From its inception in the late 1980s to the present day, hip hop culture in Mozambique underwent several stages in which the process of “keeping it real” was in constant negotiation with the association of the Global Hip Hop Nation (GHHN), and its local cultural and linguistic elements. This article, using tropes of temporality as the main framework, discusses how relocalization of the GHHN is constructed in Mozambican hip hop. There is a progressive connection between the past, present and future which is highlighted by local rappers. The article argues that Mozambican hip hop activism is built through acts of engagement in political tropes, in which local rappers are acting as spokesmen of the marginalized population through lyrics that claim citizenship. The political discourses produced during the Frelimo’s socialist governance era are rescued to challenge the liberal politics developed in the present democratic period, which, in large part, is contested by the population at the margin of the development. Therefore, local rappers’ lyrics address popular complaints related to some political decisions that negatively affect the population at the margins and lead to general societal malfunction. The local African languages that were ideologically marginalized since the colonial regime are now being rescued by local rappers as a way to contextualize them into contemporary, metropolitan and transnational languages. This linguistic relocalization indexes a new present and an aspiration for a different future, where these languages will be inserted together with Portuguese to allow communication in urban spaces. This engagement by rappers can be perceived as acts of linguistic citizenship.

Colonial era language policies and practices in Mozambique sought to render native African languages (and their speakers) invisible in public space. This ‘order of (in)visibility’ was later adopted by many African states, including Mozambique, by choosing the ex-colonial language as the one and only official language and prohibiting or ignoring the use of African languages in the interest of so-called national unity. Recent postcolonial democratization of African countries is seemingly beginning to change the colonial heritage of local linguistic underdevelopment, with the introduction of language policies that – on the surface at least – give more value to local African languages. This thesis argues, however, that African languages remain marginalized in systematic ways that replicate historical linguistic inequities. The three studies that make up the thesis focus on the technologies, spaces and mechanisms whereby these languages have been manufactured as marginalized from colonial times until the present. The studies build on a combination of ethnographic and archival data. A theoretical framing in a sociolinguistics of globalization approach broadly defined, and complemented with an explicit emphasis on temporality provides the conceptual framework and methodological toolbox for analysis. Study I explores the impact that colonial politics had on the management of multilingualism focusing on how local African languages were ideologically constructed as frozen in the past, whereas Portuguese was depicted as a modern, state-bearing language of progress. This ideology was later assimilated by the postcolonial regime always placing the local African languages in a position of inferiority in relation to Portuguese. Study II analyses how public space was used in chronologically different political regimes to produce different orders of visibility for local African languages and Portuguese in the semiotic landscapes of urban Maputo. The focus of this paper is on artifacts of memorization and public discourses that made local African languages invisible in public spaces until early 1990, when political changes introduced new orders of visibility for these languages in public space. However, ‘archaeological’ traces of Portuguese remain in the orthographic and linguistic forms in which local African languages are authored, testimony to its continued hegemony in public space. Study III explores how local African languages are now used in practices of hip hop relocalization, where ‘keeping it real’ and authenticity as features of the genre simultaneously serve to ideologically resuscitate political individuals such as the incorruptible President Samora Machel (1920–1986). In this way, the very marginalization – past-ness – of these languages carries a vibrant contemporary protest. The main thrust of the thesis is to argue that local African languages are discursively produced in temporal frames distinct from the mainstreaming of Portuguese. It is this that continues to reproduce the relative marginality of these languages.

This chapter focuses on the idea that in Mozambique, multilingualism, commonly understood as the co-existence and juxtaposition of more than one language, is one mechanism whereby essential features of colonial social logics are reconfigured in contemporary ‘postcolonial’ societies. They interrogate how multilingualism, whilst ostensibly promising a trope for linguistic (and cultural) diversity, is best seen, in common with other forms of neoliberal governance, as a response to ‘the effects of anti and postcolonial movements in the liberal world’. They conclude that this constancy is not accidental, but a key dimension of how multilingualism as a particular political regime of language organization has been used historically and in contemporary time as a technology of liberal governance. The paper highlights the meaning, the significance and the indexical values that African languages have vis a vis Portuguese, in a context where African languages are subordinated.