This article argues for the importance of including the construction of informal housing in histories of the African built environment. It examines the proliferation of illegally built masonry houses in the unplanned, predominately African neighborhoods of Lourenço Marques (today's Maputo) during the last years of Portuguese rule. Officials tolerated reed construction in these neighborhoods, but they saw unauthorized permanent construction there as an obstacle to the expansion of the formalized, predominately European city core. These ‘modern’ masonry houses, however, embodied some of the highest aspirations of their builders – aspirations that increasingly overlapped with those of lower-income whites that lived in such close proximity. Racial politics was manifested as material politics as clandestine construction challenged the divisions that had long defined the city. Informal housing thus helps to illuminate some of the peculiarities of race in urban lusophone Africa during the last years of colonial rule, a period usually understood in terms of wars for independence, but that in cities were also years of surging economies and the rising expectations of many African workers.

This article examines the scars and marks left on the bodies of survivors of the Mulele rebellion (DR Congo), their signifying capacity, their relationship not only with the body but also with the uncertainty of time, the arresting of time, and the annihilation of future time that the scars and marks seem to both signify and put into effect by making the body useless, undesirable, and revolting to others. Drawing on extensive oral interviews and other forms of evidence, including scars and marks on the bodies of survivors, as well as a body of theory on psychoanalysis, continental mirror, time, laughter, and the gaze of others, this article argues that to be tortured during the rebellion was unimaginably terrible. But the suffering did not end there. There was something beyond that, something even more important that caused a kind of psychic suffering, which not only exceeded the physical, but also extended across time.

If we were required to sacrifice our own interests whenever doing so was best overall, or prohibited from doing so unless it was optimal, then we would be mere sites for the realization of value. Our interests, not ourselves, would wholly determine what we ought to do. We are not mere sites for the realization of value – instead we, ourselves, matter unconditionally. So we have options to act suboptimally. These options have limits, grounded in the very same considerations. Though not merely such sites, you and I are also sites for the realization of value, and our interests (and ourselves) must therefore sometimes determine what others ought to do, in particular requiring them to bear reasonable costs for our sake. Likewise, just as my moral status grounds a requirement that others show me appropriate respect, so must I do to myself.