he had managed to build a small real estate empire in Chamanculo. About a decade later, shortly after independence, more than two dozen Guambe properties were nationalized by the new Frelimo government, leaving only the original homestead for Castigo and his brother. In the 1990s, Castigo built new rental units and a bar in his yard.
These houses are not mere antiquities. They are not vestiges of a deep past that arrived in the present as the same structures they were when originally built, worn down by the corrosive effects of a process we oversimplify as “time.” The houses and the spaces around them bear the marks of decades of historical change. More to the point, the houses are the change—or at least they constitute a significant part of the story of what change has meant for the residents of Chamanculo over the past century. Each of the houses I have mentioned is an ongoing project; each has never ceased to be a work in progress for the people who have lived in it. Self-built is something of a misnomer, as people have long hired professional carpenters and stonemasons to build their houses. If not self-built in the narrower sense, however, the houses have nonetheless been custom-made to the owners’ specifications. For people on meager salaries or those simply making a little here and a little there, the costs of housing have added up over the years to a massive investment of resources, energies, and anxiety. People hope that their houses will serve as their largest bequests to the generations that follow.43
Buildings and spaces may seem to “say” a great deal on their own behalf, but they do not, of course, actually speak for themselves. A good deal of this book is based on interviews: with residents of Maputo, including a number of stonemasons and carpenters; with current and former Mozambican officials of various ranks, from neighborhood block leaders to cabinet ministers; with several former Portuguese-era officials, including those now living in Portugal and those who are now Mozambican citizens; and with several foreign architects who were attached to Mozambique’s housing and planning agency in the late 1970s and 1980s. Much of the book is based as well on the stories that sons and daughters told me about their mothers and fathers. The interviews were conducted from 2008 to 2016, though they were concentrated during my longest stay in Maputo, from 2011 to 2013. In Chamanculo, I was usually accompanied by one of several research assistants, each of whom was a resident of the neighborhood. They would introduce me to people and translate from the Ronga or Changana on those occasions when Portuguese was not suitable, and they usually were as much a part of the conversation as I or the interviewee was. The interviews were deliberately conversational, wide-ranging, and generally long. I recorded more than 150 conversations, but many of these were with people I kept returning to again and again, and inevitably, many conversations were not recorded at all, including those with the people I stayed with in Chamanculo for several weeks at a time.
The question of housing did not always come up in interviews. In lieu of more substantial historical work on the granular texture of everyday life in Lourenço Marques and Maputo, one must read a number of social-realistic novels, newspaper chronicles, and published memoirs, as I have done my best to do—all part of an effort to grab from the past everything that one can.44 There is no substitute, in any case, for listening to people talk about the past and how they regard their place in it. To ask them solely about housing would have been to foreground housing perhaps artificially. On several occasions, I video-recorded people giving me a tour of their houses. Digital copies of all interview recordings (both voice and video) and transcripts of the interviews will be deposited with the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique as well as with the architecture and planning faculty of the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, both in Maputo.
The interviews were a group enterprise of people convened by an American researcher with his own interests; his own priorities; and his own presumptions about house, home, household, and property—presumptions shaped by his own individual experience of the commodified US real estate industry and the marketing of the American “dream house.”45 I have tried not to impose such idealizations on the struggle for shelter in Maputo, such as by highlighting cases only because they conform to prior expectations of what aspiration looks like. For instance, the reader will not encounter a great deal of discussion about architectural distinction—as might attract the attention of an architectural historian—because architectural distinction is not, historically, what most people have aspired to in the subúrbios of Maputo. Rather, they have sought dignified conformity. Additionally, stories people told of making houses in Maputo often silenced the role of women. Women tended to put forward their husbands as the sole spokespersons for the history of their houses. And in the accounts men gave, they tended to exclude the role of women, often a primary role, in the financing of construction—as the significant participation of single women in the colonial-era rental industry helps to make evident. This is to say nothing of the general silencing of the role of women in the construction process itself, as well as in the ongoing maintenance of a house.
This book is mostly about the relationship of a household to its neighborhood, to the rest of the city, and to a state-in-formation. And though I attempt when possible to reveal the internal dynamics of households—much as the best urban ethnographic work does—this is not my emphasis. As anthropologist Karen Tranberg Hansen writes, the intimate spaces of houses are sites of conflict, and a house that for one member of a household signals a great achievement may be for other members of the household the product of their exploitation or unrewarded sacrifices.46 Nor was I able to explore as deeply as I had hoped to the living arrangements to which stigma was attached. A number of compounds in the colonial era, for example, were largely inhabited by women who relied on sex work, in whole or in part, for their income—and decades later, women were hesitant to even acknowledge that they once lived in a compound, whether or not they engaged in sex work. Furthermore, that many of the cases discussed in this book involve a married man and woman ought not lead the reader to assume that this was the composition of most households.
The consequences of not fully examining household dynamics for a project that attempts to explore the politics of housing are steep, since such dynamics are ultimately inseparable from such politics. At the same time, although this book argues that the spaces of the city are more than just the background to other dramas, it must be acknowledged that often and, in fact, usually in the course of daily life, they are mere background. Moreover, the background for many extends well beyond Maputo. People in the city have long maintained ties to rural homesteads, and many women in Maputo (and not a few men) travel to fields (machambas) not far from the city. This fact would be more significant, however, for a work that examines labor and livelihoods, which this book does only minimally. Nor can the book escape the choice of the neighborhood where most research took place. Because Chamanculo is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Maputo, with some of the city’s longest-rooted families, its dynamics are quite different from those in neighborhoods to the north of the city, where very few people lived before the 1960s. People in Maputo’s oldest neighborhoods have had a markedly different experience of colonial rule and independence than, say, people who arrived in the city as refugees of the civil war in the 1980s. And Chamanculo, where Presbyterians associated with the Swiss Mission had a significant presence, developed somewhat different types of social networks than, for instance, the nearby neighborhood of Mafalala, with its significant Muslim presence.
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Though the chapters are organized in rough chronological order, each is thematically distinct, leading to significant chronological overlap. I have tried to avoid forcing a master narrative upon life in Mozambique’s capital; instead, I make use of many smaller narratives, an approach that might be dismissed as storytelling in some quarters. The object here is to reveal the palette of options available to people in history and the invisible frame of constraint—not to establish what the norms and possibilities definitively were (as if this were even doable) but rather to feel for their contours. To relate the histories of individuals with the details of their lives left in is not for the purposes of making dry history more “accessible.” The stories are the evidence.
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