increasingly promoted by state agencies and occupied with political propaganda and with the affluent local tourism industry. Suburban misery, it was argued, did not result from Portugal’s colonial action but was the outcome of an unbalanced modernity that promoted cultural isolation and self-exclusion.48 The urban segmentation was kept because “so many evolved and highly paid Africans” would not trade “the ease, conviviality and prestige they enjoyed in the suburbs for the restrictions, impersonality and anonymity that they would experience in the large and modern apartment buildings.”49 The euphemization of discrimination by way of paying compliments to a suburban culture supposedly prone to isolation, did little, however, to tackle the problem of the labor force’s productivity or political and social unrest.
Progressively inoperative, the suburban social contract, which established a set of minimal principles of sociability and conviviality among groups with diverse backgrounds and habits, was seen in the eyes of the modern planner as a space of marginalities, fostered by a cultural and social anomie that for a long time proved useful to the colonial-exploitation model promoted in the region: that contract benefited suburban land proprietors and homeowners, private and public businesses that exploited the permanent stock of African workers, as well as the vast number of settler families that could easily have had in their houses and commercial spaces a large number of domestic servants.50 Despite the existence of distinct strategies to face the urban malaise, which expressed how state institutions were permeated by different rationalities, urban plans, as well as the few concrete interventions in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques, in fact increased the policy of social separation. This situation facilitated the persistence of a cheap reproduction of the labor force, based on a policy of high taxation, low salaries, and reduction of the managing costs of the suburban space: it was up to Africans to build their own existential territory and their social welfare networks. Suburban football grew out of this forced autonomy.
Housing, Work, and the Creation of “Suburban Autonomy”
The aim to organize indígena neighborhoods in the periphery of Lourenço Marques, already present in the plan devised by Araújo in the early twentieth century, would only be achieved later. The nearby experience of South African compounds were the inspiration behind the plans in the capital of Mozambique. In 1916 a committee put together by the Câmara do Comércio (Chamber of Commerce) and by the Administração do Concelho do Porto e Caminhos de Ferro (Port and Railway Council Administration)51 visited Durban to assess the municipal housing experience and the workers’ food regime, so as to apply a similar system to the four thousand indígenas that worked in the port of Lourenço Marques.52 Between 1918 and 1921, near the market of Xipamanine, the administration built a small social-housing project. The high cost of rents meant the thirty-three brick houses ended up in the hands of the black and mestiço bourgeoisie.53 The journalist João Albasini visited the neighborhood in 1921 and painted a dark picture: it had no running water, electric lights, sewage system, or roadways and had only a single cesspit.54 In 1922 a decree authorized the government of the colony to take out a loan for the construction of hostels or indígena neighborhoods.55
The 1922 police regulations for servants and indígena workers, besides imposing a mechanism of registration, identification, and permanence and contract authorization, forced these Africans to settle into hostels.56 The capital for the construction of these facilities, gathered through a fund financed by the compulsory registration of Africans arriving in the city, ended up being diverted to indígena-labor inspection services.57 Large companies that hired and transported workers to South Africa, as the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association, the Railways, and Delagoa Bay, built provisional neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city to accommodate migrant workers.58 A 1926 ordinance required all male indígenas over fourteen to carry an identification and job carnet: the labor contract determined not only the permanence but also compelled holders to have a place of residence.59 It was only at the end of the 1930s that the fund for the construction of houses for the indígenas was reestablished. Using cautious language, the discourse of the Law by Decree of 1938, which regulated the construction of new indígena neighborhoods, suggested an interest in separating populations under the pretext of a controlled adaptation to urban space.60 In 1939 the first expropriations took place, close to Angola Avenue. In 1940, after the areas destined for indígena neighborhoods had been established,61 the first houses of the neighborhood of Munhuana began to be built. Justified by matters of “health, public order, and morality,” the project, inaugurated in 1942 and whose responsibility fell on the Repartição Técnica (Technical Division) of the Câmara de Lourenço Marques (Lourenço Marques Municipality), was inspired by South African models.62
FIGURE 3.1. Munhuana’s native neighborhood—crematorium. Author: A. W. Bayly and Co. Source: Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino.
The 1942 Regulamento de Identificação Indígena (Indígenas’ Identification Regulations) and the 1944 Regulamentos dos Serviçais Indígenas (Indígena Servants’ Regulations) maintained the existing mechanisms of control over permanence and mobility, under penalty of correctional labor.63 Forced labor was applied to other misdemeanors: change of job without prior consent, self-employment without permission, casual unregistered work, absence from the municipal area without prior authorization, instigation of colleagues to give up their occupations, failure to register within three days after your arrival.64 By the end of the 1950s, fines began to replace forced labor,65 and before the end of the indigenato regime, the new identification regulations issued an identity card to “evolved” indígenas who showed good behavior, which afforded them a greater degree of mobility.66
The logic of social closure continued to define the city’s growth plans developed by the Gabinete de Urbanização Colonial (Office for Colonial Urbanization)67 in the early 1950s. Plano Aguiar (1952–55), devised in 1947 by the architect João Aguiar for the Gabinete de Urbanização, foresaw the organization of various indígena neighborhoods, which included a set of public facilities. It separated these neighborhoods from the cement city, and proposed an intermediate landscaped area that would operate as both a physical and a social buffer.68 The project did not come to fruition, but Plano Aguiar continued, up to 1969, to direct the city’s growth. Aguiar, head of the Gabinete de Urbanização, was responsible for the elaboration of the planos de urbanização (urbanization plans) of numerous cities in Portuguese colonial Africa. As registered in one of the key documents that defined Portuguese colonial urban policies, the land use in these projects stressed the fundamental distinction between the spaces for Europeans and those for indígenas, even though the distinction between the two was now more subtle.69 Aguiar defended ethnic discrimination among the indígena population and, even within the European population, he distinguished among the various types of Europeans, from colonial clerks to the poorer settlers, whom he in fact called settler-workers (colonos-trabalhadores).70
When, in 1958, the Fundo para a Construção de Casas Destinadas à População Indígena (Fund for the Construction of Houses Destined for the Indígena Population) was created, urbanization plans gave priority to the construction of public facilities, schools, sports fields, gardens. In 1961, in the newspaper Notícias, José Craveirinha protested against a form of urban planning that worked against the integration of the indígena.71 He felt the policy of promoting neighborhoods that “represented clusters of stability for intrinsically tribal cultural forms,” was only attenuated by the presence of poor settlers: “the precarious houses of the so-called ‘reed-and-tin neighborhood’ in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques are not an asocial sign of local exoticism but rather a universal particularism of the large populational clusters, nor are these neighborhoods we speak of destined solely for African residents since many metropolitan families live there.”72
Several suburban players spoke of this poor milieu, where
