The area inside this curve was initially known as the ringed area. Beyond the curve, most of the responsibility of municipal authorities ended and the subúrbios began.
The full significance of the term subúrbio in the Portuguese planning tradition remains vague. In nineteenth-century Portugal, it was used colloquially to refer to new industrial areas surrounding Lisbon and to describe outer housing districts, some of them wealthy, some of them poor—just as the various derivations of the word were used in other parts of Europe and in North America.30 There are some indications that the designation acquired a more precise meaning in Portugal’s colonies, perhaps for the first time in Lourenço Marques in 1903 when areas between the arc of the municipality and the arc of the concelho were specifically identified, in a legal decree, as “subúrbios.”31 Doing so was part of an ongoing attempt to discipline the sell-off of land there, which for decades had been marked by landgrabs, giveaways, and corruption.32 In Europe and North America, suburbs were unanticipated expansions of established cities. In many cases, they were seen negatively, as outside the reach of governmental authority and prejudicial to the development of the city itself. In Lourenço Marques, however, the making of a place called the subúrbios followed closely upon the making of a place called the city, in anticipation of the city’s eventual expansion.33 These areas were not urbanized yet—nor, for that matter, was most of the municipality itself—but they would be, eventually.
Crystallizing Portugal’s renewed efforts at empire was the indigenato.34 Instituted in 1899, with many revisions thereafter, this was the legal apparatus upon which rested Mozambique’s system of forced labor. Basically, all “native” (indígena) men not engaged in formal employment had a “moral and legal obligation” to labor for the government or for a private designee of the government for up to six months at a time. Since farming one’s own fields did not count as a formal job, most Mozambican men were vulnerable to impressment—and when authorities felt moved to, women, children, and the elderly were forced to labor, too. Chibalo, as this kind of labor was called in southern Mozambique, paid meager wages (if any at all) and often lasted more than the statutory six months. It could also be levied as punishment for not paying hut taxes or for the most trivial offenses, real or imagined. Beyond that, it imposed hardships not just on the men who were forced into backbreaking, sometimes fatal work but also on the families they left behind. Chibalo was one of cruelest facts of Mozambican life, along with forced crop cultivation, which was instituted in the 1930s.35 Both were legally abolished in the early 1960s, though various forms of coerced labor nonetheless persisted in many parts of Mozambique.36
Figure 1.3 The subúrbios, 1978–79. (Barry Pinsky)
Figure 1.4 Mavalane, 1980s. (CDFF)
Many scholars have plumbed the depths of chibalo, and the subject of forced labor will not be expanded upon here. Penvenne produced the authoritative account of how the indigenato functioned in Lourenço Marques, where chibalo labor built nearly all of the city’s public works projects, including the cathedral that was erected in the 1940s by crews of men who were chained together as they worked.37 A few aspects of the indigenato, however, deserve to be highlighted here.
The indigenato redefined citizenship within Mozambique, creating a legal distinction between so-called natives and nonnatives. Europeans, Asians, and many people of mixed race were considered nonnatives, or “civilized,” and were conferred the rights of Portuguese citizenship at birth. But black Mozambicans—the vast majority of the population—were deemed natives unless they could prove themselves sufficiently “evolved” to be considered Portuguese. Those hoping to shed their native status had to read and write in Portuguese, earn a reasonable wage in a formal job, dress the way a Portuguese was expected to dress, eat what a Portuguese did, and eat it with a knife and fork. He or she had to speak Portuguese in the house, and the house at the very least had to be of wood-and-zinc construction, rather than reeds. The rules could be vague and were revised many times over the years, and the application of the law was particularly murky when it came to women and to the mixed-race children of “civilized” fathers who did not acknowledge parentage.38 At some point after one successfully applied for citizenship, an inspector would visit one’s household to verify that standards were being upheld. Over the decades, the African press frequently decried the double standard that did not require the many illiterate whites in Mozambique to pass a test to obtain citizenship. The deliberately rudimentary education provided to black Mozambicans ensured there was only a tiny pool of potential applicants. For black Mozambicans, becoming assimilated (assimilado) was usually necessary for pursuing more advanced educational opportunities and climbing higher up the job ladder.39 Nonetheless, having to discard as inferior one’s African identity was a humiliating experience for many, and some who met the requirements for assimilation refused to go through with it.40
Figure 1.5 Pushing a truck through suburban roads, 1971. (Notícias archive)
Much like France and the évolués (evolved ones) of its empire, Portugal trumpeted the existence of assimilados to show its critics that its native policies were not racist, since they demonstrated that anyone, no matter the color of their skin, could become Portuguese.41 Yet the number of assimilados was alone sufficient to refute that claim: by the abolition of the system in the early 1960s, there were perhaps only five thousand people with assimilado status in the entire territory, considerably less than 1 percent of the total African population.42 Still, however miniscule the number of people classified as assimilado may have been in Mozambique during the reign of the indigenato, they were nonetheless a recognizable segment of the population of Lourenço Marques. Following the abolition of the indigenato, the word assimilado continued to refer in common parlance to any black Mozambican who had acquired a certain level of formal education and secured a modestly paying job, such as clerk, office assistant, schoolteacher, bookkeeper, interpreter, or nurse—the highest positions to which a black Mozambican could realistically aspire during the colonial era.43 In the years after independence, to have been assimilado carried with it the unjust stigma of having purportedly approximated oneself too closely to the colono (the Portuguese settler) and benefited from the impoverishment of one’s Mozambican brothers and sisters.44
Figure 1.6 A water fountain in the subúrbios, undated. (AHM, icon 4621)
As Penvenne has illustrated, there had always been a number of more privileged Africans in the city during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not a few of them highly visible figures in local affairs.45 They were traders, elephant hunters, labor recruiters, journalists, and intellectuals, many with some combination of African, European, and Asian parentage. Their cultural and linguistic fluency—the ability to make connections between different groups of people and different spheres of urban and rural life—was a point of pride and often a source of profit. On paper, however, the indigenato pigeonholed more-privileged blacks into the single, distinct category assimilado, while hiving off those Africans with a more diverse racial background (called mestiços, mulatos, or mistos) as if they were a separate and identifiable community. The law flattened, conceptually, the myriad interests that collided daily in a place that still retained many of the characteristics of an unruly frontier town. The assimilado, the black Mozambican who had supposedly abandoned an African self in exchange for European status, was, in more than one sense, a Portuguese
