Classical References in the Urban Landscape of Mozambique
by Carla Bocchetti
Carla Bocchetti has a PhD in Classics from the University of Warwick and is currently an associate member of the French Institute in South Africa IFAS-Research. Her research interests include cartography and the classical tradition, Homer and geography, and the visual language of architecture in port cities of ‘colonised’ Africa.
After living in Nairobi for six years, she has published an edited volume Global History, East Africa and the Classical Tradition (2016), which considers the Swahili world and ancient cartography in relation to the classical tradition.
She is the author of a monograph Description and Geography in Homer, Centre for Hellenic Studies (CHS) Harvard (forthcoming), and the video, Odyssey 11 filmed in Mozambique, as part of the ‘Reading the Odyssey ’round the World’ project hosted by the Centre for Hellenic Studies (2020). She has also published on port cities and the Classics (forthcoming) and Orientalism (forthcoming).
Classical References in the Urban Landscape of Mozambique
Walking through the streets of Maputo you can see an amazing city full of different architectural styles, including outstanding examples of monumentality and hybrid Neoclassicism. These ex-colonial buildings now blend in with life around them, and it will be difficult to say that they still portray only examples of imperial culture.
On the contrary, the more you spend time looking at how local people live alongside their monuments, the clearer it becomes that the buildings help to contribute to a sense of place. Rather than being exclusive, they become familiar references to everyday life, thus adding value to the people’s feeling of inclusion and belonging in their own city.
If you spend a day in the old district of Baixa, you will be surprised to see all sorts of references to classical antiquity. These are embedded within a new language of African references, and are placed in settings that create contrast with their surroundings. They also challenge realities of origin and authority, and end up developing into diverse forms of experiences of ancient Greece and Rome in Africa.
One example is the train station of Maputo, previously named Lorenzo Marquez while Mozambique was still a Portuguese colony. Built between 1913-1916, it said to be inspired by one of the disciples of Eiffel, the same of the famous Eiffel Tower in Paris. The architects were Alfredo Lisboa de Lima, Mario Veiga and Jose Ferrera da Costa. It is of Victorian style with Neoclassical columns and decorated capitals and a facade in the shape of a portico. The central tower has a clock and a high dome made of bronze that was commissioned in South Africa. Trains still run to connect Maputo to neighbouring towns, and to the mining areas of South Africa.
Several buildings of the central district at Baixa are also decorated with murals with echoes of antiquity. At the Bank of Mozambique, former Banco Ultramarino, a huge rectangular engraved marble mural depicting warriors in battle, “The Conquest of Tangier”, can be found at the entrance, near the cashier hall. Made by the artist Francisco Relogio c.1964, the scene depicts warriors holding ‘long shadowy spears’ and round shields. The style of the figures evokes the famous Greek profile from Attic vase-painting, and with the shields and spears also gives a flashback to the Trojan War. It also is said to have an influence from Aztec art and Mexican mural paintings. The motif of the conquest may reflect the wars of the Portuguese to settle their colonies in Africa. Relogio, who was a Portuguese artist that lived 10 years in Maputo, also created a smaller mural of the same style: an azulejo painting. This is located at the nearby Rubi Building, where today it can easily be seen from the street through a window.
In other cities of Mozambique, such as Beira, colonial dreams have been transformed into new realities. Beira, home town of the laureate Mozambican writer Mia Couto, was battered by cyclone Idai in 2018, and early this year by Cyclone Chalane and Eloise. Echoing the ruin of these natural disasters is the transformation of previously grandiose colonial aspirations, epitomised in colonial architecture. The Grand Hotel of Beira offers an example which illustrates the way in which colonial dreams have turned into ruins beyond fiction.
Built in 1955, the hotel was supposed to be the largest and most luxurious hotel of all East Africa. This was a huge building with 144 rooms, large staircases, an Olympic pool, a casino, a cinema, a post office and shops. Its glory did not last long as it closed 8 years after its inauguration due to a lack of tourism, and later it became a military prison during the civil war.
Today it is home to approximately 3 500 squatters, a vertical slum with no water or electricity, similar to the David Tower in Caracas, Venezuela, that was represented in the Venice Biennale in 2012. It is, like the David Tower, a reversed urban icon exemplifying the fractures of its monumentality and the anxieties of disparate social performances attached to it, both in past and in the present, both during its period of wealth and in its current state of detriment and poverty. Built in Art Deco style by Portuguese architects, nonetheless the grandiosity of the scale and the splendour of the fantasy in which it was conceived, is related to colonial pompai, in turn inspired by ideas of the classical past.
It is not strange to find in African countries references of all sorts to the classical world. Those references once they had touched African soil have transformed into new realities, expressing new beliefs and ideas, blended with local cultures and becoming hybrid examples of performing classicism, another version of the classical past with its own set of ruins and myths. And that may mean that a new window for classics is opened – with new stories which speak of the way in which people live today – hand-in-hand with a phantom where antiquity intertwines with contemporary poverty and a diverse society.