long the mark of poverty and squalor, as well as the precariousness of urban life in general, and it still is. This had less to do with the material itself than with where it was put to use. In the countryside of southern Mozambique, for instance, a reed house was nothing to be ashamed of. A rural house was circular in plan and walled either with wattle and daub or with caniço, a tall, fairly rigid reed that grew in relative abundance by the region’s waterways.63 Adequately sized tree branches were freely available to serve as pillars and stays. Sources of clay were available, too, and often pillaged from anthills; the material was used to coat the inside and outside of reed walls, insulating huts against wind, insects, and rot. Houses were reasonably well ventilated. Fabrication of the roof was a communal affair. Neighbors joined in to bundle the straw tightly together and affix it to a conical roof structure; then, the cone was lifted onto their heads and conveyed to the hut, to be followed by a celebration.64 A hut was customarily destroyed when its resident died, but the roof structure was preserved and used to shelter a succession of new huts. In the 1940s, years before he became Frelimo’s founding president, Eduardo Mondlane provided descriptions of his childhood in rural southern Mozambique to his former teacher, Swiss missionary André-Daniel Clerc. In the resulting novel, Chitlangou, Son of a Chief (1950), the young protagonist recalls lying on the floor of his hut and looking up with admiration not at the stars but at the spiraling interior structure of the roof, a “venerable smoke-blackened cone” that had sheltered several generations of his family.65 He remarks, “I have often marveled at the skill of the men of my people: from a bundle of sticks, a heap of branches, they have fashioned this covering, in a single piece, which faces all horizons and resists the four winds of heaven.” In Chitlangou’s meditation on roof structure, Mondlane and Clerc were perhaps offering a subtle interpretation of the Mozambican character: “These supple interlaced twigs form a cable which, in its patient itinerary, unites the center to the circumference.”
Figure 1.7 Polana Caniço, 1988. (Carlos Cardoso / CDFF)
Figure 1.8 Polana Caniço, 1987. (CDFF)
Figure 1.9 Cement mix was often used to plaster reed houses. Maxaquene, late 1970s. (Eva Sävfors)
Holes were dug in the ground by hand for the placing of pillars. Parallel stays were fixed horizontally to the pillars at two or three points on both the interior and exterior of the pillars, and they were tied in place with plant fibers. Reeds were then slipped into the gap between the parallel stays. Men—when there were men around to volunteer their labor—tended to do much of the construction work, but not exclusively. Most people knew how to build such a house, and most of them contributed at some point or another to the construction of one. The only significant cost to the home dweller in the countryside, other than the time spent locating materials, was in the preparation of brew for the party that followed the placing of the roof.
By the 1950s, however, the immediate surrounds of the Bay of Lourenço Marques had been stripped of much of their naturally occurring supplies of building materials, and so, unlike in the countryside, building a reed house in Lourenço Marques was a costly affair.66 Contrary to the popular image of patchwork shantytowns improvised from scavenged waste, the materials for the typical reed house were paid for in cash at markets throughout the subúrbios. Reed bundles and tree branches were trucked in from the countryside or arrived by rail from the Incomati valley to the north, where there were even caniço plantations.67 (In the 1960s, materials for reed construction may have been the principal cargo of trains on the Manhiça line.)68 Horizontal wood stays were either rough-edged scrap from the lumberyard and cheap or machine-cut, slightly more elegant, and pricey. For fasteners, wire and nails substituted for plant fibers. Corrugated metal panels were imported from Europe or South Africa until sometime after World War II, when local factories entered into production of some materials as well. The hardy, practical corrugated metal panel, called a chapa in Portuguese, could last for decades, and it changed construction patterns utterly: by the 1950s, most houses in the subúrbios were built rectangular in plan to accommodate the panel dimensions.69 (There is a further discussion of the chapa later in this chapter.) The houses varied in size, but many were about 260 square feet, twice as long as they were wide, and sheltered two rooms.70 The width of the house was slightly more narrow than the width of the metal panel, to allow for a slight roof incline and eave.
In 1968, Alfredo Pereira de Lima authored a brief history of the progress of the city’s European settlement by chronicling its changing building types. In the early nineteenth century, he wrote, the lack of good quality wood compelled the handful of pioneers who lived outside the fort’s walls to build “African cabanas (of the hut type) covered in straw, subjecting themselves to the greatest discomforts.”71 Examples of that type of hut, he continued, were still in evidence, “almost without alterations,” in the subúrbios of Lourenço Marques. At the time Pereira de Lima was writing, there were indeed huts in the subúrbios of the kind one found in the countryside—but not many. An aerial survey in the mid-1960s estimated that fewer than 7 percent of the structures in the subúrbios had a circular plan, versus 88 percent of structures that were rectangular and also possessed a zinc-paneled roof.72 One is left to speculate how many of the circular huts were residences and how many were instead the consulting offices of healers (curandeiros); even today, curandeiros build conical-roofed huts in their yards, beside their houses, where they meet their patients and store their medicines. By rendering the “traditional hut” historically immutable, the historian also failed to recognize how much the changed economics of construction in the subúrbios altered the meaning of the house for the people who lived in it. In any case, a durable, zinc-paneled roof was considered by most people a more practical alternative to straw. In Lourenço Marques, the spare time and neighborly cooperation required to build a sturdy conical roof of the kind Mondlane described may have been, like reeds themselves, in shorter supply than they were in the countryside. One suspects that the fading use of conical roofs also diminished neighborly cooperation.73
The 1969 master plan for Lourenço Marques included a study of home construction in the subúrbios. The author, a Portuguese architect, praised reeds as an urban building material. Reeds, he speculated, filtered out dust and noise but allowed air and speech to pass through, regulating the relationship between intimate home life and outdoor public life without strictly separating them. Perhaps the group feeling typical of African culture owed something to the permeability of reed walls, he continued. Concrete walls, by contrast, would impose European-type individualism and were liable to stifle African conviviality “as coercive obstacles, as exoticisms that modify people’s psychological characteristics.”74
It is unclear whether the architect was referring to the walls between yards, the walls of houses, or both. In any case, residents of reed houses would not have seconded his rosy appraisal. Few houses were elevated above the sewage-strewn waters that frequently inundated the suburban landscape, and rot and vermin shortened the life span of reeds to a few years at most, so the material had to be constantly replaced. Reeds are also highly flammable. With almost everyone in the subúrbios cooking on open coals and lighting their rooms at night with kerosene lamps, it was common for fire to set a house alight, sometimes consuming a few dozen homes.75 The more squeezed the space, the more likely a fire.
Contrary to the architect’s theory of reed-based ubuntu, the density of settlement kept one’s house in often uncomfortable proximity to neighbors and their latrines. People in reed houses complained of a lack of privacy.76 Clay insulation would have blunted some of the outside sounds and smells and prolonged the useful life of reed walls, but the sandy
