apartheid as militants from the African National Congress (ANC) were, but they were challenging apartheid’s premise that their proper place was in a barren rural Bantustan.24 James Brennan’s work on Dar es Salaam addresses another way that politics was mediated through housing: how fraught landlord-tenant relations fed into anti–South Asian prejudice.25 These tensions helped give form, after independence, to a racialized idea of who could belong to the new Tanzanian nation. Each of these scholars reveals the overlapping strata of power cutting through urban societies. Each traces continuities between life under regimes of minority rule and under the regimes that followed. And each explores how the making of urban space constitutes a kind of multilateral politics that has not always announced itself as politics—or even in words. These are also some of the animating concerns of this book. My points of emphasis are different because Maputo’s history was different—peculiar even, owing to some of the peculiarities of Portuguese rule. Still, in the city’s subúrbios, some themes relevant to the histories of many African cities are made more salient.
In African cities, things usually did not go according to plan, but Maputo reminds us that often enough there was no operative plan to begin with—at least not the kind produced by professional urban planners. Once we move past the dispossession and displacement that gave birth to the subúrbios, we find that the suburban landscape is better understood for what authorities did not or could not do there than for the ways authorities imposed themselves. Given this history of official indifference and fecklessness, why begin with government initiatives, when the initiatives of so many households were on such obvious display? People built their own houses not only as a means of survival but also to realize their highest ambitions. And at key moments during the colonial era and since, many people in the subúrbios, rather than cowering in submission before an oppressive state, actually tried to bring government and sometimes even planners into their lives.
The subúrbios of Lourenço Marques exploded in size in the 1960s, just as unplanned settlement was booming across much of Africa and for similar reasons. Like the regimes of newly independent countries, Lisbon loosened urban influx controls in its African territories, and the appeal of cities was strong, even if in many cases this was less because of what the city offered and more because of what the countryside did not. Scholars of urbanization in Africa continue to puzzle over “informality,” a concept intended to grasp all the economic activity outside the gaze of policy makers. As a description of how people in the subúrbios actually lived their lives, the concept helps us very little; in fact, it obscures all the unwritten rules that oriented how neighbors dealt with each other.26 But the distinction made between the formal and the informal does capture a real and long-standing desire for a connection: not just by governing authorities hoping to intervene where they have yet to do so but also among ordinary people hoping that they will. Governance clearly exists at many scales and in many guises, but here I am referring to the kind that only states and municipalities, with their resources and stamp of universal legitimacy, can provide. People in the subúrbios have often yearned for this kind of governance because there is too much that they cannot do on their own or build on their own. When government is absent, it is a felt absence, not freedom. Residents have felt it when there is no active authority either willing or able to provide drinkable water, illuminate dark streets, or guarantee that people can occupy tomorrow the land they intend to build upon today. National authorities, during the colonial era and since, have felt it when, looking upon the living conditions of most residents of their capital city, they sense the emptiness of their own pretensions to leading a modernizing state. Mozambicans have had more reason than most to flee oppressive state power or to resist it.27 But much of the urban politics set in and around the capital from the 1960s through the 1980s cannot be easily described as protest or resistance or opposition to state power. Those who would govern and those who would be governed also reached desperately for one another—usually without success.
This book emphasizes episodes in which people called out for intervention, doing what they could to make their neighborhoods visible to authorities who would not see them or who convinced themselves that the subúrbios were, for the time being, beyond help. In the 1960s, one of the only public debates that managed to emerge in Lourenço Marques, despite heavy censorship, involved black residents of the caniço talking about their living conditions to a daily newspaper with a mostly white readership. Shortly afterward, African nurses at the city’s central hospital developed their own housing scheme for the subúrbios and put it before the municipality. Secret police were locking up people where there was only a whiff of dissent, and yet during a government survey of conditions at the Munhuana housing project, residents had the courage to openly and harshly criticize housing authorities. (All these episodes are addressed in chapter 2.) Even the clandestine masonry builders of the 1960s (discussed in chapter 3), though certainly eager to escape police attention, were in their own quiet way insisting that they were not temporary sojourners but integrated into city life, participants in what they considered a modernizing world.28
Scholars refer to appeals like these, in which people do things or say things that assert a right to be in the city and enjoy the benefits that permanence should entail, as acts of urban citizenship.29 There is some awkwardness in applying the term to late colonial Lourenço Marques. Most people at that time were dubious that being a Portuguese citizen afforded them much of anything. For that matter, we should be cautious in using the word state, as if there were some kind of clearly realized apparatus of functioning institutions to which people could direct their appeals. John Comaroff has said of the typical colonial state that it was “an aspiration, a work-in-progress, an intention, a phantasm-to-be-made-real. Rarely was it ever a fully actualized accomplishment.”30 In some ways, Portuguese authorities in late colonial Mozambique could make themselves felt quite sharply, but in others ways, they were barely there. The same could be said for Mozambique after independence. The Frelimo state was, in many respects, an almost fictive entity needing people to fill it with content and meaning.31
In the years under discussion here, the connections between would-be citizen and would-be state were so faint and there was so little mutual understanding of rights and responsibilities that the effort of seeking government action required a great deal of imaginative heavy lifting. After independence, for instance, as people in the subúrbios attempted to give substance to being new citizens of a new state, they did so in part by acting as if the government were intervening in their lives—executing housing policy and urbanizing neighborhoods—even as the attention of authorities was absorbed elsewhere. This notion may seem abstract for now, but the latter part of the book will develop the idea further. Chapter 4 discusses the 1976 nationalizations of the City of Cement, which triggered the spontaneous nationalizations of suburban properties. Chapter 5 explores official urban planning in suburban neighborhoods during the first decade of independence—or, rather, what looked like official planning. During the early years of Frelimo rule, what appeared to be state-led initiatives in the subúrbios were sometimes carried out by people who were simply behaving as if the state were leading them.32
Some of this fits the picture of decolonization in its narrower sense—the story of a country becoming politically independent—but all of it was part of the process of decolonization in its broadest sense—how people tried to dismantle structures of inequality, both before and after independence. For residents of Mozambique’s capital, the built environment was a medium through which this politics happened because the urban landscape was ever present and unavoidable.33 The material qualities of buildings, houses, and streets—their tangibility, their visibility, their relative fixedness—made construction a necessarily public act. The book demonstrates this dynamic at every opportunity, beginning in the first chapter with a tour of Lourenço Marques, where the density of urban space brought many different sorts of people so physically close together: Africans from around Mozambique, Europeans and South Asians from different social backgrounds, and authorities and those they attempted to
