The failure of the educational system in Mozambique, which served mostly as a rhetorical trope,23 contrasted with the permanence of a colonial practice focused on the reproduction of a cheap working force. In Lourenço Marques, the social segmentation excluded indígenas from accessing cultural activities in the city; more broadly, it excluded them from any citizenship model set out by the colonial state.24 The Portuguese colonial policy delineated from the late nineteenth century onward, exacerbating nationalistic and racist conceptions, endangered the position of the local petite bourgeoisie,25 composed mostly of mestiços, who had achieved important positions within public administration and in commercial circuits from the beginning of the nineteenth century.26 Facing greater colonial repression and stronger professional competition following the growing numbers of settlers, members of this petite bourgeoisie developed a political and social protest dynamic, assuming the defense of the rights of indígenas. The Grémio Africano de Lourenço Marques (GALM), created in 1908, became the institutionalized center of these protests; its basic principles were spelled out in publications such as O africano (est. 1908) and O brado africano (est. 1918). The group around the GALM, educated and culturally identified with European colonial society, had an active role in denouncing colonial abuses, thus fighting for citizens’ right to equality, especially indígena people’s access to education and the Portuguese language as crucial instruments for their social mobility.27 Embracing the “African” cause, and influenced by the international Pan-Africanist movement, by metropolitan political associations, and by the South African political process, the GALM was very active until 1926.28 This protest was made not along anticolonial lines but rather in the name of a more humane and modern economic colonialism in which, for instance, African labor would be better handled—housed in organized compounds and in well-designed suburban neighborhoods, protected from the harm caused by wine made easily available by the metropolitan producers—instead of being used in the development of South Africa’s mining industry. As the colonial system became more repressive, a certain African elite was able to confront the colonial administration’s policies in an increasingly euphemistic register, which in many instances took on an integrationist slant (e.g., “we also deserve to be part of the Portuguese nation”).
The military dictatorship established in Portugal in 1926, which gave way in 1933 to the Estado Novo regime led by António de Oliveira Salazar (r. 1932–68), set about updating the previous legal framework of domination. Even before the military coup of May 28, 1926, João Belo’s government issued the Estatuto Político, Civil e Criminal dos Indígenas de Angola e Mozambique (Political, Civil, and Criminal Statute of Angolan and Mozambican Natives), the original basis for the indigenato system,29 fine-tuned in 1929, when the Estatuto Político, Civil e Criminal dos Indígenas (Native’s Political, Civil, and Criminal Statute) was approved. According to these statutes, civilizational status of the indígenas did not entitle them to constitutional rights, and they were thus subjected to a specific legal regime, based on their custom and usage, which the colonial administration would formalize. Portugal promised to gradually integrate indígenas through work and education. The diplomas they earned would complement the basic laws that defined the place occupied by the colonies within the Portuguese nation. The 1930 Acto Colonial (Colonial Act), as well as the 1933 Carta Orgânica do Império Colonial Português (Organic Charter of Portugal’s Colonial Empire), alongside the Reforma Administrativa Ultramarina (Overseas Administrative Reform), set up the centralizing policy imposed by the Portuguese state on its colonial domains. In 1928, reacting to the international pressure that arose after the publication of the Ross Report, in 1925, denouncing the continuation of compulsory forms of labor regimes in Portuguese colonial territories, the government approved the Código de Trabalho dos Indígenas das Colónias Portuguesas de África (Portuguese African Colonies’ Native Labor Code), which excluded forced labor.30 However, various exception clauses foresaw the use of chibalo as a law enforcement method. The ambiguity of this law and the inoperativeness of any type of control allowed for the continuation of semi-enslavement practices by public and private interests, sustaining a weak production structure based on intensive labor practices.31 The 1929 Diploma Orgânico das Relações de Direito Privado entre Indígenas e Não Indígenas (Organic Diploma of Private Law Relations between Natives and Nonnatives) completed this legal framework. Placed outside the corporative order imposed by the Estado Novo regime in Portugal, which was extended to the colonies on 5 March 1937, the indígena had a specific labor status.32 He also benefited from a separate education. After the 1926 Estatuto Orgânico das Missões Católicas Portuguesas de África (Organic Statute of the Portuguese Catholic Missions in Africa) had recognized the role of the Catholic Church in the indígenas’ education, the Acordo Missionário (Missionary Agreement) of 1940 and the Estatuto Missionário (Missionary Statute), approved the following year, gave the church the de facto responsibility for setting up segregated schools. The educational role entrusted to the Catholic Church aimed at countering the “denationalizing” effect attributed to the influence of Protestant missions, which, from the end of the nineteenth century, as a reflex of South Africa’s influence,33 were active in the Lourenço Marques region.34
After the end of the Second World War, although at a hesitant pace at first, the indígena question was reframed, which explains the appearance of a euphemistic rhetoric in many official documents as well as in the general language we now find in the archives. The process of euphemization of the exercise of power reached its highest level in 1951, when the Portuguese government replaced the terms empire and colonies with overseas and overseas provinces. Portugal was uno e indivisível (one and indivisible). A few years later, the lusotropicalist theory devised by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre was a political legitimating tool, based on the principle of the exceptionality of Portuguese colonialism.35 During this period, the regime was laying the groundwork for a new stage of economic exploitation of its African territories.36 Still, the increasing state control over African labor, put in place by laws like the Regulamentos dos Serviçais Indígenas (Indígenas Servant’s Regulations) of 1944 and 1949, continued to foster the conditions for the formation of an institutionalized discriminatory society.37 According to these regulations, which essentially aimed at regulating social life in urban spaces like Lourenço Marques, the indígena was generally defined as a servant whose urban existence was dependent on a labor activity that the state, through the Curadoria dos Negócios Indígenas (Native Affairs Curatorship), tried to discipline through fear, intimidation, and punishment. The coercive formation of a labor market imposed a certain moral economy in which paternalism and violence become the ground of a wide social contract.
The elaboration of the Planos de Fomento Económico (Economic Development Plans), which also served to accommodate private capital’s growing business interest, marked a new era of expansion.38 As argued by Gervase Clarence-Smith, in spite of the discourse on Portugal’s civilizing mission, the Portuguese Third Empire in fact reinforced its economic vocation.39 The state’s investment in infrastructure but also in the production of specialized knowledge, to face the multiplication of colonial science’s spheres of intervention, sought to accommodate the internationalization of Mozambique’s economy and the influx of capital, which was concentrated in large metropolitan economic groups and in foreign companies. Historian Adelino Torres defines the Portuguese strategy in Angola as a “second colonial pact.”40 On the basis of the formation of an imperial economic space, Portugal tried to maintain sovereign control within a context of economic internationalization. In Lourenço Marques, during the late colonial period the economy became less dependent of South African demand, but colonial revenue captured by the taxation of the migrant workforce continued to be decisive for the equilibrium of the trade balance.41
Lourenço Marques was inhabited at the close of the 1970s by at least one hundred thousand Africans.42 This population grew at an average rate of twelve hundred individuals per year between 1940 and 1959, and sixty-five hundred per year between 1950 and 1960. After the end of the indigenato, with the slackening of restrictions to circulation and residence, entries increased.43 Dependent on entering the symbolic space of “the cement” to survive, suburban dwellers built their own life territory, beyond the city’s
