INTRODUCTION

      You, mother!

      Transforming the reeds into zinc

      and the zinc into stone

      in the wearying battle against time

      —Calane da Silva, from “Incomplete Poem to My Mother” (1972)¹

      IN 2010, about two dozen architecture students at Maputo’s main university were sent into the subúrbios in search of the last of the city’s reed houses. There are many ways to describe the low-lying neighborhoods where most residents of Mozambique’s capital city live, but any frank depiction must underline the fact that, historically, life in the subúrbios has been conditioned by a lack of basic urban infrastructure. For most of the twentieth century, flooding was frequent, and the absence of sewage and drainage lines left neighborhoods vulnerable to cholera outbreaks. To dispose of trash, people had to bury it in their yards or burn it. Very few residents had ready access to running water or electricity. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, Mozambique’s nearly double-digit economic growth was changing the picture. The threat of flooding remained, but the water and energy grids were rapidly expanding into suburban households. Many latrines now had concrete septic tanks. Most people were building their houses out of concrete blocks.

      A majority of people in the subúrbios once lived in houses built from the reeds that grow beside waterways throughout rural southern Mozambique. The fences of their yards were usually made of reeds as well. But now, even in the neighborhood called Polana Caniço—Polana was a chief’s name, caniço means “reed” in Portuguese—reed house construction, which had been declining for decades, was very rare. The architecture students went to Polana Caniço to record specimens of the elusive suburban reed house before the use of concrete pushed it to extinction. When they found one, they took its measurements and documented it with photographs and architectural renderings, and they interviewed residents about their experiences building with reeds.²

      Despite the rustic appearance of the suburban reed house—some might call it a shack—its construction is actually highly standardized.³ Reeds, wood stays, and all the other building materials are purchased at local markets. The basic unit, a low-slung, two-room rectangular structure, is smaller than a one-car garage. The shade of a tree makes the outdoors more comfortable and more sociable than indoors, so daily life—preparing meals, washing clothes, conversing with friends—takes place outside, in the yard. At one end of the yard are a pit latrine and a bathing area, each screened with reeds. As with so many urban housing types, the roof of the reed house is corrugated, galvanized (zinc-coated) iron or steel sheeting. For residents of the subúrbios, the sound of rainfall is a hard, metallic rattle.

      To the curious architecture students, the reed houses connected present-day Maputo to a long vernacular building tradition on the city’s margins. “We were trying to learn how they were built so we don’t lose this knowledge,” Maputo architect Rui Gonçalves, who was one of the student researchers, later told me.⁴ “How can we learn from what we did here, from our own culture, from our own history?” The part of the neighborhood where their professor sent them was a sandy area adjacent to the bay shore and its polluted but popular beach. Gonçalves and the two other students on his research team spent hours looking for reed houses but had no luck. “We started getting desperate. We asked people, ‘Where can we find houses of caniço?’ Most people couldn’t help us. We walked and we walked, until we got to what you could say was the end of the line: a swamp. We felt let down.” But then they decided to walk around the edge of the swamp, and they found an isolated reed house here, another there. Occasionally, there would be two next to each other. The inhabitants of these houses were among the most impoverished people in the subúrbios, living on land where no one else would build. Water lay just below the surface.

      When the students asked residents questions, they were happy to answer, but they had trouble finding anything good to say about their houses. Reeds rotted quickly, they said, and the material was expensive to replace. Bare reed walls were no better than a sieve against blustery winds and chilly fog. Living in reeds was almost like dressing in rags. Many residents were already stockpiling concrete blocks. “No one is proud of living in a reed house,” said Gonçalves. Residents were bemused that the students thought they possessed anything of value, let alone a house that they themselves thought so little of. It turned out that only a small number of them had built their own houses; most had paid someone else to do the work. Some had recently migrated from parts of Mozambique where houses were built from different materials. In Maputo, local knowledge of reed construction was once nearly universal. Now, only a relative handful of builders were keeping those methods alive—and only because their customers could afford no better.

      Well before the architecture students came calling, the reed house had its admirers. In the 1960s and 1970s, Pancho Guedes, the noted Portuguese architect, would circulate in the subúrbios and photograph the colorful patterns painted on the wood doors and window frames that distinguished some reed houses. Other outsiders who ventured into the subúrbios at the time spoke approvingly of reeds as if they were freely available—as free as the reeds used in houses in the countryside—and good for air ventilation. But the subúrbios were not simply villages transposed to the edges of a city. In dense conditions, where one person’s bedroom might be a few feet from another’s latrine, reeds offered little privacy or protection. Reeds were once so closely identified with the precarious life of the subúrbios that all these neighborhoods were also known, collectively, as “the caniço.”

      People of greater means in the subúrbios might use reeds for their fences, but not for their houses. Until the 1970s, they built wood-framed houses clad entirely in galvanized metal panels, and some were quite regal, with lots of rooms, a veranda, and a many-gabled roof.⁵ Many landlords also built wood-and-zinc compounds, in which tiny units were rented out to the very poor. Wood-and-zinc construction predominated in the oldest parts of the subúrbios so that well into the twentieth century, these districts bore a resemblance to nineteenth-century mining camps. Wood-and-zinc houses stood firmer than reed houses, and the larger models were a mark of status. But this construction method posed its own problems. Termites fed on the wood, and depending on the weather, the house could be unbearably cold or intolerably hot.

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