of Oregon pine, false ceilings, and many rooms on the inside.87 A false ceiling regulated the indoor climate. It caught leaks from above, stopped moisture rising from below, and most importantly formed an attic buffer space that kept hot air from reaching living areas. The higher the roof, the more it drew off heat from below. More zinc panels and more wood were required, so these high-peaked roofs (high, that is, against the low-slung norm of the subúrbios) advertised from some distance away the relative wealth of the people they sheltered. The finest wood-and-zinc houses, perched on concrete plinths and reaching almost to treetops, gave neighborhoods the barest hint of a skyline. The scale was deceiving. Even in the largest houses of the subúrbios, all living quarters were located on a single floor.
Despite the exigencies of the building code, there were still some four hundred houses of wood and zinc within the City of Cement in 1950. One displeased engineer called them “genuine crimes, genuine matchboxes, authentic abortions.”88 At a forum in 1949 on problems facing the municipality, an official called them “obsolete vestiges of the heroic epoch of occupation, almost all of them nests of illness, giving to certain streets the lamentable aspect of shantytowns.”89 He hoped they could be demolished in short order. When they were torn down, the panels often got sold to people in the subúrbios, who used them to build houses that were a mark of relative status. Because the wood-and-zinc houses required greater resources to build, popular memory tends to recall them as out of reach for all but assimilados and mestiços.90 But this was not the case. Even some of the larger houses were built by people whom no one would consider, by any definition, assimilado. Jochua Guambe, born in rural Inhambane, went to Lourenço Marques in the early 1900s to avoid paying the newly imposed hut tax.91 He did not work in the city, and he never had need to learn Portuguese. Earning his living as a hunter, he would bag game in Inhambane and then travel to South Africa, mostly on foot, to sell animal skins and claws at a market in Durban. Lourenço Marques was merely a convenient base of operations between his sources of supply and places of demand, and later, the city’s subúrbios became the site of Guambe’s small real estate empire. In the 1930s, he built a house of wood and zinc for his family, on one of about two dozen lots of property he eventually purchased in Chamanculo. It had the features common to the houses of the suburban elite: a semienclosed veranda, a concrete plinth, a false ceiling, and a pigeon coop perched beside the roof. The house was L-shaped, rather than a conventional rectangle, so instead of two roof inclines, there were four, giving the roof a more complicated profile and a more South African appearance than the more common duas águas. There were two bedrooms, one for himself and one for his sons.
“If you had a house like this, it was a symbol of the fact that you owned land,” said Castigo Guambe, Jochua’s youngest son. “It wasn’t just anybody who owned land.” With his native status, Jochua Guambe could not actually be a landowner in the eyes of Portuguese law.92 But his eldest son, Júlio, who worked in a shoe store downtown, had legally assimilated, and he vouched for his father on titling documents. When Jochua Guambe died in the 1960s, he left his properties and the family house to Júlio, and when Júlio died in the 1980s, the house passed to Castigo, who still lives there today. Guambe replaces the wood-slat interior walls when they rot, and he repaints the exterior zinc panels green when they fade. Recently, he had to cut down the sick mango tree that grew beside the house, the last survivor of the many that his father had once planted in the yard. It was the tree where his father invited the curandeiras of the neighborhood to perform ancestral ceremonies, a practice Castigo continued for years. Studding the trunk were the heads of rusted nails that had secured the drying skins of slaughtered goats for the better part of a century.
House construction stretched the resources even of so-called assimilados. Alsene Cumbana, who had assimilated status, held many jobs over the years—as a deliveryman for a bakery, as a veterinary worker—and when he went to Lourenço Marques in 1947, he was able to buy a simple, two-room house of wood and zinc.93 A few years later, he married. But as the family grew, eventually including nine children, and as they took in Cumbana’s older brother, a miner who had lost the use of his legs, they could not afford to expand the house solely on one salary. Eurica Cumbana, Alsene’s wife, worked the family’s garden plot in the nearby countryside, did all the food preparation and cleaning, and was responsible for raising the children, but now she asked her husband to buy firewood and charcoal for her to resell in front of the house. “She would split the wood herself,” said Elizabeth Cumbana, her daughter, who still lived in the house in 2011. “She wouldn’t even get someone to help her do it, because she said that it would be like giving money away.” The house’s two rooms eventually became five. Eurica told her daughter: “This house grew because I always sacrificed myself for it to grow.” Many women in the subúrbios financed house construction through the selling of charcoal, produce, and traditional brews.94 They also supported each other’s projects by participating in lending clubs, called xitique.95
It will be recalled that the word assimilado took on meanings beyond its legal definition and applied colloquially to black Mozambicans of some means. It is likely that some people were thought of as assimilado just because they lived in a house of wood and zinc. That is, the house made the assimilado, rather than the other way around. In the 1930s while working at the counter of a building materials store downtown, Salvador Simão Hunguana built a house in Malhangalene, a lightly populated, almost rural neighborhood north of the city.96 The house he built was particularly distinguished for the area, having eight rooms and being surrounded by a large citrus grove. Working at the materials store no doubt helped Hunguana with supplies. When his assimilado friends pulled strings to get assimilated status for him as well, his house—just as impressive if not more so than some of the Portuguese-owned homes in the vicinity—allowed him to overcome his shortcomings in regard to other legal requirements. Somewhat indirectly, housing was destiny. Hunguana’s children were able to enter government schools and eventually acquire higher-paying jobs because of the house their father had built.
By the 1960s, wood-and-zinc construction predominated in the parts of the subúrbios closest to the city.97 But in the years following independence, when enforcement of the masonry ban was greatly relaxed, new construction in wood and zinc came to an abrupt halt. Regardless of whatever prestige and comfort it afforded over the reed-built house, the wood-and-zinc house could not compete in either prestige or comfort—or in cost—with construction in concrete block.
CANTINAS
José da Costa shipped off for Mozambique as a young Portuguese army conscript in the 1940s, and upon his discharge a few years later, unexcited about a return to village life in Portugal, he decided to stay in Lourenço Marques.98 On his own and barely literate, da Costa had few prospects. He took a job as the assistant to a stonemason. Then, he met an enterprising African woman named Glória da Conceiçao Nhambirre. She convinced him to borrow a truck so they could go into business transporting firewood from the countryside. They sold their wood bundles at a stand in Chamanculo, and they lived together in the reed house of her family nearby. Nhambirre possessed the acumen, nimbleness, and entrepreneurial drive that da Costa, as he unabashedly told others, completely lacked. But from birth, da Costa had an important qualification that Nhambirre did not. He was Portuguese and thus could sign official documents and own a business. After a few years of selling firewood, the couple built a cantina.
By the mid-1960s, there were hundreds of cantinas in the subúrbios, about one for every five hundred to six hundred people.99 The cantina was a commercial and social hub of everyday suburban life, a cross between a general store and a bar, and with few exceptions, it was the only authorized business in the subúrbios. To say it catered to people’s day-to-day needs is to understate just how much people depended on it. At six in the morning, the first customers of the day filed in, sullen men often on their way to the docks, with an escudo and a half in hand for a roll of bread. Throughout the day, women or their children appeared at the counter with small change to buy a few tablespoons of cooking oil or a cup of rice. Over the years, the municipality installed public fountains here and there in the subúrbios, but they fell far short of demand. The long lines and
