Age of Concrete. David Morton
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distant outskirts of the city.37 There was no compensating, however, for the loss of two towering fig trees that were felled to make way for the road improvements. The oldest residents of Chamanculo could not remember a time when the trees were not there. They easily could have been a century old or more, their trunks had twisted together, and they gave permanent shade to what had long been one of Chamanculo’s principal crossroads. Residents call the part of the neighborhood in the vicinity of the fallen trees Beira-Mar, after the long-defunct African football club once headquartered nearby. The team’s wood-and-zinc clubhouse still functions as a bar, but the adjacent practice grounds disappeared in the 1980s when refugees from the country’s civil war were settled there, ostensibly temporarily.
It is testament to the neighborhood’s antiquity and to the long legacy of many families there that Ronga, the language indigenous to the Maputo area, is still the mother tongue of a significant number of residents. According to self-described purists, though, many of the younger people in Chamanculo who think they speak Ronga actually speak a blend of Ronga and Changana, a very similar language that, due to continual immigration from rural areas not far to the north, has predominated in the city since at least the 1960s. People who arrived in the neighborhood from the countryside in the 1950s and 1960s are still considered newcomers by residents who trace their local lineage back still further. Within a five-minute walking radius of where the fig trees used to be are some of Maputo’s most established families. Eneas Comiche is a former finance minister, and in 2018 he once again became president of the Maputo City Council (essentially the mayor), a decade after serving his first term in that office. Some years ago, he worked with members of his family to restore the wood-and-zinc house they grew up in, though all that can be seen of it from the street is its handsome double-pitched roof. It was the house where, in late 1960, the family received Janet Mondlane, the American wife of Eduardo Mondlane, the Mozambican academic who less than two years later assumed the helm of Frelimo, a newly formed movement for independence. The trip was Janet’s introduction to her husband’s land of birth. She wrote to Eduardo of the Comiche house and what she thought it revealed about their friend Eneas. About eleven people lived in only three rooms, she noted. “But the house is as well-kept and clean as a pin,” she wrote. “The children are well-groomed . . . and suddenly I remembered the boy in Lisbon, well-dressed and elegant in his dark blue suit, studying economics. It was here that they grew up, where there wouldn’t be anything without a mother’s love and affection.”38
Ana Laura Cumba, who died in 2012, had lived in a house built by her late father, Frederico de Almeida Cumba, the man who, as the Portuguese-appointed traditional leader (called a régulo), was once perhaps the most feared and reviled African man in Chamanculo.39 As régulo from 1945 until 1974, he made himself relatively wealthy, in part by extracting bribes, and had long before converted a portion of the house from wood and zinc into concrete block. Sometime after his death, Ana Laura rented out much of the house to tenants, keeping one bedroom for herself and another for her traditional healing practice.
Margarida Ferreira, the daughter of one of the régulo’s counselors, lost her house when her husband died; her in-laws simply took it from her.40 But her daughter Graça, who sold clothing, helped her lay the foundations and build partial walls for a new house. Ferreira’s sons also helped. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, they returned from East Germany where, like thousands of other Mozambicans in the 1980s, they had been factory workers.41 They carried back with them a number of domestic appliances purchased in West Berlin. The appliances were assets. The brothers sold them in Maputo, and the proceeds were used to finish their mother’s walls and install a roof.
Castigo Guambe was living in a wood-and-zinc house, palatial by Chamanculo standards, that his father, a hunter, had built in the 1930s.42 The elder Guambe, who first arrived in Lourenço Marques in the early 1900s, never worked for anyone other than himself, and by the time he died, in the 1960s, he had managed to build a small real estate empire in Chamanculo. About a decade later, shortly after independence, more than two dozen Guambe properties were nationalized by the new Frelimo government, leaving only the original homestead for Castigo and his brother. In the 1990s, Castigo built new rental units and a bar in his yard.
These houses are not mere antiquities. They are not vestiges of a deep past that arrived in the present as the same structures they were when originally built, worn down by the corrosive effects of a process we oversimplify as “time.” The houses and the spaces around them bear the marks of decades of historical change. More to the point, the houses are the change—or at least they constitute a significant part of the story of what change has meant for the residents of Chamanculo over the past century. Each of the houses I have mentioned is an ongoing project; each has never ceased to be a work in progress for the people who have lived in it. Self-built is something of a misnomer, as people have long hired professional carpenters and stonemasons to build their houses. If not self-built in the narrower sense, however, the houses have nonetheless been custom-made to the owners’ specifications. For people on meager salaries or those simply making a little here and a little there, the costs of housing have added up over the years to a massive investment of resources, energies, and anxiety. People hope that their houses will serve as their largest bequests to the generations that follow.43
Buildings and spaces may seem to “say” a great deal on their own behalf, but they do not, of course, actually speak for themselves. A good deal of this book is based on interviews: with residents of Maputo, including a number of stonemasons and carpenters; with current and former Mozambican officials of various ranks, from neighborhood block leaders to cabinet ministers; with several former Portuguese-era officials, including those now living in Portugal and those who are now Mozambican citizens; and with several foreign architects who were attached to Mozambique’s housing and planning agency in the late 1970s and 1980s. Much of the book is based as well on the stories that sons and daughters told me about their mothers and fathers. The interviews were conducted from 2008 to 2016, though they were concentrated during my longest stay in Maputo, from 2011 to 2013. In Chamanculo, I was usually accompanied by one of several research assistants, each of whom was a resident of the neighborhood. They would introduce me to people and translate from the Ronga or Changana on those occasions when Portuguese was not suitable, and they usually were as much a part of the conversation as I or the interviewee was. The interviews were deliberately conversational, wide-ranging, and generally long. I recorded more than 150 conversations, but many of these were with people I kept returning to again and again, and inevitably, many conversations were not recorded at all, including those with the people I stayed with in Chamanculo for several weeks at a time.
The question of housing did not always come up in interviews. In lieu of more substantial historical work on the granular texture of everyday life in Lourenço Marques and Maputo, one must read a number of social-realistic novels, newspaper chronicles, and published memoirs, as I have done my best to do—all part of an effort to grab from the past everything that one can.44 There is no substitute, in any case, for listening to people talk about the past and how they regard their place in it. To ask them solely about housing would have been to foreground housing perhaps artificially. On several occasions, I video-recorded people giving me a tour of their houses. Digital copies of all interview recordings (both voice and video) and transcripts of the interviews will be deposited with the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique as well as with the architecture and planning faculty of the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, both in Maputo.
The interviews were a group enterprise of people convened by an American researcher with his own interests; his own priorities; and his own presumptions about house, home, household, and property—presumptions shaped by his own individual experience of the commodified US real estate industry and the marketing of the American “dream house.”45 I have tried not to impose such idealizations on the struggle for shelter in Maputo, such as by highlighting cases only because they conform to prior expectations of what aspiration looks like. For instance, the reader will not encounter a great deal of discussion about architectural distinction—as might attract the attention of an architectural historian—because architectural distinction is not, historically, what most people have aspired to in the subúrbios of Maputo. Rather, they have sought dignified conformity. Additionally, stories people told of making houses in Maputo often silenced the role