Mundane rituals such as daily commutes often are overlooked or portrayed as backdrop in works of scholarship. It was therefore refreshing to read three new works by Africanist scholars deeply investigating the historical and economic factors impacting the owners, workers, and passengers of urban transportation sectors in African cities, from the colonial era to the present: Jennifer Hart’s, Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation; Kenda Mutongi’s, Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi; and Matteo Rizzo’s, Taken for a Ride: Grounding Neoliberalism, Precarious Labour and Public Transport in an African Metropolis. Each offers important contributions to the literature on African cities, informal economies, mobility, regulatory landscapes, and urban infrastructures.
Scholars across disciplines increasingly ground social theory in the materiality of infrastructures, especially in urban areas where complex layers of sociality provide unique challenges to research and analysis. Infrastructures constitute “the architecture for circulation, literally producing the undergirding of modern society” while generating “the ambient environment in everyday life,” according to anthropologist Brian Larkin (Reference Larkin2013:327). Mutongi, Hart, and Rizzo document this circulatory architecture through colonial railways, road building projects, duct-taped pick-up trucks, and “pimped-out” minibuses, using transportation to explore broader topics and anchor theoretical debates. For Rizzo, daladala minibuses in Tanzania highlight a complex economic sector where heterogeneity of the informal economy can be theoretically grounded, challenging mainstream research and policy assumptions that celebrate the role of small-scale entrepreneurs as a short-hand for work in the informal sector, while underplaying the daily lives of multiple hierarchies of wage labor operating in the informal economy. Basing her study in Kenya, Mutongi offers an alternative analytical angle, using the matatu sector to highlight the success of African-run business without assistance from government or development agencies. Hart examines the “vehicular history” of Ghana’s “mammy trucks,” “boneshakers,” and trotros to illustrate how African entrepreneurs used colonial technology for their own purposes, and with relative autonomy, for nearly thirty years in the early twentieth century.
Although each of the texts documents historical patterns from slightly different angles and time frames, the authors chronologically cross paths in the 1970s, Hart and Mutongi as social historians and Rizzo from a development studies perspective. This era, characterized by Rizzo as “roll-back” neoliberalism, was a time when popular transportation was liberalized across the continent, and daladalas in Tanzania, matatus in Kenya, and the trotros in Ghana, like many other informal transportation sectors around the world, emerged as local, bottom-up responses to the national governments’ failure to provide basic services for their citizens. Another important thread these books share is their attention to how the initial process of driving professionalization has, in the past several decades, given way to widespread, and often violent, criminalization of workers and owners in informal transportation sectors. More recently, these transportation sectors, and their work force, have witnessed massive urban policies referring to the negative reputation of the sector as a legitimizing device to facilitate and justify urban megaprojects promoted by the World Bank, such as Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems, currently operational in Lagos, in advanced planning stages in Dar es Salam, and in early planning stages in Nairobi and Accra.
Jennifer Hart’s sweeping social history of drivers, Ghana on the Go, traces the impacts of automobility on social, political, and economic possibilities for African entrepreneurs throughout the twentieth century. Hart is especially careful to populate her discussions of infrastructure and mobility with a variety of voices, including public discourse, newspapers, and legal archival documents, to show how “motor transportation was central to the development of a twentieth-century mobile society, in which technology served as a tool through which individuals envisioned their futures” (27). Because Hart is concerned with the impact of automobile technology on African society, she starts the discussion of transport history in the colonial period, contrasting automobility with another important infrastructural technology—the railroad. Her reflection on colonial history includes an in-depth analysis of the transition and contestations of the increasing role of automobiles in the colony. She demonstrates that disagreements between various colonial administrators over the future of automobility had real consequences, resulting in the construction of “gap roads”—roads that do not connect to one another, or are missing large parts—throughout the colony, making any long-distance automobile travel difficult. These bits of road were built to limit automobile transportation in order to regulate competition with the railroad, illustrating the ambivalence among colonial administrators concerning the experiment that was automobility and how it should be put to use.
Hart’s focus turns from the colonial built environment of rails and roads to the dynamic history of Ghana’s drivers. Drawing from oral histories of over one hundred drivers and passengers, the first half of the text contextualizes what drivers interviewed referred to as the “golden years” of driving in Ghana, when the older “mates” trained the younger drivers, whom they instilled with lessons on masculinity, political and economic principles, and literacy in the driving profession. Hart explains that this relationship fed into the moralizing debates about drivers’ negative impact on public safety. How drivers became increasingly criminalized in postcolonial Ghana takes up the second half of the book. Here we learn that driving work became known as “death work”; it was increasingly undertaken by “desperate and irresponsible” young men, who were not the same indigenous entrepreneurs as before. The system of training for drivers had given way to a mad rush for work in unlicensed vehicles, thus contributing to their increasingly negative perception by society. Hart exposes the harsh realities of the twenty-first century drivers in Ghana, arguing that the transformation from indigenous entrepreneurs to drivers as “criminals, cheats, and bad citizens was rooted not only in declining economic conditions but also in a shifting discourse of autonomy and belonging, responsibility and prosperity, which had its roots in the nationalist period and came to full fruition in the years of political instability” after the fall of Ghana’s revolutionary first president, Kwame Nkrumah (183).
Mammy truck drivers and other “indigenous entrepreneurs” in colonial and postcolonial Ghana have parallels in the matatu owners of Kenya. Emerging as a local response to the need for urban mobility outside the colonial bus service that had a stranglehold on passenger transportation, matatu owners built a public transportation sector for Nairobi’s four million residents which they have sustained over the past sixty years. Although laudatory and ultimately hopeful, Mutongi’s Matatu does not overlook the darker elements of the sector. In the introduction, Mutongi argues that, “A detailed study of the matatu industry shows that despite the appreciable social, economic and even political advances associated with the industry, its history and has been one of exploitation, crime, violence, and corruption” (11). Mutongi’s own detailed study of the sector does indeed touch on each of these themes throughout the text’s seven parts and twelve chapters. The history of the matatu sector unfolds through the eyes of owners who in the early 1960s were wondering: What good was independence from Britain if a citizen could not legally make money from their matatu? (56). An important commonality we see across African workers in the colonial era is the way in which driving work pivoted on important debates around citizenship for the “indigenous entrepreneurs” who inhabit the historical narrative. Emphasizing the legacy of matatus as both a basic urban service and a key part of economic development, Mutongi shows that as early as the 1960s, matatus were transforming the city and the country by providing affordable mobility to Kenya’s new citizens while allowing owners to move into the middle class (67). Early debates concerning the legality of matatus in Nairobi in the 1960s intersected with race and national identity as matatu owners regularly invoked racial and nationalist language around the unfairness of European- and Asian-owned transport businesses, claiming that they were not “real Kenyans.”
Mutongi’s text can alternatively be viewed as a regulatory history of Kenya. As anthropologist Janet Roitman argued over a decade ago, there is much to be learned from regulatory landscapes, or by exploring the productive edges and nuances of wealth creation that blur the lines of formal and informal, licit and illicit, regulated and unregulated, which is all well illustrated by these mobile workers (2005). Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, praised the sector as it grew, deregulating and decriminalizing it in 1973. However, during the rule of Kenya’s second president, Daniel arap Moi, who held office for twenty-eight years, the matatu drivers’ perceived unruly nature was never successfully controlled and actually became worse over time. Finally, with the election of Kenya’s third president in 2002, Mwai Kibaki, and the subsequent appointment of John Michuki into his cabinet, major transport regulations were passed. These regulations, known as the Michuki Rules, ushered in a period of what Mutongi refers to as self-regulation. As the owners of matatus rode the waves of deregulation and reregulation they “ushered in a new generation of urban culture.” Over the next forty years matatus shaped what Mutongi calls “Generation matatu”—those who have grown up around the urban minibus taxis called matatus, and embody “the era of cosmopolitanism, multiparty politics, neoliberalism and global hip-hop” (183). Mutongi narrates her account of Nairobi’s postcolonial past with voices of the owners, workers, and passengers of matatus, in much the same way that Luise White used economies of settlement and sex work to bring colonial Nairobi to life in The Comforts of Home (1991).
Similarly to Hart and Mutongi, Rizzo uses the public transportation sector to anchor theoretical debates regarding broader scholarship on African cities and economic informality. However, whereas Mutongi and Hart often focus on the small-scale entrepreneurs and their shifting relationships to the state as they navigate middle-class life, Rizzo’s perspective sits firmly with the crews—drivers and conductors—who sell their exploited labor to bus owners. In Taken for a Ride, Rizzo lends a clear, critical voice to the interdisciplinary debate surrounding the framing of research on urban Africa, making important contributions to the discussion of class heterogeneity in the informal sector. As in Ghana and Kenya, drivers in Tanzania have experienced increasing stigmatization and criminalization over the past several decades.
Through rigorous longitudinal, qualitative, and quantitative data collection and analysis, from Informal Labor Reports to interviews with daladala drivers over a period of ten years, Rizzo documents “jobless growth” in Tanzania and the heterogeneity of the informal labor force at work in Dar es Salam. Rizzo traces shifting mechanisms of neoliberalism from the 1970s, when “roll-back” neoliberalism was operationalized as austerity measures, to “roll-out” neoliberalism, where governments and corporations, often in Public Private Partnerships (PPPs), use regulation to realign targeted sectors. In the early chapters, Rizzo frames the historical path of urban transportation through the state’s actions, and he traces the shift from the regulatory environment of developmentalism to one of “actually existing neoliberalism.”
Rizzo argues that too much of the literature on African cities and labor precarity reproduces a polarized perspective on life in African cities, which is either depicted as a hellish landscape of chaos and suffering, or as a rich environment of creativity and innovation, and says that this polarity, and especially the romantic view of life in African cities, can “crowd out an understanding of the concrete realities they face, and thus any possibility of assessing the meaning and impact of their actions and reflecting on the triumphs and tragedies” informal workers experience (7). Meanwhile, Mutongi argues that by turning our scholarly focus to sectors and actors like matatu owners, and the workers they employ, we can learn about building a thriving, sustaining industry outside the framework of “development” and with respect for local responses to urban problems. Hart describes how a “new age of democratized mobility created new possibilities” for African drivers while “enabling new forms of labor migration, economic enterprise, cultural production defined by autonomy and mobility” (1). Although Hart and Mutongi ultimately make hopeful arguments, they do not overlook the “concrete realities” or the “tragedies and triumphs” of their subjects, indeed, both scholars address and respond to one of Rizzo’s critiques of celebratory accounts of informality: they do not over-privilege informal sector actors as homogenous small-scale entrepreneurs, but instead discuss the rich and layered hierarchy of workers and owners in these sectors as well.
Another way that these three works avoid some other theoretical issues that plague scholars of African cities or even of the “new mobilities” scholarship is that they use the language of infrastructure to ground people and create a concrete place for generative discussions of complex urban issues like citizenship, criminality, ethnicity, and class as they play out in everyday life. Interdisciplinary scholars have been exploring how the nature of infrastructure and its materiality reflect the “systemic violence that occurs when society governs itself” and becomes not only the site of violence, but also its medium (Rodgers & O’Neill 2011:403). Infrastructure technologies are booming and innovative, attracting and spending amazing amounts of money. But they are also avenues of other ideas, practices, inequalities, and violence. The materiality of public transportation infrastructures allows for particular automotive technologies to act as alternative urban archives of shifting lives.
Just as the railway was seen as a “mobile memorial to British power” in colonial Ghana (Hart:30), contemporary popular transportation systems are mobile memorials in their own right—memorials to urban transformation and the “indigenous entrepreneurs” who ushered it along, memorials to the re-regulatory tendencies of past and current neoliberalisms playing out across African cities, monuments of the struggles of the mobile workers at the center of these economies. The history and analysis of informal transportation sectors across Africa and the world at large are worthy of further investigation. As we face an uncertain future of unprecedented urban growth, particularly on the African continent, these histories, ethnographies, and analyses of public infrastructures seem all the more timely. All three of the books reviewed here advance the existing scholarship and provide valuable contributions to the institutional and personal libraries of scholars of the region. Read individually, but especially together, these recent publications will be of great interest to all scholars in disciplines spanning African history, urban studies, anthropology, and geography, as well as scholars of mobility, infrastructures, and the regulatory environment of neoliberalism at work and on the road.
