This educational work was intended to inspire action. This chapter explores what some of this work catalysed, including mobilising songs by the group Akut Kuei, whose work inspired many young men to return to fight in the SPLA, to men and women sharing war news, organising fundraising and practical help for the rebel efforts, and other (often unclear or uncertain) efforts towards resistance. Not all of this work was for the SPLA; many young men organised for southern militia groups working in Khartoum or were inspired to return to family villages to fight in local militias against predation from the Sudan government and SPLA forces alike. Others (men and women) joined the SPLA’s New Sudan Brigade, or the pan-Sudanese and pan-Africanist underground organisations of the African National Front and the National Democratic Alliance, among other small political parties and ‘spying’ work. This chapter explores people’s various aims and self-justifications alongside their accounts of this work, with a close eye on the epistemological and methodological questions of these retrospective accounts of subversion.

An essential practice of the transport work at the station, one that focuses many of the concurrent and competing attempts to make a living, is the preparation of buses for departure. This is what the station workers refer to as ‘loading’, the significance of which highlights key aspects of hustle as activity. Chapter 4 looks at the practices and the various ruses, tricks, and bluffs that make up the task and craft of loading. It shows how changes in the organisational structure of the station, accelerated by the pressures of the urban labour market, have created a context of loading that is permeated by contingent constellations, a situation of constantly reproduced hustle. After detailing the practices of non-competitive and competitive loading, it turns the analysis around to describe the different ways in which station dwellers experience, accommodate themselves to, and try to exploit situations of hustle.

There were practical limits to these political imaginaries and projects. People needed to work, and the war was a source of employment for many displaced people. This chapter explores the parallel systems of governance in Khartoum that southern militia-running businessmen (including Kerubino Kuanyin Bol, Paulino Matip, Abdel Bagi Ayii Akol, and others) organised in Khartoum, including their own prisons, barracks, and offices. Many residents drew on their jobs, sympathetic policing, and ‘traditional’ courts, but these rebel authorities also propagated their own ideas of future structures of political community based on regional zones of ethno-political authority. This is an unrecorded history of militia governance, looking beyond these authorities’ immediate mercenary aims and exploring their leadership’s and members’ own critiques of governance and models of power. This sets a challenge to current studies of rebel governance systems, which rarely examine pro-government proxy militias. It also outlines how the more creative, inclusive, and imaginative intellectual work detailed in this book was undermined (and ultimately buried) by these wartime exigencies and practical (if mercenary) structures of militia work and ethnic self-defence.

Chapter 5 focuses on the different temporalities that are interwoven in the station, feeding into everyday experiences and informing patterns of action. In Accra’s station, just as in most bus stations in Ghana, departures do not follow designated scripts dictated by clock time; instead, they are collectively timed by the inflow of passengers. These inflows follow different rhythmic temporalities co-composed in Accra and in the destinations served by the station. By detailing the daily work activities of an inexperienced and an experienced station worker, it teases out different levels of perceptual attunement to movement and rhythm taking shape hundreds of kilometres away. It argues that the tacit dimension of temporal and kinaesthetic enskilment highlights important qualities needed to make hustle successful, which essentially requires the ability to ‘read’ the different rhythms of eruptive situations and to align and time one’s actions accordingly.