Forthcoming in Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa, edited by Elizabeth Cooper and David Pratten, Palgrave Macmillan 1 Rhythms of uncertainty and the pleasures of anticipation by Julie Soleil Archambault Abstract Based on ethnographic material from the city of Inhambane in Mozambique, this chapter examines the temporalities of material uncertainty and argues that uncertainty is best understood as interrupted by moments of respite rather than as a continuous plight. Key to the discussion is the idea that particular rhythms such as the monthly rhythm set to the tempo of payday shape and modulate experiences of uncertainty in distinct ways. The chapter shows, through a focus on planos or plans drafted in anticipation of payday, how young people project themselves into the future, beyond everyday concerns with subsistence, and how the allocation of scarce resources is guided by a profound desire to live rather than merely survive. *** In Moments of Freedom, Johannes Fabian (1998) writes If freedom is conceived not just as free will plus the absence of domination and constraint, but as the potential to transform thoughts, emotions, and experiences into creations that can be communicated and shared, and if ‘potential’, unless it is just another abstract condition like absence of constraint, is recognized by its realizations, then it follows that there can never be freedom as a state of grace, permanent and continuous. As a quality of the process of human self-realization freedom cannot be anything but contestatory and discontinuous or precarious. Freedom, in dialectical parlance, comes in moments (p. 21). Based on ethnographic material from the city of Inhambane in Mozambique, 1 this chapter examines young people’s temporal experiences with material uncertainty. In line with Fabian’s understanding of freedom—a short hand for a sense of authorship and control over one’s life (Jackson 1998)—as discontinuous, I propose to think about uncertainty as an experience broken up and shaped by moments of respite, by recurrent interludes set to the tempo of payday, as well as by more ad hoc ones, such as when one gets a lucky break (bolada). Key to my discussion is the idea that particular rhythms shape and modulate experiences of material uncertainty in ways that translate into experientially distinct temporalities. These phenomenologically discrete experiences are nicely captured by the distinction Inhambane residents like to make between living and merely surviving. A rhythm, with its recurrence and tempo, brings an element of predictability, if not a degree of certainty, into a social environment otherwise marked by unpredictability. A rhythm either interrupts, draw attention to or muffles whatever is going on in the background. In Mozambique, like in other countries in Africa, although only a few may have direct access to wages, most will nonetheless feel payday through a trickledown effect as recipients of remittances, entrepreneurs or individuals relying on the generosity of others. As Kwei Armah’s (1968) bus conductor puts it in the novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, ‘Much better the days after pay day, much, much better. Then the fullness of the month touches each old sufferer with a feeling of new power.’ (p. 2). The chapter examines this feeling of new power, these moments of freedom, which come with payday through the planos, or plans, young people make for ‘the near future’ (Guyer 2007). Permanently living in survival mode? When describing how they get by, young Mozambicans use the word desenrascar which literally means to disentangle oneself from a situation (Honwana 2012: xii). Echoing young people the world over (Amit and Dyck 2012; Honwana 2012; Jones 2010; Mains 2012; Vigh 2006), they speak of timely improvisation and highlight their resourcefulness in the face of adversity and uncertainty. The idea of desenrascar repeatedly comes up in everyday conversation, thus giving a sense that everyone