Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The beach and government buildings, though, were strictly white places. Mozambic-
an women without shoes or wearing traditional capulana wraps couldn't get on down-
town buses or enter stores. “We were not relaxed in the city and we went to work and
returnedtothesuburbswhentheworkwasover,”saidFernasTembe.“Whenwewalked
inthestreettheydidnotpayanyattentiontous,but,forexample,thechildrenofWhites
provoked us” (Frates 2002, 194-95). In more recent interviews, men described the ten-
sion of any encounter with authorities, when forgetting to remove one's cap in respect
could result in physical punishment.
One former ranking official, João Pereira Neto, once the intelligence chief for Por-
tugal's Overseas Ministry, recalled in a recent interview that he was shocked by the po-
larized racial climate that prevailed in Lourenço Marques, which seemed to have more
incommonwithacityinSouthAfricathanitdidwithitscolonialsistercity,Luanda.On
a visit to Mozambique's capital in 1970 he was astonished by the sight of black work-
ers rushing home to the
caniço
after work in the City of Cement, hoping to avoid being
caught up by an informal nine p.m. curfew. “It wasn't an official curfew,” said Neto,
“but they knew that they ran the risk of running into a group of whites, those that the
Mozambicans called a 'posse.'” Mozambique in the 1960s and 1970s functioned as a
kind of renegade province, Neto said—a place where local officials and white civilians
undermined Lisbon's attempts at reform.
The city's shantytowns were terra incognita for most Portuguese, less known and
less well understood than many parts of the Mozambican countryside (Penvenne 2011).
Maps of Lourenço Marques rarely showed anything beyond Avenida Caldas Xavier,
as if the neighborhoods that sheltered the majority of the urban area's population were
nameless,ordidnotexist(Morais2001;Frates2002).Theseneighborhoodswereonlya
few miles from City Hall, but as one resident recalled, during the war for independence
the Portuguese distributed propaganda in the shantytowns by dropping leaflets from
helicopters.
The racial division of Lourenço Marques was visibly so stark in part because it was
inscribed in the architecture. To build within city limits, one had to use permanent
materials—hence the colloquial designation “City of Cement” (Rita-Ferreira 1967). In
the shantytowns, however, construction in permanent materials required a builder to
jump through so many costly regulatory hoops that it was effectively prohibited. The
shantytowns were areas zoned for prospective expansion of the formal European city;
concrete houses there would have made the work of bulldozers more difficult (Morais
2001).
But because the differentiation of African society was contained within the confines
oftheshantytowns,theywerenonethelessplacesofgreatdiversityinconstruction.Res-
idents interviewed about the housing choices they made in the colonial era described
