LITMIR.BIZ

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Africa people live in backyards, not apartment blocks. There are a number of ways to protect your backyard. The Portuguese and the European did not take kindly to it: “you and your superstitions.” I don’t believe it myself . . . in fact I don’t like witchcraft, but the fact is it exists.

      Legislative changes, such as the end of indigenato, were of little use without a new urban social contract shaped by a more detailed and modern state intervention. While in the metropole there was on ongoing debate about a reformation of corporatism, a model that was not efficient within the framework of postwar economic projects, in the colonial context a segregated corporatism proved even more obsolete.³⁸ Outside the corporative system, indígenas were excluded from the legal framework for labor relations, passed in 1956.³⁹ According to the 1962 Rural Labour Code, only individuals considered urban workers, who were mostly white, could join unions. After the end of indigenato, the unionization of Africans was still extremely low.⁴⁰

      Other colonial powers addressed the urban question in Africa much earlier.⁴¹ National and international institutions⁴² shared policies and techniques and promoted empirical studies that aimed to back social policies usually announced under the banner of “social promotion” or “rural welfare” when aimed at the placement of rural populations.⁴³ In the Portuguese context, concerns with detribalization—the social integration of the urban, “evolved” indígena, the monetization of exchanges, the loss of traditional community bonds, the stabilization of the labor force, the dangers of proletarianization in the wake of state and private investment⁴⁴—were recognized by state colonialists such as Marcelo Caetano, Joaquim Silva Cunha, and Adriano Moreira.⁴⁵ But in the colonial terrain, urban management continued to depend mainly on the old methods of co-optation, violence, intimidation, and surveillance.⁴⁶ Organized by Adriano Moreira in 1956, the Centro de Estudos Políticos e Sociais (Center for Political and Social Studies) was the most serious effort toward modernizing the official social-management structure.⁴⁷

      Late empirical diagnoses of the urban situation in Lourenço Marques like Rita-Ferreira’s monograph should not damage the lusotropicalist narrative, which was increasingly promoted by state agencies and occupied with political propaganda and with the affluent local tourism industry. Suburban misery, it was argued, did not result from Portugal’s colonial action but was the outcome of an unbalanced modernity that promoted cultural isolation and self-exclusion.⁴⁸ The urban segmentation was kept because “so many evolved and highly paid Africans” would not trade “the ease, conviviality and prestige they enjoyed in the suburbs for the restrictions, impersonality and anonymity that they would experience in the large and modern apartment buildings.”⁴⁹ The euphemization of discrimination by way of paying compliments to a suburban culture supposedly prone to isolation, did little, however, to tackle the problem of the labor force’s productivity or political and social unrest.

      Progressively inoperative, the suburban social contract, which established a set of minimal principles of sociability and conviviality among groups with diverse backgrounds and habits, was seen in the eyes of the modern planner as a space of marginalities, fostered by a cultural and social anomie that for a long time proved useful to the colonial-exploitation model promoted in the region: that contract benefited suburban land proprietors and homeowners, private and public businesses that exploited the permanent stock of African workers, as well as the vast number of settler families that could easily have had in their houses and commercial spaces a large number of domestic servants.⁵⁰ Despite the existence of distinct strategies to face the urban malaise, which expressed how state institutions were permeated by different rationalities, urban plans, as well as the few concrete interventions in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques, in fact increased the policy of social separation. This situation facilitated the persistence of a cheap reproduction of the labor force, based on a policy of high taxation, low salaries, and reduction of the managing costs of the suburban space: it was up to Africans to build their own existential territory and their social welfare networks. Suburban football grew out of this forced autonomy.

       Housing, Work, and the Creation of “Suburban Autonomy”

      The aim to organize indígena neighborhoods in the periphery of Lourenço Marques, already present in the plan devised by Araújo in the early twentieth century, would only be achieved later. The nearby experience of South African compounds were the inspiration behind the plans in the capital of Mozambique. In 1916 a committee put together by the Câmara do Comércio (Chamber of Commerce) and by the Administração do Concelho do Porto e Caminhos de Ferro (Port and Railway Council Administration)⁵¹ visited Durban to assess the municipal housing experience and the workers’ food regime, so as to apply a similar system to the four thousand indígenas that worked in the port of Lourenço Marques.⁵² Between 1918 and 1921, near the market of Xipamanine, the administration built a small social-housing project. The high cost of rents meant the thirty-three brick houses ended up in the hands of the black and mestiço bourgeoisie.⁵³ The journalist João Albasini visited the neighborhood in 1921 and painted a dark picture: it had no running water, electric lights, sewage system, or roadways and had only a single cesspit.⁵⁴ In 1922 a decree authorized the government of the colony to take out a loan for the construction of hostels or indígena neighborhoods.⁵⁵

      The 1922 police regulations for servants and indígena workers, besides imposing a mechanism of registration, identification, and permanence and contract authorization, forced these Africans to settle into hostels.⁵⁶ The capital for the construction of these facilities, gathered through a fund financed by the compulsory registration of Africans arriving in the city, ended up being diverted to indígena-labor inspection services.⁵⁷ Large companies that hired and transported workers to South Africa, as the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association, the Railways, and Delagoa Bay, built provisional neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city to accommodate migrant workers.⁵⁸ A 1926 ordinance required all male indígenas over fourteen to carry an identification and job carnet: the labor contract determined not only the permanence but also compelled holders to have a place of residence.⁵⁹ It was only at the end of the 1930s that the fund for the construction of houses for the indígenas was reestablished. Using cautious language, the discourse of the Law by Decree of 1938, which regulated the construction of new indígena neighborhoods, suggested an interest in separating populations under the pretext of a controlled adaptation to urban space.⁶⁰ In 1939 the first expropriations took place, close to Angola Avenue. In 1940, after the areas destined for indígena neighborhoods had been established,⁶¹ the first houses of the neighborhood of Munhuana began to be built. Justified by matters of “health, public order, and morality,” the project, inaugurated in 1942 and whose responsibility fell on the Repartição Técnica (Technical Division) of the Câmara de Lourenço Marques (Lourenço Marques Municipality), was inspired by South African models.⁶²

      FIGURE 3.1. Munhuana’s native neighborhood—crematorium. Author: A. W. Bayly and Co. Source: Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino.

      The 1942 Regulamento de Identificação Indígena (Indígenas’ Identification Regulations) and the 1944 Regulamentos dos Serviçais Indígenas (Indígena Servants’ Regulations) maintained the existing mechanisms of control over permanence and mobility, under penalty of correctional labor.⁶³ Forced labor was applied to other misdemeanors: change of job without prior consent, self-employment without permission, casual unregistered work, absence from the municipal area without prior authorization, instigation of colleagues to give up their occupations, failure to register within three days after your arrival.⁶⁴ By the end of the 1950s, fines began to replace forced labor,⁶⁵ and before the end of the indigenato regime, the new identification regulations issued an identity card to “evolved” indígenas who showed good behavior, which afforded them a greater degree of mobility.⁶⁶

      The logic of social closure continued to define the city’s growth plans developed by the Gabinete de Urbanização Colonial (Office for Colonial Urbanization)⁶⁷ in the early 1950s. Plano Aguiar (1952–55), devised in 1947 by the architect João Aguiar

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