indigenato altered the lives even of those not directly taken for chibalo. The system institutionalized the debasement of all African labor so that it was cheap and more easily controlled. Natives who were engaged in waged labor and even Africans who held citizenship saw their roles diminished at the port, the railway, and the municipality—the city’s largest employers. At the low end of the wage spectrum, African earning power was undermined by chibalo; the threat of it sent men to the city looking for any formal work they could find. And the earnings of those in better positions were eroded by the fitful though continual growth of the Portuguese population, as whites benefited from job preferences.47
Until the 1960s, natives carried a pass that showed they had been granted an administrator’s permission to be in Lourenço Marques, and this permission was tied to the securing of a job. People in the subúrbios lived in fear of police raids. Those caught without a pass were subjected to vicious whippings or chibalo or both, and women, for whom formal work was much harder to come by, tended to live a particularly fugitive existence.48 Assimilados, too, were stopped and ordered to produce documentation; they had to show they were not natives.49 The right of all black Mozambicans, whether citizens or not, to simply walk the streets of Lourenço Marques or even the dirt tracks of the subúrbios was made contingent. One did not belong unless one proved otherwise.
The logic of the subúrbios and the logic of the indigenato, though initially articulated at roughly the same time, were not perfectly synced. The subúrbios were where the promise of municipal infrastructure ended; the boundary line that marked the frontier was drawn with a vision in mind of the European metropolis that some hoped would soon emerge within the curve’s embrace. Ill-defined parts of the subúrbios were called native reserves, but in practice, these were not like the native reserves of South Africa and neighboring British colonies, that is, areas where all black Africans not residing at their places of employment had to live and where only Africans could live. As natives, most people living in the subúrbios were subject to the ostensibly customary authority of a Portuguese-appointed hereditary leader, or régulo (discussed in the following chapter), just as they would be in the countryside. But the word subúrbio in itself conveyed no precise legal implications relative to either race or citizenship. Officially speaking, one did not have to be native or black to live in the subúrbios, and one did not have to be white to live within the curve of the ringed area.
Thoroughgoing segregation was achieved nonetheless, testament to the power of racialized labor exploitation and restrictive ownership laws, as well as ever-more exacting building codes that excluded most Africans from a city being remade in concrete.50 In the early twentieth century, natives who already claimed property within Lourenço Marques proper were allowed to keep it so long as they could establish proof of possession, but few could assemble the paperwork demanded by the municipal bureaucracy to do so. Those who could were limited to 400 square meters (less than one-tenth of an acre), enough space for a house and a small yard.51 Also in the first decade of the century, municipal authorities indulged in what became a recurring compulsion to modernize the face of the city, and such initiatives usually resulted in the demolition of houses that did not belong to whites. As nearly everywhere in the colonial world, fear of the plague had justified the destruction of a number of houses belonging to Africans and Asians, in the city and the subúrbios; the rules exempted white-owned homes from health standards.52 One health official described the capital in 1910 as having the “mean aspect of a city of tin,” referring to a shantytown, and that year, citing sanitation concerns, the municipality decreed that all new construction within city limits had to be built in masonry.53 The order confined to the subúrbios the new builders who could afford no more than wood and zinc. In 1932, costly bureaucratic procedures that were imposed on those who wanted to expand, renovate, or simply paint their existing houses made maintaining one of the aging wood-and-zinc homes in the city that much more onerous. Houses constructed of wood and zinc within the ringed area, furthermore, were assessed a building tax at a higher rate than those made of concrete block.54 Because of the suppression of African wages by the indigenato and the inflow of whites from the metropole, Africans could not maintain a hold within the city.
In 1938, the governor-general marked out native reserves at some distance from the city, in which all natives had to reside unless they were living in an employer’s compound or home.55 Those houses remaining in newly designated native-free areas of the subúrbios would be destroyed. The draconian law would have been of a piece with South African–style segregation if it had been implemented. According to Penvenne, Portugal’s colonial minister scuttled the plan, arguing that it violated the principles of nonracialism.56 By then, there were very few black Mozambicans within the city proper who were not also living with their employers as domestic servants. Most had long since been pushed to the subúrbios. Those who were from Lourenço Marques and belonged to the original Ronga-speaking clans had already been squeezed off their land by arbitrary removals and stricter building codes.57
The displacement of Africans from the area where most whites lived had proceeded incrementally, though nonetheless inexorably. By 1960, the subúrbios were also home to two-thirds of the mixed-race population, somewhat more than one thousand people of Asian (mostly South Asian) background, and more than nine thousand whites—almost a quarter of the city’s European population at the time.58 Many of these suburban whites lived in concrete neighborhoods that had eaten into the subúrbios, displacing the people who had lived there, so even though their title deeds said “subúrbio,” the neighborhood often had some degree of urban infrastructure. But other whites, mostly men, lived in the cantinas—general stores that doubled as bars—that they ran in the heart of the subúrbios or in wood-and-zinc houses just at the edge of the city proper, often with African partners. There were also white men who kept two households—one with an African companion and one with a white and legally recognized spouse in town or in Portugal. Alto Maé, a neighborhood just inside the curve, was somewhat comparable in its demographics to the suburban neighborhoods just outside the curve, though more prosperous relatively speaking. In the meantime, the curve itself had become a nexus for prostitution in a port city notorious for it. The borderlands where city met subúrbio represented the real diversity, in all respects, of the Portuguese Empire, though it was not the kind of racial pluralism that Lisbon image-makers were eager to promote.
In the 1950s, pushed by hut taxes, forced crop cultivation, chibalo, and land dispossession and pulled by Lourenço Marques’s economic growth, more and more people from the countryside went to the capital seeking employment. At the same time, the immigration of Portuguese to the city, many themselves fleeing destitution in Portugal, was climbing apace. Between 1940 and 1960, the total population of both city and subúrbios almost tripled, to about 178,500 people, with the African population consistently accounting for about two-thirds of the population (though Africans were likely undercounted).59 The influx of Portuguese immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s brought city development flush against the caniço.
This is when the ringed area truly became the City of Cement—more completely concrete and nearly universally thought of as “the white city” despite the enduring diversity of some neighborhoods.60 Mestiço men and well-dressed black men (that is, assimilados) could be seen in restaurants, bars, the cinema, and shops. But most establishments in the City of Cement did not welcome black Mozambicans, most of whom could not afford to shop there in any case.61 When residents of the subúrbios went to the City of Cement, it was to work, and when they clocked out, they were subject to a 9:00 p.m. curfew.62 In any encounter or near encounter with whites, one was expected to show what was considered proper deference. Failure to step off the sidewalk to make way, to humbly lower one’s gaze, or to stand up and remove one’s cap in the presence of a police officer could result in a beating. Employers could request that police punish their employees for absences and perceived misdeeds. Until the early 1960s, labor relations throughout Mozambique were based on a credible threat of violence. In the City of Cement, it could often seem just around the corner.
THE REED HOUSE
For
