Mobile Urbanity in Southern Africa. The Socio-Spatial Practices of Informal Cross-Border Traders Between Johannesburg and Maputo

Abstract

The paper investigates the interplay between informality, mobility, and urban space in Sub-Saharan Africa, by focussing on the practices of the mukheristas, Mozambican informal cross-border traders. In the mukhero, informality and mobility intersect and constantly reshape each other, in a way that has turned a customary survival strategy into a phenomenon well-blended with the global logics underpinning contemporary urban processes. The mukheristas deploy movement across transnational distances as a livelihood strategy to overcome structural constraints and, by doing so, they interconnect translocal urban spaces and heterogeneous networks. By re-tracing their socio-spatial practices between Johannesburg and Maputo through a grounded-theory approach based on multi-sited ethnographic explorations, the paper tries to unfold crucial, but underestimated process pertaining to the constitution of the urban life in Sub-Saharan Africa.