Age of Concrete. David Morton
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indirectly, housing was destiny. Hunguana’s children were able to enter government schools and eventually acquire higher-paying jobs because of the house their father had built.
By the 1960s, wood-and-zinc construction predominated in the parts of the subúrbios closest to the city.97 But in the years following independence, when enforcement of the masonry ban was greatly relaxed, new construction in wood and zinc came to an abrupt halt. Regardless of whatever prestige and comfort it afforded over the reed-built house, the wood-and-zinc house could not compete in either prestige or comfort—or in cost—with construction in concrete block.
CANTINAS
José da Costa shipped off for Mozambique as a young Portuguese army conscript in the 1940s, and upon his discharge a few years later, unexcited about a return to village life in Portugal, he decided to stay in Lourenço Marques.98 On his own and barely literate, da Costa had few prospects. He took a job as the assistant to a stonemason. Then, he met an enterprising African woman named Glória da Conceiçao Nhambirre. She convinced him to borrow a truck so they could go into business transporting firewood from the countryside. They sold their wood bundles at a stand in Chamanculo, and they lived together in the reed house of her family nearby. Nhambirre possessed the acumen, nimbleness, and entrepreneurial drive that da Costa, as he unabashedly told others, completely lacked. But from birth, da Costa had an important qualification that Nhambirre did not. He was Portuguese and thus could sign official documents and own a business. After a few years of selling firewood, the couple built a cantina.
By the mid-1960s, there were hundreds of cantinas in the subúrbios, about one for every five hundred to six hundred people.99 The cantina was a commercial and social hub of everyday suburban life, a cross between a general store and a bar, and with few exceptions, it was the only authorized business in the subúrbios. To say it catered to people’s day-to-day needs is to understate just how much people depended on it. At six in the morning, the first customers of the day filed in, sullen men often on their way to the docks, with an escudo and a half in hand for a roll of bread. Throughout the day, women or their children appeared at the counter with small change to buy a few tablespoons of cooking oil or a cup of rice. Over the years, the municipality installed public fountains here and there in the subúrbios, but they fell far short of demand. The long lines and (for many) the long distance to fetch fountain water were enough to persuade people with a few more cents at their disposal to fill their empty oil cans at the nearest cantina spigot and pay for the privilege. Perhaps the most lucrative time of the day for a cantina proprietor (cantineiro) was when men returned from work and gathered to drink. Cantinas were where those with native status could legally purchase alcohol, and from the late nineteenth century onward, they were essential to Lisbon’s strategies for making the colonies a profitable market for (cheap) Portuguese wine.100
Figure 1.16 João da Costa, a.k.a. “Xibinhana,” pours a drink at his Chamanculo cantina, 1960s. (Sérgio da Costa)
The cantina was a masonry structure of impressive size—impressive, that is, only because there was nothing around to compete with it. Older cantinas, like the many built in the 1930s, had high-peaked roofs and wide pediments supported by fluted iron columns so that the entrance was like a cut-rate Roman temple portico.101 Cantinas tended to be elevated well above the rainy season high-water mark, and their wide verandas gave clear views of the street life passing by. Even after business hours, when tables were put away, cantina verandas were a place for men to congregate away from home. For many women, the cantina was a necessary stop during the workday; for many men, the cantina was a place to relax.
Figure 1.17 Dinis Marques and the da Costa children, behind the Xibinhana cantina, mid-1960s. (Dinis Marques)
Fines for public drunkenness were once the local administration’s most significant source of revenue, according to Penvenne.102 Many employers, meanwhile, had long identified cantinas as a threat to a healthy, well-disciplined workforce, and in the 1950s, hours were restricted.103 African men were said to be spending too much of their earnings getting drunk rather than sustaining their families. Cantineiros locked up in the evening, but customers knew they could enter through the yard at the “horse door,” a rear entrance so called because during their nightly patrols, mounted police would also sometimes show up there.104 Usually, though, an officer could be easily bought off with a beer. Perhaps as a result of the new rules, cantinas built in the 1960s minimized outdoor space. The newer cantinas lacked verandas to command the streetscape. They were turned inward.
A serialized short story that appeared in 1960 in O Brado Africano, a newspaper for African readers, was written as a defense of rule-breaking cantineiros and their clientele. The economics of poverty, argues the fictional Chinese cantineiro of the story, require people to make their purchases whenever they get hold of a little cash, a happenstance that follows its own clock. The African customer, he adds,
likes to converse a little, together with friends someplace, let’s say a public place, just as whites do, and this place, similar to the clubs of white people, can only be a cantina… there he feels the pleasure in passing a few convivial hours outside work, wooing women, listening to the radio, hearing the latest news in a different way than he was used to in the bush. And what would be the ideal place for this mutual companionship? Obviously the cantina!105
The cantina was perhaps the only place where non-Africans were compelled to cater to the pleasure of Africans, in part because of competition among cantineiros.106 At the same time, the cantineiro was often seen as a parasitic figure who schemed for ways to cheat his clientele. He was often so out of his element and reliant on an African employee or companion to communicate with customers that he became a target of ridicule. It was an unequal struggle, but the clientele made ample use of the power to name. Penvenne writes of the generic cantineiro moniker: mumaji, which was indirectly derived from the Portuguese phrase meaning “want more?”—the badgering question of a cantineiro seeking to run up a customer’s tab.107 Residents of the subúrbios also categorized individual cantineiros according to an elaborate and uncharitable taxonomy. José da Costa was a fixed, ornery presence behind his cantina counter, and his dog Lisboa (Lisbon) was always seen dozing at the foot of his stool. The similarities between da Costa’s snarling features and those of his dog earned him the nickname Xibinhana, which in Ronga means “bulldog,” a name that stuck precisely because he hated it. Da Costa and Nhambirre never gave their cantina a name, but everyone called it Xibinhana. Another cantina in Chamanculo, the only one with two levels, was unofficially called Ximajana—meaning “short one”—because of the small-statured Portuguese who owned it. Another cantina was Zestapor, a corruption of José está porco—“José is piggish”—because of its owner’s generally unhygienic appearance, his practice of storing pig feed in his truck, and his habit of brushing his teeth in the same sink where customers washed their hands. The cantineiro just a hundred feet or so away was nicknamed Agarragajo—“Getthatguy.” That is what he would yell from the cantina’s steps when a customer slipped away without paying, which apparently occurred with some frequency.108 In a place without addresses and with few official street names, the local cantina became the most obvious landmark when giving directions to one’s house, and it lent its name to the immediate area of the neighborhood.109
COMPOUNDS
In a more distant part of Chamanculo, about halfway between the City of Cement and the campus of the São José de Lhanguene Mission, is what must be the largest pigeon coop in Maputo. Most of the larger houses of wood and zinc feature a coop somewhere on the roof or in the yard. This particular one is more like a pigeon apartment block. It features some four hundred separate holes for pigeons to roost, and it rivals in size the elegant wood-and-zinc house beside which it stands. The house was built in the 1920s by a Goan man named José Araújo, but the pigeon coop—expanded several