Tanzania’s Informal Economy: The Micro-politics of Street Vending 9781786994509, 9781350222854, 9781786994523

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Politics and Society in Urban Africa Politics and Society in Urban Africa is a unique series providing critical, in-depth analysis of key contemporary issues affecting urban environments across the continent. Featuring a wealth of empirical material and case study detail, and focusing on a diverse range of subject matter – from informal economies to urban governance, infrastructure to gender dynamics – the series is a platform for scholars to present thought-provoking arguments on the nature and direction of African urbanisms.

Other titles in the series: Paul Stacey, State of Slum: Precarity and Informal Governance at the Margins in Accra

About the author Alexis Malefakis is Africa curator of the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich, where he also works as an academic researcher. He previously lectured at the University of Konstanz, Germany. His previous works include Making a Living from Old Shoes: Tanzanian Street Vendors as Urban Experts (2016) and Auto Didaktika:Wire Models from Burundi (2017), both of which are based on exhibitions he curated at the museum.

Tanzania’s Informal Economy The Micro-politics of Street Vending

Alexis Malefakis

Tanzania’s Informal Economy: The Micro-politics of Street Vending was first published in 2019 by Zed Books Ltd, The Foundry, 17 Oval Way, London SE11 5RR, UK. www.zedbooks.net Copyright © Alexis Malefakis 2019 The right of Alexis Malefakis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 Typeset in Plantin MT by seagulls.net Index by Matthew Hyland Cover design by Burgess & Beech Cover image © Mark Henley / Panos All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978-1-78699-450-9 hb 978-1-78699-452-3 pdf 978-1-78699-453-0 epub 978-1-78699-454-7 mobi

Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction 1 Looking beyond the informal economy 7 Social theoretical foundations of the study 9 Sociality 9 Narrative 10 Spatial practice 12 Temporality 14 Chapter overview 15 1. Street vending in Dar es Salaam A brief history of struggle After independence: resuming colonial policies Street vendors in Dar es Salaam today: a desire for change Ethnographic fieldwork with mobile street vendors

19 20 24 30 31

37 2. Urban perspectives on rural pasts: a narrative of ‘being Wayao’ in Dar es Salaam From the village to the kijiweni 39 Narrating Wayao-ness 42 46 Being Wayao in the city 3. The micro-politics of sociality among Wayao street vendors Sources of uchawi Pinned down by ‘dirty magic’: the story of Rahim On the flip-side of uchawi: replicating kinship-like relations

51 56 57 61

4. Too familiar to trust: a paradox of social proximity The case of the bank account Theories of trust Trust among self-organised workers Opacity and trust

67 68 71 72 75

5. The creative potential of shoe vending: practices and emerging sociality

79

6. Carrying knowledge through the streets: old shoes as meaningful objects The temporal organisation of Karume Market Mapping shoes onto the streets Grandmothers and city girls Knowing how to act

85 89 93 97 99

7. Sharing is daring: cooperation at the kijiweni Sharing tools Sharing profits Practices of entrustment in the absence of trust

103 107 110 116

8. Creating a market where there is none: the spatial practices of street vending Finding your way through the streets The rhythms of street vending Talking to ‘witches’ and ‘whites’: categorising customers Use the force: street vending with an attitude The market as an epistemic landscape

123

141 144

Conclusion: Stuck in an extended present

147

126 130 135

Notes 157 References 161 Index 173

Acknowledgements This book is a revised version of my PhD thesis, which I wrote at the University of Konstanz, Germany. I am indebted to Thomas G. Kirsch who supervised my work patiently and productively and who expanded my horizons as an anthropologist. I also thank Thomas Reinhardt and Judith Beyer for their examination of my work and their reviews. I thank Julia Scheller with whom I shared an office and also all the phases of enthusiasm and frustration that writing a PhD thesis naturally involve. I thank Tim Bunke for many creative and critical discussions of my work and for offering alternative perspectives on life and work when I needed them. I thank Colman Titus Msoka at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Dar es Salaam for supporting my project without hesitation and for helping me get my research and resident permits. I thank the Commission for Science and Technology for granting permission to conduct this research. Parts of Chapter 3 were published in an earlier form in Africa, 88(S1), Special Issue ‘Urban Kinship’ (2018), pp. S51–S71. I thank the rights holders for permission to use this text in the book. I thank my family, Iakovos, Heiderose, Stelios, Yvonne and Lea Malefakis, for their constant support. I especially thank the shoe vendors from the kijiweni, who allowed me to live and work with them and who participated in my project while trying to earn a living. Without their patience and openness this book would not exist. To protect their identity, I do not disclose their names but use pseudonyms throughout the text. This book is dedicated to Anneliese Mwakatobe who opened my eyes. And it is dedicated to Medinat Adeola Malefakis who led me into a new life.

Introduction Do you see how they disrespect a grown up like me? Contempt has taken over. They talk behind my back, ‘he doesn’t know business,’ ‘he’s just a scrounger’. But that’s what the Wayao1 are like. You know, when two or three people of the same tribe come together, respect will decline. Especially with the Wayao. So even if you gave me a million shillings to do business here, all the money would be lost here in no time. I would rather move to a different location and mix with people from other tribes, Wandengereko or Wazaramo.2 At least that would broaden my horizon and my business would thrive. From an interview with a Mwyao street vendor

For a group of Wayao street vendors in the city of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, close ethnic and kinship relations were simultaneously an advantage and a hindrance. Relatives had helped them migrate to the city from their home village in the south of the country and had housed them for the first few months. Once living in the city, each had been introduced to the business of selling second-hand ladies’ shoes on the streets by one of his relatives. Having worked closely together for many years by the time of my research, the vendors had created a shared stock of continuously updated market knowledge, they shared materials and tools to refurbish their merchandise, and relied on one another as a safety net that provided a modicum of support in times of need. Nonetheless, while cooperation was indispensable in their demanding line of business, there was an air of mutual contempt and mistrust among them which made more substantial collaboration impossible. They depended on one another in many ways, yet they despised the fact that they stuck together. This book is about sociality in the self-organised street economy in an African metropolis. The study is based on fifteen months of anthropological fieldwork that I conducted between 2010 and 2013 with a group of around forty male street vendors who specialised in trading second-hand ladies’ shoes in the Central Business District

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of Dar es Salaam. The Wayao street vendors I worked with shared a problem with their colleagues all over the world. As mobile street vendors they had to create a market where there is none to begin with. In a marketplace, set off from the wider social sphere physically and organised according to locally construed market principles, customers and vendors interact with one another with the expectation to ultimately enter into sales conversations. But for ambulatory vendors who look for customers on the streets the situation is much more complicated: they have to create vending situations out of chance encounters with passers-by who initially do not necessarily intend to buy something. Viewed that way, street vendors, rather than merely ‘misusing’ public space, skilfully influence the social environment they engage with in order to ‘set the stage’ for a very particular kind of performance, namely, a sale. Through their work, street vendors thus transform the epistemological, social and cultural geography of the city (see Chari and Gidwani 2005: 268) and turn it into a market that they simultaneously navigate and engage with. And in order to be able to do so, the Wayao street vendors I worked with relied on shared market knowledge. Paradoxically, despite most of them aspiring to autonomy from their Wayao colleagues, like the vendor in the introductory quote, their dependence on their shared approach to the market bound them together – as an unintended side effect of their practices. The shoe vendors this book is about were rural migrants from a village called Miungo in the south of the country and identified themselves ethnically as Wayao. Because future prospects for youths in the village looked dim, they had individually migrated to the city following their relatives and fellow villagers who had already established themselves in Dar es Salaam and the business of street vending. They all had come to the city to improve their living conditions and they perceived the urban environment as potentially offering them plenty of opportunities to do so. Many saw the possibility of mingling with people from different walks of life and with different regional, ethnic and social backgrounds as a way of expanding their horizon and thus getting new ideas for business opportunities. Against the backdrop of the heterogeneous social environment that potentially offered myriad opportunities to change their course of life, the Wayao street vendors experienced their prolonged dependency on their relatives as a kind of gridlock. Consequently, they interpreted

Introduction

3

the complex and intimate social relations that they entertained as constrictive and hindering their individual aspirations to get ahead in life. For the Wayao street vendors, therefore, being closely related through kinship ties, ethnicity, a shared past in the village and a shared present in the city was coterminous with standing in one another’s way. This book is about the contradictory effects of social relations among a group of street vendors. With its focus on the ambivalent effects of close social relations that simultaneously integrate and disintegrate the group of shoe vendors, the book adds complexity to discussions of kinship and ethnicity as structuring principles in the so-called informal economy. Since self-organised economic strategies of urban populations in the Global South has become a topic of interest for researchers of diverse disciplines and a topic of concern for policy makers, the so-called informal economy has often been defined by its dependence on social ties rather than official and state-sanctioned regulations for effective functioning. While ‘reliance on indigenous resources’ and ‘family ownership of enterprises’ have been emphasised as characterising the informal sector (International Labour Office 1972: 6), the continuous vulnerability and precarity of informal workers has often been explained by external factors and forces, such as a neoliberal economic order, adverse official regulations, lack of capital or persecution by authorities. As I will show, the precarity of the street vendors in this particular case was not solely caused by factors outside of their sociality, such as their criminalisation by the authorities. Part of their vulnerability derived from the fact that they operated economically on a short day-to-day cycle, while life in the city required them to plan ahead and budget their money in order to provide for their families. While they worked closely with their fellow Wayao and relatives, the precarity they experienced was caused by the micro-politics of their social relations that made it impossible for them to trust one another sufficiently to cooperate substantially and thus to help one another make headway towards their shared goal of a better life in the city. From the perspective of the street vendors, it was exactly the ethnic and social homogeneity of their group, their mutual dependence and notions of too intimate knowledge they had of one another that made it impossible for them to trust each other (see Chapter 4). Being too closely related, they all wished to disentangle themselves from their colleagues.

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In order to understand the contradictory effects of complex social relations among street vendors, I focus this study around the aspect of temporality. In a social theoretical perspective, I will argue that integrative moments in sociality are coterminous with actors’ participation in the joint creation of shared future horizons. For example, to trustfully relate to others means to pre-empt an otherwise contingent future and to act ‘as if ’ it was known to all actors involved in the trustful arrangement (Luhmann 1979). To create trustful relations therefore also means to create shared anticipations of the future. An unwillingness of actors to share a future horizon, on the other hand, may find expression in an unwillingness to trust, in suspicions and accusations – as was frequently the case with the Wayao street vendors. Focusing on aspects of temporality in a study of self-organised workers may seem farfetched and as overly theorising the lives of people who probably would not agree to pin down the source of their problems to such an abstract phenomenon as time. However, my focus on time in street vending has been inspired by experiences and empirical observations I made over and over during fifteen months of fieldwork with the shoe vendors. Initially, the vendors had no time to participate in my research project. But their reluctance was not an expression of their lack of interest in my research or their dislike of me as a person, but was caused by the simple fact that the temporal requirements of participating in my project clashed with the temporal requirements of doing business in the streets (Malefakis 2015). From the realisation that time management and the rhythms of social life in the city are critical for the practices of street vending, I came to understand that the precarious sociality among the street vendors also hinged on the interplay of contradictory temporalities that the shoe vendors jointly created. I had set out in 2010 to study street vendors in Dar es Salaam with the intention to understand a specific kind of sociality which, as I assumed, would be shaped by the street vendors’ necessity to help one another but that would be contested by their individual selfinterest and struggle for profit maximisation. This research interest was backed by a solid literature on the ‘urban crisis’ and on the situation of urban youths in Africa that argued for the emergence of new forms of sociality in urban fields (Abbink and van Kessel 2005; De Boeck and Honwana 2005; Diouf 2003; Durham 2000; Goldstone

Introduction

5

and Obarrio 2016a; Grant 2003; Simone 1998, 2004a; Tostensen et al. 2001; Weiss 2002). However, right at the beginning of my fieldwork I came to understand that there was a much greater degree of continuity in the social relationships of street vendors than I had previously expected. Paradoxically, as I soon learned from conversations with the Wayao vendors, this continuity did not lend a great degree of stability to the way they experienced their sociality. When I asked them about the organisation and dynamics of their group, all of them rejected the idea that there was any such thing as a group in the first place, in the sense of a sociological small group, comprised of a certain number ‘group members’ who aim at a shared objective and thus are connected by a continuous process of interaction and communication, by which they develop a sense of togetherness (Schäfers 2010). Instead they declared, sometimes with pride, but often with regret, that they were struggling all alone for themselves. The continuity in their social relations was evaluated by the vendors themselves not as a stabilising factor in the highly dynamic and harsh urban economy of the streets but, paradoxically, as a problem. In their daily work the vendors depended on the knowledge and skills they had jointly created from individual experiences over the course of many years. The second-hand ladies’ shoes they sold on the streets originated largely from clothes donations in richer industrial countries in Europe, Asia or in the United States (see Hansen 2000; Rivoli 2005). Being able to navigate Karume Market, one of the largest outlets of used clothes and shoes in Dar es Salaam, and to pick out shoes that were sellable to the middle-class customers they targeted in the inner city, was a complex matter (see Chapter 6). Skilfully choosing shoes depended on an understanding of the temporal logic according to which market vendors calculated prices for their merchandise, with qualities and prices of shoes changing over the course of time. It involved understanding the reputation of and demand for particular brands with different customer groups. And it entailed knowing the respective dress codes and fashions of different customer groups in the inner city. Being able to sell used shoes required an understanding of material aspects of the shoes in order to be able to assess the state of preservation and quality of shoes. It involved the skills necessary to repair and refurbish them with simple tools. Selling to different target groups required a shoe vendor to first of all know where and when to encounter a particular

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kind of customer in the city. It brought together knowledge of their respective demand in shoes, appropriate ways of approaching them and the respective profit margins different kinds of merchandise would allow for with different kinds of customers. A large part of that knowledge was entailed in the language the shoe vendors used to denote different kinds of shoes, customers, vending locations and tactics. A young street vendor who wanted to learn the trade had to learn to understand the slang with which his colleagues communicated their experiences and advised one another. Learning the slang of street vending and thus getting access to the necessary experiences and practical knowledge was coterminous with getting access to the streets’ market. But while their cooperation allowed them to structure their work routine and thus to plan their business from day to day, their close social relations simultaneously discouraged them from collaborating more substantially and committing to their group more fully. As some of the shoe vendors complained, over the course of many years that they had worked together they had not made an effort to join forces in order to improve the overall situation for them all. For example, some among them had tried to convince their colleagues to pool parts of their capital in order to be able to afford larger quantities of commodities and thus to create a larger joint business from which all participants would benefit. Their attempts however were quickly rejected by their colleagues citing the overall situation of mistrust among them (see Chapter 4). Despite working for many years in the same business and facing the same problems, the Wayao remained in a situation in which they lived only from one day to the next, existing hand to mouth, unable to plan for the future or to make that step forward that had driven them to come to the city in the first place. Having realised that the dynamics of the street vendors’ sociality was not merely a matter of solidarity and competition, I then learned that it was the different forms of temporality that they created and drew upon in their daily conduct that accounted for the integrative and disintegrative moments in their sociality. Consequently, this book, rather than being another study of social networks or the uses of social capital in the so-called informal economy, reflects on the ambivalent role that social relations play in the particular case of street vendors in Dar es Salaam.

Introduction

7

Looking beyond the informal economy With this focus on the micro-politics of kinship relations, the case presented here complements other studies of so-called ‘informal economies’ in urban Africa and other parts of the world (Bhowmik 2010; Bhowmik and Saha 2013; Castells and Portes 1989; Cross and Morales 2007; Graaff and Ha 2015b; Hansen and Vaa 2004; Hansen et al. 2013; Hart 1973; Kinyanjui 2014; Lindell 2010; Staples 2007; Tripp 1997). Since the idea of an informal economic sector juxtaposed and in opposition to a formal sector has been suggested by anthropologist Keith Hart (1973) and utilised by the International Labour Organization in the early 1970s, the concept of an informal economy has undergone considerable transformations (for an overview see AlSayyad 2004; Wilson 2010, 2011). The anthropological perspective taken in this study aims at understanding the life worlds of the Wayao street vendors on their own terms. In delineating the concrete and complex formations of social relations and cultural understandings of the streets’ market that their practices created and were shaped by, I feel that locating this book in the academic discourse on urban informality would limit rather than enlighten our understanding of the street vendors’ work and life. A strictly dualistic notion of two separate spheres, one being organised according to official regulations and the other being some kind of growth in the interstices of the ‘proper’ formal system, not only does injustice to the fact that in reality both aspects of human behaviour are tightly interwoven (Castells and Portes 1989; Elwert 1983; Hansen et al. 2013; Roy 2005). The dichotomy ‘formal’ versus ‘informal’ also comes with the heavy burden of normative valuations. What is labelled informal appears as some kind of deviation from an assumed norm or standard. As a consequence, the so-called informal sphere often appears as a faulty or incomplete version of the ‘regular’, ‘proper’ or ‘official’ economy (Graaff and Ha 2015a; Herrle and Fokdal 2011). If the ‘informal economy’ is characterised in negative terms by a lack of appropriate business permits, the violation of zoning codes, the failure to report tax liability, non-compliance with labour regulations, the use of illegal means to produce legal products (Brown et al. 2010: 667); and when street vending and other self-organised economic activities are rendered in terms of an ‘underground’, ‘unregulated’ or ‘black’ economy, such economic

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strategies are associated with the illicit and illegal (Hart 2010: 375), and the people earning their living in such ways are at risk of being criminalised. The idea of an informal economy thus lends itself to being used by elites to control and police less privileged parts of society in order to maintain their own power (see MacGaffey and Bazenguissa-Ganga 2000: 5). On an analytic level, the idea that ‘formal’ systems such as economies or bureaucracies are organised solely by rational principles, in the sense that they are not organised by socio-cultural processes such as personal relations on the basis of kinship, ethnicity or other affiliations and statuses, or reciprocal giving of material or immaterial ‘gifts’ (Rottenburg 1995), confuses cultural ideals with realities. That the ‘formal’ economy guarantees the rational allocation of scarce means to infinite and competing ends is part of what economist Felwine Sarr called the ecomyth of industrial society, a narrative with cosmological implications that ‘fosters representations of the universe and society, legitimizes institutions, ensures beliefs, shapes modes of life and thinking’ and thus guarantees the maintenance of the social order (Sarr 2015: 342). If authors from industrial societies try to understand the life worlds and economic strategies of people in other parts of the world in terms of ‘informality’, the analytical value of such a ‘middle-class outsider perspective’ (Herrle and Fokdal 2011: 4) is questionable. If economic processes are studied as cultural processes, on the other hand, the dualism formal/informal implodes. Both dimensions of organisations and processes are guided by culturally shaped worldviews and notions of rationality and value. Even the ‘rational’ allocation of resources, as described by economics, is necessarily organised according to cultural ideas of the value and relevance of ends to which scarce resources are allocated (Sahlins 1981b). So despite the fact that the term ‘informal economy’ figures prominently in the title of this book in order to reach a readership interested in self-organised labour, this study leaves behind the notion of informality as a conceptual lens. It instead analyses the Wayao street vendors’ economic activities as cultural processes that generate and in turn are shaped by a particular form of social relations and that create a market knowledge that is shared among the vendors. As I will show in detail, the vendors’ work was not at all ‘informal’ in the sense of lacking form or established regularities

Introduction

9

(Hart 1992: 217), but created durable socio-cultural forms that bestowed a degree of permanence and stability on their practices. Rather than rendering their practice as informal in the sense of an urban mode of operation (Roy 2005), I look at the vendors’ agency (see Herrle and Fokdal 2011: 7), which created and shaped a social order among them that, nevertheless, remained subject to constant contestations and negotiations and therefore oscillated between integrative and disintegrative moments.

Social theoretical foundations of the study Drawing on Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration (Giddens 1979, 1986), I analyse the shoe vendors’ sociality as a dialectic process that emerges from their interactions and practices and in turn gives order to emerging practices. On the following pages I will introduce the theoretical concepts that help to understand the dynamics of social relations and practices that shape the routines of the Wayao street vendors.

Sociality Social relations along kinship and ethnic lines have often been assumed as the ordering principles of self-organised labour markets (e.g. Lomnitz 1977; Lourenço-Lindell 2002; Meagher 2006). While kinship and ethnic affiliation certainly play an important role in social relations among self-organised workers, the study of the Wayao street vendors shows that sociality is much more complex than a notion of social networks and the ‘rational’ utilisation of relationships (see Burt 1992) might suggest. When I use the term sociality, I mean something different from an everyday notion of the ‘sociability’ of people in terms of a positive longing and capacity for harmonious social relations. Not only people’s longing for harmony, but also their aspirations for autonomy and the urge to disentangle themselves from one another, to distrust and vilify each other, are to be understood as social in origin. The concept of sociality must therefore not be equated with a diffuse ‘capacity to be social’ or a ‘desire to be social’, or with notions of altruism, unproblematic cooperation, coherence

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or solidarity (Long and Moore 2013: 9–10). In real-life situations, people ‘feel alternately compelled to engage and disengage with the world around them in ways that can be profoundly affecting and indeed formative’ (Long and Moore 2013: 10). This was certainly true for the case under study: among the shoe vendors, there was an ongoing discourse about the advantages and disadvantages of being closely related to one another – through kinship, through a shared local origin and a shared past in the villages where they were born, and through a shared ethnicity. Understanding sociality therefore requires a ‘sophisticated account of agency, motivation, intentionality and desire: in short, an understanding of the human subject as he or she exists in a given place and time’ (Long and Moore 2013: 11). Furthermore, if ‘hopes, desires and satisfactions are part of the making of selves, social relations and social imaginaries’ (Moore 2011: 10), so too are fears and frustrations, repulsion, envy and mistrust. For the shoe vendors their complex and intimate social relations as kinsmen, fellow villagers, neighbours and colleagues were not only a source of solidarity but also one of the major reasons they strove for autonomy. The forces that created and shaped their sociality were not only the associative forces of mutual dependence, empathy, solidarity and trust, but also their impulses to reject one another.

Narrative Social relations are meaningful because they become constituted with a story (White 1992: 67). What it means to be related in a specific form of sociality therefore needs to be traced in the social narratives with which actors make sense of these relations (Mattingly 1998; Ochs and Capps 1996, 2001; Ricoeur 1991; Zigon 2012). In social narratives, ‘story plots’ are sketched out from the various experiences individuals bring to the communicative process. Pasts are constructed and reconstructed according to changing present experiences, giving order and meaning to social life and individual constructions of the self. One important aspect of the narrative dimension of sociality, I will argue, is that from such joint creations of pasts and shared orientations towards the present a trajectory is created that projects experiences into the future and thus makes

Introduction

11

particular expectations appear more probable than others. The temporality of narrative sociality therefore refers to social constructions of future anticipations that account for dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Narratives offer culturally accepted ‘plots’ according to which humans can order their experiences. One of the fundamental effects of narrating is to bestow an order onto events and acts that otherwise might appear incoherent and potentially contradictory (Zigon 2012: 207). Making sense of one’s life as story through narrative is not an optional extra, as the philosopher Charles Taylor pointed out. Rather, a coherent narrative is the only way we can find answers to our existence in a ‘space of questions’ (Taylor 1989: 47). The ‘plots’ we become familiar with as members of our culture are ‘thought experiments by which we learn to link together the ethical aspects of human conduct and happiness and misfortune’ (Ricoeur 1991: 23; italics omitted). The work of the imagination involved in fictional narration to which Ricoeur refers here never comes out of nowhere; it always ‘is tied in one way or another to the models handed down by tradition’ (Ricoeur 1991: 25). Yet in their social narratives, humans do not merely reproduce the stories they have been told by others. As they consciously author their narratives, they integrate their own experiences, desires, hopes and fears, thus encoding and perpetuating these elements in ways that render them communicable and accessible for others. By means of narrative, humans relate their own individual experiences to shared horizons of meaning and evaluation; at the same time, through their narrative praxis, they continually create, maintain and shape these shared horizons of meaning. In a social dimension, narratives are interfaces between an individual and the sociality of which the individual is a member. In their moral dimension, by comprising notions of good and bad, right and wrong, narratives enable individuals to situate themselves in the moral spaces (Taylor 1989: 25–52) their sociality constitutes. Narrative practice is thus ‘a key ethical practice for moral subjectivity and an existential ground for being together with others’ (Zigon 2012: 207). In a temporal dimension, narratives are interfaces that link pasts, presents and future horizons to one another (see Ochs and Capps 1996: 25). Narrative gives our temporal experience order, but not merely by structuring our present (see Taylor 1989: 47), as I insist

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on adding. Narratives open up horizons for future expectations: through narrative, we know where we are and we know where we were coming from. From that trajectory, we are able to deduce where we are going, or, in more practical terms, what needs to be done in order for us to reach that state. Narratives are therefore inherent features of sociality that link individuals to one another through their joint creation of horizons of meaning that allow them to assign order to their experiences and to deduce from the causality that narratives attribute to chains of events what their future may or may not hold in store for them. Another qualification needs to be added here: although narratives are the horizons within which individuals assign meaning to their individual past and present experiences, their social relationships, their future expectations, and their social practices, this should not lead to the assumption that such narratives cannot also include a kernel of dissociation and disorder. In the case I present here, the shoe vendors’ narratives entailed rationales and justifications for envy and distrust and reasons to strive for autonomy and detachment.

Spatial practice This study complements the vast literature on political issues around street vendors’ appropriation of public space (see for example Anjaria 2006; Bromley 2000, 2013; Chinchilla et al. 1996; Cross and Morales 2007; Graaff and Ha 2015b; Hansen 2004; Hansen et al. 2013) with an analysis of the spatial practices of mobile street vendors and their effects on social relations among them. The Wayao street vendors, like mobile street vendors in other parts of the world, were faced with a fundamental problem. They had to create market opportunities out of chance encounters with passers-by in the streets. In other words, they had to transform public space into a market. And in order to do so, each individual shoe vendor utilised the knowledge and experience of the other Wayao vendors which they shared and conceptually processed into a shared understanding of the city as a market. The necessity of appropriating public space and its transformation into a market caused a degree of integration among the Wayao vendors, despite their often explicit rejection of any durable commitment to their group.

Introduction

13

In Chapter 8 I will summarise the spatial practices of the street vendors as the creation of a market as an epistemic landscape. The market as an epistemic landscape describes a dynamic and relational matrix of knowledge about the relevant social goods and people that spanned the topography of the city. As they walked through the streets and tried to sell their shoes, they gathered experiences and know­ledge about the market potential of different locations and inscribed this market knowledge into the urban landscape by means of slang expressions (see Ingold 2007). By inscribing meaning into public places that contradicted the officially sanctioned uses of space (De Certeau 1984; Lefebvre 1991 [1974]), the street vendors’ everyday practices thus created zones of ‘possibility and autonomy’ (Pieterse, quoted in Myers 2011: 14) and turned public space itself into a resource (Brown 2001). From such an ethnographically informed point of view, it becomes clear that the street vendors did not simply ‘misuse’ public space, as local authorities and parts of the public often accused them, but, rather, through their practices, transformed public spaces and the epistemological, social and cultural topography of the city (see Chari and Gidwani 2005: 268). The spatial practices of the street vendors therefore are conceptualised as interpretative and signifying acts (Giddens 1979: 65, 1997: 72; Reckwitz 1997: 101) that inscribed meaning and knowledge into the objects they dealt with and into the spatio-temporal geography of the city they moved through. By gathering and simultaneously inscribing meaning into the urban landscape the vendors created layers of knowledge, experiences and practices that informed their perception of the city and thus enabled them to transform chance encounters into selling opportunities. By sharing their individual experiences with their colleagues, reflecting, discussing, describing and labelling particular encounters, types of customers, places and practices, the shoe vendors created relatively durable concepts, categorisations and slang expressions that always entailed programmes for action. These pools of shared forms of knowledge permitted the time–space distanciation of experiences and knowledge (see Giddens 1997: 316–317), providing practices and the sociality that drew upon these pools of shared knowledge with a degree of durability.

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Temporality The concept of temporality I use here is related to a notion of time that has been alternatively labelled ‘social time’ (Sorokin and Merton 1937) or ‘oecological time’ (Evans-Pritchard 1940: 94–138; cf. Gell 1992, 1998), concepts that have been applied to tease out a specifically socially/culturally constructed notion of time as opposed to a concept of time that takes its course irrespective of any human experience of it, such as ‘astronomical time’ (Sorokin and Merton 1937), ‘natural time’ (see Adam 1990: 150–169), or ‘clock time’ (Cooper 1992; Thompson 1967). Temporality as I use it in this study denotes the qualitative experience of time. And this temporal experience, though it is made individually, is organised by and mediated through socially constructed symbols as relatively enduring accumulations of experience and meaning (Nassehi 2008: 136).The notion of the social mediatedness of temporal experience is related to George Herbert Mead’s argument for the present as the locus of reality (Mead 2002 [1932]). Mead argued that each experience and practice takes place in its own emerging present that has no temporal expansion. That which is expanding in time is human consciousness. Any traces an experience leaves in a person’s mind are memories of it that constitute a ‘restatement’ of that experience in relation to an emergent experience of the present. Every past, therefore, is contingent upon a present according to which it is constructed in a particular causal relationship. In other words, the actor has to reconstruct a past from which the emergent present follows logically and causally, in order to deduce from that past–present trajectory a conceivable future action (Mead 2002 [1932]: 46): ‘The past in that sense is in the present; and, in what we call conscious experience, its presence is exhibited in memory, and in the historical apparatus which extends memory’ (Mead 2002 [1932]: 48). The ‘historical apparatus’ consists of evaluations, meanings, intentions and future anticipations that are not created in the present situation, but have pre-existed and are tapped into by actors as skilled partakers in their respective socialities. Part of this study is about the creation of such a symbolic apparatus that is created in and through practice and in turn shapes actors’ practices in that it gives temporal order to them. I will demonstrate how singular practices of the shoe vendors encapsulated complex pools of knowledge and experience that were derived from myriad

Introduction

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past experiences and were encoded in their slang. Their metaphorical slang expressions were the media that facilitate moments of structuration, since they allowed one actor to draw on experiences that another actor had made in the past and in a different location. In other words, they were the media that facilitate the time–space distanciation of experiences and practices (Giddens 1997: 316–317) and thus lent a degree of durability to both their practices and their sociality – a durability which, as mentioned before, was experienced as ambivalent by many of the Wayao vendors.

Chapter overview After the introduction, Chapter 1 gives a historical overview of street vending in Dar es Salaam and contextualises the ethnographic study within the city’s social history. Dar es Salaam’s growth from a small trading post in the Indian Ocean to a metropolis of nearly 5 million people in only 130 years was caused by an incessant influx of rural migrants seeking better opportunities. As the city’s formal labour market was never able to absorb the masses of migrants looking for work, Dar es Salaam’s growth was accompanied by the equally rapid growth of a large, self-organised economic sector. The combination of this ever-expanding, self-organised economy at street level and the city administrators’ depreciating attitude towards its inhabitants’ self-organised economic strategies leads to an ongoing, continually worsening situation for unregistered workers such as street vendors. Against the backdrop of this brief historic overview, the shoe vendors’ desire to improve their situation becomes comprehensible, and the significance that social relations have for their future plans gains relevance. Chapter 1 also details the ethnographic fieldwork this study is based on and discusses some methodological problems of doing fieldwork with mobile street vendors in an urban setting. Chapter 2 examines the narrative construction of sociality among the shoe vendors. As the group consisted almost entirely of Wayao who were related by kinship ties, the vendors shared many memories about rural life and jointly created a narrative that helped them make sense of their current situation in the city. A perceived inability to plan for the future, a self-attribution they deduced from their rural

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upbringing in a subsistence economy and their Yao identity figured prominently in their explanations of why they were unable to prosper in the city. This chapter reconstructs the narrative of ‘being Wayao’ which the shoe vendors lived by, showing how this narrative had both integrative and disintegrative effects on the group’s social relations. The shoe vendors’ self-depictions integrated them into a sociality that was marked by an assumed extensive sameness, since they all came from the same socio-economic and cultural background. This assumption led to suspicions about individuals in the group who were more successful in business than their peers, which were voiced as allegations of witchcraft, which I discuss in Chapter 3. On the one hand, such accusations invoked shared moralities within the group, as I argue in Chapter 3, and therefore had an integrative effect on the shoe vendors’ sociality. On the other hand, the narrative construction of sameness complicated the establishment of trustworthy relations that would allow for more durable future cooperation. As Chapter 4 shows, trust would necessitate a degree of ambivalence in the actors’ mutual knowledge, which could be bridged by trustful future projections. But, as the Wayao assumed they had an allencompassing knowledge about their peers’ background and possible aspirations, a general lack of trust limited the resilience of their social relations. Paradoxically, therefore, the notion of all-encompassing sameness had disintegrative effects for the shoe vendors’ sociality, as it impeded the creation of shared future horizons. The second part of the book focuses on the practices of street vending. In a similar way to narratives, practices are analysed as interfaces that connect individuals to one another by creating shared temporal horizons. Chapter 5 introduces the theoretical vocabulary necessary to understand the significance of common references to temporality for social practice. Chapters 6 to 8 show how the shoe vendors jointly created knowledge about the shoes they dealt with, and how this knowledge helped them organise their work routines by enabling them to make future plans. Chapter 6 follows the shoe vendors to Karume Market, where they obtained their merchandise early in the morning. The distinctions the vendors made when choosing their shoes served as reference points for making predictions about the subsequent course of their working day. Chapter 7 shows how the shoe vendors, despite their general unwillingness to trust one another, nevertheless cooperated in many ways during the

Introduction

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morning in an inner city backyard. They entrusted one another with the materials and tools necessary to refurbish their merchandise and shared the knowledge and experience necessary to repair their shoes. In addition, they had established institutionalised forms of joint sales of commodities which followed conventions that were widely acknowledged and adhered to. However, in practice, the application of these conventions was always a contested process in which intrinsic properties from the social relations of the parties involved came into play. Given the general unwillingness to trust one another, such cooperation was facilitated by the potential of material objects to convey the social commitment necessary for practices of entrustment. At the same time, its conditionality on the materiality of the objects nevertheless limited such cooperation to short temporal horizons and did not lead to the establishment of more durable and more comprehensive forms of collaboration. Chapter 8 shows how the shoe vendors organised their routes around the city by reference to a socially constructed mental map in which vending locations and their respective temporalities, customer groups with their buying behaviour, types of shoes and their appropriate vending techniques were interlinked and condensed into the symbolic names the vendors gave to these locations. When moving through the city according to this specific understanding, street vending unfolded a rhythm of alternately heightening and reducing corporeal and cognitive tensions, as the individuals moved from one location to the next, always aware of the different forms of attentiveness and practice required in each distinct selling area. Operating according to this shared mental map, the practices of street vending thus drew on a collective knowledge that hinged on the social relations within which it has been created. The chapter describes and analyses the tactics employed by the vendors to entice their customers to buy a pair of shoes. The shoe vendors called the most important vending technique kupiga fos (Swahili, literally ‘hitting the force’). This term entailed a script for a sales pitch in which an initially casual encounter on the street was gradually transformed into a binding sales situation. As well as its practical significance for the shoe vendors, the term kupiga fos also conveys in a condensed form what street vending was all about: focusing and enhancing one’s presence when encountering a customer, being eloquent and flattering, throwing oneself into the moment when sensing an opportunity, and never giving up easily. As

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the central metaphor among the shoe vendors, it had connotations of a professional ethos that was crucial for workers’ self-esteem in an economic sphere that was persistently subjected to public defamation and persecution by the city’s administrators. In the conclusion to Chapter 8, I synthesise the findings from the previous two chapters to argue that the shoe vendors’ practices not only created forms of knowledge that enabled them to make future estimates about the market, but that these forms of knowledge actually constituted the market of the streets. Rather than working in a clearly demarcated stable area, such as in a marketplace organised according to the rules of demand and supply, the vendors had to create selling opportunities out of random encounters with passers-by on the streets. The specialised knowledge detailed in this section amounted to the creation of a market as an epistemic object, an object constituted by the forms of knowledge about the complex nexus of merchandise, customers and the spatio-temporal dynamics of the city. This argument stresses the processes by which this work attained its socio-cultural form, which is a critical revelation, given that street vending often is subsumed under the term of the ‘informal market’.

1 Street vending in Dar es Salaam Dar es Salaam, situated on a natural bay on the East African coast, is Tanzania’s largest and fastest growing city, populated by 4.4 million inhabitants in 2012 (National Bureau of Statistics Tanzania et al. 2013). With its large industrial harbour handling about 12 million metric tons of cargo per year, it is one of the most important commercial hubs not only for Tanzania, but also for most landlocked East African countries such as Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe (Jerving 2013). It is the seat of the government of the United Republic of Tanzania, the city of residence of the president and the prime minister, and it hosts many national and regional offices of major international organisations such as the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank. Most of these government offices, ministries, international organisations, banks and corporate buildings are situated in the densely built-up Central Business District (CBD) around the harbour, where only a few high-rise residential buildings provide housing (mostly for people of South Asian origin). The area around Posta, the central bus stand in the heart of the CBD was the selling area of the shoe vendors I learned to know during my fieldwork. Though they lived in a poor neighbourhood on the southern outskirts of the city, they had specialised in selling shoes to the well-paid office clerks who worked in the ministries, banks and other offices in the inner city. They were not alone in looking for opportunity there. The inner city of Dar es Salaam was vibrant with economic activity in small shops, food stalls, kiosks selling mobile phone vouchers and vendors selling newspapers, handbags, watches, mobile phones, clothes and shoes on the sidewalk. And in between the passers-by, cars, buses and motorbikes hundreds of mobile street vendors sought for opportunities to offer their merchandise to potential customers. Despite efforts of authorities and policy makers to curb the socalled informal economy, street vending and other self-organised forms of work have always been the economic backbone of the

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city’s population – rather than a marginal phenomenon or a shadow economy, as the term informal economy might imply (see Wilson 2010: 341). Throughout the entire history of the city, the majority of its inhabitants have engaged in economic activities that have relied on kinship, ethnic network, or neighbourhood communities rather than on contractual regulations.

A brief history of struggle Two dynamics have shaped the city’s socio-economic environment over the course of time: a massive influx of rural–urban migrants and the inability and at times unwillingness of the city’s colonial and later post-colonial administrations to adjust their policies to this reality. There is a striking continuity between the ways in which the colonial government approached the problem of ‘unemployed’ Africans in their colonial city in the early twentieth century and the policies of the post-colonial government, which seems to have adopted the colonial vision of the city and has accordingly attempted to ‘clean’ the city of ‘undesirables’ such as street vendors. Dar es Salaam was founded in the 1860s by the Sultan of Zanzibar Sayyid Majid. In 1886, it accommodated no more than some 5,000 inhabitants (Iliffe 1979: 384–385). Some years after Sultan Majid’s death in 1870, the German East Africa Company acquired trading rights from his brother Sultan Bargash through ‘gunboat policy’ and purchased land around the small settlement from village headmen. After Hermann von Wissmann had established a full military station, Dar es Salaam was declared the new capital of German East Africa in 1891 (Brennan and Burton 2007: 19–21). During German colonial rule, the town was developed primarily as a military base. Its economic activities revolved around major construction projects following a building ordinance that set different building standards for European, Asian and African homes, thus creating a tripartite racial division of the city in terms of living standards (Brennan and Burton 2007: 24–26; Iliffe 1979: 385). By the beginning of the First World War, Dar es Salaam’s population had increased considerably: estimates range from 13,000 (Leslie 1963: 21) to 22,500 in 1913 (Burton 2005: 45). When British forces took over the city in 1916, they completed the German scheme of



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racial segregation within Dar es Salaam. Just as the Germans had been primarily preoccupied with designating building sites for new stone buildings owned by Indians and Arabs (Burton 2005: 24–25), the British also considered Africans and their residential communities to be undesirable within the city and restricted their residency to the area where their carrier corps were camped (later Kariakoo), which in the 1920s became the core of the ‘African town’ (Leslie 1963: 385). Early British colonial commentators expressed strong concerns about the presence of Africans in Dar es Salaam (Burton 2005: 70–73). The British colonial administration in general was concerned about African youths in Dar es Salaam and (practically and ideologically) assigned the African ‘natives’ to the shamba, the plantation, as their proper place in colonial society (Burton 2005: 72). The British were determined to assert effective control over the access of Africans to the city. Regulations to remove any African from the city who could not produce written permission from the district officer and to arrest any person ‘apparently destitute’ (Burton 2005: 78) sought to limit the growth of a class of ‘unemployed’ Africans in Dar es Salaam. But they failed to restrict the mobility of Africans entering and leaving the city. One reason for this was a lack of effective supervision of Africans’ repatriations to their home communities (Burton 2005: 78–79). Another reason was that living conditions in the countryside were deteriorating dramatically. Colonial policy for the rural hinterlands of Dar es Salaam did not attempt to develop peasant communities. On the contrary, the colonial government dispossessed African peasants of their land, allocated these lands to Asian and European farmers, and forced peasants to work on these farms by imposing taxes payable in cash (see Lugalla 1997: 427; Mbilinyi 1985: 90). Instead of investing significantly in the development of rural peasant communities, the colonial government provided cheap credit and labour to European and Asian farmers (Mbilinyi 1985: 90). The deteriorating living conditions in the villages, where malnutrition became a permanent problem, were actively denied by the colonial administration, which dwelled on the imagery of the unproblematic rural and agricultural live of the African peasant. In these increasingly harsh times in the countryside and on the plantations, the lure of employment in Dar es Salaam grew ever more attractive, drawing increasing numbers of immigrants.

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Life in town for the African population was marked by an imbalance in earnings and living costs. A census in 1931 counted 24,000 inhabitants (Leslie 1963: 21). But the city still lacked significant industries that could offer sufficient opportunities for wage labour. The wages the few thousand Africans got who worked as domestic servants, in the docks or as casual labourers were low and fluctuated considerably. Self-employment therefore was an indispensable means of income for Dar es Salaam’s African population (Burton 2005: 65; Mbilinyi 1985: 89). In the 1930s, street hawkers were predominantly engaged in the production and peddling of foodstuffs, ‘coffee, milk, vitumbua (rice cakes), fish (cooked and fresh), vegetables and charcoal’ (Burton 2005: 65), which were mostly taken from house to house in the European and Asian residential areas but also sold on the streets of Kariakoo and in the city centre. During an economic depression in the 1930s, unemployment increased dramatically, depriving around 40 per cent of formerly employed Africans in Dar es Salaam of their work, and those lucky enough to retain their employment saw their wages decline dramatically (Burton 2005: 68). Many Africans in the city spent up to one-third of their salary on repaying their debts and often went the last two or three days before receiving their next paycheque without any food at all (Burton 2005: 68). Deteriorating living conditions among Africans in 1943 led to the establishment of a system of food rationing in order to ensure the availability of basic supplies at affordable prices. This led to an upsurge in migration from the poor periphery of the city to Dar es Salaam (Brennan and Burton 2007: 39). By 1944, Dar es Salaam’s African population had increased from 26,000 to 40,000 (Brennan and Burton 2007: 38). Even though living conditions rapidly worsened in the 1940s, rural–urban migration further increased. As a result, Dar es Salaam’s population grew to almost 70,000 inhabitants in 1948, of which around 51,000 were Africans (Burton 2005: 194). The colonial government’s efforts of the previous decade to curb the influx of young African immigrants seemed to have failed (Burton 2005: 198). Young immigrants in particular and sometimes even ‘children’ (Burton 2005: 95) kept moving to town, where they soon became engaged in ‘poorly comprehended means to subsist’ (Iliffe 1979: 36). For colonial officials, the ‘second economy’ on the streets was generally regarded as suspicious, as it proved to be difficult to



Street vending in Dar es Salaam

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control. The manner and the derogatory language with which colonial commentators condemned any way of life and form of sociality that they were unable to understand makes it clear just how antipathetic the colonial administration was to the urban African population. Policies to remove ‘undesirable persons’ from the city were merely the most practical expression of this attitude. However, these policies were part of a more general discourse about the morality such ‘undesirables’ represented in the colonial imagination. They were depicted as ‘drones and SPIVs’: people who lived off of the work of others, just like male honeybees (drones), or ‘Suspected Persons and Itinerant Vagrants’ (SPIVs), who lived from their ‘wits, without doing any regular work’ (Mbilinyi 1985: 89). In colonial commentaries and policies, urban Africans were mostly depicted as unattached and out of (colonial and customary) control, living a thug’s life in a state of anomie. John Leslie ridiculed new emerging lifestyles of urban youths as ‘the cult of cowboy’. Inspired by popular Western films, jeans, wide hats, neckerchiefs, and heavy shoes became fashionable for young men in the city; with this outfit came a particular attitude: ‘it is the revolt of the adolescent, in age and in culture, against the authority of elders, of the established, of the superior and supercilious’ (Leslie 1963: 112). Arguably, the reasons for the growing unrest of Africans in the city were the continuously rising food prices and food rationing, deteriorating housing conditions, and the colonial administration’s harsh policies against anyone caught roaming the streets in search of an income opportunity. Any expression of dissatisfaction, however, was delegitimised by demonising it as part of the ‘dangerous mob element’ of Dar es Salaam’s Africans (Leslie 1963: 113). The African population by far outgrew the colonial administration’s measures to ensure ‘public order’ in the city. Throughout the 1950s, the city’s growth rate accelerated. By 1958 Dar es Salaam’s population had reached more than 140,000 people (Burton 2007: 123). Raids against so-called ‘undesirable persons’ were now a daily occurrence in the city. Anyone who was found on the streets after 9 a.m., when according to European notions law-abiding citizens were supposed to be at work, was a legitimate target for removal in the eyes of colonial officers (Burton 2005: 253). The administration’s relentless persecution of Africans who did not match the Europeans’ ideals of efficiency and orderliness further aggravated

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the living conditions of Africans in the city. In the late 1950s, over 2,000 individuals were ‘repatriated’ annually from Dar es Salaam to the countryside, thus shifting the urban problem to rural areas where no measures were implemented to improve the harsh living conditions that had driven the peasants to migrate to the city in the first place (Burton 2007: 129). As a result, and despite the colonial administration’s effort to clean the city of ‘undesirables’, people inevitably kept coming back. By 1958, Dar es Salaam’s population was growing rapidly at a rate of around 8,000 people per year (Burton 2006: 375). Unemployment became a grave problem. Trade unions estimated the number of unemployed at around 10,000 people (Burton 2006: 375). The colonial administration, however, tended to downplay the problem of unemployment in Dar es Salaam, sticking to an official estimate of the number of unemployed at around 5,000 in a city of more than 140,000 inhabitants (Burton 2006: 375). Growing unemployment and strikes of dockworkers throughout the 1940s and 1950s were the context in which the political consciousness of the African nationalist struggle gained a strong foothold in Dar es Salaam. The schoolteacher Julius K. Nyerere was elected president of the Tanganyika African Association in 1953 and began to transform the association into the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), an organisation that soon found overwhelming support among the urban population (Brennan and Burton 2007: 51). TANU’s growing political strength partly stemmed from its popularity with unemployed and underemployed youths in Dar es Salaam (Burton 2006: 379).

After independence: resuming colonial policies Although the independence of Tanganyika1 in 1961 brought some changes in the way Dar es Salaam was governed, there was a striking continuity between the colonial vision of the city and the way TANU officials clung to that vision and tried to realise it by coercing unand underemployed people to leave the city (Burton 2007: 126). Paradoxically, although the un- and underemployed had been among TANU’s strongest supporters during the colonial regime, as early as 1960, Chief Minister (and later first President) Julius



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Nyerere cautioned against the potential problem that large numbers of un- and underemployed Tanzanians posed to social stability if they were susceptible to the idea that their government did nothing to improve their situation (Burton 2007: 138). The post-colonial government’s policies that continued the colonial administration’s policy of removing ‘undesirables’ found considerable support among the small fraction of Dar es Salaam’s residents who had benefited from late colonial policies and from the rising wages in the late 1960s. Yet it was only 20 per cent of the city’s inhabitants who were in salaried positions and received such regular wages at all (Burton 2007: 126–127). Mass migration from rural areas to Dar es Salaam remained the most influential force shaping the city’s social, economic and political life. The post-colonial administration struggled for control over the city, just as the colonial administration had. In the administration’s discourse, the un- and underemployed urban poor were considered a threat to the project of national development (Burton 2007: 129). The administration’s approach to the unemployed masses in the city was one of purification: The ‘modern’ city needed to be cleansed of people who were incapable of productively engaging in the project of developing the city and the nation. Colonial strategies to tackle this ‘problem’ thus found a continuation in the post-colonial administration of Dar es Salaam, with its large-scale repatriation campaigns Kupe (1973; literally ‘tick’), Kila Mtu Afanye Kazi (1976; ‘Everybody should work’) and the Human Resource Deployment Act, better known in Tanzania as Nguvu Kazi (1983–1984; ‘labour force’) (see Burton 2007).Yet measures to resettle unemployed people in villages where there was no infrastructure in place to profitably engage in agriculture were therefore just as useless as they had been in colonial times (Burton 2007: 134). The 1970s were a time of crises for Tanzania. The global oil crises in 1973 and 1974 had a devastating impact on rural producers in Tanzania, whose products lost value dramatically on the world market, prompting rural youths in particular to try their luck in urban areas (Msoka 2005: 38–39). In addition, droughts in 1974 and 1979 diminished agrarian production, and the villagisation programmes of 1974 and 1975 had disrupted established agrarian production patterns (Liviga and Mekacha 1998: 27). Grain had to be imported, and oil prices rose dramatically in 1973 and 1974, draining

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Tanzania’s foreign currency reserves (Costello 1996: 139). The war with Uganda in 1978 put a further strain on the scarce resources of the state. In 1979, Tanzania had to enter into negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in order to obtain foreign funds (Costello 1996). However, Nyerere’s socialist policy of selfreliance conflicted with the idea of accepting the IMF’s terms for foreign aid. Instead, the government launched its own ‘structural adjustment’ initiatives, the National Economic Survival Programme in 1981 and the ‘Structural Adjustment Programme’ in 1982 (Liviga and Mekacha 1998: 27; Lugalla 1997: 434). Only in 1984, after Nyerere had handed over power to his successor Ali Hassan Mwinyi, was the new president able to negotiate with the IMF to implement a full-blown structural adjustment programme (SAP, 1986), known in Tanzania as the Economic Recovery Programme. In the long run, these measures would fundamentally transform the Tanzanian economy and society, with socialism being replaced by capitalism (Brennan and Burton 2007: 62; Costello 1996: 139). The SAPs of the IMF and the World Bank basically sought to replace state-controlled economic policies with market mechanisms, encouraging growth in the private sector by liberalising trade regulations (Briggs and Yeboah 2001: 20–21). But investment concentrated on consumption rather than on production, and private investors tended to invest in short-term, small-scale businesses such as import–export activities, rather than in large single-plant investments such as production facilities (Briggs and Yeboah 2001). With trade liberalisation now allowing the importation of a variety of goods in increasing quantities, these years revealed a ‘starved appetite for consumer goods and luxury items of all sorts’, which arrived in the country in large quantities via the Indian Ocean (Brennan and Burton 2007: 62). The importation of second-hand consumer goods (in local parlance known simply as mitumba) such as used cars, furniture, clothing and shoes proliferated, offering business opportunities not only to importers and wholesalers but also to retailers, including both shop owners and street vendors (Msoka 2005: 53). In accordance with the SAP, the public sector was downsized considerably, resulting in large numbers of public servants being laid off, but because the private sector failed to grow as planned, it could not absorb the growing number of unemployed workers.



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Consequently, the government found itself compelled to open up ways that would allow people to engage in self-organised economic activities in order to supplement their dwindling (if at all existent) incomes. By the 1990s, Dar es Salaam had a population of over 1.3 million (Liviga and Mekacha 1998: 6), and the National Informal Sector Survey of 1991 numbered the people engaged in ‘informal’ economic activities in Dar es Salaam at precisely 315,958 (Planning Commission and Ministry of Labour andYouth Development 1991).2 Because real wages kept declining and chances to access ‘formal’ employment were continually dwindling, the Tanzanian government made a U-turn in its approach to the so-called ‘informal’ economy and to street vending, acknowledging the fact that Tanzanian citizens had no alternative other than to provide for themselves by engaging in self-organised economic activities. However, this change in attitude was only half-hearted. In the 1990s, it was recognised that ‘informal sector’ activities indeed contributed considerably to the gross domestic product (GDP). Hence, the ‘growth potential’ (Luvanga 1996: 2) of selforganised economic activities gained recognition, leading to a number of policies that tried to integrate the profits made in the ‘informal sector’ into ‘formal’ economic statistics. The recognition of the significance of ‘informal’ economic activities for the livelihoods of Tanzania’s population was coupled with multiple efforts to at least partially formalise their business premises and activities. One reason for this was the reintroduction of local governments, which had been replaced in the 1970s by a centralised national government. These local governments were reintroduced without any concession of substantial sources of revenue with which they could implement their governmental duties (Msoka 2005: 64). One means of obtaining revenue was the taxation of small-scale entrepreneurs, as the City Commission of Dar es Salaam attempted in the 1990s by assigning business premises and sales locations to entrepreneurs for a fee of 100 Tanzanian shillings (Msoka 2005: 65). The Commission also encouraged the foundation of the umbrella organisation VIBINDO (Jumuiya ya Vikundi Vya Wenye Viwanda na Biashara Ndogondogo, Umbrella Organisation of Small Businesses) as an official representative for informal sector workers. By 2007, the organisation represented 300 associations of small-scale entrepreneurs with a total of around 40,000 members (Lyons et al. 2012:

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1018). A large-scale initiative to formalise the informal sector in order to include its economic growth in the country’s formal economy was implemented under President Benjamin Mkapa’s ‘Programme to Formalise the Property and Business of the Poor in Tanzania’ (Mpango wa Kurasimisha Rasilimali na Biashara za Wanyonge Tanzania; MKURABITA). However, most of the initiatives under MKURABITA to formalise self-organised businesses failed to offer mobile street vendors opportunities to license their businesses and thus to ensure freedom from harassment. In order to be registered, businesses were required to have a fixed and legal address (Lyons et al. 2012: 1023). Naturally, street hawkers could not comply with that requirement. In any case, progress on the MKURABITA measures was slower than had been hoped for, and after Mkapa handed over power to Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete in 2006, the programme lost its most important advocate in government, as Kikwete did not support it (Lyons et al. 2012: 1021). Today, Dar es Salaam is one of the fastest growing cities in Africa and the entire world, with a growth rate of 5.6 per cent (National Bureau of Statistics Tanzania et al. 2013: 2). Compared to its 5,000 inhabitants in the era of Sultan Majid, only 130 years later the city’s population has increased almost a thousandfold: in the 2012 census conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics, the population of Dar es Salaam was figured at 4.36 million people (National Bureau of Statistics Tanzania et al. 2013). Lyons and Msoka (2010: 1082) estimated the ‘street-vendor population’ in Dar es Salaam at 700,000 people in 2008. Both sets of numbers may be inaccurate given the fact that, firstly, during the census of 2012, many residents refused to participate as a form of resistance, and secondly, that estimates of ‘informal’ and therefore by definition unregistered businesses can only be approximations at best. What can be stated without doubt, however, is that self-organised economic activities in Dar es Salaam remain the most vibrant economic sphere in the city, offering opportunities to earn livelihoods or to supplement wages to hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of people. Under President John Pombe Magufuli, in office since 2015, city authorities have been instructed to tolerate street vendors and evict them from the public spaces they occupy only if alternative locations have been designated for them and if they have been given notice ninety days before. From the perspective of mobile street vendors,



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selling from official and permanent business premises would reduce their vulnerability to police raids and allow them to stock larger quantities of merchandise. But such a ‘settlement’ only makes sense economically if the vending location is not removed from the stream of people they would otherwise cater to and if it is not too close to other established markets. The Machinga Complex, a multi-storey building close to Karume Market, opened in 2006, is an example of a well-intentioned but ultimately failed attempt to settle mobile street vendors. Built with a loan from the National Social Security Fund and managed by Dar es Salaam City Council, the complex was supposed to offer business premises to otherwise ambulatory street vendors. However, rents for vending spaces inside the complex are too high for small-scale traders, and all the goods the vendors would offer on five storeys are on sale in Karume Market on ground level only a few hundred metres away. Machinga Complex is unattractive to customers and consequently also for street vendors and remains almost entirely empty until today. Many but not all informal sector workers are organised in numerous small organisations. Umbrella organisations such as the Tanzanian Small Scale Industrialists Society (TASISO), the Tanzanian Food Processors Association (TAFOPA), or the Small Industries and Petty Traders Association VIBINDO, advocate the needs of their respective member groups in the political arena. According to VIBINDO, an organisation with more than 300 member organisations representing over 40,000 individual members, access to affordable business premises is one of the biggest problems smallscale entrepreneurs face (Madihi and Eliasa 2008). In addition, the government’s implementation of the Business Activities Registration Act from 2007 imposes nearly insurmountable registration procedures for their members. Registration of their small businesses would require them to go through a thirteen-step process with different administrative bodies and in addition would cost them more than 90 per cent of their US$340 average annual income (Skof 2008: 172). It is understandable that small-scale vendors recoil from an expensive and time-consuming administrative process that ultimately makes them liable for taxation and thus further diminishes their incomes (Madihi and Eliasa 2008: 21).

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Street vendors in Dar es Salaam today: a desire for change Despite increasingly harsh living conditions, the city has remained a magnet for hopeful youths who willingly exchange a life of hard manual labour in the countryside for the prospect of a meagre income in cash, some basic amenities such as electricity and running water, and the chance to improve their social position in the long run. The same was true of the shoe vendors I met in Dar es Salaam’s inner city. They, too, had left their villages in the rural south of the country, looking for a better life in the city. As most of them told me, upon arrival they quickly learned that life in the city would require them to adapt to a way of life they were not used to. Most notably, the monetary economy in the city required them to steadily earn cash in order to pay for everything they consumed: housing, transport, clothing, food and water. Since the older ones among them had arrived in the 1990s, living expenses in the city had risen constantly, affecting their business, as rising prices for commodities meant that their customers had less money in their pockets to spend. In addition, their situation on the street deteriorated due to increasing numbers of youths trying their luck at street vending. Over the years, more and more young men from the village have come to join the shoe vendors in their backyard. While the growing number of street vendors naturally brought with it growing competition on the streets, the overpopulation of the shoe vendors’ favoured work space, a backyard in the inner city, also brought with it social problems, as this social proximity for the vendors meant not only opportunities to cooperate, but also sparked fears of envy, jealousy, witchcraft and mistrust, as I will explain in more detail in Chapters 3 and 4. The shoe vendors therefore anticipated increasing challenges and worsening work and living conditions for their future. They knew that the city’s growth would lead to a building boom. The number of high-rise buildings and shopping malls in the inner city had risen considerably during the period of my research alone. But the shoe vendors and other street vendors did not benefit from this gentrification. For them, the improvement of infrastructure and the increase in large-scale formal business in the city meant more surveillance and more security guards chasing them away from premises. In addition, with advancing age they would no longer be physically able



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to circle the streets for hours on end in the blazing sun looking for customers, as some of them told me. All in all, what they expected of their future as street vendors in the city was a tightening situation. When I talked with individual shoe vendors about their future prospects, many expressed a desperate desire to change their situation. What they longed for was to get away from street vending altogether and to start a completely different business over the next few years. What kept them from doing so, according to their accounts, was sufficient capital to invest more substantially in their business, to buy larger stocks of merchandise, and thus to yield larger profits; or to change their line of business altogether: instead of selling goods in the streets, selling commodities from Dar es Salaam in the countryside and bringing agricultural products to the city’s food market. During my research I quickly realised that the shoe vendors I worked with had encountered quite similar experiences in the past and experienced their situation in the city in similar ways. And the ways they expressed both their future expectations and dreams bore striking resemblances. Yet despite their similarities in many ways and their close and complex social relations they were not inclined to come together as a group and collectively find a way out of their vicious circle of low capital and marginal incomes. On the contrary, as I will show in the following chapters, their close social relations seemed to be experienced not as a solution, but as part of the problem they faced.

Ethnographic fieldwork with mobile street vendors The ethnography presented in this book is based on fifteen months fieldwork that I conducted between 2010 and 2013 with a group of around forty-five male street vendors in the inner city of Dar es Salaam. Ethnographic research is based on direct participation and personal conversations with the people whose lives and work is being studied. This requires the ethnographer to be immersed in the social and cultural world to be studied to the point where the researcher is able to describe this lifeworld from an internal perspective. In order to do so, a degree of impartiality on behalf of the ethnographer is necessary as well as language proficiency in the local idiom. Ethnographic fieldwork requires personal relations

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that the ethnographer needs to establish with the people to be worked with. Gaining access to one’s field of study thus is best understood as a continuous process. Learning a new language, in this case Swahili, is never fully completed, as semantic subtleties and allusions that native speakers intuitively play with may pose real challenges for the student. And in a similar way, personal relations are never fully established, but may need to be deepened and reproduced on a daily basis in various contexts. Despite the omnipresence of street vendors in the city, when I began my fieldwork I soon realised that establishing durable personal relations with individual vendors would prove a difficult task. When during an exploratory phase of several weeks in 2010 I browsed the city’s streets I found it relatively easy to get into contact with mobile street vendors who naturally saw me first of all as a potential customer and therefore had a professional interest in talking to me. Apart from such encounters, however, I soon realised that the mobile nature of street vending would make it difficult to form more durable relations with them, the kind necessary for qualitative ethnographic research. In addition, as an anthropologist, I was interested in the social relations and interactions among street vendors and therefore it was not enough for me to become acquainted with individual street vendors. In order to learn about sociality among street vendors, I had to find a group of vendors who frequently cooperated and interacted and as far as possible become part of their group myself. After some weeks of inefficiently circling the streets, I fortunately met a Rastafarian who sold a range of wood carvings, paintings and other curios to tourists from a small, improvised shop in an inner city backyard. I was glad that my new acquaintance invited me to visit his shop and enjoyed my daily visits. I spent more and more time hanging out with him, making conversation with him in my then broken Swahili and gradually learning more words and slang phrases in use in Dar es Salaam’s streets. From my new base of operations I embarked on tours through the streets, looking for street vendors willing to speak to me. After some days, however, I came to realise that, further back in the Rastafarian’s backyard, there were a number of young men working on old shoes – washing them, polishing them, bringing them back into shape, displaying them on the pavement in the front and carrying them off into the streets. My Rastafarian friend’s shop was also the kijiweni,3



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the hang-out spot, of a group of shoe vendors who specialised in selling second-hand ladies’ shoes. They of course had also noticed the strange mzungu4 who kept coming to their workspace. Being a guest of the Rastafarian, who had known these men and worked in close proximity with them for many years, it was easy for me to make friendly contact with them, to introduce myself and explain the reason for my presence in the streets. While my physical presence at the kijiweni was soon accepted as an exotic yet harmless intrusion, my attempts to become more closely acquainted with them individually and to gradually impose my fieldwork agenda on them were met with irritation and, sometimes, outright rejection. Initially, interviews were out of the question. When I approached some of the vendors to ask if they would agree to being interviewed for an hour or two, they told me that they ‘had no time’ to be interviewed. This statement initially puzzled me, since I often spent up to two hours during mid-morning sitting ‘idly’ with several vendors on the pavement in front of the backyard, waiting for the shoes to dry before they embarked on their tours through the streets. Weeks passed without being able to carry out any ‘proper’ interviews. During the first two or three months, my fieldwork made a downright mockery of the research agenda I had devised, a plan that turned out to represent yet another version of the ‘myth’ of research as a calculated, intentional and efficient activity of ‘data collection’ (Wolcott, 2005: 76). In reality, I had little control over the course of my research. Reflecting on the progress of my fieldwork, I realised that merely ‘being there’ with them was not at all equivalent to ‘doing it’ (Castañeda 2006). My intention to do ‘proper’ fieldwork put me under pressure to use my limited time efficiently. Accordingly, I perceived the many hours spent on the streets without being able to gather information at the desired rate as merely ‘waiting’ for something to happen or, in some of my more frustrated moments, as ‘wasted’. The shoe vendors, on the other hand, naturally had quite a different experience of those hours that did not converge at all with mine. Those hours on the pavement were never wasted but spent waiting, either for the occasional customer to pass by, or for the right time to embark on a tour through the streets. The shoe vendors always used that time of the day for discussions with their peers, on their experiences in the streets and which vending tactics had or had not worked, for what possible reasons. In that sense, they really

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had no time to be distracted by my nosey questions, so there was an unavoidable and severe asynchrony between me and them. My rhythms and their rhythms simply did not converge. During the first weeks of research I experienced the kind of frictions that Johannes Fabian describes when he writes that the process of ethnographic knowledge needs to be initiated by encountering ‘resistance in the form of incomprehension, denial, rejection’ (Fabian 2001: 25). Such moments of confrontation, he argues, have to be made productive through communication. He further notes, however, that there are some aspects of life that cannot be described or explained verbally. After all, much of social life is performative (Fabian 2001: 29; Hirschauer 2006). What Fabian therefore proposes to grasp those aspects of culture that may not be explicit and may, thus, be experienced as a kind of ‘resistance’ in fieldwork is to work towards synchronicity between the fieldworker and the people under study. The foundation of knowledge production in fieldwork, he argues, is time shared with the people one wishes to study – not only in the sense of a temporal co-presence in the same moment, but in the phenomenological sense of experiencing simultaneity in our two streams of consciousness (Schütz 1967: 102–107). As I sat in silence with the shoe vendors, I began to realise that, in order to be able to share time with them, I had to converge my attention with theirs. My frustration at being unable to do interviews notwithstanding, what really mattered for the shoe vendors themselves was something that was hard to put into words anyway. While sitting on the pavement in front of the backyard or while walking the streets in silence, it was the passers-by who caught their full attention. As I learned, the street vendors were minutely observing the tiniest movements of people walking by, following their eye movements as they did or did not wander over to the shoes on display. It was crucial for their business that they understood the walking rhythms and the differential kinds of attentiveness shown by different types of passers-by. The street vendors were real ethnomethodological experts in interpreting the slightest indications of interest that a woman would give away. As I gradually learned to observe what was going on in the streets in a similar way to them, I slowly began to understand that we now were beginning to share our time, even though we did not interact or talk to one another at all. Just sitting there with them allowed me to experience what they were experi-



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encing: a state of heightened cognitive attention while physically resting and preparing for a long day out in the streets. Through ‘deep hanging out’ (Clifford 1997: 56) in a positive sense, I managed to reduce the frictions that had initially occurred and allowed for a kind of experiential convergence to take place.

2 Urban perspectives on rural pasts: a narrative of ‘being Wayao’ in Dar es Salaam Q: Is there anyone here who helps you more than the others? A: Here? No-one. I’m on my own.1

My fieldwork began in a small backyard in inner-city Dar es Salaam. That backyard was formed by a narrow passage between two buildings and was nearly closed off at its rear by a third office building except for a small gap in the far right corner that led onto a bigger backyard. The bigger backyard was occupied by cook shops where the employees of the adjacent offices would take their lunch. The small backyard in the front was occupied by a group of around fortyfive male street vendors who used that area as their kijiweni, their meeting place and workshop. While they conducted their business in the streets of the inner city, the backyard served as a kind of backstage area where they prepared their merchandise before they took it to the streets. The shoes they sold they had bought in Karume Market, one of the largest outlets for second-hand clothes and shoes, situated at the far end of the busy market area of Kariakoo, some thirty minutes on foot from the kijiweni of the shoe vendors. There used shoes were delivered in large plastic bales by market vendors who sold them to street vendors and ultimate buyers alike starting from 5 a.m. each day. The shoes the vendors picked up in Karume Market often were battered, dusty and worn-out and therefore needed washing, padding, some repairs and an application of shoe polish before they could be re-sold to customers in the streets. During mid-morning, the kijiweni in the backyard was a busy place where the shoe vendors gathered around plastic basins with water and some washing powder and washed their shoes, then stuffed them with wads of old plastic rags and hung them to dry on lattice gates in the backyard. They made small repairs such as fixing a sole that had come off, gluing

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small rips in the upper material or removing unattractive inner soles and maybe replacing them with a spare sole of a different pair. Faded upper materials were dyed black or brown and leather shoes were treated with shoe polish. Between around nine o’clock and noon the shoe vendors worked on the merchandise mostly individually, but some also helped one another out with the tools and materials they used to smarten up their shoes and sometimes gave one another advice how to repair damage. The morning hours at the kijiweni generally were a time of conversation and interaction between the shoe vendors. As one after the other came into the backyard, a black plastic bag with shoes obtained in Karume Market in hand, the colleagues would greet one another, exchange the latest news and gossip, give each other hints as to the latest developments in fashion and demand on the streets, and share their recent experiences with different groups of customers. The kijiweni also was an important social arena for the shoe vendors, where they shared their market knowledge, contrived cooperation or negotiated their relations to one another. On the surface, kijiweni was a very sociable place where the shoe vendors worked together as a group and helped one another out both materially and in terms of sharing information. As I came to understand after a couple of weeks, however, sharing materials, advice and information was not always a straightforward matter but was often fraught with suspicions and conflicts. As some shoe vendors pointed out to me, if they were given advice as to how to treat a particular material with shoe polish of a certain kind, for example, the question of whether or not that advice was to be accepted depended on the kind of relationship between the two. Rather than merely being a sign of mutual support, somebody else’s advice was sometimes considered to be an interference that might be motivated by malevolent intentions. And the sharing of materials was often a reason for disputes among the shoe vendors, because they closely monitored which of their colleagues would use whose polish, glue or brush, and which of them would return the favour when asked at a later time (see Chapter 7). The backyard that was the shoe vendors’ kijiweni therefore was a place not only of cooperation but also of mutual observation and suspicion. The spatial narrowness of the kijiweni in a way amplified the close social proximity that many of the shoe vendors experienced

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as a confinement rather than an asset that would help them get ahead in life. Most of the forty-five men2 that I learned to know over the course of my fieldwork were between twenty-five and thirty-five years old. Many of them were married and had small children they had to provide for. In addition to being in a similar social situation in the city, they also shared a past and were more than colleagues in the business of selling shoes. A large majority of them, around thirty-five in all, had been born in the southern Tanzanian region of Mtwara, in the village of Miungo and some neighbouring villages close to the town of Masasi. Those born in the south shared an ethnic identity and referred to themselves as Wayao (singular Mwyao), members of the Yao ethnic and language group. Other shoe vendors I came to know at the kijiweni who were not from Masasi identified themselves variously as Wandengereko, Wapare, Wamakua, or simply ‘Wabongo’,3 natives of ‘Bongo City’, as Dar es Salaam was often referred to in street slang. The Wayao therefore comprised the largest group at the kijiweni. The relative ethnic homogeneity was due to the pattern of rural–urban migration that had brought each of them to Dar es Salaam and the streets.

From the village to the kijiweni The push factors for rural–urban migration are relatively well understood and are mostly a result of the grave inequalities between urban and rural areas in terms of the income opportunities, infrastructure and social services available (Ishumi 1984; Liviga and Mekacha 1998; Mbilinyi and Omari 1996). These findings are in agreement with what the Wayao told me about the situation in their home villages in the south. What they envisioned there for their future was a life of hard manual labour hoeing fields by hand, low agricultural yields and even periodic seasons of starvation, insufficient educational opportunities, inaccessible healthcare facilities and almost no cash flow at all. Life in the village offered no future prospects for the young and ambitious. Or, as one of my interlocutors in Dar es Salaam pointedly commented: Kule bwana mimi hapana! (‘Down there, man, count me out!’).4 What drew many young men from the villages in the south to Dar es Salaam were the glittering ‘city lights’ that sometimes

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flashed up in the remote villages when visitors who had made their way some time ago to towns like Mtwara, Lindi or even far-off Dar es Salaam returned. The symbols of success they displayed – their stylish jeans and sneakers, mobile phones and smart haircuts – made these people appear to the youths in the village to be safi, clean, I was told. Their living conditions had apparently changed for the better, or at least so it seemed to the young men. As one of the shoe vendors explained: What drew me to Dar es Salaam was when I saw someone who had moved from the village to Dar es Salaam. If he had already stayed there for one or two years, when he returns to Masasi you will find that his overall conditions have changed. You see? Like the life he lives is a good one, different from the life you have in the village. If he comes, you see he is wearing nice clothes, he looks good, his face looks good, he has a nice haircut, so you think ‘Ah! Life must be nice there!’ That’s how I was lured into coming to Dar es Salaam.5

This is why, for some youths in the villages around Masasi, migrating to the city had become a ‘standard plan’.6 After they finished the obligatory seven years of primary school, often around the age of sixteen or seventeen, if they found a way to scrape together the bus fare, Dar es Salaam was the place to go to. After they arrived there, however, they quickly realised that life in the city posed its own challenges: in the villages, people subsist on the produce of their own labour in their fields, albeit at an insecure and very low level, but in the city everything costs money. Rent, food, water, and of course electricity, transportation and clothes have to be paid for. Moving to the city meant entering into a capitalist cash economy. For many young men, that was a real challenge. As they had no capital of their own to start a business, they initially lived off of the generosity of relatives who gave them shelter in their homes. But kula kulala bure, eating and sleeping for free, as my interlocutors often jokingly termed their first months in Dar es Salaam, sooner or later led to tensions with their hosts, as the young men would not contribute to the household’s finances. Urged by their hosts to find their own means of support and without capital of their own or any appropriate education to find employment, the only way for them

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to participate in the city’s economy was to follow their host into the business where he had established himself. So for a young Mwyao coming to live with an uncle, cousin or brother in Dar es Salaam, the obvious income opportunity was to help his relative selling used clothes on the streets of the city. The shoe vendors’ migration to the city, as well as their entrée into the city’s economy, largely depended on kinship relations. Their further career in the street market also often followed well-trodden paths that other Wayao from their villages had taken before: many of the shoe vendors had started their careers selling used skirts on the streets of the poor residential areas referred to as uswahilini,7 then switched to selling used blankets, and finally converged on selling used women’s shoes in the city centre. There seems to have been a considerable bandwagon effect in the movement of the Wayao through different segments of Dar es Salaam’s street markets before they appropriated their kijiweni in the inner city and established themselves as shoe vendors. Daudi: I was selling skirts in the streets. That was in ’98 and ’99. Until 2000, I was selling second-hand skirts here at Posta.8 Sanga: I was selling those skirts, later I changed my business, I saw that there was no profit in it. I started to sell bedspreads. […] After some time, I saw that there was no profit in selling bedspreads. That’s when I came here to the kijiweni to sell shoes.9 Saidi: I used to sell bedspreads, second-hand bedspreads. But I saw the business of bedspreads doesn’t pay. Some days it was hard. So I thought, I better leave it be.10 Abdul: There was a time I stopped selling sunglasses and started to sell second-hand bedspreads. But I didn’t come to see its profit. So I stopped. To be honest, it didn’t take long before I stopped. Business was hard.11

When I talked with the shoe vendors about their previous occupations in the city, they often told me that they had been introduced by a friend or relative to the selling of second-hand skirts or bedspreads on the streets. But when they explained the

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reasons why they changed their line of business after some time, they always made a point that it was a matter of their own assessment of the economic viability of the particular business. They emphasised the autonomy of their decisions in their life histories and the competence with which they had made these decisions. However, when I tried to ask about the social setting within which they had made these decisions, they did not feel inclined to explicate the role their colleagues in these various businesses may have played in the decisions that they nevertheless seemed to have taken in parallel. The vendors’ general propensity to stress their autonomous decisions in their lives, I later understood, was a significant constituent of their narrative that stood in stark contrast to the fact that in many of their decisions, such as their migration to the city, they probably were dependent on assistance from their relatives and peers. In other words, these aspects of their narratives shed light on the way many of the shoe vendors conceived of themselves as autonomous individuals (see Zigon 2008: 148). In recounting their life stories to the ethnographer, the shoe vendors downplayed the interdependencies of their life trajectories, and instead stressed their own autonomy in decision-making. From their perspective, their close kinship relationships and their shared ethnicity as Wayao were indeed problematic and nothing to be particularly proud of, it seemed.

Narrating Wayao-ness The Wayao at the kijiweni held similar views about the effects that their rural upbringing had on their attitudes towards one another. They expressed in particular how difficult it was for them to rely on their fellow Wayao when it came to substantial cooperation, as the necessary degree of trust was hard for them to generate. Some of them saw a related problem in the fact that the Wayao at the kijiweni were totally unwilling to accept the idea that any of the others could be in a better position than themselves. Accordingly, any form of leadership among them that might have allowed them to organise their cooperation more durably was ruled out from the outset. Among the shoe vendors at the kijiweni, the term ‘Wayao’ (or its singular ‘Mwyao’) often had quite a negative connotation.

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Field notes, 14 July 2011 Around 10 a.m. at the kijiweni. Power is cut and the electric generators roar deafeningly. At around 10.30, a customer comes and sits on a chair on the pavement. She tells the shoe vendors to bring a couple of pairs of shoes in her size, since with her rather large feet she has difficulties finding shoes that fit in the shops. Instantly, five or six shoe vendors run to and fro and start crowding around her in a hustle. Some other vendors observe the scene and make jokes about their colleagues. Rahim turns to me and says snidely, Unawaona wayao? – ‘Do you see the Wayao?’

Rahim was a Mwyao himself, and like him, many of the shoe vendors often used the term ‘Wayao’ or ‘Mwyao’ to half-jokingly criticise their colleagues for their inappropriate behaviour or their recklessness, their intractability or noisiness, or their lack of manners, education, sincerity and trustworthiness. While the Wayao at the kijiweni certainly shared a vast range of cultural knowledge and qualities (in addition to their common language, Kiyao) they might have referred to in positive terms, at the kijiweni, the term ‘Mwyao’ almost always had a derogatory connotation. Coming from the mouths of my Wayao friends, such depictions of the Wayao as loudmouths and have-nots could be understood as a kind of underdog pride. But when directed at them by their non-Wayao colleagues, the label ‘Mwyao’ was sometimes meant as an outright insult. The reasons why the Wayao at the kijiweni had such a negative self-image became clearer to me once they described the living conditions they had experienced in their rural villages in the informal conversations and narrative interviews I conducted with them. The Wayao shoe vendors depicted themselves as members of one of the poorest and most underprivileged groups in the country, a group that lagged behind the overall ‘development’ that played such an important role in Tanzanian public and political discourse. In fact, in their home villages, people basically relied on a subsistence economy, cultivating mixed-crop fields with hand hoes and thus hardly producing any surplus at all that could be sold in the markets of the surrounding villages for some cash. Mikorosho, cashew-nut trees, were the only cash crop and also the pride and pervasive topic of conversation for the people in the villages. But they only yielded crops once a year, which the farmers gave on commission to the local

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cooperatives that sold them to Indian exporters before paying the farmers, which sometimes took months. Money for health services and education was therefore basically non-existent in the villages. Above all, the education in the village schools was considered by the Wayao at the kijiweni to be insufficient. As one of my interlocutors vividly expressed it: ‘In the village schools people don’t study. They only wipe off their ignorance.’12 When narrating their pasts in the villages, their experiences with hard manual labour in their parents’ fields and the education received in the village schools, many of my informants expressed how these pasts had shaped their present experiences in the city: Being poorly educated, they understood that they were ill-suited for any kind of formal employment in the city. For the Wayao shoe vendors, therefore, the ethnic homogeneity at the kijiweni was a problem rather than an asset. As Abdul once articulated it: We are from the same village, and it’s not a secret that it’s much better if you mix with people from different walks of life. Because everyone has his own ideas, so you can pick up the thoughts of different people. But all the thoughts here [at the kijiweni] are the same, the same ones as in the village. They aren’t city thoughts, just village thoughts. […] You know, in the village, people, they are just there. The father is there, the mother is there, you all work in the fields. And even if you yourself don’t work in the fields, you will still get something to eat. […] Here [at the kijiweni] we don’t think much about how our lives will be later. […] Our minds are still the same as they were back there [in the village]. Now we came here but we still only meet one another, so our minds still revolve around the village.13

Abdul attributed this general lack of foresight to their rural upbringing, where they had lived quite literally from hand to mouth, and also to the homogeneity at the kijiweni in terms of the lifeexperiences of his fellow Wayao. Not only did Abdul and his colleagues consider themselves to be the ‘same’ with respect to a general lack of foresight, they also assumed that they all had a negative attitude towards one another. Envy, suspicion and mistrust were some of the features they considered characteristic of their Wayao identity. In a group interview I conducted with three of the shoe vendors,14 Abdul,

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Saidi and Abu, they spoke about the negative associations many of their fellow Wayao had with their assumed sameness. A statement by Abu summarises the arguments the three made about the relationship between their sameness and a social climate of mutual disrespect and even contempt: Our education is low, that’s why we disrespect one another. We missed out on education, and so we have that mutual contempt built into our heads. Because I know in which house Saidi was born, I cannot accept his advice. It’s like: ‘Who do you think you are?’ Maybe this attitude will vanish with the younger generation. But our elders also had that mutual contempt for one another. It’s like, everybody should stick to themselves, and nobody should outdo anyone.15

Abu here related the notion of having ‘missed out’ on education and having contempt ‘built into’ their heads to the expectation that nobody should outdo anyone else. The fact that he mentions his knowledge of the house in which Saidi was born hints at the intimate knowledge they have of each other, a knowledge that seemed to complement their low level of education, but in an unfavourable way. Knowing one another so well and additionally knowing that they had all had a bad education led to an egalitarian moral maxim: from their being the same, it followed that nobody should outdo anyone. Their unwillingness to accept the superiority of any of their fellow Wayao in other situations even tipped over into outright mutual contempt. My three interviewees emphasised that mutual disrespect and contempt was not something they had learned only after they had arrived in the city; rather, such feelings were also widespread among the people in their home villages. Saidi stated this clearly: Since that contempt has been going on for a long time, it became something like a heritage for us. It’s like, for instance, if your father has a certain character trait, this trait will take hold of you, too, and your kids will have this trait as well.16

In a desperate tone, his cousin Abdul added that they were well aware of the consequences their negative stance towards one another had for them in their daily interactions, but, he concluded, there was

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no way of letting go of the habit: ‘Ndivyo tulivyo!’ – ‘That’s how we are!’, he summarised. According to him, the Wayao at the kijiweni were all too aware of ‘how they are’ and more often than not based their decisions of whether or not to trust one another on this self-ascription alone. In such situations, their self-image of being unable to respect and trust one another became such a powerful social imaginary that it worked as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy (see Chapter 4).

Being Wayao in the city The Wayao perceived the city as a socially heterogeneous environment that potentially offered them opportunities to cooperate with people from different social or ethnic backgrounds. Such opportunities to mingle with different people were regarded by some as offering a more versatile understanding of urban life than their ongoing adherence to the behaviour and attitudes they had brought with them from the village. The self-ascriptions they expressed as being generally unworthy of trust or badly educated contrasted with what they perceived to be characteristics of other groups of rural migrants in the city. For instance, they told me that the general envy and condescension with which the Wayao treated one another ruled out effective networking in the city, but they had observed that people from other regions of the country used their ethnic and kinship networks in Dar es Salaam in profitable ways and with considerable benefits. As Juma put it in an interview: Our horizon of understanding is limited. That’s how our parents were, and now that we’ve come to the city we still stick to each other. We’re all from the same place, and we haven’t mingled with other people who might understand life better and could give us some inspiration. You can’t learn anything new there [at the kijiweni], the ideas we exchange there are the same ideas we brought with us from home. For other people in the city it’s different. If one of us would go and cooperate with Wachagga, or Wahaya or Wasambaa, I believe they would change rapidly.

Juma expressed his frustration with the fact that, despite being in an environment that offered opportunities to ‘mingle with people’

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who might ‘give us some inspiration’ and thus expand their horizons, the Wayao at the kijiweni clung to one another and missed out on chances to experiment with alternative perspectives on, and solutions to, their problems. In the same interview, Ibra elaborated on his perception of other ethnic networks’ performance in the urban economy: Look at other places, where there are shops run by Wanyekyusa, people from Mbeya. If you go into their shops, all the employees are Wanyekyusa, all you will hear is their local language. Or in a Mchagga’s shop, they will all be Wachagga, people from the north. But us from the south, we are not like that.

Ibra expressed his envy of people from other ethnic backgrounds. Yet being ‘from the south’, as he and his colleagues at the kijiweni were, their intimate relations were causing malevolence and mistrust among them rather than giving access to employment. Envy and jealousy among the Wayao was rooted in their notion of being equally ill-equipped to succeed in the city, since they all shared a rural upbringing that they felt had left a negative imprint on their mentality. The Wayao at the kijiweni hoped to partake in that urban heterogeneity that AbdouMaliq Simone described as an ‘intersection of socialities’ which complement each other to form ‘an infrastructure for innovative economic transactions in the inner city’ (Simone 2004b: 407, 419). The Wayao at the kijiweni, however, conceived of their sociality rather as an island only peripherally connected to that peopled infrastructure of the city. According to their own understanding, their rural upbringing had left such an indelible psychological imprint on them that they lacked the ‘readiness to switch gears’, to change focus and location and to experiment, which Simone asserted was characteristic of urban residents in Africa (Simone 2004b: 424). It is important to note, though, that this self-ascribed inability to cope with urban life did not render the group of Wayao I am describing as misplaced villagers or illadjusted ‘tribesmen’ in town (see Mayer 1963). Indeed, most of them had moved to the city as teenagers and had spent the better part of their adult lives there. As veterans of itinerant trading, they knew the city like the backs of their hands and skilfully navigated the rapidly changing social environment of the streets. Instead of being regarded

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as evidence of their insufficient integration into the city, their negative self-image should actually be understood as a narrative strategy they employed to make sense of their perceived inability to realise their dream of a better life in the city. Their narrative of being Wayao, in other words, was moulded through their engagement with the city. In this narrative of ‘being a Mwyao at the kijiweni’, the past poor living conditions in the villages were causally linked to the unfavourable conditions in which the shoe vendors found themselves in their present situation in the city and additionally shaped their anticipations of their futures. The notion of sameness had significant effects on how the Wayao at the kijiweni conceived of their social relationships and the social practices they engaged in with one another. In its most extreme form, their unwillingness to accept advice from one of the others tipped over into mutual contempt, suspicion and distrust. The shoe vendors had actual experiences of dishonesty, deception, fraud and theft even among their close relatives at the kijiweni. Pairs of shoes sometimes ‘disappeared’ from the backyard at the kijiweni to the annoyance of the owner who had spent his hard-earned money to purchase them at the Karume Market, and sometimes they ‘reappeared’ in the hands of a colleague who had tried to sell them without telling the owner. Such instances would lead to vociferous verbal arguments at the least, and in one case the owner actually wanted to call the police to punish the thief – but at the last moment he reconsidered, as the police were known not to be very helpful and might cause even more trouble at the kijiweni. In the many small deals the shoe vendors made to entrust one another with one or two pairs of shoes to be sold on commission (see Chapter 7), it often happened that these arrangements resulted in fights about the price that had been fixed for the sale. The general inclination to take advantage of one another was well known and expected among the vendors. Occasional conflicts were staged very vocally, sometimes verging on physical assault. But as there was no one among the shoe vendors in a position to pass judgement over an accused perpetrator’s misconduct, such fights eventually fizzled out without being resolved. Even in cases of more substantial and obvious fraud, there did not seem to be any way of resolving or even any attempt to resolve the conflict. When the cousins Abdul and Saidi, for instance, decided to cooperate by pooling their funds to enlarge their business, eventually Saidi discovered that Abdul had kept a considerable part

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of their joint profits for himself. The fraud materialised quite visibly in the form of a heap of bricks on the small plot of land outside of town where Abdul wanted to build a room for his family. Abdul’s plot was right next to that of Saidi, who had been planning the same move but had not yet saved enough money to buy bricks. Despite this apparent deception, however, the two did not break off ties with one another or even get into a serious fight, although their cooperation ended instantly. When I asked Saidi about the conflict, he just shrugged and told me he could not start a fight about it with Abdul; such conflicts and contradictions, it seemed, were endured as a part of their social interactions and relationships. They were relatives, he said, they could not let go of one another.

3 The micro-politics of sociality among Wayao street vendors For the Wayao street vendors, the complex and intimate social relations they maintained as fellow villagers, Wayao and kinsmen caused claustrophobic sentiments among them. They felt stuck in a kind of gridlock, incapable of making it on their own, yet rejecting the idea of depending on one another (Malefakis 2018). Because of their shared past in the village, their intimate kinship relations and the all-encompassing mutual knowledge, they felt unable to trust one another. Instead of providing a basis for reciprocal trust (see Corsin Jiménez 2011: 178, 181), the transparency they attributed to their social relations had flipped into mutual disrespect, vilification and mistrust. The claustrophobic sentiment attached to their intimate social relations was amplified by the city’s dense social environment – particularly by the physical confinement of the kijiweni, which fostered mutual surveillance and an air of suspicion. The shoe vendors’ negative associations with their close social relations were expressed most dramatically as accusations of uchawi (Swahili: witchcraft).1 Some of them blamed their colleagues for their own inability to succeed in business and they expressed their frustration through the idiom of uchawi. Paradoxically, however, the notion of uchawi among the Wayao street vendors can be analysed following two quite contradictory directions: Accusations of uchawi were moral commentaries on individualistic aspirations in situations where such ambitions were negatively valued due to a moral maxim of sameness. The flip-side of this perspective, however, is the fact that uchawi accusations hurled at individuals who were not a priori included in the sociality of fellow villagers and ethnic kinsmen had an integrating effect, as they marked the social relationship to such individuals as significant and relevant. As an illustration of the first way to approach uchawi as a negative ‘syndrome of belonging’ (Geschiere 2003: 44), I detail below

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the story of Rahim. In his biographical narrative, Rahim situated himself within a tight web of relationships at the kijiweni that were fraught with intimate mutual knowledge. He had involuntarily severed his relationships with his family in his home village, and thus his colleagues at the kijiweni now constituted the sole sociality to which he depicted himself as belonging. His story nevertheless takes an interesting twist when he blames his hopelessness and his being stuck at the kijiweni on his colleagues and fellow Wayao who (he claimed) sought to prevent his individual success by using ‘dirty magic’ against him. For the second approach to uchawi as an ‘index of belonging’, I introduce Patrick, a shoe vendor who did not share the ethnic identity, local origin and history of migration with the Wayao at the kijiweni. He was therefore not part of the web of tight, complex relationships among them from the outset. Patrick was quite a successful shoe vendor, at times at least, and his success became obvious to his colleagues at the kijiweni in the form of the many pairs of shoes he prepared in their backyard. Many of the less fortunate shoe vendors profited from his success when he gave them pairs of shoes to sell in the streets on commission. Accusing Patrick of using uchawi implicitly reminded him of the value the Wayao vendors placed on their relationship with him as someone who gave them support in the form of merchandise. Rather than expressing their wish to distance themselves from the illicit use of uchawi, such allegations, conversely, stressed the significance the others attributed to their relationship with Patrick by integrating him into the discourse on morality among the Wayao at the kijiweni. Anthropological research on witchcraft, magic and sorcery in African contexts has produced a vast corpus of literature dealing with such diverse theoretical matters as the cultural construction of rationality (Evans-Pritchard 1965, 1978; Heinz 1997; Horton 1967, 1993; Kapferer 2003; Tambiah 1984) and, more recently, witchcraft discourses in relation to social, material and cultural changes in the wake of ‘modernisation’ and ‘globalisation’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993, 1999; Geschiere 1997; Green and Mesaki 2005; Sanders 2003, 2006). However, the reason I discuss ideas about uchawi among the shoe vendors is not related to the epistemological dimension of witchcraft beliefs or their relations to discourses on and experiences



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of modernity and tradition. Rather, I am interested in the micropolitical significance of uchawi accusations as an attribution by which belonging and dependence were evaluated but also constructed among the shoe vendors. I understand such accusations in the context of close social proximity (as found at the kijiweni) as a kind of ‘social diagnostic’ (Moore and Sanders 2006: 20) that comments on moral issues such as anxieties over ‘illicit accumulation’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). In so doing, I take up an idea from the classical literature on witchcraft that relates witchcraft beliefs and accusations to morals and systems of values in a society. In his landmark study of Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande (originally published in 1937), Evans-Pritchard (1978) argued that the Azande’s beliefs in the efficaciousness of witchcraft, divination and magic was not a matter of a supposedly ‘pre-logical mentality’ (Lévy-Bruhl 1978) but was instead a ‘normative ideational system’ (Tambiah 1984: 92) that was socially constructed and existed side by side with a notion of ‘natural’ causation comparable to our own, Western way of thinking (see Evans-Pritchard 1978: 74). According to Evans-Pritchard (1978: 69), the Azande would acknowledge a plurality of causations in the case of an unfortunate event, and would resort to the idiom of witchcraft and magic only in situations that were of particular social and moral significance. In the case of an unfortunate event, such as a hunting accident with fatal consequences, the Azande understood very well that it was, for example, a spear gone astray that had injured the victim. But, they claimed, the injury would not have been fatal, had it not been for the ‘second spear’ (Evans-Pritchard 1978: 71), the witchcraft involved in the chain of events, that led to the death of the unfortunate hunter. However, the thrower of the ‘second spear’ was not believed to be a creature from the underworld but rather a living person, maybe a neighbour or even a relative, who had been in some kind of conflict with the victim. The negative emotions that the alleged culprit felt towards the victim, the Azande believed (according to Evans-Pritchard), manifested themselves in a force that he calls ‘witchcraft’, a force that ultimately caused the accident to be fatal. According to Evans-Pritchard (1978: 98), therefore, what the Azande implicitly invoked when they alluded to witchcraft in situations of crisis and bad fortune were their ‘moral rules’. Accusing a person of being a witch was to accuse them of ‘anti-social sentiments’

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(Evans-Pritchard 1978: 98). Witchcraft among the Azande was not only a theory of causation but also a theory of morality, entailing ethics that condemned anti-social sentiments such as envy, greed and hatred (Multhaupt 1990: 25). Taking up this particular perspective on witchcraft, uchawi accusations among the shoe vendors may also be understood as constituting commentaries on an individual’s conduct that deviates or contradicts a shared value system. For instance, an individual’s ambition to outperform his colleagues in business would contradict the shared assumption of their fundamental sameness, as expressed in their narrative of egalitarianism. According to this idea, any individual success would be suspicious, as all the colleagues were believed to be equally ill-equipped to succeed in the city. Accusations of uchawi occurred against the narrative of egalitarianism that rendered economic life at the kijiweni a zero-sum equation (see Sanders 2006: 170): One individual’s outstanding success would diminish the chances for success of the others. Thus, when the shoe vendors commented on a colleague’s performance in the market as being enhanced by the illicit means of uchawi, they were not only making a comment on his ‘magically’ mediated relation to the market, but also on his relationship to them. They accused him of claiming more for himself than was legitimate, of striving for pre-eminence when he really should have stayed in line with his colleagues. However, such accusations only make sense if both the accusers and the accused participate in a shared set of values that they invoke in their social relationships and interactions. As Evans-Pritchard has argued for the Azande, witchcraft accusations among the shoe vendors were clearly related to morality and social sentiment, or rather to immoral resentments such as envy, greed and jealousy. Witchcraft as resentment presupposes concrete social relationships lived in close spatial proximity (Evans-Pritchard 1978: 95) that allow for continuous interactions in which all those involved can invoke shared notions of proper conduct or solidarity (Multhaupt 1990: 92). In this perspective, witchcraft accusations presuppose that the accused can legitimately be called to order, as the social relationships the accusers and the accused have involve shared moralities that the accused is compelled to follow. If witchcraft accusations are grounded in a shared system of values and a shared morality, such accusations can indeed be seen



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as ‘indexes of social relations’, as Max Marwick (1952: 120) claimed (and see Multhaupt 1990: 26). Marwick followed Evans-Pritchard in the assumption that ideas of witchcraft are a ‘function of personal relations’ (Evans-Pritchard 1978: 95; quoted in Marwick 1952: 124). In his study of The Social Context of Cewa Witch Beliefs, he argued that witchcraft gossip and accusations particularly hinted at tensions in social relationships. Furthermore, because in most societies there are many institutions that regulate personal relationships, witchcraft beliefs and accusations being only one of them, these beliefs and accusations should therefore be understood as a function of the ‘effectiveness of the social institutions for regulating these relations and for harmlessly discharging any tensions that may arise from them’ (Marwick 1952: 125). Among the Cewa, he argued, witchcraft accusations only occurred when there were ‘no other adequate institutionalized outlets’ for tensions in social relationships (Marwick 1952: 130). Expanding our perspective beyond immediate personal relationships, however, Marwick still related his discussion of Cewa witchcraft beliefs to the overall question of to what ‘extent [they] maintain the social structure’ under study (Marwick 1952: 120). While a structural framework for understanding such a dynamic matter as social relations limits our analysis, as Victor Turner (1986: 112–113) argued (and see Multhaupt 1990: 28), it is worth noting that for the shoe vendors at the kijiweni, accusations of uchawi actually aimed at the restoration of a moral equilibrium as outlined in their narrative of sameness – an equilibrium that many of them in fact regarded as one of the problems that kept them from successfully adapting to the dynamic and ever-changing social environment of the city. While uchawi accusations were a means to resolve the cognitive dissonance of witnessing the business success of a fellow vendor who was supposed to be equally unable to succeed in the city, such accusations did not hint at ‘dissociative processes’ (Marwick 1952: 126) such as conflict and tension, ultimately resulting in the ‘dissolution of social relations which become redundant as lineage segmentation proceeds’ (Marwick 1952: 232). As I will show in this chapter, uchawi accusations were indeed discursive means by which social relationships were created and shaped in a particular way rather than dissolved and ruptured; they called on the accused individuals to subjugate themselves to the shared narrative of morality and immorality that was so important for the sociality of the shoe

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vendors. As a particular element in the larger narrative of their sociality, uchawi was embedded in their idea of their general sameness and egalitarianism. But, as I will argue, uchawi gossip and accusations were not only derived from that narrative of sameness. The idea of uchawi was also employed for its persuasive power, prompting individuals to assume their proper part in the narrative and to comply with the demands that it placed on them, even if they did not have a part in the story in the first place.

Sources of uchawi For the Wayao vendors, uchawi was closely connected to notions of locality, kinship and belonging. In many conversations and interviews, my interlocutors would point out the fact that their colleagues and fellow Wayao would use their occasional visits to their rural homes to consult their local mganga (Swahili: ‘traditional healer’). There they would obtain medicines for protection from uchawi and hirizi, lucky charms that were used for specific purposes, in their case mostly business success. In the villages, uchawi was closely related to social proximity and kinship. Similar to what Peter Geschiere (2003) reports for the Maka of Cameroon, the Wayao viewed close kinship relationships as a particularly potent source of uchawi powers. For the Wayao vendors, uchawi was not only the ‘dark side of kinship’ (Geschiere 2003), but kinship relationships were actually believed to be the currency that wachawi (practitioners of uchawi) could trade for their extraordinary powers, as a story I heard in the village of Miungo illustrates. When I visited Miungo, the home village of the majority of the shoe vendors, together with Saidi in early 2012, one evening his mother told us a story that provides a good example of how the Wayao’s notion of uchawi was tightly connected to kinship. During the day, she told us, she had seen a man in the fields around the village who, she claimed, had died several days before. The reason he came back as a ghost was the circumstances of his death: He had been killed by his own mother, who was known to be a mchawi. The wachawi, Saidi explained, adding to his mother’s story, would frequently meet in nightly conspiratory gatherings in order to renew their powers. During these meetings, one of the participating wachawi



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would have to sacrifice one of their close kin, offering their soul and body to the congregation in order to obtain new uchawi powers. It was in such a meeting, I was told, that the death of the man was sealed. His mother killed him by secretly feeding uchawi medicine to him. In the meantime, however, the other wachawi had changed their minds and did not accept her sacrifice. They therefore cursed her undead son to haunt the village. In order to comply with the congregation’s demands, the story went on, the old lady ordered one of her other adult sons, who was living in Dar es Salaam, to come visit her in the village. She was secretly planning to sacrifice him to the congregation of wachawi as well, Saidi’s mother told us, but the son became suspicious and refused to visit his mother. Eventually, it was the mchawi herself who was afflicted by the evil energies she and her colleagues were trying to invoke: The old lady was now very sick, and the villagers expected her to die soon. This narrative strikingly resembles what Geschiere (2003: 43) reports on the Maka in Cameroon, where ‘“[w]itches” were supposed to have a special hold over their relatives and everyone agreed that the djambe le njaw (“witchcraft of the house”) was the most dangerous one’. The association of kinship not with solidarity, benign reciprocity or altruism but instead with the malevolent powers of witchcraft held true for the Wayao as well, both in their home villages and at their kijiweni in downtown Dar es Salaam. Because the social proximity of their relationships was often experienced as an inhibiting factor for their personal success in life, the notion of uchawi was frequently applied in order to make sense of and to formulate a socially relevant explanation for bad luck. As the story of Rahim below shows, the close interrelatedness of the shoe vendors, their relationships as relatives, fellow villagers, fellow Wayao, neighbours and colleagues were fraught with ambiguity, as these close relationships and the intimate knowledge of one another could easily flip into negative attitudes, attitudes for which uchawi accusations were a condensed symbolic token.

Pinned down by ‘dirty magic’: the story of Rahim Rahim was one of the oldest vendors at the kijiweni. Born in 1969 in Newala, Masasi, he and his family moved to Miungo when he was twelve years old. He had come to Dar es Salaam in 1995 and had

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been one of the first street vendors at the kijiweni. ‘I am like a native to this place [the kijiweni]. We created this place for the others. If it weren’t for us, I don’t know where they would be now’, he summarised his rootedness at the kijiweni. Many of the currently active shoe vendors, he claimed, had been introduced to the business by him, notably his two younger brothers. He had come to Dar es Salaam with aspirations similar to those of many other youths, to ‘find a life’.2 He had initially had considerable economic success selling electric equipment in the streets of downtown Dar es Salaam. But the money he made went to support a drinking habit that he had formed soon after his arrival in the city. ‘I squandered my life in those years’, he said with regret. His wife had left him some years ago, taking their child, and ever since he had lived the life of a msela, a bachelor and loner. He had no capital of his own and depended completely on two or three individuals among his colleagues to give shoes to him on commission. Tall and skinny, with a cheap pair of sunglasses covering his glazed-over eyes, he agreed to be interviewed on the staircase in the backyard at the kijiweni one day. His voice hoarse from cigarettes and cheap spirits sold in little plastic bags, he described his intimate relationships with his colleagues at the kijiweni: I’m telling you, these kids, they know me inside out. That’s how well they know me. Even if by bad luck I drop dead today, they would take care of my corpse and bring it home to my village. And they wouldn’t have to ask the way! It’s straight to my mother’s house. You see? And if they had a problem, I would go straight to their mother’s home. I know them, I know them completely.3

Rahim, I should add, had an ambivalent relationship with his home village. Since the day he had left Miungo in 1995, he had never returned to visit his mother. He elaborately explained to me how exhausting and time-consuming the journey from Dar es Salaam to Miungo had been in the past: the road to the regional town of Masasi had not been paved at the time, and crossing the Rufiji River on the way south was a matter of days or even weeks, as the ferry’s schedule was unreliable. Probably there was yet another reason that was nagging at Rahim’s conscience. Rahim had followed the lure of the city, but after almost



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twenty years in Dar es Salaam, he still had nothing to show for it. Travelling to Miungo posed a financial problem, as he was unable to afford the bus fare, let alone bring material gifts to his mother and relatives at home. Apart from the shame this would bring on him, it seemed to me that it was his sincere wish to take care of his mother financially and materially, and his inability to fulfil this desire seemed to frustrate him. If I go back, I would have to prepare myself a bit. I want to take care of my mother’s living conditions. I would want her to move into another house. The house she’s been living in up to now only has a thatched roof. That’s what’s strangling my soul, and that’s why I stay here with these kids [at the kijiweni].

Rahim believed that there was no way he could return to his home village; that the maternal ties had been severed a long time ago. Considering his personal relationship to his village and his mother, along with a yearning for home and his sense of failure, what he said about his colleagues taking his dead body to his mother’s house can be understood as an expression of longing for home and of belonging to the sociality of the kijiweni. ‘These kids’ were the only family he had left. He imagined them one day carrying his corpse along the road he felt too embarrassed to travel while alive. That was how well they knew him, and that was how much he depended on them. However, as comforting as the idea might be to be surrounded by people who would take care of his dead body, in the interview Rahim did not linger on the subject for long, but instead went on to counter his melancholic depiction of his desire for longing and belonging with a statement showing the flip-side of his intimate relationships at the kijiweni. Those kids, when they came from the village, they were very humble. But now they already know the streets, they know how to make money. Their respect has declined. Do you see how they humiliate a grown-up like me? They look at me as if I have no brains. They know I am their elder, but they abase me. […] If God helps me find work, I will leave here and go to some other place.

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His desire to leave the kijiweni notwithstanding, Rahim was completely economically dependent on his social relationships there. Yet he strongly resented the fact that he was so closely enmeshed in relationships of dependence with his relatives: You know, when two or three people of the same kabila4 come together, respect will decline like three or four guys, respect will decline. Respect will decline, Alexi. […] So even if you gave me a million shillings to do business here, all the money would be lost here in no time. I would rather move to a different location and mix with people from other tribes, Wandengereko or Wazaramo. At least that would broaden my horizon and my business would thrive. So even if you gave me a million shillings to do business here, I would not stay. Even with Wasukuma, I could relax. But those kids here, they use mambo ya kiswahili.5 They’re walking with uchawi mchafu – with dirty magic, it’s very dangerous.

Rahim considered that a more heterogeneous social network in terms of ethnic background would have positive effects on his situation, blaming the ethnic homogeneity at the kijiweni for the waning respect he had experienced. Without making a direct statement about the causal relationship between close social proximity and the proliferation of uchawi, Rahim proceeded from explaining his intimate relationships with his peers to a general statement about the negative attitudes among members of his ethnic group, and then jumped to a conclusion that related those negative attitudes to practices of uchawi. According to Rahim, using uchawi to prevent another person’s financial progress was ‘typical’ of the way his relatives treated one another, in their home village as well as in the city. In their rural places of origin, he explained, uchawi was closely related to envy and disdain for fellow villagers’ economic success: This situation started with our elders, not with us, with the elders. […] Even if I could make some money today and returned to Miungo to start a business there, for instance, buying a grinding machine for corn, it wouldn’t work. Even if it was a brand-new machine, I would have to go and see a mganga before I bought it. You explain to him: I want to buy a machine and set



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it up at this or that place. He would come and prepare the place. That’s when the machine would work. […] People, they kill you, they hate you just like that. They hate you, they hate you, they hate you. They don’t want any progress.

The way in which Rahim depicted uchawi as occurring in situations where individual ambitions for advancement provoked envy among an individual’s peers resonates with the literature on witchcraft as a moral discourse in which ‘conspicuous successes’ (Geschiere 1997: 69), according to local ideology, need to be levelled out. In the hypothetical situation in which Rahim managed to succeed in business, he would prefer to change his business location, mingling with people outside his group of relatives and fellow Wayao, so that he could escape the watchful eyes of his colleagues in the backyard. But, entangled as he was in intimate social relationships at the kijiweni, the state of Rahim’s affairs was an open book to his peers. He felt entirely at their mercy. In the narrative he related to me about his life at the kijiweni, his colleagues would immediately see through all his attempts to achieve success, to break free from the confinement to which they had pinned him down, by means of uchawi. It is important to note here that their ‘dirty magic’ was not a means of terminating social relationships. Instead, as Rahim interpreted it, it was a way to pin him down in his unfortunate situation. He expressed the effects of the uchawi his peers used on him with a metaphor of detainment: ‘They locked me up here, those kids are keeping me down in this situation’, he said. That was the ‘dark side’ of social proximity as Rahim experienced it.

On the flip-side of uchawi: replicating kinship-like relations Although uchawi allegations were the dark side of the social intimacy Rahim experienced at the kijiweni, they also had the positive effect of an integrating force, by subjugating the accused to a moral narrative about kinship relations. Geschiere’s main argument is that witchcraft in Africa has too often been mistaken for a counterpoint to kinship, whereas it is, in fact, the ‘dark side of kinship’ (Geschiere 2003)

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– in other words, an integral element of it. Yet at the kijiweni, the uchawi discourse was not confined to kin or to members of a single ethnic group. As the previous discussion has shown, uchawi allegations occurred in social relationships that were particularly close and significant; therefore the most intimate ties (such as kinship relationships) were the most prone to such accusations. Inverting that argument, however, uchawi accusations outside intimate kinship relationships can be understood as exposing the perceived proximity and significance that actors attributed to their social relationship with the accused. Where the primary features of belonging – such as kinship, a shared ethnic identity or a shared local origin – were missing, the narrative of kinship relations nevertheless reached out to connect other individuals to the sociality by trying to include them in a discourse of morally appropriate conduct. This was the case when the social relationship with that individual was highly relevant for the group’s sociality. Thus, uchawi accusations marked a zone of significant social relationships, by subjugating the accused to the ‘code for conduct’ (Schneider 1968: 29) associated with relatives. In such instances, the ‘negative’ perception that a social relationship was infested with uchawi was turned into a positive evaluation of the significance of a social relationship. Patrick was an exceptional individual at the kijiweni in many respects. He was not a Mwyao from southern Tanzania, but had been born in the Kilimanjaro region in northern Tanzania and identified himself as a Mpare. Accordingly, his migration to Dar es Salaam followed a different route, both geographically and socially. He had not been introduced to the business of selling shoes by a relative from his home village but by a friend he had met in the city. This friend had initially taught him the business of selling shoes in the poorer residential areas known as uswahilini. After realising the different business potentials of the various areas of the city, Patrick and his friend moved their business from the poor outskirts into the more promising Central Business District in downtown Dar es Salaam, where both subsequently established themselves at the kijiweni and built relationships with their Wayao colleagues over the course of time. The relationships that Patrick maintained with his colleagues were therefore not something the vendors had nurtured from birth; instead, they had to be continuously created and maintained.



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Patrick did not a priori participate in the social imagination and narrative of transparency and egalitarianism that the Wayao vendors associated with being kin. While the narrative of kinship that the Wayao lived by made trustful relations for them impossible, Patrick was a trusted and admired confidant for many of them. Some of the Wayao told me that they thought Patrick listened to them seriously and was ready to give advice and, sometimes, substantial help in situations where they did not dare turn to their relatives. They suspected that their relatives would use their confessions against them, turn down their requests for help, and gossip behind their backs about the personal misfortunes and problems they had admitted. Most importantly, Patrick was the only shoe vendor at the kijiweni who frequently generated considerable profits, which he reinvested in his stock. He sometimes owned twenty or more pairs of shoes, which made it impossible for him to sell all of them by himself in the streets; even the most experienced shoe vendors could manage to carry only ten or eleven pairs in their hands. Patrick therefore often had to distribute some of his many pairs of shoes to his colleagues via winga arrangements (see Chapter 7). For unlucky vendors – particularly Rahim – he was a dependable source of credit in the form of merchandise. In fact, Patrick had established permanent lending relationships of commodity giver and taker with Rahim and two or three other vendors. Patrick’s success became obvious at the kijiweni when his shoes occupied most of the backyard areas that the vendors used to dry their shoes after washing them. They took up the entire surface of one or two large black plastic tanks and spread out over an adjoining staircase; they hung from lattice gates at the entrances of adjacent offices, provoking many colleagues passing in and out of the backyard in the morning to comment on his ostentatious display. They called him a mchawi, both behind his back and directly to his face. When Patrick heard this, however, he rejected it and stressed that his success was nothing more than the result of his astuteness in reinvesting his profits in his business. He argued that more pairs of shoes would yield larger profits and thus enable the continuous growth of his business. He said that only the Wayao believed that uchawi could influence such a simple matter as trade. According to him, uchawi had come to the kijiweni with the Wayao and pertained only to them.

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Accusing Patrick of using uchawi to increase his sales was not merely a moral commentary on his potentially antisocial aspirations for self-betterment. After all, his individual success was something many of the shoe vendors depended on. When they called him a mchawi, they were not so much reminding him of their aversion to individual ambition, but implicitly commenting on the value they placed on their relationships with him, as somebody who gave them moral support and credit in the form of merchandise. In this way, they reminded him to reinforce his relationships of solidarity with his colleagues by letting them share in his success. The uchawi discourse at the kijiweni thus also became a discourse of belonging, as it commented on the fact that the accused was worthy of scrutiny, indicating that relationships with him were particularly important to the others. Outperforming his peers amounted to distancing himself from them, with the consequence that the group might lose the benefits of being related to him. Calling him a mchawi discursively put pressure on him to distribute his surplus success to the group. Rather than expressing their wish to distance themselves from the illicit use of uchawi, such allegations stressed the significance the others attributed to their relationship with Patrick. Among the Wayao at the kijiweni, the notion of uchawi was part of a narrative by which the shoe vendors made sense of their current situation in the city, a situation marked by continuous struggles in the harsh business of street vending. Since, according to their self-ascription, they all were ill-equipped for life in the city, as their minds ‘still revolved around the village’, none of them was believed to be capable of achieving any success in business unless they employed illicit means. Uchawi accusations thus became a way of reintegrating the counter-intuitive empirical observation that some vendors indeed enjoyed some temporary success into the narrative of ‘being Mwyao’. Notably, uchawi accusations were not used to contest relationships with individuals who had displayed inappropriate conduct. As the case of Rahim has shown, uchawi here was understood as the means by which his peers had locked him into an unlucky situation in which he was kept dependent on their goodwill. In the case of Patrick, by calling him a mchawi, the Wayao implicitly attributed to him the characteristics they considered to be typical of a successful Mwyao, namely that he had cheated by using uchawi; they thereby



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subjugated him to their moral maxim of egalitarianism. In this way, the proliferation of uchawi accusations at the kijiweni may have quite a different significance for the sociality under study than merely hinting at anxieties and envy among the shoe vendors. As part of a shared narrative that was an inherent dimension of their sociality, uchawi allegations were attempts to enter into a conversation that evolved from an accusation of illicit individual aspirations into a broader discourse about belonging and the meanings of kinship relations. Uchawi accusations were not about the revocation of dysfunctional social relationships, but rather about their continuation as despised, yet indispensable, resources that the vendors needed to maintain in order to earn a living on the streets. Kinship relations at the kijiweni were full of contradictions. While the shoe vendors were bound together through tight and complex social relations as kinsmen, Wayao, fellow villagers, colleagues and neighbours, their close social proximity frequently flipped into a disintegrative social force that blew them apart. However, the negative sentiments of mistrust, jealousy and disdain that found their most dramatic expression in uchawi accusations were not opposed to an otherwise harmonious notion of being related to one another. In fact, they sprang from the same sources as the binding forces of sociality. Thus, paradoxically, such allegations that, at first glance, appeared to be directed at the disassociation of social relations ultimately revealed an integrative social force.

4 Too familiar to trust: a paradox of social proximity Without the general trust that people have in each other, society itself would disintegrate, for very few relationships are based entirely upon what is known with certainty about another person. (Simmel 1978: 178–179)

Trust is considered by many social theorists to be the ‘social glue’ that keeps society from disintegrating. As Georg Simmel in the introductory quote states, trust is often believed to substitute for incomplete or ‘uncertain’ knowledge. As I will show with reference to the Wayao shoe vendors, however, the relationship between levels of mutual knowledge and trust is a bit more complex than this short quote suggests. I will argue that trustful relationships, rather than bridging incomplete mutual knowledge, actually require a degree of intransparency that allows actors to bridge it by giving trust. Where, on the other hand, there are no gaps in what actors know about each other, as was the case with the Wayao vendors, trust may not simply be unnecessary, but impossible. Without trust in their colleagues, the shoe vendors considered themselves to be struggling on their own, day in, day out. Despite many small instances of entrustment among the shoe vendors at the kijiweni that created short-lived cooperation on a daily basis, a general lack of trust was considered by many of them to be the problem that prohibited them from cooperating more substantially and durably and thus to improve their overall economic situation. In this chapter I will discuss the ‘case of the bank account’ to show how the narrative construction of sociality, based on an egalitarian moral maxim prohibited the creation of trustful relations among the shoe vendors. The Wayao vendors’ notion of who they were, with all their negative self-attributions, thus became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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The case of the bank account Not all of the Wayao preferred to fend for themselves. Some of them had realised that by joining forces they might better their overall situation much more easily than by each of them struggling individually. There had been some initiatives by individual shoe vendors who had tried to convince their colleagues to cooperate more substantially, to join forces and merge their businesses and thus to increase their profits. One of the vendors, Abdul, once told me how he had called on his colleagues at the kijiweni to pool part of their profits in a shared bank account in order to create a large stock of capital that, after a few years, would allow them to switch to a more lucrative line of business from which all participating colleagues would benefit. Underlying his initiative was his awareness of the fact that, whether they liked it or not, most of his colleagues had been working in close proximity at the kijiweni for many years. But due to their lack of foresight, he explained, they had failed to establish any kind of continuing cooperation. In his opinion, if they had established such cooperation back in the years when they were starting out, by the time we were talking, they would already have improved their overall situation considerably. The kind of long-term cooperation he proposed, however, seemed inconceivable for most of the shoe vendors. Abdul had proposed his idea of a joint bank account twice to his colleagues at the kijiweni. But despite their similar experiences of a precarious life determined by little capital and small profit margins that did not allow them to substantially plan ahead and thus to stabilise their social situation, both times his colleagues rejected the idea, based on the argument that such trustful collaboration was inconceivable for a group of Wayao. Abdul had argued that their individual struggling for a livelihood would get them nowhere, and that their best chance to improve their situation would be to organise themselves as a kikundi or group and to establish a system in which each of them would regularly deposit a small amount of money into a joint bank account. The money thus accumulated over a few months or years could serve as a reserve fund for personal emergency situations and as a capital stock that would allow them to jointly expand their business endeavours. Abdul had already opened a personal bank account himself and argued that the banks’ requirements were not burdensome. The



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crucial point, however, was that they would have had to choose two individuals among them who would be authorised to deposit and withdraw money from the account. ‘We could have chosen whomever we wanted to send to the bank, but that would have required us to trust one another, to build trust’, he told me.1 When Abdul suggested the plan to his colleagues at the kijiweni, except for two or three of his closer friends, most of his colleagues preferred to sit back and wait for someone else to come forward. And those who did come forward, to Abdul’s frustration, did not support the idea. He depicted the situation at the kijiweni as a mess, vendors shouting over one another, none of them commenting positively on Abdul’s idea. Most of his colleagues expressed very negative attitudes toward the plan, and it seemed to him as though others who had not really made up their minds were influenced by their colleagues’ strident opinions. The gist of their reaction was that they preferred to go on fending for themselves, earning their own money and spending it according to their own needs, rather than joining any kind of group that would require them to entrust their hard-earned money to a bank account to which, most significantly, only two of them would have access. When I discussed the matter with Abdul, his cousin Saidi, and their colleague Abu, who had been among the handful of supporters, they related their colleagues’ rejection of the plan to the fact that it had been one of them who had proposed it; this made it extremely unlikely for the colleagues to take the proposal seriously, as Abdul reflected: Because they see that it’s me who is talking to them, and they know the circumstances in which I live, they just go: ‘Ah! Let him talk. What kind of life does he live? On what grounds does he want to give us advice?’2

Saidi commented in a similar vein: If it was me who made a proposal, like, ‘Hey Abu, or Alexis, or Abdul, I have this or that idea in my mind, let’s try this or that’, they would not listen to the words I speak but would just say, ‘Ah! This guy, Saidi, he can’t tell me anything!’ […] It was the same with Abdul’s idea: They didn’t take it seriously because it

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was Abdul who had proposed it. But if it had been a member of parliament or a minister who had come and talked like that, they would have listened and taken it seriously. But since it was Abdul, they just ridiculed the whole idea.

An egalitarian maxim among the Wayao, which was based in a narrative according to which none of them was well-equipped for urban life, impeded a joint endeavour that would require them to trust one another and particularly to trust one of them sufficiently to take the lead in such an enterprise. As Saidi further elaborated: All in all, when it comes to trusting one another, we have the problem that … I know Abdul, Abdul knows me, and I know Abu [referring to his two colleagues present at the interview]. So it’s like, ‘Ah! Abu is not capable of taking care of my money. He is not capable of leading me’. You see? Because I can say Abdul cannot lead me, and Abdul can say that I cannot lead him. […] There is this kind of individualistic stance among us, like I can’t trust Abu, Abu can’t trust Abdul, and Abdul can’t trust me. And that accounts for a lot of things here.

The proponent of the idea was already suspect because he was a colleague, and thus the proposed project was even more suspect – namely, the idea that only one or two of them would be authorised according to the bank’s regulations to access the money that all of them were supposed to contribute from their meagre profits. To give part of their hard-earned money in trust to one or two of their colleagues was apparently inconceivable for most of them; the few colleagues who were reluctant to immediately react to the proposal, Abdul recounted, were ultimately persuaded by those colleagues who had loudly pointed out the downsides of the project, claiming that none of the colleagues present was eligible to take care of their money on their behalf. Thus, while the vendors inclined to join the proposed project might have been pondering its pros and cons, their more vociferous colleagues discouraged their trust by reminding them of the general incapacity of any of them to either lead the group or to be trusted. The problem of trust here was not a matter of filling in the gaps in what was possibly knowable about the others; on the contrary, any burgeoning nucleus of trust seemed to have been



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checked by the awareness of ‘how they were’. Understood in this way, trust is not an affective way of relating to others, but rather an epistemic category that entails forms of knowing and not-knowing, confiding and believing, imagining and hypothesising (see UllmanMargalit 2004: 66).

Theories of trust While trust is often implicit and rarely discussed among social actors (except in cases of breaches of trust), it is probably one of the most powerful imaginaries people attribute to their social relationships. To interact with one another ‘as if’ we knew what the outcome of the interaction would be is arguably the basis of much of our everyday interactions. In this respect, ‘all social life is “fictional” and the fictions needed for trust are only one part of this’ (Möllering 2006: 114). All of our interactions and communications, it can be argued, are built on the hypothesis that our partners will not do something completely out of line and hence compromise our interactions, communications and the joint definition of the situation in general. The fact that we need to hypothesise about our partners’ future conduct is due to the simple truth that we cannot foresee the future; thus, in order to continue to interact, we need to pre-empt the future by trusting others (Luhmann 1979: 24–31). The problem of knowing and not-knowing as it pertains to trust is discussed in some of the vast sociological literature on the topic of trust (Gambetta 1988; Hardin 1996; Luhmann 1979; Möllering 2006; Seligman 1997) with reference to the growing functional differentiation between societies in the wake of ‘modernisation’, ‘[t]he breakup of local, territorial, and, crucially, primordial ties that accompanied Europe’s entry into the modern era’ (Seligman 1997: 15; cf. Giddens 1996: 319). In this perspective, trust became more and more necessary because ‘traditional’ modes of relationality fell apart under the influence of ‘modernity’. Where kinship and status no longer guaranteed durable and reliable relationships, such accounts assume, people were prompted to build trust in more abstract forms of relationality, such as the social, economic or political institutions and organisations of the modern nationstate. In this evolutionary line of argument, change from traditional

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to modern societies is coterminous with growing complexity and places excessive demands (Überforderung) on individuals who must select from a growing number of possibilities that, at some point, exceeds their capacity to evaluate each one (Luhmann 1979). At this point, Luhmann (1979: 24–31) argues, trust becomes a ‘mechanism for the reduction of social complexity’: where division of labour and growing complexity entails a ‘division of knowledge’ (Corsín Jiménez 2011: 178), trust is the epistemic tool that bridges the gap of what is happening, what can be known about it, and what needs to be known in order to do what has to be done. Even though this is largely related to notions of trust in societal institutions under conditions of growing complexity, trust in this literature is nevertheless conceptualised in a way that is also interesting for the study of social imaginations as integral parts of sociality: trust is conceived of as an epistemic category that is related in specific ways to forms of knowing and not-knowing.

Trust among self-organised workers The notion of trust in social relations among rural migrants in the informal economy of an African city has been discussed by the anthropologist Keith Hart (1988) with reference to Frafras in Accra, Ghana, in the late 1960s. The discussion Hart presents is a relevant point of reference for the argument I make here about trust as an epistemic operation that ultimately involves the blanking out or ignoring of incomplete knowledge. According to Hart, Frafra migrants had three different modes of relationality that they could use to forge economic relations, and each of them entailed a different form of knowing about one another: kinship, entailing statuses typical of ‘traditional’ ideology and practice; contracts, which Hart (1988: 178) understood as the antithesis of kinship, implying the possibility of legal sanctions through the ‘modern’ state; and the ‘free-floating social relationships formed by choice in the expectations of mutuality’, neutrally described as associations, in more positive terms, friendship, which Hart (1988: 178) inferred as ‘the negotiated order of free individuals joined by affection and shared experience rather than by legal sanction or the ties of blood’.



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Hart (1988: 187) suggested that the relational patterns and role expectations that kinship relationships involve are based on a form of knowing that he labels as ‘faith’: it requires no hard evidence but is an emotionally charged, unquestioning acceptance. In thus idealised kinship relationships, individuals do not need to know a relative’s interests in an interaction or competence to accomplish their part of the agreement. This lack of knowledge is compensated by the positive affection that comes with ties of blood, inhibiting either party from enforcing their own interests to the detriment of the other. As Hart (1988: 178) argued, in the new urban environment of the Frafra migrants this customary morality no longer functioned properly and therefore did not provide a reliable context for social relationships, because important authorities safeguarding the ‘certain obligations of birth and community’ were not present in Accra. As a consequence, ‘Frafra migrants [lost] faith in their traditions as a viable framework for urban economic life’ (Hart 1988: 178). However, the fact that Hart invoked the decline of traditional authority in Accra as a reason why the Frafras lost faith in their kinship relationships somehow seems to contradict his concept of faith as affectivity making up for a lack of knowledge. It seems instead as though the traditional authorities were required to safeguard the arrangements the Frafras entered into on the basis of kinship relationships by means of the power they exerted over them, and because they were not present in the city, the Frafras could not invoke this authority when interacting with their relatives. Arguably, the power traditional authorities exert over kin and community implies a quite different kind of knowledge and expectations than what Hart labels as ‘faith’. With reference to the Wayao at the kijiweni, it becomes clear that generally associating kinship with positive affection is problematic, even for the purpose of analytic clarity. If, as Hart argues, Frafra kinship relations were the locus of faithful obligations, the Wayao in the present study associated very different ideas with their kinship relationships. As has become evident, kinship for the Wayao was a highly ambivalent arena in which notions of dependence and reciprocity and feelings of envy, contempt and suspicion were continually and simultaneously invoked. Equating kinship a priori with a positive emotional charge that by way of unquestioned faith would eliminate doubts about one another would paint a misleading picture of the situation. For the Wayao, kinship came with a quite different set of

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imaginations and evaluations of social relationships that, far from engendering blind faith, instead promoted doubt and mistrust. At the other pole of Hart’s continuum, contracts are associated with confidence, a form of knowing on the basis of available ‘good evidence’ that renders obsolete any recourse to emotion and affect to make up for a lack of knowledge (Hart 1988: 187). In the case of the Frafras, when kinship relationships were no longer reliable in Accra, the ‘contractual ethos of the civil society’ (Hart 1988: 189) that the city represented could not offer a stable base for relationships because ‘[t]he Frafras have not been socialized to make and keep contracts of this sort’ (Hart 1988: 189), while the sanctioning force of ‘[s]tate law does not apply except in the form of occasional punishment’ (Hart 1988: 189). The same may apparently be said about the shoe vendors at the kijiweni: they had no effective means of sanctioning their quasi-contractual arrangements (such as selling shoes on commission, see Chapter 7), and appealing to the police was regarded as a bad idea, since the authorities’ lack of sympathy for the street vendors’ affairs was notorious. For the Wayao, as for the Frafras, the police were agents they preferred to avoid in their daily affairs.Yet for the Wayao at the kijiweni, the sharp distinction between arrangements of a contractual kind and those based on kinship relationships can only be an analytical one. Even their quasi-contractual arrangements involved their kinship relationships, since virtually all their colleagues were simultaneously their relatives of one sort or another. For the purpose of his argument, Hart opposes faith/ kinship and confidence/contract, but in the real-life situations at the kijiweni, these two elements were always intertwined. Where both contractual relationships and relationships based on kinship were problematic for the Frafras, Hart (1988: 189) argues, they had to establish ‘free-floating associations’ based on ‘some reciprocal understanding, where interest and risk are negotiated within relations formed by shared experience (even secrets), by love, knowledge, choice’. Hart associates this form of relationality with trust, which he situates analytically in the middle of the continuum spanning from faith to confidence. In the gap between faith and confidence, ‘trust is located in the no man’s land between status and contract, the poles of primitive and modern society in evolutionary theory’ (Hart 1988: 188). At this point, Hart’s argument about trust being ‘in between’ traditional and modern forms of sociality



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seems to make advances to the sociological discourse on trust in modernising societies briefly outlined above. But it is not only the evolutionary overtones that are interesting (yet irritating) in Hart’s remarks. His notion of the ‘no man’s land’ also implies that trust is a feature of social relationships ‘betwixt and between’ the poles of his continuum. In the absence of better or more reliable patterns of relationality, such as those represented by kinship or contractual exchanges, the Frafras faute de mieux (Hart 1988: 189) had to rely on relationships built on trust. Thus, while Hart quite explicitly explains the forms of knowing involved in faith (little knowledge compensated by positive affection) and confidence (knowing hard facts and no affection), he nevertheless remains unclear what exactly the epistemic operations of trust were for the Frafras, except that they involved some kind of negotiation of an understanding about one another’s interests that was conducted on the basis of a certain kind of shared experience. Hart’s argument is therefore much in line with the ‘classical’ perspective on trust in much of the sociological literature: it is in situations marked by ‘weak inductive knowledge’ (Simmel 1978: 179) and an absence of solid evidence or proof that trust becomes vital. Fragmented knowledge about the initial situation, in combination with an awareness of the agency of all parties involved and their potential for ‘betrayal’ and ‘defection’ (Gambetta 1988: 218–219), makes it necessary to leap ‘across the gorge of the unknowable from the land of interpretation into the land of expectation’ (Möllering 2001: 412). Yet what Hart does not specify is how exactly that leap across the gorge is accomplished.

Opacity and trust According to Christoph Möllering, the creation of trust is the result of people’s interpretation of the reality they experience. Interpretation leads to an expectation of how to act and how partners in interaction will react. Trust, he argues, must not be confounded either with the interpretations themselves or with their effects (i.e. acting in accordance with certain expectations); in fact, it is situated in between the two, bridging the gap between interpretation and expectation. Möllering (2001: 405) understands this linking bridge as a cognitive

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capacity, a concept that has already been targeted by Simmel (1978: 179) when he introduced the ‘element of socio-psychological quasireligious faith’ to his discussion of trust. According to Möllering, the epistemic operation at work in trust is the ‘suspension’ of absent knowledge in order to span the distance between interpretation and expectation. By means of suspension, actors create simplified illusions of reality in which certain rationally possible futures are ruled out (Möllering 2006: 112) while others are amplified. This conceptualisation of suspensions rests on the idea that certain aspects of social relationships and encounters will always remain more or less opaque. Individuals can only ever approximate what they know about others, their interests and their competences. In other words, there always remain aspects that are unknown but that need to be filled in using imaginations based on interpretations and experiences of reality. In this way, trust can be understood as an epistemic operation by which what is not knowable with certainty, the ‘twilight zone’ of inter-subjective encounters, must be entirely ignored, nullified or at the least ‘argued away’ to the point where the other’s scope of agency is minimised so that individuals can build ‘favourable expectations’ with regard to the future. This view of trust as an epistemic operation differs notably from other conceptions of trust in which it necessitates ‘considerable knowledge’ (Cook et al. 2005: 4), even ‘[r]obust knowledge, of the kind that can be trusted’ (Corsin Jiménez 2011: 178), or ‘appropriate levels of transparency’ (Corsin Jiménez 2011: 181). As an epistemic operation, trust is actually the creation of intransparency, whereby individuals hide from themselves what cannot be known with certainty. However, this operation of trust presupposes ‘patches of the unknown’ in actors’ mental representation of the other. If the ideas individuals have about the other were entirely transparent and if their knowledge of the other could be complete, such an operation would not be necessary; it might even be impossible, as the case of the Wayao suggests. For the Wayao at the kijiweni who were listening to Abdul’s suggestion to open a shared bank account, it was impossible to remove from their awareness what they presumed to know about one another. According to their narrative of sameness that determined the ways they interacted, there was no ambiguity in what they knew about one another. Hence, there was no gap between their interpretation and their expectations. The blueprint for their interpretation was their



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self-image, according to which none of them was superior in any respect that would allow them to take charge of any project such as the joint bank account or to administer their pooled money – their reservations concerning the trustworthiness of their colleagues were altogether too compelling, as they knew that everyone was facing exactly the same financial problems. According to their narrative of ‘being Mwyao at the kijiweni’, they had a clear vision of whom they were dealing with, and they consequently could not commit themselves to the kind of cooperation a joint bank account would necessitate. Their notions of social proximity and the negative effects of their assumed sameness that marked their sociality strongly prefigured what they could imagine for their relatives and colleagues. The sameness the Wayao assumed for themselves did not serve as a basis of ‘robust information’ (Corsin Jiménez 2011: 180) that could bridge the gap between assessing and expecting; rather the reason for their lack of trust was too much knowledge about one another in line with their shared self-image of ‘how they are’, derived from their narrative of ‘being Mwyao’. This self-image led them to the assessment that their colleagues would probably not respect the interests of the others in trustful cooperation (see Hardin 2004), as their sociality was fraught with expectations of dishonesty, fraud, envy and jealousy. Trust, therefore, was problematic because the shoe vendors could not ignore the potentially adverse agency of their colleagues but instead had to decide whether or not to cooperate knowing full well the probability of their partners’ betrayal. Because of self-ascribed characteristics of untrustworthiness, it turned out to be impossible for them to trust one another sufficiently. In the end, none of the shoe vendors approved of Abdul’s plan, much to his disappointment. Since they felt they could not trust one another enough to substantially cooperate and thus to better their situation, the shoe vendors at the kijiweni preferred to rely individually on their own abilities to sell shoes in the streets. As I will detail in the following chapters, however, the skills and knowledge that the shoe vendors developed and made use of in their daily work were to a large extent socially constructed and shared among their colleagues at the kijiweni. Despite their aspirations to individuality, therefore, the daily practices of shoe vending unfolded integrative moments in the sociality of the Wayao shoe vendors.

5 The creative potential of shoe vending: practices and emerging sociality In the following chapters I will detail the practices of shoe vending as I studied them with the group of Wayao shoe vendors in Dar es Salaam. Following the vendors’ ideal-typical working day, I will follow them to Karume Market, one of the largest outlets for second-hand clothes and shoes in Dar es Salaam. I will show how they categorised the available merchandise according to their experiences with different market segments and how their choice determined the rest of their working day. The shoe vendors at the kijiweni cooperated in many ways, sharing tools and materials necessary to refurbish their merchandise and simultaneously creating and continuously updating shared market knowledge. The following chapters will describe the specialised skills and the knowledge that the Wayao at the kijiweni have created over the course of many years on the streets of Dar es Salaam. These jointly created skills and knowledge were indispensable for each vendor individually. In that respect, the vendors depended on their colleagues at the kijiweni, despite the fact that there was a general air of envy and mistrust that sparked in many of them the wish to disentangle themselves from their fellow Wayao. While the narrative construction of sociality that I presented in the previous chapters revolved around the theme of sameness and excessive mutual knowledge that made durable trustful relations difficult, the practical aspect of shoe vending, unintentionally, had an integrative effect on the social relations at the kijiweni. The specialised skills and forms of knowledge of mobile street vendors are often overlooked when their work is subsumed under the label of the informal economy, a term that, as the anthropologist Keith Hart pointed out, implicitly conveys the notion that such self-organised ways of earning a livelihood lack form and regularity (Hart 2010: 217). The work routines of the Wayao street vendors, on the other hand, were organised according to their shared understanding of the spatio-temporal geographies of spending power in

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the inner city and thus attained a degree of predictability and regularity. For the present study it is also crucial to understand how the practices of shoe vending shaped the vendors’ social relations and thereby gave their sociality stability despite individuals’ aspirations to autonomy. As I will show, the vendors’ knowledge and skills evolved from their individual practical experiences in the streets which were gradually categorised and sedimented into verbal expressions, and thus shared with their colleagues at the kijiweni. These jointly created forms of knowledge shaped subsequent practices by enabling a vendor to classify his experiences and to react accordingly. Just as narratives relate individual experiences to socially constructed horizons of experience and meaning, practices tap into socially constructed practical knowledge and thus link individuals to socialities. This conceptualisation of practice as a dynamic interface between individual action and more patterned aspects of sociality is backed by an anthropological and sociological literature on the problematic relationship between concepts such as structure, process and agency (Ahearn 2001; Evens and Handelman 2006; Giddens 1997; Munn 1992; Reckwitz 1997, 2003; Sahlins 1981a; Turner 1985). To understand the dialectic relation between practice and sociality it is useful to briefly review the theoretical concepts of Pierre Bourdieu on habitus (Bourdieu 1976, 1983, 1987, 2000a, 2000b) and Anthony Giddens` theory of structuration (Giddens 1979, 1986). Bourdieu’s concept of practice lends itself to the present analysis, as he elaborated his concept of habitus with reference to (among other things) his study of the Algerian peasant society of the Kabyles and the transformation of their economic practices under the influence of colonial and capitalist economies (Bourdieu 2000a). There are some striking parallels in what Bourdieu described for the Kabyles and what the Wayao at the kijiweni experienced. The Kabyle peasants in the early 1960s and the shoe vendors were experiencing similar frictions in their lives: in both cases, rural ways of life with their associated notions of work and experiences of temporality were confronted with a capitalist and urban economy that forced the actors to grapple with quite different modalities of work and inherent temporal requirements. The capitalist economy confronted the Kabyle peasants with a temporal logic and a notion of the future that, according to Bourdieu, was quite alien to their



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habitual orientations. The orientation of the peasants towards the future, Bourdieu (2000a: 32) argues, was not marked by deliberately setting an objective that was to be attained in a planned fashion; rather, the relationship between present and future was experienced as an ‘organic unit’. The peasants knew from their experience of the present what was coming in the immediate future, and they adjusted their future expectations to what they knew from experience would be possible (Bourdieu 2000a: 43) – in other words, their subjective future expectations matched the objective chances of those expectations coming true (Bourdieu 2000b: 216). This ‘traditionalism’, as Bourdieu calls the pre-colonial Kabyle society’s way of life, does not attempt a conscious understanding of the future, instead avoiding any falsification of future expectations by not planning into the future at all but pursuing the status quo (Bourdieu 2000a: 58). What Bourdieu depicts for the Kabyle society in transition bears striking parallels to what my interlocutors at the kijiweni told me about their ‘minds still revolving around the village’ when they really ought to be focused on the challenges of urban life, such as developing foresight and planning for the future. In particular, the shoe vendors had a similarly problematic understanding of the temporal requirements of their economic and social life as the Kabyles who struggled to adjust their traditional ways to the requirements of urban life. As in the case Bourdieu presented for the Kabyles, social practice among the shoe vendors at the kijiweni appeared to be under the strain of a kind of social inertia, reproducing the same social relationships and forms of cooperation over and over again without allowing much change. According to the Wayao’s own understanding, their ‘mindset’ was responsible for their inability to adjust to the changing requirements of urban life. Even though they had been living in the city for years, many of them were still thinking ‘village thoughts’, as Abdul described it (see Chapter 2). They consciously identified as part of who they were their proclivity to distrust each other and to resent their colleagues’ success (see Chapter 4). Their habitus, one could argue, therefore not only entailed how they thought, but also what they thought (see Bongaerts 2011: 154). The shoe vendors, however, were not merely acting and reacting habitually and unreflectively. During their daily routines on the streets they were constantly confronted with situations which required them to reflect their abilities and to be creative, to attentively

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sense opportunities, to remain open to surprises, and to create ad hoc solutions in unfamiliar situations. Often they acted according to a mode of trial and error, reacting to unexpected encounters that required them to adapt and to devise new skills and tricks in response. In such moments, the creative aspect of social practice that is lacking from Bourdieu’s conception (de Certeau 1988: 125) came to the fore. In their everyday practices, they were constantly required to push the boundaries of what they knew in order to pursue their aim of earning a livelihood in the city, and by and large they did so successfully. The dynamic interplay between practice and sociality among the shoe vendors requires a theoretical framework that allows us to understand how this resulted in the creation of a sociality as a succession of structuring moments. Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration offers prolific analytic tools for understanding people’s active relationships to structural aspects of sociality by means of their practical consciousness, which is not only a matter of unconsciously reproducing assumed rules for practices but also entails actors’ reflexive monitoring of the situations in which they find themselves. In contrast to Bourdieu, Giddens conceives of practice as inherently reflexive. According to Giddens, people’s preconditions are not determining forces that merely imprint themselves on their habitual ways of feeling, thinking and acting, but rather resources that actors consciously evaluate, interpret and utilise according to their aims and projects. Giddens’ actors are endowed with various potentials to allocate material resources and to exert influence over others (Lamla 2003: 57). They are capable of reflecting on the resources available to them according to their social position and to actively position themselves in relation to these, enacting them and thus creating and transforming them. This stress on the reflective and creative capacities of actors makes this conceptual framework fruitful for the purpose of analysing the shoe vendors’ creative practices, because it allows us to understand practices as interpretative and signifying acts (Giddens 1979: 65, 1997: 72; Reckwitz 1997: 101). The practices of the Wayao shoe vendors inscribed meaning and knowledge into the objects they dealt with and into the spatiotemporal geography of the city they moved through. By gathering and simultaneously inscribing meaning into the urban landscape the vendors created layers of knowledge, experiences and practices



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that informed their perception of the city and thus enabled them to transform chance encounters into selling opportunities. The vendors thus created the market of the streets as an epistemic landscape (see Chapter 8), an urban landscape they moved through according to their shared knowledge of vending locations that were associated with specific customer groups with their respective tastes and buying behaviours. By sharing their individual experiences with their colleagues, reflecting, discussing, describing and labelling particular encounters, types of customers, places and practices, the shoe vendors created relatively durable concepts, categorisations and slang expressions that always entailed programmes for action. These pools of shared forms of knowledge permitted the time–space distanciation of experiences and knowledge (see Giddens 1997: 316–317), providing practices and the sociality that drew upon these pools of shared knowledge with a degree of durability. In the following chapters I trace the pooled forms of experiences and knowledge as they were sedimented in the vendors’ slang expressions or acted out in concrete practices that followed particular conventions. The sections are organised chronologically: I follow a shoe vendor’s ideal-typical working day, starting with a description of a visit to Karume Market, where the vendors obtained their merchandise from second-hand dealers in the early morning hours. The vendors’ method of browsing through the heaps of used shoes was far from arbitrary, as they oriented themselves by categorisations of shoes based on the types of customers they would appeal to, knowing that different types of customers required different sales techniques and promised different profit margins. After their visit to Karume Market, the vendors went to their backyard, where they washed and prepared their merchandise during the morning before creating a large display of shoes on the front pavement by pooling their individual pairs and neatly arranging them into one coherent pattern. This coherent configuration of shoes, I argue, actually did something the individual pairs were not able to do: it changed the passers-by’s perception of the shoe vendors and their businesses, allowing the vendors a different approach to their customers than when walking individually in the streets. The morning hours at the kijiweni were a time of many small incidents of cooperation in which the vendors borrowed and lent the few simple tools they used in the preparation of their merchandise and

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sometimes made arrangements to take or give a few pairs of shoes for sale on commission. Such arrangements of sales on commission were well established and followed certain conventions that differed according to the location of the sale. These conventions, however, were partially contradictory and were thus prone to strategic manoeuvres in which one convention was played off against another according to situational requirements and personal intentions. When the shoe vendors left the kijiweni to circle the streets with their shoes for the rest of the day, they oriented themselves by symbolic landmarks in the urban environment that they created by denoting places as spaces in which particular expectations were combined with sales practices that matched these expectations. Thus, they created an experiential landscape in which specific forms of space, time, knowledge, experience and practice were associated with one another. Their movements through that landscape unfolded in a specific experiential rhythm consisting of the rising and subsequent release of corporeal and cognitive attention according to the named spaces they moved into and out of. Attention naturally was focused on encounters with potential customers. In these encounters, the vendors’ primary intention was to interrupt the rhythms of their counterparts in order to draw their attention to their merchandise and to create a sales situation (see Chapter 8).

6 Carrying knowledge through the streets: old shoes as meaningful objects One day in June 2011, I visit Karume Market for the first time with my friend Saidi. As he has told me in previous conversations, business in Karume Market starts as early as 4 a.m., when the marketers open the first bales of shoes, empty out the contents onto their wooden stalls, and start rummaging through their wares looking for particularly well-preserved items they can sell at high prices. Most of our colleagues at the kijiweni have told me they would not want to miss those early hours in Karume Market, as the quality of the available shoes is the best at that time. Saidi and I, however, enter the market around 6.30 a.m., just as the sun is rising over Kariakoo. The fact that we have come to the market relatively late, my host emphasises, has nothing to do with his laziness, but rather is a tactic to obtain commodities with an optimal balance of quality and price. This comment catches my attention, and I scribble down the information in my notepad. As we push deeper into the market on the narrow, muddy paths between the market stalls, I try not to bump into the young men who resolutely push and shove one another from market stall to market stall, eager to get lucky and find particularly attractive shoes among the large heaps of mitumba, as second-hand merchandise is called in the local parlance. I cautiously move between them, trying not to step on anybody’s foot, so as not to draw too much attention to my presence. As I look up, I realise that I have already lost sight of Saidi, who has moved on further into the market, looking for a couple of pairs of shoes for his day on the streets. I pause for a moment to take in an impression of the overall situation as it presents itself to me. Karume Market is where thousands of street traders obtain their used t-shirts, trousers and shoes each morning. It is located on the corner of Rashid Kawawa Road and Uhuru Street at

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the far end of the bustling market area of Kariakoo, some 3.5 kilometres from our kijiweni downtown. The particular section of Karume Market that Saidi and I entered is reserved for the sale of used shoes only. In an area approximately 50 by 50 metres, square wooden tables are arranged in rows that roughly form a checkerboard pattern. The entire area is covered by a roof of corrugated iron sheets, creating a rather dim and gloomy atmosphere. As I move through the market, I realise that the entire floor of the market is rather uneven. The narrow paths between the market stalls are muddy and littered with odd shoes that were singled out as unsellable and have now become obstacles for the crowd of shoe vendors, who trip over them and stomp them into the ground. The market stalls basically consist of wooden platforms, roughly 2 by 2 metres, each of which supports a large heap of about 200 or 300 shoes. At the rear end of most platforms, on small wooden stools, sit the presumed owners of the stalls, many of them women, rolledup wads of cash in their hands, staring languidly or sleepily at the bustle around them. Young men are standing on the tables, rifling through the heaps of shoes. Upon closer inspection, I notice that many of them are not wearing any shoes themselves as they dig through piles of shoes up to their elbows. Most of the heaps are a hodgepodge of shoes of diverse styles, sizes, materials and qualities: worn-out flats next to battered high heels, musty slippers under heavy mountain boots, bent thongs and scuffed sneakers next to sparkling dress shoes. An odour that reminds me of the changing room in a gym emanates from all of them. Some of the market stalls have put up sound systems with speakers that blare out the popular taarab music, hypnotically swaying Swahili songs flavoured with Arabian melodies and electronic effects. On top of that background noise, the marketers incessantly shout out numbers such as ‘arobaini arobaini arobaini arobaini!’ – ‘forty forty forty forty!’ Others shout ‘uliza bei uliza bei!’ – ‘ask for the price, ask for the price!’, while still others shout formulas whose meaning eludes me entirely, such as ‘sina simu sina simu sina simu!’ – ‘I got no phone, I got no phone, I got no phone!’ or a simple ‘dala dala dala dala!’ I scribble these formulas in my notepad and plan to ask Saidi about these different styles of salesmanship later on.



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I spot him at a stall some distance in front of me and start pushing through the crowd to reach him. I watch as he pokes his hand into the heap on one of the tables, producing a highheeled woman’s shoe, brown in colour, with golden netting in the front on top of the toes. As he notices me next to him, he points his finger to a label on the sole of the shoe that states, ‘Made in Germany’. ‘Sumu hiyo, wakinasista du wanapenda’, he comments: ‘This is poison, fashionable girls love it.’ He holds the shoe with his left hand under the sole and pushes the fingers of his right hand where normally the toes go. He pulls his fingers out and now holds it in his right hand with his arm stretched out in front of him. He narrows his eyes to slits and tilts his head back a bit, as if imagining how a passer-by would perceive it if they only glimpsed it in passing. He grasps its heel and pulls at it, testing its stability and checking whether or not it is cracked anywhere. He turns the shoe around and inspects the rubber sole under the flat part of the shoe and on the heel, running his fingers over the material and feeling for spots where it might have worn off. Finally, he examines the golden netting at the front of the shoe, looking for fissures and scratches in the plastic material, and eventually pointing out to me a spot where the netting has gotten a bit loose, pulling it out from its position sandwiched between the body of the shoe and the upper. However, the damage does not appear to be irreparable. He holds the shoe up to the merchant and snaps at him to catch his attention. ‘Oya! Oya! How much for this one?’ The vendor takes it from his hand, turns it around two or three times, inspecting its condition, then responds, ‘Two hundred’, holding it out to Saidi. Saidi tilts his head to one side and makes a questioning gesture, swiftly turning the palms of his hand upward, asking him to reduce the price: ‘Seventy’, he offers. The merchant, obviously not in the mood to indulge in lengthy discussions about his prices, simply drops the shoe back onto the heap without so much as a look at Saidi and turns his attention to another customer who is asking the price for a shoe. Saidi, now empty-handed, turns to me and signals that we should move on. This guy, he explains, is too proud of himself right now. We ought to return to ask for that shoe again after some time has passed.

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At the next table, a merchant shouts out a single price: ‘Fifty fifty fifty fifty!’ As Saidi starts rummaging through the shoes again, I decide to do likewise and start to pick out shoes and set them aside, digging deeper into the heap to search for shoes that look like the ones I see every day at the kijiweni. It is now that I realise how rare the styles of shoes in which the vendors at the kijiweni specialise actually are at this market. The shoes on the tables are mixed men’s and women’s shoes. Most of them are either too worn out to be repaired and resold, or they are types of shoes I cannot imagine are in great demand in Dar es Salaam – winter boots, for example. Of the women’s shoes that I come across, only very few are fashionable and fancy, and of those few pairs of high-heeled, classy shoes, most have broken heels or are irreparably torn. Indeed, I do not find a single shoe that in my opinion would attract a wealthy and fashionable customer downtown. But then again, maybe I have not yet quite understood which styles and fashions are sought after in the streets, and which cracks and scratches can be repaired with the few simple tools the shoe vendors possess. As I turn to Saidi, I see him inspecting a rather flat shoe with a thick sole and a nondescript brownish upper, just the opposite of fancy and stylish. However, he seems content: ‘Mbegu hiyo, vya kibibi’, he says: ‘This one is a seed, it’s grandmotherly.’ I nod my head, although I do not quite understand what he means. I note down mbegu and vya kibibi so that I can follow up these threads in later conversations. After some inspection of the condition of the shoe, Saidi asks the merchant to look for its counterpart. He hands it to Saidi, who takes it, runs his fingers over the entire shoe, flexes the sole, and finally holds the two shoes next to one another, sole to sole, and measures whether or not they are actually a pair in the same size. He fumbles in his pockets and produces a couple of notes he hands over to the merchant without any further discussion about the price. Puzzled, I ask him why he did not try to drive down the price. He tells me that the merchant was piga debe, ‘hitting the canister’, so there really was no point in trying to argue with him. I jot down the expression in my notebook and dive headlong after Saidi, who has already moved on to the next table and is sticking his hands into the heaps of shoes.



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The few words I scribbled down in my notepad when visiting Karume Market turned out to offer valuable entry points to investigate further the different forms of knowledge that the shoe vendors utilised in their practices. From the heaps of shoes, Saidi had picked out only those pairs that in his experience would appeal to the customers his business targeted. He knew that ‘fashionable girls’ liked high heels, but elderly ladies preferred ‘grandmotherly’ shoes. His orientation in Karume Market was guided by his matching of the merchandise on offer with his experience with different types of customers. Consequently, the labels with which he designated the various shoes he selected from the heaps were not simply a matter of semantics, but had an inherently practical dimension. The words the shoe vendors used to categorise different types of merchandise were the result of a kind of ‘collective sedimentation’ of past experiences (Berger and Luckmann 1969: 73–74), objectified into verbal expressions and shared in this form among the colleagues at the kijiweni. And while they browsed through the merchandise on offer, they not only projected past experiences onto the exemplars they came across in the market, but they also projected into the future what kind of customer a particular style of shoe would appeal to. Different types of customers required different sales tactics, had to be enticed to different degrees, took more or less time to make a choice, and were more or less ready to pay high prices. These names and categories were therefore not only inherently practical in nature, but also entailed a significant temporal dimension, since they allowed a degree of predictability in what a vendor could expect from his work day. The practical problems a vendor faced during circulation in the streets had to be considered by the vendor as he tried to make the right choice of merchandise in the morning. This selection of merchandise, however, had to be made under consideration of the market’s own temporality in the first place. As indicated in the above description, an experienced vendor like Saidi knew that the sale of second-hand shoes was organised according to its own temporal sequence.

The temporal organisation of Karume Market Obtaining sellable shoes at Karume Market was a matter of knowing where to look for them, and also when to look for them.

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Understanding the temporal organisation of Karume Market was crucial, as it was related to the profit margins one would be able to realise later on the streets. In the early hours, when the mitumba was first spread out on the tables, the variety of styles and qualities was the greatest, and there was the best chance of coming across shoes in very good condition. But the marketers naturally were keen to drive up prices for sought-after shoes in order to break even quickly. They knew that a large proportion of the shoes in the plastic sacks would ultimately turn out to be of low quality or even worthless and would only sell for a low price. This was the reason why during the early hours in Karume Market, prices for each individual pair of shoes had to be negotiated with the marketers. Saidi’s tactic was to wait for the moment when the merchandise on offer was still of good enough quality to be attractive to his customers, but after the marketers had lowered their prices because they had reached their break-even point. In the above vignette, however, the ‘two hundred’ the marketer wanted for the shoe Saidi had selected from his table was not a bargain. ‘Two hundred’ was shorthand for 20,000 TSh,1 a price far above Saidi’s purchasing power. With average retail prices on the streets of around 10,000 to 12,000 TSh, the 20,000 the marketer boldly demanded was way out of his range. However, as time passed and the best-quality shoes were sold to more affluent customers, the overall quality of the available shoes decreased, as did the prices the merchants demanded. This was why Saidi preferred to wait until the hustle and competition for the outstanding exemplars had cooled down, along with the prices. This time was marked by a change in the way the marketers advertised the prices for their commodities. As I described in the above vignette, at the time I entered the market with Saidi, some marketers were still inviting their customers to negotiate bei za kuelewana – prices by mutual consent, referring to the system of individually negotiating prices for shoes that were supposedly of good quality – while others had begun to shout out flat prices that applied to their entire supply. During this time, from around 6.30 to 7 a.m., Karume Market changed over from the system of bei za kuelewana to kupiga debe, from ‘consensual prices’ to ‘hitting the canister’, as the market participants differentiated the different modes of salesmanship. The expression ‘to hit the canister’ originally referred to the conductors of the ubiquitous mini-buses in Dar es Salaam, who drew attention to their services by



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hitting the sides of their vehicles with a flat hand and crying out their terminal destination. In the market, it denoted the practice of crying out flat rates that applied to the entire merchandise on offer. Such flat rates were considerably lower than the earlier individual prices, but the longer one waited for the prices to drop, the less the chance of finding good-condition and attractive shoes. The shoe vendors at the kijiweni were well aware of the temporal organisation of Karume Market, and most of them deliberately pursued their individual tactics to navigate that temporality in accordance with their particular purposes. Some preferred to buy only a very few pairs of outstanding quality and therefore entered Karume as early as 4 a.m., paid high prices they negotiated with the marketers, and subsequently tried to sell the shoes at even higher retail prices on the streets. Others opted to buy more pairs of lower quality, investing no more than 2,000 or 3,000 TSh each, attempting to hawk them quickly and for considerably lower retail prices. Still others, like Saidi, tried to catch the specific moment in the timing of Karume when the system of bei za kuelewana made way for kupiga debe, hoping for an opportunity to find the last few good-condition and fashionable pairs at prices that had dropped considerably, thus optimising the correlation between the quality of their commodities and the capital invested. This calculus of quality, price and the temporal organisation of Karume Market had implications that transcended the immediate present and vicinity of the marketplace in itself. The way in which a shoe vendor navigated the temporal organisation in the morning had far-reaching consequences for his entire working day on the streets. The clientele the vendors catered to in the inner city were mostly middle-class office workers, and the vendors knew the styles and fashions they liked and the quality and condition they would demand. Getting up early and entering Karume Market in the small hours of the morning might therefore require a vendor to spend large sums on a few pairs of shoes, but later in the day this would allow him to cater to the most sophisticated clientele from the inner city’s offices and to be in a position to demand high prices. Arriving too late for the best shoes in Karume, while less financially burdensome, implied that the vendor would miss out on the well-off customers later on and that he might have to circle the streets longer to sell his less attractive merchandise. Or even worse, the poor quality of

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his shoes might force him to extend his route beyond the inner city to the less affluent residential neighbourhoods, colloquially called uswahilini, where people would buy shoes only for trifling amounts. As Daudi once pointed out to me: Since we do business here at Posta [in the city centre], we buy our shoes at dawn. At 5 a.m., we get nice shoes. Others sell shoes in the uswahilini. They buy their merchandise starting at 8 a.m., 9 a.m., when the good shoes have already been bought by others. […] That’s the reason they run up to the uswahilini. We who have nice shoes, we stay here in the city. We are people of the city.2

Picking out the wrong shoes could have devastating effects on a shoe vendor’s business. If he was too stingy and bought shoes at the cheapest rates in Karume Market regardless of their style and quality, he might find himself circling the streets for hours on end without attracting any customers for his wares. A shoe vendor who carried around the same shoes for several days would be mocked by his colleagues and advised to ‘get up earlier’ in order to obtain suitable merchandise in Karume Market. For a vendor, being unable to sell a pair of shoes had a discouraging effect. The longer a pair of shoes stayed with him, the less he dared to charge for it, since he realised that his choice obviously did not cater to his clientele’s taste. After a couple of days, a vendor would sell the shoes at their purchase price or might even ditch them altogether instead of wasting his energy carrying them around with him unprofitably. As the design and condition of the shoes available at Karume Market were confusingly variable and the shoe vendors’ encounters with potential customers highly contingent and unpredictable, singling out the right shoes that would catch the eyes of ladies on the streets was anything but a trivial task. It required the generation of a grid of categorisations that allowed Saidi and his colleagues to cognitively rearrange the variety of used shoes with reference to their past experiences and future anticipation of selling them on the streets. From these correlations, the shoe vendors could anticipate the kinds of encounters they would have during their working day, how they would have to negotiate with their customers, and the prices they could ultimately demand for their merchandise.



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Mapping shoes onto the streets By categorising the shoes they came across in Karume Market, the shoe vendors ascribed to them the experiences they had made with different customer groups and their buying behaviours and thus related the shoes to the market on the streets. As I show in Chapter 8, that market was not a clearly marked zone in geographical space, but consisted in the specific forms of perceiving and understanding the streets of the inner city. Only if they understood the different fashions and dress codes of different customer groups and were able to approach these in appropriate ways with the right kinds of shoes could Saidi and his colleagues transform chance encounters on the streets into sales. The old shoes in Karume Market, which largely came from the US, Europe and Asia and had found their way to East Africa through clothing donations and container ships, had to be appropriated into local fashions and market demands. Knowledge about the criteria that various types of customers used in looking for shoes was crucial but somewhat problematic for the shoe vendors. Where production and consumption occur in social and cultural contexts that are spatially or temporally far removed from one another, the circulation and exchange of goods may entail a constant quest for reliable information and knowledge regarding the use, quality, utility and meaning of goods. In his seminal text on ‘Commodities and the politics of value’, Arjun Appadurai (1986: 41) points out that ‘[c]ommodities represent very complex social forms of knowledge’. This complexity is partially a result of the fact that the knowledge that is ‘read into’ a commodity at the production end may be quite different from the knowledge that consumers ‘read from’ the very same commodity, and this difference grows as the social, spatial and temporal distance between producers and consumers increases (Appadurai 1986: 41). As Appadurai’s processual argument about the ‘social life of things’ suggests, despite their solid material form, commodities and other material objects are not necessarily unambiguous with respect to the meaning and knowledge ascribed to them, but are in fact malleable and transformable carriers of cultural meaning that may differ greatly from one cultural context to another and over the course of their lifetimes. In precapitalist societies, he argues, the gap between production knowledge on the one hand and knowledge of the market and the consumer

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on the other was much smaller, and translating external demands to local producers was the domain of traders who bridged these gaps of knowledge (Appadurai 1986: 42). Appadurai contends that it is the task of the trader to translate demands to producers, but such a translation is clearly impossible in the case of the circulation of donated used clothes shipped from Europe, the USA and Asia to East Africa. Demand in East Africa’s street markets influences what people in Europe, the USA and Asia donate (let alone what is produced in these economies) to an extremely limited degree. In the globalised economy, Appadurai (1986: 42–43) writes, there remain sizeable ‘unclosable cultural gaps’ in knowledge between producing and consuming countries that nevertheless offer significant opportunities for high profits but also involve the risk of deprivation for traders and producers (Appadurai 1986: 43). In the case of the second-hand clothes that are sold in local markets in Africa (such as Karume Market in Dar es Salaam), there is a large gap between the production and the consumption side. Consider this peculiarity: for the most part, the clothes and shoes sold at Karume Market were originally donated by people in richer regions of the world. Charitable organisations such as the Red Cross or Salvation Army have for decades organised clothes drives and over the years established a system of donations that produce such large quantities of second-hand clothes and shoes that many charities have partnered with commercial companies that collect, sort and ship the used clothes. In Switzerland, for example, companies such as Texaid, a partner of Caritas Switzerland, collect around 50,000 tons of used clothes and shoes per year, of which around 60 per cent can be re-sold to markets in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa (Grob 2016). Parts of the profits thus generated flow back to the charitable organisations. Though many donators in Switzerland and other rich countries may believe that their donations are given to the needy in poorer world regions, the global circulation of second-hand clothes from Europe and other wealthy regions to less affluent regions is a multi-million dollar business in which the largest profits are primarily generated in the donor countries rather than in the receiving societies (see for example Hansen 2000; Rivoli 2005). When the import of used clothes and shoes into Tanzania started to flood local markets, some consumers were irritated by the idea



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that these fashionable and sound items had been given away by Europeans for free. As Brad Weiss reported, people in Tanzania made sense of the tons of well-preserved clothes and shoes from Europe by imagining that they had belonged to people who had died in far-away Europe, whose wardrobes had subsequently been donated to poorer countries. The used clothing sold in markets such as Karume Market therefore became known simply as kafa ulaya, ‘[someone] died in Europe’ (see Weiss 1996: 138). Later, the commodity was renamed after the Swahili word for the large bales in which they arrived, mitumba. Bridging the gap between contexts of knowledge on the production side and contexts of knowledge on the consumption side is not merely a matter of translating external demands into local production or sparking demands in one part of the world for what is produced in another. The task of the market traders and the street vendors obtaining commodities from them was not to broker knowledge from the demand side of their trade to the production side. Nor did they try to create demand in the streets of Dar es Salaam that would emulate the fashions and seasons in the places from which the used shoes came by seeking to understand the meaningful distinctions and seasonal changes in Western shoe fashions. And clearly they did not adopt the donors’ notions of the ‘needy recipients’ of their charitable donations as the powerless ‘victims’ of hardships, grateful to clothe their suffering bodies in the cast-offs of rich societies. In other words, the street vendors did not attempt to keep track of the knowledge contexts from which their commodities came, but rather ascribed to them meanings that made sense to them and were useful for their particular purposes of re-selling them on the streets of the city. By categorising the shoes and labelling them with names such as ‘grandmotherly’ or ‘fashionable girls’ the Wayao shoe vendors mapped them onto the market of the streets (see Chapter 8). The shoe vendors’ challenge therefore was not to understand the knowledge contexts in which the commodities were produced, but rather to include them in their own local knowledge contexts. This context, however, was itself fragmented. Saidi and his colleagues therefore could not simply appropriate the used shoes they found in Karume Market into a uniform space of knowledge about fashionable shoes that they shared with their customers. What they knew about styles,

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trends and demands on the streets emerged from their experiences with passers-by and customers who inhabited social and economic worlds that differed considerably from the Wayao’s own. The shoe vendors deliberately targeted better-off customers who had the financial means to pay prices that would provide substantial profits. Such customers mostly worked in government or private sector offices, and these work environments required them to dress accordingly. In addition, their salaries allowed them to be a bit picky, purchasing clothes and shoes in accordance with trends and paying prices that the shoe vendors themselves could not afford. In their encounters with customers, the shoe vendors learned about the criteria according to which shoes were deemed desirable by their different target groups. In the vignette above, for example, when Saidi pointed to the label in a shoe that said ‘Made in Germany’, he knew that this was a major selling point for that particular pair of shoes, as his customers had certain ideas about the quality of products coming from different regions of the world. He explained this point to me in an interview: If there is a label in a shoe saying ‘Made in Germany’, they really love it. They say it’s very sturdy. Shoes from Germany, Italy, Brazil, ya! […] If you have two pairs of shoes, one from Germany and the other from China, you will sell the German one at a higher price. Because I will point it out to them: ‘Look here, Germany! This one is from Germany, have you seen?’ The customer will say, ‘Sure, it’s true, it’s a good shoe, this one’.3

For Saidi, the label in the shoe was a point of reference he could use to assess its attractiveness for the customers on the streets, because he could relate it to what he had learned in conversations with them: ‘They say it’s very sturdy’ does not refer to his own experience with German shoes, but rather to the experience of his customers. In his statement, shoes from Germany, Italy and Brazil were clustered together, while shoes from China were depicted as less attractive to customers; they would not sell at prices as high as the German shoes. Strikingly, according to the shoe vendors’ experience, customers would trust the quality of shoes ‘Made in China’, but only if they were second-hand and not new. Things produced in China generally had a bad reputation in Dar es Salaam, as most people in the city had had



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negative experiences with the shoddy quality of cheap plastic products or the counterfeit mobile phones imported from China and sold in the local markets. Calling a battered mobile phone or any other questionable item ‘a Chinese’ was a common way of mocking its dubious quality. Yet, paradoxically, in the case of second-hand shoes, the label ‘Made in China’ would not make it unattractive in the eyes of the customers and thus of the shoe vendors, as Saidi explained: ‘Because there are two kinds of Chinese things [in Tanzania]: One is secondhand that the Chinese produce for Europe, it’s of good quality. But the other one that the Chinese produce for Tanzania, that one is fake.’4 As he explained to me, the fact that second-hand Chinese shoes had been shipped to Dar es Salaam from Europe,5 where they had originally been purchased and worn by ‘Whites’, overwrote the negative associations Tanzanians had with things made in China. Europeans, it was believed, would not buy cheap knock-offs of low quality. Thus, objects manufactured in China for the European market were believed to be of higher quality than things produced in China for the African market. ‘Chinese’ in local parlance stood for dodgy fakes, while ‘European’ was equated with ‘original’ products and brands. Based on their customers’ knowledge of and interest in the origin and biography of second-hand clothes, the shoe vendors had built a coherent argument that allowed them to sell their shoes not as ‘Chinese’ in the Dar-es-Salaam sense of the word but as ‘originals’ from ‘Europe’. According to that dichotomous logic, other labels of manufacturing countries, such as ‘Made in Brazil’ or ‘Made in Italy’, could be mobilised as selling arguments as well. In their sales pitches, experienced shoe vendors could argue that shoes ‘Made in Brazil’ were of the latest fashion, according to a common opinion held by many customers. But the new shoes on display in the city’s shops labelled ‘Made in Brazil’, they would say, were most likely ‘fakes’ from China. The ones they had on offer, on the other hand, had previously been worn by Europeans and were therefore ‘the real thing’, despite being used.

Grandmothers and city girls While browsing through the heaps of old shoes in Karume Market, the shoe vendors cognitively matched the shoes they saw to the respective

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customer groups they knew would most likely buy these particular kinds of shoes. This matching not only associated certain kinds of shoes to particular customer groups. It also located both shoes and their respective customers geographically at particular vending locations in the city and temporally at the time of the day that these vending locations were known to be most promising for business. And it entailed assumptions about which vending tactic was appropriate to their specific target customers, how a sales pitch would usually unfold and what profit margins were most likely to be expected. When the shoe vendors for example associated a flat, unadorned and solid shoe with relatively old customers, sometimes referred to as wakinamama, ‘the mothers’, or wakinabibi, ‘the grandmothers’, they knew at what points in time they would most likely encounter this particular group of customers, how best to approach them and at what rate they could sell shoes to them. When, on the other hand, they labelled shoes as suitable for masista du, ‘fashionable girls’, they expected a different course of events and outcome. In an interview, Musa pondered this difference: You know, those fashionable girls, they really have to like it [the shoe]. Those mothers, on the other hand, they have already grown up a bit, so they wear almost anything. If it fits them, that’s it, they buy it. But a girl really needs to love the shoe. […] That’s the habit of those girls, you sell them well, if they like it, they buy well [i.e. for high prices], but you have to explain the shoe to them very verbose, you see? But the mothers, they have no problem to decide; if they like it, they give you the money. […] So I would rather sell to mothers, they don’t hassle you like those fashionable girls. That’s why I look for the designs mothers like.6

As Musa described it, sales conversations with different customer groups took a different course and yielded different profits. ‘Mothers’ did not require a vendor to eloquently convince them about the merits of a shoe. However, the prices wakinabibi were prepared to pay were rather low. Selling to them was therefore straightforward in negotiations, but ultimately limited in terms of profit. Their experience with ‘fashionable girls’ seemed to be quite the reverse. The college students they encountered at certain vending locations (see Chapter 8) often took a street vendor offering them



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shoes as opportunity to pass spare time between two classes. They had the habit of engaging the vendor in long conversations, often including their fellow students gathered around them, discussing individual shoes and sometimes going into detailed criticism of styles. But most of the times, the shoe vendors said, they did not ultimately buy a pair of shoes, but headed back to class and left the vendor empty-handed. However, on the rare occasions that a vendor managed to convince them to buy a pair of shoes, younger women, particular students, were known to be ready to pay higher rates than older customers. The shoe vendors’ incentive to get themselves into lengthy and often frustrating discussions was the prospect of randomly hitting the jackpot and selling a pair of shoes for a price that was many times what they had paid in Karume Market. In order to cater to one or the other target group during their working day, the shoe vendors had to consider the distinctive designs and fashions the respective customers would demand as they were exploring Karume Market: High-heeled fancy shoes would draw the attention of fashionable girls, whereas flat but convenient shoes were appealing to elderly ladies. Most of the shoe vendors had their own preferences with regard to the segment of the street market they targeted, depending on their ability to pay high prices for fancy shoes in Karume and on their willingness to try their luck with the city’s fashion-conscious young women. Obviously, though, most of them preferred to cater to elderly ladies. Most of the shoes they circulated with were flat, inconspicuous and convenient. Only a few of them took their chances with wakinasista du – among them Saidi, who from time to time would mix a few pairs of fancy shoes into his merchandise, just in case.

Knowing how to act The knowledge of different customer groups that the vendors associated with the shoes on offer in Karume Market was the product of a process of communication among the shoe vendors at the kijiweni in which they shared their experiences with one another and classified them into verbal labels. When Saidi and his colleagues applied these labels to the merchandise on offer in Karume Market, they tapped into pooled experiences that helped them to organise their individual

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work routines. Labelling shoes ‘grandmotherly’ or appropriate for ‘fashionable girls’ not only to distinguished one style of shoe from another, but also invoked in an instant entire programmes of action that anticipated the typical kinds of encounters a vendor would have during his day with a particular kind of customer. The market knowledge the vendors thus shared gave their work routines a degree predictability that stabilised their business in the face of constant economic insecurity. The categorisations of shoes and customers carried with them ‘horizons of anticipated similar experiences’ (Schütz 1962: 7) that allowed the shoe vendors to know how to act at specific moments. The categories with which the vendors mapped shoes onto the market simultaneously enabled them to skilfully navigate the market of the streets, socially, geographically and temporally (see Goodwin 2002). The knowledge entailed in the processes described above was not ‘market information’ that was language-like and transferable through language (Crick 1982: 288–289; Goodenough 1957; Whorf 1988 [1963]). It was rooted in corporeal and cognitive experiences and situated practice alike (see Ahearn 2001: 110; Marchand 2010: 3). The way the shoe vendors knew about the streets’ market involved their experiences with the physical environment (Ingold 2010, 2011) as well as the social situation in which they produced and transmitted that knowledge (Lave and Wenger 2002; Marchand 2010). The meaningful categories used to differentiate the variety of shoes in Karume Market were the result of the ‘conceptual processing’ (Keller and Dixon Keller 1996: 25–26) of experiences the shoe vendors had had over their careers. These categories would make no sense if examined only in the context of Karume Market. What was ‘grandmotherly’ about a particular shoe, for instance, was not detectable by looking at the shoe alone. In the face of the confusing variety of commodities, any other kind of categorisation would have been equally conceivable. But the knowledge of the shoe vendors, organised in categories, was a practical response to the task of singling out from the heaps of old shoes those exemplars that they could relate to previous experiences and observations. An individual shoe vendor knowledgeable with respect to the jargon of street vending as developed at the kijiweni could tap into these intersubjective ‘sediments’ (Berger and Luckmann 1969) in order to make sense of his encounters with people on the streets and organise his future work routine on that



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basis. By co-constructing interpretations and meanings for their experiences with customers and shoes, the shoe vendors simultaneously created a social reality in which these meanings became significant (see Ahearn 2001: 111).

7 Sharing is daring: cooperation at the kijiweni After our visit to Karume Market in the morning, Saidi and I walk through busy Kariakoo to the kijiweni, where we find some of our colleagues sitting on the concrete plant tubs opposite the bookshop on the pavement, with others standing around them, chatting. They greet us as we move on through the passage and into the small backyard. At the back end, a couple of vendors are standing between the tailor shop and the large black water tanks, eagerly stuffing their shoes with wadded plastic. These bundles are called bonye, which simply means ‘squeeze’, and they are tightly squeezed into the shoes using a stick in order to restore the washed shoes to their original shape. Saidi and I greet the congregation and start working on our own shoes. I have bought two pairs of shoes myself this morning. Saidi disappears for a minute and then comes back with a large, twelve-litre plastic bottle a quarter full of water that he has bummed from the mamalishe in the next backyard – the women cooking rice, beans, and stew for the office workers. We wash our shoes in a plastic basin using washing powder that Saidi produces from a plastic bag, and then we stuff them with bonye that we take from a large, square wooden box on the ground between the water tanks. These boxes originate from the Bank of Tanzania, I have been told. After they are withdrawn from service, they are sold by hawkers in the streets for a couple of thousand shillings. There are six or seven such boxes at the kijiweni. Each is shared by five or six vendors to store their merchandise, ragged plastic bags they have picked up for their bonye, cardboard pieces they squeeze into the front of the shoes before stuffing them, a number of wooden sticks, and black plastic bags that contain dye, shoe polish, some tattered brushes, sponges, razor blades, rubber soles, superglue and the like. On the side of the wooden box, someone has written ‘Mwilijo’ with shoe polish, the name of one of the two matrilineal kin groups from Miungo to which most of the Wayao here belong.

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From the box in front of me, I pick out a piece of cardboard and stick it into one of my shoes. I put the shoe back onto the water tank and collect some ragged plastic bags from the wooden box, roll them up into a tight bundle, and squeeze it into the shoe, keeping the cardboard between the bundle and the shoe’s upper. I stuff the front of the shoe so that it almost bulges out of shape, then I add another bundle of plastic to its heel end so that the entire shoe is firmly padded inside. Saidi watches me as I do this and advises me to use one of the sticks to push the plastic bundles into the corner of the shoe so that none of the material of the upper will be wrinkled. After we finish putting bonye in our shoes, we arrange our stuffed shoes on the water tanks and hang them on the lattice gate of the small tailor shop in the corner of the backyard to dry. Then we return to the front, out onto the pavement, greeting with handshakes our colleagues who have just arrived at the kijiweni with black plastic bags full of shoes they bought at Karume Market, just like us. After a couple of minutes out front, Saidi and I return to the small backyard to look for our shoes. We collect our dried pairs and join the group standing around the water tanks next to the stairs. They move a bit to the side to allow me in between them, smile at my choice of merchandise, and comment on it, saying things like, ‘You got yourself some work today, Alexi?’ and ‘This one is sumu, poison’, referring to its drop-dead stylishness, and ‘I like that one, I have a customer who might be interested, how much do you want for it?’ As I remove the bonye from one of the shoes, the other is passed around through the hands of my colleagues. I turn to Abdul, who had asked its price, and tell him 8,000 shillings. He nods, and we agree that he will take it to his customer later on. The shoe comes back and I ask who can lend me some shoe polish. One of the colleagues, Sarumu, hands me a black plastic bag that contains some halfempty cans of shoe polish and some brushes. Beka comes along and asks if he can take the shoe polish to prepare his shoes in the other backyard. Sarumu tells him to bring his shoes here instead, since he cannot take the polish with him. The two argue for a little bit, but finally Beka goes to pick up his wares. After I finish up preparing my two pairs of shoes, I take them out front to display them on the pavement.



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Here, the shoe vendors have arranged their merchandise in one large display. In one long row, the majority of the shoes stand with their toes pointing towards the building, pairs not necessarily together, and in front of them a further row of shoes is arranged lengthways, completing the display. The shoe vendors stand behind that row with their back to the street, facing the stream of passers-by on the pavement. I put three of my shoes down at the end of the row, placing the one remaining in front of the other three so that the pattern of shoes is completed again. But as I put them down, Saidi comes and points out to me that I have not arranged them properly: The one shoe I placed lengthways in front of the others is oriented with the inside edge of the foot to the front, in other words, facing the potential customers. This is wrong. As he points out to me, all the shoes in the front row are arranged so that they present their outer side to the passing customers. Like that, he tells me, the potential customers can assess the beauty of their merchandise in passing, seeing the shoes from the front and from the outside in one glance. I correct my mistake and join Saidi and the colleagues standing behind the row of shoes, leaning on a parked car, looking at the passing people, inviting potential buyers: ‘Welcome, mother, take a look here!’ or ‘I got something for you, auntie!’

Midmorning, the kijiweni became an arena of social interaction for the shoe vendors. Despite their general mistrust of one another and their ambitions to disentangle themselves from their Wayao colleagues, the shoe vendors cooperated in many ways during this time of the day. The shoe vendors joined their colleagues in the backyard one by one, either carrying with them the shoes they had just bought in Karume Market or retrieving their left-over shoes from the previous day from a wooden box they shared as storage with some of their colleagues. They gathered around plastic basins to wash their shoes and shared the materials necessary to refurbish them. While doing so, they simultaneously shared practical knowledge about how to repair a snapped-off heel or how to dye faded material. Especially for young Wayao who had only recently come to Dar es Salaam to learn the trade, mornings in the backyard offered plenty of opportunity to observe their more experienced colleagues and to learn from them.

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Often one of the shoe vendors loudly recounted an anecdote he had experienced the previous day on the streets: for example, how he had successfully sold a shoe at a ridiculously high price to a customer, or how he had bumped into the police at a corner where the vendors could usually do business in peace. His colleagues would listen and chip in their own experiences of similar kinds, and often used slang expressions and metaphors to summarise the experience of their fellow vendor. A customer who unquestioningly paid the first price a vendor told her for example was referred to as a mzungu, literally a ‘white’ person, even though the actual customer probably was a Tanzanian who did not know how to bargain with a street vendor, just like a European tourist (see Chapter 8). Or an unexpected police raid was compared to an attack of chavichavi, hairy caterpillars that drop down from trees and leave the afflicted itching wherever they were touched. While the vendors stood together and worked, they commented on one another’s choice of shoes, gave their opinion on which kind of customer it most likely appealed to and estimated its market value. A particularly good pair of shoes could be called mawe, literally ‘stones’, a term also denoting money in street slang, thus indicating the profits expected from their sale. Or they might be called mbegu, a ‘seed’, metaphorically alluding to the ‘harvest’ it would yield in the near future. Unattractive or battered shoes, on the other hand, were often jokingly called Kigamboni, alluding to the part of town that lay across Dar es Salaam’s harbour and was only reachable by ferry, but here referring to the far end of Karume Market, where prices and qualities of shoes were known to be the lowest, and where that specific shoe was jokingly said to have originated. Less experienced shoe vendors in particular would listen carefully to what their colleagues said about their shoes, since their comments would give them hints about their chances of selling the shoe quickly or carrying it around for days without making anything from it. During this time of the day shared sales called winga were arranged among the Wayao vendors at the kijiweni. This was a sale on commission in which one vendor entrusted a pair of shoes to one of his colleagues and negotiated a fixed price that he would have to return to him in case he was able to sell it. Any amount of money exceeding this price was the borrowing vendor’s to keep. All these instances of collaboration were negotiated in an air of mutual mistrust and were tightly circumscribed temporally and



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materially. The shoe vendors often deliberately refused to take any more advice than they thought necessary, as their general aspiration was to achieve autonomy and independence from their fellow Wayao and colleagues rather than dedicating themselves to a shared objective. And while the rules of winga were generally known and accepted among the Wayao at the kijiweni, there were many instances of attempted or actual fraud, when one of the colleagues tried to interpret the rules applying to different forms of joint sales to his own benefit. And in accordance with the Wayao’s self-image of equality, there was no leader in the group who was in a position to pass judgement or to sanction the misbehaviour of an accused vendor. The instances of entrustment of tools and materials and the sharing of merchandise and profits among collaborating vendors shows how the Wayao at the kijiweni constantly had to evaluate the reliability of their relations in order to dare entering into such short term cooperation. This cooperation did not so much integrate the entire group of shoe vendors into a ‘community of practice’ (Holmes and Meyerhoff 1999; Lave and Wenger 2002) as it forged short-term alliances of individuals. In addition, the processes of negotiating cooperation and the way that the vendors dealt with breaches of such arrangements threw into relief once more the negative self-ascription of untrustworthiness and brought to the fore cleavages and faultlines among the Wayao at the kijiweni.

Sharing tools Sharing materials, tools, knowledge and merchandise always involved expectations of reciprocity. The shoe vendors closely observed whether or not a colleague they had previously helped out would return the favour, and the narrow physical confines of the backyard fostered an air of mutual surveillance. During midmorning at the kijiweni, the colleagues trickled into the backyard, those who had purchased fresh merchandise in Karume Market carrying black plastic bags containing their ‘booty’. All of these shoes needed serious repair and preparation, but not every shoe vendor possessed all the tools necessary to take care of his merchandise. It was therefore common for vendors to borrow a brush or razor blade from their colleagues. Although most vendors were not too fussy about

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these small items, they nevertheless attached conditions to the joint use of their tools. Field notes, 19 July 2012 [As I stand in the small backyard at the kijiweni,] Sarumu gives me his black plastic bag that contains dawa (shoe polish, literally ‘medicine’). I stand at the water tank with Cholo and apply shoe polish to my shoes. Beka comes along from the second backyard and asks us if we have black dawa. Cholo tells him that we do, but that he cannot take it with him. He tells him to bring his shoes and use our dawa on site. Beka takes it from the plastic bag, and the two argue a little bit. In the end, Beka disappears into the second backyard to fetch his shoes.

The sharing of tools and materials between Cholo and Beka was not an expression of trust, but had to be negotiated in the context of the general suspicion that tools and materials might never reappear once they had slipped out of one’s hands. There was an air of reluctance in the way tools and work materials were handed from one vendor to another. In some instances, the supplicant was compelled to use the tools under the watchful gaze of their owner; in others, they might even be discouraged from use altogether by the owner demanding a fee. Field notes, 29 May 2012 I am sitting with Hassan, Patrick, and a couple of colleagues in the second backyard by the beauty salon when Kadagaa appears and asks us for brown dawa. Hassan reacts brusquely and tells him to pay 200 shillings for it. Kadagaa gives him a coin and Patrick reaches for the plastic bag in the wooden box to look for the brown polish. Kadagaa complains that Hassan should return his money, since it is not even his polish they were talking about, but apparently Patrick’s property. They argue loudly, but eventually Hassan returns the money and Kadagaa disappears. Hassan points his finger toward the first backyard: ‘wale’ (those people there) scrounge a lot, he tells me. If they want to use something, they should pay for it.

The complicity between Hassan and Patrick here stood in sharp contrast to the way Kadagaa was fobbed off. As he was apparently



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one of ‘those people’ from the smaller backyard in the front, he was not entitled to use the tools and materials Hassan and Patrick shared. Hassan and Patrick, on the other hand, seemed to be collaborating so closely that Hassan’s rejection of Kadagaa’s request to use what turned out to be Patrick’s property was met with the latter’s tacit consent. The sharing of tools and materials was confined to coalitions of vendors that formed around storage locations for merchandise at the kijiweni. Some of these were the shared wooden boxes in which the shoe vendors stored their merchandise and tools overnight at the kijiweni. The boxes were marked with names that had apparently been written on them with shoe polish: one was tagged ‘Hassan’, another one ‘Mr. Ibra’, and yet another was marked ‘Mwilijo’, the name of a kin group in the village Miungo to which Ali, his younger brother Cholo, Karim, P Square and a few other vendors belonged. Usage of these boxes, however, did not strictly follow kinship relations, as Kadagaa, not a Mwyao from Miungo at all, also used the ‘Mwilijo’ box and Patrick and Hassan, who both used ‘Hassan’, were not related to one another. The vendors who stored their shoes in one of these boxes also stored their cans of shoe polish or their packs of razorblades in that box, and other colleagues who stored their shoes and tools in the same box would share their materials with one another. The sharing circles thus took shape around the wooden boxes that five or six colleagues considered their own. Some stored their boxes on the stairs in the front backyard, out of sight of passers-by, while others stored theirs inside the beauty salon in the second, larger backyard, a service for which the owner of the salon charged a few hundred shillings every week. This was how the subdivision of the shoe vendors into ‘those people’ in the front backyard and ‘those people’ in the second backyard at the back was created. The rather reluctant way in which Kadagaa was discouraged from participating in Patrick’s and Hassan’s coalition was mirrored by how ‘those’ in the front talked about ‘those’ in the back, as I witnessed from time to time. There was a kind of agreement among the vendors who stored their merchandise and tools in the same box that these tools could be used by all participants, as they in turn would pool their materials and tools as well. Outside of such reciprocal coalitions, however, joint use was depreciated as sponging and was therefore carefully

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controlled, either by requiring a supplicant to use a tool under the scrutiny of its owner or by discouraging it altogether by demanding a fee. The notion of reciprocity that prevailed in this form of collaboration was also detectable in the way profits were shared in stationary collaborative sales. Here, however, reciprocity had to be demanded despite an established convention that initially contradicted it.

Sharing profits There were two generally distinct ways in which the vendors realised joint sales. One involved the vendors creating a joint stationary display of their shoes from which one vendor would sell. The other one, called winga, pertained to situations when one vendor explicitly asked one of his colleagues to take some of his merchandise on his tours and to sell them for him on commission. In the first case, the vendor selling his colleague’s shoe was not entitled to any specific amount, but usually the owner of the sold shoe would cut him in on his profits by a small amount of money. In the second case, the taker of winga knew the price the giver was expecting and tried to sell the shoe at a higher rate in order to earn a profit margin he could keep for himself. After they finished refurbishing their merchandise in the backyard, the vendors would gradually bring the shoes that were ready out onto the pavement in front of the backyard and arrange them into one large, coherent display. As more and more vendors finished preparing their shoes and arranging them on the pavement, the display slowly grew during midmorning and often consisted of up to sixty pairs of shoes. Notably, it was not the mere accumulation of shoes on the pavement, but the orderly arrangement that changed the way passers-by perceived the business they conducted, as the vendors told me: You look for customers according to your capital. If you have a small capital, you cannot stay in one place, you have to circulate in order to find customers. […] But if you have a large capital, a lot of pairs, seventy, fifty, ah! You would just sit outside here and wait for them to come. […] If you circulate in the streets, people scorn you: ‘Ah, this guy is hungry, he’s just so poor.’ That’s why



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they only pay low prices. But if you set up your shoes outside here [on the front pavement], they are coming by themselves, they ask you for the price, and if they like it, they just buy it. If you set up your shoes here, they don’t scorn you, they respect you. And also you sell for good prices. So if you had a lot of capital, it would be nice to stay here, but here there’s no one with a large capital of his own.1 The difference between doing business together in one place and circulating in the streets is that if you circulate, you look for customers that are walking down the street where you happen to be at that moment. But if you sit in one place, people come because they know that this is a place for business, and they know that if they come anytime they will find you there. But if you circulate, you have to walk with ‘force’.2 […] Because the people you meet on the streets have no intention to buy anything in the first place.3

A large and stationary display of merchandise changed the way customers viewed a business. That, in turn, allowed the vendors to adjust their prices upwards. The difference was, as the second excerpt argues, that the passers-by they encountered during their tours on the streets had to be convinced to take an interest in their merchandise even though they had no intention of buying anything in the first place. Aesthetics mattered a great deal, and the appearance of the display was a major concern. The arrangement of the shoes first of all followed the material structure of the pavement. The orthogonal gaps between paving slabs were used as a grid by which shoes could be neatly oriented in parallel and at right angles. The vendors used different patterns for arranging the shoes. In the most common, the shoes were lined up in one long row along the curb, toes pointing towards the passing pedestrians, with an additional row lengthways in front of this, the outsides of the shoes turned towards the passers-by. After they finished preparing their shoes in the backyard, the first vendors to display their shoes arranged them in this pattern, and the colleagues joining them later had to follow the pattern and arrange their shoes accordingly. They shifted some of the shoes aside, fitted their own pairs into the gaps, and placed a couple of shoes in the front row running lengthways. If they were clumsy about organising

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the display, they would be cautioned by their colleagues to rearrange it neatly. After one or two hours, one by one the vendors would pick up their shoes from the display and leave for their individual routes through the streets. The resulting gaps in the display were carefully filled in again with the remaining shoes. Individual pairs of shoes were merged into one large formation, and while the exact composition and shape of the formation changed over time, its coherence was maintained throughout its existence. The shoes had to stand in a neat row in order to create the impression of being the merchandise of one large and stationary business. Instead of each shoe vendor standing with a few pairs of shoes on the pavement, actively approaching passing women to get them to take a look, they now waited for customers to approach them of their own free will. And whereas on the streets, each vendor focused his attention on his own merchandise, at the kijiweni all of them were focused on the joint display. Sales from such a joint stationary display followed particular rules that had evolved from the shoe vendors’ experience. If a customer approached and took an interest in one of the shoes on display, instead of several vendors addressing her and possibly trying to sell her their own shoes, it was common that only one vendor would take the lead and negotiate with the customer, even if the shoe she was interested in was not his own. The performing vendor would provisionally act on behalf of his colleagues, and the customer would not even necessarily notice that he was not selling his own shoes. Even if he did not know the exact price his colleague had intended for a particular shoe, he was never at a loss for an immediate answer that came quick as a shot: A shoe at the kijiweni would simply cost the standard price of 22,000 shillings.4 In his answer, there was no moment of hesitation. Even though such high prices were rarely ultimately realised, the standard 22,000 was a promising starting point for negotiations that resulted in retail prices that were considerably higher than out on the streets. When the vendors were circulating on their routes, shoes usually sold for around 8,000 to 10,000 shillings, but at the kijiweni they often went for 15,000, 18,000, or sometimes even more than 20,000 shillings. If the performing vendor realised the sale, it was common practice that he would hand over the entire amount to the actual owner of the shoe who either stood beside the display with his colleagues and had witnessed the entire sales pitch



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or who was busy in the backyard preparing his last pairs of shoes for the streets. The reason why the performing vendor had to hand over the entire amount, I was told, was the stationary nature of the sale. A customer who later changed her mind or was unhappy with the quality of her purchase might return at any time to demand her money back. In such instances, it was the owner of the shoes who would be forced to reimburse her. But if he had shared his profits with the performing vendor, claiming that share back would have led to considerable complications. It was therefore an acknowledged convention that in stationary collaborative sales, the entire amount had to be handed over to the owner of the shoes that were sold. However, the owner of the shoe would usually cut his colleague in on his profit and return a small-denomination bill to the performing vendor. If there was no small bill in the bundle, the owner would ask his colleagues for change or look for change in one of the adjacent shops. The performing vendor would thereby get his ganji or maji ya kunywa, literally his ‘drinking water’. Thus, while there was an acknowledged convention not to share, and although most vendors dearly required every single shilling they could make from their business, it was common to share one’s profit with the performing vendor. An owner’s refusal to share with the performing vendor would sometimes lead to quite aggressive arguments and accusations that the owner had roho mbaya, a bad character. Such accusations naturally had a ‘reputational effect’, in that they might prevent the accused from entering into similar collaborative arrangements in the future (see Cook et al. 2005: 84–85). Sales from the joint display followed reciprocal expectations among all the vendors involved. The transactions between the owner and the performing vendor were publicly performed before the eyes and ears of all the colleagues gathered around the joint display. An owner knew that being accused of having roho mbaya when it came to cutting in a colleague might have negative effects later on. Someday, it would be he who sold a colleague’s shoe and was at his mercy to get a little ‘drinking water’. In this way, in the long run, collaborative stationary sales took the form of a reciprocal exchange of minor favours and small amounts of money. Despite the general rule that the owner of a sold shoe would hold on to the entire amount paid by the customer a vendor had to care about his colleagues’ opinion of him more than about the rare occasions when a customer reclaimed her money.

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Two divergent and in fact incompatible expectations thus governed the praxis of collaborative sales at the kijiweni. The only ‘regularity’ I observed about this praxis was that it was performed with a considerable degree of inconsistency. Although in many cases the performing vendor got his ganji out of the owner’s profit, in other cases the owner would claim the entire amount and did not share his profits at all. The simultaneous applicability of these two contradictory conventions left considerable leeway for individual shoe vendors to pursue their own interests in playing one convention off the other (see Comaroff and Roberts 1992: 14–15; Moore 1975: 210–238). Field notes, 4 April 2012 11.30 a.m. in the backyard. Omari and Saidi are loudly discussing the question of whether or not a vendor who sells a colleague’s shoes at the kijiweni should have to hand over the entire amount from a sale to the mwenye (owner) of the shoe. The cause for their discussion is a case that had occurred the previous day: Hamis had sold one of Abdul’s shoes but refused to hand over the entire price. As it turns out, Abdul had not been around when the customer had approached him and asked about the price of the shoe. Hamis had conducted the negotiations, and when they had reached a price of 20,000, he whispered to the other vendors standing around whether anyone knew the exact price for that shoe. Saidi signalled 12,000 to him. The customer left, saying that she would return later with the 20,000 shillings. By the time she came back, Abdul had returned and was standing right next to Hamis as he sold her the shoe for the agreed price of 20,000. Hamis collected the money and was about to hand over 12,000 to Saidi, thinking that he was the owner of the shoe. But Abdul stopped him, demanding the entire 20,000, telling him that he was the actual owner. Hamis refused to give him the money, claiming that Saidi was the mwenye, since he had told him at which price to sell the shoe. Abdul, however, claimed that Hamis knew very well that these particular shoes were Abdul’s, since he had borrowed them some days ago in order to give them to his girlfriend as a present, but they had not fit her. Omari and Saidi are now discussing whether or not Saidi had made a mistake in telling Hamis the price. Saidi defends himself by saying that no matter what he had told Hamis, it



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was sheria (law) at the kijiweni that the mwenye should get the entire price of his shoe. Abdul, Hamis and Hashiri, listening to the argument, support his point. But Omari makes reference to a different setting, when a vendor takes a colleague’s shoes into the streets and is told the price the mwenye will demand upon sale. Abdul loudly interrupts, shouting, ‘Winga sio palepale, winga lazima utoke!’ (‘Winga does not pertain to stationary sales, for winga you are required to leave!’). A collaborative sale at the kijiweni needs to be distinguished from winga, Abdul claims: if the mwenye was present when the shoes were sold at the kijiweni, he had the right to claim the entire price and could decide for himself whether and how much ganji he would give his colleague. But if the shoes were sold out on the streets, a different sheria would apply.

Abdul later told me that he had given Hamis the unusually large ganji of 5,000 TSh, but Hamis kept on claiming the entire difference between 12,000 and 20,000 TSh. Abdul also told me that he suspected Hamis had handed the money to Saidi well aware of the fact that Abdul was the real mwenye, but that he was simply trying to take advantage of the uncertainty created by the applicability of three different and contradictory conventions in that particular situation. In addition to the two incompatible conventions applicable in collaborative stationary sales, a third convention was invoked in this setting, the one that usually governed winga, mobile sales on commission. In winga, the giver of the merchandise negotiated with the receiver of that merchandise a fixed price for each pair. This arrangement only concerned two individuals and did not take the shape of a circle of mutual reciprocal expectations as stationary sales did. However, its rules were commonly known and generally accepted among the shoe vendors. In winga, contrary to stationary collaborative sales, the performing vendor was required to hand over only a predetermined amount of money to the mwenye and could keep whatever he managed to negotiate on top of that for himself. In the above vignette, the vendors had to navigate three different and incompatible conventions: First, Hamis claimed to be conducting the collaboration according to winga conventions by handing over to the supposed mwenye only the predetermined price of 12,000 TSh. Abdul argued that Hamis was only pretending not to know that he,

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Abdul, was the real mwenye, as this would have changed the mode of the collaboration into a stationary sale, the second convention, according to which Abdul could claim his right to the full amount. Finally, Abdul gave in to a considerable degree when he handed over a rather generous ganji to Hamis that greatly exceeded the normal small sum of 500 or 1,000 TSh for ‘drinking water’, but this amount seemed appropriate to reconcile their conflicting claims. Eventually, the purely strategic invocation of different conventions by different actors had to give way to a more accommodating solution to the problem. What shaped this negotiation was not a form of institutionalised ‘rule’ that could have been enforced by any authority within the group, but rather the ‘intrinsic properties of social relations’ of the parties involved (Comaroff and Roberts 1992: 12): the antagonistic forces of individualistic aspirations and the inevitable need to cooperate that kept sociality at the kijiweni continually in motion.

Practices of entrustment in the absence of trust Joint sales such as winga arrangements in a way contradicted the Wayao’s self-description as untrustworthy. As I detailed in Chapter 2, their close and intimate social relations as relatives and fellow Wayao who had grown up together in the same village were the basis of a narrative according to which they were all equally ill-equipped for life in the city. The Wayao at the kijiweni by and large disdained one another and even more so as they were constantly reminded in their daily lives that they needed one another in so many ways in order to be able to conduct their business. Each one of them relied on the shared understanding of the market in the streets and depended on continuously updating knowledge about current developments in it. Many of them shared the tools and materials necessary to refurbish their shoes, since rubber soles, razor blades, shoe polish and brushes cost money that was always scarce. And some of the vendors who had been unlucky needed the support of their colleagues, who would give them shoes on commission in winga arrangements. The instances of cooperation I described above, however, do not refute the Wayao’s claim that in general they did not trust one another.



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While trust, as I have argued in Chapter 4, is best understood as a form of thought, what the cooperative arrangements such as sharing tools or winga entailed were specific practices of entrustment (Shipton 2007). Entrustment involves concrete material objects that change hands. The tangibility of entrustment sharply distinguishes this practice from the more abstract nature of epistemic trust. In winga, the shoe vendors did not reason in an ‘empty space’ of vague future anticipations, but created temporary relationships that involved and were shaped by material objects. The shoes thus entrusted made the agreement between the giver and the receiver of winga quite tangible. Secondly, while some authors have described trust as a kind of ‘social glue’ without which society simply would disintegrate (cf. Simmel 1978: 178-179), entrustment has a much more circumscribed scope and effect, binding individuals together only temporarily and with reference to the entrusted good, and it does not necessarily create more durable and general trust among them. This point is of particular importance for the present discussion of sociality at the kijiweni. While the general lack of trust among the shoe vendors prevented their sociality from stabilising and gelling into more reliable and predictable social relationships, short but repeated cycles of entrustment created emerging and shifting constellations of temporary bilateral relationships that unravelled when the entrusting arrangement ended. The contract that the partners in winga entered into attained a degree of tangibility and conspicuousness by means of the materiality of the shoes. How was the relationship inscribed into the shoes? In an ethnographic example of a Papua New Guinean society, Marilyn Strathern (1999: 96–97) argues that it was the divisibility of the money introduced to Papua New Guinean societies that ‘divid[ed] the mind’ of the people. Due to the divisibility of any amount of money into smaller amounts, people came to associate money with the many different purposes for which these smaller amounts might have been used, and thus became aware of the multiple divisions within themselves and between themselves and other people, of ‘the expectations of parties to a relationship’. Whereas traditional media of exchange such as cowries and pearl shells were non-divisible by nature, the divisibility of money encouraged people to envisage all of the relationships in which money was or could be used, thus creating an ‘anxiety, a sense that debts must be returned more quickly and

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exchange accelerated’ (Reed 2007: 39). In this line of argument, in addition to the sheer materiality of the entrusted shoes, by which the contract became a ‘hard fact’, there was arguably a similar process at work in winga of envisioning divisions and relationships. For the receiver of winga, the shoes handed over to him by the giver were laden with a double value: One was fixed by the owner, but the other was variable and dependent on the final price he would negotiate. Within the overall amount he expected to get for a pair, probably somewhere around 10,000 TSh, the receiver had to negotiate with the giver a price that would be low enough for him to ensure his own minimal expectations of a profitable margin in the expected final price. According to Strathern’s arguments, the separate expectations and values inscribed discursively into the shoes made the objects epistemically divisible and thus turned them into a material record of the relationship between the giver and the receiver (see Reed 2007: 38–39). By taking the entrusted shoes, the receiver of winga simultaneously grasped the relationship he had entered into. Institutionalised forms of sharing and cooperating such as winga followed conventions that were widely accepted and adhered to among the Wayao vendors. Breaches of such agreements put the parties concerned in a difficult situation, since they could not call on any authority at the kijiweni that was invested with the power to judge and sanction breaches. In such instances the duped vendor could only try to make the case public and thus to shame the perpetrator to the point where he would admit to his mistake and right the wrong. I often witnessed two or more vendors accusing one another of deceitfulness and staging vociferous fights in front of their gathered colleagues, trying to persuade them their claims were justified. In the absence of effective sanctions, the accused still had to fear acquiring a bad reputation that would make future collaborations with his colleagues more difficult. Field notes, 27 March 2012 Saidi tells me how he gave a pair of shoes to Mudi in the morning, telling him that if he returns, he should bring back the pair or 10,000 shillings. A little while later, Mudi arrives at the kijiweni and tells Saidi that he has sold the shoes for 10,000 but has already spent 1,000 on some food, so all he offers Saidi is 9,000 shillings. Saidi gets really upset and shouts ‘mimi sifanyi



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biashara hii!’ (‘I don’t do this kind of business!’). 10,000 was the agreed-upon price, so he wants the entire 10,000. Mudi starts explaining how difficult it was to sell the shoes, but Saidi interrupts: ‘hii ndo siri yako, mimi sikwepo’ (‘This is your own secret, I wasn’t there’). Saidi demands Mudi’s cell phone as collateral and sends him off to borrow the missing 1,000 shillings from someone. Saidi furiously yells at him and remains obstinate, pacing up and down before the group of colleagues sitting around the kijiweni. Mudi tries to justify his actions to the others, but they just sit and listen and do not comment. Mudi walks over to the other colleagues sitting opposite the passageway to try to explain himself to them, too. But no-one takes his side. Finally, he leaves. Tozi comes over to us and tells Saidi that he is right about the issue. Saidi tells him that Mudi definitely must have more money because he sells a lot. Mudi comes back after ten minutes or so and hands over a 10,000 shilling note to Saidi. The next day, Saidi tells me that he had started the whole fuss also in order to show his colleagues at the kijiweni that he would stick to his agreements. If they had seen, he tells me, that he accepted 9,000 instead of 10,000 shillings from Mudi, they would exploit that later. He also tells me that he suspects that Mudi had just walked once around the block before handing over the money because he would have felt embarrassed to produce the 10,000 shilling note from his pocket in front of all the colleagues after having complained so vociferously that he really had no money other than the 9,000 he had offered Saidi.

The bilateral arrangement between Saidi and Mudi was put on trial publicly before their colleagues at the kijiweni, and as no one took Mudi’s side he finally had to give in. However, the excerpt illustrates another important fact about winga and other obligations among the shoe vendors. Such public arguments performed in the presence of colleagues were the usual means of addressing breaches of agreements, but the efficacy of such performances in most cases was rather limited. A shoe vendor deprived of his share in an agreement had no means of claiming satisfaction other than making the misdemeanour public and hoping that his colleagues would support his case. I never witnessed a situation in which a vendor who had breached an agreement was seriously punished or expelled.

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Field notes, 11 December 2012 Malik arrives [in the backyard] and takes a can of shoe polish from Hamis’ plastic bag. All of a sudden, Rajabu starts shouting at Malik, calling him mshamba (literally ‘villager’, used derogatively). The others join in the rant in the presence of Malik. Malik does not comment at all but insolently goes on polishing his shoes. After he leaves, I ask Hamis why they had called him mshamba. He explains that Malik has the habit of taking winga from people and keeping all the money for himself. Then he moves on to a different kijiweni to do the same thing there. Hamis repeats that Malik really is a mshamba and not a mjanja (‘smart guy’). He says: ‘Kwenye ujanja lazima uelewane na watu’ (‘If you want to be smart, you have to get along with people’). ‘Anadaiwa na watu wengi hapa, lakini hatumfukuzi kwa sababu ni ndugu yetu’ (‘He owes money to a lot of people here, but we don’t chase him away because he’s our relative’).

Even though kinship relationships were not per se a source of mutual trust, in conflict situations they were nevertheless invoked and thus made effective, while at the same time making any form of sanctioning difficult. This was one reason why all contractual arrangements between the shoe vendors were not merely contractual but actually enmeshed in the complex web of relationships and meanings that constituted the sociality among them. Cooperation was not a simple matter of either appealing to kinship relations or to contractual arrangements, the way Hart described it for the Frafra migrants in the ‘informal economy’ of Accra (Hart 1988; see Chapter 4). The application of conventions was a complex and ambivalent process. On the one hand, they were used to define mutual expectations and to create shared definitions of situations, but on the other hand, they could be used as arguments to put forward competing and incompatible definitions of situations according to the individual interests pursued by the actors involved. Thus, while there were ‘processes of regularization’ (Moore 1975: 219) at work in the daily routines at the kijiweni, concrete situations were often indeterminate to a great degree, as the interactions between the shoe vendors offered various points of reference for significantly differing interpretations. Established conventions were thus subject to continuous ‘situational adjustment’ (Moore 1975), but they were still resources that the



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vendors could tap into in order to state their individual arguments in mutually comprehensible and acceptable ways. The conventions of entrusting and sharing arrangements were therefore structuring moments – not because they lent unequivocal structure to practices, but because they were emergent resources that facilitated individual action and gave momentum to social processes.

8 Creating a market where there is none: the spatial practices of street vending The Wayao street vendors shared a common problem with street vendors all over the world: they had to create market opportunities outside of a marketplace. Whereas in a marketplace, set off from the wider social sphere physically and organised according to locally construed market principles, customers and vendors interact with one another with the expectation to ultimately enter into sales conversations, for vendors who look for customers on the streets the situation is much more complicated: they have to create vending situations out of chance encounters with passers-by who initially do not necessarily intend to buy something while walking in the streets. While street vendors’ spatial practices have often been accused by authorities and city planners of ‘misusing’ public space (Bhowmik 2010; Bromley 2000; Cross and Morales 2007; Hansen et al. 2013), street vendors actually skilfully influence the social environment they engage with. Through their work, street vendors thus transform the epistemological, social and cultural geography of the city (see Chari and Gidwani 2005: 268) and turn it into a market that they simultaneously navigate and engage with. Street vendors’ practices, though they might appear flexible and fleeting, are not transient and without effect on the urban environment (see Cupers 2015). Their practices leave memory traces and thus charge their vending locations with ‘interactional potential’ (Milligan 1998) for future encounters with customers. Street vendors in that way leave a mark in urban space and produce ‘meaningful cultural landscapes based on the inventive potential of memory’ (Cupers 2015: 145). By inscribing meaning into public space that contradicts the officially sanctioned uses of space (De Certeau 1984; Lefebvre 1991 [1974]), street vendors’ everyday practices thus create zones of ‘possibility and autonomy’ (Pieterse, quoted in Myers 2011: 14) and turn public space itself into a resource (Brown 2001).

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By inscribing their experiences and market knowledge into urban space, the shoe vendors created a market that I capture here with the notion of an epistemic landscape, a dynamic and relational matrix of knowledge about the relevant social goods and people that spanned the topography of the city. The term epistemic landscape captures the socially constructed street market as a web of meaning and knowledge that is spread out over the geography and temporality of the city. Customers moved through the city, their demand for specific kinds of shoes changed with fashions, and their purchasing power and readiness to buy varied according to the days of the week or holiday seasons. Successfully selling shoes on the streets to a large extent depended on being at the right spot at the right time, having the right kind of commodity on offer and knowing what price is appropriate to a customer’s current financial situation. Understanding the temporality of different spaces and the rhythms of movements in and between them constituted an approach to urban space that allowed the vendors to turn chance encounters into sales situations. What I mean by epistemic landscape therefore is not coterminous with a ‘mental map’ that represents relevant coordinates in static, Cartesian space through imaginative representations (De Certeau 1984; Gell 1985; Ingold 2010). The epistemic landscape is not a representation of what is going on in the market, it constitutes the market. The challenge for the shoe vendors I worked with was to engage with an urban environment that was set in motion itself and that changed over time (Ingold 2007: 155). In a general sense, the shoe vendors’ ‘locational behavior’1 (Bromley 1978) was first of all determined by the spatio-temporal distribution of income opportunities (customers and their purchasing power), but also by the spatiotemporal distribution of competing and complementary traders, and the regulatory behaviour of urban authorities and private watchmen (see Bromley 1978: 43). The street vendors therefore had to firstly gain knowledge of the various rhythms of social life in the city and secondly to devise tactics by which they could transform chance encounters into sales situations and thus ‘manipulate events in order to turn them into ‘opportunities’’ (De Certeau 1984: xix). These tactics presupposed not only an understanding of the ‘macro-movements’ of customers and purchasing power through the streets but the skills necessary to engage with ‘micro-movements’ of potential customers (see Klaeger 2017: 396, 397). If a passer-by let



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her eyes linger for a second on a vendor’s shoes, often unconsciously, she gave away her interest in his merchandise. The vendors had to be attentive to such cues and nuances in the movements of passers-by. Their challenge was to pick them up and to react to them in such a way as to create a sales situation in which their customer’s attention was attuned to them (Malefakis 2015). The shoe vendors that I worked with spent the better part of their working day circling the streets on their own. After the first hours of the morning at their kijiweni, when the vendors washed and refurbished the merchandise previously obtained in Karume Market, they individually embarked on their tours through the inner city. Opening hours, lunch breaks and closing times of offices, banks, colleges or ministries and the rush hours of commuter transport to and from residential areas laid down the temporal grid of the shoe vendors’ movements through the city. But while they organised their tours referring to this rather coarse grid of outward Zeitgebers (Ballard et al. 2008: 330–333; Bluedorn 2002: 150), the shoe vendors’ engagement with the market unfolded as an experiential rhythm. According to the vending area they moved through, they changed their corporeal and cognitive tensions in order to be ready to approach the kinds of customers they expected there. Moving through the city thus created a rhythm composed of the continuous building up of cognitive and corporeal tension, the subsequent release of that tension before it was again built up, and so on (see Ingold 2007: 197; Lefebvre 2004: 5–18; Malefakis 2015). In addition, the tactics of street vending necessarily entailed attempts to disrupt the walking rhythms of other pedestrians, who were concerned with myriad other things than buying a pair of shoes. For the shoe vendors, therefore, walking the streets of the city was not a flowing but more of an erratic and jumpy rhythmic experience. Moving through the city required observational skills and a pronounced sensitivity towards people in the streets and their moods, attentiveness and walking rhythms. In that sense the street vendors ‘felt’ their way through the city, as they were not simply moving but ‘wayfaring’ (Ingold 2007: 155) through a social landscape that was full of clues, references and indications for them. Being able to ‘read’ these clues and references, to gather information and to interpret it, was a ubiquitous challenge for the street vendors, just as it is for vendors in any other kind of market setting

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(see Appadurai 1986: 43; Geertz 1979). The skills of the shoe vendors lay in their ability to interpret potential customers’ reactions to their addresses and offers so as to turn chance encounters on the street into emergent sales interactions (see Prus 1989: 24).The knowledge necessary to achieve that was not merely disembodied, information-like discursive knowledge (see Lakoff 1998: 8) but entailed interpretative, experiential, corporeal, cognitive and sensual dimensions. These forms of knowing the streets and how to engage with passers-by were sedimented into a slang vocabulary with which the vendors named their preferred vending locations, distinguished different kinds of customers, ascribed particular vending tactics to them and associated them with the kind of merchandise they most likely wanted. Their slang, however, was not just a rhetorical style. It organised the way they perceived the streets and related to the events they encountered there (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980). It is important to note that the shoe vendors not only shared their individual experiences with one another (see Chinchilla et al. 1996; Nunez 1993), but created shared forms of knowledge. By communicating their experiences to their colleagues and thus creating, through a process of joint ‘conceptual processing’ (Keller and Dixon Keller 1996: 25–26), shared metaphors and verbal symbols to convey their knowledge, the shoe vendors narratively re-enacted their past journeys through the market and thus ‘mapped’ their experiences onto it (Ingold 2007: 155). On the following pages, I will trace the construction of the market through the language the vendors used to denote vending locations. These terms entailed dimensions of experience, expectation and proscriptions of how to engage with the denoted elements of the market. Therefore, the words did not merely represent what was going on in the market. Through their practical relevance the vendors’ language constituted the market as socially constructed forms of perception and practice.

Finding your way through the streets Field notes, 17 July 2012 11.30 a.m. I accompany Daudi on his tour. As we cross Azikiwe Street, Daudi comments, ‘Wasite wanalinda hapa’ – The city



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police guard this area. He points to the other side of the street, where usually a number of vendors are selling wallets, belts, and greeting cards. Today, not a single vendor is present. At 11.40, we turn right onto Ohio Street. Daudi says, ‘Unajua kutembea bila faida?’ – You know what it’s like to walk without profit? I tell him that probably it was not profitable to walk the streets so shortly before the noon prayer in the mosque. He nods and says that at noon there are not many people in the streets because of the intense sun. It would be better at 8 in the morning or later, around 5 p.m. At 11.45, we stop at the corner of Sokoine Street and arrange the shoes on the narrow pavement in front of the bank there. Hamis comes by (11.55). Daudi asks him, ‘Umeona mitaa kweupe?’ – Have you seen the ‘white’ [empty] streets? Musa comes along and joins us. Daudi says: ‘Umeona mishe ya leo?’ – Have you seen today’s tour? Musa answers, ‘Hamna kati leo’ – There was nothing ‘inside’ today. The four of us stay silent for three or four minutes. Hamis buys a cigarette from a passing vendor and lights it. After a while, a new topic of conversation comes up: soccer.

Besides the British Premier League and the German Bundesliga, what went on ‘inside’ was naturally the abiding theme in conversations among the shoe vendors. After they had finished preparing their shoes and had displayed them for some time on the pavement at the kijiweni in midmorning, the shoe vendors went kati or ‘inside’, mostly one by one in order to avoid the direct competition that would inevitably occur if they tried to entice customers in close proximity to one another with their rather similar merchandise. The mobile part of the shoe vendors’ working day was conducted more or less individually – more or less, because there was a striking degree of similarity in the routes they took through the streets. Sooner or later they all showed up at the same street corners, intersections, bus stops, stretches of pavement and parking lots, or in front of the same office buildings, supermarkets and banks. Brief exchanges of greeting, a quick chat, or the passing on of some information then interrupted the routine of walking the streets that was usually characterised by silently walking through the streets and minutely observing passers-by and the ways they reacted to their merchandise.

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As I started accompanying the shoe vendors on their tours through the streets, I initially had difficulty keeping up with them. I was slowed down considerably by an almost obsessive habit of scribbling down the names of the streets we were walking along. Through this reference to the inner city’s street map, which I more or less knew by heart after a couple of weeks on the streets, I was trying to orient myself and to demarcate the inner-city area the shoe vendors had chosen as their business territory. However, one day I realised that my technique of orientation and the way the shoe vendors oriented themselves in the city differed fundamentally. I was accompanying Saidi that day, and as we turned into a small backstreet whose name I did not know, I asked him for the name of the street. His answer, I could tell, was wrong. He indicated the name of a street I was certain was located some hundred metres away. Only then did I realise that the way I was trying to keep track of our movements through the streets was based on an entirely different logic than the way Saidi and his colleagues planned their tours. Jotting down a large question mark in my notebook, it suddenly became clear that it had been naïve of me to assume that the street vendors would orient themselves in the city by street names. The way I had prepared myself by studying the city map probably was a very European way of orienting oneself in unknown territory. For the shoe vendors, the street names probably had little practical meaning in themselves. Although Saidi might have been unable to pinpoint our location on a street map, he could nevertheless answer the question I asked him after I had realised that my preoccupation with street maps was misguided: whether he planned his tour before he embarked on it, and how he did so. As he told me, his mishe, as the shoe vendors called their tours, followed more or less the same route, and so he knew pretty well where a day’s tour would lead him prior to leaving the kijiweni. As he explained, from the kijiweni he would take a small street that led up to NBC (the National Bank of Commerce), then turn towards Posta (the bus stop at the central post office), go on down to Wizarani (‘at the ministries’), descend to Magogoni (a college for public servants) near the ferry port, and then walk along the waterfront back to Mahakama Kuu (the High Court). After a couple of minutes of sitting and waiting there, he would return to Posta and more or less start the whole circle again, maybe inspecting more closely the smaller side streets around Wizarani



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this time, maybe resting for some time at Georgie’s (named after a social club). He would make this tour many times in succession, until around four or five in the afternoon, when he would interrupt his routine to stay for an hour or so at Mariedo, a stretch of pavement in front of the high-rise Benjamin Mkapa Pension Tower, named after the clothing store ‘Mariedo’ located nearby. There he would meet some of his colleagues and they would arrange their shoes on the pavement in a coherent fashion, as they did during the midmorning at the kijiweni. As many of the shoe vendors explained to me, the reason why they canvassed these particular parts of the city was that they expected to encounter well-off customers there. In the shoe vendors’ understanding of the market, the inner-city streets were subdivided into zones where sales were more lucrative and zones where people’s spending capacity was low. One such zone of the latter kind was Stesheni (‘at the station’), a bus stop only a couple of hundred metres west of the kijiweni. In the shoe vendors’ experience, the people one met there were not very interested in street hawkers’ merchandise, and the prices they offered were considerably lower than in other parts of the city – and furthermore, the area around that bus stop was known to be frequently patrolled by the city police. The shoe vendors therefore avoided Stesheni and turned to the area east and north of their kijiweni instead. As the shoe vendors circled those streets around Posta and Wizarani, so too did hundreds of other street hawkers selling everything from fruits and vegetables to cigarettes, groundnuts, shoes, shirts, trousers and other articles of clothing. There were no exclusive business territories that groups of street hawkers claimed for themselves and defended against intruders. They all simply went where they thought the money was. Embarking on a tour from the kijiweni to the ‘inside’ of the market of the streets meant setting oneself in motion, changing one’s level of attention, and focusing on monitoring the constantly shifting and moving environment, with passers-by suddenly emerging from house entrances, side streets or parked cars and equally abruptly disappearing from sight again. Walking through the streets was therefore an entirely different experience and practice of street vending than stationary sales at the kijiweni. In stationary sales, the shoe vendors’ efforts to attract attention from passers-by centred on the creation of a coherent display, while they themselves remained in the back-

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ground so as to create an impression of orderliness and propriety (see Chapter 7). In walking the streets, on the other hand, they were required to actively enhance their physical presence in order to draw attention to themselves and their shoes. Consequently, they heightened their attention to their surroundings to constantly be ready to react to a passer-by’s glance at their shoes, to instantly seize an opportunity, and to adjust themselves to the walking pace and direction of the customer in order to create a sales situation with them. Within the area of rotation, there were particular paths and spaces that were known to be especially promising vending locations. Some of these paths and spaces were marked with names, such as the ones mentioned above (Mariedo, NMB, and Georgie’s). These names did not merely denote a particular location in the city. For the shoe vendors, these named spaces were associated with particular ways of walking, watching and talking, according to their knowledge of what customer groups were most likely to be encountered there. In the shoe vendors’ understanding, certain expectations, experiences and practices were synthesised (see Löw et al. 2007: 64) and agglomerated in the names they gave those spaces. For them, different vending spaces were associated with their respective customer groups and their buying behaviour. Moving from one such area to another therefore required them to change their approach accordingly, adjusting their attention and physical presence to the kinds of customers they expected there. This building up of cognitive and corporeal tension when approaching vending spaces and the subsequent release of this tension and its substitution by other forms of attentiveness when moving into a different vending area constituted the rhythm (see Ingold 2007: 197) of mobile shoe vending as I experienced it among the vendors of the kijiweni.

The rhythms of street vending The shoe vendors roughly adjusted their timing to the timing of what might be called the ‘formal city’ (see Hansen and Vaa 2004: 8). In their view, the opening hours of offices, lunch breaks, closing times and rush hours afforded the best opportunities to encounter well-off customers on the streets. Those time frames represented external Zeitgebers (Ballard et al. 2008: 330–333; Bluedorn 2002: 150)



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for the organisation of their work routine, and they oriented themselves by this outward grid of time. The vending spaces thus were not only interspersed in physical space, but also in time. Magogoni, for instance, was to be frequented around lunchtime when students were leaving the building, whereas Mahakama Kuu was preferable at closing time around 4 p.m., just before rush hour. People crowded around the central bus terminal Posta at 4 or 5 p.m., and the Mariedo opposite offered a convenient spot to display shoes on the pavement and to lie in wait for customers. For the shoe vendors, these vending spaces were associated with experiential, cognitive and practical expectations and dispositions. Moving along their path from one vending spot to another, the shoe vendors continually changed their cognitive and corporeal approach to their social surroundings. NMB, for instance, named after a nearby branch of the National Microfinance Bank, was a parking lot that was a particularly popular vending location; almost all the shoe vendors from the kijiweni passed through it on their tours. Because the parking lot was zoned off from the busy street, by walking into it, the shoe vendors opted out of the general movement on the street, which gave them the opportunity to focus their attention on a minute observation of other people passing through the space. The parking lot was equally popular with other passers-by who chose to walk across the twenty or so metres of parking lot instead of along the street, where pedestrians (due to traffic jams and rush hours) either had to carefully watch out for speeding cars or had to squeeze through the occasional gridlock of motor vehicles that polluted the air with their fumes and made walking through the streets an awkward endeavour. Because passers-by often chose to escape the motor vehicles by passing through the parking lot of the NMB, the shoe vendors and a number of other street hawkers found a constant flow of people there who were freed of the requirement to watch out for cars and therefore had the opportunity to let their eyes wander over the street vendors’ wares. In return, the shoe vendors focused their gaze on the pedestrians around them instead of on the cars, singling out the women among them according to the styles of shoes they had on offer, and particularly monitoring the way these potential customers reacted to their merchandise. If the eyes of an oncoming pedestrian lingered on one of his pairs of shoes for just an instant too long, a vendor would immediately turn

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around, catch up with the woman, lift the hand with the shoe up into their field of vision, and start enticing her volubly to stop and try on that shoe. The generally heightened attentiveness within the space of the NMB at such moments was further focused on one single interaction that needed to be steered in a particular direction, to be transformed from an arbitrary encounter on the street into a sales talk with a degree of commitment on both sides. When I witnessed such brief encounters, my own attention to the exact sequence of words spoken, eye movements and hand gestures might have come close to what the shoe vendor himself experienced in that situation. Our temporal experience was changed; the inner durée of the moment was stretched due to the heightened density of information we processed as we both focused our attention on the minute details of the encounter (Flaherty 1991, 2003). Other spaces, such as Magogoni, Mahakama Kuu or Georgie’s were associated with other specific expectations of experiences, opportunities, different types of encounters with customers or colleagues, and different forms of communication. At Magogoni, one might dare to flirt a little with one of the young students while showing her one’s shoes, but the elderly civil servants at Mahakama Kuu had to be greeted respectfully. Georgie’s was a stretch of pavement in a rather nondescript side street that never had many pedestrians walking through it, named after a shut-down social club located on the street. Georgie’s was not so much a promising location for business but rather a popular meeting point and hangout spot among the shoe vendors of the kijiweni. This was a spot that was reserved for a break, catching one’s breath and chatting for a couple of minutes. The vendors would share a cigarette and exchange some of the experiences of their working day. While they hung out at Georgie’s, the shoe vendors themselves would not take the initiative for a couple of minutes. They preferred to relax their heightened attention and corporeal tension before moving on again. The rhythm of street vending does not simply describe the ordered repetition of the events to which the shoe vendors attuned their tours and practices. Rhythm as an embodied experience is not exhaustively conceptualised by referring to periodicity and the regular occurrence of events. It is rather the human experience of such periodicity that transforms it into ‘patterns of changes’ (see Langer 1953: 127) that constitute rhythm as experience, such as the shoe vendors’



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different experiences of the vending locations they moved through regularly. As Henri Lefebvre has argued, although rhythm always involves a repetitive element, this repetitive element is experienced by relating it to other repetitive sequences, referring them to our bodies, our heartbeats, our waking and sleeping hours, etc. (Lefebvre 2004: 10). Rhythm, though it appears to be ‘regulated time, governed by rational laws’, notably always involves ‘what is least rational in human being: the lived, the carnal, the body’ (Lefebvre 2004: 9). To speak of the rhythm of mobile shoe vending therefore implies a much more far-reaching contention than merely stating that it is spatio-temporally organised according to the external Zeitgebers of the formal city. Rhythm is not merely an ordered system of quantitative time intervals, but the experience of being pushed and pulled, compressed and decompressed, of building up tension within oneself and subsequently releasing it (Ingold 2007: 197), of the bodily experience of differential expenditures of energy (Lefebvre 2004: 5–18) – in other words, experiencing different moments in time as qualitatively different temporalities. Notably, these rhythmic experiences were not entirely individual but structured by a matrix of named vending spaces and the paths between them. This matrix was what Musa referred to using the term kati, the ‘inside’, and the creation of that matrix was an achievement of the sociality of the vendors. Kati was a landscape of heterogeneity from which the vendors gathered experiences and meanings by moving through it in a specific manner (see Ingold 2007: 192). Only from their active engagement with particular spaces in that landscape did the shoe vendors experience and know where and how the ‘market’ in the streets was. These experiences and forms of knowledge were simultaneously synthesised into the qualitatively different expectations associated with different spaces (see Löw et al. 2007: 64). The constitution of these spaces, though derived from the immediate experiences of individual shoe vendors, was not merely an individual achievement. The names the shoe vendors attributed to different vending spaces and the practical knowledge entailed in those names were constituted by myriad individual experiences and practices that were explicated, discussed, and thus shared among them over the course of time. A new and inexperienced shoe vendor who had just come from his village to learn the business from a

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relative had to obtain access to the shared experiential landscape by picking up the names as he followed his sponsor. It was crucial for him to understand the nexus between the geography of the city, the movements of people through the streets, the timing of particular spaces and, most importantly, how to actively engage with the different rhythms of different spaces. By walking with an experienced colleague, he learned the names of spaces such as NMB, Magogoni and Georgie’s as implicit categorisations of the associated experiences and practices (see Throop 2005). It was not an individual achievement, but rather the result of an ongoing process of communication and interaction among the shoe vendors at the kijiweni and during their circulation on the streets that led to the creation of an experiential landscape of knowledge that organised specific forms of space, time, knowledge, experience and practice. The experiential rhythm of street vending was not marked by evenly recurring events, but by the different experiences and requirements of different vending locations. The nature of their business actually required them to let their walking rhythms be picked apart by the rhythms of other pedestrians with whom they needed to converge in order to create vending opportunities. In that respect, the rhythms of street vending entailed a degree of ‘entropy’ (Edensor 2008) that is insufficiently captured by the notion of flowing, smooth rhythmicity. The shoe vendors’ explicit focus was to intersperse their walking with rhythms other than their own, looking for little cues and accents in the movements of passers-by that allowed them to attune their own rhythms to them in order to create a particular form of encounter. Their walking therefore did not inscribe one long and stringent ‘story’ into urban space (see De Certeau 1984) but needed to be picked to pieces by other rhythms in order to yield success. In the shoe vendor’s slang, the experience of walking the streets monotonously without finding many opportunities to offer their merchandise to passers-by was referred to as nyama ngumu, ‘tough meat’: for them, circling the streets repetitiously was like chewing on a tough piece of meat without ever really getting to swallow it, therefore ultimately having nothing in their stomachs – in many cases, quite literally. Because the situation on the streets was generally experienced as constantly increasing in difficulty, with prices for merchandise and the number of street vendors trying their luck continually rising while well-off customers remained rare, the overall situation on the streets



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was referred to in general as ‘tough meat’. What the shoe vendors were therefore required to do was to actively create opportunities to interfere with the monotony of walking the streets and to distract the walking rhythms of the potential customers they encountered. In these interruptions of rhythms and distractions of attention lay their chances to open up opportunities to sell. To achieve this, the shoe vendors had become ethnomethodological analysts.

Talking to ‘witches’ and ‘whites’: categorising customers Being able to create vending opportunities in the streets depended on the street vendor’s adoption of a committed and ambitious attitude towards events in the streets. Encounters in the streets were fleeting and short-lived. Transforming them into sales situations required the vendors to attune their cognitive and corporeal tension to the specific interactional potential of a given location and to react appropriately. The shoe vendors needed to minutely observe and interpret the little cues and signals pedestrians gave with their bodies and gazes while they were walking past them: A glance at the shoes for just a split second could indicate a passer-by’s willingness to engage in a conversation with the vendor (see Goffman 1971: 3–18). If a passer-by gave away her interest in a vendor’s merchandise, the vendor had to keep her focused on his shoes by any means possible in order to create a temporal simultaneity between her stream of consciousness and his stream of consciousness by directing them to the same object (see Schütz 1967: 102–107, 163–167). Encounters between vendors and passers-by were precarious situations, because passers-by were not customers from the outset and hence were not necessarily inclined to follow a ‘script’ that predetermined their role in a conventional seller/buyer interaction (see Prus 1989: 24). On the contrary, passers-by interested in a shoe often tried not to adopt the role of buyer for as long as possible, in order to keep the possibility of opting out of the conversation at any time. It was the shoe vendors’ most demanding task to talk to passers-by in such a way that made them gradually give in to the vendors’ definition of the encounter as a sales situation. It involved psychological sensitivity and observational and communicative skills.

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The Wayao shoe vendors approached passers-by in the streets according to their shared knowledge of the different customer groups they catered to. Being able to categorise a potential customer into one or the other group enabled the vendor to resort to preconceived tactics of offering his merchandise and conducting the sales pitch. As I detailed in Chapter 6, the vendors roughly subdivided their target group by age into ‘grandmothers’ and ‘fashionable girls’ and took that classification of customers into account when they chose their merchandise in the morning hours at Karume Market. They knew that catering to elderly ladies would probably yield smaller profits but would require less effort in terms of convincing, since ‘grandmothers’ were not inclined to waste their time talking to a street vendor if they did not intend to buy something. On the other hand, young and fashionable girls would in some cases spend a lot of money on a pair of shoes, but they often halted a vendor’s routine for several minutes and made him describe his merchandise in detail without ultimately buying anything. In their encounters on the street, a third categorisation had been established among the vendors: the mchawi or ‘witch’. However, when this term referred to a customer, it did not imply any kind of ‘occult’ powers or the use of illicit means to influence events or people (see Chapter 3). Here, the term mchawi referred to a customer who wasted a vendor’s time and energy by indulging in lengthy conversations and price negotiations until both reached an agreement – only to back out the deal at the last moment. The shoe vendors were very careful not to get involved with such customers, since they perceived that type of interaction as disrespectful of their professional attitude. After all, in contrast to such passers-by who liked to chat with vendors just for fun and had no intention of actually buying anything, the shoe vendors of the kijiweni were under pressure to earn their livelihoods and to provide for their dependants; consequently, they had no time to waste with ‘idle chatter’. A mchawi was an unpopular type to encounter on the streets, but the most auspicious kind of encounter was with a mzungu, as ‘whites’ were generally referred to in colloquial parlance. However, here ‘whiteness’ did not refer to the skin colour of a customer, but to their perceived ‘incapacity’ to properly negotiate prices – or, possibly, their lack of interest in driving down prices due to their secure purchasing power. A mzungu would simply cheua hela, ‘burp out the money’,



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without a fuss. A vendor who got lucky in this way would try to establish more durable relations with that customer, asking her for her cell phone number and promising to give her a call should he come across a pair of shoes of the particular style and size she demanded. There were apparently no safe criteria to assess whether or not a customer was a mzungu, but the sales tactics of the shoe vendors were ultimately always built on the assumption that by some lucky chance any woman they encountered could turn out to be one. The instant in which a vendor encountered a passer-by he judged to be a potential customer was a moment of intensified attention and enhanced bodily and cognitive presence. The time window they had to engage her attention was quite short. The split second in which she raised her eyes to take in the vendor and his merchandise was their only chance to interrupt her rhythm of walking and to insert their own agenda into her stream of consciousness. Once she had moved on, they told me, her thoughts had already wandered on with her, and there was no way of making them come back to the instant of the encounter. Customers on the streets therefore had to be addressed personally and specifically, in contrast to the general invitation the vendors used during the period of the joint display at the kijiweni. This personal form of invitation generally referred to a specific shoe the vendor was carrying that he would instantly try to relate to the taste of the passer-by or the size of her feet. ‘Angalia hii hapa’ (‘look at this one here’), for instance, or ‘saiz yako ninayo’ (‘I got your size of shoes’) were typical formulas the vendors used on the streets, pointing out particular shoes and their respective features that they assessed as matching the taste of their mark. This direct address usually resulted in at least a glance at the merchandise. But often the passer-by would stop any further approaches with a wave of her hand or by stating that she had no money to spend. However, if a passer-by actually did slow down her walking pace and stopped, turning her attention to the vendor and the shoe he had pointed out to her, usually her first reaction was to ask for the price of the shoe. Only an inexperienced vendor would disclose the price so easily. A usual tactic was for a vendor to divert the customer’s attention away from that question, telling her that the prices were the ‘usual prices’ (bei za kawaida), not exorbitant, while at the same time giving her the impression that the merchandise he carried was of particularly high quality.

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Experienced shoe vendors displayed an impressive sensitivity to the psychology of their customers in such conversations. Rather than signalling to their customer that the shoes they offered were cheap enough for her to buy, they gave the impression that firstly their merchandise was of outstanding quality, since it was ‘real mitumba from Europe’ (see Chapter 6) and secondly that she, the customer, was clever for noticing that quality and wealthy enough to afford it. The way the vendors addressed their customers either respectfully as mama mkwe (‘mother-in-law’) or by calling her tajiri wangu (‘my wealthy [friend]’) was intended to enhance the effect of flattering her while at the same time signalling a kind of subordination on the part of the vendor. In some instances, this relative subordination was even exaggerated and thus utilised as a specific sales strategy when the usual course of enticing a customer had failed. If the customer did not respond to the vendor’s flattery in the desired way, accepting her status as ‘wealthy’ and accordingly starting the price negotiations at a rather high level, the vendor could change the register of communication. He would then attempt to turn the situation from a sales pitch into an encounter between a needy person and a charitable person, utilising social inequalities for his own purposes. The customer would increasingly be addressed in kinship terms (mama yangu, ‘my mother’, for instance), and the vendor might change his bodily posture, bowing his head and explaining that the money he is trying to make with his honest work will support not only him but also his wife and children who were waiting for him at home with empty stomachs. However, changing the register of communication only seemed promising once the customer had been ‘hooked’ by the merchandise on offer. In order to achieve that, the vendor would divert her questions about the price by trying to create an atmosphere of non-committal and entertaining chatter. What he offered her instead of a commodity was fahari ya macho (‘a joy for the eyes’), and all inevitable questions about prices were answered with angalia bure (‘looking is free’). Some women would be visibly annoyed by such sales techniques and would pressure the vendor to tell her what his price was, as they only had a certain amount of money with them. Such conversations usually did not lead to sales, since the amount the customer offered was generally far below what the vendors wanted, and the finality of the customer’s statement discouraged the vendor



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from engaging further in any attempt to negotiate a higher price. It took some effort to entice the customer to allow herself to be drawn into further conversation and negotiation; experienced vendors tried to achieve this by going on to emphasise the non-bindingness of the situation while simultaneously involving the customer in joint practice. Through flattering, positive remarks about the perfect match between a particular shoe and, for instance, the dress the customer was wearing, a vendor could coax her into trying on the shoe. The openness of the situation was maintained by reassuring the customer: usihofu (‘don’t be scared’), jaribu kwanza uone kinavokaa mguuni (‘try it on first so you see how it fits your foot’) or jaribu bure (‘trying it on is free’). In most cases, the vendor would kneel down before the customer, offering his head or his shoulder for her to brace herself; he would take off the shoe she was wearing, set it aside, and put on the particular shoe she was interested in. As Saidi explained to me, once the customer had the shoe on, hana mapepe tena (literally, ‘she is no scatterbrain anymore’).2 Putting on the shoe made her focus. Provided the shoe actually fit her foot and matched her taste, this was the moment when the situation created some commitment on the part of the customer, and the shoe vendor made the next step by similarly making a commitment: Now her questions about the price would be answered. When I conducted my own first sales pitches with customers, my shoe vending colleagues – after they had finished falling about laughing – gave me a comprehensive critique of the manoeuvre, whereby I came to realise that the course of a price negotiation needed to follow a particular pattern in order to end at the highest possible price. Negotiating a price involved some twists and rhetorical tricks that seemed to be well-established among the shoe vendors as standardised sales tactics. One such trick was to start with a high price. Although it was generally known that in mobile sales the final prices usually turned out considerably lower than stationary sales (see Chapter 7), starting with a high price (20,000 TSh or more) served the double purpose of flattering the customer as a tajiri and of avoiding missing out on the rare chance that a customer might unexpectedly agree on the spot – turning out to be a real mzungu. The vast majority of customers the vendors encountered were not ready to pay the initial prices they were quoted, usually rejecting the price, immediately slipping their foot out of the shoe and handing it

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back to the vendor. Of course, this definite gesture was not the end of the negotiation. The beginner’s mistake I made in my first sale was to answer that gesture with a considerably lower price. As my colleagues afterwards told me, the price I announced was probably below the price the customer had actually been ready to pay. Instead of giving in to the customer’s demand to offer her a better price, the tactic was to give her an opportunity to make an offer. In this way, the vendor could get an impression of how ‘wealthy’ that customer actually was. Once the customer responded to the invitation to make an offer, the vendor had to signal to her that the deal was basically already done and that now it was only a matter of a bit of conversation to reach a final price that both parties would be happy with. In that moment, the situation was focused and defined as a binding sales pitch, since customers knew that their announcement of a price signalled their definite intention to ultimately buy the shoe; only a mchawi would opt out after making an offer. In price negotiations, there were a few standard phrases the vendors used to express the unacceptability of the offered price, such as unaniua (‘you’re killing me’) or nitakufa njaa (‘I will starve to death’). Once the vendor sensed that the negotiations had reached their final stage, a measure of last resort to increase the customer’s offer was to state that the price she had just announced was actually a good price, but it was the exact amount the vendor had himself paid in Karume Market to obtain the shoe. If she would be willing to put a few thousand TSh hela ya kula (‘money for food’) on top, the vendor might say, they would have a deal. Applying this rhetorical trick was a matter of timing, as I learned in my first pitches. Much to the amusement of my colleagues, who minutely observed my performance, I had answered the customer’s very first offer by saying that this was the price I myself had paid. Consequently, she ‘knew’ that she only needed to increase her offer by a mere 1,000 TSh hela ya kula and that I would have no effective argument at hand to further negotiate a higher price. An experienced vendor, in contrast, would utilise that argument only when negotiations had reached their final stage. However, this bold move to squeeze out some more money did not always work, and in many instances the customer would maintain her final offer, forcing the vendor to accept it with the words lete hio hela (‘give me that money’). The prices the vendors obtained on the streets were often around 10,000 TSh, yielding a normal profit



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of around 6,000 TSh,3 depending on the money they had spent on a particular pair of shoes. I witnessed such sales pitches many times as I accompanied one of the vendors through the streets. Most illuminating, however, were the few times I sold shoes myself. The comments my colleagues made afterwards repeatedly pointed out the same mistakes on my part, indicating that they had a common understanding of ‘how to do it properly’. The skilful performance of a sales pitch, they often stated, was the most critical part of selling shoes on the streets. A vendor who failed to talk properly to his customers would fail to make a living from the shoes in his hands. As Daudi once put it, ‘If you can’t talk to a customer, you will sleep hungry’. Some of the young relatives who had come from the villages to be introduced into the business by a more skilled vendor were sent back to Miungo after only a few weeks because they were unable to talk the talk of a shoe vendor.

Use the force: street vending with an attitude The street vendors’ tours through the city were not always eventful and most encounters on the streets passed by without any result. This experience of circling the streets repetitiously without success was summarised in the vendors’ slang expression nyama ngumu, tough meat. And the ‘tougher’ the ‘meat’ was, the greater was the challenge to interfere with the walking rhythms of passers-by and to distract them and turn them into customers. They had to focus, enhance their presence, be eloquent and flattering, throw themselves into the moment when they sensed an opportunity and never give up easily. The attitude with which the vendors confronted the market was condensed in the shoe vendors’ slang expression piga fos, literally ‘hitting [using] force’. The term piga fos was arguably the central metaphor in the vocabulary of the shoe vendors. It entailed what was considered to be the proper way of doing business on the streets. As one of the vendors explained to me in an interview: Sometimes in business you need to go crazy in order to persuade a customer. You act like you lost your mind. Because if she sees you laugh a lot she will laugh too. And if you laugh together, it

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means that you have already become friends. So you tell her: ‘Just try [the shoe] on, at least! You can try it on today, some other day you can call me and tell me where to bring that shoe for you!’ She might say, ‘Ah! I don’t have any money …’ You say, ‘Just try it on, trying it on is free!’ So she tries it on, she looks at it, she sees how good it looks on her, ah! ‘How much for it?’ You see? You already got her there. […] Then I tell her, ‘I do business in the streets, but I always tell people the truth. If a customer doesn’t look good in a shoe, I will tell her, but you … you look just stunning!’ [laughs] Napiga fos! – I throw myself into it! I tell her, ‘Your foot looks very good in that shoe. I wonder whether it’s actually the shoe or the foot that looks so beautiful?’ She will laugh and say, ‘It’s my foot, of course!’ You tell her, ‘Ok, both are pretty, the foot and the shoe!’ […] You adulate her. You tell her, ‘Only clever people have a taste for this merchandise. You, because you’re shrewd, you have an eye for these shoes here. If you were not clever, you would not have chosen this shoe!’ […] That’s how you talk to a customer and piga fos.

By paying compliments, praising her, making jokes and provoking her to respond to his teasing, the vendor kept the customer’s attention focused while he tried to subtly increase the shoe’s desirability for her. No matter what individual ruses and idiosyncrasies the sales pitch of different vendors entailed, piga fos always required them first and foremost to fully draw the attention of the customer to the shoe he presented to her. However, the necessary skills, eloquence and experience for a successful piga fos performance varied considerably among the shoe vendors of the kijiweni. Particularly some of the younger and inexperienced vendors who had just recently come from the villages often gave up the business of street vending after only a few weeks because they could not let go of their humble posture and ‘go crazy’ in the way described here. Piga fos was not for everyone, but for the shoe vendors at the kijiweni, it was what their business was all about. They used the term piga fos to explain to me what they were doing, but they also used it to sting their colleagues into action if they saw that they were not paying enough attention, that they had not perceived an opportunity on the streets, or if they were lazing about on the pavement at Mahakama Kuu while potential customers were perusing their



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display of shoes. Nenda kapige fos! (‘Go and force!’) was a ubiquitous exclamation, when they bid a vendor goodbye who embarked on his tour from the kijiweni in the morning, or in the brief encounters they had with one another along their paths through the streets. I often overheard vendors shouting this slogan at one of their colleagues in order to encourage and startle him, prompting him to focus and to heighten his cognitive and corporeal tensions, to move and get involved and find an opportunity to earn some money instead of complaining about the nyama ngumu they all experienced. The term piga fos thus also was an expression of self-esteem. If business on the streets was often nothing but nyama ngumu, piga fos was the remedy: find a customer, buckle down, ‘go crazy’ and sell your shoes! By shouting their slogan to a colleague, they encouraged and startled him, prompting him to focus and to heighten his cognitive and corporeal tensions, to move and get involved and find an opportunity to earn some money instead of complaining about his situation. The slang expression therefore contained not only a programme for action but also a kind of evaluation of ‘how to do it properly’. Shouting out piga fos! was an expression of pride. In the entire vocabulary of the vendors that denoted all the different forms of knowledge, expectations, experiences and practices, piga fos was arguably the central metaphor in this street culture of busyness. For the sociality at the kijiweni, the term was a key verbal symbol that summarised what their business was all about. It gave individuals clues about how to organise their practices in accordance with a shared notion of ‘how to do it properly’. Being able to skilfully engage with social life on the streets and to transform encounters into opportunities gave the Wayao shoe vendors a sense of pride – with good reason, one could add. As I have learned firsthand, to choose sellable commodities in Karume Market, refurbish them at the kijiweni and to address different customer groups appropriately required both a degree of outgoingness and reflective comportment that experienced street vendors had cultivated over the course of many years. Given the fact that parts of the public, city administrators and commentators in newspapers and other media often degraded street vendors like the Wayao at the kijiweni as poor, uneducated and criminal ‘hooligans’, the sense of pride it gave the vendors to be able to defend their place in the city as honest businessmen becomes even more palpable. For the shoe vendors to be able to say ‘we are

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people of the city’, as the shoe vendor in Chapter 6 exclaimed, was preconditioned not only on their ability to claim their place in the urban environment, but to transform urban space into a market they successfully engaged with.

The market as an epistemic landscape Shoe vending as conducted by the shoe vendors of the kijiweni, it has become clear by now, was not at all a matter of individual trial and error. By partaking in the sociality at the kijiweni, the Wayao shoe vendors were able to tap into pooled forms of knowledge, experience and conventions for practices that had been created over time as sedimentations of myriad individual experiences cast into jargon, technical terms, slang expressions, slogans, and metaphors. A vendor who picked out viatu vya kibibi or ‘grandmotherly shoes’ could expect encounters with a particular kind of customer and could expect the sales pitch to take a certain direction rather than another. It would be short and obliging, but the profits would be rather small. A vendor thinking of going to Magogoni knew it was best to go there at a certain time of the day; he also knew that he would encounter a number of potential customers there who might try on many shoes without buying anything, but ultimately one of them might actually purchase a pair at a rather profitable price. For the shoe vendors, these terms afforded particular meanings that allowed them to organise the way they perceived the city, related to other people, thought and acted (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). The expressions the shoe vendors used to denote the various relevant aspects of their business constituted the market. This market did not exist as a specific location with a particular social organisation marked off from other locations and spheres of social life, but only as specific forms of perception, experience, knowledge and practice that the vendors created as a consequence of their engagement with the streets. In the usage of the shoe vendors, the proper Swahili word for market (soko) always referred to Karume Market. But they had many names for the market on the streets, all of which referred to their active involvement with and movement within it. Taking to the street market was kuingia kati (to ‘go inside’), or it was kupiga misele (‘hitting the rounds’), or kuwa kwenye mizunguko (‘being in rotation’).



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Kati or ‘inside’ was therefore a dialectic creation. It only came into being by actively engaging with it. The metaphors and symbols the shoe vendors used did not represent the market but the different forms of knowledge, experience and practice that they denoted constituted it. By classifying encounters, places, times and commodities, the shoe vendors themselves created the market as an epistemic thing (see Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2000: 145), as an object constituted by specific forms of knowing to which they related in specific ways. What the shoe vendors did therefore bears a striking resemblance to what Karin Knorr Cetina and Urs Bruegger found in the international financial market they ethnographically analysed on the trading floor of a Swiss bank. As they argue, for the traders sitting in front of the computer displays that constantly fed them the latest information about movements in the market, prices, demand and so on, the market was not at all an entity or a place ‘out there’ in the ‘real world’ but was constituted as an epistemic thing precisely in and on the multiple computer screens that confronted them at their workplaces. Instead of understanding these screens as tools representing deals and activities that were taking place somewhere else in physical space, the researchers argue, for the traders, all of these deals and activities actually took place on these screens: ‘The market composes itself in these produced-and-analysed displays to which traders are attached’ (Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2000: 146). The shoe vendors obviously were not attached to any computer screens, but their relation to the market constituted a dialectic similar to the one that Knorr Cetina and Bruegger described for financial market traders. For the shoe vendors, kati was something they themselves created in and through their specific approach to their social environment that was instructed by the conventionalised concepts and practices they themselves continually produced, reproduced and transformed through their engagement with it. To return to a question posed earlier in this chapter, what went on ‘inside’ for the shoe vendors can now be understood in terms of the jargon expressions that structured their work routines. If Karume Market had no sumu in stock, one might hope to get some winga from a colleague; encounters on the streets could be of the kibibi sort – brief, often successful, but limited in terms of profit; or of the kisista du kind – contingent, effortful, but potentially lucrative. It was not very promising to go by Stesheni, but Wizarani and Magogoni

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were expected to be populated by well-off people, at least at certain times of the day; Georgie’s would allow time for a quick rest and a chat, whereas Mariedo and its ceaseless stream of passers-by in the late afternoon was a good location to attract customers among the commuters; one might be annoyed by the foul play of a mchawi along the way, or, if lucky, one might bump into a mzungu who would just ‘burp out’ the money one demanded from her without even trying to negotiate; if a vendor had tasted too much nyama ngumu during the day, the only chance he had was to piga fos in order to change his luck. Taken together, the various forms of knowledge entailed in all of these expressions provided the individual vendor with solutions to the most fundamental problem he and his colleagues faced: to know what, who, where and when the market on the streets actually was. The creation of a market as an epistemic thing was not an achievement of individual shoe vendors but an outcome of their continuous communication and interaction with one another. A shoe vendor’s approach to the streets and the people he met was in this way informed to a considerable degree by what he had learnt from interaction, communication and cooperation with his peers – in other words, by partaking in the sociality at the kijiweni. The conventionalised usage of particular terms to denote specific expectations, experiences and practices was therefore inherently social in origin and allowed individual vendors in turn to be social (Nassehi 2008: 133). Only by participating in the sociality of the shoe vendors could an individual shoe vendor obtain access to these forms of knowledge and thus understand the city as a market. Despite their general unwillingness to commit to one another, therefore, the Wayao shoe vendors unintentionally bound one another together by continuously creating and updating their market knowledge.

Conclusion: stuck in an extended present Q: I have one final question for you. When you grow old, do you want to return to your village? A: I am asking myself that question every day. When I grow old, how will I support my family? After fourteen years in the city, I don’t own a house, I don’t own a plot of land, I pay rent. I don’t have any education, and our business is like that, one day you get something, other days you don’t. How will I live when I am old? Will my kids go to school? Will I build a house for my family? But even if I decide to go back to the village, I don’t even own a hut there. I don’t have a field to grow crops. I don’t have anything. Where will I begin? My head hurts when I think about this question.

The feeling of being stuck that Daudi expressed in one of our last conversations was shared by many of the Wayao shoe vendors at the kijiweni. The reason why they had come to the city initially was to change their overall outlook on life. The heterogeneous urban environment, they hoped, would offer them opportunities they had not seen in their rural homes. After many years, however, none of them felt they had made any substantial progress in life. Against the backdrop of vibrant and diverse Dar es Salaam, most of the shoe vendors were frustrated that they somehow were still depending on their fellow villagers and relatives with whom they had grown up in Miungo. Rather than helping one another to get ahead in life, the Wayao suspected their fellow Wayao of thwarting anyone’s plans to be successful, and some even expressly blamed them for their adverse situation. The claustrophobic sentiments engendered by their intimate relationships were amplified by the narrow physical structure of the kijiweni, which fostered mutual observation. While, on the one hand, this spatial proximity facilitated small-scale and short-term

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cooperation, such as the entrustment of tools (see Chapter 7), on the other hand it fostered an air of mistrust. Despite many of the shoe vendors working together, when asked about their attitudes towards their peers, the shoe vendors expressed the wish to disentangle themselves and to fend for themselves rather than trustfully collaborate with the others. This research finding complicates the rather general observation that labour relations in the so-called informal economy are based on ‘kinship or personal and social relations rather than contractual arrangements’ (International Labour Organization 1993: 52). It would be wrong to simply assume that self-organised workers such as the Wayao merely benefited from their ethnic and kinship relations. An ethnographically informed perspective from the inside of their sociality shows that the continued reliance on kinship and members of the same ethnic group can be considered by the actors themselves as part of the problem rather than the solution. While factors external to the shoe vendors’ sociality, such as adverse official regulations, a general lack of capital or regular persecutions by authorities caused them severe problems, their problematic form of sociality hampered any efforts to find collective solutions to these challenges. Their precarious situation therefore was also caused by the micro-politics of street vending they lived by. The Wayao’s sociality continuously oscillated between integrative and disintegrative moments that were caused by the constant interplay of temporal convergences and divergences. The shoe vendors thus were caught in a state of a temporarily extended present that they inhabited together but which never unfolded into a future imagination that they would inhabit as a group (see Goldstone and Obarrio 2016b). In the sense of an ethnography of the shoe vendors’ near future (Guyer 2007), through the chapters I have traced the specific temporalities that unfolded in the street vendors’ sociality and looked at the futures these opened up for them. For analytical reasons, I have distinguished a narrative and a practical dimension of their sociality and outlined the temporalities created in these dimensions of the shoe vendors’ daily lives. In a narrative dimension of their sociality, the shoe vendors made sense of their difficult present situation in the city by blaming it on their rural upbringing which, they felt, had not prepared them for the challenges of urban life. The Wayao often told me how they suffered

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from the condescension they experienced from people in the city and especially political and economic elites, who looked down on them as uneducated and poor villagers. I was puzzled to find that they described themselves to me along those same lines (see Chapter 2). A childhood in poverty, with malnutrition and periods of starvation and no future prospects of improvement in the village had pushed them to try their luck in the city. But after years in the city, they still felt that they were all equally ill-equipped to cope with urban life. Their rural upbringing in an agrarian subsistence economy had left such an ‘imprint’ on their minds that in the city they still struggled with the challenges of an urban capitalist economy that required them to plan into the future, to budget their finances and to save or pool their funds so as to be able to substantially invest in their business and thus to generate larger profits. Their minds still ‘revolving around the village’, as Abdul put it in an interview (see Chapter 2), meant that they saw themselves as being focused on the present to the extent that they did not dare to project even their social relations into a shared future. Their notion of ‘being Wayao’ was burdened with notions of incapacity and inaptitude that led to an inability to substantially trust one another and engendered a general air of mutual contempt at the kijiweni. This negative self-image was thrown into relief against the backdrop of the heterogeneity of the city in which the Wayao observed how rural migrants from other parts of the country made better use of their ethnic networks and hence became more successful in the urban economy. In contrast, they felt that they were restricting and constraining each other, always trying to prevent one another from getting ahead of the others in business. In this urban context, they developed a negative self-image that determined their interactions and thus became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The shoe vendors’ social relations as relatives and fellow Wayao were not merely predetermined through ties of blood or ethnic affiliation but became meaningful and efficacious through their narrative practices, through the stories that the Wayao told one another about who they were and what it meant to be related to one another in complex ways. Such narrative constructions of social relations are key ethical practices that define the moral spaces in which individuals negotiate and navigate their being together (Taylor 1989: 25–52; Zigon 2012: 207). While narrative practice to a large part is retrospective and aims at making sense of events that lie in one’s past, I

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interrogated the shoe vendors’ narratives with regard to the futures they implied for them (see Guyer 2007: 417). In a temporal dimension, their self-image linked their shared memories of their past to an understanding of their present situation in the city. And from that trajectory through time they projected certain imaginations and not others into their future (see Ochs and Capps 1996: 25). In that sense, the shoe vendors’ aspirations to individual autonomy were informed by their shared cultural ideas and ethical orientations as entailed in the narrative they lived by (see Appadurai 2013: 187). A shoe vendor’s ambition to free himself from the close confines of sociality at the kijiweni therefore was not an individual and asocial sentiment simply directed against the sociality it targeted but an inherently social sentiment deeply rooted within it. In a practical dimension of their sociality, on the other hand, the Wayao shoe vendors jointly created short-term future horizons that helped them to efficiently organise their work routines. In their business of mobile street vending, it was crucial to be at the right place at the right time with the right commodities for the customer group that was to be expected then and there. Timing was everything. To successfully turn chance encounters with passers-by into sales situations, the shoe vendors were required to skilfully engage with the different rhythms and temporal requirements of different vending locations and customer groups (see Chapter 8). Different vending locations were frequented by a different clientele that demanded different kinds of shoes and had to be approached in ways appropriate to their social status, moods and overall buying behaviour. The shoe vendors’ experiences with different kinds of encounters were stored in the expressions with which they denoted their preferred vending locations, such as Mahakama Kuu or Magogoni (see Chapter 8). Their knowledge of the temporal requirements of different locations in turn was projected onto the shoes the vendors picked out in Karume Market, when they classified them according to their respective target customers (see Chapter 6). Browsing through the heaps of old shoes that came from clothing donations in richer industrial countries in Europe and Asia or from the US, they categorised their potential merchandise according to the different customer groups they would appeal to and thus mapped them onto the streets’ market. In that way, as the vendors organised their work routines according to a shared understanding of the temporality

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of the streets’ market, they synchronised their practices and thus engendered a degree of temporal convergence and integration among them that flew in the face of their explicit unwillingness to commit to one another. The practices of shoe vending, despite their mobile and seemingly transient nature, had crucial effects both on the urban landscape and on the social relations among the vendors themselves. By synthesising and verbally ‘mapping’ their experiences onto the city (Ingold 2007: 155), the shoe vendors attached meaning and experience to the urban landscape and thus turned it into a resource in its own right (see Brown 2001). The vendors’ language and the ways of perceiving entailed in it constituted the market as a social space, a ‘relational arrangement of living beings and social goods’ (Löw 2016: 131) that they actively engaged with. To capture the way that the Wayao vendors transformed the epistemological, social and cultural geography of the city and turned it into a market (see Chari and Gidwani 2005: 268) I introduced the notion of the market as an epistemic landscape (see Chapter 8). With the term I refer to a matrix of socially constructed knowledge and experience that actors simultaneously gather from and inscribe into the social environment they move through. It is the result of a continuous process of spacing of the relevant social, material and symbolic goods and people, locating them at specific nodes in the spatio-temporal dynamic of the social environment; and the simultaneous synthesis of these nodes into a shared understanding of their relations to one another and to oneself by means of memory, imagination and signification (see Löw et al. 2007). This social construction of a meaningful landscape unfolded structuring moments in the practices of the shoe vendors (Giddens 1986), since it allowed them to anticipate events in certain locations in the city and to react appropriately according to their shared expectations of their immediate futures. Despite their explicit unwillingness to commit to a shared future horizon, therefore, on a day-to-day basis the shoe vendors depended on the continuous matching and synchronising of their individual experience with the shared understanding of the city as a market. And that market continually changed and posed new challenges. Demand for shoes was subject to changing fashions, but supply in Karume Market was driven by clothing donations in world regions that were far away from Dar es Salaam. Shortages in sellable goods

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were often a problem, aggravated by the constant influx of new rural migrants who tried to find entry into the business of street vending and thus tightened competition for both goods and customers. The built environment of the inner city changed rapidly, with old buildings making way for high rises that often housed commercial centres on their ground floors. New buildings and shopping malls often were guarded by private watchmen who were mandated to keep the premises ‘clean’ of street vendors. However, depending on the time of the day or if street vendors succeeded in making friends with them, some watchmen allowed them to pass through entrance areas or to display their wares on the pavement in front of it. Most importantly, the spatio-temporal dynamic of the streets was interspersed with occasional raids by the city police that the street vendors had to grapple with. Confiscation, eviction and being arrested were constant threats that added to the difficulties the shoe vendors faced in making a living in the streets. Most confiscations, however, could be averted by cutting the officers in on the meagre profits a vendor made during his day. Being forced to subsidise the police’s income was painful for vendors and their families who basically lived on the much-cited ‘dollar a day’. The way that representatives of the official administration frequently benefited from the illegality and vulnerability of vendors in the so-called ‘informal economy’ on the streets once more blurs the assumed distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ economies and would make an interesting object of study in its own right (see Anjaria 2006: 2145). In the everyday experiences of the shoe vendors, this forced ‘collaboration’ urged them to share knowledge about looming police raids by frequently updating one another on occasions when they crossed paths during their tours on the streets. To skilfully navigate this dynamic urban landscape, a shoe vendor could tap into the shared pool of experience and knowledge that was subject to continuous actualisations in the ongoing discussions among the Wayao at the kijiweni. Partaking in this ongoing process of knowledge creation allowed him to organise his work routine efficiently and thus to attain a degree of predictability and stability for his individual business. Access to market knowledge, in other words, was mediated through social relations that, however, were subject to constant contestations. Paradoxically, the disintegrative sentiments of suspicion and contempt that constantly called into question the merit of close

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social relations at the kijiweni did not as such contradict the shoe vendors’ intimate relations, but were a corollary of them. Because of their shared past in the village, their intimate relations and the all-encompassing mutual knowledge they assumed to have of one another, they felt unable to trust one another (see Chapter 4). Instead of providing a basis for reciprocal trust (see Corsin Jiménez 2011: 178, 181), the transparency they attributed to their social relations had flipped into mutual disrespect, vilification and mistrust (Malefakis 2018). The social proximity and intimacy of their relations were experienced as a hindrance to their individual aspirations for success. The shoe vendors’ negative associations with their close social relations were expressed most dramatically as accusations of uchawi (see Chapter 3). Some of them blamed their colleagues for their own inability to succeed in business, and they expressed their frustration through the idiom of uchawi. In that sense, uchawi accusations comprised a negative ‘syndrome of belonging’ (Geschiere 2003: 44) that was not intended to sever social relations but provided an outlet to express the anxieties that came with a stifling mutual dependence. As I have argued in Chapter 3, the notion of uchawi, surprisingly, even generated an integrative momentum among the shoe vendors, since it called to order anyone who was believed to deviate from the shared morality of sameness that was part of the shoe vendors’ narrative sociality. The term sociality, as I have used it here, is therefore much more complex than an everyday notion of people’s positive ‘sociability’ or ‘capacity to be social’. It entails anti-social aspirations to autonomy and individuality that, however, are social in their origins and shared with others. For the Wayao at the kijiweni, their kinship and ethnic relations were laden with socially constructed notions of intimacy, dependence, contempt and mistrust. These complex meanings associated with kinship and ethnic relations show that such relations have to be understood as cultural constructs (Reed 2007). In addition, the everyday experience of being related may be full of contradictions that need to be constantly navigated by actors in specific situations. Understanding, from an inside perspective, the meanings of social relations requires a thorough analysis of the motivations and desires as well as the fears and frustrations and feelings of envy and mistrust that compel actors to alternately engage with or disengage from one another. What shaped the Wayao shoe vendors’ sociality was not

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only their dependence on one another for very practical reasons but also their impulses to reject one another. These impulses, as I have shown, were not simply unsocial but inherently social sentiments. During the time of my research, the shoe vendors at the kijiweni lived and worked under precarious circumstances, and they continue to do so until today. Only a few of them have managed to leave the business of mobile street vending or to increase their incomes by engaging in a second line of business on the side. During my fieldwork and beyond some of the vendors with whom I have developed particularly friendly relations have asked me to help them by lending them money. Often I invested my private funds in their business, but the effects never were long lasting. After some weeks of bad luck in business, their increased capital stock had swiftly dwindled back to a few thousand shillings that allowed for only meagre profits. In preparation for an exhibition that I have curated at the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zürich, Switzerland, in 2016, I visited the shoe vendors at the kijiweni and asked Saidi for his collaboration, for which I could offer him a fee sufficient to buy a small motorbike. As he told me, he took the motorbike back to his home village and gave it to one of his relatives who used it to transport agricultural produce, buying it in bulk wherever prices were cheap, and taking it to other local markets where it could be sold with some profit. Apart from such singular interventions, however, I largely felt powerless to substantially change their situation. Street vending in Dar es Salaam is anything but a marginal phenomenon and street vendors, despite often being depicted as petty criminals or vandals, are professionals with highly specialised skills. As the introductory overview over the history of Dar es Salaam has shown, street vending and other self-organised forms of work have always been the economic backbone of the city`s population – rather than a ‘shadow economy’ operating on the margins of society, as the term informal economy might imply (see Wilson 2010: 341). An ethnographically informed point of view such as the one I have offered in this book allows us to look beyond dichotomies such as formal/informal to better understand the emerging social and cultural forms that street vending and other forms of selforganised work in Africa and other parts of the world attains through the continuous practice of self-organised workers. As I argued in the introduction, the notion of informality is burdened, often implicitly,

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with the heavy load, of negative stigmatisations that associate the informal with the improper, illicit and illegal. The term thus lends itself to controlling and policing less privileged segments of society. The stories the Wayao shoe vendors told me of how they have been persecuted, confiscated, beaten and imprisoned as well as the many interactions with the city police that I witnessed and was part of gave me a vivid impression of how the administration’s fight against poverty often turned into a fight against the poor. While the situation of street vendors and their lack of alternative means of income are well known and obvious to anybody living in the city of Dar es Salaam, the city administration approaches the ‘problem’ of street vending with evictions and the criminalisation of street vendors or imposes entirely unrealistic measures to legalise and register their businesses, such as the Business Activities Registration Act of 2007 that required traders to register through a thirteen-step process with different administrative bodies that would cost a street vendor more than 90 per cent of their annual income (Skof 2008: 172). Such measures show that for some elites, street vendors simply remain ‘undesirables’ (Burton 2007) and that there is little political will to actually change their situation for the better. The mismatch between such elitist visions of Dar es Salaam as a ‘modern city’ in which the streets are free from traders and the lived realities of its inhabitants is glaring and incomprehensible. A necessary precondition for effective and sustainable measures to alleviate the situation of less privileged segments of society and to include them in the national economy by means of registration and taxation is to understand and acknowledge the practical knowledge and the complex cultural and social forms that self-organised workers such as the Wayao street vendors create and live by.

Notes Introduction 1

Members of the ethnic group Yao, singular Mwyao. 2 Members of the ethnic groups Ndengereko and Zaramo.

1 Street vending in Dar es Salaam 1

2

3

4

The mainland part of what became Tanzania in 1964 through a union with the Zanzibar archipelago. As per definition entrepreneurs in the so-called ‘informal’ economy do not register and apply for licences, I am sceptical as to the accuracy of such numbers. Most authors writing about the ‘informal economy’ of Dar es Salaam, however, note that the proportion of people engaged in self-organised economic activities skyrocketed in the 1990s (Msoka 2005: 170–172). Colloquial Swahili for a meeting place or hang-out spot, literally ‘at the stone’. Colloquial Swahili for ‘white person’.

2 Urban perspectives on rural pasts 1

Interview with Sanga, 16 June 2011. 2 Over the course of my fieldwork, the size and composition of the group of shoe vendors at the kijiweni varied, and while I continually introduced myself to

and got to know all of the newly arriving youths from the villages, I concentrated on a relatively stable ‘core’ of shoe vendors, whom I knew had already spent several years selling shoes on the streets. While this study focuses on a group of male street vendors, many women in Dar es Salaam also support themselves and their families through self-generated economic activities. While men in the city often work without any European type of employment contract, as construction workers and craftsmen, in transport or as vendors of electronic equipment, housewares or clothes, women often prepare and sell foodstuffs and meals in their homes, street stalls or cafés in the city. 3 Ndengereko, Pare, and Makua are ethnic groups in Tanzania; the prefix wa- denotes members of those groups. 4 Interview with Daudi, 30 May 2011. 5 Interview with Saidi, 21 May 2011. 6 Interview with Saidi, 21 May 2011. 7 Colloquial Swahili for poor residential area, literally ‘at the Swahilis’. 8 Interview with Daudi, 30 May 2011. 9 Interview with Sanga, 16 June 2011. 10 Interview with Saidi, 21 May 2011.

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11

Interview with Abdul, 16 May 2011. 12 Interview with Daudi, 6 October 2012. 13 Interview, 20 July 2011. 14 The two cousins Saidi and Abdul were from Miungo, and Abu, who was not directly related to them by kinship, was from the neighbouring village Mkululu. 15 Interview, 21 September 2011. 16 Interview, 21 September 2011.

3 The micro-politics of sociality among Wayao street vendors 1

For a discussion of the problem of defining the term ‘witchcraft’, with all its connotations of various phenomena and concepts in Africa and elsewhere, see Moore and Sanders (2006: 3–6). In order to avoid subsuming the ideas and phenomena I describe here under the English term ‘witchcraft’, which refers to a European historical experience and not contemporary African realities, I will use the Swahili term uchawi when referring to my area of study and ‘witchcraft’ to refer to the literature covering similar phenomena in other parts of Africa. 2 Swahili: Kutafuta maisha. 3 Interview, 4 February 2012. All excerpts in this section are taken from this interview. 4 Swahili: tribe. 5 Swahili: ‘Swahili affairs’, a colloquial metaphor for uchawi practices.

4 Too familiar to trust 1 2

Interview, 21 July 2011. Interview, 11 July 2011.

6 Carrying knowledge through the streets 1

2 3 4 5

6

At the time of the research 20,000 TSh equalled roughly €10. The marketers and street vendors had established short forms to communicate prices in which terms such as ‘twenty’, ‘fifty’, or ‘two hundred’ had to be multiplied by 100 in order to arrive at the actual price (2,000, 5,000 or 20,000, respectively), while the term dala simply denoted 5,000 by convention. Interview, 6 October 2012. Interview, 11 June 2011. Interview, 11 June 2011. Possibly because my interlocutors knew that I was European, or maybe because Europe figured so prominently in the imaginations surrounding second-hand clothes (as the reference to kafa ulaya suggests), the shoe vendors referred solely to Europe when I talked to them about their ideas about the origin of the shoes. Even though I often came upon price tags in the shoes I rummaged through in Karume Market in US dollars and Asian currencies, I will adopt here my interlocutors’ references to Europe as the place of origin of their commodities. Interview, 25 June 2011.

7 Sharing is daring 1 2 3 4

Interview with Hassan, 14 May 2011. See the section ‘Use the force!’ in Chapter 8. Interview with Daudi, 6 October 2012. At the time of the research approximately €10.

Notes

8 Creating a market where there is none 1

The notion of ‘behaviour’ that Raymond Bromley uses to discuss the spatial practices of street vendors in Colombia is problematic, since it may be understood to reduce their practical skills to habitual responses to environmental stimuli. The practices I describe here were a matter of reflective practice that was informed by socially constructed forms of knowledge. 2 Field notes, 11 February 2012. 3 At the time of the field research, 6,000 TSh equalled roughly €3.

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Index Abdul, street vendor, 49, 69, 76–7, 114 Abu, street vendor, 45, 69–70, 158 Accra, Ghana, 72–4, 120 aesthetics, in street vending display, 111 Africa, 4, 7, 20, 28, 47, 61, 154; destination of used commodities donated elsewhere, 93–8; site of anthropological research on witchcraft, 52 Africans, in Dar es Salaam under colonial and post-colonial government, 20–8 agency, 9–10, 75–7, 80 aid, 26 Algeria, 80 anthropology, 1, 7, 52, 80 anticipation, 4, 11, 14, 48, 92, 117 Appadurai, Arjun, 93–4, 126, 150 autonomy, 9–10, 12–13, 80, 107, 123, 150, 153; as personal attribute claimed by street vendors, 42 Azande, 53 bank account(s), 67–9, 76–7 Bargash, Sultan of Zanzibar, 20 Beka, street vendor, 104, 108 Bourdieu, Pierre, 80–2 Bruegger, Urs, 145 Burundi, 19 Cameroon, 56–7 causality, 12 causation, witchcraft as Azande theory of, 53–4 Cetina, Karin Knorr, 145 Cewa, 55, 168 charities, 94–5, 138

China, 96–7 city girls, target market for street vendors, 87–9, 95–100, 136 Cholo, street vendor, 108–9 cognition, 17, 35, 55, 75, 84, 92, 97, 100, 125–6, 130–1, 135, 143 colonial administration, Algeria, 80; Dar es Salaam, 20–5 communication, 5, 34, 71, 99, 132, 134, 138, 146 community, 20–1, 73, 107 cooperation, 1, 6–9, 16–17, 38, 42, 49, 67–8, 77, 81–3, 103, 107, 116, 120, 146, 148 corporeal, 17, 84, 100, 125–6, 130–2, 135, 143 creativity, 79, 81–2 criminalisation, of street vendors in Dar es Salaam, 3, 8 Dar es Salaam, 1–2, 4–6, 15, 19–25, 27–32, 37, 39–41, 46, 57–59, 62, 79, 88, 90, 94–7, 105–6, 147, 151, 154 Daudi, street vendor, 41, 92, 126–7, 141, 147, 157–8 deep hanging out, fieldwork practice, 35 dependence, 2–3, 10, 53, 60, 73, 153–4 dirty magic, 52, 57, 60–1; see also magic, uchawi, witchcraft drinking, of alcohol, 58, 113, 116 ecomyth, 8 education 39–40, 43–5, 147 eloquence, as professional skill of street vendors, 17, 142 employment, 21–2, 27, 40, 44, 47, 157, 166

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ethnicity, 1–3, 8–10, 42–7, 51–2, 60–2, 148–9, 153 ethnography, 15, 31–34, 117, 135, 148, 154 Europe, 5, 93–97, 106, 138, 150; colonial administration in Dar es Salaam, 19–26 Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan, 14, 52–5 expectation, 2, 11–12, 31, 45, 72–3, 75–7, 81, 84, 107, 113–15, 117–18, 120, 123, 126, 130–3, 143, 146, 151 experience, 2–6, 10–15, 17, 31, 33–4, 38, 43–4, 48, 52, 57, 60–1, 63, 68, 72, 74–6, 79–84, 89, 92–3, 96–101, 105–6, 112, 124–6, 129–30, 132–4, 137–46, 149–53 Fabian, Johannes, 34, 164 fashion, 38, 81, 87–9, 91–100, 129, 136; fashionable girls, see city girls fieldwork, 1–5, 15, 19, 31–9 Frafra (Ghana), 72–3, 120 future, 2, 4, 6, 10–12, 14–16, 18, 30–1, 39, 48, 71, 76, 80–1, 89, 92, 100, 106, 113, 117–18, 123, 148–151 Germany, 20–1, 87, 96, 127 Geschiere, Peter, 61 Ghana 72, 166 Giddens, Anthony, 9, 13, 15, 71, 80, 82–3, 151 government, Dar es Salaam and modern Tanzania, 19–21, 25–8, 96 grandmothers, 88–9, 95–100, 136, 144 habitus, 80–1 Hamis, street vendor, 114–16, 120, 127 Hart, Keith, 7–9, 72–9, 120 Hassan, street vendor, 108–9 hawkers, 22, 28, 103, 129, 131 housing, 19, 23, 30

Ibra, street vendor, 47, 109 identity, 16, 39, 44, 52, 62 imagination, 11, 23, 63, 148, 151 IMF (International Monetary Fund), 26 immigration, into Dar es Salaam under British rule, 21–2 individualistic aspiration, 3, 51, 65, 80, 116, 153 individuality, 77 informality, 7–8, 154 infrastructure, 25, 30, 39, 47 insecurity, 100 interaction, 5, 9, 32, 38, 45, 49, 54, 71, 73, 75, 105, 120, 123, 126, 132, 134–6, 146, 149, 155 intransparency, 67, 76 Italy 96–7 jargon, among street vendors, 100, 144–5 Juma, street vendor, 46 Kabyle, 80–1 Kadagaa, street vendor, 108–9 Kariakoo, 21–2, 37, 85–6, 103 Karume Market, Dar es Salaam, 5, 16, 29, 37–8, 48, 79, 83–6, 89–97, 99–100, 103–7, 125, 136, 140, 143–5, 150–1 Kenya, 166 Kigamboni (‘unatractive or battered shoes’, Swahili), 106 Kijiweni, 32–3, 37–9, 41–4, 46–8, 52–5, 57–65, 67–9, 73–7, 79–81, 83–6, 88–9, 91, 99, 103–9, 112, 114–20, 125, 127–32, 134, 136–7, 142–4, 146–7, 149–50, 152–4 Kikundi (group, Swahili; see also bank account), 68 Kikwete, Jakaya Mrisho, 28 kinship, 1–3, 7–10, 15, 20, 41–2, 26, 51, 57, 61–5, 71–5, 103, 109, 120, 138, 148, 153 knowledge, 1–3, 55–6, 8, 12–14, 16–18, 34, 38, 43, 45, 51–2, 57, 67, 72–7, 79–80, 82–4, 89, 93–5, 97,

Index

99–100, 105, 107, 116, 124, 126, 130, 133–4, 136, 143–6, 150–3 kupiga fos (street vending technique ‘hitting the force’), 17, 90, 91, 144 labour, 3, 7–9, 15, 21–7, 30, 39–40, 44, 72, 148; see also work landscape, 13, 82–4, 123–5, 133–4, 144, 151–2 Lefebvre, Henri, 13, 123, 125, 133, 167 lending, between street vendors, of merchandise, 63; by the author of money, 154 Leslie, John, 20–3 livelihood, unattainable through individual ‘struggle’ , 68 Luhmann, Niklas, 41, 71–2 Machinga Complex, Dar es Salaam, 29 magic, 52–4, 57, 60–1 Magogoni (college for public servants, Dar es Salaam), 128, 131, 132, 134, 144, 145, 150 Magufuli, John Pombe, 28 Majid, Sayyid, Sultan of Zanzibar, 20, 28 Malawi, 19 Malik, street vendor, 120 Mamalishe (women cooking and selling food for Dar es Salaam office workers, Swahili), 103 Mariedo clothing store, Dar es Salaam, 129–31, 146 market, site of ‘street economy’ vending, 1–2, 5–8, 12–13, 15–18, 25–6, 29, 31, 37–8, 41, 48, 54, 79, 83–6, 88–95, 97–100, 103–7, 116, 123–6, 129, 133, 136, 140–1, 143–6, 150–2 Marwick, Max, 55, 168 Masasi, 39–40, 57, 58 material, 1, 5, 8, 17, 38, 52, 59, 79, 82, 86–7, 93, 104–5, 107–9, 111, 116–18, 151 Mead, Margaret, 14, 169

175

memory, 14, 123, 151 micro-politics, 3, 7, 51, 148, 158 middle class 5, 8, 91 migration, 2, 15, 20, 22, 25, 39, 41–2, 46, 52, 62, 72–3, 120, 149 Miungo village, southern Tanzania, 2, 39, 56–60, 103, 109, 141, 147 Mkapa, Benjamin, 28, 129 modernity, 53, 71 money, 1, 3, 30, 40, 44, 48–9, 58–60, 68–70, 77, 98, 106, 108, 110, 113–17, 119–20, 129, 136–8, 140–3, 146 moral, 11, 23, 45, 51–5, 61–2, 64–5, 67, 73, 149, 153 Möllering, Guido, 71, 75–6 Mpare, 62 Mtwara, 39–40 Mudi, street vendor, 118, 119 Mumbai, 161 Musa, street vendor, 98, 127, 133 Mwilijo, Miungo village kinship group, 103, 109 Mwinyi, Ali Hassan, 26 Mwyao, 1, 39, 41–3, 48, 62–4, 77, 109, 157 Mzungu (inept, tourist-like haggler regardless of ethnic origin), 106, 136–9, 146 narrative, 8, 10–12, 15, 16, 37, 42–3, 48, 52, 54–7, 61–5, 67, 70, 76–7, 79, 116, 148–50, 153 navigation, 2, 5, 47, 91, 100, 115, 123, 149, 152–3 negotiation, 9, 26, 75, 90, 98, 107, 112–16, 136–40 Nigeria, 169 Nyerere, Julius, 24–6 Obligation, 73, 119 observation, 4, 38, 64, 100, 125, 131, 135, 147 opportunity, 2, 12–13, 15, 18–19, 22–3, 26, 28, 30, 39, 41, 46, 82–3, 91, 94, 99, 105, 123–4, 130–2, 134–5, 140–3, 147

176

TANZANIA’S INFORMAL ECONOMY

organisation, 5, 24, 27, 29, 89–91, 131, 144; see also self organisation ownership, 3 Papua New Guinea, 117 past, 3, 10–12, 14–15, 31, 37, 39, 44, 48, 51, 58, 89, 92, 126, 149–50, 153 Patrick, street vendor, 52, 62–4, 108–9 pitches (language used in street vending), 97, 139–41 police, 8, 29, 48, 74, 106, 127–9, 152, 155 post-colonial government, Dar es Salaam and Tanzania, 20–5 poverty, 149, 155 practice, 2, 4, 7, 9, 11–18, 48, 72, 77, 79–84, 89, 91, 100, 107, 112, 116–17, 121, 123, 126, 129–30, 132–4, 139, 143–6, 149, 151, 154; see also spatial practice practical knowledge, 6, 80, 105, 133, 155 praxis 11, 114, 161, 164, 170 predictability, 80, 89, 100, 152 present, 3, 10–12, 14, 44, 48, 81, 91, 147–50 public space, 2, 12–13, 28, 123 qualitative, dimension of social spatio-temporality, 133 quantitative, inadequacy of ‘quantitative time intervals’, 133 quasi-contractual arrangements, 74 race, as conceived in colonial legal codes, 21 Rahim, street vendor, 43, 52, 57–61, 63–4 rationality, 8, 9, 52, 76, 133 reciprocity, 57, 73, 107, 110 relationality, 71–5 rent, 29, 40, 147 representation 76, 124 rhythm 4, 17, 34, 84, 124–5, 130, 132–135, 137, 141, 150

Ricoeur, Paul, 10–11 rules, 18, 53, 82, 107, 112–13, 115–16 rural–urban, social, spatial and temporal relationships, 20–5, 30, 39, 42–7, 56, 60, 72, 80, 147–9, 152 Rwanda, 19 Saidi, street vendor, 41, 45, 48–9, 56, 69–70, 85–93, 95–9, 103–5, 114–15, 118–19, 128, 139, 154 Sanga, street vendor, 41, 157 SAP (Structural Adjustment Program), 26 Sarr, Felwine, 8 Sarumu, street vendor, 104, 108 second-hand goods, 1, 5, 26, 33, 37, 41, 79, 83, 85, 89, 94, 96–7 self: -ascription, 46–7, 64, 77, 107; -betterment, 64; -depiction, 16; -description, 116; -employment, 22; -esteem, 18, 143; -image, 43, 46, 48, 77, 107, 149–50; -organisation, 1–4, 7–9, 15, 19, 27–8, 72, 79, 148, 154–5 sentiment: claustrophobic, 51, 147; (anti-)social, 53–4, 65, 150, 152, 154 sharing, 13, 38, 79, 83, 103, 107–10, 117–18, 121 sheria (law, Swahili), 115 shoes, 1–6, 9–10, 12–19, 30–4, 37–44, 48, 51–8, 63–5, 67–8, 74, 77, 79–84, 86–93, 95–101, 103–10, 112–17, 119–20, 124–55 skill, 5, 14, 77, 79–80, 82, 123–6, 135, 141–2, 154 slang, 6, 13, 15, 32, 39, 83, 106, 126, 134, 141, 143–4 sociality 1, 3–6, 9–13, 15–16, 23, 32, 47, 51–2, 55–6, 59, 62, 65, 67, 72, 74, 77, 79–80, 82–3, 116–7, 120, 133, 143–4, 146, 148, 150, 153 social proximity, 30, 38, 53, 56–7, 60–2, 65, 67, 77, 153; see also spatial proximity

Index

solidarity 6, 10, 54, 57, 64 sorcery, 52; see also magic, witchcraft space, 2, 12–13, 15, 28–30, 33, 83–4, 93, 95, 123–4, 130–4, 144–5, 151; see also public space; time-space distanciation; spacial practice spatial practice 12–13, 123 spatial proximity, 33, 54 spatiality, 12–13, 38, 54, 93, 123, 147, 159, 163 spatio-temporality, 12–13, 18, 79, 82, 93, 123–4, 133, 147, 151, 152 S.P.I.V. (‘Suspected Persons and Itinerant Vagrants’), 23 style, 40, 86–8, 90–1, 95, 99, 104, 131; see also fashion structure, 6, 55, 80, 111, 121, 133, 145, 147; see also structuration structuration, 9, 15, 80, 82 Swahili, 17, 32, 51, 56, 63, 86, 95, 144, 153 synchronicity 34, 151 Taarab (music), 86 Tanganyika, 162, 166, 169; TANU (Tanganyika African National Union), 24 Tanzania 1–35, 37–49, 51–65, 67–77, 94–7, 103–21, 123–8, 130–55 taxation, 7, 21, 27, 29, 155 Taylor, Charles, 11, 149 temporality, 4–6, 11–17, 34, 80–93, 124–5, 132–5, 148, 150–1 Texaid, 94 time 14–15, 20, 33–4, 38, 40–2, 83–5, 87, 89–90, 89–99, 105–6, 112–14, 124–5, 129, 130–1, 133–4, 136–8, 144–6, 150, 152; see also timespace distanciation time-space distanciation 13, 15, 83 Tozi, street vendor, 119 tradition 11, 53, 56, 71–4, 81, 117 trust, 3–4, 10, 16–17, 42, 46, 51, 63, 67, 69–72, 74–7, 96, 108, 116–17, 120, 149, 153 Turner, Victor, 55, 80

177

Uchawi, 51–7, 60–5, 153; see also witchcraft Uganda 19, 26 underemployment, 24–5 ‘undesirable’, applied to street vendors, 21–5, 155 unemployment, 20–1, 24–6 urban: economy, 5, 47, 80, 149; landscape, 13, 82–3; space, 123–4, 134, 144 Uswahilini, low-income residential areas of Dar es Salaam, 41, 62, 92 vendors, 1–10, 12–20, 26, 28–34, 37–44, 48, 51–8, 62–5, 67–70, 74, 77, 79–84, 86, 88–9, 91–3, 95–101, 103, 105–7, 109–21, 123–55, VIBINDO (Umbrella Organisation of Small Businesses), 27, 29 villagisation, 25 Wabongo, 39 Wachagga, 46, 47 wage(s), 22, 25, 27–8 Wanyekyusa, 47 Wapare, 39 Wasambaa, 46 Wasukuma, 60 Wayao 1–9, 12, 15–16, 37, 39, 41–8, 51–2, 56, 57, 61–5, 67–8, 70, 73–4, 76–7, 79–80, 82, 95, 103, 105–7, 116, 118, 123, 136, 143–4, 146–53, 155 Winga, 63, 106–10, 115–20, 145 witchcraft, 16, 30, 51–61, 153 work, 2, 5–8, 11, 15–16, 18–19, 21–3, 25, 30–1, 34, 44, 59–61, 76–80, 89, 96, 100, 104, 108, 118, 120, 123, 131, 138–40, 145, 150–2, 154 World Bank, 19, 26 Yao, 16, 39 youth, 2, 4, 21, 23–5, 30, 40, 58 Zambia, 19, 165 Zanzibar, 20 Zimbabwe, 19

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