South African urban planner probably would have found Lourenço Marques as exotic as the South African tourist did.14 Unlike in South Africa, the displacement of Africans in Mozambique’s capital occurred as the City of Cement expanded, rather than to realize theories of racial “separate development.” People in the subúrbios were more or less on their own, and the limited number of housing units built for Africans in Mozambique by the government or by religious charities during the entire period of colonial rule probably amounted to less than a single neighborhood in Soweto.15 In the 1950s, several thousand poor and working-class whites lived in the Lourenço Marques subúrbios, often side by side with African neighbors and often with African companions. The cities of Portuguese Africa can certainly be understood as variations on an apartheid theme, but we could just as easily consider the personal intimacies that persisted despite segregation, as well as the separations maintained in tight quarters.
Figure 1.2 The curve where city meets subúrbios, 1969. (MITADER)
This chapter demonstrates the place of the built environment in people’s lives during the decades after World War II, materially and symbolically: how urban space, at its many scales, did not simply reflect relations among city dwellers but also conditioned them. Perhaps all too typical of histories of the colonial era, the first part of the narrative emphasizes Portuguese initiatives and how Africans were compelled to respond to them. Even while attempting to center the subúrbios in the story of mid-twentieth-century Lourenço Marques, one cannot help but see them as the outcome of the colonial conquests of an earlier period. The tour hastens through previous centuries before lingering in the 1950s. Much of what is said here also applies to the 1960s and early 1970s, but the specificities of urban life during the last fifteen years of Portuguese rule are discussed in chapters that follow.
INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS
The Portuguese were not the only Europeans to show interest in what they later called the Bay of Lourenço Marques, but they were the first (in the early 1500s) and the most persistent.16 The bay and the estuary that fed into it gave access to sources of ivory, gold, and slaves in the southeast African interior; the name given to the bay derived from a Portuguese ivory trader, allegedly the first European to exploit the area.17 For centuries, the Portuguese at Lourenço Marques never numbered more than a few dozen, and malaria tended to reduce the settlement to a handful until more troops could be ordered to repopulate the small garrison and more civilians could be compelled to join them.18 From the late eighteenth century onward, the Portuguese military post and its adjoining settlement were located on the north shore of the estuary where it opened onto the bay, on a sandy spit of land described by historian Alfredo Pereira de Lima as less than a mile long and a quarter mile wide and “almost drowned by pestilential swamp.”19 The construction in the mid-nineteenth century of a stone-and-lime wall along the north side of the settlement helped stave off raids from that direction, but it did nothing to protect against mosquitoes. Beyond the marsh and on slightly higher ground were the scattered homesteads of people loyal to the Mpfumu chief, and on the south side of the estuary was the closely linked Tembe clan.20 The longtime inhabitants of the areas around the bay spoke Ronga, and they called the Portuguese settlement Xilunguíne, meaning “place of the white men.” Throughout the nineteenth century, the vast majority of Xilunguíne’s residents were not whites but rather Asians, African traders and slaves, and people who claimed diverse origins.21
Beset by disease, the settlement was, for most of its early history, a precarious place to be for virtually everyone who lived there. Considering the unsanitary conditions and the tumbledown state of most housing, it is no exaggeration to say that the first slum of Lourenço Marques was the settlement itself. Signs of vigor resulted from the growth of Boer settlement in South Africa’s interior from the 1830s onward, together with the spike in the overall European population of the hinterland following the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley in the 1860s. Lourenço Marques was the closest seaport to Pretoria, and for the Boers it had the added advantage of being controlled by a power other than Britain. In 1876, shortly after Portugal successfully fended off a British attempt to claim part of the bay, the military post was elevated to the status of a town. One year later, a team of engineers arrived from Portugal to begin draining the swamps that surrounded the settlement on most sides, and they were celebrated as conquering heroes. These two linked developments—the resolution of Portugal’s sovereignty over the bay and the infrastructural upgrades—allowed Lourenço Marques to expand in pace with growth in South Africa.
The rooting of the Portuguese settlement also coincided with the abolition of slavery in Mozambique in the 1870s, after which the town would become a showcase for how labor could continue to be exploited under different guises. Forced African labor dug the earth and hauled the rocks to fill the swamps surrounding Lourenço Marques. But according to Jeanne Penvenne, the public works projects that made the vicinity of the fort more tolerable for habitation simultaneously made life less tolerable farther afield.22 The dirt for fill was excavated from nearby areas of established African settlement, thus displacing homesteads, and after the work was done, the empty pits became ponds of stagnant water and breeding grounds for malarial mosquitoes. In other words, infrastructural improvements displaced disease conditions from the growing town to the areas that were now on the town’s outskirts. Just as significant to the future of African life in Lourenço Marques was a fire that swept through the Portuguese settlement in 1875. The fire was the latest in a series, and because it had been fed by reed-walled, thatched-roof structures, construction in reed and straw was prohibited. In turn, that presumably pushed much of the African population beyond the bounds of the town’s perimeter wall.
With the opening of the goldfields in the Transvaal in the 1880s, the town came more fully under the glare of global capitalism. In 1887, the year the town was elevated to a city, the colony’s chief engineer gave Lourenço Marques its first significant urban plan—essentially, a Cartesian grid imposed on a non-Cartesian landscape.23 As Valdemir Zamparoni observes, it might have been easier to simply move the settlement to a more salubrious spot as some advocated, but the impulse to force nature to submit before man and technology overwhelmed pragmatism.24 Surveyors marked out the straight lines of future growth, and street signs appeared for streets that did not yet exist. Over the next decade, Portugal’s relationship to Mozambique and to the people who lived there changed rapidly and radically, as did the relationship of Lourenço Marques to the rest of the colony. What was known as Portuguese East Africa had been limited mostly to trading outposts on the coast and to posts and plantations along the Zambezi River; only in 1891 were Mozambique’s borders with British Africa agreed upon. Now, by the terms of the Berlin Conference, Portugal sought “effective occupation.”25 In 1895, the Transvaal railway was completed, and in recognition of the city’s centrality to Mozambique’s economic prospects, the colony’s capital was soon moved to Lourenço Marques from the Island of Mozambique, the sleepy former slaving port off the colony’s north coast.26 By 1897, Portuguese forces and their local allies had destroyed southern Mozambique’s Gaza state, consolidating Portugal’s control over the territory. Much of Mozambique was then parceled up and leased to concessionaires to administer and exploit, but the region south of the Save River, including Lourenço Marques, fell under Portugal’s direct governance.
For administrative purposes, two concentric arcs were drawn on the chart of Lourenço Marques, relative to a point near its port.27 The outer arc, with a radius of 7 kilometers, defined the concelho within it—that is, the principal administrative unit governing everyday life in the Portuguese settlement and its near vicinity. The inner arc, with a tight radius of approximately 2 kilometers, defined much of the northerly limit of the municipality, which would administer specifically urban services such as transit, trash removal, road construction, and building permits.28 At some point (it is unclear exactly when), barbed wire was installed along the municipal boundary.29 This line later became the route of the Ring Road, and
