Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 10.4 Lourenço Marques and its neighborhoods at independence, 1975. Key: 1. Port and
rail facilities, Subúrbios (yellow); 2. Chamanculo; 3. Xipamanine; 4. Mafalala; 5. Munhuana; 6.
Aeroporto; 7. Maxaquene; 8. Polana Caniço City of Cement (red); 9. Alto Maé; 10. Baixa (down-
town); 11. Polana; 12. Sommershield. (Credit: Luciana Justiniani Hees, adapted from a map in
Henriques 2008)
The legal division of the black Mozambican population into assimilado and indígena
was abolished along with the regime of forced labor in 1961. During the last decade
or so of Portuguese rule, as the Lisbon regime battled Frelimo guerillas in northern
Mozambique, Portuguese authorities attempted to win over Mozambican “hearts and
minds” (Castelo 2007). Educational opportunities for Mozambicans in Lourenço
Marques improved, and as wartime development boosted the city's economy, employ-
ment prospects improved as well. The numbers of relatively favored black Mozambic-
ans, still commonly referred to as assimilados , grew. But, as Penvenne points out, a
wage ceiling remained in place: with the continual swelling of the city's white popula-
tion, the incomes of assimilados with the highest levels of formal education stagnated
(Penvenne 2011).
The city, meanwhile, became perhaps more racially segregated than it had been be-
fore. The vast majority of whites lived in the City of Cement. Asians—those not living
in the shantytown cantinas they owned—lived mostly in the two commercial neighbor-
hoods within the City of Cement (Mendes 1985). Most people of mixed race as well
as the great majority of Africans lived in the shantytowns. The lines were not definite:
Hundreds of poor whites lived in the shantytowns and thousands of blacks lived as ser-
vants in the backyards of the City of Cement (Castelo 2007). But that the City of Ce-
ment was “the white city” was not a matter in dispute for those who actually lived in
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