Age of Concrete. David Morton

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      During the bairro’s first phase of construction, between 1940 and 1943, almost four hundred units were built, the majority of them with only one room. Each unit had its own narrow yard, and the yards were arranged along streets in half circles around a central plaza, where a police post and the bairro management office were located. Each property was supplied with piped water and electricity, but use was restricted to certain hours of the morning (for water) or evening (for electricity).¹³² In terms of space, the houses were no upgrade from the suburban norm. Rooms were about 120 square feet, smaller than many reed houses in the vicinity. Nonetheless, the neighborhood initially proved attractive enough that people who were not designated natives—that is, people of mixed race and people with assimilado status—occupied many of the units.¹³³ Presumably, they did so either through the exchange of favors, as was so common within the municipal apparatus, or by illegally subletting from original tenants.

      In his report for 1946, the administrator of the concelho harshly criticized the results of the completed development. At enormous expense, the Bairro Indígena da Munhuana only housed some three thousand people, and of these, perhaps not even half were the indígenas it was intended for. “It is possible,” he remarked, “that whoever authorized and outlined this type of housing was possessed of the best of intentions, thinking to give maximum comfort to the native population of the city. Unfortunately this goal was not reached and the problem of housing the great mass of the native population of Lourenço Marques remains unresolved.”¹³⁴ The Bairro Indígena was “far, very far indeed from meeting needs,” wrote the head of Mozambique’s office of native affairs in 1951.¹³⁵ Munhuana “seems to us a drop of water in the ocean.” He added that he regretted the municipality had carried out its plans without regard to social welfare and the “customs and traditions” of the natives. “This is not just a matter of building houses,” he argued.¹³⁶

      In historian L. Lloys Frates’s view, the radial plan of the neighborhood demonstrated the panoptic ideal of centralized spatial control, the kind one finds in many prison plans, where everyone and everything can theoretically be monitored at all times.¹³⁷ The police station in the Bairro Indígena featured a turret, for instance; a police officer, if he could maintain the attention needed for it, could surveil activity across the spacious central plaza. Because the turret was located at the edge of the plaza, however, rather than at its center, one could not see what was happening at ground level in most of the neighborhood. Perhaps more significant than the turret were the low perimeter walls of every yard, which rose no higher than a person’s waist. Clearly, someone intended to keep track of the tenants in this bairro; each unit was given a number and was located on a street with a name, and each tenant established a record with the municipality (that is, the landlord) regarding his or her payment or nonpayment of a monthly rent.

      Just about all government initiatives of the time, including forced labor, carried with them the pretension of “civilizing” the natives, and the Bairro Indígena was no exception. Rosa Candla was one of the first residents of the bairro.¹³⁸ Born in a rural district, she was orphaned at a young age, and in the early 1940s while she was in her teens, a Portuguese couple drove her to Lourenço Marques so she could try her luck in the city. She was taken in by a railroad worker who had just acquired a house in the Bairro Indígena. They lived together for more than sixty years in a two-room unit near the police post. In a 2009 interview, Candla could not recall much about her life in the neighborhood during the colonial era, but she did relate one story that for her encapsulated the nuisance of living in such close proximity to authorities. Like most of the women in the neighborhood, Candla did her shopping at the nearby Xipamanine market. If she passed the police post with her groceries balanced on her head, the officer on duty would order her to remove her bundles and carry them in her hands at her sides, which presumably was the proper comportment of a civilized Portuguese.¹³⁹

       THE PORTUGUESE YARD

      For untold numbers of young men and women from southern Mozambique, the daylong bus trip to Lourenço Marques marked their initiation into city life, well before buildings of the City of Cement or its subúrbios came into view. In the rural areas farther north of the city, many young men migrated to the Rand to work on the mines. But during the last decades of Portuguese rule, the Mozambican capital was the destination of younger brothers and sisters, the more desperate, and tradespeople such as carpenters and stonemasons seeking to establish themselves where there was consistent construction work. For most of the younger passengers, the bus ride was the first time they traveled faster than they could run. They often boarded the bus without a single escudo, without shoes, and without food, and unlike those headed for the mines of “John,”—Johannesburg—most had only a vague sense of where they would stay when they arrived in the city. Many were quite young, preteens and adolescents. Much of what they knew of Lourenço Marques was what they heard on the bus.

      A tangle of reasons justified the exodus of these young migrants. Added to forced labor and forced cultivation there were now the perpetual dislocations to make way for Portuguese plantations and other agricultural schemes. One earned only a trickle of cash in the city, but in the countryside, one earned it in dribs and drabs if at all. Still, few Mozambicans cultivated an image of Lourenço Marques as a final destination, a place to build a life and family and to thrive. At best, the city was considered a short- or medium-term measure and a temporary refuge. As soon as they had earned some cash and once the crisis at home had passed, they would return. This, at least, was their thinking when they first came to the city.¹⁴⁰

      A fictional account serialized in O Brado Africano in 1959 and 1960 tells the story of Moleque Salomone, a boy from the countryside who tires of laboring in the fields of his Catholic mission school and seeks escape.¹⁴¹ At the local cantina, he is recruited to work in the home of a Portuguese family in Lourenço Marques. The boy thinks he is twelve years old. The recruiter decides he looks more like fourteen. Salomone discusses his fate with the old miner sharing his seat on the bus to the city. As the landscape rushes past him for the first time, the boy confesses his torn feelings. “No one obligated me to go to the city, but I also didn’t abandon home because I wanted to.”¹⁴² The miner listens and shares his own misgivings of a life lived mostly away from home. But he offers the boy no consolation. When they arrive at the bus station in Lourenço Marques, the miner has only ominous counsel for him.

      Here, life in the city is different than life in the bush. Here no one knows you and you don’t know anyone. You’ll get to know one person or another, but it won’t do you any good. Here you live like a leaf carried from the ground by the wind and that twists in the air without knowing where it’s going to fall. The life of a servant is the life of a leaf dragged by the wind. Understand?¹⁴³

      He advises Salomone to forget about home; the memory will only distract him from doing a good job. And when he is older, he will realize his mistake in having chosen the urban life, but he will be unable to return home.

      Because of the late hour, Salomone must spend the night on the concrete patio of a cantina near the bus stop with other young servant recruits. In the morning, Portuguese men come to claim the boys they signed up to employ. The first building in the City of Cement that Salomone will come to know is the office of the concelho administration, where he will sign the contract that binds him to a Portuguese family for the year. Then, he will be introduced to the family’s quintal (yard), his new home.

      The demand for young male servants grew fierce with the growth of the city’s white population.¹⁴⁴ They came cheap, and they were pliable, divorced from family and most other social connections and possible complications. As Penvenne points out, they were preferred to female servants because Portuguese women feared African women would be sexual prey for their husbands, and many African women tried to avoid this type of work in part because they feared the same thing.¹⁴⁵ A young male servant cooked the family breakfast, washed the dishes, made up the beds, fed СКАЧАТЬ