Age of Concrete. David Morton
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the mixed-race population, somewhat more than one thousand people of Asian (mostly South Asian) background, and more than nine thousand whites—almost a quarter of the city’s European population at the time.58 Many of these suburban whites lived in concrete neighborhoods that had eaten into the subúrbios, displacing the people who had lived there, so even though their title deeds said “subúrbio,” the neighborhood often had some degree of urban infrastructure. But other whites, mostly men, lived in the cantinas—general stores that doubled as bars—that they ran in the heart of the subúrbios or in wood-and-zinc houses just at the edge of the city proper, often with African partners. There were also white men who kept two households—one with an African companion and one with a white and legally recognized spouse in town or in Portugal. Alto Maé, a neighborhood just inside the curve, was somewhat comparable in its demographics to the suburban neighborhoods just outside the curve, though more prosperous relatively speaking. In the meantime, the curve itself had become a nexus for prostitution in a port city notorious for it. The borderlands where city met subúrbio represented the real diversity, in all respects, of the Portuguese Empire, though it was not the kind of racial pluralism that Lisbon image-makers were eager to promote.
In the 1950s, pushed by hut taxes, forced crop cultivation, chibalo, and land dispossession and pulled by Lourenço Marques’s economic growth, more and more people from the countryside went to the capital seeking employment. At the same time, the immigration of Portuguese to the city, many themselves fleeing destitution in Portugal, was climbing apace. Between 1940 and 1960, the total population of both city and subúrbios almost tripled, to about 178,500 people, with the African population consistently accounting for about two-thirds of the population (though Africans were likely undercounted).59 The influx of Portuguese immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s brought city development flush against the caniço.
This is when the ringed area truly became the City of Cement—more completely concrete and nearly universally thought of as “the white city” despite the enduring diversity of some neighborhoods.60 Mestiço men and well-dressed black men (that is, assimilados) could be seen in restaurants, bars, the cinema, and shops. But most establishments in the City of Cement did not welcome black Mozambicans, most of whom could not afford to shop there in any case.61 When residents of the subúrbios went to the City of Cement, it was to work, and when they clocked out, they were subject to a 9:00 p.m. curfew.62 In any encounter or near encounter with whites, one was expected to show what was considered proper deference. Failure to step off the sidewalk to make way, to humbly lower one’s gaze, or to stand up and remove one’s cap in the presence of a police officer could result in a beating. Employers could request that police punish their employees for absences and perceived misdeeds. Until the early 1960s, labor relations throughout Mozambique were based on a credible threat of violence. In the City of Cement, it could often seem just around the corner.
THE REED HOUSE
For Mozambicans, the reed house was long the mark of poverty and squalor, as well as the precariousness of urban life in general, and it still is. This had less to do with the material itself than with where it was put to use. In the countryside of southern Mozambique, for instance, a reed house was nothing to be ashamed of. A rural house was circular in plan and walled either with wattle and daub or with caniço, a tall, fairly rigid reed that grew in relative abundance by the region’s waterways.63 Adequately sized tree branches were freely available to serve as pillars and stays. Sources of clay were available, too, and often pillaged from anthills; the material was used to coat the inside and outside of reed walls, insulating huts against wind, insects, and rot. Houses were reasonably well ventilated. Fabrication of the roof was a communal affair. Neighbors joined in to bundle the straw tightly together and affix it to a conical roof structure; then, the cone was lifted onto their heads and conveyed to the hut, to be followed by a celebration.64 A hut was customarily destroyed when its resident died, but the roof structure was preserved and used to shelter a succession of new huts. In the 1940s, years before he became Frelimo’s founding president, Eduardo Mondlane provided descriptions of his childhood in rural southern Mozambique to his former teacher, Swiss missionary André-Daniel Clerc. In the resulting novel, Chitlangou, Son of a Chief (1950), the young protagonist recalls lying on the floor of his hut and looking up with admiration not at the stars but at the spiraling interior structure of the roof, a “venerable smoke-blackened cone” that had sheltered several generations of his family.65 He remarks, “I have often marveled at the skill of the men of my people: from a bundle of sticks, a heap of branches, they have fashioned this covering, in a single piece, which faces all horizons and resists the four winds of heaven.” In Chitlangou’s meditation on roof structure, Mondlane and Clerc were perhaps offering a subtle interpretation of the Mozambican character: “These supple interlaced twigs form a cable which, in its patient itinerary, unites the center to the circumference.”
Figure 1.7 Polana Caniço, 1988. (Carlos Cardoso / CDFF)
Figure 1.8 Polana Caniço, 1987. (CDFF)
Figure 1.9 Cement mix was often used to plaster reed houses. Maxaquene, late 1970s. (Eva Sävfors)
Holes were dug in the ground by hand for the placing of pillars. Parallel stays were fixed horizontally to the pillars at two or three points on both the interior and exterior of the pillars, and they were tied in place with plant fibers. Reeds were then slipped into the gap between the parallel stays. Men—when there were men around to volunteer their labor—tended to do much of the construction work, but not exclusively. Most people knew how to build such a house, and most of them contributed at some point or another to the construction of one. The only significant cost to the home dweller in the countryside, other than the time spent locating materials, was in the preparation of brew for the party that followed the placing of the roof.
By the 1950s, however, the immediate surrounds of the Bay of Lourenço Marques had been stripped of much of their naturally occurring supplies of building materials, and so, unlike in the countryside, building a reed house in Lourenço Marques was a costly affair.66 Contrary to the popular image of patchwork shantytowns improvised from scavenged waste, the materials for the typical reed house were paid for in cash at markets throughout the subúrbios. Reed bundles and tree branches were trucked in from the countryside or arrived by rail from the Incomati valley to the north, where there were even caniço plantations.67 (In the 1960s, materials for reed construction may have been the principal cargo of trains on the Manhiça line.)68 Horizontal wood stays were either rough-edged scrap from the lumberyard and cheap or machine-cut, slightly more elegant, and pricey. For fasteners, wire and nails substituted for plant fibers. Corrugated metal panels were imported from Europe or South Africa until sometime after World War II, when local factories entered into production of some materials as well. The hardy, practical corrugated metal panel, called a chapa in Portuguese, could last for decades, and it changed construction patterns utterly: by the 1950s, most houses in the subúrbios were built rectangular in plan to accommodate the panel dimensions.69 (There is a further discussion of the chapa later in this chapter.) The houses varied in size, but many were about 260 square feet, twice as long as they were wide, and sheltered two rooms.70 The width of the house was slightly more narrow than the width of the metal panel, to allow for a slight roof incline and eave.
In 1968, Alfredo Pereira de Lima authored a brief history of the progress of the city’s European settlement by chronicling its changing building types. In the early nineteenth century, he wrote, the lack of good quality wood compelled the handful of pioneers who lived outside the fort’s walls to build “African cabanas (of the hut type) covered in straw, subjecting themselves to the greatest discomforts.”71 Examples of that type of hut, he continued, were still in evidence, “almost