This work presents a historical ethnography on the groups performing popular music in the urban space within the set of social and political changes in late colonial Lourenço Marques. I focus on the period from the 1960’s, with the end of the indigenous statute and the beginning of the liberation war (1964), until the independence in 1975. I argue that while reflecting the social structure of a colonial society ruled by the Portuguese dictatorship, the performance of popular music repertoires also fed the emergence of a new generation of black musicians and a nascent youth with a cultural imaginary that was beyond the dichotomy colony/metropolis.