"Machambas" in the city: urban women and agricultural work in Mozambique

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Kathleen SHELDON, Lusotopie 1999, pp. 121-140
Machambas in the City
Urban Women and Agricultural Work
in Mozambique
omen in Southern and Eastern African cities commonly devote
time and energy to cultivating an urban garden1. This activity
makes an important contribution to family nutrition and some-
times income, but despite this it was long neglected in studies of urban
informal activities, food supplies to urban areas, household labor, and
development. Urban agriculture has been the subject of several reports, but
it is usually presented as a new activity taken up in response to economic
crisis, and only occasionally has women’s role been researched as well
(Rakodi 1985, 1988 ; International Development Research Centre 1994 ;
Maxwell 1995 ; Mudimu 1996). In this paper I investigate the past and
present practice of agricultural labor by urban women in Mozambique to
demonstrate that they have cultivated urban gardens for many decades, and
that women from a broad range of socio-economic groups do this work.
These findings broaden the scope of current research on this topic, as both
the focus on Mozambique and on the history of urban farming offer new
information. The evidence further indicates that the inclusion of this area of
female endeavor improves our understanding of the process of urbanization
from an African perspective.
It has been suggested that Africans « made something of the city which
their colonizers had not intended » (Coquery-Vidrovitch 1991 : 33). In earlier
urban studies, the attention paid to male workers has had the effects of
emphasizing an urban-rural dichotomy, and of hiding the important
activities of women that contributed to urbanization. Urban residents
1. An early version of this paper benefited from the advice of Judith Carney, Steve Tarzynski,
and my colleagues in the affiliated scholars program at the Center for the Study of Women,
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) : Jaclyn Greenberg, Dorene Ludwig, Paulene
Popek, and Jill Cherneff. I presented this material at the 1989 annual meeting of the U.S.
African Studies Association in Atlanta, Ga., where Karen Tranberg Hansen and the
audience had helpful comments, and at the V° Congresso luso-afro-brasileiro de ciências sociais
in Maputo, Mozambique, 1-5 September 1998 where Amélia Sumbana and others made
suggestions. An earlier version of this paper is included in the compact disk of the
proceedings of that conference. I would also like to thank Alice Hovorka, whose interest in
this topic motivated me to return to this paper after several years of neglect (HOVORKA
1998).
W

122 Kathleen SHELDON
commonly experienced urbanization as a series of changes that incorporated
rural practices in the urban milieu, rather than a sharp break with their rural
past. In Bishwapriya Sanyal’s study in Zambia (Sanyal 1987), he found that
one of the factors that contributed to people choosing to garden was longer
term residence in the city. While feeling « settled » encouraged an increase in
urban gardening, longer residence also improved access to land, an access
that new migrants did not have. Women’s urban gardening is a clear
indication of a growing sense of urban identity and attachment, an impor-
tant aspect of African urbanization.
I have previously discussed the intersection of women and urbanization
in African cities (Sheldon 1996). In this paper, after an overview of women
and urban agriculture in Eastern Africa, I focuse on the history of women
and urban agriculture in Mozambique. Before I went to Beira, Mozambique,
where I lived for two years from 1982 to 1984, I had a schematic idea about
the division between rural and urban life. It seemed self-evident that rural
women were engaged in agricultural labor, and probable that urban women
were not. Urban women might sell produce in the market, or find other
sources of income in the informal economy, but I expected that agriculture
itself was outside the urban areas. Beira, however, was noted for its
extensive fields and gardens, called machambas. There were many small
gardens in backyards and empty lots, as well as alongside modern multi-
story apartment buildings. Also important were rice fields in the central area
of the city, the presence of small animals (especially chickens and goats), and
of mango, papaya, and citrus trees and banana plants in all neighborhoods.
These activities did not only appear in the African caniço or shanty
neighborhoods, nor were they restricted to suburban or peripheral areas :
one large rice field was immediately adjacent to the provincial governor’s
home. Many women had access to fields outside the city, but the extent of
agriculture inside the city limits was striking.
The other intriguing discovery was that the majority of women who
worked full time in the garment or cashew factories also invested time and
energy in urban family agriculture (Sheldon 1988, 1991) : this work was not
only the province of women who were otherwise unemployed and had time
to devote to growing food for their families ; it was also a common recourse
for women working for a wage during a time of food scarcity. The adap-
tation of women’s rural labor to the urban setting, even for women with full-
time waged jobs, speaks eloquently of the rural impact on African city life.
This realization led to a rethinking of the conventional wisdom about
urban dwellers. Much research on African urbanization emphasizes the
rural-urban connections and migratory patterns that indicate the permeabi-
lity of rural and urban categories. Richard Stren introduced the idea of the
« ruralization » of African cities in part through deepening rural-urban
interactions, and Sanyal discusses the dismay of western planners when
African cities didn’t present a « modern » aspect as they had expected
(Sanyal 1987, Stren 1986). Urban gardening suggests an even greater inter-
section of rural activities and urban settlement, with the connection not
being urban-waged men and rural-farming women, but urban-waged men
and urban women with gardens, including women who were also working
for a wage.

Urban women in the city 123
Irene Tinker comments that a variable definition of « urban » makes it
difficult to compare studies in different cities (1994 : xi). Some peri-urban
areas appear quite rural, though their density and relative proximity to the
city suggest their borderline urban character. In this setting, it appears that
people identify as urban residents by comparing their lives in peri-urban or
urban areas to true rural life. This contrast allows people to consider areas
adjacent to cities proper as being within the urban ambit, as they are clearly
not rural. In this paper I prefer an expanded concept of urban, including as
urban residents those who live in suburban neighborhoods but who
consider themselves city-dwellers. A closer look at women’s urban
gardening will help us develop an Africa-focused history of urbanization.
Urban Gardens in Eastern Africa
Information from countries in the region indicates that urban agriculture
is widespread and constitutes an important source of food supplies for
urban families, though the role of women in maintaining the practice of
urban agriculture is rarely documented. While work on women and
agriculture understandably focuses on the rural areas, even sources that
discuss urban food supplies and urban agriculture often make no reference
to the essential role of women in that activity (Davison, ed. 1988a ; Guyer
1987 ; Mbuyi 1989). For example, one source on African cities comments that
« All over tropical Africa urban dwellers undertake some cultivation, and it
is the main occupation for many in the smaller towns », without specifying
whether women or men or both are doing that cultivation (O’Connor 1983 :
137). A study of Harare details the expansion of illegal urban agriculture,
creating « rural landscapes in an urban environment », but does not mention
who is doing the gardening (Mazambani 1982 : 138), though later
Zimbabwean studies incorporated gender issues (Mbiba 1995). A discussion
about agronomists, knowledge, and the practice of agriculture in the
Rwandan town of Butare focuses primarily on men involved in cultivating
(Pottier 1989). While these apparently gender-neutral depictions seem
innocent, women and the work they do remains invisible when not
specifically mentioned.
Yet when women were mentioned, it was sometimes in a dismissive way.
The following quote from A.L. Epstein (1969 : 89) describing urban dwellers
in colonial Zambia aptly summarizes the conventional view that the real
urbanites were men :
« The African of the towns no longer lives on the produce of the soil he has
cultivated himself. Although a great many African women in Ndola do
prepare gardens in the areas of bush which fringe the town, the produce of
these gardens remains at most a valuable supplement to a diet of which the
basic items are bought with cash. The urban African is essentially a wage-
earner, dependent for his livelihood on the opportunities and services
provided by the others, particularly Europeans ».
Women’s activities defined them as non-urban though Epstein admits
they lived in the city.
Other research has corroborated urban agriculture as a female activity in
the colonial era mining towns (Chauncey 1981 : 147). Zambia has been the
site of some important in-depth research on the practice of urban

124 Kathleen SHELDON
agriculture, though not all of it is gender aware (Bowa et al. 1979). In one
study of modern Lusaka, urban agriculture was found to be an important
means of survival for families without access to steady or well-paid jobs
(Sanyal 1984), while another observes that women on the urban fringes grew
food both for consumption and for sale (Jules-Rosette 1985). Other
researchers found that from 40 to over 60 percent of households in some
neighborhoods in Lusaka maintained an urban garden (Jaeger & Huckaby
1986). Rakodi has looked at Zambia and urged that the agricultural work of
urban women must be viewed within a « framework of the gender division
of labour, especially as regards the distribution of tasks and benefits from
work within the household » (1988 : 496).
Information from Nakuru, Kenya, demonstrated how urban women
engaged in « income-stretching gardening », and used their rural
cooperative skills for urban survival (Wachtel 1975-76). In Kenya, urban
gardens gained support from development agencies as a way of organizing
women into self-help cooperatives (Chege 1986 ; Freeman 1993). Studies of
the practice of urban agriculture in Nairobi and other Kenyan cities have
included women and gender issues, even when that is not the central theme
of the study (Freeman 1991 includes a chapter on women ; Lado 1990 and
Memon & Lee-Smith 1993 both include scattered information on women).
In Iringa, Tanzania, Swantz (1985 : 125) discovered that « most town
women were engaged in agricultural activities and found it possible to
combine urban life with production of basic foods », but did not further
elaborate . Willene Johnson, another researcher in Tanzania, found that for
women in towns agriculture remained « their most important single source
of self-employment income » (1986 : 248-9). Cash crop agriculture was
practiced in towns as well as in peripheral areas, and women either main-
tained access to traditional land or as migrants they rented land or entered
into share-cropping agreements. In a sample of self-employed women, 41
percent were primarily engaged in urban agriculture. Johnson found that
women continued to practice agriculture for several reasons including their
desire and need to provide food for themselves and their children, their skill
and experience in agriculture in relation to other possible activities, patterns
of land use that allowed agriculture to continue in urban areas, and the low
level of capital investment needed. Many women who grew cash crops were
also involved in street trading. One Tanzanian example from the 1950s, of a
female schoolteacher who matter-of-factly included gardening in her
account of her daily work, suggests that urban women working for a wage
also cultivated gardens. Her husband did not mention such an activity when
outlining his day (Leslie 1963 : 65-67, cited in Geiger 1987 : 12).
The practice of urban agriculture appears to fluctuate according to a
variety of economic factors, and flourished in the late twentieth-century
continent-wide economic crisis. As Aili Tripp (1989, 1992) found in
Tanzania, one response to rising poverty is the increased reliance on sources
of income and supplies outside the formal economy, and therefore outside
State controls such as taxation and license fees. Peri-urban agriculture filled
this need, feeding families while operating outside the formal economy.
Small-scale urban agriculture can supplement family nutrition in a time of
food scarcity or high prices in the market. While some of the urban produce
may enter the market, usually there is too little surplus, and potential
vendors hesitate when faced with the need to pay market fees. Although the

Urban women in the city 125
rise in urban cultivation has led to more research on urban agriculture, the
accumulation of information from throughout the region indicates that this
is not a new phenomenon. Urban agriculture was practiced by women in the
colonial era, and by women of professional as well as working-class and
peasant backgrounds.
Twentieth-Century Colonial Mozambique
While there is some indication that families increasingly turned to urban
gardens in the 1980s and 1990s as a result of the international economic crisis
and the new impoverishment of African urban residents, the evidence from
Mozambique demonstrates that this is not a new phenomenon. In
Mozambique, and in Beira in particular, available information suggests that
women have long been involved in urban agriculture. The persistence of this
work through time shows that it is more than a short-term survival
mechanism or a new strategy for coping with troubled times in the 1980s.
For decades city dwellers relied on their household gardens to get by, and
women played the central role in this work. This is not to undercut the
importance of rural food-supply networks, but to point out that that food
supply was not always adequate for urban African families, especially
poorer families who could not afford market prices for food. There are
differences in the outcome of this labor, however. It appears that in colonial
times individual women were more apt to sell some surplus crops in the
market for a cash income, while by the 1980s it was more often a source of
additional food for family consumption, especially for waged women.
Geographer Maria Clara Mendes (1985 : 103), in her study of colonial
Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), Mozambique, comments on the pre-
valence of gardens in the periphery of that city. The gardens were located in
the peri-urban Vale de Infulene, as well as in the non-industrial areas of
Choupal, Benfica, and Matola and Machava. Mendes does not specify
whether men or women were cultivating, and there are no statistics
available that indicate the gender of land owners. But testimony from
women still cultivating in the area in the 1980s indicated that women were
among those hired as farm labor on the white-owned farms during the
colonial era (White [1985]). The sale of food grown in those fields formed an
alternative source of income for Portuguese settlers as well as for African
residents who had fewer options for earning an income. Agricultural land
was taken over for residential and industrial construction in the 1950s,
sometimes by subterfuge on the part of Portuguese colonialists (Gentili
1985 : 196 ; Penvenne 1983 : 150). It is clear from the testimony of two
women whose land was taken over in the 1980s by Green Zones projects that
women had control of some of this land in earlier decades (White [1985]).
Despite a pattern of higher density occupation, the areas named above as
agricultural centers in the 1940s continued to be farmed into the 1990s, when
they formed the Green Zones, the term for the agricultural belt just outside
the city with extensive gardens belonging to both cooperatives and
individuals.
Statistics assist in pinpointing the role of women in urban agriculture : in
1940 the city of Lourenço Marques counted 45,070 African residents, of
which 28,525 were men and 16,545 were women. Two-thirds of the women

126 Kathleen SHELDON
(10,321) were « nas terras » or on the land, an indication of their agricultural
work. Only 2,576 men (under 10 percent) were similarly listed. Statistics for
the smaller cities of Inhambane, Quelimane, and Tete indicate that around
half of all urban women were engaged in agriculture (Moçambique
1944 : 4-7).
Beira began to exist as a city in the 1890s when Portuguese settlers started
building at a site where there was no previous permanent settlement,
hoping that the bay would be suitable for a port. The Mozambique
Company, the charter company that administered the central Mozambican
region of Manica and Sofala, established its headquarters there in 1892.
A railroad to the interior, largely financed by British investors, was built to
serve Rhodesia and Nyasaland.
Beira’s residential neighborhoods, as was common throughout the
region, were racially segregated under colonialism. The Portuguese built
modern homes and apartment buildings for themselves along the coast
where ocean breezes minimized the impact of the climate. They viewed
themselves as the urban residents, with rurally-based Africans providing the
necessary labor in the port and in European homes. Men who came to work
for the Mozambique Company in the port or railroad often lived in barracks-
style housing. But African workers and their families also began to settle in
nearby areas, generally without the benefit of paved roads or regular water
supply. This simultaneous development of family-based African commu-
nities in the center and periphery of Beira went unrecognized by the
Portuguese. Many women in these areas continued their accustomed culti-
vation to supply food to their families.
In Beira in 1940, where men were able to find work at the port or railway,
only 230 men out of 14,534 male residents (under 2 percent) were considered
nas terras. However, 2,023 women were listed as nas terras out of 3,564 urban
female residents (57 percent). Twenty years did not change this disparity
greatly : in 1960, 33,183 official African urban residents included 25,585 men
and 7,598 women. Of these residents only 601 men were listed as being
engaged in agriculture, while 1,166 women fell into that category (that is, 2.3
percent of men and 15 percent of women) (Moçambique 1960 : 400-401).
These numbers, of course, can only give us an incomplete and possibly
erroneous picture. In Beira for many years the bulk of the African
population was considered transient, and the numbers listed for specific
occupational categories are suspect. Official statistics for Beira divided the
African population into « fixed » (permanent) and « fluctuating » (transient)
categories. The transient population was estimated at a steady 44,000 from
1956 to 1968, an indication that this was not based on an actual count
(Câmara municipal da Beira 1968). Authorities assumed that most African
residents were men on short term labor contracts, and ignored evidence of
increasing settlement and community development in the center of the city.
If anything, the numbers of women engaged in urban agriculture were
greatly underreported in these censuses2.
Descriptions from various observers corroborate the statistics and indi-
cate that the most common productive activity for urban women in colonial
Beira was agriculture, despite the difficult terrain of that city (Muchangos
1989). Beira’s location at the juncture of the Pungue River and the Indian
2. For a more general discussion of problems in measuring women’s agricultural labor,
see Benería 1982.

Urban women in the city 127
Ocean meant that much of the land was either swampy due to the river delta
or sandy closer to the shoreline, making gardens difficult in many areas.
Flooding was also a common problem as Beira is a low-lying city. Nonethe-
less, in my interviews with women working for a wage in the 1980s, several
who had been born and raised in Beira described their mothers as peasant
women (camponesas) who had been residents of Beira themselves, where
they had machambas in earlier decades.
During the 1950s and 1960s there was some recognition of the absence of
waged work for women in Beira, in contrast to men’s more common
experience of participation in the work force. A Portuguese study of Mozam-
bican labor commented on the lack of waged women workers (Junta de
investigações do ultramar 1959 : 80). African women were also aware of the
problem. A « person-on-the-street » interview (« Falam os Leitores ») in the
local African newspaper, Voz Africana (9 June 1962), elicited the following
response from twenty-year-old Beatriz Dimitre,
« Ah ! The problem that most bothers me is the lack of support for the African
girls, all of whom have difficulty in finding work. To prove this, just look at
the offices and businesses of our city, and we can conclude that the
percentage of girls in these businesses is minimal or none ».
At the time this complaint was voiced, the newspaper reported on
women working at rural tasks in Chipangara, said to be Beira’s most typical
neighborhood (« Chipangara, o bairro mais típico da Beira »). Describing the
neighborhood as « neither city nor country », the writer referred to the many
gardens in peoples’ yards. An accompanying photograph showing women
pounding maize in their pilões (large wooden mortars) was captioned : « In
Chipangara old and young women pound as in the country » (Voz Africana,
21 July 1962 : 6-7). Some of these women sold produce in the local markets,
as they had no other way of earning an income (« Um Mercado Impro-
visado », Voz Africana, 17 November 1962 : 12). That men had other recourse
even within the informal sector is indicated by reports of men in Chipangara
sewing at machines in their doorways, and by the 187 members of the
Association of African Carpenters, Painters and Barbers in Beira (« A Asso-
ciação de carpinteiros, pintores e barbeiros africanos da Beira », Voz Africana,
16 June 1962).
Two Portuguese studies from the late 1960s also reveal the widespread
presence of machambas in the African neighborhoods of colonial Beira
(Coimbra 1970 ; Rodrigues 1967). Rui Neves da Costa Rodrigues, an urban
planner, mentioned that the neighborhood of Massamba-M’Chatazina had
many small machambas, although he stated that other neighborhoods were
too susceptible to flooding for gardens to be successful. There was evidence
of Chinese residents’ vegetable gardens, with the crops being grown for sale
in the city’s markets, though these were disappearing by the late 1960s
(Rodrigues 1967 : 110). Rodrigues gave only cursory attention to the African
neighborhoods while admitting that those areas had been neglected in
Beira’s urban planning efforts. But even in his brief description of the
neighborhood of Chipangara, he referred to its proximity to downtown
Beira, the density of the settlement of the houses, and the existence of
household agriculture (ibid. : 141-142).
Ramiro Duarte Henriques Coimbra, a geographer who also studied
Beira’s African neighborhoods in the 1960s, paid much closer attention to the
economic life of those communities. He observed that in areas where

128 Kathleen SHELDON
gardening was difficult, families would still try to grow some peppers or
tomatoes in their yards. In presenting a typical family budget, he stated that
the male head of the family was the only one with a salary, and all families
had a small machamba (Coimbra 1970 : 33, 65). He also described how men
would at times prepare the land for a new season’s planting, but noted that
this was usually limited to cultivating sweet potatoes. Women commonly
combined their agricultural work with other domestic chores, as in the rural
areas, and often did their work with infants on their backs. machambas
tended to be small, often twenty-five meters square, and were primarily
dedicated to sweet potatoes or rice (ibid. : 79-84).
Women’s continuation of agricultural labor throughout the colonial
period occurred in part because they were restricted from other possible
sources of income. Additionally, they could rely on an established skill and
access to seeds and supplies, all continued from rural connections. The
unregulated nature of African community settlement allowed families to
appropriate plots for gardens, though it may also have made it easier for
Portuguese settlers to expropriate land. Local chiefs (régulos) who controlled
land could charge rent for access to land and for permission to build housing
(Äkesson 1988 : 4, Doc.1 ). Thus the capital input was minimal, and the labor
was readily available from women skilled in agriculture. Women in Beira
had a history of agricultural work that continued through the colonial era
into independence.
Post-Independence Mozambique
The Mozambican government has long regarded urban agriculture as a
way to increase food supplies to the city. The rural production of food was
disrupted for several years as a result of drought and the activities of
Renamo (Resistência nacional de Moçambique), the anti-Frelimo force suppor-
ted by South Africa in the 1980s (Renamo was transformed into a legitimate
political party in the 1990s). Poor economic decisions by the State also
worked as a disincentive for rural farmers to produce food for sale to the
urban areas as they did not in return have access to consumer goods such as
soap, matches, or clothing. By 1980, census information indicated that most
urban women (and many fewer urban men) continued to be involved in
agricultural production. Countrywide, the census reported that 187,862
women were economically active in urban areas ; of that total, 132,173
(70 percent) were in agriculture. Comparable figures for men counted only
55,951 men in agriculture out of a total of 370,913 urban working men
(15 percent) (Moçambique 1983a : 34 ; for comparable figures from a smaller
study see Ibraimo 1994 : 25).
After independence the State encouraged people to cultivate abandoned
truck farms on Maputo’s periphery. It provided seeds and tools as incentive,
and local grupos dinamizadores mobilized residents to form cooperatives
(dynamizing groups were neighborhood-based organizing committees). In
Maputo in the early 1980s, the availability of vegetables was assisted by the
presence of « between 40 and 50 cooperatives with more than 3,000 members
and an even larger number of individual farmers, all of whom were
permitted to sell produce either at their fields or in market stalls reserved for
their use » (Isaacman & Isaacman 1983 : 160 ; Zonas verdes de Maputo 1984).

Urban women in the city 129
A report on the development of Green Zones activities in Maputo during the
1980s also describes an increasing reliance on small gardens in peoples’
yards and on the expansion of Green Zones cultivation as the economic
situation deteriorated in the mid-1980s. During that period, aid from a wide
variety of foreign-aid organizations and governments supported the
establishment of Green Zones cooperatives (Sambane 1988)3. Unfortunately,
these reports do not disaggregate male and female input in either cultivation
or marketing. In general, however, government agricultural policy was
divided between rhetoric in support of family-oriented farmers and funding
for larger enterprises such as State farms (Sheldon 1994).
Women cultivated small machambas in the early 1980s in response to the
shortages of food caused by the war in the rural areas, but the need for
family gardens continued in the late 1980s despite the increase of produce in
the markets. The impact of the World Bank and International Monetary
Fund-designed Economic Restructuring Program (PRE), which was
instituted in 1987, was to open up the markets while simultaneously raising
prices. The overall effort in Mozambique as elsewhere was to support the
establishment of free-market trading, while diminishing the role of the
government in regulating prices and providing services (Green 1989 ;
Hermele 1990 ; Loxley 1988 ; Marshall 1990 ; Roesch 1988). While food was
simply not available in the early 1980s, prices were controlled and kept to an
affordable level. Although the market stalls were frequently empty, or filled
only by piles of spoiled cucumbers, what fruits and vegetables were
available were priced at about 35 meticais per kilogram in the early 1980s,
when 40 meticais equaled about US$ 1.00. By July 1989, the rate had spiraled
up so that 800 meticais equaled $1.00. There was a wide variety of vegetables
for sale in 1989, but the cost per kilogram had risen to ten times that of five
years earlier. After PRE in 1989, the cheapest vegetables (tomatoes and
cabbage leaves) were 300 or 400 meticais per kilogram, with some less
common vegetables such as eggplant up to 500 or 600 meticais.
Salaries had also been increased, but not by the same percentage. An
average garment worker’s salary in 1983 was around 8,000 meticais a month.
In 1989 an office worker for the women’s organization in Beira was earning
26,000 meticais a month, a fairly typical monthly salary for an educated
worker. A salaried young man selling non-food supplies in a cement stall in
a Maputo market in August 1989 earned only 10,000 meticais a month. It
was commonly understood that an urban family dependent on a single
wage earner would only have enough money for two to three weeks of food
supplies each month. Thus the appearance of fruits and vegetables in the
urban markets did not signal the end of urban hunger.
Studies by Mozambican anthropologist Ana Loforte (1987, 1989) indicate
how urban immigrants continued to rely on rural survival skills. These skills
involve more than simple agricultural activity, as rural-based values that
focus on family, ethnicity, and religion are predominant among new urban
residents. Residents of the « cement city » in Maputo generally do not have
gardens. However, in the city’s suburban neighborhoods women continue to
be involved almost exclusively in agricultural labor (Loforte 1987 : 58 ; 1989 :
24). In research conducted in the neighborhood of Mahlazine on Maputo’s
periphery, Loforte (1987 : 60-61) found that 80 percent of the families had
3. Aid came from Norway (Norad), Canada (Cuso), Unicef, Usaid, Italy, France, and the
Friedrich Ebert Foundation based in Germany.

130 Kathleen SHELDON
machambas close enough for daily work. A further 10 percent of families had
machambas at a distance of twelve to fifteen kilometers. Some of the women
had market stalls where they sold a portion of their produce, but the
productivity of the land varied from area to area, and not all families
produced a surplus (Lundin 1986 : 3).
A system of agricultural fields in the urban periphery received support
through the government’s Office of Green Zones, which had branches in
major cities. In Maputo many agricultural cooperatives have access to land
in the Green Zones. These cooperatives are noted for the high level of female
involvement, with up to 90 percent of the total membership being women4.
The cooperatives do not always pay a living wage to members, but the
members can purchase harvested food at low cost. They also have access to
amenities such as day-care centers and literacy classes organized by the
cooperatives. Many cooperative members continue to cultivate a personal
machamba as well as contribute several hours each day to the cooperative
fields5.
While all land was nationalized in 1975, people continued to follow
customary usages when considering ownership. Land cannot be owned by
individuals. Land titles allowing access and use are governed by the land
law established in the Constitution at independence, and reconfirmed in the
new Constitution passed in 1990 (Sachs & Welch 1990 : 27-45)6. Many people
consider the land they farm as belonging to themselves or a family member,
as they have continued to have access to it since independence. This
ambiguity may become problematic in the urban areas in particular, as land
becomes scarce and conflicts develop between inhabitants who wish to
cultivate land for themselves and wealthier, more powerful individuals who
crave that land for housing, industry, or corporate farming. Private
landowners in Harare, Zimbabwe, reportedly considered piecemeal culti-
vation as « a form of trespassing on their lands » (Mazambani 1982 : 134).
The confusion that can arise from the existence of conflicting customary and
profit-oriented land allocation systems is discussed in a number of sources,
though the specific system of government ownership in Mozambique is
unusual (Mabogunje 1990 : 163-166 ; Mbuyi 1989 : 154-158 ; Simon 1989).
Additionally, much of the debate on access to land has focused on issues
pertaining to rural communities rather than to access to urban plots
(Casimiro 1994, Kloeck-Jenson 1998).
In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was a continuing struggle in the
Green Zones over land access and use between the female farmers and those
who wanted to build residences or factories. Those who tried to deprive the
4. I do not include all Mozambican cities in this article. Information on cooperatives in the
northern city of Nampula can be found in MARSHALL & ROESCH 1993. They report that
membership in the Nampula cooperatives was « overwhelmingly male. Women made up
only about 5 per cent of the membership. Virtually all male members, however, depended
on the labour of their wives and other female members of the householdsî to do the
agricultural labor » (ibid. : 255). The cooperative union was instituting a system of « family’
memberships so as to include the women who were doing the work » (ibid. : 270).
5. Some of the many studies and reports on the Maputo cooperatives are found in AYISI 1995 ;
BENJAMIN & DANAHER 1988 ; GENTILI 1985, 1989 ; MARSHALL 1988 ; MULDER 1988 ;
SALVADOR 1986.
6. Also see « People’s Assembly Approves New Constitution », Mozambiquefile, 172,
November 1990 : 4-11 (land ownership discussed on p. 7). Further debates over land
ownership in Mozambique’s Parliament in 1997, though focused on rural land, maintained
the prohibition against individual land ownership ; see « Assembly Passes New Land
Law », Mozambiquefile, 253, August 1997 : 4-9.

Urban women in the city 131
cooperatives of their land claimed that the women did not know how to use
the land properly. While women were vulnerable in this situation, they
found their access to agricultural land was protected through membership
in the cooperatives7.
Celina Cossa, president of the General Union of Cooperativists (UGC for
União geral de cooperativistas) spoke out repeatedly for the rights of urban
farming women. In 1989 she spoke fervently to the Fifth Party Congress of
Frelimo (Mozambique Liberation Front) about attempts to take over
cooperative land, characterizing it as a form of banditry, though the bandits
« do not carry machine-guns, [but] are armed with the cannons of opportu-
nism with which they want to restore exploitation »8. She described the
struggles over land as a « war » (interview by author with Celina Cossa, 21
August 1989). Speaking to a UGC conference in 1990, she was explicit about
the attitudes of some entrepreneurs toward the cooperative women :
« Some people, arguing as ever that we are illiterate, incapable, ignorant and
above all, almost all women, sum it up by saying that we don't know how to
manage our property, our land. They say that with the PRE, what is important
is private initiative. But there are many ways of developing private initiative.
As poor people, we feel the need to unite and work together in cooperatives »
(Marshall 1991 : 7).
President Joaquim Chissano responded by supporting the contribution
made by the cooperative women to the nation’s political and productive
effort. He said : « We are aware that there are those who want to kill the
cooperative movement. But we know that the cooperatives do not merely
produce food. They also develop men and women, they liberate men and
women »9. Individual women’s economic insecurity was ameliorated by the
political activity of the cooperatives. For poor female-headed households in
particular access to land in the Green Zones was a significant factor in
improving family nutrition (Green 1991). Despite evidence that the
cooperatives were not profitable, Frelimo committed itself to supporting
urban farmers for principled reasons, recognizing the importance of
collective effort.
Women and machambas in Beira Urban agriculture in Beira has not been
as well documented as that in Maputo (two exceptions are ƒkesson 1988 and
Ayisi 1995). The information presented here is drawn from two primary
sources : interviews I conducted in the early 1980s with urban women
working for a wage and information I collected during a visit to Beira in
August 1989. The 1989 data include my observations of activities sponsored
by the Women’s Project of the Green Zones Office of the City of Beira.
Though I did not conduct a quantitative survey, the information reveals the
importance of women’s urban agriculture in Beira. At the end of the
7. However, this point of view is contested by some of the interviews included in WHITE
[1985] which suggest that some of the land claimed by the cooperatives had previously been
held by women. Those women, in consequence of losing their land, were angry with the
cooperative and with the government, and one woman reportedly damaged a water pump
and other facilities on the property when the cooperative took it over. White wonders
whether the land was easier for the cooperatives to claim because the female owners were
more vulnerable, but with no statistics on the gender of land owners during colonialism
and after, this is difficult to prove one way or the other.
8. « Cooperatives Fighting a Double War », Mozambiquefile, 157, August 1989 : 13.
9. « Peasant Land Being Stolen by Private Farmers », Mozambiquefile, 153, April 1989 : 16, and
« Cooperatives Fighting a Double War », Mozambiquefile, 157, August 1989 : 13. This point of
view is corroborated by WHITE (1985).

132 Kathleen SHELDON
twentieth century the city continued to have a formerly-Portuguese sector,
including a downtown area of shops and cement office buildings and
apartments centered around a town square. However, the greater urban area
spread out and encompassed a variety of suburban and peri-urban
neighborhoods. Residents in the outlying areas consider themselves to be
living in Beira despite their distance from the city center. As Gunilla ƒkesson
commented, « A woman in the city with a machamba does not belong to a
peasant family. She is part of a working family that is urban or in the process
of urbanization with a family budget based above all on her husband’s
salary and on products in the market for the subsistence of the family. But
even though they are urban women many of them dedicate themselves to
agriculture on a small scale in the city » (1988, Doc.7 : 13).
Census information from 1980 indicated the predominance of agricul-
tural work for women. The official number of residents in Beira was still
overwhelmingly male : out of a total population of 87,114, there were 61,663
men and 25,451 women. Of 22,708 workers in agriculture in the city, 19,991
were women (Conselho Coordenador do Recenseamento 1983b, 43, 45). In
another example of the involvement of Beira’s households in urban agri-
culture, figures indicated that 70,000 families in Beira had one or more
members cultivating rice in the 1980s (« Beira’s Rice Crop Fails », AIM
Information Bulletin 129 (1987) : 12-13). About 5,000 hectares of city land
was dedicated to rice production, which resulted in 8,000 tons of rice in 1987
(Muchangos 1989, 283-286). Discrepancies in census counts reflect in part the
uncertainty of Beira’s outer boundaries. Unofficial estimates, including
central Beira and the surrounding peri-urban neighborhoods, indicated that
greater Beira’s population of 250,000 in the early 1980s had risen to over
400,000 by 1987, with the unprecedented growth blamed on the war in the
rural areas.
The Green Zones office in Beira stated that 88 percent of the 9,060 hec-
tares of agricultural land were used for family agriculture. For the most part,
the work was done by women who did not have their own waged work, but
whose husbands held jobs in the city’s businesses10. Muchangos’s discussion
of agriculture in Beira differentiated between three types of cultivation :
agricultural fields and enterprises on the peri-urban outskirts and in
neighboring towns, open fields devoted primarily to rice, and small plots in
individual yards where food for family consumption was grown. The
outlying areas were formerly cultivated by Portuguese and Chinese
residents as truck gardens, and have the space for more extensive chicken
and pig husbandry. Regarding the vegetable gardens, he comments that the
prevalence of these gives the city a notably green aspect, as « each family,
generally the women, tries to cultivate vegetables and fruit trees next to their
home, which also contributes to improving environmental quality »
(Muchangos 1989 : 283-286).
The agricultural land was located in all parts of the city. A newspaper
article listed the following neighborhoods as possessing numerous
machambas : Estoril, Macuti, Macurungo, Munhava, Chota, Vaz, Manga, and
Inhamizua11. These neighborhoods were near the center of the city as well as
10. « Agricultura em minifúndios alivia orçamentos familiares », Notícias, 25 August 1989 : 3,
special supplement to mark Beira’s 82nd anniversary.
11. « Agricultura em minifúndios », op. cit.

Urban women in the city 133
in more suburban areas ; for instance, Estoril and Macuti are formerly Por-
tuguese seaside areas, while Manga was a large peri-urban neighborhood12.
In examining the practice of urban gardening in the early 1980s in Beira,
it is clear that the conditions created by the South African-sponsored war of
destabilization played a role. Food cultivation in rural areas was disrupted,
and the transport of food to the city was often impossible. This directly
impacted the cashew and garment workers in my study, who had to become
much more creative in finding food for their families. The agricultural work
was primarily women’s responsibility, despite their waged activity. Even
nurses, who had not described their own mothers as peasants as the factory
women had, turned to agriculture to deal with the shortages. Äkesson
(Doc.4 : 2), in her report on Green Zones agriculture, mentions in passing
that social groups such as professionals, technical workers, nurses, business
people, and civil servants were among those cultivating machambas.
Two garment workers mentioned that their male household workers
helped some, especially if the day’s work of cleaning and laundry was not
too demanding. One woman’s children helped clean the harvested rice. But
most of the cultivating had to be left until the women could do it themselves,
after work on Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday. One cashew worker
mentioned that her husband was making a machamba ; when I commented
that very few men did such work, she replied : « With hunger, he does it »,
to the laughter of other women present. This woman’s mobility was
restricted by her newborn infant, and it is likely that the family faced the
prospect of no sweet potatoes unless the husband prepared the garden.
Researchers in the colonial era had commented that men often prepared the
land, but it was more common to observe women preparing the ground for
planting in the 1980s.
While the nurses were less apt than the factory workers to have a garden,
one nurse said she was growing onions and other vegetables in her yard,
and another nurse showed me her duck’s new ducklings when I visited her
home in the former Portuguese neighborhood of Ponta Gía. Due to their full-
time jobs, waged workers were often unable to spend time standing in line
to buy food when it was available in the shops. One cashew worker said that
she would run from the factory to the shops hoping to find food. Another
told me that she had had no food for two days because she could not
manage to wait in line to buy supplies. Growing food for themselves directly
alleviated this problem.
Of the seven garment workers interviewed at the Belita factory, five had
had a machamba in Beira at some time in their lives. The two women who
had not had an urban garden had disparate backgrounds : one was the
daughter of a woman who had herself worked as a garment worker and a
teacher, and was the most distant from a rural family background. The other
was the youngest garment worker interviewed and she was still childless.
12. One obstacle in pursuing this research was the inconsistency of neighborhood names in
Beira. Massamba-M’Chatazina, one of the two neighborhoods studied by Coimbra in the
1960s, did not appear on any maps that I consulted in the 1980s. There was no official map
of the city, and existing maps from the Green Zones Office and other sources do not agree
on neighborhood boundaries or names.

134 Kathleen SHELDON
As some of the others had only begun to garden in the 1980s, she may also
turn to an urban machamba as her family’s food needs grow.
Sixteen of the twenty-six cashew workers interviewed stated that they
had a machamba. Most of the machambas were in Beira, though one was in the
nearby town of Mafambisse. Because I asked whether they had a machamba
in Beira, women who had one in Dondo or Mafambisse, outside the city,
may have answered « no » to the specific question without elaborating.
Likewise, a cashew worker first answered « no » when asked if she had a
machamba, and then went on to say that she only had a small garden in her
yard. It may well be that still other women discounted food grown in their
yards as not constituting a proper machamba. For example, one garment
worker described hers as « a small machamba, just a hobby ». But despite its
location in the yard by her home in Vaz neighborhood, she grew rice as well
as greens and cabbage.
Two garment workers had previously had machambas, but had stopped
cultivating them. One discontinued it because her plot was located in the
neighborhood of Munhava, and she felt this was too distant from her
residence. The other had experienced a poor year in 1982 after the arduous
work of planting and weeding, and so had decided not to invest the effort in
a garden in 1983. The drought of the early 1980s in Southern Africa was
clearly a contributing factor, and she may opt to plant again in the future.
Her land belonged to her father in Munhava, and she continued to claim
rights to it.
One garment worker had begun a machamba on land in Beira she said
belonged to her aunt, and had planted rice and sweet potatoes for her
children. Another mentioned paying rent to the government for her rice
field. She had previously had an extensive rice machamba, but had to cut
back when her legs began bothering her and her doctor ordered her to stop
working in the wet rice fields. She began to work at Belita garment factory
when she was forced to reduce her machamba. She continued to grow rice for
her family, but her yield of three to four large sacks a year was much less
than her earlier output.
Part of the confusion over whether the land they cultivated constituted a
machamba may stem from the idea that a « real » machamba results in food for
the market, with the small amounts consumed by the family being too
minimal to consider. In only one case did a factory woman say that her crops
were for sale. She had worked for six months selling produce in the market
before coming to the cashew factory, and lived with an aunt who still went
to a stall to sell their surplus. Acknowledging that they cultivate a machamba
may also be related to how these women define themselves, whether they
feel they are peasants living in the city or urban women who happen to keep
a garden. The research project focused on them as waged workers, so this
issue did not directly arise in the interviews. But it appears that there was a
continuum. At one end were women who earned a factory wage and later
began a garden and who might consider themselves urban working women.
At the other end were women who had devoted most of their time to
cultivation in the urban periphery and then found factory work while
cutting back on their agricultural labor. Such a woman might view herself as
a newly-employed peasant despite a history of urban residency.
Women market vendors working on their own account indicated that
they purchased their supplies from truck farmers cultivating farms in

Urban women in the city 135
Chimoio and other areas outside the city limits. When one market vendor
sold fruit in the downtown market in the early 1970s she would purchase
bananas, oranges, tomatoes, and other fruit, which she then sold at her stall.
As that supply ceased in the early 1980s she began to cultivate manioc for
sale. She had not previously cultivated a machamba, but was driven by
necessity to plant manioc and sell the leaves for matapa, a common sauce
served with rice.
The testimony of these women illustrates that agricultural labor within
the city boundaries was an important part of women’s responsibilities, and
that it supplied a crucial part of a family’s food. The efforts of these women
on weekends, and in at least one case early in the morning before work,
reflected the necessity of growing food in the face of extreme shortages.
Green Zones in Beira
Although most women worked their machambas as individuals, Beira did
have a Green Zones Office which supported their efforts. However, in
contrast to Maputo, the women were generally not organized into coopera-
tives. In a study of land distribution and women’s work organization, Jean
Davison (1988b) compared women’s participation in a cooperative in Dondo
outside of Beira with an irrigated rice scheme in Beira’s Macurungo
neighborhood. She found that the restructuring of agricultural labor into
new collective forms did not appreciably diminish women’s work load,
although women in the cooperative were able to develop their leadership
and decision-making activities.
The Women’s Project within the Office of Green Zones for Beira received
UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) support for a six-month program
of courses directed at women who work in the Green Zones. Six
neighborhoods were considered to be dedicated primarily to agriculture,
and thus were part of the official Green Zones efforts : Macurungo, Vaz,
Chota, Mascarenhas, Ndunda, and Vila Massanga (the last two are more
properly suburbs). The program offered classes in literacy, arithmetic,
agriculture, and health. Women attended afternoon classes after working in
their fields in the morning. The courses began in 1986 with 100 women and
12 teachers in four different neighborhoods. This number has increased each
year (120 women in 1987, 182 in 1988, and 218 through August 1989).
Participants in each session selected a small number of women as monitors
who continued as liaisons after the course ended. In addition to information,
the Green Zones office supplied seeds, hoes, and other materials to the
women who participated13.
By 1995 the program had further expanded to the neighborhoods of
Aeroporto, Muchatazina, Maraza, and Munhava, and courses in sewing and
cooking had been added to those on education and health. Over 640 women
participated, still supported by UNICEF funding. The entire program could
last three years and the women who completed that would have the
equivalent of a fifth class, or third level of adult education. The program also
13. Nelton Guta, director of the Women’s Project of the Beira Green Zones Office, conversation
with author, 15 August 1989.

136 Kathleen SHELDON
offered classes for children who had not found space in the overcrowded
official schools14.
While admirable, this program suffered from many shortages – as did the
whole society. For example, in August 1989 the teachers at the Chota child
care center had not been paid for two months, and the food supply for the
children was limited to massa, the maize porridge eaten by Mozambicans.
The children sang a song with the words « Every day, every day, only massa,
only massa ». These problems became a disincentive for women to
participate, as they could not be sure that their children were being well
cared for in the center (Sheldon 1992).
The individual machambas belonging to women affiliated with the Green
Zones project were generally under a half hectare in size, although some
ranged up to one and a half hectares. Many of the participants had only
small gardens in their yards where they grew vegetables such as eggplant,
lettuce, cabbage, carrots, and onions15. While rice was commonly grown all
over Beira, the Green Zones course was just introducing rice cultivation to
their curriculum in 1989. Certainly the limited size of these machambas
indicated that the food was grown to supplement rather than entirely supply
the food needed by a family. Though in general the food grown was for
family consumption, the Green Zones Office was also supporting women
who wished to begin selling their produce in the markets. In 1992 they
sponsored a workshop designed to help women assess their abilities and
potential for being successful in marketing their produce. The women
worked together to learn such business basics as how to calculate their
expenses, how to gauge their receipts and earnings, and whether there
would be a customer base for what they intended to sell. The workshop
included examples of women selling greens (hortaliça) in the market as well
as discussion of the courage needed to start a business (Projecto Mulheres
nas Zonas Verdes 1992).
The Green Zones programs also raise the issue of State involvement in
women’s urban agriculture. Urban agriculture has been mentioned as a way
for women to contribute to their family budgets while avoiding paying taxes
or other fees, in effect remaining outside the reach of the State. In
Mozamique, however, the involvement of the government in supporting
women’s urban farming has contributed to the success of women’s economic
activity. The city government in Beira is developing support systems for
urban farming women that could increase women’s production and provide
important backing to efforts to improve urban nutrition. Despite the conti-
nued shortages and problems in implementing assistance to those women,
the policy currently recognizes the importance of the work they are doing.
* * *
Labor in African cities includes agricultural work, and women’s work
load is undercounted when this essential sector is omitted or ignored.
Women in Mozambique have pursued this activity for decades under
Portuguese colonialism as well as in the 1980s in the face of a debilitating
war and economic suffering. It is not simply a carry-over from rural life, but
14. « Mulheres camponesas formam-se na Beira », Notícias, 14 August 1995, reporting an
interview with Adelaide Alfeu from the Women’s Project of the Beira Green Zones Office.
15. « Agricultura em minifúndios ».

Urban women in the city 137
a conscious choice made in the course of adapting to urban life. The fact that
women of varying class backgrounds cultivate gardens in the cities is a
further indication of the importance of this activity to urban life in general in
African cities. Urban agriculture has played an important role in maintai-
ning a viable family life, and in developing African urban communities. It is
clear that the effort invested by African women in urban farming has been
substantial. Acknowledging the widespread practice of women’s urban
gardening forces a reassessment of African patterns of urbanization.
Septembrer, 1998 / May, 1999
Kathleen SHELDON
Center for the Study of Women, University of California at Los Angeles
<ksheldon@ucla.edu>
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