Pensativities: Selected Essays

The City on the Veranda of Time

Like all cities, Maputo was fashioned out of invention and myth. The city of red acacias: the first invention. Acacias aren’t really acacias. Second fallacy: the splendid trees that embellish the city originate in the continent of Africa. They came from Madagascar. What does their origin matter if they were installed, in all their colour and perfume, in the cityscape of the Mozambican capital? They arejust like its inhabitants, most of whom nowadays come from other regions. Third misunderstanding: the name. After Independence, an indigenous name was chosen so as to help return the city to the country that was in the process of being born. Lourenço Marques was brought down from its pedestal and Maputo raised as if evoking a dream. However, the new name did not appear to satisfy the demands of historical and geographical rigour. Maputo is a watery name, the name of the river that flows out into the southern part of the bay. There are those who say that it would be more correct to call it Pfumo or KaMpfumo.

Incontrovertible truths are details that survive the passage of time. For example, take those streets that are carpeted with jacaranda flowers. There, next to the Hospital, who has the courage to step on that lilac-coloured ground? This city, which switched its name from Lourenço Marques to Maputo, is still called Xilunguine by many of its inhabitants. Xilunguine is the place where whites live. Indeed, the city is the door through which the country conducts its barter with modernity. This is the veranda where the world woos the Mozambican nation most persistently. Mozambicanness transits through here, and it is here that our multicultural identity, which is our very claim to citizenship, is woven and interwoven.

The city has been criss-crossed by time and by different worlds. The colonial past lives on in many, often beautiful buildings. The revolutionary period is still present, with its now-faded words staining walls and façades. A slogan fades with time, grows old. If it wasn’t born already old. The old houses in the upper part of the city — especially those next to the Polana district — bear witness to an early period, when the Barreira Vermelha area was first settled and the city assumed the pompous sobriquet of “the new Buenos Aires.”

This was at the turn of the century and the city’s inhabitants were seeking refuge from the low-lying areas, which were marshy and unhealthy. Until the end of the nineteenth century, Lourenço Marques never succeeded in breaking out of the cane palisade extending along a sandy bank, which now houses FACIM (the Maputo Agro-Commercial and Industrial Fair). Everything was contained within this narrow strip, where the Portuguese felt safer. Up above, on the higher ground, was the bush, and to the north, the muddy territories of the mangrove swamps.

A stroll through modern Maputo allows us to read these signs of History. The city is recent but, as in a shell, the different ages became juxtaposed in layers. Another logic then organized the urban space on grounds of race, class, civilization. What was sought was the mirror of a certain type of Europe, as if it were the Mediterranean, rather than the Indian Ocean lying next to it. Later, the city was disarranged and rearranged, sometimes in the naïve hope of accommodating everyone and allowing itself to be inhabited in a spirit of equality. Under attack from the countryside, the city resists. Managed by the demands of urgency and the ever-insufficient funds, Maputo’s beauty eventually imposes itself even after the most difficult moments such as last February’s heavy rains.

Some trees resist as well. Some of them are monuments. The old phama in Xipamanine that gave its name to the area. The kigelia in front of the fort: how many stories, how many myths? It’s worth visiting African cities for their trees, which contain legends, and are laden with more stories than foliage.

A Place Where Hybridities Are Made

Much is known about Maputo’s historic and architectural heritage. But the city has other lesser-known merits. Maputo was the melting pot for experimentation in new artistic currents. It was there that much of Mozambique’s art and thought were forged.

Over a period of decades, the suburbs of old Lourenço Marques had the atmosphere of a borderland, a place of cultural hybridity. In districts like Mafalala, Malanga, Xipamanine and even Malhangalene, space was no longer ordered completely along the lines of race.

It was in areas like these that the cultural hybridity that is the basis of Mozambican thought was forged. In these borderland areas, exchanges were woven not only between races but between cultures. The importance of Makua communities in districts like Mafalala is well known. From a cultural point of view, these areas were highly productive.

During the second half of last century, this suburban belt constituted a series of extremely active cultural niches. Names such as Noémia de Sousa, José Craveirinha, Chichorro, Malangatana, Calane da Silva, the guitar player Daíco, the musical group Djambo, are all products of this cultural conviviality. However, it wasn’t only art but actual political thought that germinated in these peripheral areas — civic centres (the African Association), newspapers such as the Brado Africano, student associations (NESAMO, the Nucleus for Mozambican African Secondary School Students), all this agitation occurred on the urban periphery as if a new world were being born from the outside, an invasion from the skin that aims towards the centre.

It is quite common for suburban districts like these, inhabited by the working classes, to be the limbo where artistic currents are renewed. Samba first emerged in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, tango was born in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. We can, without doubt, detect a similar tendency in the suburbs of Maputo — Fany Mpfumo and Marrabenta music, José Craveirinha and the new poetry, Malangatana with his hugely innovative impulse in painting, Alberto Chissano in sculpture. And we could add Chichorro, the painter of women waiting for marriage on their verandas. Maputo continues, like Chichorro’s women: biding time on its wide veranda that looks out over and into itself.

Article published in İndico, July 2000.