Bairro Acordado is one of the 18 neighbourhoods of Nampula City. It covers an area of roughly 16 square kilometres. Like other peri-urban neighbourhoods of the city, it borders the city centre on one edge and stretches into the rural hinterlands from there, casting a scattered settlement pattern across the landscape.
49 As indicated on the map in Figure 2, the city centre is located south of Bairro Acordado. The border between the centre and neighbourhood is marked by a railroad track. This track was built during colonial times and it connects the eastern coastal city of Nacala to the western inland city of Cuamba, near the border with Malawi. Two main roads traverse the track into the neighbourhood. Leading north, the roads demarcate the western and eastern borders of Bairro Acordado, thereby separating it from the adjacent
neighbourhoods. There are warehouses across the track, used to store imported goods. The residential areas come next, and housing is at its most congested in these parts. Halfway through, in the central part of Bairro Acordado, runs a side road, cutting across the neighbourhood horizontally to connect the two northbound roads. The neighbourhood’s primary and secondary schools, the health post, the Sede (seat of the local government administration), the police post and the central market are all located along or near this side road. This also where the neighbourhood’s river originates, which meanders through Bairro Acordado on its way North. In the dry season, the river appears a brook, easy to cross on foot. But in the rainy season, it swells into a current and people have drowned, caught while washing their clothes. Following the river north, the terrain slopes downward and the houses become sparser, until there are only fields, trees, bushes and red soil. The neighbourhood’s northern limits are reached where the river flows into a larger river, and the inselbergen (isolated hills rising abruptly from the plain) appear, dotting the landscape around Nampula City.
Once, in the past, Bairro Acordado had a reputation for being uninhabitable, even dangerous. The stories I was told by research participants about this reputation spoke of violence and cannibalism. For instance, one story recounted how the area had been covered in woods during colonial times. No one had dared to live there as white people were rumoured to roam around at night to abduct the African population and consume their human flesh.
When I mentioned these stories to the régulo (chief) of Bairro Acordado, he started laughing. He was the ‘traditional’ leader of the neighbourhood, and had grown up in the area. We were sitting inside the pwaro (a round, freestanding pavilion, traditionally used
50 for receiving visitors) near his house. A short, soft-spoken man in his sixties, he wore a crisply ironed shirt and a faded, red baseball cap. He was relatively new to the job, having been named régulo only the year before. Following Makhuwa notions of matrilineal kinship, he had inherited the position from his late mother’s brother, through the female line.
Those stories, responded the régulo, had their origins in the 1950s, when Nampula City grew and the Portuguese colonial regime claimed several tracts of the land in the area near the city centre for infrastructure projects. The land was occupied at the time by a small number of subsistence farmers, including by one of the predecessors of the régulo. When the farmers moved to more remote northern parts of the neighbourhood, they told the stories I had heard to their children, to prevent them from going near the project sites and getting into trouble. No, said the régulo, it was true that, in the past, Bairro Acordado had a reputation for being uninhabitable, but this dated back further in time. In the pre-colonial era, a caravan of traders had come upon the area. They were travelling from the interior of Nampula province to the coast to exchange tobacco for salt. Night fell and they needed a place to sleep. As there was not a single house in sight, they decided to pitch their camp near a water basin and put out sentries, wary as they were of a raid. The raid came, but not in the form they had expected; the next morning, they woke up covered in mosquito bites. Do not go there, they warned people as they continued their journey, it is infested with insects. “You see?” chuckled the régulo, “insects, that is why no one wanted to live here.”
This reputation no longer applies. Today, Bairro Acordado is home to over 50,000 inhabitants. Some of them belong to the autochthonous population. The majority, however, are migrants from other parts of Nampula province. They present a diverse picture. To illustrate this, there were a few wealthy people among the residents I met over the course of fieldwork. They lived in large, air-conditioned houses with guards opening the gates for them as they rushed in and out in their 4-wheel drives. One man, for
example, was the owner a number of businesses in the coastal city of Angoche. He had acquired local fame for holding his wedding in an airplane. There were also signs of extreme poverty. Only a block away from the above man lived a single mother with four
51 small children. She showed me the plant leaves she gathered every day near her house. Together with xima (corn flour), they constituted her family’s only source of nourishment. There were similar contrasts in other domains. A university professor I knew lived next door to the mother of one of my research participants. She had never gone to school and was illiterate. Likewise, the leader of one of the reformist mosques where I conducted research looked out from his house onto a chapel. It was maintained by one of his neighbours, and twice a week, a Catholic prayer group met there for their religious service.
I have summarised the general characteristics of Bairro Acordado’s population in Table 3. The data come from Mozambique’s 2007 census (INE 2007) and demonstrate the socio- economic and religious diversity of the neighbourhood. For example, in terms of religion, the population is equally divided between Islam and Christianity: 46 percent of residents are Muslim, 40 percent Catholic, 7 percent Protestant, and 7 percent have none or a different religion. With regard to education, a fifth of the adult population has never gone to school. The same ratio applies to people who have frequented either secondary school or higher, meaning that primary school is the highest education level of 59 percent of adult residents. Meanwhile, three quarters of residents live in adobe or wooden houses, while one quarter live in houses made of cement. Less than half (41 percent) have access to running water, and only a third of households have electricity. The others use water from public and private wells, and gas lamps and candles for lighting.
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Table 3. Demographic characteristics of Bairro Acordado (2007 Census)
NEIGHBOURHOOD POPULATION Gender Male 52% Female 48% Age 0-19 57% 20-29 19% 30-39 11% 40-50 7% 50+ 6% Place of birth Nampula Province 91% Another province of Mozambique 9% Born within Nampula Province
Nampula City 65% Other 35% Religion Catholic 40% Muslim 46% Protestant 7% None/Other 7% Education None 17% Literacy course 2% Primary school 59% Secondary school 19% Higher education 3% Literacy Literate 64% Illiterate 32% Partial/No info 3% Everyday language eMakhuwa 56% Portuguese 42% Other 2% Employment State 16% Private 14% Informal 69% Light at home Electricity 36% Petrol/Paraffin/Kerosene 60% Other 4% House material Cement 25% Adobe 59% Wood 13% Other 3% Water source Piped water 41% Public fountain or well 52% Private well 6%
53 Diversity, similarly, is what characterises Bairro Acordado in terms of governance. On the one hand, there are the neighbourhood secretaries. Since 1975 Independence, when
FRELIMO took over from the Portuguese, they have been in charge of Bairro Acordado according to the following hierarchy. The neighbourhood secretary (secretário do bairro) supervises affairs at the neighbourhood level. Together with the Director of Social Affairs, he answers to the superintendent at the administrative post, who is in charge of several neighbourhoods, and to the city administration. Directly under the neighbourhood
secretary come a dozen section secretaries (secretário da unidade comunal). Each presides over an administrative section of roughly 3,000 inhabitants. The section secretaries, in turn, oversee block secretaries (secretário do quarteirão). Every block consists of 50 households, and it is their job to keep track of what is happening in their vicinity, inform their superiors where necessary, mobilise the population for government campaigns such as vaccination drives, and provide a number of services to residents, including the signing of statements of residence and good conduct. While there have been some changes in personnel, many secretaries have been in their positions since the days of socialism. The neighbourhood secretary, for instance, became involved in the running of the
neighbourhood in the late 1970s. He used to combine his role as neighbourhood secretary with his job at Nampula’s National Defence Secretariat, but has worked full-time as neighbourhood secretary since his retirement in 2001.
On the other hand, there are the neighbourhood’s ‘traditional’ authorities. Their offices, including that of the aforementioned predecessor of the current régulo, had originally been abolished by FRELIMO after Independence. Recently, however, following FRELIMO’s decentralisation policies (see Chapter 1), the ‘traditional’ authorities have been newly installed. The position of the régulo had been formally recognised by the government several years before I arrived in Bairro Acordado. The recognition of lower-ranking leaders (cabos, chefes de povoação) proceeded subsequently while I was in the field. They fall under the jurisdiction of the provincial government and are mainly active in the rural parts of Bairro Acordado. Among other responsibilities, they are in charge of the
allocation of agricultural land, and carry out some of the tasks of the neighbourhood secretaries.
54 Meanwhile, there are several other structures involved in the governance of Bairro
Acordado: the neighbourhood’s community court, the community police, an advisory council of local business representatives and civil society leaders, and FRELIMO’s women’s association called Organização da Mulher Moçambicana (OMM) (Organisation of the Mozambican Woman). I will describe the workings of Bairro Acordado’s
community court in the following section.