Maputo

What visions for the future of the “Greater Maputo”? What territorial images and analytical interpretations we can build on to envision long- term strategies and political decisions to promote integrated and sustainable development?
Moving from these questions, through an innovative methodology and a transdisciplinary approach, the book offers a tool-kit for reading and rethinking the Maputo metropolitan region, from the perspective of a more balanced and comprehensive rural-urban relation. In addition, the volume outlines a combination of key guidelines and spatial scenarios for a possible agenda for the sustainable development of the Province of Maputo, with particular attention to the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) nexus. The book presents a selection of the main results of the research project “Boa_Ma_Nhã, Maputo!” funded by Polisocial Award 2018 – the social engagement and responsibility programme at the Politecnico di Milano – to support PIMI, an ongoing educational and research programme at the Eduardo Mondlane University, Maputo.

In recent decades, extreme rains and drought have struck urban regions in Africa like never before. Nevertheless, limited information is available on which to base development of early warning systems, identification of high-risk zones and formulation of local action plans. This book is about how to build the knowledge necessary for planning adaptation to climate change in Sub-Saharan cities. It brings together lessons learned from international development actions conducted by a number of scholars in disciplines ranging from meteorology and hydrogeology to urban planning and environmental management. Selected methods to assess the impacts of extreme weather and ecological stress are presented along with possible approaches to improve the adaptive capacity of Sub-Saharan cities through institutional measures at the local government level. The book is addressed to graduate students, researchers and practitioners interested in enhancing their knowledge and skills in order to integrate climate change into applied research and development projects in urban Africa.

How do people live together in cities shaped by inequality? This comparative ethnography of two African cities, Maputo and Johannesburg, presents a new narrative about social life in cities often described as sharply divided. Based on the ethnography of entangled lives unfolding in a township and in a suburb in Johannesburg, in a bairro and in an elite neighborhood in Maputo, the book includes case studies of relations between domestic workers and their employers, failed attempts by urban elites to close off their neighborhoods, and entanglements emerging in religious spaces and in shopping malls. Systematizing comparison as an experience-based method, the book makes an important contribution to urban anthropology, comparative urbanism and urban studies.
The book can be downloaded open access from here: https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-4797-6/cities-of-entanglements/

Content:

Introduction - Cities of Entanglements
Navigating Belonging? Entangled Spaces, Entangled Lives in Alexandra Township
Intimate Encounters? Domestic Work in Home Spaces
A Politics of Loss? The Threat of Public Housing in a Johannesburg Suburb
A Politics of Proximity? City Building, Enclosure and Expansion in Maputo
Building Communities? Paternalistic Bonds and Religious Spaces
Spaces of Freedom? Shopping Together, Living Apart
Closing Remarks: Urban Entanglements as Blind Fields
Postscript: Entangled Comparers. Experiencing Cities through Comparative Ethnography

Published in Kulimar 4 (December, 2015), Matola: Instituto Superior de Artes e Cultura, pp. 127–140.

Janne Rantala

Resumo: Rapper Azagaia e Seus Críticos: Debate sobre Moçambique

Crítica polémica contra a música rap dentro e fora da comunidade de hip hop, já há longo tradição nos Estados Unidos da América, na terra natal da cúltura hip hop e da música rap mas a crítica Moçambicana construi-se novo capitulo no novo contexto socio-historial. O material da minha pesquisa é uma onda dos textos polémicos contra o produção do rapper Azagaia entre 2007–2009 e uma das suas músicas As Mentiras da Verdade (2007), sua letra e o video. Alem das outras coisas a música representou, e descobriu, para o espaço público, a narrativa popular sobre o assasinato do antigo presidente Samora Machel. A música tornou-se muito popular o que foi uma das rações que ela tambem provocou muita crítica. Este estudo tem foco nas críticas relacionados para aquela música. Maiores críticos de Azagaia foram cientistas sociais. Os textos polémicos deles foram publicados nos seus blogos privados e parte daqueles tambem no jornal Notícias. As letras do Azagaia foram tratados como argumentos falsos com a falta da lógica quais continuam a tradição do debate social da baixa qualidade. As letras do jovem músico foram criticados como se-trata argumentos no debate académico mas com pouco respeito. O facto que as letras do rap podiam tambem estar analisados como actos ”performativos” e polifónicos recebeu pouca consideração. No nivel mundial este estudo do caso contribui da investigação das relaçoes entre rap e política e no contexto Moçambicano ele descreve um capitulo na longa história das referencias ao Samora Machel na intervenção social da música popular durante a época pós-socialista, e mas particularmente entre rap interventivo do Maputo. A onda das críticas revela o papel da música popular na resistencia do quotidiano e a disconcordancia profunda entre a população escolarizada do Maputo sobre narrativa nacional e políticas do actualidade.

Palavras chave: Rap, interpretaçoes do passado, espaço público, liberdade da expreção, intelligentsia



Rapper Azagaia and his Critics: Battling the Thruths about Mozambique

This is a type of an extended case study about Mozambican society looked through a figure of Azagaia, a Mozambican critical rap musician. It nods to rapper Chuck D's notion that rap is CNN of the black people. This could be read that a (critical) rap describes social problems of urban disadvantaged population with the means of lyrical and rhythmic versions of social reportage and participant observation. In this sense critical rappers are a group of activists–intellectuals who are able to recognize and popularize social problems and thus contribute to a positive social change. Azagaia is taken as an example of this, since he has succeeded bringing commonsensical but marginalized views concerning Mozambique's past and politics into public sphere. Azagaia considers himself and is valued by several commentators as an opinion leader and interpreter of the peoples' concepts. It seems that the public, particularly in Maputo, has accepted Azagaia as its spokesman well beyond the principal audience of underground rap. Audience of critical music could also include masses with weak access to printed press and even the illiterate, and therefore it is natural that his audience is divided. I look at the public discussion concerning his music and make some notes about tense and complex relations between different social groups. Azagaia’s lyrics deal with the difficult and unclear moments in Mozambique's recent past and, in this way, they reflect contemporary politics and therefore there is also discordant notes among the Mozambican intelligentsia. He has also openly thought reflectively supported the demonstrators in 2008 and 2010, and in media his music was brought as a symbol of the revolt. Parallerly he has gained a role as a civil activist, recognized also internationally and this fact has supposedly protected him from the major efforts of repression. In this article I focus with the means of social cartography and a content analysis on the vast public critique towards lyrics of a piece ”As Musicas da Verdade” made by some Mozambican sociologists during the years 2007–2009. This critique was published in national stately media and in their own blogue sites and was part of campaign against Azagaia and might have contributed to the dramatic reduction of media presence of his production but paradoxically also to the institutionalization of Azagaia as a representant of freedom of expression. Without doubt sociologists' attacks tell about social power of music. Intensive attention did not, however, result any academic publications. This paper tries to fills this gap. The study could contribute to understanding and enforcement of Mozambican democracy particularly in the fields of public discussion and freedom of expression.

Keywords: Rap, interpretations of the past, public sphere, freedom of expression, intelligentsia

A partir de pesquisa etnográfica realizada nos últimos anos no sul de Moçambique, o presente artigo responde antropologicamente à pergunta colocada por um telespectador moçambicano sobre o porquê da
inexistência de sujeitos homossexuais em contextos rurais locais. O argumento central aqui apresentado é de que ainda que o desejo (homo)erótico preceda e prescinda da linguagem, a constituição de um sujeito propriamente homossexual não. Logo, as cidades oferecerão não apenas um ambiente propício para a vivência de experiências eróticas e identitárias desse sujeito, mas também a episteme necessária para que ele se constitua como tal.

Though the record of the Egyptians is considered first rate, and that of the Hopewell is extraordinary in their earthworks, what one needs is a web of evidence from around the world. Outside of the giant spheres of Costa Rica, which have yet to be measured, the author had not observed other overt references to the gas giant gods, as they are seen in EPEMC. However, the work of Michael Tellinger in exposing the allegedly 200,000-250,000 year old Maputo, and the similar site of Bakoni in South Africa, as a lost city, has brought an excellent opportunity to examine both the enhanced ability of EPEMC to explain infamous OOPArt iconography in a non-pseudoscientific format (such as aliens), and to improve the position over the already weak mainstream archaeological argument, which has no explanation at all. If a concordance of the Cosmic Egg motif and sky god archetype is proven to exist worldwide, it will fundamentally change the narrative about the cosmology of the Solar System by precluding the present (untenable) accretion model. The world's myths all speak of a war of the gods, which has been ignored by the mainstream, or sidestepped through Jungian psychological mumbo-jumbo. However, in the altstream there is only two possibilities: an alien war of politics (as purported by the Hindus and Middle Easterners), or planet discharge and solar system rearrangement, as supported by Veliovsky, Talbot, Cardona et al.

This study examines approximately 100 physical house and plot surveys across the study area in Maputo, Mozambique, including 50 which were case study sites in either the 1990 or 2000 surveys, using similar survey techniques – which permits a longitudinal overview of change in the area from central Maputo north along the railway line.

Concentrando-se nas revoltas de 2010, não só as aborda em termos gerais, mas dá uma atenção especial às revoltas que tiveram lugar na cidade de Chimoio, permitindo assim alargar o horizonte da análise do centro, que é Maputo, para uma realidade periférica, a capital da província de Manica. Inspirado pelo conceito de efervescência de Durkheim, o autor afasta-se do conceito dominante na literatura de revoltas da fome (food riots) e destaca as dimensões plurais,  olissémicas, festivas e criativas dos levantamentos populares, que se exprimem, embora com carácter efémero, como experiências de engajamento político e de crítica ao Estado pós-colonial.

The Zion churches, classified as AIC, are part of a transnational phenomenon that spread in South Africa at the beginning of 20th century by the action of North-American missionaries.
In Mozambique, the “Work of Zion” was introduced by the local workers returned from the South African mines during the colonial period, but its diffusion in the country became considerable after the economic liberalization of the 80’s and, especially, after the end of the civil war in 1992. Nowadays, the Zion churches, whose principal characteristic is the spiritual healing through the prophets’ work, represent one of the most popular religious movements in southern Mozambique.
In this paper I will show how the complex local spiritual world is reshaped among some Zion churches in Maputo and Matola, Southern Mozambique.
In Southern Africa the missionary work introduced a dichotomist vision about spiritual forces, in which all the “heathen” spirits, especially those that cause possession, were considered evil and classified as “demons”. Despite the missionary influence, especially in the lexicon, the Zion churches which I worked with in Maputo and Matola reformulate every day, through the performance of their healing practices, the local perception of evil, which is much more fluid and connected to the logic of kinship allegiances. In this way, among the Zion churches the meaning of “mademonio” and “angels” is quite different than the one introduced by the missionaries and this linguistic ambiguity represented the major challenge for my work.

This article analyses the large-scale popular urban uprisings that shook Mozambican cities on 1 and 2 September 2010, following the government’s announcement of successive rises in the price of public transport fares and basic commodities. Using ethnographic material from the city of Chimoio and the capital Maputo, the following work highlights the organisational character of the ‘strikes’ (greves), as the popular uprisings were called, and explores them as a new form of organising political discontent. Comparing them to other historical and contemporary popular uprisings, this article argues that the strikes violently and rhizomically generated ephemeral and egalitarian forms of political authority and order that simultaneously confronted, replicated and undercut the aspects of Mozambican statehood. Deploying Durkheim’s notion of effervescence, the work further argues that the creative fervour, multisemic aspects and festive character of the popular uprisings need to be recognised; thus, this analysis challenges the reductive labelling of these events as ‘riots’ or ‘food riots’.

Keywords Effervescence, Mozambique, popular uprising, rhizome, sovereignty

Resumo A história nacional, do período colonial, celebrada nos memoriais da cidade de Lourenço Marques (renomeada Maputo em 1976), recaía nos triunfos da Ocupação e dos seus heróis, no esforço de Guerra, nos feitos extraordinários, elementos comuns à maioria das histórias nacionais e aos vários projetos imperiais das potências europeias ao longo do século XX. O que foi nessa altura símbolo das conquistas do país colonizador tornou-se uma herança problemática na véspera da Independência. A ressemantização do espaço público e a omissão de muito desse espólio, que abrange edifícios, pedaços de cidade e vivências urbanas, tornaram evidente a transferência de poder e um novo projeto político-cultural que procurava contrastar heranças do colonialismo. O texto descreve sucintamente a construção de memoriais e a eleição dos monumentos (da colonização) em Moçambique durante a primeira década do Estado Novo português (1933-1974), de forma a refletir sobre a interpretação e validação contempor...

O presente trabalho é fruto de Missão Científica realizada em outubro de 2016, juntamente com diversos estudos teóricos referentes a República de Moçambique (Continente Africano). A capital nacional Maputo, com seus 1,2 milhões de habitantes, é digna de paisagens e desdobramentos intrigantes, sobretudo com relação ao pujante mercado da economia informal – responsável pela ocupação de grande maioria da população. Desta forma, o presente trabalho científico se apoia na apresentação e discussão das ricas experiências vividas e observadas pelos “entroncamentos” viários e espaços de reprodução social da informalidade moçambicana – as vielas e ruas de onde parecem “nascer/surgir” vendedores dos mais diversos gêneros, que vão desde alimentos, bens de consumo simples, transportes “clandestinos”, fármacos medicinais, serviços de beleza, dentre tantas outras peculiaridades que fazem de Maputo um lugar único

Urbanisation in sub-Saharan Africa constitutes a radically different context from that in the global North, in terms of scale and pace of urban change and the nature of political and economic structures where state capacities are limited and non-state action dominates. However, any urban planning that is generally practiced tends to be based on northern norms and methods, without significant impact. The article draws on empirical research examining state and non-state activities in urban land development in Maputo, Mozambique. Here, whereas land-use planning based on state control has limited impact, urban land is physically structured by urban dwellers aspiring to establish legitimate and viable forms
of socioculturally informed physical order. In fact, even where such ‘ordered’ land-use practices are not implemented (whether by state or non-state actors), collective forms of sociocultural organisation still orientate and guide land-use practices in many ‘unplanned’ areas, and this remains the dominant form of land development. This leads to the query: who actually ‘plans’ the African city?

Urbanity as a form of redemption, of starting anew, has long been at work in cities
nearly everywhere. Through the dissolution of existing urban forms and
technologies and the replacement by carefully planned environments, the
emergence of cities that offer citizens full access to ideal futures based on a near perfect constellation of the corporeal, material, and technological elements of
urban life is envisaged. Crucially, such utopic urban models necessarily operate
on the basis of a paradoxical doubling or "twinning": as a system of
reason, utopian urbanity is incapable of realizing its own promises (Grosz
2001). The fulfillment of a projected future essentially dissolves urbanity's
utopic systematicity and thus puts an end to its own problem-solving capacities.
Hence, in order to preserve its capacity to reboot the city, urbanity needs to
constantly double itself as an exterior and always deferred stranger. Attempts to
simultaneously escape history and realize the purportedly deep-seated capacities
of a nation or city are particularly evident in contemporary Africa and Asia.
Based on ethnographic data from Maputo, Mozambique, and Jakarta, Indonesia,
this chapter explores recent processes of urban gestation where infrastructural
configurations, some old and some new, seem to develop though
the internal twinning of the existing city. Across sub-Saharan Africa and
Southeast Asia, the spatial layouts of urban environments are currently being
reshaped through the construction of entirely new "parallel cities" from
scratch rather than rehabilitating the existing built environment. Often initiated
by private real-estate developers and large-scale construction consortia,
these spatial reconfigurations, if successfully implemented, aim at serving the
interests of a cosmopolitan property-holding elite while completely bypassing
long-honed, if often messy, practices of urban management on the ground of
sub-Saharan African and Asian cities today. Alternatively, they constitute bets
for young lower-middle-class households demonstrating faith that they will
eventually be at the core of the "real ciry."

Based on recently gathered ethnographical data from Maputo, Mozambique, this article examines the vertical growth of the city. In particular, it focuses on the production of social and physical divides that emerge when the city's rooftops are being used for habitational purposes. During the last two decades, rooftop spaces in Maputo's inner-city have increasingly been appropriated for habitational use by owners of the build-ings' apartments. In order to secure a viable subsistence level, owners rent out their apartments and move to small storage rooms on the rooftops. Very few of these rooftops have electricity and water installed and so residents connect to the buildings' existing but increasingly fragile systems of power cables, water pipes and drain pipes. In many of the city's apartment buildings, this spatial organization-where apartment owners living on the rooftops are informally attached to the apartment renters through a fragile and leaking system of pipes, tubes and cables-has caused numerous and ongoing conflicts, which constantly threaten to disrupt the volatile social stability of the building. In this article, I introduce the notion of 'rooftop autophagy' to capture the dynamics of a critical urban phenomenon, which grows by feeding on itself and, by so doing, generates major urban divides at the heart of the city.

Estive recentemente em Maputo (Moçambique), no quadro de dois congressos, onde apresentei comunicações: Congresso Internacional “Cultura e Turismo: desenvolvimento nacional, promoção da paz e aproximação entre nações”, realizado na Universidade A Politécnica, nos dias 26 e 27 de novembro de 2018; e no XIII Congresso da Lusocom - Federação Lusófona de Ciências da Comunicação, na Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, nos dias 28 e 29 de novembro de 2018. Aproveitei para conhecer Maputo, deslocando-me na maior parte das vezes a pé na tentativa de olhar para a forma como o Estado moçambicano se relaciona com a memória, tendo por base o facto de eu integrar o projeto de investigação que decorre no quadro do CECS-Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Sociedade da Universidade do Minho (em parceria com a Universidade Eduardo Mondlane), intitulado “Memories, cultures and identities: how the past weights on the present-day intercultural relations in Mozambique and Portugal?”, financiado pela FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia/Fundação Aga Khan.
Será que a mente está descolonizada em Moçambique (Mbembe, 2017)? É a pergunta que, com este ensaio, me proponho dar resposta.

Eusebio (b.1942), soccer player and the first Africanborn
European Footballer of the Year, was born
Eusebio da Silva Ferreira in the Lourenco Marques
(now Maputo) suburb of Mafalala in the Portuguese
colony of Mozambique. The son of a relatively poor
family where the father was a railway mechanic,
Eusebio had five brothers and one sister. He joined
Sporting Club Lourenco Marques in his early teens
and helped the side to a Mozambique national
championship in 1960. His exceptional soccer
talent was discovered at age seventeen by a visiting
Brazilian coach who tipped off Bela Guttmann, the
legendary Hungarian manager of the Portuguese
club Benfica. Guttmann subsequently flew to
Lourenco Marques and shortly thereafter brought
Eusebio to Lisbon and Benfica in December 1960.
Controversy between Sporting Lisbon and Benfica
remains to this day about the circumstances around
Eusebio's signing for Benfica and not their bitter
rival, Sporting -- the latter accuses the former of
having tricked and kidnapped Eusebio before the
contract was signed.

Bjørn Enge Bertelsen's chapter presents excerpts from his article 'Effervescence and ephemerality: Popular urban uprisings in Mozambique'. This is an analysis of instances of violent popular protests occurring in Mozambican cities in 2008 and 2010, arguing, specifically, that these intensely political events were 'rhizomic' in their organisation. Drawing on both Deleuzian notions of the rhizome as a form of political order as well as Durkheim's notion of effervescence, the article sought to challenge conventional notions of African postcolonial political orders and protest. In his COMMENTARY, Bertelsen reflects, firstly, on the coming into being of the above TEXT as an explicit challenge to certain visions of Africa and politics , particularly those basing themselves on universal visions of politics, poverty and the postcolonial subject. He describes also how the particular acephalous and open-ended form of the riots was forged and fuelled by constant digital interventions—in the shape of, for instance, text messages – and how this impinged on the writing of TEXT and, more profoundly, upset notions of linearity. It led him to see fieldwork material as vibrant, anthropological temporality as open-ended, and the discipline's authorship as non-singular. Crucial to his argument is how anthropologically composed texts may be more properly seen as mere freeze-frames: artefacts cut out from messy and multiple temporalities.

Based on recent ethnographical data from Maputo, Mozambique, this essay examines the revolutionary aesthetics of political meetings in a sociopolitical environment marked by the collapse of a national socialist ideology. Local political meetings in Mozambique articulate a paradoxical tension between sacrifice and revolution. While socialist rule disintegrated in the mid-1980s, most local political meetings allow for the actualization of the revolutionary socialism which the governing Frelimo party was forced to sacrifice in order to remain in power. In the essay, it is thus examined how the enactment of a revolutionary aesthetics successfully exposes what Frelimo was incapable of realizing and thus momentarily captures the party's ideological legitimacy. Taking my inspiration from Roy Wagner's recent work on holography and invention, I explore the relationship between sacrifice and revolution as an articulation of a symmetrical 'twinning' of seemingly contrastive political principles that are held together by a singular political aesthetics that is actualized only at political meetings.

From the perspective of urban studies, this article provides an account of the evolution and heritages of Luanda and Maputo. Drawing on notions of capitalness and heritages of Portuguese influence, the article argues for a reconciliation with the legacies of material culture and their integration into the daily imaginary of post-independence Mozambique and Angola.

A statue of stainless steel cast in China and placed at the entrance of the new National Stadium in Mozambique sparked controversy between Chinese donors and Mozambican recipients in the period leading up to the stadium's 2011 inauguration. Based on ethno graphic fieldwork among the Mozambican and Chinese nationals involved in the project, we explore the multiple misunderstandings surrounding the statue and show how they came to define Sino-Mozambican relations. Entextualized through materiality, the misunderstandings assumed a monumental form in the statue, and the message of mutual incomprehension continued to reverberate across the social terrain of Sino-Mozambican relations long after the statue itself had been removed. Misunderstandings, we argue, should not be dismissed as ephemeral communicative glitches, but seen as productive events that structure social relations.