‘One beer, one block’: concrete aspiration and the stuff of transformation in a Mozambican suburb

Abstract

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.

Air in Unexpected Places

“…A central medium for this explosive construction is concrete, the material of new roads, runways, ports, dams and of course residential buildings. Against this backdrop of ' Africa Rising' , anthropologists have begun to explore how concrete becomes a medium for aspiration (Archambault 2018). This tracks with my experience of Hewa.…”

Material Compromises in the Planning of a ‘Traditional Village’ in Southwest China

“…Embedded with preconceptions such as progress and modernity, concrete functions as a medium in dynamical engagement with people's aspirations (Archambault 2018;Stolz 2019). From the perspective of affect theory, the engagements that people associate with materiality are not objective qualities inherent in the material form but subjective experiences that do not always overlap with those of others (Navaro-Yashin 2009).…”

Concrete violence, indifference and future-making in Mozambique

“…It was the freshly poured concrete, and the bags of cement used to make this concrete, that had captured the imagination of these young men and women whose dreams of a better future, though thwarted for many years, were finally starting to materialize. After years of uncertainty, they had managed to secure jobs and to find the means to move out of the overcrowded inner-city neighbourhoods that had absorbed most of the refugees during the war (Archambault, 2018). The newcomers were also creating new opportunities for their nativo neighbours by buying their land and populating the suburb (Archambault, forthcoming).…”

“…Everyone is making blocks. People even describe building as being ‘in fashion’ ( construir está na moda ) (Archambault, 2018). All this fresh concrete exuding promises of a better future is, however, emerging amidst the concrete ruins of a not so distant violent past.…”

“…Although some experienced the decrepit houses scattered across the peri-urban landscape as haunted, these leftover concrete structures left most people indifferent. Unlike the fresh concrete, which made people fall in love and inspired pop songs (Archambault, 2018), the decaying concrete seemed almost affectiveless.…”