Cell phones play a conspicuous role in the way young people in Inhambane, Mozambique, juggle visibility and invisibility in their everyday lives. By opening up new social spaces within which individuals can engage in various pursuits with some degree of discretion, cell phone communication helps redress socioeconomic inequalities while preserving an unpleasant public secret about the workings of Mozambique's postwar economy: that young women are encouraged to exchange sexual favors for material gain. Drawing on the literature on secrecy and building on the local notion of “visão,” I propose an extended use of the idea of “social navigation” that captures concerns about appearances and the reproduction of wider epistemologies of ignorance.

In Southern Mozambique, most people have a story about themselves or a couple they know who split up 'because of the phone' (por causa do telefone). Although some stories are more dramatic than others, the kinds of misunderstandings they represent are described as the mobile's biggest drawback. Based on research on mobile phone use among young adults in the city of Inhambane, the article focuses on instances when connections backfire and when mobile phone communication generates conflict. It examines the ways in which mobile communication participates in the circulation of and access to information: not necessarily the kind of 'useful information' referred to by endorsers of the 'ICT for Development' perspective, but rather information that is meant to remain secret. The aim is to provide an alternative perspective on the transformative potential of mobile communication in the hopes of enhancing our understanding of the impacts of the spread of the technology.

Behind some of the tall fences that compartmentalize domestic space in Inhambane hide luxurious gardens that are usually under the care of an individual who answers requests for cuttings and who seeks out, in everyday meanderings, new species to add to his or her collection. In this Mozambican city, gardeners articulate their engagement with plants as guided by an overriding principle: the love of plants. One gardener even described his plants as his lovers. What makes human‐plant relations in Inhambane even more ethnographically intriguing is that the most romantic gardeners tend to be either young men or older women. In this essay, I engage with the growing posthumanist literature on multispecies ethnography and explore what it would entail to take the love of plants seriously. I ask whether the statement “my plants are my lovers” should be taken metaphorically or literally. I situate human‐plant relations in Inhambane against the backdrop of the region's particular social and historical geographies—from a Portuguese settlement to a postsocialist, postwar society wrestling with growing inequality and the commodification of intimacy—and show how human‐plant relations deserve to be understood both as ontological relations in their own right and as a response to the commodification of intimacy. I do not argue that the commodification of intimacy has led young men, in their search for new forms of affection, to fall in love with plants; falling in love with plants is contingent, not reactive. Rather, I suggest that human‐plant relations are not only experienced and constructed in contrast to commodified forms of intimacies, but also offer a template for new interpersonal intimacies. My analysis of human‐plant relations is informed by my wider interest in affective encounters, in the transformative potential of everyday engagement with the material world. I explore the transformative potential of affective encounters between plants and gardeners to start thinking about how new intimacies, new ways of being and relating, emerge and take shape.

As the world's most used material, after water, cement is particularly good to think with. And as I show below, it may also be good to ‘become with’, especially across the Global South, where demand is soaring. In Africa, the continent with the fastest‐growing cement consumption at the moment, demand is expected to rise by 50 per cent over the next couple of years. The cement industry even refers to sub‐Saharan Africa as ‘the last cement frontier’, and speaks of cement as the continent's ‘new oil’. Fueling this consumption, alongside the spectacular projects of futuristic satellite cities, shopping malls, tower blocks, and ring roads, are the millions of small domestic construction projects increasingly visible on the landscape, especially the peri‐urban landscape. Although Mozambicans have long engaged with concrete as a politically and affectively charged material, this engagement now increasingly starts at the level of the bag of cement, as young people acquire cement to make their own concrete blocks, and eventually to build their own houses. Inspired by this ethnographic observation, this article is analytically driven by a wider interest in transformation. Based on research in a Mozambican suburb under expansion, it examines, through an analysis of changing domestic building practices, how the hope of achieving something – in a word, aspiration – congeals and materializes. Drawing on the literature on affect and materiality, I show how cement and concrete – as materials that young Mozambicans dream about, invest in, and play with – participate in shaping aspiration. In the end, I argue that the transformative outcome is very much the contingent result of an encounter, at a specific historical moment, between particular subjectivities and the materiality of cement and concrete.

This article examines the ways in which young men in the city of Inhambane, southern Mozambique, harness communication to express and address experiences of constrained physical and social mobility. It starts with an analysis of a highly valued form of oral communication –bater papo– that youth, especially young men, engage in on a daily basis before turning to mobile phone use. Tying these different forms of communication together is a profound desire to claim membership of, and to participate in, a world that remains elusive for most. However, if mobile phone communication builds on pre-existent forms of communication, it takes on particular aesthetic qualities that speak of, rather than resolve, exclusion. The article argues that, while helping bridge distances in significant ways, mobile phone communication nonetheless, and somewhat ironically, also betrays young men's immobility.