PART I
TOURIST DREAMS AND DREAMS OF A TOURISM INDUSTRY: JOHANNESBURG AND LOURENÇO MARQUES, CIRCA 1910-1955
You must know this, and a number of other things about our life in Johannesburg to understand what Lourenço Marques, a small resort on the coast of Portuguese East Africa, means to us. Indeed, I cannot imagine what we would do without it . We go to Lourenço Marques, it's our Little Escape.
NADINE GORDIMER, 'South African Riviera', 1957
Within months of Nadine Gordimer's murmuring about the importance of having an east coast bolt-hole to elude the rigours of South African life, her fado-like refrain was being matched, albeit in prosaic form and at a tangent, by a most unlikely official source - a prominent Afrikaner nationalist. During a brief visit to Lisbon, Dr EG Jansen, the second-to-last Governor General of the Union of South Africa, while bending the diplomatic knee to the cynically propagated myth that Mozambique was a 'province' of Portugal rather than a brutally neglected far-off colony, enthused: 'By a happy accident we are neighbours.'
Jansen's was a cheerfully myopic observation, one that overlooked the fact that he represented a white-minority Calvinist regime deeply committed to an extremist form of racial segregation and social conservatism, while his nominally Catholic hosts prided themselves on a supposedly more open and forgiving form of 'Lusotropicalism', one accommodating of non-racialism. But since diplomacy is the art of sipping arsenic as if it were champagne, he pushed on. 'I believe', he told the press, 'that we should be grateful to history for this accident.'1
But mere propinquity is, alas, seldom enough to guarantee a happy outcome when it comes to the historical relationship between countries. Sharing a border was never in itself enough to draw Mozambique and South Africa into an authentic, closer, organic association. As Edward Said once pointedly reminded us:
Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about myths and imaginings.2
It requires but little reflection to appreciate just how deep such geographically derived complexities can run when reconstructing the intricate historical connections that developed around tourists and tourism between 20th-century South Africa and southern Mozambique and, more especially, between Johannesburg and Lourenço Marques.
A rudimentary settlement on Delagoa Bay since 1544, Lourenço Marques was designated a 'town' in 1876, not long after the discovery of diamonds near Kimberley. In 1887, just twelve months after the opening of the Witwatersrand goldfields and the founding of Johannesburg, a town council cemented its new status. Then, in 1898, unconsciously reflecting the town's rise as a dependency of the mineral revolution on the Highveld, it was made the capital city of Mozambique.
Born a nondescript, malaria-plagued port, albeit one located on a beautifully sheltered Indian Ocean bay, Lourenço Marques struggled to match up to its rapidly changing legal status. Outsiders agreed that it occupied a unique position in the world order of debasement. In 1900, a traveller, apparently blessed with the English gift of understatement, felt that it was the 'vilest, filthiest and most deadly place to white men in all the hospitable world'. Stanley Hollis, the US consul, was even more fulsome when pleading with the State Department to grant him special leave of absence that same year. Lourenço Marques was one of 'the most miserable, unhealthy, desolate and God-forsaken places on the face of the earth'. It was, he said, 'a place destitute of material and social comforts, and filled with the scum of South and East Africa'.3
Some of Lourenço Marques's less appealing material conditions could be traced to its unpromising, swampy, riverside location. Harbours - like mining towns - are sited for the most part where nature dumps her bounty and not where humanity necessarily choses to live and work. Although a cleaner, healthier and infinitely more presentable entrepôt a decade later, Lourenço Marques never fully outgrew its reputation as a grubby port dominated by its cosmopolitan demi-monde. Not everyone found its reputation off-putting, though. Indeed, for many moneyed single male visitors, the demi-monde was the port's principal attraction.
But the port itself shaped only part of the town's complex, evolving, dual social character. Although it remained a preponderantly maledominated enclave, with an exceedingly modest European population throughout the interwar period, it gradually acquired the infrastructure that allowed it to present the more pleasing 'city' face that it aspired to.
In 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression, a visiting banker noted that the business quarter had not changed noticeably over several years but conceded that municipal affairs were well-managed and public spaces well-maintained. But it was the 'the residential area' that earned his fulsome support. It 'has grown out of all recognition and quite a number of the suburban residences, with their attractive gardens gay with colour, can be classed with the best to be found anywhere in South Africa'. Lourenço Marques was no longer only a sleazy port, to be enjoyed by visiting males with time and money, but a new city on the march, 'and as a seaside resort it is steadily increasing in popularity'.4
By the time Nadine Gordimer visited it, in the mid-1950s, Lourenço Marques was a modern colonial city famed for its relaxed 'continental atmosphere'. Many South African visitors nevertheless took some comfort from the fact that, for the most part, it was also racially segregated, and the city's proximity to Johannesburg turned Lourenço Marques into a 'natural playground' for Highveld visitors - much as white Rhodesians turned to Beira, further up the coast, for their vacations.5 It was, in short, a coastal retreat suitable for a family holiday.
But, for a century prior to that, Lourenço Marques had been little more than a backward bayside settlement replete with many of the social features and structures customarily associated with tawdry ports the world over. After World War I, however, its emerging dual character - as both port and resort, along with the sometimes competing economic imperatives driving each - became more pronounced.
The ensuing tussle, as to which of the city's component parts - port or resort - might emerge dominant, was at its most pronounced during the interwar period. But, by the end of World War II, the outcome was increasingly apparent. As a resort, the city was steadily losing traction in the greater southern African tourist market. A comprehensive, sympathetic survey conducted by a local businessman, in 1950, concluded that, while Lourenço Marques attracted significant numbers of South African tourists each year, the stream was but 'a mere trickle compared to what there should be if only our potentialities were realized and the visitor properly catered for and attracted'.6 The situation did improve, perhaps even significantly so, over the years that followed and into the early 1960s.7 But, for many white visitors, the resort remained mired in an indeterminate, surreal blueish haze. Along African coastlines it is often the least threatening mists, those of dreams and potentialities, that conceal the deadliest shoals of all - stark reality.
One such hidden reef lay in the fact that, insofar as the economic fortunes of Lourenço Marques as a tourist hub were tied to another city, the link ran 350 miles west, to Johannesburg and its satellite towns. It was not an affectionate coupling of the type forged in heaven, rather one born of convenience, one compelled by geography. And, just as Lourenço Marques mutated from a port settlement with an adolescent profile, appealing to an adventurous if not always strictly youthful population, into a recognisably more mature resort city with identifiable social parameters, so too did Johannesburg evolve from a rough mining town into an established industrial city.
Like Lourenço Marques in its infancy, early Johannesburg never wanted for critics. God could only do so much. Cast among a few largely treeless quartz outcrops - sentinels guarding the world's deepest and richest gold reefs - the place, despite being blessed with the finest of climates, lacked other redeeming natural features capable of sustaining significant outdoor amusements, entertainment or leisure. Already physically stretched, young miners in search of recreation were, in any case, not much given to hiking, taking in the undulating landscape or contemplating starry skies. Their priorities lay elsewhere. There was no shortage of entrepreneurs, criminal or otherwise, willing to cater for basic and other needs. Man stepped in to plug nature's gaps, giving rise to the mining-camp sociology beloved of filmgoers.
Olive Schreiner was appalled to witness the rape of nature, modest of countenance as it undoubtedly was. 'Here's this great fiendish hell of a city sprung up in ten years in our sweet pure African veldt', she wrote to Edward Carpenter, in 1898. 'A city which for glitter and gold,...
