Age of Concrete. David Morton
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Figure I.2 A path in the caniço, late 1970s. (Eva Sävfors)
On the eve of Mozambique’s independence from Portugal in 1975, the subúrbios were home to more than three hundred thousand people, about three-quarters of the population of Lourenço Marques, as Maputo was then called.6 The remaining quarter lived in the central part of town colloquially called the City of Cement—or simply, “the city”—which was then predominantly European (Figure I.3). In local languages, this area continues to be called Xilunguíne, which means “place of the whites,” even though the vast majority of the European population left Mozambique around the time of independence.7 The apartment blocks and high-rises of the City of Cement are not primarily made of cement, per se, but of concrete. Concrete is the more durable substance that results from mixing cement together with water, sand, and gravel or other crushed stone aggregate and then allowing it to cure.8 To be even more precise, the City of Cement is mostly of steel-reinforced, concrete-frame construction with blocks of either concrete or clay used as infill. The name City of Cement has by and large fallen out of use for the same reason that the subúrbios are no longer called the caniço. Since masonry architecture, sometimes just referred to as stone, is the norm in the subúrbios, it no longer distinguishes the haves from the have-nots. Most people now have it.
There was nothing inevitable about the hardening of the caniço into stone. The decades-long transformation of tens of thousands of houses from reeds and wood-and-zinc construction into structures of more resilient materials was a drawn-out but often high-stakes drama and not exactly linear. For a long time and from an official standpoint, everything about the subúrbios was supposed to be temporary, including most people. During the colonial era, the vast majority of Africans in Lourenço Marques not living as domestics in the homes of their employers lived in the subúrbios.9 And until the 1960s, most of them required an official pass for the privilege of living even there. They needed to be formally employed to keep the pass, and many went without one, hoping not to be caught. Few had title to land. Many rented units in cramped compounds. Many others paid a ground rent to a private landowner for a small plot with ill-defined boundaries on which to build. But the rental receipts people stored in suitcases under their beds hardly amounted to anything like secure tenure. In the 1960s and early 1970s, land values spiked, and so did the fear of displacement.
Figure I.3 Maputo in the late 1970s. (Map illustrations by Sarah Baxendale, based on an undated map located at MITADER)
Housing in the subúrbios was not quite legal, at least not categorically. It was tolerated. The municipality allowed reed and wood-and-zinc construction, but it prohibited anything that might hinder future upgrading plans. Thus, with few exceptions, one could not build in concrete even if one could afford to. Beginning in the 1960s, though, many more had enough money to build in concrete, and during the last decade or so of Portuguese rule, several thousand people in these neighborhoods, including a number of lower-income whites, overcame their fears of displacement and ventured to build houses (albeit often rudimentary ones) out of some combination of concrete and clay blocks. In doing so, they risked stiff penalties and possible demolition. I will not be the first to point out the importance to people of building lasting homes on tenuous ground.10 Beyond comfort and beyond status, a permanent house “stakes a claim to belonging” in places that work against it.11 Masonry construction was a political act—a break with expectations that Africans should be satisfied with perpetual impermanence—though it would be many years before most people in the subúrbios felt they could even consider it. The colonial regime, for its part, grasped the power of concrete in uncertain times. The rising skyline of the City of Cement in the 1960s announced to whomever saw it that, despite the wave of decolonization across Africa, Portugal belonged in Mozambique—or, as Lisbon put it, that Mozambique was part of Portugal.12
This book foregrounds what historians usually render as background: neighborhoods of the kind often thought of as undifferentiated, ahistorical slums.13 Each neighborhood in Maputo and each yard is a specific place with a specific past. Taken together, the countless gambles, disputes, impositions, half measures, achievements, and failures inscribed on the landscape constitute an enormous, open-air archive. The book spans the period from the 1940s to the present, but it concentrates on the roughly three decades straddling Mozambique’s independence. It offers a different kind of story about decolonization than the ones that are often told. Strikes, rallies, nationalist appeals, boycotts, armed rebellions—these were the conventional signposts on the way to independence during the twilight of colonial rule in Africa. Epic-scale development schemes and efforts to mold new national identities tend to frame the discussion of how people after independence attempted to uproot colonial-era legacies. And yet, in cities throughout Africa, there were many people who, whether or not they were caught up in politics of a more explicit sort, were engaged in a politics around housing and infrastructure that did not always call itself politics. In this volume, I argue that the house builders and home dwellers of the subúrbios of Mozambique’s capital helped give substance to what governance was and what governance should do. This is especially remarkable when we consider the authoritarian nature of rule under the right-wing Portuguese dictatorship and then the Marxist-Leninist dictatorship that eventually succeeded it. At stake was not just a vision of what a “modern” city should be but also a vision of what a modern society was and what it meant to belong to one.14
Figure I.4 Chamanculo, one of the oldest neighborhoods in the subúrbios, 1969. (MITADER)
Figure I.5 The City of Cement, 1974. (AHM, c-2–4762)
Clandestine masonry home builders were a small, if growing, contingent in late colonial Lourenço Marques, but they were emblematic of a longer struggle to improve living conditions in the subúrbios. Both before and after independence, people attempted to integrate the city’s center and periphery, in part by pushing authorities to acknowledge their neighborhoods and to take responsibility for them. Responsibility, in turn, meant “urbanizing” neighborhoods with infrastructure and adjudicating the many disputes that arose there over tenancy. There are dangers in treating the subúrbios only as a pathology—as problems to be solved—as many policy makers have done; we risk turning these places into mere abstractions and dehumanizing the people who live there. But it is also true that, historically, people living in Maputo’s subúrbios have recognized the conditions in which they live as a problem. They have sought answers, alternatives to the brute-force solution to so-called slums that governing authorities everywhere have reflexively resorted to: clearance.
This book departs from much of the historical scholarship on the built environment in urban Africa in that it further shifts the emphasis from laws to practices; from the architect’s drafting table to the building site; from housing officials and professional planners to landlords, tenants, and home builders; and from government-led projects to places better characterized by official neglect. Yet as a political history, it is not a history from below as that approach is frequently understood. The shape of the city is neither imposed from above nor orchestrated from below.15 It results from the friction of many interests colliding in tight confines.
Scholars often describe the kinds of ground-level interactions that happen in cities as the politics of the everyday because the jostling among neighbors and the tangled dynamic between individual residents and municipal agencies or state authorities do not fit the typical image of what a political contest looks like. In Maputo, the episodes in which these everyday politics were revealed did not feel ordinary to the people who experienced them. Between 1950 and 1990, the population of the capital grew at least tenfold, and there are many people alive today who, depending on their age, have witnessed the population of Maputo and its satellite