Concrete violence, indifference and future-making in Mozambique

Abstract

In the Mozambican suburb of Inhapossa, piles of fresh concrete blocks vividly convey a sense of the momentous transformation under way in a place where building is now described as being ‘in fashion’. Exuding promises of a better future, this fresh concrete is emerging amidst the ruins of a not so distant violent past, in a country where the built environment has been scarred by decades of war, economic decline, neglect and vegetalization. If ruins are reminders of what once was or of what could have been, what do they become in a context of growing prosperity? The contrast between fresh and rotting concrete seemed to beg for anthropological attention, to call for an approach that would simultaneously capture the poetics and politics of concrete throughout its life and even longer afterlife. What my ethnography revealed, however, was that unlike the fresh concrete, which inspired songs and made people fall in love, the decaying concrete scattered across the suburb often inspired little more than indifference. By examining how Mozambicans remember the past and project themselves into the future through their engagement with the built environment, I propose to approach indifference neither as refusal to engage, nor simply as silence, and certainly not as political illiteracy, but rather as an affective experience in its own right that speaks of a particular orientation towards the future.