When historian Lilly Havstad haggles with a Mozambican fish vendor for a kilo of tiger prawns at a downtown market, it’s a lively, timeless encounter. Once she has her prawns in hand, she engages in a spirited bidding war with the proprietors of the acre of open-air cafes behind the market who compete to prepare her crustaceans on the spot. Havstad selects one and sends the newly purchased bag of prawns, along with some fresh Indian Ocean squid and redfish, off to be seasoned, grilled, and set down at a table along with cold bottles of the local Laurentina Premium beer and tongue-numbing pieri-pieri sauce. Havstad (GRS’17) is based in Mozambique’s capital Maputo, known as Lourenço Marques before gaining independence from Portugal in 1975. It’s a dynamic, multiethnic (major groups are the Makua, Shona, and Shangaan, as well as descendants of the Portuguese) east African port whose broad avenues, lined with trees blooming purple and crimson flowers, are sprouting modern high rises among weathered colonial-era stone buildings.

Havstad spends hours poring over newspaper collections and interviewing market vendors to learn more about shopping, cooking, and dining habits.

Shopping and eating choices are an important component of Havstad’s research. A Boston University history PhD candidate whose work has been chiefly supported by the African Studies Center, she is here on a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Abroad fellowship to explore “patterns of social mobility and urban provisioning in colonial and postcolonial Maputo City.” Mozambique is on the rise in the wake of a 16-year civil war that claimed more than a million lives before it ended in 1992. The war forced millions of Mozambicans to flee their homes in the countryside for the relative safety of Maputo, which struggled to cope with the tide of refugees. But these days, with construction and mining fueling a fast-growing economy, luxury apartments and five-star hotels with high-end restaurants are rising in Maputo, and the food people are eating reflects the intersection of old and new, rural and urban, African and European.

And, Havstad has learned, what the Mozambican middle class eats sheds new, and in many ways counterintuitive, light on what she calls “the intimacy of the colonial encounter,” the exchange of customs and preferences between colonizer and colonized. The majority of existing scholarship on the middle classes of the developing world comes from a Western bias, she says, and implies that becoming middle class makes people more like the culture that colonized them. Instead, Havstad is focusing on the give-and-take between colonial and native, the mutual acquisition of characteristics like food preferences.

Havstad’s dissertation will focus in part on Mozambican foodways—a broad term encompassing everything from how and where food is bought, sold, slaughtered, and harvested, to its preparation and consumption. “Using food as a lens is allowing me to explore the tastes, traditions, and practices that people have brought with them from other parts of the region,” she says. Havstad adjusts that lens to probe every angle, “from urban gardening to preferences to cook over coals or with oil, to eating bread or starchy roots for breakfast, to how often one eats meat and on what occasions, to ideas about sharing food, to choices about what to prepare for visitors, to foods prepared for special occasions.”

“Talking with market vendors, some of whom consider themselves within a lower middle class—on the lower end of the scale, but still above the urban poor—helps me get a sense of how markets work,” says Havstad. Fluent in Portuguese, she is becoming a familiar face among the mercados and street-food stalls of a place she fell in love with on her first vacation to the historic port in 2007. She returned in 2013 to study Portuguese, and for her Fulbright-Hays year shares a flat in the neighborhood of Malhangalene with her husband, Tyler Flack (GRS’14). The city is home to 1.2 million, a multiracial, multicultural study in contrasts, where messy capitalism thrives along avenidas named during the Soviet-allied “People’s Republic” years for Mao Tse Tung, Vladimir Lenin, and Karl Marx.

Havstad is fluent in Portuguese and, whether in supermarkets, at street stalls, or in sprawling fresh markets, she approaches and questions anyone who piques her scholarly interest.

Havstad spends many hours in the newspaper collections at the Biblioteca Nacional de Moçambique, poring over mid-to-late-20th-century news broadsheets for food columns, recipes, feature photos, even advertisements reflecting people’s cooking, shopping, and festive eating habits. Her dissertation will shed light on what aspirations have driven people to move to the city “and what they have brought with them—their cultures, tastes, habits—that has given life to the city.”

As Maputo’s middle class prospers, its upward mobility is reflected in a rising consumption of meat, says Havstad. All over the city, freshly killed chicken, beef, and pork, as well as an abundance of seafood from moray eel to barracuda, find their way to the grill. These may be supplemented with more traditional fare, including cassava root, beans, millet, potatoes, the ubiquitous maize meal staple xima (pronounced sheema), paozinho rolls, and pastel de nata, a rich egg-custard pastry. As in many post­colonial cultures, every pastry and stew is emblematic of historic trends in survival, assimilation, and ethnic identity. A New York Times travel report once described the country’s food as “one of the world’s original fusion cuisines.”

Havstad’s brand of research demands confidence as well as an adventurous, omnivorous palate. In supermarkets, at street stalls, or in sprawling fresh markets, she disarmingly approaches anyone who piques her scholarly interest. What are you buying/selling? How will you prepare it? Is this a family recipe? Do you always use fresh coconut or do you buy processed coconut products? Havstad’s research leads her to Annabella, a vendor at the cavernous Mercado Central.

“I see a story of an African city shaped by the meeting and mixing of cultures.” Lilly Havstad

Mozambique is among the world’s leading exporters of raw cashews, first brought to the region by the Portuguese, but Havstad learns that Annabella fries and bags her cashews at home. The nation’s cashew processing plants fell victim to the civil war and have yet to reopen. “I discover something new every week,” says Havstad, whether it’s from interviews or in the archives, where she comes upon food influences ranging from African to Brazilian to French. Like Africans across the continent, Mozambicans consume a variety of bitter, often tough greens, now dietary staples, though the habit was born of food shortages and deprivation. Havstad polls women on how they prepare kakana, a leaf made palatable when served in a curry with pounded peanuts and coconut milk, along with rice or xima. Everyone seems to have a different notion of whether to boil the leaves or steam them, and for how long, she says. Family traditions—just like Grandma’s chicken soup or Mama’s pasta sauce—are passed along, no matter the economic circumstances or social aspirations.

“I am finding that the stories I am collecting are not shaping up in terms of a so-called loss of African culture in the process of urbanization—and middle-class formation—in a cosmopolitan city with strong European, particularly Portuguese, influences,” says Havstad. “Instead, I see a story of an African city shaped by the meeting and mixing of cultures, a process that makes Maputo such a cosmopolitan city.”

Mozambique’s Portuguese flavor dates back to 1498, when Vasco da Gama made anchor off the coast on his way to India. The period since Portugal officially colonized Mozambique at the turn of the 20th century is especially intriguing to Havstad. The Portuguese heritage is very much a part of urban Mozambican history and culture, visible in Mozambican tastes for Portuguese fare, and in the blending of colonial and traditional cuisine.

Ocean to table: one of a cluster of cafes behind a sprawling fish market prepared a platter of tiger prawns purchased fresh moments earlier.

But food is just one way Havstad is documenting the give-and-take between colonizer and colonized. For example, she has interviewed descendants of so-called assimilados. The term was used by the Portuguese to describe colonial subjects who—at least overtly—rejected their native cultures and took on European ways, reflected in everything from eating with cutlery to adopting the colonialists’ religion and tongue. The assimilados are often viewed as imitators of European colonial elites, but Havstad is finding, she says, “that it is also worth considering the evidence that Africans who had the means to become assimilados did so in search of better opportunities for themselves and their families, and that the adoption of certain European customs—such as dining at a table and eating with cutlery rather than sitting around a pot on the ground and eating with your hands—did not replace or erase African customs, values, and tastes. And these customs, habits, tastes are not static, especially not in the urban setting, where the pace of change is seemingly more rapid than in rural areas where historically there has been less contact between cultures.”

That’s not to say that Mozambicans are gleeful about Maputo’s lurch toward the more generic emblems of the global middle class. Three KFCs have arrived, for example, to a culture that steadfastly prefers its chicken grilled. And among younger informants, aged 18 to 25, the knowledge of how to cook, say, verduras or vegetable stews, is not lost, says Havstad. She has found that traditional dishes turn up along with meat at middle-class weddings. “They may prefer meat dishes, but they still value verduras, associate them with family—mothers and grandmothers especially—and can tell me how they or their grandmothers make them.” Ask 10 Mozambicans how they prepare verduras and you’re likely to get 10 recipes. Nearly all verduras have a tomato, onion, and garlic base and either yam or squash, but the leafy greens can vary. Verduras usually include coconut milk and are spiced with cumin, turmeric, salt, and pepper.

Havstad left Mozambique in September 2015 for Lisbon, where she had the opportunity to flesh out the archival record in Portuguese colonial-era documents. Ultimately, weaving together live interviews, archival research, and participant observation, she says, will round out what she believes is still “a biased picture of middle-class formation that is primarily based on Western experience, and of ‘others’ acculturating to the Western world.”

The writer’s travel for this report was supported in large part by the BU African Studies Center.