plan their futures, left open the option of returning to the safer and more stable environment of the countryside.22 When he published Os Africanos de Lourenço Marques, Rita-Ferreira registered the existence in the suburbs of what he called a “cultural hiatus.”23 In Lourenço Marques there grew a structurally young population, educated in the city and freer from its ties with rural society, managing their own movements and desires: “many urbanized Africans live in marginal and transitional areas, and even immoral and broken, environments where there are no new values to take over from the old ones.”24 Empirical evidence clearly demonstrated how the suburban social contract was not a reliable framework for regulating the production and preservation of social peace.
These studies acknowledge that the colonial state’s incapacity to fill this void could lead to the emergence of a dangerous national consciousness.25 Even if South African labor agencies continued to operate in Lourenço Marques, unemployment among young educated Africans grew, and with it a resentment of the lack of opportunities, which made them potentially dangerous in the eyes of the colonial apparatus.26 Their position within the social structure, their educational level, and their contact with sources of information made them more sensitive to discriminatory processes, which persisted well after the end of the indigenato.27 The situation of racial conflict in neighboring South Africa made these fears all the more vivid. Such dangers were enhanced by continuous discrimination. In 1967, out of the 1,069 marriages celebrated in the city, only 52 joined people of different ethnic groups; only one involved a white person and a black; and 21 joined whites and mixed-race people.28 In that same year, of 5,499 births, 522 resulted from “mixed” relationships, and 254 were illegitimate children.29 In 1968, 8.3 percent of the city’s population was the result of a “racial mix” and the trend seemed to point toward a decrease in these numbers.30
The biographical memories of former football players who were born out of relations between Western men, mostly Portuguese, and African women, bear clear testimony to this basic inequality. Mário Wilson talked about the origins of his privileged situation:
My grandfather was an American, Wilson, who snatched a black woman, just because he wanted his problems sorted out. He crossed over to the other side of Lourenço Marques, Catembe, and on one of his walks he spotted the daughter of a régulo that had the shapely body he was looking for, and he said, “That one’s mine.” He crossed the river again, back to Lourenço Marques, and made her his wife. Because he was an American he might well have been racist through and through, but he still had child after child, six children, and he raised every one of them simply because he could afford it, [and] sent them over to study in South Africa. The two eldest sons were sent to boarding school straightaway. . . . Across the whole of Africa, all the Mandelas were born among the African elite. The African part had their own culture, their social gatherings and festivities, their sporting representations, but all of these things were marked by racism, a rejection that individuals themselves internalized and accepted as natural.
The story of Hilário da Conceição (b. 1939), a Portuguese international raised in Mafalala who played for Sporting de Lisboa, is rather different. He thinks of himself as a “second-rate mulatto,” the typical condition of children not recognized by their white fathers:
My mother is a Chopi, tribal, one of those that have tattoos on their faces and belly. . . . I never knew my father. My mother came from Manhiça to the city. . . . she was a very pretty and sweet girl and she didn’t know anyone there. . . . To this day I don’t know who my father was. That happened sometimes, you know? In this kind of relationship, the father was almost always Portuguese, and then he’d take off. And why did he take off? Because often the Portuguese would go from Portugal to Mozambique but had a wife back home, or else the wife was here and they had children, a married life, but they had fun with the African women. But then when there was some responsibility . . . if they had got a woman they were seeing pregnant, then they’d cut and run.
Rita-Ferreira’s research also demonstrated how the indigenato was still operational after its legal end.31 Although the administrative division of Lourenço Marques approved in 196932 did not make any reference to traditional powers, the state continued to delegate certain functions to it.33 Beyond the day-to-day management, the state delegated a host of official duties to these authorities: information on local issues, resolution of cases of private law, and identification of individuals wanted by the law.34 Reports on the “social situation” sent by the local Portuguese governors to the SCCIM in 1965, which were based on a centralized inquiry, revealed how traditional authorities were chosen, co-opted, and permanently surveyed long after the indigenato was abolished.35 The transference of Africans, in 1969, into the framework of common law did not solve the problems of a population that for the most part remained unregistered or unidentified by the administration36 and that lacked the educational, financial, and bureaucratic means to access justice or file complaints about urgent matters: property rights, rent disputes, labor law issues, and questions of social rights or family law. The construction of provisional shelters and houses in the suburbs also depended on the acquiescence of traditional administrators.37 The suburb dweller continued to be subjected to institutions that were increasingly inadequate to handle the disputes that emerged out of the everyday urban experience. Given the legal vacuum and the frail legitimacy of the traditional institutions in the resolution of conflicts and problems, suburb dwellers increasingly resorted to the services of the emergent “witchcraft market” as a means of defending their rights. Many of these practices broke with the standards of the weakened customary law. The need for protection was consistently invoked by former football players when they mentioned witchcraft. Daniel Matavela (b. 1952), one of the first black players to play in the Mozambican branch of the Portuguese football club Académica de Coimbra, in 1968, noted,
Each people have their own ways. The African is superstitious. Religion tried to educate us, so that we would stay clear of witchcraft, but it’s just a reality. In Africa people live in backyards, not apartment blocks. There are a number of ways to protect your backyard. The Portuguese and the European did not take kindly to it: “you and your superstitions.” I don’t believe it myself . . . in fact I don’t like witchcraft, but the fact is it exists.
Legislative changes, such as the end of indigenato, were of little use without a new urban social contract shaped by a more detailed and modern state intervention. While in the metropole there was on ongoing debate about a reformation of corporatism, a model that was not efficient within the framework of postwar economic projects, in the colonial context a segregated corporatism proved even more obsolete.38 Outside the corporative system, indígenas were excluded from the legal framework for labor relations, passed in 1956.39 According to the 1962 Rural Labour Code, only individuals considered urban workers, who were mostly white, could join unions. After the end of indigenato, the unionization of Africans was still extremely low.40
Other colonial powers addressed the urban question in Africa much earlier.41 National and international institutions42 shared policies and techniques and promoted empirical studies that aimed to back social policies usually announced under the banner of “social promotion” or “rural welfare” when aimed at the placement of rural populations.43 In the Portuguese context, concerns with detribalization—the social integration of the urban, “evolved” indígena, the monetization of exchanges, the loss of traditional community bonds, the stabilization of the labor force, the dangers of proletarianization in the wake of state and private investment44—were recognized by state colonialists such as Marcelo Caetano, Joaquim Silva Cunha, and Adriano Moreira.45 But in the colonial terrain, urban management continued to depend mainly on the old methods of co-optation, violence, intimidation, and surveillance.46 Organized by Adriano Moreira in 1956, the Centro de Estudos Políticos e Sociais (Center for Political and Social Studies) was the most serious effort toward modernizing the official social-management structure.47
Late empirical diagnoses of the urban situation
