half measures, achievements, and failures inscribed on the landscape constitute an enormous, open-air archive. The book spans the period from the 1940s to the present, but it concentrates on the roughly three decades straddling Mozambique’s independence. It offers a different kind of story about decolonization than the ones that are often told. Strikes, rallies, nationalist appeals, boycotts, armed rebellions—these were the conventional signposts on the way to independence during the twilight of colonial rule in Africa. Epic-scale development schemes and efforts to mold new national identities tend to frame the discussion of how people after independence attempted to uproot colonial-era legacies. And yet, in cities throughout Africa, there were many people who, whether or not they were caught up in politics of a more explicit sort, were engaged in a politics around housing and infrastructure that did not always call itself politics. In this volume, I argue that the house builders and home dwellers of the subúrbios of Mozambique’s capital helped give substance to what governance was and what governance should do. This is especially remarkable when we consider the authoritarian nature of rule under the right-wing Portuguese dictatorship and then the Marxist-Leninist dictatorship that eventually succeeded it. At stake was not just a vision of what a “modern” city should be but also a vision of what a modern society was and what it meant to belong to one.14
Figure I.4 Chamanculo, one of the oldest neighborhoods in the subúrbios, 1969. (MITADER)
Figure I.5 The City of Cement, 1974. (AHM, c-2–4762)
Clandestine masonry home builders were a small, if growing, contingent in late colonial Lourenço Marques, but they were emblematic of a longer struggle to improve living conditions in the subúrbios. Both before and after independence, people attempted to integrate the city’s center and periphery, in part by pushing authorities to acknowledge their neighborhoods and to take responsibility for them. Responsibility, in turn, meant “urbanizing” neighborhoods with infrastructure and adjudicating the many disputes that arose there over tenancy. There are dangers in treating the subúrbios only as a pathology—as problems to be solved—as many policy makers have done; we risk turning these places into mere abstractions and dehumanizing the people who live there. But it is also true that, historically, people living in Maputo’s subúrbios have recognized the conditions in which they live as a problem. They have sought answers, alternatives to the brute-force solution to so-called slums that governing authorities everywhere have reflexively resorted to: clearance.
This book departs from much of the historical scholarship on the built environment in urban Africa in that it further shifts the emphasis from laws to practices; from the architect’s drafting table to the building site; from housing officials and professional planners to landlords, tenants, and home builders; and from government-led projects to places better characterized by official neglect. Yet as a political history, it is not a history from below as that approach is frequently understood. The shape of the city is neither imposed from above nor orchestrated from below.15 It results from the friction of many interests colliding in tight confines.
Scholars often describe the kinds of ground-level interactions that happen in cities as the politics of the everyday because the jostling among neighbors and the tangled dynamic between individual residents and municipal agencies or state authorities do not fit the typical image of what a political contest looks like. In Maputo, the episodes in which these everyday politics were revealed did not feel ordinary to the people who experienced them. Between 1950 and 1990, the population of the capital grew at least tenfold, and there are many people alive today who, depending on their age, have witnessed the population of Maputo and its satellite city Matola increase between thirty and fifty times over, to almost 3 million people.16 This kind of dizzying growth rate since the midcentury is not uncommon for African cities, but it is a fact worth emphasizing for readers who have not themselves lived through a similar hyperexpansion from town to metropolis. We can imagine what such growth meant for those hoping to manage it or for those making a home amid what was a fierce competition for space. Into this same span of time, the people of Maputo compressed the experiences of forced labor, independence, and then civil war, as well as the traumatic results of efforts to impose first colonial capitalism, then a socialist command economy, and then the policies of structural adjustment. One way to look at these episodes is to see how they were reflected in the city’s built environment. But this approach makes it seem as if changes in the cityscape were a sideshow to the real action. Another approach, the one taken in this work, is to see how the making of the built environment shaped people’s expectations and aspirations and how people understood historical change.17 When older residents of the city speak of the more distant past, they are careful to clarify that the city they are talking about is Lourenço Marques, not Maputo. Although the main reason is to delimit the era of Portuguese rule, another motive for the distinction is that, in memory, the neighborhoods where they grew up were, by comparison to today, mato—or “bush.” When some were children, trees and other plants still marked off the boundaries of their yards, if they were marked off at all. The thought is astonishing to people as they recall it today, within a landscape of concrete. Without having moved anywhere, they occupy a different place.
THE UNPLANNED
Frantz Fanon described the typical colonial city as divided brutally in two. One part, the “white folks’ sector,” was “built to last, all stone and steel.” The other part, “the ‘native’ quarters, the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation,” was a place “that crouches and cowers, a sector on its knees, a sector that is prostrate.”18 Writing in 1961, he was justifying violent revolution. But historians of the African built environment limit themselves when they address only how cities were split unequally between colonizer and colonized and, relatedly, the role of European administrators and professional architects and planners in doing the dividing.19 European officials often put great faith in city plans. Some cities were clearly intended as demonstration models of the ruling ideology, with each race in the civilizational hierarchy slotted into its proper place on the urban map. Racial zoning, triumphal boulevards, ostentatious institutional architecture, and housing designed for African workers certainly reveal a lot about what colonial officials and design professionals thought of Europe’s place in Africa. But when scholars continually dwell on a relative handful of government officials and functionaries, it is as if everyone else in the city was a passive bystander. A dream in blueprint is assumed to have created the desired reality on the ground. Projects that impressed their designers are assumed to have impressed their African audiences. Segregation is assumed to have been complete. As Laurent Fourchard argues, if we see cities only from the commanding heights, the history of colonial cities, including South Africa’s apartheid variant, becomes little more than an uncomplicated tale of the colonizer controlling the colonized. The emphasis on schemes imposed from above, particularly on spatial planning based on race, “omits the agency of African societies, their capacity to overcome such divisions, to ignore them or even to imagine them differently.”20 Home builders in the various “native” quarters of the continent were not, as Fanon put it, prostrate. Lourenço Marques was a starkly segregated city, but it was not only segregated.
An important departure from the top-down trend is the work of Garth Myers, who, though concerned with official planning schemes in Zanzibar, also takes care to elaborate how these schemes failed over much of a century because of the continual pushback from Zanzibaris.21 Planners never appreciated people’s deep attachment to long-standing local practices of land tenure and house construction, he argues, with all the meanings for patronage and status these practices conveyed. Myers calls the Zanzibaris’ stubborn resistance “speaking with space.”22 In a similar vein, though in a very different context, Anne-Maria Makhulu calls living in the informal settlements on the outskirts of 1970s and 1980s Cape Town “activism by other
