Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
would bring with them their rural, communitarian values, and to putting city dwellers
to work in the countryside, where they would learn what it meant to be authentically
Mozambican (Machel 1976).
Yet it was this same petit bourgeoisie that was given the keys to the City of Cement.
One of the contradictions of Portuguese propaganda had been that even those Africans
considered “civilized” were effectively barred from living within the borders of the
designated civilized enclave. That contradiction had now been resolved, so that the
postindependence dispensation gave a measure of coherence to colonial-era attitudes
linked to race—attitudes that distinguished between “civilized” and “uncivilized” ways
of life, between the fixed city dweller and the rural sojourner who was best suited to the
shantytowns.
Frelimowasitselfmarkedbycontradiction. Forallitschampioning oftraditional rur-
al values, Frelimo also demonstrated a distaste—in word and in practice—for what it
regardedascountrybackwardness,andFrelimoleadersconsideredthemselvestheclear-
eyed agents of modernization (Hall and Young 1997; Pitcher 2002; Mahoney 2003;
Sumich 2005). Perhaps populating central Maputo with civil servants was another ex-
ample of how its ideas of what constituted modernity—and the modern city—echoed
Portuguese notions (and not just Portuguese notions, of course). While listing the do's
and don'ts of making a home in the City of Cement—such as not bringing livestock into
buildings—the president instructed future tenants to not hang their colorful
capulanas
outside their apartments. “Otherwise the city will look as if it belongs to
monhés
,” a
common, though pejorative term for Indian and Arab Muslims (Machel 1976, 69).
