Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Indigenous populations were to be kept close enough to be of use, while at the same
time kept in their place—whether in backyards or the city's margins—and only for
as long as their labor was needed. Movement was often strictly controlled. Until the
1960s, for instance, a person classified indígena was only permitted to live in the area
of Lourenço Marques— including its shantytowns—if he or she carried an official pass
granting that right, a pass predicated on formal employment. Getting caught without a
pass could subject the offender to beatings, jail time, forced labor, or in extreme cases,
deportation to the cocoa plantations of the island of São Tomé (Penvenne 1983, 1989,
1995; O'Laughlin 2000). The idea of an African city, a city populated mostly by Afric-
ans and shaped by the complexities of African life, was contrary to what a city was sup-
posed to be.
The various European colonial powers did not share an identical vision. Some cities
inBritain'sAfricanempire,notablyNairobi,optedforastandardapartheid-likearrange-
ment(Myers2003),andtheBritish wereingeneral lesscircumspect inusingraceasthe
criterion for spatial separation. The Portuguese (until the 1960s, at least) shared a great
dealofaffinitywiththeFrench.LiketheFrench,thePortugueseprovidedsomeAfricans
with an avenue to citizenship and equal rights, including the right to live in European
districts (Wright1991;Çelik1997;Morton2000).Butallthesedifferentlegalisms were
not nearly as significant as the ultimate de facto reality of racial residential segregation
which so many white settler cities held in common until independence.
IfPortuguesecolonialurbanismsetitselfapart(i.e.,apartfromallbutFrenchAlgeria)
it was in the sheer size of white settler populations in its cities and the intensity of con-
struction necessary to house them. By the 1960s the streetscape of Lourenço Marques
wasdominated byhigh-rise apartment buildings, aglaring contrast withthelow-density
neighborhoods of bungalows characteristic of white districts in many other African cit-
ies. One result was that the City of Cement—particularly images of its modernist archi-
tecture—played an unusually large role in giving meaning and content to being white
and Portuguese in the Mozambican context (Frates 2002; Penvenne forthcoming). One
might say that the City of Cement was built as it was for this very purpose. In any case,
it gave the independent government of Mozambique an entrenched built legacy of con-
siderable size to contend with.
The second significant difference pertained to shantytown growth. With greater in-
dustrializationandthegreaterneedforAfricanlabor,nearlyallurbanareasinAfricaex-
perienced a dramatic increase in African population after World War II (Freund 2007).
The growth was even more pronounced in the 1960s, in large part because newly in-
dependent governments abolished urban influx controls. In Portuguese cities in Africa,
however, influx controls were eased years before independence. Shantytown popula-
tions exploded in size for a further generation while still under colonial rule, sharpening
Search WWH ::




Custom Search