Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
integration nor gradual racial turnover. In mid-1974, a year before Mozambique's inde-
pendence from Portugal, a large majority of residents of the City of Cement—perhaps
70,000 people—were white (Rita-Ferreira 1988). By mid-1976, a year after independ-
ence, a large majority of residents of the City of Cement were black.
Rarely has a city found itself in a position to so utterly reorient itself. Nonetheless,
the City of Cement remained a zone of privilege. It became the home to party elites,
warveterans,militaryfamilies,andthosewithbettersalariedwork,generallyasgovern-
ment functionaries—Mozambique's nascent African middle class. For most shantytown
dwellers, the City of Cement remained out of reach. Many never even considered the
possibility. Sebastião Chithombe, for instance, never did.
This chapter draws heavily from Lefebvre's (1991) and Foucault's (1980) insights re-
garding space: how the urban landscape, rather than simply reflecting existing social in-
equalities, at the same time, engenders them. This dynamic, furthermore, has as much
to do with competing conceptions of the city as with the physical reality of the city
itself—conceptions, for instance, of what constitutes modernity and civilization, and
ideasaboutwhoissufficiently“modern”or“civilized”todeservetheamenitiesofurban
life. A central theme of this topic is how such inequalities, once embedded in the urban
environment, manage to persist, though perhaps in different forms. Maputo represents
an extreme case in this regard.
Itwouldbedifficulttofindcircumstancesthat,atfirstglance,seemedmorefavorable
to undoing a grossly unequal system of housing than the conditions that prevailed in
Maputo in the years after independence. Following the Portuguese flight, Maputo was
given what seemed to be a virtual blank slate, and it was governed by staunch Marx-
ists often disposed to treating class privilege as a crime. Yet the new regime decided
that for the tens of thousands of houses and apartment units of the City of Cement to
be of any use at all they would need relatively privileged tenants capable of paying a
rent sufficient to maintain them. And even when rents were lowered, most people still
couldn't afford to live there. That Maputo remained during this revolutionary period a
largely dual city, divided between the formal City of Cement and its shantytowns and,
to a significant extent, between two different ways of life, lends further confirmation to
just how rigid a social hierarchy can be once it has been reinforced in concrete.
Portuguese Colonialism, Whiteness, and Racial Segregation in Urban Spaces
Portugal is today, a small, economically marginal country on the western edge of
Europe. Italso hadamarginal economy whenit wasoneofthe European powersclaim-
ing a controlling stake in Africa—the unlikeliest member of a select club. Portugal's
Africancoloniesinthetwentiethcenturywereavestigeofitsdominanceinthefifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, when Portugal maintained a mercantilist empire with a truly
