Age of Concrete. David Morton
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Here, life in the city is different than life in the bush. Here no one knows you and you don’t know anyone. You’ll get to know one person or another, but it won’t do you any good. Here you live like a leaf carried from the ground by the wind and that twists in the air without knowing where it’s going to fall. The life of a servant is the life of a leaf dragged by the wind. Understand?143
He advises Salomone to forget about home; the memory will only distract him from doing a good job. And when he is older, he will realize his mistake in having chosen the urban life, but he will be unable to return home.
Because of the late hour, Salomone must spend the night on the concrete patio of a cantina near the bus stop with other young servant recruits. In the morning, Portuguese men come to claim the boys they signed up to employ. The first building in the City of Cement that Salomone will come to know is the office of the concelho administration, where he will sign the contract that binds him to a Portuguese family for the year. Then, he will be introduced to the family’s quintal (yard), his new home.
The demand for young male servants grew fierce with the growth of the city’s white population.144 They came cheap, and they were pliable, divorced from family and most other social connections and possible complications. As Penvenne points out, they were preferred to female servants because Portuguese women feared African women would be sexual prey for their husbands, and many African women tried to avoid this type of work in part because they feared the same thing.145 A young male servant cooked the family breakfast, washed the dishes, made up the beds, fed the dog, and swept the floors. He occupied the very bottom rank, below the cook and the launderer. The cook and launderer usually lived in the subúrbios and walked to work, but the moleque, or “kid,” as the servant was called, lived on site, occupying a single-room, windowless unit in the yard, usually part of a larger concrete-block structure that was also used for storage. He typically slept on a reed mat. During the day, all servants shared the yard, where most cooking and the washing of clothes took place. Homeowners themselves barely saw the yard, except perhaps when spying it from a window above.
Servants called the head of household patrão—a word that combines the senses of the English words boss and patron. The young servant’s daily life was circumscribed by the concrete walls of the yard and the house it served, and so, life stirring beyond the property’s boundaries was usually glimpsed only a few hours per week. He could grow quite close to the people he served, and depending on how young he was and the sentiments of his employers, he might essentially be raised by them. But his utter dependence on his patrões and his near confinement to their home also left him vulnerable to violent whim. Swift and frequent punishment was levied on servants for lax work, alleged theft, or perceived cheekiness. If the man of the house did not beat the servant himself, he dragged him to the police station to have the police administer the beating.146 The instrument of choice was a wooden paddle. The palmatória, so called because it was whipped against upturned palms, became a kind of emblem of the arbitrariness and brutality of Portuguese rule, long after its use was curtailed in the late 1950s. The servant’s only real protection from an abusive patrão was the one-year contract—if he could bear the situation that long—coupled with a fluid market for servants that left few adolescent boys unengaged for more than a few days.
Adriano Matate arrived in Lourenço Marques in 1950 from rural Gaza; since he could go no further in school, he needed to secure a job to avoid chibalo.147 He found quick employment in the yard of a Portuguese family. He was sixteen and made 80 escudos per month, a pittance. “They called us moleque,” he recalled years later. “Not ‘servant,’ not ‘workman.’ They called us ‘moleque.’ You see how it was?” His schedule was simple. When he was not working or sleeping, he was at church. He left the property to pray twice a week, on Thursday nights and on Sunday afternoons. Once, his patrão was away for a week or so. During his absence, police appeared at the home to question Matate. The wife of his employer had reported him because surely only a thief, she told them, would be slipping out of the yard every night. The police searched Matate’s small room and then took him to the station, all the while indicating to him that they did not truly consider him a suspect in any crime. Unfortunately for Matate, he was detained at a time when local administrators were being pressured by Lisbon to fill labor quotas for the cocoa plantations of São Tomé.148 Within days, he and his cellmates were on a ship for the remote island colony. Matate was told his sentence was nine years. His exile lasted twelve.
For many young men working and living in backyards in the City of Cement, Sunday afternoon was spent in the subúrbios. Out of sight of patrões and mostly out of sight of police, the bairros were a place to let off steam. Residents of Chamanculo recall that during the colonial era, Sunday was actually the most dangerous day of the week. The adolescent servants dressed themselves up in their most stylish clothes and formed temporary gangs of convenience, roaming suburban lanes in search of other gangs to fight or innocents to rough up. One postindependence novelist, writing in 1985 about the subúrbios in the 1960s, recalled the tranquility that prevailed midweek compared to the weekend, when “fearsome bandits with white trousers” appeared in the neighborhood, “a harmonica on their greedy lips and sugarcane in hand, disemboweling anyone who crossed their path, venting their frustrations and suppressed desires for revenge against the patrões who humiliated them from Monday morning to late Sunday afternoon.”149
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When scholars began in earnest to explore African urban history, they appreciated that what made a city fundamentally different from the countryside—what made it worthy of study in its own right—was its greater diversity within closer confines.150 People lived side by side with others of different backgrounds and beliefs. They socialized in ways that were entirely new to them.151 Some tinkered with nationalist ideas. Labor struggles took on a certain edge.152 New forms of autonomy—cultural, economic, political—emerged among women and men as they found common ground under trying circumstances.153 In the subúrbios of Lourenço Marques during the last decades of Portuguese rule, women factory workers banded together for mutual support; men shut out of the whites-only football league formed their own; and musicians from around southern Mozambique created a unique style of guitar-driven dance music, marrabenta.154
Though the social and economic distances between them were usually enormous, Africans of various backgrounds in Lourenço Marques also lived in close proximity to Europeans and people of South Asian descent—mostly as employees. But in many cases, they also met as companions and fellow worshippers and neighbors. Segregationist schemes in cities throughout colonial Africa were halfhearted and incomplete.155 Even apartheid South Africa, taken as the archetype of racial planning, had its gray zones and people living illegally in outbuildings in white areas; moreover, South African segregation makes no sense without the history of racial proximity and intimacy that it attempted to put an end to.156 It may seem remarkable that people in Lourenço Marques’s City of Cement could be so blind to conditions in subúrbios that were such a short walk away. Then again, ignorance took a great deal of effort.
Figure 1.20 Lídia Manhiça Muhale, Chamanculo, 2011. Muhale and her husband, Filipe Muhale, built their wood-and-zinc house in the 1960s, eventually adding rooms in concrete block to accommodate a growing household. (David Morton)
Figure 2.1 View of the City of Cement from the caniço, 1960s. (Ricardo Rangel/CDFF)
Chapter 2
THE POLITICS OF VISIBILITY
The “City of Reeds” Debate, 1962–65
FEW COLONIZING powers, in any historical context, have been able to resist the appeal of the checkerboard urban grid.1 The grid