In Taken for a ride, SOAS lecturer Matteo Rizzo takes you for a trip to the burgeoning East African metropolis of Dar es Salaam and explores the dala dala (minibus) system which has in recent years been the way the masses travel around a sprawling city of four million people that has grown immeasurably since colonial times, putting immense pressure on traffic and roads. Rizzo takes up the position of the workers: drivers, conductors plus the men (there are a handful of women only) who round up the passengers. He estimates their numbers as 20–30,000, which must represent something like 5% or thereabouts of the adult male population of Dar, not an insignificant percentage.
This is tough work. There are many accidents, the pay is poor and the hours extremely long. The men spend most of the day travelling through crowded, overly narrow roads for long distances back and forth with little respite. It is a job only the young can do. A lucky minority use their driving skills to get better jobs after some years but most can only look forward to dropping out into a huge pool of the unskilled and poorly connected just aimed at survival, as Rizzo's chapter on social mobility indicates. A sad issue that comes up concerns the discounts the buses must give to scholars en route to school; as a result, the conductors often try to chase boys and girls from the buses as the limited profits just diminish even further if there are too many of them. This is a perfect example of a well-intended government intervention that works poorly through neglecting worker interests, and indeed those of petty capitalists too.
Many observers would merely handle this situation as part of the enormous and undifferentiated mob of the informal sector, a categorisation which has dominated the literature on the popular classes of poor cities (and what other class do researchers get paid to write about?) with a so-called post-modern and culturalist lens, interrogating something like – perhaps the masculinity – of the workforce. Rizzo instead tries to capture the material side of life and the relation of the workers to their work situation and to their employers.
The informal sector is usually considered the discovery of the anthropologist Keith Hart 40 years ago at a time when anthropologists were still the dominant figures in African studies; indeed some may argue that they still are. Hart put his finger on what is indubitably the reality that fast-growing cities like Accra where he was based could not be understood either in terms of the labour demands of industrialisation, for which there was very limited activity, or in terms of an artisanal population geared towards the needs of a non-Western ‘theatre state’ with its court and aristocracy. What was the point of such cities and what was the way to characterise workers there? For most contemporaries, such as Bert Hoselitz (‘parasitic cities’) or Peter Gutkind (the ‘energies of despair’), this was a very negative development. The newly big cities of Africa were dystopian, distorting the development possibilities of the relevant countries, just what W. Arthur Lewis told us should not happen. A further development of the former grouping has been observers such as Martin Murray (on central Johannesburg) or Mike Davis in his bleak global study of worldwide slums.
On the other side, however, emerged people like Andrew Hake writing about the squatter settlements of Nairobi as slums of hope. The latter crowd, including the Peruvian Hernando de Soto Polar and Bangladeshi Grameen Bank guru Muhammad Yunus, continues to find traction seeing the poor in the cities as striving for agency, voice, autonomy – and for them, neoliberal social and economic solutions are far more attractive than the dreary, authoritarian dictates of the nationalist state. Aili Mari Tripp, an East African specialist, gave this a feminist kick: the developmental state is retrograde but also hopelessly masculinist, indifferent to the problems of poor women. While the first school tends to lead us towards throwing up our hands in despair, the second attracts the rapt attention of the international financial institutions, who are only too anxious to unload solutions to Africa's problems on the heads of the mass of poor people who can lift themselves up by their bootstraps, to look for solutions where the rich sacrifice little or nothing.
Rizzo's first chapter is a powerful and important challenge to both tendencies, clearly written with an excellent sense of judgement. It narrows in to a critical summary of African urban studies today that deserves a wide readership. The broad-compass view of the informal sector may have some descriptive merit, he concedes, but in the end informality is a vague and negative term that does not get us very far. Is not work work, even if it's informal and outside the state's purview?
It is also even more questionable that the answer lies in a supposedly benevolent state or, even more unlikely, international agencies, formalising and, of course, privatising, economic activities in third-world cities. This is a monograph based on the author's periodic trips to his site of study for well over a decade, together with his excellent command of English (not his first language) and Kiswahili. What looks like ‘same old, same old’ from high in the air becomes far more differentiated into categories of economic purpose and utility and issues of class that need the same consideration that they always did, just as in the so-called First World. The post-modern world may dispense with huge factory workforces in industrial cities (although one can still find enough of them in Asia) but exploitation remains exploitation.
The transport workers of Dar es Salaam are quite numerous and absolutely critical to the life of the city. Their jobs are almost never covered by contract or any legal agreement. Low pay goes a little further through the dangerous practices of speeding and overloading. These workers are anything but parasitical. In the public eye, they are often reviled as the cause of Dar's immense transport problems. They are not necessarily the nicest of men, but understanding them in essentially culturalist terms, even gendered ones, does not get us too far.
Rizzo devotes two chapters to efforts on the part of the bus workers to organise themselves. These he contrasts sharply with the old state-generated unions. The necessity for ‘agency’ and ‘voice’ to bring workers together is as great as ever although Rizzo is very conscious of the difficulty of doing this in the isolated work situation of these men, who are mostly considered entirely unskilled. The once-rich history of labour struggles in Tanganyika and early independent Tanzania largely abandoned is now here resumed. An initially disinterested state, pressurised by the realities of an electoral system, has gradually taken up the idea of workers’ rights with more interest lately for all the problems with creating a real trade union out of precarious, low-skilled labour.
A major reason for the difficulties of organisation is that the bus owners tend to be, at least apparently, very small-scale capitalists with little visible movement towards agglomeration and growth in scale. Indeed the state seems to have little interest in tabulating or taxing them. Of this the author could have made more. There is certainly room for a study of the bus owners and their understanding of the economy and their workforce as a companion to this worker-centred study. Rizzo argues that this would be a challenging task methodologically, and much of owner identity is in fact hidden as ‘Less than ten per cent of owners operate their own bus’ (66). One might also say that it would be interesting to learn more about the domestic life of the daladalamen and what they go to home to; here some will say Rizzo's work-based focus, even for men working 15-hour days, goes too far in one direction.
In his final chapter Rizzo looks at efforts through this new century to create a more ‘rational’ transport system, the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) plan which is now coming into being, one that has a major ideological buy-in from the Tanzanian state and that could fit a desperately needed improved road system. African countries today are eager to appear modern and progressive. In one important sense it is an advance. The concept of public transport associated with ujamaa gave way to a vicious and ruthless privatisation that has proved costly in more than one way. BRT at minimum returns to some notion of a public that has to be served. However, Tanzania, as John Iliffe told us long ago, is still a poor country, even if less so than in colonial times. The only way such a scheme can be financed is through the so-called private–public partnership route. To that end there is in place a large World Bank loan which loads the state with debt, and of course there are no dynamic Tanzanian capitalists who can take this on in the way World Bank researchers imagine. Instead, the process has been massively corrupted. Moreover, reform of the kind envisioned in Washington would mean eliminating small-scale capitalists and substantially reducing the number of workers. It also would affect the common run of passengers by raising fares. BRT at first sight is a classic neoliberal ploy on the African continent, but Rizzo also points to the reluctance of the Tanzanian state to play the active promotional role that it is scheduled to play. The problem is not merely neoliberalism but the reality of a state, typical in Africa, that endorses neoliberalism yet is unable actually to put it into operation fully, or even perhaps at all. The outcome of struggles around BRT or DART (Dar es Salaam BRT) and what it will be like as it evolves is still quite unclear.
Here Rizzo makes a very interesting point. Many researchers simply point the finger of blame at neoliberalism, always bad, and leave things at that, whether talking about Bangkok, Bogota or Bujumbura. However, neo or not, there is a genuine liberal impulse at play which creates contradictions. Politics in Tanzania may mostly be about competing patronage machines, but the country is a formal democracy with a relatively free press and regular elections. The government has in reality pussyfooted around reform in transport for fear of alienating the urban citizenry. The original proposed bus fares of the new system, for instance, have been substantially reduced. Moreover, the state has tended to reassert itself where it can, sometimes reversing noxious privatisations. Where neoliberalism advances it does so in an incomplete way that reflects its jostling with historic and social realities on the ground. The South African case is similar. Patrick Bond likes to claim that the African National Congress talks left but walks right; Jeremy Seekings is on target in suggesting that quite often it talks right but walks left.
This excellent study should point the way to rescuing urban studies in Africa from the dominance of arid collections publishers like and bright ideas that funders like, where one size fits all, where good case studies are often buried. The patient observation of realities on the ground that shows a realistic grasp of exploitation and a context for agency can start to create a more nuanced, human and perhaps even struggle-based way of understanding African cities. There are some such already of course. Marie Huchzermeyer (2011) has dissected Nairobi in terms of landlords and tenants. Kate Meagher (2010) has investigated carefully the lives of eastern Nigerian shoemakers, albeit not from a particularly urbanist perspective. Even sidewalk hawkers are part of complex distribution networks for food, drink or other basic commodities, if not directly employed by some kind of wholesaler. Of course unemployment and poverty are very real, but works such as Rizzo's are still the way forward to better understand these overriding phenomena, all that makes for a hard life. As the Kiswahili adage has it: chungu lakini dawa – bitter, but at least medicine.