also by the proximities that persisted despite the divisions. The subúrbios, for example, came right up against the City of Cement. After independence, people who occupied abandoned apartments inhabited one of colonialism’s most durable legacies. And the new regime was not just a voice blaring on the radio. The new regime was many people’s landlord.
“Concrete tells us what it means to be modern,” writes architectural historian Adrian Forty. “It is not just that the lives of people in the twentieth century were transformed by, amongst other things, concrete—as they undeniably were—but that how they saw those changes was, in part, the outcome of the way they were represented in concrete.”34 When historians describe societies they know little about, usually because the societies are ancient or not European, they often resort to terms from material culture. They speak of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age, and they often struggle with a very clouded view of the choices their historical actors were capable of making. In researching this book, I had the benefit of greater personal familiarity with many of the people I would write about, and yet I was still struck by just how much a single material shaped their expectations and conditioned their possibilities. As this book intends to make clear, it was and continues to be an Age of Concrete.
CHAMANCULO UP CLOSE
Subúrbios does not carry the same meaning that suburbs does in English. In Maputo, the subúrbios have been understood as places previously beyond the reach of urban infrastructure and still largely wanting. Some might object to defining places by what they lack. But this is one of the ways that many people in Maputo understand where they live, and they call these areas what they were called by the Portuguese officials who drew the municipal boundaries more than a century ago and put the subúrbios on the far side of those boundaries. Each neighborhood, or bairro, has its own name and its own history. Because of the low-lying topography of much of the subúrbios, many neighborhood names reflect a waterlogged past. Before drainage canals were built in the 1980s, flooding and disease outbreaks were more regularly recurring calamities in the area once called Xitala Mali—meaning, in Ronga, “place of the abundant waters.”35 Munhuana means “the salty place” in Ronga, and it is so called because of the marshy land there. Lagoas, in Portuguese, means “lagoons.” The neighborhood that features most prominently in this book is Chamanculo, one of the oldest and most populous bairros in Maputo.36 It means, in Ronga, “place where the great ones bathe.” The great ones are the ancestor spirits believed to frequent a creek that once passed through the area. (The creek now only makes an appearance, never a welcome one, during heavy rains.) People have lived in Chamanculo in some numbers as long as there has been a city by the Bay of Maputo. Many of the older men who live in the neighborhood were once employed at the docks and rail facilities down the hill. The railway links Maputo to South Africa’s Rand, the economic hub of southern Africa—a connection that initially provided this port city on the Indian Ocean with much of its reason for being.
In 2011, the municipality started paving Chamanculo’s central artery, revealing some of the bairro’s deeper history to those who were unfamiliar with it. The road, named in the colonial era for a Portuguese physician, had been paved for the first time, hastily, almost a half century before, and by the 1980s, it had crumbled to dust. The new road was to be a more deliberate affair, laid with paving blocks rather than asphalt. Even before it was completed, the road was renamed for Marcelino dos Santos, Mozambique’s independence-era vice president, whose mother, over one hundred years old, still lived in a house in nearby Malanga. Because the road had to be widened from its existing footprint, a few feet or so of space had to be carved out of the houses and yards that hemmed it in on either side. As high concrete perimeter walls were peeled away, one gained a better glimpse into the larger yards where successive generations had built houses adjacent to those of their parents and grandparents. In some instances, one could see, in the cross section of a severed house partition, the rough impression left in plaster of old reed walls that had rotted away behind concrete-block walls, a kind of fossil of the not-so-distant past, before masonry construction was the norm. Homeowners affected by the new road had been indemnified for their troubles (though many said what they received was hardly enough), and at least one family’s house had to be demolished altogether, its residents resettled on a plot on the distant outskirts of the city.37 There was no compensating, however, for the loss of two towering fig trees that were felled to make way for the road improvements. The oldest residents of Chamanculo could not remember a time when the trees were not there. They easily could have been a century old or more, their trunks had twisted together, and they gave permanent shade to what had long been one of Chamanculo’s principal crossroads. Residents call the part of the neighborhood in the vicinity of the fallen trees Beira-Mar, after the long-defunct African football club once headquartered nearby. The team’s wood-and-zinc clubhouse still functions as a bar, but the adjacent practice grounds disappeared in the 1980s when refugees from the country’s civil war were settled there, ostensibly temporarily.
It is testament to the neighborhood’s antiquity and to the long legacy of many families there that Ronga, the language indigenous to the Maputo area, is still the mother tongue of a significant number of residents. According to self-described purists, though, many of the younger people in Chamanculo who think they speak Ronga actually speak a blend of Ronga and Changana, a very similar language that, due to continual immigration from rural areas not far to the north, has predominated in the city since at least the 1960s. People who arrived in the neighborhood from the countryside in the 1950s and 1960s are still considered newcomers by residents who trace their local lineage back still further. Within a five-minute walking radius of where the fig trees used to be are some of Maputo’s most established families. Eneas Comiche is a former finance minister, and in 2018 he once again became president of the Maputo City Council (essentially the mayor), a decade after serving his first term in that office. Some years ago, he worked with members of his family to restore the wood-and-zinc house they grew up in, though all that can be seen of it from the street is its handsome double-pitched roof. It was the house where, in late 1960, the family received Janet Mondlane, the American wife of Eduardo Mondlane, the Mozambican academic who less than two years later assumed the helm of Frelimo, a newly formed movement for independence. The trip was Janet’s introduction to her husband’s land of birth. She wrote to Eduardo of the Comiche house and what she thought it revealed about their friend Eneas. About eleven people lived in only three rooms, she noted. “But the house is as well-kept and clean as a pin,” she wrote. “The children are well-groomed . . . and suddenly I remembered the boy in Lisbon, well-dressed and elegant in his dark blue suit, studying economics. It was here that they grew up, where there wouldn’t be anything without a mother’s love and affection.”38
Ana Laura Cumba, who died in 2012, had lived in a house built by her late father, Frederico de Almeida Cumba, the man who, as the Portuguese-appointed traditional leader (called a régulo), was once perhaps the most feared and reviled African man in Chamanculo.39 As régulo from 1945 until 1974, he made himself relatively wealthy, in part by extracting bribes, and had long before converted a portion of the house from wood and zinc into concrete block. Sometime after his death, Ana Laura rented out much of the house to tenants, keeping one bedroom for herself and another for her traditional healing practice.
Margarida Ferreira, the daughter of one of the régulo’s counselors, lost her house when her husband died; her in-laws simply took it from her.40 But her daughter Graça, who sold clothing, helped her lay the foundations and build partial walls for a new house. Ferreira’s sons also helped. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, they returned from East Germany where, like thousands of other Mozambicans in the 1980s, they had been factory workers.41 They carried back with them a number of domestic appliances purchased in West Berlin. The appliances were assets. The brothers sold them in Maputo, and the proceeds were used to finish their mother’s walls and install a roof.
Castigo Guambe was living in a wood-and-zinc house, palatial by Chamanculo standards, that his father, a hunter, had built in the 1930s.42 The elder Guambe, who first arrived in Lourenço Marques in the early 1900s, never worked for anyone other
