their aptitude for absorbing other peoples into European civilization.6 Johannesburg served as a convenient foil. Roughly 300 miles away, the apartheid metropolis, shaped by a proudly unbending racism, was an example of what Lourenço Marques was not. In revised histories of the Portuguese era that emerged once that era was ending, Johannesburg typified what Lourenço Marques, essentially, always had been.7

      Mozambique’s capital in the decades after World War II was, in many respects, a dual city. The paved street grid, energy grid, sewage lines, municipal trash disposal, and piped water all more or less ended at the curve of Avenida Caldas

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