Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
firsttimeI'deverbeeninabathroomlikethatforareasonotherthantowashthefloors,”
hesaidinarecentinterview.Inthelivingroomheturnedthelightswitchonandoff.He
took pride in knowing the light was “ours,” even though the apartment was not his.
Chithombe and thousands of other shantytown residents were soon offered an oppor-
tunity to acquire an apartment of their own in the City of Cement. On February 3, 1976,
Chithombe was listening on the radio to Samora Machel, Mozambique's first president,
as he spoke before thousands of supporters in a plaza at the edge of the city. Since in-
dependence from Portugal the year before, Frelimo, the armed independence movement
Machel led, and which now governed the country, had nationalized all land, health clin-
ics, schools, and even funeral parlors. Now the moment had come to nationalize rental
housing.Withmostofthecity's white population nowgone,tensofthousandsofhomes
andapartmentunitsintheCityofCementwereavailableforoccupation.“Thecitymust
have a Mozambican face,” declared the president. “The people will be able to live in
their own city and not in the city's backyard!” (Machel 1976, 69). Lourenço Marques,
Machel announced, would now be called Maputo.
If one were to write a global history of white flight, it might begin with a chapter on
U.S. cities in the 1950s and 1960s, when court-mandated school integration and feder-
al subsidies of suburbanization encouraged many white residents to leave urban centers
and black neighbors behind. It would also have to include a chapter on South Africa in
the 1980s and 1990s, as the fortified edifice of apartheid began to crumble and whites
fled behind the walls of gated suburban communities. These are classic examples, and
the similarities between them are clear: just as racial segregation was weakened, a new
form of racial segregation took shape. The most dramatic episodes of white flight,
however—dramaticbecauseofhowquicklyandcompletelytheytookplace—mayhave
been those witnessed in the settler cities of colonial Africa during the era of decoloniza-
tion. This chapter is about one of these cities. In Maputo in the mid-1970s tens of thou-
sands of white residents didn't just pack up and move down the highway, but rather re-
moved themselves from the country en masse and nearly overnight. Post independence
Maputo raises an intriguing question about race and the urban landscape: What happens
to racial privilege when there is no longer a privileged race?
There are only a handful of cities that share circumstances roughly comparable to
Maputo's: cities such as Luanda, capital of Angola (which also became independent
from Portugal in 1975), and the larger coastal cities of Algeria, from which the French
withdrew in1962(Greger 1990;Lesbet 1990).Like Maputo, these were sizable African
cities developed for the almost exclusive use of white settlers. Indigenous populations
livedmostlyinoutlyingshantytownslums(andinthecaseofAlgiers,acentrallylocated
ghettoaswell).Andthesecitieswereallabandonedsorapidlythattherewasnosignific-
antperiodoftransitionfromonesituationtoanother;therewasneithermeaningfulracial
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