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.

Chapter 6 examines the social and economic implications of the station’s unscheduled departures by exploring the practices and experiences of waiting at the station, which, in a major public transport hub, is a quintessential property of social action. Building on a ‘slow’ ethnographic elaboration of the minutiae of loading a bus (which took six and a half hours), it presents the positions of three groups of actors in relation to the temporalities of waiting at the station: the passengers, the drivers, and the station workers responsible for organising departures. A focus on the dimensions of ‘empty time’ contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the station hustle, one that goes beyond its seemingly perpetual busyness and ceaseless activity, and that facilitates a subtle analysis of the social and economic relations in contexts of contingent and involuting organisations of labour and time.

How did ordinary working people imagine their political communities and futures within displacement and conflict in Khartoum, and how did they try to turn these ideas into action? The introduction sets out the book’s key intervention in African intellectual histories, opening up working-class and displaced people’s political projects outside of print media and universities, built around exploitative jobs, surveillance, and everyday violence and racism within the war. Challenging current political analyses of modern African civil wars, it also explores its wider contributions to ideas of Blackness and racial identification in modern Sudanese and African histories, and to urban histories of displacement and refuge, setting intellectual history within its practical and time-consuming context of long bus rides, paperwork, jobs, and racist policing. The Introduction also outlines the methodological basis in a creative but fragmentary archive and competing translations and interpretations, setting out a structure for the following chapters.

To survive the city and the war, displaced families and friends needed to keep themselves and each other physically, socially, mentally, spiritually, and culturally safe. This chapter is about this discussion of self-preservation and what this entailed when, to many, the war and displacement risked societal disaster. It explores the debates and projects that were built within new churchyards, evening schools, and social spaces, where men and women argued over what integrity and moral order looked like. Social and cultural projects – from night language schools and clan associations to childcare circles and neighbourhood vigilante gangs – all involved setting out definitions of responsibility and standards. They also raised questions about the practical meaning of being displaced ‘southerners’. In a stressful expensive city and a fragmenting southern war, this chapter explores how people developed different limits of mutual support and kinship, and understood their political community based on different standards of Blackness, shared history, and knowledge.

The concluding chapter summarises the key findings of the book by juxtaposing the workings of Accra’s old, established station with the designated function of a government-mandated and top-down administered public road transport terminal – the ‘new station’, as Accra’s urbanites have pithily dubbed it. It scales up the comparison to consider the significance of urban infrastructure as a ‘hard’ technical system and as a ‘soft’ system of sociality in relation to questions of governance, social order, and the significance of usage. Finally, it reflects on the broader implications of this study by pointing out empirical and theoretical continuities with the practices, places, and politics of urban hustle that go beyond this particular case of a West African bus station.

Chapter 7 extends the typology of waiting at the station (established in Chapter 6) by considering the practices of two groups who exploit rather than endure periods of waiting: the station’s mobile vendors and service providers, and so-called ‘shadow passengers’, a group of professional ‘waiters’ deployed to entice passengers to enter the buses. By transforming what, to passengers, is often tantamount to ‘empty’ and ‘delayed’ time into a means of generating income, the commercial practices of station hawkers and shadows valorise the waiting time of others, thus harnessing economic margins as characteristic of hustle as activity. The close reading of different waiting temporalities as they unfold within and encompass the station hustle throws into sharp relief the irregularity of work engagements and the different ways in which people act on the temporal porosity that these engagements entail.

In Khartoum the work of managing displacement and organising the future involved extensive educational projects. Residents of all socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds organised adult night schools and taught their own syllabuses of critical political and social education, using self-written alternative history textbooks, in multiple mother tongues or in a common southern Sudanese Arabic. Based on private archives of teaching resources, school records, aid agency archival marginalia, and personal accounts of educative work, this chapter reconstructs this intellectual terrain. It explores the definitions of education among these residents, which included practical and moral knowledge, linguistic creativity, and critical political analysis.

Many people fleeing the massacres, village burnings, slave raids, and famines across southern Sudan from the early 1980s followed paths north to the capital. This chapter starts at the height of this wartime displacement in the mid-1980s, detailing the emergency mutual support and organisation that people undertook, based on older associational cultures and systems rooted in long histories of migration and displacement north. The chapter locates the people whose lives and work are followed through the book, as they build new neighbourhoods and negotiate access, safety, and work within the hostile capital.