January 28, 2025

Heritages of Portuguese Influence

Julio Carrilho e Walter Rossa

Mozambique's capital is characterized by a fusion between its colonial past and its post-colonial present. This combination, which occurred essentially after Independence, was predominantly in the direction of "caniço" (reed) to "cement city", i.e., from the outskirts, where the urban colonized once were segregated, to the city center, designed and built for the settlers. With their mass exodus, during Mozambique's troubled socio-political transition, the African populations of "caniço city" gradually began to appropriate the public and private space of the "cement city". This arduous process required the new tenants to adapt to the old "whites' city" ("xilunguíne" in Ronga) and vice versa. After the initial euphoria of the "revolutionary spring", with its promises of "scattering" the deposed colonial system and replacing it with a "planned economy" based on "African socialism", it quickly became clear to the new rulers and those they governed that access to the central areas of the desired "socialist city" would not be available to all Mozambicans, but only to those who fit the desired socio-political profile of the "new man". A few years after Independence, this led to the reappearance of segregation and gentrification phenomena in the capital, generally in a violent and coercive manner, without the racial component of the deposed regime, but with strong economic, social, and cultural discrimination.In response, the victims of this marginalization resorted to informal strategies of resistance and survival that had already helped them to survive in the old "caniço" during the colonial era. Consequently, these marginalized urbanites ended up empirically creating an alternative modernity to the one intended by the new political order, just as they had done during the colonial regime. In the conflict and tension between the official modernity imposed by the rulers, before and after Independence, and the alternative or possible modernity adopted by the population, the city under study built its diffuse identity. The tensions between traditional and modern, informal and formal, illegal and legal, primitive and civilized, "caniço" and "cement", "caniçofication" and gentrification, will thus contribute to shaping the urban spaces of Mozambique's capital from the time of the colonial occupation to the post-colonial period.This dissertation intends, through a multidisciplinary and comparative approach that prioritizes the perspective of the "caniço" and its inhabitants, to list and dissect the aforementioned tensions, their actors, and respective strategies, whether formal, informal, or a compromise between both. It also focuses on how they shaped the urban landscape of the city of Maputo, in particular its central core. Essentially, the aim is to understand from a "different perspective" how the "caniço city" emerged, evolved, and resisted, in the colonial context, and how it influenced and/or contaminated the "cement city", after Independence.