Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the distinction between the booming City of Cement and its booming shantytowns and
between the daily lives of whites and the daily lives of blacks.
The Cement City and Its Shantytowns
Lourenço Marques emerged in the late nineteenth century as the principal port
city for the goldfields of neighboring South Africa. By World War II, it was one
of the busiest ports in Africa, and it soon became one of southern Africa's most
populous cities. With ever-increasing Portuguese immigration, it also possessed
one of the largest white settler communities south of the Sahara (Duffy 1962;
Castelo 2007; Penvenne 2005, 2011). During the last generation or so of colo-
nial rule, Lourenço Marques had the appearance of being two cities: one mostly
whiteandtheothermostlyblack—twodistincturbanlandscapes,dividedforthe
most part by the curve of Avenida Caldas Xavier (Anon 1974).
The City of Cement was inside the curve, which for a number of years was also the of-
ficial city limit. Nearly all buildings were built of concrete blocks or clay bricks, cars
drove on a grid of paved roads, and homes were hooked up to electricity and running
water. The neighborhood of Alto Maé, in the northwest part of the formalized city, was
the one area with a notable degree of integration, a part of town where Indians, lower-
income whites, people of mixed race, and a small number of blacks lived side-by-side
(Mendes 1985; Penvenne 1995; Frates 2002).
Figure 10.5
Lourenço Marques's City of Cement, 1971. (Credit: F. Sousa/AHM)
