a few more cents at their disposal to fill their empty oil cans at the nearest cantina spigot and pay for the privilege. Perhaps the most lucrative time of the day for a cantina proprietor (cantineiro) was when men returned from work and gathered to drink. Cantinas were where those with native status could legally purchase alcohol, and from the late nineteenth century onward, they were essential to Lisbon’s strategies for making the colonies a profitable market for (cheap) Portuguese wine.100
Figure 1.16 João da Costa, a.k.a. “Xibinhana,” pours a drink at his Chamanculo cantina, 1960s. (Sérgio da Costa)
The cantina was a masonry structure of impressive size—impressive, that is, only because there was nothing around to compete with it. Older cantinas, like the many built in the 1930s, had high-peaked roofs and wide pediments supported by fluted iron columns so that the entrance was like a cut-rate Roman temple portico.101 Cantinas tended to be elevated well above the rainy season high-water mark, and their wide verandas gave clear views of the street life passing by. Even after business hours, when tables were put away, cantina verandas were a place for men to congregate away from home. For many women, the cantina was a necessary stop during the workday; for many men, the cantina was a place to relax.
Figure 1.17 Dinis Marques and the da Costa children, behind the Xibinhana cantina, mid-1960s. (Dinis Marques)
Fines for public drunkenness were once the local administration’s most significant source of revenue, according to Penvenne.102 Many employers, meanwhile, had long identified cantinas as a threat to a healthy, well-disciplined workforce, and in the 1950s, hours were restricted.103 African men were said to be spending too much of their earnings getting drunk rather than sustaining their families. Cantineiros locked up in the evening, but customers knew they could enter through the yard at the “horse door,” a rear entrance so called because during their nightly patrols, mounted police would also sometimes show up there.104 Usually, though, an officer could be easily bought off with a beer. Perhaps as a result of the new rules, cantinas built in the 1960s minimized outdoor space. The newer cantinas lacked verandas to command the streetscape. They were turned inward.
A serialized short story that appeared in 1960 in O Brado Africano, a newspaper for African readers, was written as a defense of rule-breaking cantineiros and their clientele. The economics of poverty, argues the fictional Chinese cantineiro of the story, require people to make their purchases whenever they get hold of a little cash, a happenstance that follows its own clock. The African customer, he adds,
likes to converse a little, together with friends someplace, let’s say a public place, just as whites do, and this place, similar to the clubs of white people, can only be a cantina… there he feels the pleasure in passing a few convivial hours outside work, wooing women, listening to the radio, hearing the latest news in a different way than he was used to in the bush. And what would be the ideal place for this mutual companionship? Obviously the cantina!105
The cantina was perhaps the only place where non-Africans were compelled to cater to the pleasure of Africans, in part because of competition among cantineiros.106 At the same time, the cantineiro was often seen as a parasitic figure who schemed for ways to cheat his clientele. He was often so out of his element and reliant on an African employee or companion to communicate with customers that he became a target of ridicule. It was an unequal struggle, but the clientele made ample use of the power to name. Penvenne writes of the generic cantineiro moniker: mumaji, which was indirectly derived from the Portuguese phrase meaning “want more?”—the badgering question of a cantineiro seeking to run up a customer’s tab.107 Residents of the subúrbios also categorized individual cantineiros according to an elaborate and uncharitable taxonomy. José da Costa was a fixed, ornery presence behind his cantina counter, and his dog Lisboa (Lisbon) was always seen dozing at the foot of his stool. The similarities between da Costa’s snarling features and those of his dog earned him the nickname Xibinhana, which in Ronga means “bulldog,” a name that stuck precisely because he hated it. Da Costa and Nhambirre never gave their cantina a name, but everyone called it Xibinhana. Another cantina in Chamanculo, the only one with two levels, was unofficially called Ximajana—meaning “short one”—because of the small-statured Portuguese who owned it. Another cantina was Zestapor, a corruption of José está porco—“José is piggish”—because of its owner’s generally unhygienic appearance, his practice of storing pig feed in his truck, and his habit of brushing his teeth in the same sink where customers washed their hands. The cantineiro just a hundred feet or so away was nicknamed Agarragajo—“Getthatguy.” That is what he would yell from the cantina’s steps when a customer slipped away without paying, which apparently occurred with some frequency.108 In a place without addresses and with few official street names, the local cantina became the most obvious landmark when giving directions to one’s house, and it lent its name to the immediate area of the neighborhood.109
COMPOUNDS
In a more distant part of Chamanculo, about halfway between the City of Cement and the campus of the São José de Lhanguene Mission, is what must be the largest pigeon coop in Maputo. Most of the larger houses of wood and zinc feature a coop somewhere on the roof or in the yard. This particular one is more like a pigeon apartment block. It features some four hundred separate holes for pigeons to roost, and it rivals in size the elegant wood-and-zinc house beside which it stands. The house was built in the 1920s by a Goan man named José Araújo, but the pigeon coop—expanded several times over the years—was the work of his son António.110
António Araújo, whose mother was Ronga, worked for years as a truck driver for the municipality, and as a younger man he sidelined as a journalist for O Brado Africano. In the 1960s, he became an entrepreneur. Calling on his connections in the city government, he was able to open a bar and dance club directly adjacent to his house, and because it was 1962, he called the place Twist Bar. His wife, his brother, and his sons took turns behind the counter and in the kitchen while he was occupied with his other business affairs. One of those businesses, a housing compound built at the other end of his property, was meant to target the clientele coming through the bar doors. With dozens of one-room units, it may have been the largest compound in Chamanculo.111
The English word compound, when referring to housing, possesses a surprising history. It has nothing to do with a being a mixture of elements, as in a chemical compound or a composition, but probably derives from the Malay word kampong, which means “village.”112 The word’s almost bucolic origins speak to the radical transformations to which the age of empire subjected it: compounds were what the British called the earliest colonial housing clusters in Southeast Asia—enclosures for European residences and factories. Later, the miserable, fenced-in dormitories where miners were housed on South Africa’s Rand were called compounds, and when larger employers in Lourenço Marques built worker housing, often big sheds to shelter hundreds of people under one roof, compound became componde.113 In the first decades of the twentieth century, conditions at these various dormitories in Lourenço Marques were considered scandalously abysmal, even by the low standards inherent to a system of forced labor.114 Neither authorities nor employers showed any sustained interest in financing a housing solution, either through paying higher wages or building livable homes. They were not eager, furthermore, to make permanent a workforce that it usually suited them to treat as transient.
In the 1950s, workers migrating to the city who did not have family to stay with and could not afford to build or rent a reed house of their own had no choice but to live in a compound. The typical compound featured a series of discrete units arranged in
