Age of Concrete. David Morton
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Figure 1.12 The Guambe house, built in Chamanculo in the 1930s, in 2011. (David Morton)
Figure 1.13 Jochua Guambe (just right of center) and his family, early 1950s. (Castigo Guambe)
Figure 1.14 The Tembe house, built in Chamanculo in the early 1960s, in 2012. (David Morton)
Figure 1.15 Firewood for sale, Minkadjuíne, 1987. (CDFF)
While zinc was relatively durable, it was terrible at regulating the ambient temperature. It magnified outdoor heat, turning rooms into ovens, and it did nothing to insulate against the cold other than fending off the wind. A zinc roof, whether it topped a wood-and-zinc house or a reed house, leaked where nails secured the panels to joists. At night, there was a drizzle indoors even when it was not raining outdoors because moisture would rise from sleeping bodies, condense on the roof panels, and then fall as cold droplets. Zinc-paneled walls did not have to be frequently replaced as reed walls did, but termites fed on wood pillars and rafters, limiting their useful life. For those who could afford it, a common solution was to elevate the house on a concrete plinth, which also elevated it above the frequent water inundations. The low-end wood-and-zinc house was like a simple shed, with a roof inclined in a single direction. The first time the house was expanded in size, a roof incline was added in the direction opposite to the first, just as with the reed house. From the standpoint of status, this second incline was what began to distinguish the house from its neighbors; in fact, such a double incline defined the house. One sought to live in a house of duas águas—“two gradients”—to drain off rainwater in opposite directions.86
Going from a house of two gradients to the embellishments that truly distinguished a wood-and-zinc house was a leap that few could make. The finest houses of wood and zinc, called chalés, featured semienclosed verandas, many gables, and large pigeon coops on the outside (baby pigeons were a Portuguese delicacy) and floors of Oregon pine, false ceilings, and many rooms on the inside.87 A false ceiling regulated the indoor climate. It caught leaks from above, stopped moisture rising from below, and most importantly formed an attic buffer space that kept hot air from reaching living areas. The higher the roof, the more it drew off heat from below. More zinc panels and more wood were required, so these high-peaked roofs (high, that is, against the low-slung norm of the subúrbios) advertised from some distance away the relative wealth of the people they sheltered. The finest wood-and-zinc houses, perched on concrete plinths and reaching almost to treetops, gave neighborhoods the barest hint of a skyline. The scale was deceiving. Even in the largest houses of the subúrbios, all living quarters were located on a single floor.
Despite the exigencies of the building code, there were still some four hundred houses of wood and zinc within the City of Cement in 1950. One displeased engineer called them “genuine crimes, genuine matchboxes, authentic abortions.”88 At a forum in 1949 on problems facing the municipality, an official called them “obsolete vestiges of the heroic epoch of occupation, almost all of them nests of illness, giving to certain streets the lamentable aspect of shantytowns.”89 He hoped they could be demolished in short order. When they were torn down, the panels often got sold to people in the subúrbios, who used them to build houses that were a mark of relative status. Because the wood-and-zinc houses required greater resources to build, popular memory tends to recall them as out of reach for all but assimilados and mestiços.90 But this was not the case. Even some of the larger houses were built by people whom no one would consider, by any definition, assimilado. Jochua Guambe, born in rural Inhambane, went to Lourenço Marques in the early 1900s to avoid paying the newly imposed hut tax.91 He did not work in the city, and he never had need to learn Portuguese. Earning his living as a hunter, he would bag game in Inhambane and then travel to South Africa, mostly on foot, to sell animal skins and claws at a market in Durban. Lourenço Marques was merely a convenient base of operations between his sources of supply and places of demand, and later, the city’s subúrbios became the site of Guambe’s small real estate empire. In the 1930s, he built a house of wood and zinc for his family, on one of about two dozen lots of property he eventually purchased in Chamanculo. It had the features common to the houses of the suburban elite: a semienclosed veranda, a concrete plinth, a false ceiling, and a pigeon coop perched beside the roof. The house was L-shaped, rather than a conventional rectangle, so instead of two roof inclines, there were four, giving the roof a more complicated profile and a more South African appearance than the more common duas águas. There were two bedrooms, one for himself and one for his sons.
“If you had a house like this, it was a symbol of the fact that you owned land,” said Castigo Guambe, Jochua’s youngest son. “It wasn’t just anybody who owned land.” With his native status, Jochua Guambe could not actually be a landowner in the eyes of Portuguese law.92 But his eldest son, Júlio, who worked in a shoe store downtown, had legally assimilated, and he vouched for his father on titling documents. When Jochua Guambe died in the 1960s, he left his properties and the family house to Júlio, and when Júlio died in the 1980s, the house passed to Castigo, who still lives there today. Guambe replaces the wood-slat interior walls when they rot, and he repaints the exterior zinc panels green when they fade. Recently, he had to cut down the sick mango tree that grew beside the house, the last survivor of the many that his father had once planted in the yard. It was the tree where his father invited the curandeiras of the neighborhood to perform ancestral ceremonies, a practice Castigo continued for years. Studding the trunk were the heads of rusted nails that had secured the drying skins of slaughtered goats for the better part of a century.
House construction stretched the resources even of so-called assimilados. Alsene Cumbana, who had assimilated status, held many jobs over the years—as a deliveryman for a bakery, as a veterinary worker—and when he went to Lourenço Marques in 1947, he was able to buy a simple, two-room house of wood and zinc.93 A few years later, he married. But as the family grew, eventually including nine children, and as they took in Cumbana’s older brother, a miner who had lost the use of his legs, they could not afford to expand the house solely on one salary. Eurica Cumbana, Alsene’s wife, worked the family’s garden plot in the nearby countryside, did all the food preparation and cleaning, and was responsible for raising the children, but now she asked her husband to buy firewood and charcoal for her to resell in front of the house. “She would split the wood herself,” said Elizabeth Cumbana, her daughter, who still lived in the house in 2011. “She wouldn’t even get someone to help her do it, because she said that it would be like giving money away.” The house’s two rooms eventually became five. Eurica told her daughter: “This house grew because I always sacrificed myself for it to grow.” Many women in the subúrbios financed house construction through the selling of charcoal, produce, and traditional brews.94 They also supported each other’s projects by participating in lending clubs, called xitique.95
It will be recalled that the word assimilado took on meanings beyond its legal definition and applied colloquially to black Mozambicans of some means. It is likely that some people were thought of as assimilado just because they lived in a house of wood and zinc. That is, the house made the assimilado, rather than the other way around. In the 1930s while working at the counter of a building materials store downtown, Salvador Simão Hunguana built a house in Malhangalene, a lightly populated, almost rural neighborhood north of the city.96 The house he built was particularly distinguished for the area, having eight rooms and being surrounded by a large citrus grove. Working at the materials store no doubt helped Hunguana with supplies. When his assimilado friends pulled strings to get assimilated status for him as well, his house—just as impressive if not more so than some of the Portuguese-owned homes in the vicinity—allowed