Age of Concrete. David Morton
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for pursuing more advanced educational opportunities and climbing higher up the job ladder.39 Nonetheless, having to discard as inferior one’s African identity was a humiliating experience for many, and some who met the requirements for assimilation refused to go through with it.40
Figure 1.5 Pushing a truck through suburban roads, 1971. (Notícias archive)
Much like France and the évolués (evolved ones) of its empire, Portugal trumpeted the existence of assimilados to show its critics that its native policies were not racist, since they demonstrated that anyone, no matter the color of their skin, could become Portuguese.41 Yet the number of assimilados was alone sufficient to refute that claim: by the abolition of the system in the early 1960s, there were perhaps only five thousand people with assimilado status in the entire territory, considerably less than 1 percent of the total African population.42 Still, however miniscule the number of people classified as assimilado may have been in Mozambique during the reign of the indigenato, they were nonetheless a recognizable segment of the population of Lourenço Marques. Following the abolition of the indigenato, the word assimilado continued to refer in common parlance to any black Mozambican who had acquired a certain level of formal education and secured a modestly paying job, such as clerk, office assistant, schoolteacher, bookkeeper, interpreter, or nurse—the highest positions to which a black Mozambican could realistically aspire during the colonial era.43 In the years after independence, to have been assimilado carried with it the unjust stigma of having purportedly approximated oneself too closely to the colono (the Portuguese settler) and benefited from the impoverishment of one’s Mozambican brothers and sisters.44
Figure 1.6 A water fountain in the subúrbios, undated. (AHM, icon 4621)
As Penvenne has illustrated, there had always been a number of more privileged Africans in the city during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not a few of them highly visible figures in local affairs.45 They were traders, elephant hunters, labor recruiters, journalists, and intellectuals, many with some combination of African, European, and Asian parentage. Their cultural and linguistic fluency—the ability to make connections between different groups of people and different spheres of urban and rural life—was a point of pride and often a source of profit. On paper, however, the indigenato pigeonholed more-privileged blacks into the single, distinct category assimilado, while hiving off those Africans with a more diverse racial background (called mestiços, mulatos, or mistos) as if they were a separate and identifiable community. The law flattened, conceptually, the myriad interests that collided daily in a place that still retained many of the characteristics of an unruly frontier town. The assimilado, the black Mozambican who had supposedly abandoned an African self in exchange for European status, was, in more than one sense, a Portuguese invention.46
The indigenato altered the lives even of those not directly taken for chibalo. The system institutionalized the debasement of all African labor so that it was cheap and more easily controlled. Natives who were engaged in waged labor and even Africans who held citizenship saw their roles diminished at the port, the railway, and the municipality—the city’s largest employers. At the low end of the wage spectrum, African earning power was undermined by chibalo; the threat of it sent men to the city looking for any formal work they could find. And the earnings of those in better positions were eroded by the fitful though continual growth of the Portuguese population, as whites benefited from job preferences.47
Until the 1960s, natives carried a pass that showed they had been granted an administrator’s permission to be in Lourenço Marques, and this permission was tied to the securing of a job. People in the subúrbios lived in fear of police raids. Those caught without a pass were subjected to vicious whippings or chibalo or both, and women, for whom formal work was much harder to come by, tended to live a particularly fugitive existence.48 Assimilados, too, were stopped and ordered to produce documentation; they had to show they were not natives.49 The right of all black Mozambicans, whether citizens or not, to simply walk the streets of Lourenço Marques or even the dirt tracks of the subúrbios was made contingent. One did not belong unless one proved otherwise.
The logic of the subúrbios and the logic of the indigenato, though initially articulated at roughly the same time, were not perfectly synced. The subúrbios were where the promise of municipal infrastructure ended; the boundary line that marked the frontier was drawn with a vision in mind of the European metropolis that some hoped would soon emerge within the curve’s embrace. Ill-defined parts of the subúrbios were called native reserves, but in practice, these were not like the native reserves of South Africa and neighboring British colonies, that is, areas where all black Africans not residing at their places of employment had to live and where only Africans could live. As natives, most people living in the subúrbios were subject to the ostensibly customary authority of a Portuguese-appointed hereditary leader, or régulo (discussed in the following chapter), just as they would be in the countryside. But the word subúrbio in itself conveyed no precise legal implications relative to either race or citizenship. Officially speaking, one did not have to be native or black to live in the subúrbios, and one did not have to be white to live within the curve of the ringed area.
Thoroughgoing segregation was achieved nonetheless, testament to the power of racialized labor exploitation and restrictive ownership laws, as well as ever-more exacting building codes that excluded most Africans from a city being remade in concrete.50 In the early twentieth century, natives who already claimed property within Lourenço Marques proper were allowed to keep it so long as they could establish proof of possession, but few could assemble the paperwork demanded by the municipal bureaucracy to do so. Those who could were limited to 400 square meters (less than one-tenth of an acre), enough space for a house and a small yard.51 Also in the first decade of the century, municipal authorities indulged in what became a recurring compulsion to modernize the face of the city, and such initiatives usually resulted in the demolition of houses that did not belong to whites. As nearly everywhere in the colonial world, fear of the plague had justified the destruction of a number of houses belonging to Africans and Asians, in the city and the subúrbios; the rules exempted white-owned homes from health standards.52 One health official described the capital in 1910 as having the “mean aspect of a city of tin,” referring to a shantytown, and that year, citing sanitation concerns, the municipality decreed that all new construction within city limits had to be built in masonry.53 The order confined to the subúrbios the new builders who could afford no more than wood and zinc. In 1932, costly bureaucratic procedures that were imposed on those who wanted to expand, renovate, or simply paint their existing houses made maintaining one of the aging wood-and-zinc homes in the city that much more onerous. Houses constructed of wood and zinc within the ringed area, furthermore, were assessed a building tax at a higher rate than those made of concrete block.54 Because of the suppression of African wages by the indigenato and the inflow of whites from the metropole, Africans could not maintain a hold within the city.
In 1938, the governor-general marked out native reserves at some distance from the city, in which all natives had to reside unless they were living in an employer’s compound or home.55 Those houses remaining in newly designated native-free areas of the subúrbios would be destroyed. The draconian law would have been of a piece with South African–style segregation if it had been implemented. According to Penvenne, Portugal’s colonial minister scuttled the plan, arguing that it violated the principles of nonracialism.56 By then, there were very few black Mozambicans within the city proper who were not also living with their employers as domestic servants. Most had long since been pushed to the subúrbios. Those who were from Lourenço Marques and belonged to the original Ronga-speaking clans had already been squeezed off their land by arbitrary removals and stricter building codes.57
The displacement of Africans from the area where most whites lived had proceeded incrementally, though