Futureless-ness and the reformatting of the urban

As mentioned above, when researchers approach highly unequal urban orders, we reach for template descriptors of structural or neoliberal regimes or focus on the violence exerted against their subjects (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2021). Typically, we document multiform patterns of exclusion, suggesting that such regimes are integral to excesses of militarized/securitized urbanism or adopt another analytical shorthand denigrating (the potential for) human sociality and relationality. Why do we, as analysts, provide such analyses? Very often, we hold, it is because there are so many features around us indicating that the future – the very possibility of a future or any future – is absent. Further, the dehumanized and dehumanizing shapes of the urban both prefigure and exemplify such futureless-ness (Davis Reference Davis2006; Ghertner et al. Reference Ghertner, McFann and Goldstein2020).

Three broader trends also support such a bleak reading. First, many analyses indicate the end of a world made and controlled by man given that we now inhabit an Earth where the ontology of capital is all-encompassing in its insistence on there being no external limit to its global and universal ambition (Berardi Reference Berardi2015). For urban worlds, this entails a real estate thinking that reshapes our affective relations with what we used to consider home and household in a city increasingly dominated by capital-intense structures and surveillance capitalism designed to protect investments and to attract investors (see also Stein Reference Stein2019). Second, another vision of the end of the future relates to accelerated climate destruction, which makes it increasingly futile to envision development towards universal human growth, including a materially higher standard of living for all of Earth’s inhabitants (see also Scranton Reference Scranton2015). Within the urban as well as the political context, this seems to imply that we should abandon ambitions about development and instead console ourselves with devising more robust or resilient urban orders to meet increasingly dramatic climate collapse (Grove Reference Grove2018; Tsing Reference Tsing2015; for a critique of Tsing, see Bertelsen Reference Bertelsen2021). Such robust, resilient and flexible urban orders are, we would like to stress, predominantly futureless, generating a restricted political-ecological form of resilient present. A third incarnation of futureless-ness presents itself through the global dominance of algorithms – machine reasoning, logics of probability and what technology critic Evgeny Morozov call solutionism. Crucially, this mode of futureless technopolitics, which sets up technology and calculability as universal tools of intervention into the human condition, can be deployed to solve problems before they are even articulated, debated politically or engaged democratically (Morozov Reference Morozov2014; see also Goldberg Reference Goldberg2021: 42).

As one of us (Bertelsen) has underlined in an analysis of urban politics in Maputo (Bertelsen Reference Bertelsen2021), the production of non-futures is not merely a discursive or theoretical exercise – an Anthropocenic game of words. In Maputo there are in circulation powerful conceptions about resilience and non-futures that are key to urban requalification programmes and the (subordinate) roles the poor play in these. This work is an empirical analysis of urban requalification processes in Maputo, where many young urban poor saw themselves sidelined. Their experiences included understanding having their potential future eclipsed by urban development steeped in urban resilience thinking – emphasizing non-development and adaptation for the poor and privileging transformation for the wealthy. Reacting against this form of urban futureless-ness, our interlocutors engaged in restless and insurrectionary manoeuvres in groups called teams (also in Portuguese) – driving around in cars, being loud and boisterous, drinking alcohol, and so on (Bertelsen Reference Bertelsen2021; see also Groes-Green Reference Groes-Green2010).

How do these invocations of futureless-ness impact how we approach the city – both as an empirical phenomenon and as an analytical entity? And does ‘city’ hold any significance – heuristically as well as analytically – as the entirety of the globe is urbanizing? Henri Lefebvre is clear in his argument that a notion of ‘the urban’ both should and can replace ‘the city’, as the latter term relates to a fetishized, stale and age-worn concept of the city as a centric and well-ordered urban society (Reference Lefebvre2003 [1970]: 16–17). In Africa, societies are increasingly formed in an urban context; we also know, more generally, that such urban settings comprise radically heterogeneous spaces for ‘metabolic exchanges that are global in reach and extent [and that] the future of humanity is increasingly understood in terms of the city’s social organization and physical design’ (Wakefield and Braun Reference Wakefield and Braun2014: 4; see also Wakefield Reference Wakefield2022).

So, if the imagery of ‘the city’ is no longer very useful to understand African urban formations, what alternatives are available? As made clear in the introduction to this special issue, we hold that it is more accurate to emphasize the fundamental openness of African urbanities (see also Pieterse and Simone Reference Pieterse and Simone2013) as well as to explore the many forms that challenge the production (analytical as well as empirically unfolding) of futureless-ness, as in Maputo.

Maputo: mobile compassion and speculation

Maputo has around 2 million inhabitants if one also includes the twin city of Matola with which it shares a continuous urban space (Morton Reference Morton2019). Confronted with both novel and entrenched forms of inequality occasioned by the recent pandemic, inflation, economic recession and political unrest (Rantala Reference Rantala2025; Bertelsen Reference Bertelsen2025), many inhabitants are busy speculating about the forms of activities that generate income or, at least, possibilities. But what do we mean by speculation beyond the point made by Nielsen above about ‘capturing certain key traits of the context’? In one sense, speculation may also be seen as a practice of the void – the gap between expectation and anticipation (Bryant and Knight Reference Bryant and Knight2019). And, if we probe the context of Maputo, speculation is omnipresent and materializes in, for instance, the infinite ways in which to organize ruses, boladas – all with the aim of earning some meticais, the Mozambican currency. In other words, speculation is geared towards filling the gap – or, better, mobilizing the gap to one’s advantage.

In this context of rife speculation, we focus on one such practice in Maputo – namely, the painted signs found on various types of motorized vehicles, including overcrowded minibuses (chapas), beaten-up or glitzy BMWs, three-wheel taxis, and lorries loaded with goods. Very often these have distinct texts on their front or back windows, doors, bumpers or other parts of their metallic bodies – texts that are equally enigmatic and clear. As Elísio Macamo underlines above and as supported by longstanding research on relations between the political, the spatial and transportation in Maputo (Colaço Reference Colaço1998; Matsinhe Reference Matsinhe and Serra2000), we should see the car or the chapa as more than a material object. Further, if we also view the traffic of these vehicles, then we need to pay attention to how cars and chapas are fundamentally interwoven with the social and relational. Crucially, then, the texts on the vehicles that engage the senses of urbanites become important as an entry point to understand the urban situation and, particularly, the place of the intimate and detached, the social and the non-social. We suggest that in these texts there exists a tangible commonality of direction to at least some of what is hinted at, stated or conjured – namely, a desire for a new sociality, an attack on indifference, and a wish to create affective spaces of mutuality.

Let us provide a few examples that we have collected over the years.

This car was seen in the outskirts of Maputo in 2018 (Figure 1), near the city’s major international sports stadium. At one level, the meaning may seem like a somewhat obvious reference to guard dogs, as in ‘Beware of the dog’. However, in conversations with people about what was written on the car – not least those with whom we were sharing a chapa that day – the ‘them’ in the expression ‘A dog, a dog with them’ indicates something wholly different, along the lines of ‘to hell with them’. ‘Them’ then indexes a composite form of elite – that is, major political leaders, the economic elite, the government more broadly and the rich. In other words os grandes chefes (the big bosses), as one passenger called them. The text on the car also thereby signifies a critique of a dog-like elite: they live a life beyond the law, enriching themselves at the cost of the common man, like greedy dogs. Further, the transmogrification into a dog also signifies a warning to the ‘top dog’ – in conversations, often cast as ‘the elite’ or ‘the government’ – that a band of dogs is forming, poised for the attack.

Figure 1.

‘A dog, a dog with them.’

Figure 1. Long description

A silver Toyota Vitz car is seen from the rear, driving on a highway. The car has a sticker on the rear window that reads ‘Cão, Cão com Eles.’ Above the car, there is a green road sign indicating directions to various destinations, including ‘Matola’ and ‘Residencial Polana.’ In the background, there is a white water tower with the word ‘TUDOR’ on it, and the sky is overcast with clouds. The scene captures a typical urban highway environment with other vehicles and infrastructure visible.

The passengers in the chapa agreed that had he (i.e. the owner, for it was a man – they were certain of that) had the possibility, the owner/driver would also have taken advantage of any situation and enriched himself in the same way. Others to whom we showed the photograph also emphasized another important dimension. There was a suggestion here, a speculation, that the transformation into a dog was involuntary, and that the person would have preferred to be a moral person rather than having to steal. What was indicated in our conversations, therefore, was that such a pursuit of a monetarily rich life was something he felt forced into and that it would mean leading a morally problematic life of indifference to others.

The photograph in Figure 2 was taken in 2021 – also from the front seat of a chapa, where I (Nassone) was told what the text indicates. As to what is stated linguistically, the first part reads, in Shangaan (the majority language in Maputo), ‘You will also grow old.’ Then, added in Portuguese,‘If you are lucky.’ The first part, Na wena uta guga, is probably inspired by a popular song by the Mozambican artist Mabermuda recorded around 2018. The song revolves around an aged ambulant seller who responds to a disrespectful son. In conversations with passengers, similar yet additional themes came up. Key among these was that the Shangaan and Portuguese parts together conveyed the following sense: ‘If I am horrible and miserable today – destitute and poor – you should not think badly about me.’ The reasoning behind this was to underline that all people have once been attractive and dynamic. But time transforms everyone and no one can escape age. In addition, but especially with the Portuguese latter part, people agreed that it expressed that old age is a form of luxury – a futurity to be desired, to be coveted. In this way, the text also exemplifies a rejection of the simple imperative of the present and an understanding of development and age.

Figure 2.

‘Na wena uta guga, se tiveres sorte.’

Figure 2. Long description

A car with a license plate reading ‘MNI 16 34’ drives on a road. The car has a sign that reads ‘Na wena uta guga, se tiveres sorte.’ The road is lined with other vehicles, including a black SUV and a white van. On the left side of the road, a person in a purple outfit carries a large white bag. The scene is set on a cloudy day with buildings and utility poles in the background.

Seen in November 2025, ‘Jealous down’ (Figure 3) was written on a minibus momentarily parked near Chamanculo. In conversations with those passing by, as well as those sitting around but who were not the owners of the vehicle, the significance of ‘Jealous down’ was eagerly communicated to us as encouraging people to ‘lower the jealousy’ (abaixa o ciúme). Many stated that it was a way of indicating ‘do not be envious’ or ‘do not bother me/interfere with my success/style’. A central message here is that whoever sees the minibus might experience feelings of envy or jealousy but that, crucially, the owner responds humorously by imploring those who see the vehicle to ‘lower that jealousy’. However, people also agreed that it is a statement about status – communicating that the owner knows that he or she has something of value (the car, the lifestyle) and therefore also asserts pride and confidence, as if saying ‘I am fine, envy does not affect me’. Generally, it was also commented that these phrases function as personal slogans, almost like social tattoos, as their owners become known and addressed by these sayings and it is common for them to be called not by their own names but by these phrases.

Figure 3.

‘Jealous down.’

Figure 3. Long description

A white van with orange stripes and the words ‘JEALOUS DOWN’ on the front is parked on a dirt road. The van has a license plate that reads ‘MME 31 00’. Several people are standing and sitting nearby, with a silver car and a rusty truck also visible in the background. The scene is in an urban area with buildings and a billboard in the distance.

Taken in December 2025, in a parking lot in the Baixa area of Maputo, the slogan on this car (Figure 4) made many people laugh, as the direct translation would be ‘buttocks of/like a mosquito’. In Maputo, the expression ‘mosquito butt’ (bunda de mosquito) is used popularly and humorously to refer to someone with very small, almost non-existent buttocks. By writing this on a car, people agreed that the owner was probably conveying a message of jest, irony or even provocation. ‘Mosquito butt’ is also a highly visual metaphor: the mosquito is tiny, and therefore its ‘butt’ would be almost invisible. In this case, it also conveys, according to interlocutors, the message ‘don’t worry about me, I’m invisible, I have nothing, I’m like a mosquito – in fact, I’m like a mosquito’s butt, so don’t bother with me’. The expression is also used as a marker of group membership. In Maputo neighbourhoods, expressions such as Team Bunda de Mosquito function as cultural markers, showing belonging to a young and urban community, typically rebellious and challenging social norms and standards (see above and also Bertelsen Reference Bertelsen2021 for an analysis of teams). While bunda de mosquito is not in itself an offensive phrase, either for the elite or for the general public, some of our interlocutors also underlined that it may be seen as a provocation or even a mild insult. This is related to the prevailing idea that those who govern Mozambique are responsible for many urbanites in Maputo being as thin and invisible as a mosquito’s behind.

Figure 4.

‘Bunda de mosquito.’

What is an urban African public? Art, texts and improvisation

Texts like these neither emerge nor circulate in a context devoid of other competing expressions – textual as well as visual. Africanist scholarship has dealt with the complex notions of the public/private distinction (Ekeh Reference Ekeh1975) and the many forms that override this far too simplified dichotomy in African contexts. Similarly, in an important work on historical aspects of Tanzanian street life under Ujamaa, Emily Calacci (Reference Calacci2017) has mapped how young people especially in Dar es Salaam produced, at street level, a plethora of booklets, pulp fiction novellas, song lyrics and other formats – what she calls ‘street archives’. Such work involved ‘a new kind of popular public intellectual who would innovate new modes and visions of urban community’ (Calacci Reference Calacci2017: 2) and was conducive to producing a bottom-up urban collective ethos of postcolonial African citizenship. Work resembling Calacci’s and Ekeh’s analyses has been undertaken by Ouma and Krishnan. When commenting on the existence of literary publics outside the formal realm, they note that ‘there were/are other “circuits of value” … for literary and cultural interpretation based on audiences and publics outside of the modern cultural institutions whose agenda is loyal to the state and therefore sometimes unconsciously to imperial legacies’ (Ouma and Krishnan Reference Ouma and Krishnan2021: 197).

Inspired by the works of Ekeh, Calacci and Ouma and Krishnan, mapping and exploring the existence of such multiple publics are what motivate our analysis of what may sometimes be regarded as a marginal phenomenon of ordinary African street life. When we refer to the collectivities that interpret these signs, we draw on Ouma and Krishnan in not settling for the more dominant notion of publics – one derived from Habermasian notions of text circulating among strangers imagined as constituting a form of social whole. Instead, we take inspiration from ‘a less normative use of the word [‘public’] … to indicate a way of being in the world, a publicness which gains its meaning not through the act of constituting an audience or a readership but a modality of visibility in public’ (Ouma and Krishnan Reference Ouma and Krishnan2021: 198, emphasis added).

As in many other African cities, urbanites in Maputo are surrounded by – or, should we say, saturated in – a plethora of texts and visual imagery. Unsurprisingly, these are often adverts, but they also encompass political slogans for the party in power since 1975, Frelimo (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique/Front for the Liberation of Mozambique), which adorn billboards, walls, cars and T-shirts. In addition, there are graffiti tags on walls indexing ephemeral forms of gang structures, so-called teams, which are commonly tied to certain bairros or areas within these (see Bertelsen Reference Bertelsen2021). Furthermore, there is also a rich Mozambican tradition of political as well as social awareness murals – often also in the form of popular art.

Through recurrent and collective fieldwork in the bairro Maxaquene, we have regularly interviewed the street artist Barimo, who resides in the area. Barimo, a man celebrated as a street artist in his bairro, was in his mid-thirties at the time of our last interview in December 2022. He is from Maputo but grew up in different bairros before settling down in Maxaquene. There, he lived alone in a hired dependência – a very modest single-floor one-room structure located in the patio area behind a larger house. During our conversations with him, we often also brought up the thriving street art scene in Maputo; in response, Barimo would usually respond that he ‘liked to work alone’, that he was unaware of some of the works in other bairros when we showed him images on our phones, and that he preferred to ‘stay in Maxaquene’. Speaking in both Shangaan and Portuguese, he recounted how he had ‘been painting since 1999. All my messages comment on life in the bairro and also the politics of Maputo.’ When the conversation turned to what these politics entailed, he referred to the artworks themselves:

At the level of form and material, Barimo’s works seem to reflect other works in Maputo, a scene excellently mapped by, for instance, David Bailey (Reference Bailey2023). Bailey, who does not document or analyse Barimo’s work specifically, points out that while there is a long tradition of street art in Mozambique, for instance in the collective and individual projects using recycled materials (see also Schwartzott Reference Schwartzott, Khan, Meneses and Bertelsen2018), ‘there are tentative signs that artists in Mozambique are themselves becoming more connected to the continuing global diffusion of hip-hop culture’ (Bailey Reference Bailey2023: 237).

While Barimo does use recyclia (street waste), his work is not easily interpreted as reflecting hip-hop culture as he may be seen as being intensely concerned with reinterpreting unfolding political events – like the recurring unrest in Maputo and other Mozambican cities (see Bertelsen Reference Bertelsen2016b). Moreover, Barimo also speculates on contemporary developments, through text, art and aesthetic elements. Crucially, and reflecting the relation with people that Barimo expressed – and his ambition to draw people together (juntar pessoas) – inhabitants of this relatively poor and densely populated neighbourhood greatly appreciated the work of this original artist. Further, they also commonly donated both money and paint to him. This allowed him to create his works on their walls, between houses, or in those spaces in informal settlements that are neither public nor private. What is important in this context is that inhabitants not only supported Barimo materially but also invested time into deciphering the meanings of his works. The conversations around the meaning of the pieces of art that we were fortunate enough to be privy to mainly concerned the latest political scandals in Mozambique. Maxaquene inhabitants we conversed with described one of the pieces (Figure 5) as an effort to visualize the opaque and invisibilized connections between the son of a former president (Nyimpine Chissano), commonly believed to be involved in both embezzlement and homicide, and two major companies: the Linhas Aeras de Moçambique (the national airline) and Banco de Moçambique (the national bank) (see also Nuvunga and Orre Reference Nuvunga and Orre2019).

Figure 5.

Untitled art piece by Barimo in Maxaquene, 2014.

Figure 5. Long description

The image shows a concrete wall covered with various graffiti and text written in Portuguese. The text includes names of businesses such as ‘Hotel Polana,’ ‘FioBibCil,’ ‘Latinos Asenhora,’ ‘COSLEHU Municipal,’ ‘BDM,’ ‘LAM,’ and ‘Toyota Dimo.’ Additionally, there are names of individuals and phrases like ‘Joao Tichis Jany,’ ‘Samora Machel,’ ‘Eduardo Fidu Modlani,’ ‘Afimandu Guebuza,’ and ‘Mata Bicho.’ The wall also features some artistic elements.

Such works and the meaning-making labour that accompanies them are often amplified and transformed by the digital domain – in particular through WhatsApp. This expansion of meaning-making practice means not only that texts and graphical elements are widely disseminated but also that the virtual and digital worlds expand and sustain pervasive popular ideas about occult practices related to sorcery and nefarious forms of accumulation (see also Newell and Pype Reference Newell and Pype2021). In addition, the existence of such a ‘virtual occult space’ accentuates and gives particular force to an already existing and strong African popular culture, which, as Barber showed (Reference Barber1997), commonly thrives on political scandal and the ridiculing of politicians. Crucially, the texts, narratives, video clips and images circulating online commonly address forms of speculation or predation with the intention of making or accumulating money, particularly by inserting oneself into collectives that make this possible (see also Bertelsen Reference Bertelsen, Nielsen and Rapport2018; Mangeya and Tagwirei Reference Mangeya and Tagwirei2022; Nyamnjoh Reference Nyamnjoh2025; Bertelsen and Bahi Reference Bertelsen, Bahi, Fuh and Omar2026). Flora Botelho’s (Reference Botelho2021) work outlines some of these (often pro-collective) dynamics in an analysis of how the affective, relational and gendered aspirations for the future are fundamentally interwoven in many Mozambican women’s orientation in the social and physical spaces of the city. Furthermore, as Chilaule and Mottelson (Reference Chilaule and Mottelson2025) show in an overview of what they call ‘informal infrastructure provision’ in Maputo – their example relating to cooperation around street paving in the relatively poor bairro Maxaquene D – such collaboration is locally grounded and supported. Their findings indicate that ‘the initiative is fostering collaboration thus strengthening social cohesion in the neighbourhood’ (ibid.: 14).

Other instances of ambulating texts or shifting art might have been provided here, but those mentioned above clearly express a widespread awareness of the potential dangers, immorality and violence of Mozambican society. However, they are simultaneously expressions of aspirations for empathy, compassion and collectivity (perhaps especially Figures 1–4) in an urban landscape that could be described as marred by brutal and exclusionary forms of enclaved detachment (Nielsen et al. Reference Nielsen, Sumich and Bertelsen2021) or by the ‘displaceability’ that characterizes Maputo’s streetscapes and affects its poorer inhabitants (Baeta et al. Reference Baeta, Mbiba and Butina-Watson2022). A central feature here is that the form of empathy economy expressed in situated and spontaneous discussions around the texts shown in Figures 1–4 go beyond a direct form of social critique, at least in its slogan-type variety. Instead, both texts and the discussions they generate contain paradoxical and sometimes humorous calls to reflect on human commonality, on the difficulties of leading a good life in urban Mozambique, and on relationality and sociality. Barimo’s work also relates to some of the same issues but more clearly relates to making sense of the predatory and accumulative aspects of social and political life in Mozambique, adopting a sharp critical edge against the current political regime. Put differently, Figures 1–5 do not document marginal phenomena but illustrate how urban meaning condenses around signs and how these are interpreted as aspirations to social forms not yet realized or on the horizon; this argument is also analysed by Archambault for Maputo (Archambault Reference Archambault2021). They form, as Ouma and Krishnan (Reference Ouma and Krishnan2021: 198) have pointed out, ‘a publicness which gains its meaning not through the act of constituting an audience or a readership but a modality of visibility in public’. Such a modality, we have shown, is simultaneously playful, inclusive and aspirational.

Elective communities and plurality against futureless-ness

In a comparative analysis of (non-)working-class areas in the global South – from Djakarta and Kinshasa to Accra and Dakar – AbdouMaliq Simone argues that such areas may be regarded as spaces always already deadened by violence of the spatial, semiotic, statal or economic kind. Such an argument may in many ways resonate with the vision of a capital-centric futureless-ness we expounded above. However, in his work, Simone delves into the semiotic, affective and relational in a more profound sense and conjures (textually and analytically) an urban landscape of fickle relationality, attachments and forms of care. Simone’s term ‘improvised lives’ captures both the precarious living conditions of people and their chronic impermanence. However, he also shows how people engage their impermanence by experimenting with relational, social and (fleeting) collective forms. By highlighting these ephemeral relational and social forms in high-density, poor and lower working-class areas, he showcases forms of relationality and exchange that de-territorialize the hegemony of capital and state. Simone writes:

The melding together of provisional and even speculative economies with forms of relationality entails a rejection of a more formal approach to an urban politics of rights: ‘What is refused is to become solely or primarily a “problem to be solved” or a “people to be liberated or developed”’ (Simone Reference Simone2019: 23). To inhabit urban spaces that are (made) marginal and to (re-)socialize these with improvisation, playfulness and collective orientations are precisely what the texts on cars or Barimo’s art, in our view, indicate. Thus, the connection between the ambulatory texts and street art as a form of peripheral care is apparent; one may also argue that Figures 1–5 involve a call to attend to invisibilized forms of sociality, which are fundamental for the city to work.Footnote ¹

As we have sought to show above, the ambulatory texts and art strongly indicate that Maputo’s urban landscape is not solely a space for the deployment of narratives of the end of the future, an object of capitalist (increasingly primitive) accumulation or a place where violent forms of displaceability or exclusion through enclaving unfold. Crucially, what we have attempted to show also aligns with a broader argument on African modes of thought on the collective and the self, eloquently put forward by Congolese-French philosopher Nadia Yala Kisukidi. Drawing on both African and European registers of thought, she underlines how one can identify a type of ‘elective community’ in wider African contexts. According to Kisukidi, this involves ‘a shared will to be several’ (Reference Kisukidi, Mbembe and Sarr2023 [2019]: 104).

For us, Kisukidi underlines a desire for plurality (in several senses of that term) in the face of the singularity of capital and state, as well as the increasingly fragmented urban landscape of Maputo represented by enclaves, large and small. Instead, the notion of an ‘elective community’ as open-ended and plural resonates well with the collectivities that form around interpretations of ambulatory texts, as well as Barimo’s shifting artwork. Furthermore, Kisukidi’s notion of elective community and its orientation towards plurality resonates directly with what we have shown Barber, Calacci, Ekeh and Ouma and Krishnan indicate – namely, the importance of being attentive to the forming of often non-institutional kinds of publics at street level in African urban contexts. Needless to say, Maputo is not unique in being a site where moving as well as immobile objects are adorned with meaning and inscriptions. Other moving objects have been documented in African popular culture for many decades. For instance, Filip De Boeck and Marie-François Plissart reflect on the ships, canoes and other water vessels that both move and are immobilized on the Congo River, taking their cue from Foucault’s underlining of boats being ‘great reserves of the imagination’. De Boeck and Plissart write:

These dynamics seem, on one level, to be similar to those we have identified above for Maputo. However, in contrast to our findings, De Boeck and Plissart (Reference De Boeck and Plissart2014 [2004]: 226) conclude that ‘Kinshasa is a pitiless city with no place for the weak. Infrastructures of lack and incompleteness rarely generate a great capacity for compassion.’ Similar visions of the aggressiveness exuded on forms of transport have also inspired African literary critics. Kwame Anthony Appiah underlines in his analysis of Nigerian bolekaja critics that they are inspired by ‘mammy wagons’ of public transport – where bolekaja means ‘come down, let’s fight’, representing the aggressiveness of the touts (Appiah Reference Appiah and LaCapra1991: 141).

While the violence of the urban context of Maputo is well documented, as referenced above, and while there are trends of exclusion and enclaving that tend to reproduce themselves as economic and structural logics over time (Sumich Reference Sumich2023), in contrast to De Boeck and Plissart’s bleak vision for Kinshasa or Appiah’s note, we hold that the urban context of Maputo is also a laboratory for sociality, temporality and aspiration – including of the collective, plural and elective kinds. Our reading reflects some of the more in-depth work on African urban transport and meaning making, for instance work on Nairobi’s matatu drivers – transport vehicles of various sizes and conditions run by shifting constellations of companies. Kenda Mutongi (Reference Mutongi2017) has shown not only how operators have developed their own language, Sheng, but also how they equip minibuses with music sound systems and that the vehicles themselves are ‘festooned with snappy slogans’ as a way to attract riders (see also Wango Reference Wango2020). Further, as Meghan Ference has underlined in an impressive ethnography on matatu work, joyriding and collective engagement with the city, ‘the matatu counterpublic and the aesthetic practices embedded there are also expressions of the city and act as public statements from the street’ (Ference Reference Ference2024: 76, emphasis added).

Comparing Maputo ambulatory texts with material from Nairobi, one may surmise that there is a definite – and gendered – element of playfulness, showmanship and creativity that imbues and shapes the mobile worlds of urbanites (see also Fuh Reference Fuh2012). When analysing Figures 1–4, one should therefore also approach ambulation itself as spectacle – in the sense that it is a particular mode of engaging the ebbs, flows and shifting spaces of the urban world. However, one does so as integral to a (fleeting) collectivity and as a public that is oriented towards the visible, as pointed out by Ouma and Krishnan (Reference Ouma and Krishnan2021). Like Nairobi’s matatu mobility, the Maputo forms of spectacle, interpretation and collectivities briefly described here are modes that mobilize populations – in different textual and interpretative ways – against the separationist and static logic of capital or an elite perceived to be marginalizing and impoverishing urbanites.

In this way, the elective community of urbanites interpreting (and often sharing) vehicles and their signs in collective, playful and non-striated forms stands in contrast to urban enclaves and their related forms of mobility: the enclaved city of gated communities and securitized urban spaces and the preferred form of mobility between these bubbles, what has been called the SUV mode of citizenship (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2005). The ambulatory texts or Barimo’s art may therefore be understood as an integrated part of the continuous semiotic work that is ceaselessly carried out in African urban spaces. For, as Cumbe (Reference Cumbe and Bigon2016: 203) notes in his incisive work on the toponymics of Maputo, ‘this linguistic landscape transforms the vehicle [the minibus] into a new territorial paradigm, a “living laboratory” of conjunct spatial associations in a variety of languages’. These are urban dynamics that hegemonic understandings of the urban global South, anthropological analyses included, sometimes do not pay enough attention to (see also Wilhelm-Solomon Reference Wilhelm-Solomon2017).

In lieu of a conclusion, a speculation

The way we have approached ambulatory texts and Barimo’s art here is also to indicate that they are expressions of a desire and a will to not give in to the futureless-ness found in many of the hegemonic discourses and which is also expressed in urban Mozambique – for instance, in development discourses frontloading resilience and enclaving (see Bertelsen Reference Bertelsen2021). We hold that the widespread and popular street-level speculation around these cars and works of art may be understood as an unwillingness to succumb to the freezing of time, to futureless-ness. In some way, we would argue, the texts and art also undermine the total ambition of analyses projecting necropolitics as a hegemonic order at the street level (but see also Lindell and Ugembe Reference Lindell and Ugembe2026). Instead, they constitute surfaces onto which convivial paradoxes and aspirations are written – perhaps most clearly expressed in the texts in Figures 2 and 3.

As Morten Nielsen also highlights from Maputo, speculation in this context is intimately tied to attempts to consolidate one’s own position in an increasingly insecure situation:

Following this argument, for Maputo’s urbanites to approach the texts on cars and also in a sense to pay attention to – even facilitate – Barimo’s art is both logical and important. This would be, as Nielsen points out, to position oneself. But it would also matter because these cars and the art comprise semiotically important surfaces onto which both aspirations and interpretations of Maputo are made relevant. As already shown, many of these are fundamentally humanizing. Our work thereby adds to similar analyses of what one may call ‘the invisible grammar of the African city’ and underlines its importance (see, for example, Guyer Reference Guyer2004; De Boeck and Plissart Reference De Boeck and Plissart2014 [2004]; Nuttall and Mbembe Reference Nuttall and Mbembe2008).

It is important to be clear here that speculation, in this format, can also be insurrectionary. If the speed of capitalism, of ideologies of resilience and compliance, is antithetical to democracy, to collective urban engagement (pace Virilio (Reference Virilio2002)), then speculation in its many forms is not only a way of salvaging a remnant of the human, of sociality, but also a means of carving out a potential for future and for rupture. Here, the visually striking and affective texts on vehicles and Barimo’s art are significant reminders of relationality, hope of prosperity, re-humanization of the other and the importance of the fight against evil, such as envy or jealousy. In a sense, these expressions link the possibility for compassion with speculation. Such speculation comprises a motile and mobile affective ‘economy of empathy’. Or, as Wilhelm-Solomon puts it when analysing inner-city dynamics among the marginalized in Johannesburg, ‘everyday rhythms of commoning – the affective labour of forming social relations in the interstices of the state ensemble and real estate markets – are in constant play with forms of uncommoning – emergent fissures and divisions in the city’ (Reference Wilhelm-Solomon2024: 10).

These ambulatory texts and Barimo’s works of art emerge as more significant than the fading (and sometimes defaced) posters of former or current Mozambican presidents on city walls or the advertisement boards that are stuck up along Maputo’s main arteries. Moreover, these creative expressions are much more enigmatic and offer richer food for thought than the often empty, if not hollow, signifiers of goodness with which domestic and international NGOs dot the urban landscape, on cars, walls or signs outside their many buildings – a reflection of a country inundated by aid and donor money for decades but with a continuously declining economy and entrenched inequality.