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

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.