Transposing Afropolitan Mobilities

The philosopher Achille Mbembe nudges us as we contemplate frontiers that are, de facto, more open to some than others. In his latest book in English, Out of the Dark Night (2021), Mbembe sees nation-state borders in Africa as regressive and colonial. For example, he points to pre-colonial (European) mobilities under the influence of the Ottoman empire’s Cyrencia, Egyptian Sudan, and the Sokoto Caliphate and the Haoussa cities of Sokoto, Katsina, and Kano. Trade, politics, and religious relations were negotiated and synched across nominal borders to create, simultaneously, ‘nomadism and citadelisation’ (Mbembe, 2021, p. 183). For Mbembe, the outcome was a ‘federation of networks’, a ‘multinational space’, a ‘space of circulation and negotiation’ extending from trade to culture and back (Mbembe, 2021, p. 183). Human subjects, with open borders as opposed to no borders, largely transcended the Saharan binary (with above the Sahara being North African and Arab, and below, or ‘Sub-’, being ‘Sub-Saharan’ and Black). This Africa, and the possibility of an African cosmopolitanism, which Mbembe has affirmatively styled ‘Afropolitanism’ in writing (e.g., Mbembe, 2005; Mbembe, 2020), becomes through ‘immersion’ and ‘dispersion’ (Mbembe, 2021, pp. 214–215). In South Africa, Afrikaners (‘Africans’ in Afrikaans), who are ostensibly ‘white’, as well as South Africans of Malay, Indian, and Chinese origins, for example, immerse themselves with the rhythms of the continent and, at some level, blur and reconfigure ‘true’ (Black) African autochthony (Mbembe, 2021, p. 213).¹ And, of course, Mbembe’s African dispersion highlights Black African diasporas who brought Africa to the so-called New World as well as Asia and Europe.

Mbembe’s Afropolitanism can be advanced by actively decentring humanism—something Mbembe does up to a point. This is not at all to suggest that Mbembe stands out as an apologist for humanism. In Out of the Dark Night, Mbembe places himself in conversation with many who challenge and rebuke humanism while also elevating Southern Theory (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012; de Sousa Santos, 2008, 2014). He also thinks with theorists like Barad (2007) and Braidotti (2014) who are at some level critical nodes in critical posthumanist debates. (That said, the Braidotti engaged in Out of the Dark Night is not Braidotti’s The Posthuman (2013).² Unsurprisingly, though, Mbembe, not unlike Braidotti, owes Deleuze and Guattari, and their A Thousand Plateaus (1987) an intellectual debt.) In addition, critical posthumanist terminology like ‘entanglement’ and ‘planetary’ recurrently dot Out of the Dark Night, which is and is not like its French-language prequel, Sortir de la grande nuit (2010). Mbembe’s more direct nods to critical posthumanism in Out of the Dark Night mostly come via his engagement with tech-human scholarship (e.g, Hayles, 2005; Potzsch, 2014; Svensson and Goldberg, 2015) or work highlighting the colonisation-conservation nexus (e.g, Alexander and McGregor, 2000; LeBris et al, 1991; Le Roy, 1996). Simultaneously there and not there, more hints of critical posthumanism with inferences to Afropolitanism appear in his work prior to Out of the Dark Night particularly when considering borders (Mbembe 2017; 2019a; 2019b; 2019c; 2019d; 2019e) and in interviews (Bangstad and Nilsen, 2019; Goldberg and Mbembe, 2018). But, as a more rhizomatic thinker, he employs only indirect energy in developing an Afropolitanism with critical posthumanist sensibilities radically challenging humanism.

Advancing Afropolitanism, for us, entails recognizing water as an actor with agency sharing a fate and subjectivity with humans and other matter. We specifically concern ourselves with decolonising flows of water. Immersive and dispersive water courses through parts of the whole that includes the terrain holding Kruger, the Mozambique-South Africa border, southern Africa, and Africa not to mention human and other matter.

Transposition guides us as we think with Mbembe about Afropolitanism. To Rosie Braidotti, transposition as undertaking signals:

an intertextual, cross-boundary or transversal transfer, in the sense of a leap from one code, field or axis into another, not merely in the quantitative mode of plural multiplications, but rather in the qualitative sense of complex multiplicities. It is not just a matter of weaving together different strands, variations on a theme of its own…but rather of playing the positivity of difference as a specific theme of its own.

Transposing Mbembe’s Afropolitan mobilities limited to humans with more-than-human matter (i.e., water, but also, as explicated below, viruses, cattle, chain-linked fencing, air, etc.) affirmatively generates, as Braidotti might put it, ‘an in-between space of zigzagging and of crossing: non-linear, but not chaotic; nomadic, yet accountable and committed; creative but also cognitively valid’ (Braidotti, 2006, p. 5). Our transposing, though, encompasses more than situating Mbembe’s Afropolitan mobilities in relation to the more-than-human. Specifically, transposition becomes our cue to disrupt the disciplinary and discursive—so to move beyond a unitary discipline and to engage all matter as text and textual. Our transposition pointedly provokes us to refuse and move from a design history of sizing and matter, as well as depart from an overdependence on academic critical theory and physical science, to mapping terrain while wearing our transdisciplinary designer hats most notably through the decolonizing and embodied act of drawing terrain with watercolour. Maps, as everyday design tools used by designers as constituent part of design practice itself, can accentuate the holistic workings of spatial relations in ways out of bounds for academic critical theorists who just use words or, at best, use words to try to come to terms with what is second nature to designers. Drawing maps with watercolour can, in particular, push mapping’s potential to another level as explicated below. The ensuing visuality helps us to extend, or transpose, Mbembe’s immersion and dispersion (i.e., his Afropolitanism) to the more-than-human matter that is, first and foremost, water. Visuality, here, also steers us to be grounded in a space and place, which is something often irksomely absent in Braidotti but quintessentially Mbembe.

The remainder of this article moves as follows. First, in the ‘Design History of Sizing and Matter’ section, we demonstrate the futility of humanist attempts to border land. Much of this unfolds via a history of fencing in Kruger National Park. This history opens the prospect of imagining a different way to think about borders. Then, second, in the ‘Transposing Afropolitan Mobilities’ part of the paper, our unorthodox provocation leads us to reconsider mobilities by thinking about water flows in and proximate to Kruger. Watercolour is crucial to this in what is essentially a reconceptualization of borders. Finally, we offer a brief postscript used to present an update on South Africa’s ‘model’ camp, ponder the significance of transposing Afropolitan mobilities, and turn to the cosmological.

It is difficult to pinpoint when humans began delineating spatial expanses with borders. As far back as 3,000 years ago, though, long before European arrival, San people in southern Africa bordered the terrain with their art. There are approximately 150 San rock art sites in Kruger alone. (Authorities are generally cagey about disclosing the exact number of sites to prevent vandalism.) Some San drawings, in reddish pigments and with literary qualities, depict shamanistic rituals, including San efforts to channel cosmic energy in a region with an archaeological history exceeding three million years. In effect, the drawings represent the San’s humble attempts to bound the universe and the awesome omnipresence of climate on a more human scale (Hampson, 2013; Lewis-Williams, 2013; Lewis-Williams and Pearce, 2004).

Kruger would not exist without borders. Fundamentally, bordering materialises a design technique used to manipulate space and to place space into a human-centred order. (As for what is being ‘sized’ in ‘sizing and matter’: Fencing sized to humancentric needs without any regard to other matter.) In the Anthropocene, humans utilize borders, such as fencing, to contain matter as well as to produce spatial binaries complete with insides and outsides. This humanist exercise sharply departs from the cosmological dynamic found in San rock art projecting the limits of San agency.

Some matter is not easily subjected to or subjugated by fences. As humancentric designed objects, fences have relatively little impact on the movement of the small and microscopic passing above, below, and through. For instance, rinderpest swept through Africa, from the Greater Horn in the north to southern Africa in the 1880s and 1890s, including Kruger before it formally became Kruger National Park in 1926. Rinderpest virus (RPV), a morbillivirus, wafted for long periods in the air as well as maneuvered in water. A single-stranded RNA virus in the Paramyxoviridae family which includes measles, RPV became epizootic in southern Africa in the 1890s with air and water transmission. RPV killed livestock and sparked a public health emergency in southern Africa starting in 1896. Microscopic and mobile RPV indifferent to fencing, then until its 2011 eradication, entered the nostrils or mouths of cattle and sheep on the move, as well as buffaloes, elands, wild swine, giraffes, and wildebeests amongst other animals. After incubating for eight to eleven days, RPV caused fever and violent diarrhea in non-human animals leading to dehydration and a nearly 100% mortality rate. Eventually the infected expelled mobile RPV back into the air and water where it could be ingested by new carriers on the move. Human ‘management’ of RPV in southern Africa led the wildebeest population to rebound. Rebounding wildebeest, in turn, disrupted ecologies, which included a decrease in grass varieties because of the rising wildebeest numbers. This, in turn, prompted an increase in the lion population which was not good news for wildebeest. Lions, a predator species, prefer wildebeest over gazelles that are faster than wildebeest and, thus, harder to hunt (Gilfoyle, 2003; Marquardt, 2017).

Kruger’s formal and more comprehensive fencing history began well after the 1890s RPV outbreak in southern Africa and before construction of an actual fence by more than thirty years. James Stevenson-Hamilton, Kruger’s first warden (1902–1946), spied the park’s terrain in 1929 from an altitude of 650 meters. Stevenson-Hamilton, in 1929, climbed aboard an airplane to survey the park and marked, with his eyes, the boundaries that would eventually make up Kruger’s formal fence border. In the airplane, from a far enough distance, the mountain ranges, escarpments, vegetation, air, and critters appeared as a blur, zoomed out-of-detail enough for Stevenson-Hamilton’s eyes to trace the region. Stevenson-Hamilton’s eyeballing was hypothetically and humanly rendered to make the landscape, as colonised site of ‘conservation’, more easily fenced, describable, and manageable (Stevenson-Hamilton, 1993). This bordering, which culminated in fencing, also became the material means to wield the law to keep Black South Africans out of the bordered confines of Kruger. Dubbed ‘poachers’ by park authorities, Blacks used arms to kill game for food but also to keep game from destroying their subsistence crops. Interestingly, Black demands were supported by the Native Affairs Department just as the white supremacist state started to use Kruger as a national park to articulate the connection between whiteness and the nation. As Jacob Dlamini put it in Safari Nation, this was a ‘complex process of give-and-take that exposed some of the contradictions within the colonial enterprise between native administration and nature conservation’ (2020, p. 61).

Chain-linked fences are industrially manufactured metal used to create bordered insides and outsides. Designed correspondingly to human scale, chain-link fences at Kruger come in different heights, but are most commonly ten-feet high, which is enough to make overtaking them difficult when crowned with barbed wire. Every ten feet, line posts are fixed into the ground with footings that hold wire mesh. The mesh has diamond patterning, with wires running vertically and bending to create a zig-zag pattern, each wire zigs to hook with a wire that zags. This weaving along with a standard two-inch mesh supposedly prevents matter over a certain size from passing through, while still allowing human surveillance from both sides of the fence.

Figure 3

Kruger fencing has been used to engineer ‘wildlife’. For example, attendants transported white rhino to Kruger from South Africa’s Natal province in the 1960s to replenish numbers depleted in the 1890s due to trophy-hunting whites. Park staff placed the ‘foreign’ rhino in a fenced area within Stevenson-Hamilton’s larger and more totalizing fence. Staff used the fence within a fence to breed rhino, which is not unlike the way it is done today. Conservation restricted rhino interactions with species other than humans. This method negatively impacted rhino as well as the area’s ecology. Ecologists recognise that rhino use space differently and rhino generally roam a larger swath of territory when not confined in a fenced ‘sanctuary’. Adult females in lower-density areas unbounded by conservation’s fencing tend to make use of larger home ranges than rhino in higher-density areas bounded by conservation fences. Adult males also establish territories. However, in higher-density areas like those bounded by conservation fencing, fewer adult males claim and can claim territory. Basically, fencing or other alterations of the terrain alter rhino spatialising patterns including sex-specific patterns influencing the gendering of males (Rachlow, Kie, and Berger, 1999). Fencing rhino also inflects ecologies. Since rhino are voracious herbivores mowing through thicket and grass, fencing reduces their grazing area. According to conservationists, rhino grazing, when not constrained by fencing, helps to maintain the health of the savannas upon which Kruger’s ecology depends (Cromsigt and Beest, 2014).

Using fences to border proves somewhat futile in other Kruger contexts where some form of equilibrium is sought. Specifically, foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) has been a concern of park authorities as well as livestock farmers adjacent to the park. As it turns out, African buffalo in Kruger tend to be routine FMD carriers which threatens park buffalo as well as cattle at the park’s interface. Immunisation, which used to be an effective means to control outbreaks, now proves much less effective. Regular FMD outbreaks surface as a result (Ferran and Etter, 2016). Fencing systems, as a different bordering technology, also fail to prevent FMD spillage from the park to nearby cattle. (This includes internal park fencing designed to position wildlife where park authorities want them as well as fencing used as FMD containment strategy.) Park fencing falls short when flooding damages fences. This gives Kruger wildlife an escape route during their seasonal migration from range-to-range in search of water (Kaszta et al, 2018; Schalkwyk et al, 2016).

Border fencing can also reflect a more overtly political history beyond the politics pitting game-park economies against livestock-industry concerns. After South Africa’s apartheid period commenced in 1948, fencing on the western border of Kruger was, in 1961, the first to be formally erected. (Kruger’s western fence border, now, lies in the post-apartheid Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces.) Fencing to the east, on the park’s Mozambique border, came five years later. Notably, the 1913 Natives Land Act and 1936 Natives Trust and Land Act intended to displace Blacks made it easier for the apartheid state to erect Kruger fencing in a lawful way (Dlamini, 2020).

On the Mozambique-South African border, with Kruger forming much of the South African side, the current fence is made by Norex Holdings Ltd. It consists of two razor-wire fences (chain-linked) with a pyramid of coiled razor-wire in the center. When it was erected in 1984 and 1985, the coiled razor-wire was topped with audible electrified wires capable of delivering a lethal shock, prior to Kruger authorities lowering the voltage in 1990 (Monteiro, 1990). Norex fencing stretched a distance of 62 kilometers from Komatipoort on the South African side to Mbuzini on the Mozambique and Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) borders through the 1990s. Even though the electrified fence intended to regulate mobilities was electronically monitored, seasoned smugglers routinely crawled under it in 30 to 90 seconds (Oosthuysen, 1996, p. 28).

Kruger’s more recent fencing history involves the 2000 creation of the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Park. Made possible by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and, subsequently, apartheid’s formal demise in 1994, the intent is to conjoin several parks and reserves in Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Stakeholders hope to remove fences dividing parks and reserves as well as bring down barriers within parks and reserves. Politics, though, impedes the realization of this decolonial attempt to transcend sovereignty norms not just lingering in but embedded in the postcolony. Organized interests on the South African side fear poachers entering South Africa. (No Big Five game, from game park capital’s perspective, no tourists, no revenue, no profits. So, as suggested by Buscher (2013), conservation and neoliberal capital share a bed.) South Africa demands more armed rangers—not necessarily new forms of transfrontier fencing—amounting to what Lunstrum dubs ‘green militarisation’ (2015). Mozambican locals, by contrast, fear that land on which they subsist will be overrun by game. These continue to be very real human issues even as communities find the prospect of augmented tourism-related employment appealing (Hoogendoorn, 2019; Mavungha, 2009).

That fencing and borders remain so contested in southern Africa runs counter to the continent’s prevailing mood. The African Union (AU) is the continental body providing governance. AU organisational structure resembles European Union (EU) bureaucracy. Member states of the AU aspire to smooth the fluid movement of goods, services, and persons across nation-state borders by 2063. The AU Commission—the block’s executive branch—anticipates open borders will increase intra-continental trade and direct investment that will, in turn, elevate the continent’s global competitiveness (AU Commission, 2015, p. 5). Embedded in this reasoning is continental expectation that shared economic fates will diminish violent conflicts between humans within and amongst African states. A first and very important step toward achieving this goal came in 2018 when 44 of the AU’s 55 member states signed the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA). In May 2020, the 2018 agreement was ratified when 22 of the 44 member states signed it. As 2063 approaches, though, the question remains: will the borders of the united states of Africa function like the Mexico-U.S. border? The Mexico-U.S. border is governed by a free trade agreement accelerating mobility for goods and services across nation-state borders as it decelerates passage of northbound Mexicans not to mention others from the Americas and elsewhere.

Water systems, as actors with agency, transgress Kruger’s fencing from below in our transpositional mapping intervention. (Figure 4) For example, much of the Shingwedzi River Basin evades Kruger’s fencing imperative and prods us to reconsider borders and Afropolitanism. Shingwedzi’s basin embraces the Tshamidzi and Mandoro Rivers which rest outside of Kruger but, respectively, pour into the Mphongolo and Phugwane Rivers crossing Kruger’s western boundaries. At a certain point, well into the interior of Kruger, the Mphongolo flows into the Phugwane and the Phugwane leads into the Shingwedzi. Kruger’s most polluted river, the Shingwedzi, after which the basin is named, spans Kruger’s western and eastern boundaries and continues eastward from South Africa’s Limpopo province into Mozambique’s Gaza province. The greatest impact on the pollution of the transnational Shingwedzi River, according to scientists Paul Fouche and Wynand Vlok, is anthropogenic. Most of the pollution derives from improper land use, solid waste, destruction of riparian, or riverbank, zones, and cattle and commercial farming originating from the rivers to the west of the park feeding into the Shingwedzi River (Fouche and Vlok, 2010).

Figure 4

The Shingwedzi River is an Olifants River tributary (left-hand) and the Olifants, originating at Trichardt east of Johannesburg, has three catchments. Olifants catchments (Olifants, Vaal, and Crocodile) cover different terrains, ecozones, and ecologies before eventually reaching the Limpopo River via the Olifants River System which, like the Shingwedzi River System, draws from multiple rivers which, in a Deleuze and Guattari vein, have their own flows that are different yet implicated in humanist border logics contouring Kruger. The Olifants River edges at the foot of Mpumalanga-Limpopo sector of the Great Escarpment that rises to an elevation above 3,000 meters. Topographical landforms predating Europeans and the San influence the fluvial system and the Olifants River drainage network, which includes the Komati, Crocodile, Sabie, and Bylde Rivers (Viljoen, 2015). Geomorphology aside, the speed and direction of waterflow depends on wetlands, vegetation, soils, and aquifers filtering water above and below ground. This is, of course, in addition to hard engineering (e.g., human-constructed dams) which, with ‘development’ and ‘progress’, texture the terrain (Association for Water and Rural Development, 2019a, p. 4).

Figure 5

Figure 6

On 12 June 2018, the Olifants River was seasonally dry in Kruger. The dry season typically runs from May to September. But, in 2018, and the years following, the Olifants River experienced an unusually acute drought (Association for Water and Rural Development, 2019b). We witnessed how, during the dry season, species zig-zag across the waterbed, timed to the seasonal cycles of water-level change. (Figure 6) Vegetation was also clearly visible on the riverbed when we did June 2018 fieldwork in Kruger while we were awkwardly entrapped in a safari spectacle complete with our ogling of elephants and hippos from afar. While precipitation and runoff normally provide the groundwater to replenish seasonal rivers, 2015 saw the start of the worst drought conditions in South Africa since the 1980s; the Olifants River was so dry by 2018 that water barely flowed into the Limpopo River system (Essa, 2015).

Seasonality and hydrological cycles complexly intra-act with the changing life of rivers and these cycles are increasingly succumbing to overlapping anthropogenic impacts such as climate change, resource depletion, and pollution. So humans find themselves rightly implicated in cycles predating ‘the Age of Discovery’ (i.e., ‘exploration’ and the colonial exploitation that followed), the San, and, indeed, humans as species. For example, climate change is intensifying fluctuations in hydrological cycles. From south to north of the Olifants basin, scientists warn that coming years will see a considerable reduction in seasonal precipitation coupled with temperature rise (Nkhonjera, Dinka, and Woyessa, 2021). Experts predict that temperature change will further cause a reduction of the Olifants River’s water level and flow. The higher temperatures rise, the greater the increase in evaporation rates of rivers and streams in the Olifants River system, which escalates the need for water from, for example, the Shingwedzi, which is increasingly polluted and steadily damaging ecosystems. Hastened by evaporation, the ground hardens as soil cracks, less water gets soaked into the soils, and, cyclically, now, drought risk mounts (Nkhonjera and Dinka, 2017; Singh, van Werkhoven, and Wagener, 2014).

The Shingwedzi and Olifants River systems are agents wholly located within the Limpopo River Basin. The transboundary Limpopo River Basin is a transnational drainage basin with an area of 416,296 km², stretching across four nations: Mozambique, South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe (Global Water Partnership, 2011). The Limpopo River rises from the Crocodile River in South Africa’s Witwatersrand and flows northward until it acts as the Botswana-South Africa border. It then moves to the southeast along the national border between South Africa and Zimbabwe, and eventually towards Mozambique, where it briefly makes up the Mozambique-South Africa border proximate to the Limpopo River’s confluence with the Luvuvhu River. The Limpopo then moves through Mozambique and eventually arrives at Xia Xia, an estuary at the mouth of the Indian Ocean. Since early 2000, severe periodic flooding has inundated Xia Xia. Hydrology and water resources in this area are, of course, greatly impacted by climate change, causing extreme drought, flooding, and temperature fluctuation. Scientists envisage water supplied by the basin diminishing considerably by 2030 (Zhu and Ringler, 2010).

All of this underlines one point for us: that the Limpopo River Basin is indivisible. Matter within and outside the basin, including Mbembe’s Afropolitans, helps to constitute the basin just as the basin helps to constitute matter within and outside it. What we posit about humanist borders and Afropolitanism definitively links us to Chengxin Pan who has theorised a holographic relational ontology intended to shift international relations beyond its Cartesian and Newtonian absolutes, albeit in a way that privileges the human. When consulting classical Chinese texts to make the case that China and the Global North are, in short, tianxia (‘all under heaven’), Pan asserts that ‘the world exists fundamentally as holographic relations, in which a part is a microcosmic reflection of its larger wholes’ (Pan, 2018, p. 339).³ This perspective can be used to call into question the way that nation-state borders in southern Africa have been used to exclude refuge-seeking Africans who wade, swim, or trek by boat across the Limpopo.

Figure 7

In the worst-case scenario, as the realness of climate change is experienced by more people, the entire Limpopo River Basin area will be submerged in water like pigment in the watercolour that designers have seemingly forgotten to access with the rise of computer-aided design (CAD). In this scenario, colour matters. Like colour pigments in our watercolour (Figure 7), matter will be immersed and dispersed in water. The greenish colour in our watercolour map comes from admixing olive green and indigo blue, and vermilion is added to bring it closer to a brownish colour. Yellow ochre appears as a yellow heavier than straight yellow and it sets into the paper differently, appearing closer and deeper at different points. The colour in our map reflects light; it is perceived differently depending on adjacencies and conditions. Layering colours produce values and chroma, adds a sense of depth, and intensifies as the pigments gradually settle to obscure light. In this scenario, spatial planning will no longer be fixed and sizable or even representable in drawing. The search will be for opportunities rather than absolutes. Like colour, there will be no boundaries, only fields.

In our watercolour drawing, we pay attention to blending and movement of the water medium. We consider the complex multiplicities of the intermingling of organic and inorganic matter, the zigzagging of particles and flows. We remind ourselves that the pigments and water are extracted from landscapes: lakes, rivers, and ground, the very elements of the Limpopo Basin are the same we draw as transdisciplinary speculative designers. Our watercolour drawing infers the goings-on of immersion and dispersion in the terrain by being drawn in a scale of a thousandth. The drawing underscores the futility of sizing and turns the focus on matter, its mobilities, and our human bordering tendencies and practices. Drawing, in general, is but an approximation. It has always been, for the San and for us. With this re-understanding, architects and other designers might be more willing to play with differences in mobilities and borders when they do, what they do, when they do it. And this play has implications for the way that we might think about humans forced to migrate.

Water is an essential actant in watercolours. It allows the pigments to move on paper’s surface. Depending on the amount of water and how wet the cotton paper substrate is, the pigments may seep into it with ease, so the aqueous colour mixture spreads throughout its fibres. One stroke of a wet brush adds a second colour to the paper, the pigments mix, forming another colour, and waiting for other combinations to emerge in anticipation of the next stroke. Watercolour when readily used as a design tool is alive in its emergence and has no borders. Here water moves pigment across paper downwards as the weighted particles sift downwards. In suspension, the particles move with the water onto and into the fibres.

There is no other drawing medium as unruly as watercolour. Nor is there one that designers can use to capture the spacetime of the landscape and mobile matter more faithfully. Yet as a medium it follows the property of water not borders, as do landscapes. It is relational, the pigments, water, substrate, as they are in landscapes. Unlike the lead guided by a draftsperson’s hand, used to make hard edges, watercolour disperses rather than separates; it moves centrifugally rather than reduced along a sharp line.

Watercolour drawing can unmoor the moored when used by designers to map. We wonder, though, why watercolour is not used more regularly by designers and others to map. Perhaps—to answer our own musing—maps are used to trace stasis, fixing matter in spacetime; that is the essence of Cartesian mapping. Maps not in watercolour tend to show that which is already immobile and bordered. Watercolour animates the gestural as it moves with matter.

A sequel to the 2005–2008 Zimbabwe mass exodus into South Africa never materialised. However, a steady stream of Zimbabweans continued to escape to South Africa. On the South Africa side, from February 2018, a new president and national leadership not as xenophobic means that at the very least the state no longer tacitly endorses xenophobia. But the rationalisation of violence remains just below the surface in a country with a history of colonial conquest, civil war, revolution, and violent inequality inadequately tempered with the arrival of democracy in 1994.

What, though, does transposing Afropolitan mobilities have to teach us? Perhaps, in the best-case scenario, the dangers of climate change, aridity, and flooding offer a chance to move in renewed registers. In architectural and design terms, this might lead not just to a refusal of the ‘model’ camp in South Africa no matter how ‘model’ and no matter where sited. Models and sites, after all, in the short term, might very well be fleeting as climate inaction recurrently re-borders borders and the containment of bodies within political borders.

All of which might mean going back—or forward—to the San for whom bordering was something that could only be approximated and maybe not even that. The San, through drawings, aspired to transcend the mere planetary proffered by humanism’s critics, including Mbembe, in favour of the cosmos and cosmological. The San painted red ochre on granite to open it up as a portal, connecting them to the cosmos. (They invited rain this way.) The red ochre we used opens up the drawing surface to all the moving beings, zigzagging through the landscape. Now, if only mere humans, with a history but a fraction of the universe’s history, can make a decolonising turn and learn to explore their senses and sensibilities through watercolour.