From Racial Discrimination to Class Segregation in Postcolonial Urban Mozambique - Geographies of Privilege - page 223

Glossary
APIE —Acronym for Administração do Parque Imobiliário do Estado, the Mozambican
state agency that administered all state-owned real estate following the nationaliza-
tion of rental buildings in 1976.
Assimilado —Duringmostofthecolonial era,oneofseveral thousandblack Mozambic-
ans who were considered legal Portuguese citizens. To“assimilate,” an African had
toestablishthatheorshewassufficiently“civilized,”astandardthatincludedread-
ing and writing Portuguese, eating and dressing as a European was said to eat and
dress, and achieving a certain level of income and formal education.
Caniço —Portuguese for “reed,” until recent decades the most common building mater-
ial in Maputo's shantytowns. The band of shantytown settlements around the city
was often called the caniço or the Cidade de Caniço (“City of Reeds”).
Cidade de Cimento—“ City of Cement.” During the colonial era, the common term for
theformalized, largelyEuropeanpartofthecitywherestreetswerepavedandmost
buildings were built in concrete or brick.
Frelimo —The Frente da Libertação de Moçambique, or Mozambique Liberation Front,
the one-time anticolonial guerilla force that, as a political party, has governed the
country since independence. Indígena —Portuguese for “native,” the official clas-
sification of the vast majority of Mozambicans for most of the colonial era. Those
with indígena status were denied the rights of Portuguese citizenship and subject to
terms of forced labor, called chibalo .
Renamo —The Resistência Nacional Moçambicana, or Mozambican National Resist-
ance,anarmedinsurgencyassembledfromFrelimodiscontentsbyRhodesia'swhite
minority (the country became independent as Zimbabwe in 1980), and later backed
byapartheidSouthAfrica.From1976to1992thegroupsoughttodisableFrelimo's
ability to govern, doing so mostly through attacks on civilian populations. The civil
war that resulted—Frelimo calls it a “war of destabilization”—cost the lives of as
many as one million Mozambicans and displaced millions more.
Subúrbios —Another, more official term for the Cidade de Caniço, still in common par-
lance.UnliketheEnglishword suburb ,whichindicatesalackofurbandensity, sub-
úrbio indicates a lack ofurban infrastructure, such as paved roads, sewage systems,
and water provision.
Notes
1 . Historian Jeanne Penvenne is the widely recognized authority on colonial-era Maputo, particularly
inmattersoflaborandclass,andtherestofthissectionowesaparticularlyheavydebttoherwork.
2 . A number of people of mixed race were also of Indian or Chinese heritage.