The Colonial Hotel: spacing violence at the Grande Hotel, Beira, Mozambique

Abstract

In spite of its dereliction, the Grande Hotel in Beira, Mozambique, has emerged as an iconic African building. The dissonant meanings of this site, offer multiple opportunities to investigate the intersection of space and colonialism. We focus upon the cultural and political topologies of the hotel, and of colonial hotels generally, and make the proposition that they were a particular kind of violent colonial institution. By converging a relational reading of both violence and architecture, we reconstruct through the excavation of archival and related materials, the processes present in the histories of the hotel and city at large, to unmask how they acted as spaces of slow violence. White settler’s activities and rationales were underpinned by deliberative strategies of unknowing, forgetting, disavowal which together formed a kind of cultural agnosia that insulated them from the foundational violence that supported the colonial condition. We use a dispersed concept of violence, understood as a tactical and mutable process, which moves between physical, symbolic, embodied and performative domains. We address these domains in the paper through an analysis of the ways the city of Beira was planned, its architecture shaped and represented, and in the recreational and social performances within the hotel.

Out of Place

“…Even today, travel brochures featuring Global South countries are dominated by images of Whiteness-Whites as guests and managerswhile non-White men and women feature mostly as staff serving or entertaining White guests (for instance Burton & Klemm 2011). The Raffles Hotel in Singapore and other well-known hotels where colonial elites socialized have increasingly been presented by scholars as White spaces (for example Goh 2010;Peleggi 2012;Sarmento & Linehan 2019). Yet it could be argued that midmarket and high-end hotels in both White and non-White countries have traditionally been White spaces-as suggested by the comment made by the waitress who refused to serve Spaulding and his friends-that is, set up with White capital, managed by White executives, and frequented mostly by White guests.…”

On whose land is the city to be built? Farmers, donors and the urban land question in Beira city, Mozambique

“…This continued after the cement city’s administration was handed over to Portugal’s fascist New State in the 1940s. During this period, Beira’s cement city emerged as the crown jewel of Portuguese imperial aspirations, expressed through a range of grandiose art deco developments and a vibrant tourism industry for white settlers (Sarmento and Linehan, 2019). Little changed for the cane city, however, and it continued to evolve outside the gaze of the colonial planning apparatus.…”

Postcolonial testimony and the ruins of empire

“…The latter demonstrates the decay of the hotel by repeating the postcard views decades afterwards and thus underlines a before-after-logic. In this perspective, colonialism is associated with prosperity, wealth, modernization (just like back then) and is characterized by the absence of violence (Sarmento and Linehan, 2018). In contrast, the present is dominated by deterioration and poverty.…”

“…It is a comparison that tends to reproduce a widely disseminated narrative about the hotel and its transformation from a site of luxury into a slum (Berger, 2009;Fallon and Tutton, 2011;Murphy, 2013;Rolletta, 2006;Schiller, 2012). This line of thinking is supported by the absence of many details which include that the building designed by the architects José Porto and Francisco Castro had to close in 1963 due to various reasons that led to a decline of guests, among them political instability in the region and the begin of the colonial war in 1961 (Mendes, 2012, p. 254;Sarmento and Linehan, 2018). The ambivalent fact that the Grande Hotel was a symbol for the crisis and the end of empire hence remains unexplored.…”