Popular Music in a colonial city: musicians’ experiences and socio-racial issues in Lourenço Marques (1960-75)

Abstract

Lourenço Marques, nowadays known as Maputo, was the main city in Mozambique, a territory which was under Portuguese colonial rule until 1975. As a result of the urban planning promoted by the Portuguese colonial administration, social inequalities of the colonial system were inscribed in the urban geography of Lourenço Marques. There was the city centre, known as the “city of cement”, a place mainly occupied by European white population from the middle/upper classes; outside there was an extended area of neighbourhoods with poor living conditions, mainly inhabited by African population and by a smaller part of low-class Europeans and immigrants. This had an important impact on the social life of the city, reinforcing structural inequalities of the colonial system and promoting dynamics of spatial segregation, racial discrimination and creating more obstacles for those who had precarious positions in the city. In recent years, some studies have been focusing on the relation between cultural expressions and social processes in the urban context of Lourenço Marques – for example, the case of football (Domingos, 2012). Music was an activity with particular relevance in that context, since Lourenço Marques was a city with an intense nightlife activity, in which popular music had a notorious presence. There are already important accounts about music and the colonial context of Mozambique (Freitas, 2018; Lichuge, 2017; Filipe, 2012; Carvalho, 1997). However, the articulation between the activities of popular music groups from different areas of Lourenço Marques and the social dynamics in the city is a topic that still has a lot to explore. Its analysis can demonstrate the ambivalence felt by the individuals involved, but also the way they managed to overcome the constraints of the colonial system. With the main focus on the period between 1960 and 1975, marked by the historical processes of late colonialism (Castelo et al., 2012) this work approaches musical activities as a way to understand social and racial distinctions in a colonial city, based on ethnographic interviews.