Age of Concrete. David Morton
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1870s, after which the town would become a showcase for how labor could continue to be exploited under different guises. Forced African labor dug the earth and hauled the rocks to fill the swamps surrounding Lourenço Marques. But according to Jeanne Penvenne, the public works projects that made the vicinity of the fort more tolerable for habitation simultaneously made life less tolerable farther afield.22 The dirt for fill was excavated from nearby areas of established African settlement, thus displacing homesteads, and after the work was done, the empty pits became ponds of stagnant water and breeding grounds for malarial mosquitoes. In other words, infrastructural improvements displaced disease conditions from the growing town to the areas that were now on the town’s outskirts. Just as significant to the future of African life in Lourenço Marques was a fire that swept through the Portuguese settlement in 1875. The fire was the latest in a series, and because it had been fed by reed-walled, thatched-roof structures, construction in reed and straw was prohibited. In turn, that presumably pushed much of the African population beyond the bounds of the town’s perimeter wall.
With the opening of the goldfields in the Transvaal in the 1880s, the town came more fully under the glare of global capitalism. In 1887, the year the town was elevated to a city, the colony’s chief engineer gave Lourenço Marques its first significant urban plan—essentially, a Cartesian grid imposed on a non-Cartesian landscape.23 As Valdemir Zamparoni observes, it might have been easier to simply move the settlement to a more salubrious spot as some advocated, but the impulse to force nature to submit before man and technology overwhelmed pragmatism.24 Surveyors marked out the straight lines of future growth, and street signs appeared for streets that did not yet exist. Over the next decade, Portugal’s relationship to Mozambique and to the people who lived there changed rapidly and radically, as did the relationship of Lourenço Marques to the rest of the colony. What was known as Portuguese East Africa had been limited mostly to trading outposts on the coast and to posts and plantations along the Zambezi River; only in 1891 were Mozambique’s borders with British Africa agreed upon. Now, by the terms of the Berlin Conference, Portugal sought “effective occupation.”25 In 1895, the Transvaal railway was completed, and in recognition of the city’s centrality to Mozambique’s economic prospects, the colony’s capital was soon moved to Lourenço Marques from the Island of Mozambique, the sleepy former slaving port off the colony’s north coast.26 By 1897, Portuguese forces and their local allies had destroyed southern Mozambique’s Gaza state, consolidating Portugal’s control over the territory. Much of Mozambique was then parceled up and leased to concessionaires to administer and exploit, but the region south of the Save River, including Lourenço Marques, fell under Portugal’s direct governance.
For administrative purposes, two concentric arcs were drawn on the chart of Lourenço Marques, relative to a point near its port.27 The outer arc, with a radius of 7 kilometers, defined the concelho within it—that is, the principal administrative unit governing everyday life in the Portuguese settlement and its near vicinity. The inner arc, with a tight radius of approximately 2 kilometers, defined much of the northerly limit of the municipality, which would administer specifically urban services such as transit, trash removal, road construction, and building permits.28 At some point (it is unclear exactly when), barbed wire was installed along the municipal boundary.29 This line later became the route of the Ring Road, and sometime thereafter, the main segment of it was renamed Avenida Caldas Xavier. The area inside this curve was initially known as the ringed area. Beyond the curve, most of the responsibility of municipal authorities ended and the subúrbios began.
The full significance of the term subúrbio in the Portuguese planning tradition remains vague. In nineteenth-century Portugal, it was used colloquially to refer to new industrial areas surrounding Lisbon and to describe outer housing districts, some of them wealthy, some of them poor—just as the various derivations of the word were used in other parts of Europe and in North America.30 There are some indications that the designation acquired a more precise meaning in Portugal’s colonies, perhaps for the first time in Lourenço Marques in 1903 when areas between the arc of the municipality and the arc of the concelho were specifically identified, in a legal decree, as “subúrbios.”31 Doing so was part of an ongoing attempt to discipline the sell-off of land there, which for decades had been marked by landgrabs, giveaways, and corruption.32 In Europe and North America, suburbs were unanticipated expansions of established cities. In many cases, they were seen negatively, as outside the reach of governmental authority and prejudicial to the development of the city itself. In Lourenço Marques, however, the making of a place called the subúrbios followed closely upon the making of a place called the city, in anticipation of the city’s eventual expansion.33 These areas were not urbanized yet—nor, for that matter, was most of the municipality itself—but they would be, eventually.
Crystallizing Portugal’s renewed efforts at empire was the indigenato.34 Instituted in 1899, with many revisions thereafter, this was the legal apparatus upon which rested Mozambique’s system of forced labor. Basically, all “native” (indígena) men not engaged in formal employment had a “moral and legal obligation” to labor for the government or for a private designee of the government for up to six months at a time. Since farming one’s own fields did not count as a formal job, most Mozambican men were vulnerable to impressment—and when authorities felt moved to, women, children, and the elderly were forced to labor, too. Chibalo, as this kind of labor was called in southern Mozambique, paid meager wages (if any at all) and often lasted more than the statutory six months. It could also be levied as punishment for not paying hut taxes or for the most trivial offenses, real or imagined. Beyond that, it imposed hardships not just on the men who were forced into backbreaking, sometimes fatal work but also on the families they left behind. Chibalo was one of cruelest facts of Mozambican life, along with forced crop cultivation, which was instituted in the 1930s.35 Both were legally abolished in the early 1960s, though various forms of coerced labor nonetheless persisted in many parts of Mozambique.36
Figure 1.3 The subúrbios, 1978–79. (Barry Pinsky)
Figure 1.4 Mavalane, 1980s. (CDFF)
Many scholars have plumbed the depths of chibalo, and the subject of forced labor will not be expanded upon here. Penvenne produced the authoritative account of how the indigenato functioned in Lourenço Marques, where chibalo labor built nearly all of the city’s public works projects, including the cathedral that was erected in the 1940s by crews of men who were chained together as they worked.37 A few aspects of the indigenato, however, deserve to be highlighted here.
The indigenato redefined citizenship within Mozambique, creating a legal distinction between so-called natives and nonnatives. Europeans, Asians, and many people of mixed race were considered nonnatives, or “civilized,” and were conferred the rights of Portuguese citizenship at birth. But black Mozambicans—the vast majority of the population—were deemed natives unless they could prove themselves sufficiently “evolved” to be considered Portuguese. Those hoping to shed their native status had to read and write in Portuguese, earn a reasonable wage in a formal job, dress the way a Portuguese was expected to dress, eat what a Portuguese did, and eat it with a knife and fork. He or she had to speak Portuguese in the house, and the house at the very least had to be of wood-and-zinc construction, rather than reeds. The rules could be vague and were revised many times over the years, and the application of the law was particularly murky when it came to women and to the mixed-race children of “civilized” fathers who did not acknowledge parentage.38 At some point after one successfully applied for citizenship, an inspector would visit one’s household to verify that standards were being upheld. Over the decades, the African press frequently decried the double standard that did not require the many illiterate whites in Mozambique to pass a test to obtain citizenship. The deliberately rudimentary education provided to black Mozambicans ensured there was only a tiny pool of potential applicants. For black Mozambicans, becoming