ABSTRACT
In pre-colonial Mozambique there were mainly two opposed societal systems: on the one hand, the stateless Bantu communities, which developed an agro-social system based on kinship relations and subsistence agriculture and lived in scattered domestic settlements, and on the other hand, the centralised Monomotapa state which increased agricultural production, developed a new metal technology and expanded trade within a network of walled cities linked to the port city of Sofala. Later, Portuguese colonialism introduced an imperialist economy through non-sustainable relations of intensive exploitation of human and natural resources with forced labour and taxation. This resulted, on the one hand, in the increased dispersion of people in scattered settlements to escape oppression, and on the other, gave rise to a dualistic form of urbanisation in the search of improved livelihoods – the ‘cement city’, which is the postcolonial central part of the city with modern concrete buildings, surrounded by another city, the Mozambicans ‘reed city’ of the past, where most of the urban population now lives.
