was normal, we had our wood-and-zinc houses, ate flour and rice and fish and prawns . . . that’s what was available, in nature. I mean, misery did not get to the point where, how can I put it, we would starve. No, we lived within our means. . . . In the suburbs there were people with very diverse origins, some came from Zambezia, others from Manhiça, others yet from Inhambane, and there were also different religions; there were Muslims . . . it was a rather diverse world in that sense . . . there were bricklayers, carpenters, fishermen, mechanics, a little bit of everything. . . . Then there were mulattoes who lived in the city. First-class mulattoes . . . There were very few whites in the suburbs. The tradesmen owned the place, the shops, the canteens, they had daily contact with lots of African people. I mean, they were black-whites. . . . In the neighborhood schools there were no whites; a mulatto might possibly go to a white school, but not the blacks.
Mário Wilson’s description shows football as a particular laboratory of the wider urban situation:
There were very few spaces where whites and blacks could play football together, only in what we used to call friendly matches, in neighborhoods where, given the scarcity of players, Europeans and non-Europeans had to mix, driven by their passion for football, by its magic, and so kids would play with each other. . . . It was only the poorest among the Portuguese that would do it . . . there was this coincidence, the fact that it was only the poorest, because the elite were channeled onto other neighborhoods . . . the poor Portuguese were a decadent bunch, because they came from less well-to-do families, and less exclusive places, and so they had no choice, they had to play and embrace whatever pleasures came their way.
Approved in 1962, the Código do Trabalho Rural (Rural Labour Code)73—which, in accordance with postindigenato policies, did not establish any form of “cultural” or “ethnic” distinction among workers—aimed at accommodating “economically fragile workers.” These terms, used to designate the individual’s position within the economic system, replaced culturalist and racialist classifications, all the while avoiding the politicized language of class. Among those deemed “economically fragile” were workers classified as “rural”74 but also all those who, performing a variety of activities, were classified as unskilled, their work reduced to “simple labor services.” This last category included many workers that lived on the periphery of cities; these workers, as well as those in “domestic service” and those involved in “labor relations established between labor providers and people in their families” (both falling outside of the scope of the code), made up a large portion of the urban working population—African for the most part.75 This law further established the difference between permanent and casual workers. The latter were workers “hired for the day, week or month, with no continuous or long-term prospects and whose habitual residence is located in the vicinity of the workplace.” By putting an end to racial distinctions, the transformation of the legal apparatus would reclassify social categories, bringing to the fore the contrast between the qualified, permanent, unionized worker, almost always white, and the “economically fragile,” temporary, and unqualified worker, almost always black.76 Allowing for a new representation of society, the “disappearance of the indígenas” and the emergence of the “worker” was signaled by the creation of the Instituto do Trabalho Previdência e Acção Social (Institute of Work Welfare and Social Action) and by the elimination of the Direcção dos Serviços dos Negócios Indígenas (Head Office of Native Affairs).77 These shifts in labor legislation tried to reconcile the need to adjust to the political changes brought by the end of the indigenato system and the desire of certain economic sectors, namely industries with a presence in urban areas, for more flexible labor regulations.78
Urban Plans for Economic Fragile Workers
Once indigenato was over, the indígena housing construction fund became, in 1962, the Junta dos Bairros e Casas Populares (Popular-Neighborhoods and -Houses Board). In 1963, in an article titled “The Sick City,” architect Pancho Guedes spoke of the drama of the “reed belt,” which bordered “another city where more people live than all the people in the city—the city of the poor, of servants and manservants.”79 These people lived far from the center, in dire hygienic conditions and in precarious and unsound houses where children starved. Then, he pointed his finger at the way in which the cement city had swollen, the lack of planning and the proliferation of real estate businesses, thus proposing the creation of a construction plan aimed at bringing these two cities closer together and reaching “a genuine social integration—or are the ‘blacks’ fit only to stand in kitchens and lobbies?”80
“There were lots of people who came into the city from the countryside,” says Matine (b. 1947), raised in Chamanculo, a black athlete who moved to Lisbon’s Benfica in the 1960s. “I remember all too well that to the south of the Save, the Save river, everyone went in search of a livelihood in Lourenço Marques. Most of them would find a job sooner or later. They had their homes and started living in those suburbs, had their jobs.”
According to Hilário,
The worst thing that happened was that when the colonial war broke out people who lived in the countryside fled to the city, empty-handed, and had no place to live, so they took over any land they could grab and built their shacks there, with no sanitation. The empty spaces where we played football were gone. Then the war pushed people out of the countryside and that was it. Whatever space was there in between the shacks or the houses, we used it to play football, even if it was five-a-side, or six-a-side, and in the larger spaces we would play eleven versus eleven. Gradually that [football games] faded away.
In 1963 in Lourenço Marques a working group was put together to think and offer solutions for the problem of the city’s suburbs. Led by the psychiatrist Sousa Sobrinho, the so-called Grupo Central de Trabalhos (Central Working Group) gathered technicians and suburban inhabitants, namely a group of nurses that were part of the Caixa de Socorros dos Enfermeiros Nativos (Native Nurses’ Assistance Body).81 A series of meetings, accompanied by the press and the information services, resulted in the elaboration, in early 1964, of a survey that was then handed to the Câmara Municipal de Lourenço Marques (Lourenço Marques Municipality), which the group accused of inaction. The misery in these spaces, which were home to 150,000 to 200,000 people and were “incompatible with the most rudimentary concepts of housing hygiene,”82 reinforced the effects of insalubrity caused by the recurrent floods (“breeding ground for mosquitoes,” “municipal dung heap”) and epidemic diseases (such as hepatitis). In the “reed” there was only one first-aid post, and there was no post office or gardens, playgrounds, roadways, electricity, or sewers.83 Unhappy with the response on the part of the municipality, the working group carried out a vast urban renewal study entitled “Housing Problem among the Economically Fragile,” grounded in the application of the public right of expropriation and in the construction of various sorts of housing projects.84 Concerned with the living conditions of the African population, the group reproduced modernization’s purifying logic, representing the suburbs as an abscess that needed to be lanced.85 At the same time that it claimed to be the most intelligent intervention from the point of view of colonial interests86—undertaken in the name of a harmonious cultural coexistence necessary to avoid possible political and social dangers87—the plan was justified by the need to integrate the suburban populations into the city, to regulate the entry of “rurals,” all the while avoiding segregation.88 In this plan, the African population’s access to private property was seen as an important instrument of social stabilization.89 Revealing the existence of a small public space where housing in Lourenço Marques could be discussed, this rift served as proof of the lack of interest on the part of state authorities. Accordingly, the signatories suggested that the necessary process of expropriations and urban renewal did not move forward simply because they threatened the revenue of the owners of suburban plots.90
The intervention of the Câmara Municipal of Lourenço Marques during this period was intentionally feeble, despite the late effort to organize garbage
