or steel sheeting. For residents of the subúrbios, the sound of rainfall is a hard, metallic rattle.
To the curious architecture students, the reed houses connected present-day Maputo to a long vernacular building tradition on the city’s margins. “We were trying to learn how they were built so we don’t lose this knowledge,” Maputo architect Rui Gonçalves, who was one of the student researchers, later told me.4 “How can we learn from what we did here, from our own culture, from our own history?” The part of the neighborhood where their professor sent them was a sandy area adjacent to the bay shore and its polluted but popular beach. Gonçalves and the two other students on his research team spent hours looking for reed houses but had no luck. “We started getting desperate. We asked people, ‘Where can we find houses of caniço?’ Most people couldn’t help us. We walked and we walked, until we got to what you could say was the end of the line: a swamp. We felt let down.” But then they decided to walk around the edge of the swamp, and they found an isolated reed house here, another there. Occasionally, there would be two next to each other. The inhabitants of these houses were among the most impoverished people in the subúrbios, living on land where no one else would build. Water lay just below the surface.
When the students asked residents questions, they were happy to answer, but they had trouble finding anything good to say about their houses. Reeds rotted quickly, they said, and the material was expensive to replace. Bare reed walls were no better than a sieve against blustery winds and chilly fog. Living in reeds was almost like dressing in rags. Many residents were already stockpiling concrete blocks. “No one is proud of living in a reed house,” said Gonçalves. Residents were bemused that the students thought they possessed anything of value, let alone a house that they themselves thought so little of. It turned out that only a small number of them had built their own houses; most had paid someone else to do the work. Some had recently migrated from parts of Mozambique where houses were built from different materials. In Maputo, local knowledge of reed construction was once nearly universal. Now, only a relative handful of builders were keeping those methods alive—and only because their customers could afford no better.
Well before the architecture students came calling, the reed house had its admirers. In the 1960s and 1970s, Pancho Guedes, the noted Portuguese architect, would circulate in the subúrbios and photograph the colorful patterns painted on the wood doors and window frames that distinguished some reed houses. Other outsiders who ventured into the subúrbios at the time spoke approvingly of reeds as if they were freely available—as free as the reeds used in houses in the countryside—and good for air ventilation. But the subúrbios were not simply villages transposed to the edges of a city. In dense conditions, where one person’s bedroom might be a few feet from another’s latrine, reeds offered little privacy or protection. Reeds were once so closely identified with the precarious life of the subúrbios that all these neighborhoods were also known, collectively, as “the caniço.”
People of greater means in the subúrbios might use reeds for their fences, but not for their houses. Until the 1970s, they built wood-framed houses clad entirely in galvanized metal panels, and some were quite regal, with lots of rooms, a veranda, and a many-gabled roof.5 Many landlords also built wood-and-zinc compounds, in which tiny units were rented out to the very poor. Wood-and-zinc construction predominated in the oldest parts of the subúrbios so that well into the twentieth century, these districts bore a resemblance to nineteenth-century mining camps. Wood-and-zinc houses stood firmer than reed houses, and the larger models were a mark of status. But this construction method posed its own problems. Termites fed on the wood, and depending on the weather, the house could be unbearably cold or intolerably hot.
Figure I.2 A path in the caniço, late 1970s. (Eva Sävfors)
On the eve of Mozambique’s independence from Portugal in 1975, the subúrbios were home to more than three hundred thousand people, about three-quarters of the population of Lourenço Marques, as Maputo was then called.6 The remaining quarter lived in the central part of town colloquially called the City of Cement—or simply, “the city”—which was then predominantly European (Figure I.3). In local languages, this area continues to be called Xilunguíne, which means “place of the whites,” even though the vast majority of the European population left Mozambique around the time of independence.7 The apartment blocks and high-rises of the City of Cement are not primarily made of cement, per se, but of concrete. Concrete is the more durable substance that results from mixing cement together with water, sand, and gravel or other crushed stone aggregate and then allowing it to cure.8 To be even more precise, the City of Cement is mostly of steel-reinforced, concrete-frame construction with blocks of either concrete or clay used as infill. The name City of Cement has by and large fallen out of use for the same reason that the subúrbios are no longer called the caniço. Since masonry architecture, sometimes just referred to as stone, is the norm in the subúrbios, it no longer distinguishes the haves from the have-nots. Most people now have it.
There was nothing inevitable about the hardening of the caniço into stone. The decades-long transformation of tens of thousands of houses from reeds and wood-and-zinc construction into structures of more resilient materials was a drawn-out but often high-stakes drama and not exactly linear. For a long time and from an official standpoint, everything about the subúrbios was supposed to be temporary, including most people. During the colonial era, the vast majority of Africans in Lourenço Marques not living as domestics in the homes of their employers lived in the subúrbios.9 And until the 1960s, most of them required an official pass for the privilege of living even there. They needed to be formally employed to keep the pass, and many went without one, hoping not to be caught. Few had title to land. Many rented units in cramped compounds. Many others paid a ground rent to a private landowner for a small plot with ill-defined boundaries on which to build. But the rental receipts people stored in suitcases under their beds hardly amounted to anything like secure tenure. In the 1960s and early 1970s, land values spiked, and so did the fear of displacement.
Figure I.3 Maputo in the late 1970s. (Map illustrations by Sarah Baxendale, based on an undated map located at MITADER)
Housing in the subúrbios was not quite legal, at least not categorically. It was tolerated. The municipality allowed reed and wood-and-zinc construction, but it prohibited anything that might hinder future upgrading plans. Thus, with few exceptions, one could not build in concrete even if one could afford to. Beginning in the 1960s, though, many more had enough money to build in concrete, and during the last decade or so of Portuguese rule, several thousand people in these neighborhoods, including a number of lower-income whites, overcame their fears of displacement and ventured to build houses (albeit often rudimentary ones) out of some combination of concrete and clay blocks. In doing so, they risked stiff penalties and possible demolition. I will not be the first to point out the importance to people of building lasting homes on tenuous ground.10 Beyond comfort and beyond status, a permanent house “stakes a claim to belonging” in places that work against it.11 Masonry construction was a political act—a break with expectations that Africans should be satisfied with perpetual impermanence—though it would be many years before most people in the subúrbios felt they could even consider it. The colonial regime, for its part, grasped the power of concrete in uncertain times. The rising skyline of the City of Cement in the 1960s announced to whomever saw it that, despite the wave of decolonization across Africa, Portugal belonged in Mozambique—or, as Lisbon put it, that Mozambique was part of Portugal.12
This book foregrounds what historians usually render as background: neighborhoods of the kind often thought of as undifferentiated, ahistorical slums.13 Each neighborhood in Maputo and each yard is a specific
