Football and Colonialism. Nuno Domingos

with the response on the part of the municipality, the working group carried out a vast urban renewal study entitled “Housing Problem among the Economically Fragile,” grounded in the application of the public right of expropriation and in the construction of various sorts of housing projects.⁸⁴ Concerned with the living conditions of the African population, the group reproduced modernization’s purifying logic, representing the suburbs as an abscess that needed to be lanced.⁸⁵ At the same time that it claimed to be the most intelligent intervention from the point of view of colonial interests⁸⁶—undertaken in the name of a harmonious cultural coexistence necessary to avoid possible political and social dangers⁸⁷—the plan was justified by the need to integrate the suburban populations into the city, to regulate the entry of “rurals,” all the while avoiding segregation.⁸⁸ In this plan, the African population’s access to private property was seen as an important instrument of social stabilization.⁸⁹ Revealing the existence of a small public space where housing in Lourenço Marques could be discussed, this rift served as proof of the lack of interest on the part of state authorities. Accordingly, the signatories suggested that the necessary process of expropriations and urban renewal did not move forward simply because they threatened the revenue of the owners of suburban plots.⁹⁰

      The intervention of the Câmara Municipal of Lourenço Marques during this period was intentionally feeble, despite the late effort to organize garbage collection, install drinking fountains, and a sewage system.⁹¹ The creation, in 1964, of the Gabinete de Urbanização da Câmara de Lourenço Marques (Lourenço Marques City Hall Urbanization Office), constituted a reaction to this state of affairs. Then, official urbanism finally attempted to promote new urban-planning methods, articulating them with the principles underpinning the lusotropicalist inversion of the Portuguese colonial ideology, embodied, in the particular case of the organization of the populations, in the defense of multiracial settlement.⁹² The prophylactic action of modern urbanism, as it faced these social management problems, had been developed in Lisbon by the Direcção dos Serviços de Urbanismo e Habitação do Ministério do Ultramar (Overseas Ministry’s Head Office of Urbanism and Housing Services).⁹³ The elaboration of new studies, such as the 1966 Plano Regulador de Ocupação do Solo de Lourenço Marques (Regulatory Plan for Land Occupation in Lourenço Marques), yielded no practical results. The failure of official urbanism was more acutely felt during this period, when large-scale economic projects and the need for political regulation lacked effective methods for the management of the working populations. After the construction of the Munhuana neighborhood, only a four-story block was inaugurated in that same site, two blocks (thirty-two households) in the Malhangalene neighborhood and four hundred houses in the industrial zones of Matola and Machava. Given the rate at which the population was growing, these efforts fell short of the mark.⁹⁴ Urbanism’s adaptation to the fresh face of Portuguese postindigenato colonialism was still far removed from any de facto inscription in the suburb, even if the Lourenço Marques city council had indeed shouldered some of the responsibility for some new infrastructures.

      In 1969 the Gabinete de Urbanização e Habitação da Região de Lourenço Marques (Office of Urbanization and Housing for the Region of Lourenço Marques) is created, reporting directly to the General Government. New technical studies are then carried out.⁹⁵ Based on the results of preliminary inquests conducted by the General Government in the reed, the decree that created this office made this new entity responsible for “vast urban renewal operations” whose “key goal was to improve the conditions of the interested populations and provide them with the necessary collective facilities, thus avoiding, whenever possible, any major displacements of the current dwellers.” It was crucial to find a permanent address for those who came to Lourenço Marques every year looking for work, lured by the “strong magnetism of the city, by the port-railway complex and by the industrial centers of Lourenço Marques’s neighboring regions.” This required the construction of new “urban structural units” that would cater efficiently to the clusters of productive activity, and where several categories of the population would live, with no “inconvenient social segregation.”⁹⁶ Devised by the engineer Mário de Azevedo, the new Plano de Urbanização (Urbanization Plan), approved by the Lourenço Marques Municipality only near the end of 1972,⁹⁷ sought to achieve the stated goals. This plan already incorporated the concern for a more efficient integration of the peripheral city, in a convergence between social concerns and modern theories of neighborhood urbanism.⁹⁸ “Caniço” was now promoted to a “traditional housing area,” where precarious, “spontaneous,” “undisciplined” dwellings were located, and where the “economically fragile” populations lived.⁹⁹ Urban renovation in Lourenço Marques, an urgent matter for political and labor management, now also piqued the interest of a host of investors. The hypothetical construction of satellite cities and the elimination of the reed, as defended in a 1969 study,¹⁰⁰ created an extraordinary business opportunity. While fixation of the labor force was among the incontrovertible goals of these plans, there was no agreement as to the way it was to be achieved.¹⁰¹ The organization of the Plano de Beneficiação da Área Suburbana de Lourenço Marques (Plan for the Improvement of the Suburban Area of Lourenço Marques), in 1971, just before independence, would become the most ambitious intervention project. It was, however, much too late.¹⁰² In the 1970s the growth of the cement city, which spread toward the industrial areas of Matola and Machava, triggered a wave of evictions.¹⁰³ The process was over in a short time and the compensations offered to tenants were meager. While modernizing diagnoses defended state intervention to address the problem of the suburbs, the history of the construction of the periphery of Lourenço Marques demonstrated the active role of state institutions in the creating the problem in the first place.

       The Suburban Moral Economy