The social history of everyday life in late colonial Lourenço Marques supports John Lonsdale's assertion that Africans navigated in quite tight corners. Lourenço Marques municipal authorities created, perpetuated and exacerbated those tight corners, and the city's willful neglect cost African urban businesses and families a great deal. This chapter reveals that families formed by cashew shellers were broadly similar to those of the overall urban African population. The daily lives of people living in the bairros de caniço revolved around work, wages, housing, rents, strategies to leverage wages and struggles to keep families intact, fed and healthy.

Many urban women, not just cashew shellers, formed amancebado families, not because it was their last option, but because such arrangements allowed them a measure of autonomy that they valued and pursued. Poor women in particular had limited expectations of service and support in relation to employment, child bearing, formal marriage, common-law marriage and polygamy. Although the status as head of household was unusually common among women of Tarana, their family forms and lives were otherwise broadly similar to those of their neighbours. Women throughout the suburbs of Lourenço Marques experienced the essential economic and social connectivity of productive and reproductive labour in the working lives of their families.

Lourenço Marques was a settler city, and increasingly through this period a sophisticated cosmopolitan destination for white tourists. The white city was completely supported by black workers whose neighbourhoods and urban social history is as diverse and interesting as the settler city, but much more difficult to extricate. To retrieve the daily challenges the great majority of African families faced living in what everyone called caniço, the diverse and sprawling bairros de caniço, we have to extricate caniço from the projection of a white city.