In Nima, one of the zongos of Accra, a densely populated migrant neighbourhood, groups of young men and women meet on a particular spots in the public space, to chat, play and wait, while dreaming together of a better elsewhere. In these so-called 'bases', that often have prolific names such as 'Chicago' or 'U2canfly', friendship alliances are forged which help youth to think of another future, outside the neighbourhood.

In the fourties and fifties, when Nima started to grow from a temporary settlement for Muslim migrants into the crowded locality it is today, 'bases' used to be places where competitive or conflictual relations of migrants - initially strangers to one another- were soothed. Gradually however, bases transformed into springboards of an intensive international -sometimes virtual- mobility. The paper brings the biographies of several young men and women and their ventures into new worlds beyond their own zongo: in transnational trade to Japan and Korea, in international (fake) marriages or transatlantic travels, and in the cyberworld. It is propounded that Nima youth are not only transnational in their (historical and kinship) biographies, but that they turned the zongo in a social, economic and cultural hub where new forms of city-ness are invented in very cosmopolitan, though sometimes imaginary or virtual, ways through what I call a 'Western-Union cosmopolitanism'.

At first sight, today's young rural-urban labor migrants in many West African cities may fit perfectly well into what Alcinda Honwana has conceptualized as a state of "Waithood": facing a massive decline of money-making opportunities, an increasing disconnection from a modern youth culture and a fear of not being able to meet parental and peer expectations at home they seem to be excluded from social participation and mobility. However, by taking a group of northern Ghanaian male youth working in the informal load carrying business in Accra as an empirical example, I aim at depicting the limits of "Waithood" and show how this concept is based on a constricted urban perspective which excludes other possible approaches (e.g. rural and rural-urban) that could draw a more nuanced picture of today's young generation beyond social exclusion and immobility. I will show how the experience of miserable and disillusioned working and living conditions in the city nevertheless implies a promising future-orientation towards the achievement of individual goals. It is upon return to their rural home communities that most youths are able to negotiate higher social positions with peers and parents and thus give meaning to their seemingly disappointing urban experience. Far from romanticizing "village life", this rural-urban perspective depicts the future-oriented meaning of disillusion in the urban context beyond a state of "Waithood" and identifies the epistemological limits of this concept.

Bamako looks back on a long and strong photographic history. Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe - two of the most celebrated African photographers worldwide - lived and worked in this city. With others they left behind an important visual legacy of the changing everyday city life, which unfolded around them between the late colonial and the first decades of independent era. With the inauguration of the continent's oldest biennial of photography in 1994, Bamako's photographic landscape transformed itself: different institutions for promoting photography were initiated and a small group of photographers started to engage in so called art photography. In the shadow of Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe younger generations of photographers started their careers.

This paper considers the youngest generation of professional photographers in Bamako and how they try to get by and express themselves within a professional field that is contested by new digital technologies and a strong competition in a country that finds itself still in a political, economic and social volatile situation after the coup in 2012 and its aftermath.

This paper presents selected works and discusses how three chroniclers of today develop visual perspectives on the city of Bamako and beyond by moving back and forth on the urban rural continuum.

More than 10 000 students graduate every year from the Universities of Bamako, Mali. They grew up with the claim that studying is a privilege and the promise that education secures employment and, therefore, a livelihood. However, they encounter severe difficulties finding a job that corresponds to their qualification or entering the labor market in general. That situation impacts their today's actions as well as their imagination and planning of their futures.

This paper elaborates on two questions: what do graduates do today? And to what extend are their present actions geared towards the futures they imagine? One answer lies in what Malian graduates refer to as "opening up la chance". La chance is a phenomenon graduates are preparing for today. "La chance" separates the present from the future since it enables a different present - a present that has been imagined as the future in the past.

The ideas presented are based on three periods of ethnographic fieldwork in Bamako during which biographical and narrative follow-up interviews were conducted with thirty university graduates. The long-term character of the study enabled an understanding of graduates' social contexts, their present actions and their pathways into the future. It is ultimately seized how futures develop and are being developed.