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Transport, Transgression and
Politics in African Cities
This collection of eld-based case studies examines the role and contributions of
Africa’s informal public transport (also referred to as paratransit) to the production
of city forms and urban economies, as well as the voices, experiences and survival
tactics of its poor and stigmatised workforce. With attention to the question of what
a micro-level analysis of the organisation and politics of informal public transport
in urbanising Africa might tell us about the precarious existence and agency of
its informal workforce, it explores the political and socioeconomic conditions of
contemporary African cities, spanning from Nairobi and Dar es Salaam to Harare,
Cape Town, Kinshasa and Lagos. Mapping, analysing and comparing the everyday
experiences of informal transport operators across the continent, this book sheds
light on the multiple challenges facing Africa’s informal transport workers today,
as they negotiate the contours of city life, expand their horizons of possibility and
make the most of their time. It thus offers directions for more effective policy
response to urban public transport, which is changing fundamentally and rapidly
in light of neoliberal urban planning strategies and ‘world class’ city ambitions.
Daniel E. Agbiboa is Assistant Professor at George Mason University’s School
for Conict Analysis and Resolution, USA.
This series welcomes books which contribute to a sociological understanding of
the city.
The following list of possible topics is illustrative, not exhaustive.
• The city as a place of unequal access to good public and private services (e.g.
schools, parks, housing, jobs) and environments.
• How people respond to bad services and environments: (resignation, indi-
vidual action, collective action): urban protest, urban conict
• Urban governance: urban politics as a means of reconciling conicts; partner-
ships in theory and practice; decentralising decision-making (who benets)
• Urban infrastructure and its regulation (is private production and manage-
ment compatible with public need?)
• The impact of post-socialist transition, welfare regimes, and gender regimes
• Social divisions and stratication
• Poverty and coping
• Residential segregation and its effects
• Religion and the city
• Privacy, sociability and lifestyles
• The city and space: imagining urban space, interaction in urban space, priva-
tisation and control of urban space
• The city and public safety/personal security: personal, organisational and
state perspectives
• The sustainable city: its many meanings and steps (and obstacles) towards
realising it.
Published titles in this series:
Transport, Transgression and Politics in African Cities
The Rhythm of Chaos
Edited by Daniel E. Agbiboa
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/sociology/
series/ASHSER1347
Cities and Society
Series editor:
Chris Pickvance, Professor of Urban Studies University
of Kent, UK
Transport, Transgression
and Politics in African
Cities
The Rhythm of Chaos
Edited by Daniel E. Agbiboa
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Daniel E. Agbiboa; individual
chapters, the contributors
The right of Daniel E. Agbiboa to be identied as the author of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identication and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Agbiboa, Daniel E. (Daniel Egiegba), 1985– editor.
Title: Transport, transgression and politics in African cities :
the rhythm of chaos / edited by Daniel E. Agbiboa.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series:
Cities and society | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identiers: LCCN 2018021557 | ISBN 9780815377375 (hbk) | ISBN
9781351234221 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Urban transportation—Social aspects—Africa. |
Informal sector (Economics)—Africa. | Urbanization—Africa. |
Sociology, Urban—Africa.
Classication: LCC HE311 .A4 T73 2019 | DDC 388.4096—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021557
ISBN: 978-0-815-37737-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-23422-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
In memory of
ABDUL RAUFU MUSTAPHA
List of gures ix
List of tables x
Notes on the contributors xi
Introduction: transport, transgression and politics
in African cities 1
DANIEL E. AGBIBOA
PAR T I
Historical perspectives 17
1 “Taxi Pirates”: a comparative history of informal transport
in Nairobi and Kinshasa, 1960s–2000s 19
ROBERT HEINZE
PART II
Power, politics and patronage 41
2 Stomach infrastructure: informal transport, electoral
politics and the precariousness of patronage in Lagos 43
DANIEL E. AGBIBOA
3 Informal transport, politics and power in Harare 60
DAVISON MUCHADENYIKA
PART III
(Auto)mobility and place-making 79
4 Place ballet in a South African minibus taxi rank 81
BRADLEY RINK
Contents
viii Contents
5 Interfered rhythms, navigating mobilities: Chinese
migrants on the roads in Lagos, Nigeria 99
ALLEN HAI XIAO
PART IV
Pathways: social network and state law 119
6 Practices, positions and power relations: pathways of
transport workers in the eld of motorcycle-taxi services
in Dar es Salaam 121
DANIEL EHEBRECHT AND BARBARA LENZ
7 State law as a means of resistance: okada riders versus
the Lagos State government 147
DANIEL E. AGBIBOA
Conclusion: the rhythm of chaos 172
DANIEL E. AGBIBOA
Index 180
5.1 Map of Chinese residence in Lagos, courtesy of Talia Ye Tao 104
6.1 Self-employment of motorcycle-taxi drivers and capital-labour
relations 127
6.2 Possible phases of social uplift of motorcycle-taxi drivers 129
6.3 Motorcycle-taxi queuing system in Dar es Salaam 138
7.1 Okada riders waiting for passengers 151
7.2 Temporal restriction of okada riders 158
Figures
1.1 KBS buses in Nairobi 21
1.2 TCL/SOTRAZ buses in Kinshasa 22
3.1 Key public transport developments in Salisbury (1935–1980) 63
3.2 Incidental bus termini in Harare Central Business District
as of 2010 69
Tables
Daniel E. Agbiboa is Assistant Professor at the School for Conict Analysis and
Resolution at George Mason University, Arlington, Virginia USA.
Daniel Ehebrecht is doctoral researcher at the Geography Department at Hum-
boldt-Universität Berlin. He holds a Master of Arts degree in social and eco-
nomic geography and has worked as research assistant at the Institute for
Geography and at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Stud-
ies at Osnabrück University (Germany). His research interests relate to the
nexus of urbanisation, public transport and informality in Africa, with a spe-
cic focus on Tanzania and South Africa. In his Ph.D. project he investigates
the governance of motorcycle-taxi services in Dar es Salaam.
Robert Heinze is part-time lecturer at the University of Basel and an associated
researcher at the University of Bern. He nished his Ph.D. on the history of
radio in Zambia and Namibia in 2012. Since then, he has researched the history
of informal transport in Nairobi, Kinshasa, Lusaka and Bamako. His publica-
tions include “It Recharged Our Batteries”: Writing the History of the Voice of
Namibia in Journal of Namibian Studies 15 (2014), 25–62 and ‘The African
Listener’: State-Controlled Radio, Subjectivity, and Agency in Colonial and
Post-Colonial Zambia in Mano, Winston/Wendy Willems (eds.). 2017. From
Audiences to Users. Everyday Media Culture in Africa, London: Routledge.
He is currently working with Patrick Neveling on the publication of a special
issue of the Journal of Global Studies on the question of ruptures and continui-
ties in the history of global capitalism since 1945.
Barbara Lenz is Director of the DLR Institute of Transport Research in Berlin
and Professor of Transport Geography at Humboldt-Universität Berlin. Core
topics in her research on transport demand and travel behaviour in the passen-
ger and the freight sector are the implications and effects of technology use.
This includes extensive research on the interrelation of new information and
communication technologies (ICT) and travel behaviour, the use of new plat-
form-based mobility concepts, and automated driving technology from a user
perspective. Another focus of her research is public transport in Sub-Saharan
Contributors
xii Contributors
Africa and she currently leads a project on the role of informal operators in
providing public mobility options in this regional context.
Davison Muchadenyika is Research Fellow at the African Centre for Cities and
Climate System Analysis Group, University of Cape Town. Davison is an urban
planner with research interests in African cities and climate change, social
movements, housing, urban politics and governance, and international devel-
opment. He has published on these themes in journals such as Cities, Habitat
International, Urban Forum, Journal of International Development, Journal of
Southern African Studies and Development Policy Review among others.
Bradley Rink is a human geographer, focusing his research and teaching on
mobilities, urban place-making and tourism. His interest in mobilities research
and teaching is grounded in the social aspects of moving in and through cities,
and in the particular mobility strategies, moorings and challenges that emerge.
His current research project Mobilities in the Global South is concerned with
the relational aspects of people, objects and ideas in/around urban environ-
ments. His research aims to better understand mobilities and their contribution
to our understanding of relationships between urban dwellers and the cities in
which they live.
Allen Hai Xiao is Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography at the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin-Madison. He was trained in anthropology at the Chinese Uni-
versity of Hong Kong and has done extensive eldwork on Chinese migration
to Nigeria. His works have been published in Politique Africaine and the Jour-
nal of Current Chinese Affairs. Currently his interests lie in African urbanism,
mobilities, ethnicities and Yorùbá cultures.
Any âneur of the African city is probably au fait with the semiotics and mate-
riality of commercial bus services with squealing breaks, bald tires and rattling
exhaust noises emitting thick, black smokes. This transportation torture on two,
three or four wheels constitutes the mainstay of citywide transportation in Africa,
lling the ever-widening gap left by the failure of government-regulated public
transit services (Cervero & Golub, 2007; Kumar & Barrett, 2008). The poor state
of these privately owned and ostensibly ‘unregulated’ paratransit services mir-
ror the harsh working conditions of its mostly male workforce, who, like many
informal workers in Africa, lack secure income, work benets, basic health and
safety measures and legal and social protection (African Development Bank,
2013; Cervero, 2000). Despite lengthy working hours averaging something like
15 to 20 hours per day (as one minibus taxi slogan in Lagos puts it, ‘24 hours on
the road’), Africa’s informal transport workers take home meager incomes due to
the predatory culture of corruption on the road and the exacting daily demands of
transport owners (Agbiboa, 2016; Gwilliam, 2001; Rasmussen, 2012). In Nige-
ria’s city of Lagos, 99 percent of minibus taxi workers (known as danfo drivers)
suer from hypertension, a health challenge which derives from the precarious
and hazardous nature of their work (Daily Trust, 2015).
Since Walter Benjamin’s celebrated Arcades Project (1927), it has been evi-
dent that cityscapes are subjects of the gaze. The city not only constructs itself to
be seen, but also speaks to its inhabitants through what it makes them see daily,
through its visual culture. In this light, the colourful slogans etched on the mobile
bodies of paratransit services in African cities oer a window into the precari-
ous labour and radical insecurity around which the lived experience of paratransit
workers is congured (Date-Bah, 1980; Lawuyi, 1988; Soyinka, 1965). These slo-
gans exude ‘powers of enchantment and symbolization’ which enable the informal
transport worker ‘to think of his existence not in a purely politico-instrumental
way, but also as an artistic gesture and an aesthetic project open as much to action
as to meditation and contemplation’ (Mbembe, 2002: 629). The following slogans
taken from the dilapidated bodies of daladalas (minibus taxis in Dar es Salaam)
and danfos (minibus taxis in Lagos) are particularly revealing: kazi mbaya; ukiwa-
nayo (bad job, if you have one); money torture; maisha ni kuhangaika (life is suf-
fering); kula tutakula lakini tutachelewa (we’ll eat, but we’ll eat late); aiye le (life
Introduction
Transport, transgression and politics
in African cities
Daniel E. Agbiboa
2 Daniel E. Agbiboa
is hard); no time to check time; delay and danger; anything can happen; remem-
ber ur six feet (Rizzo, 2011; Agbiboa, 2017a). In his contribution to this volume,
Bradley Rink describes his sighting of a caption on a minibus taxi in Cape Town,
which reads: ‘THIS IS A TAXI! IT CAN STOP ANYWHERE, ANY TIME, ANY
PLACE.’ These words, says Rink, display ‘taxi bravado,’ but they also reveal the
active ways through which workers navigate the complicated transit landscape of
Cape Town to carve out meaningful temporalities.
The struggle for economic survival compels many informal transport work-
ers to participate in the reproduction of the transgressive system they denounce.
In particular, the automobile culture of corruption, poor remuneration and daily
harassment, combined with the extortionate powers of transport trade unions and
state agents, goads many workers into engaging in various transgressive practices
if they are to make inroads in their business of transporting. These transgressive
practices include overloading of passengers, speeding dangerously, picking up
and dropping off passengers in the middle of the road, exorbitant fares, rough
handling of passengers and feuding between rival transport unions/associations.
In the business of informal transporting in African cities, the distinction between
outlaws and those who preside over the laws are irrelevant, transgression being
the norm (Roitman, 2006). This is neatly captured in the popular characterization
of informal transport workers in Africa as being inside the system, but outside the
law (Rasmussen, 2012: 415). Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (2006: 5) have
already argued that ‘vastly lucrative returns inhere in actively sustaining zones of
ambiguity between the presence and absence of the law: returns made from con-
trolling uncertainty, terror, even life itself.’
What emerges from this ethics of transgression and ambiguity is a fetishization
of roads and transit spaces, transforming them into ‘objects of fascination and
terror and spaces of fear and desire’ (Masquelier, 2002: 831). All this coalesces to
explain the unenviable reputation of Africa’s informal transport workers as a dan-
gerous bunch of ‘thugs engaged in excessive behaviours’ (Mutongi, 2006: 568).
In his study of informal transport in Dar es Salaam, for example, Rizzo (2011:
1187) alludes to the ‘immutable discourse’ that ‘criminalizes the [daladala] work-
force and attributes the many accidents and chronic tensions of the transport sys-
tem to the hooliganism and greed of its workforce.’ This stigmatized reputation,
however, is not one that is shared by informal transport workers in Africa. For
example, Alick Munzara’s (2014: 207) study of the role of touts in the informal
transport of Zimbabwe’s city of Masvingo shows that
[m]ost of the touts interviewed expressed disheartenment over the popular
public perception that touts were a rowdy lot who survived through harassing
and coercing passengers to board specic vehicles. Some of them indicated
that they were respected members of society who were simply fending for
their children through honest means (touting).
In any case, the widespread stigmatization of not just informal transport workers
but the entire informal transport sector appears to mirror the criminalization of the
Introduction 3
state in Africa (Bayart, 1993), especially the discursive formations that emphasize
its ineffectiveness, rapacity and rogue-like practices (Goodfellow, 2015).
Segueing from this, as a principle of modernity, public transport is often asso-
ciated with lived experiences of freedom, autonomy, liberty and progress (Cress-
well, 1993; Hansen, 2006: 188; Lomasky, 1997). As Sarah S. Jain (2005: 189)
argues, ‘the materialities of cars, marketing and political values of individuated
liberty nest within one another.’ Yet for the vast majority of urban dwellers in
Africa, (auto)mobility represents an ‘emotional, relational, and social phenom-
enon captured in the complexities, contradictions and messiness of their everyday
realities’ (Nyamnjoh, 2013: 653). Owning a vehicle in Africa is a key marker of
wealth, power and privilege and, as such, a key variable in unequal power rela-
tions and class politics in urban society. As Olatunde Lawuyi (1988: 5) argues,
‘the travellers themselves know that, if angered, the driver may refuse to take
them to their destinations, for a certain power inheres in the owner’s control of the
vehicle and in a sense makes him a privileged citizen.’
Although informal transport services ll a critical void in African cities, pro-
viding easy maneuverability and demand-responsiveness, they also contribute
to urban insecurity through trafc congestion, increasing road accidents, air and
noise pollution, and violent skirmishes among its rag-tag workers that are as much
a form of self-regulation as a symptom of its failure (Dugard, 2001; Albert, 2007;
LeBas, 2013). One report estimates that Africa has fewer than three percent of
the world’s motor vehicles, but experiences 11 percent of global road fatalities
(Stockholm Environment Institute, 2013: 2). In Nairobi alone, deaths from the
matatus (minibus taxis) account for an estimated 95 percent of car-related acci-
dents (Mutongi, 2006: 550). In many African cities, a rush-hour commuter can
take up to three hours to cover 15 kilometers because of their ‘clogged streets,’
which, according to Balaker and Staley (2006: 4), ‘sap the strength from the circu-
latory system of urban life.’ These negative urban externalities most directly and
most disproportionately affect ordinary Africans, many of whom are locked into a
permanent cycle of ‘transport poverty’ (UN-Habitat, 2013).
In September 2015, leaders from around the world adopted the 2030 Agenda
for Sustainable Development. This new agenda included a set of 17 Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, ght inequality and injustice and
tackle climate change by 2030. In particular SDG 11 on sustainable cities and com-
munities puts responsibility on UN member states to make cities and urban areas
inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. Subsection 11.2 emphasizes the mandates
of states to ensure safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems for
all. After all, ‘mobility creates prosperity’ (Balaker & Staley, 2006: 20). Grounded
in the ‘rationality of Western modernity and development’ (Watson, 2007), city
governments in Africa are increasingly embracing public-private partnerships
(Myers, 2010) aimed at ‘formalising’ the informal transport sector as part of a
push towards becoming a ‘world class African city’ (Sihlongonyane, 2015). This
elite-driven ‘modernizing’ ambitions adheres to a historical pattern of seeing infor-
mal transport nay urban informality in Africa as a problem to be xed by govern-
ment regulation (Klopp, 2012; Venter, 2013: 114; Goodfellow, 2015; Heinze, this
4 Daniel E. Agbiboa
volume). Yet, as AbdouMaliq Simone (2010: 3) argues, ‘while the absence of regu-
lation is commonly seen as a bad thing, one must rst start from the understanding
that no form of regulation can keep the city “in line”.’ Mbembe and Nutall (2004:
353) have already criticized ways of seeing African cities that are still dominated
by ‘the meta-narrative of urbanization, modernisation and crisis . . . Forgetting that
the city always also operates as a site of fantasy, desire, and imagination.’ Accord-
ing to this view, African city’s fabric has been seen as ‘a structure in need of radical
transformation and only rarely as an expression of an aesthetic vision’ (Mbembe &
Nutall, 2004: 353). This volume therefore takes seriously Simone’s (2010) argu-
ment that urban life in Africa should not be imagined as ‘a series of policies gone
wrong.’ Instead, agency and determination by urban Africans to ‘nd their own
way’ and ‘the resourcefulness’ and ‘astute capacity’ on which they draw hold the
keys to understanding and navigating urban society in Africa.
In recent years, major cities in Africa, from Lagos to Johannesburg and Dar es
Salaam, have pursued bus rapid transit (BRT)1 systems in the quest for a safer,
efcient, cost-effective and sustainable solution to the problem of urban public
transport (Venter, 2013; World Bank, 2017; Rizzo, 2014). Whatever the merits of
the BRTs, and there are several (Scruggs, 2017; World Bank, 2017), their coming
has spotlighted the struggles of Africa’s informal (transport) workers for urban
inclusion and recognition (Myers, 2010), conceived here a la Judith Butler (2004:
2) as ‘a site of power by which the human is differentially produced.’ In Lagos,
for example, initial plans to restructure key public transport routes and introduce
a BRT system were complicated by the opposition of the National Union of Road
Transport Workers (NURTW), which feared that it would be forced out of the
market if bus routes were restructured and sold off to the highest bidder (Cheese-
man & de Gramont, 2017: 472; Agbiboa, this volume). In Dar es Salaam, the
recent rapid growth of BRT systems and the vested interests of the actors pro-
moting them have given rise to ‘tensions over the inclusion of the current public
transport workforce, employment destruction, displacement of current paratransit
operators, compensation and the affordability of the new service’ (Rizzo, 2014:
249). Likewise, in South Africa, tensions have arisen amidst the rollout of BRTs
in cities like Johannesburg and Cape Town (Rink, this volume).
Why (informal) transport matters
Until now, the study of informal transport systems in Africa has attracted scant
attention in the eld of urban studies. Studies that exist are limited to a few authors
(Mutongi, 2017; Rizzo, 2017; Hart, 2016; Khayesi et al., 2015; Behrens et al.,
2016) and are generally the result of country- or city-specic research, which lim-
its the lessons that can be drawn on a more regional level. For a public sector that
impacts on the everyday lives and livelihoods of millions of Africans, especially
those eking out a living on the margins, it is striking how little comparative study
has been done to understand and explain the organization and politics of paratran-
sit services, especially how they ceaselessly (re) constitute space, place, mobility
and stillness in African cities (Rink, this volume; Xiao, this volume). The dearth
Introduction 5
of comparative data on informal transport underscores the extent of invisibility of
its workforce in urban studies, especially their multiplex interactions with com-
muters, politicians and street-level bureaucrats. Yet one could think of several
reasons why the study of ‘automobile lives’ (Hart, 2016) can enhance our tenuous
grasp of the ‘simultaneous promise, threat, and resource’ of city life in Africa,
especially its capacity to provoke various relations (Simone, 2010: 3).
Firstly, informal transport is the mode of the poor in Africa, in many cases cap-
turing more than 80 percent of urban mobility needs (Howe & Bryceson, 2000;
Pirie, 2013). In many African cities, certainly the ones treated in this volume,
walking is the primary source of transport for lower-income people with very
limited car use while the opposite pertains for higher-income groups. While a
variety of informal transport services are available (including minibus, motorcy-
cle and tricycle taxis), they do not appeal to higher income groups because of their
insecurity and unreliability (Richardson & Luke, 2011). According to one study,
99 out of 100 households in Africa’s poorest cities do not own or have access to
a private car, thus they are entirely dependent on informal transport services for
reaching jobs, markets, medical clinics and other destinations (Cervero, 2000). In
fact, the average household in African cities can just afford one round trip daily,
and the poor often not even that (Kumar & Barrett, 2008; Sietchiping et al., 2012).
Secondly, informal transport provides opportunities for interaction and eco-
nomic survival, shaping the patterns of the circulation of people, resources and
information in urban space (Mutongi, 2006; Rizzo, 2011). The vehicles them-
selves, as well as the transit spaces they operate from (i.e. the bus stations, junc-
tions and roads), do not simply express social and economic relations but rather
shapes and produces them (Quayson, 2014); they are in effect ‘meeting points’
(Nyamnjoh & Brudvig, 2014) for daily conversations in which humour alternates
with pathos and dreams coexist with existential angst – angst about everyday cor-
ruption, dysfunctional services, hard work and low pay, poverty and inequality.
Sarah Jain (2005: 188) had it right when she argued that, ‘the car . . . has been
at least as much about dening social relations as it has been about transporting
people and goods.’
Thirdly, informal public transport provides a window onto many socioeconomic
and political facets of contemporary Africa. They are associated, for instance,
with ‘issues of organized crime, indigenous entrepreneurship and informal econo-
mies, transition to democracy and to free market economies, class and respect-
ability, popular culture, globalization and rural-urban migration’ (Mutongi, 2006:
550; Heinze, this volume). Fourthly, workers and their unions are key players in
Africa’s party politics, often shaping the outcome of elections (Fourchard, 2010;
Bahre, 2014; Albert, 2007; Goodfellow, 2015; Agbiboa, this volume; Muchade-
nyika, this volume). Lastly, and this is crucial, despite the chaos that is commonly
associated with informal transport provisions in African cities (Rasmussen, 2012;
Koolhaas, 2001), there is a ‘logic of practice’ (Khayesi et al., 2015) that organ-
izes the sector and keeps the city ‘on the go’ (Hart, 2016). In other words, African
cities do work amidst the chaos (Simone, 2005; Rasmussen, 2012), and we gain
a better understanding of African cities by studying how an apparently chaotic
6 Daniel E. Agbiboa
sector like informal transport ‘acquires a structure of intelligibility and intention-
ality’ (Hansen & Verkaaik, 2009: 12; see also Rasmussen, 2012).
The chapters in this volume do just this, going beyond de-contextualized nar-
ratives of Africa’s informal transport as an ‘unregulated’ sector to uncover its
‘simulacra of social order’ (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2006: 5). Robert Heinze’s con-
tribution to this volume, for example, shows how the maa-like Mungiki move-
ment in Nairobi plays a central role in organising, regulating and stabilizing labour
relations in the transgressive matatu sector. Similarly, Muchadenyika’s contribu-
tion sheds light on how ‘power dynamics and political differences’ regulate infor-
mal transport operations in Zimbabwe’s capital city of Harare. In both instances,
disorder in the practice of informal transport ‘symbolizes both danger and power’;
while ‘it spoils pattern, it also provides the material of pattern’ (Douglas, 1996:
26). This ‘potency of disorder’ is critical for navigating an informal transport sec-
tor that ‘swings in tune with its proximity to disorder’ (Vigh, 2009: 421).
What this volume is about
This volume explores the organization and politics of informal transport in Afri-
can cities. It does this from three fundamental perspectives. Firstly, it considers
informal transport as a contested eld of relations between state (formal) and non-
state (informal) actors with vested interests. Secondly, it engages informal trans-
port as a primary site of transgressive practices which serves as context – a terrain
of action and meaning. Thirdly, it interrogates the multiple spaces of maneuver
and forms of agency (individual and collective) through which Africa’s informal
transport workers get by and get ahead in a business speckled by unpredictability,
insecurity and chronic uncertainty. Through these interconnected perspectives,
the volume recongures popular narratives of disempowerment and chaos that
tend to silence the voices, lived experiences and interventions of informal trans-
port workers, as well as their hybrid spaces of autonomy, sociality and political
expectation. The volume presents informal transport as a transgressive sector,
which ‘encompasses systems of employment, provisioning and meaning-making
of impressive magnitude and relentless resilience’ (Guyer, 2002: ix).
In turn, the above perspectives pivot on three prevailing theoretical debates.
The rst relates to how we theorise the ‘public sphere’ in African cities. The
chapters in this volume canvass an understanding of the urban public sphere as
a multiplicity of publics with separate but overlapping logics (Mustapha, 2012;
Mbembe, 2001), going beyond Peter Ekeh’s (1975) theorization of a binary oppo-
sition between the ‘primordial’ and ‘civic’ publics in postcolonial Africa. The sec-
ond debate concerns the meaning of informality. For years, the ‘informal’ domain
was understood as consisting of economic activities that exist outside of, or cir-
cumvent, state regulation (Castells & Portes, 1989). In recent decades, however,
a number of scholars have challenged this received wisdom, arguing that the fact
that informal activities lie outside state regulation does not make them unregu-
lated. On the contrary, relations in the informal sector are ‘alternatively regulated’
through a multiplicity of rules, institutions and actors beyond the state (Lindell,
Introduction 7
2010; Meagher, 2011; Roitman, 2006). Thus, the formal and the informal spheres
constantly work together to produce city forms and urban economies in Africa.
Pressing this view further, Simone (2006: 357) argues that power in African cit-
ies is increasingly a product of ‘the capacity to transgress spatial and conceptual
boundaries, erasing clear distinctions between private and public, territorial bor-
ders, exclusion and inclusion, remunerated and compelled labour’ (my emphasis).
In light of the above, Africa’s informal transport is conceived in this volume
as a uid and manipulable system where formal (state) and informal (non-state)
actors ‘cooperate and compete in numerous interactions’ (Abrahamsen & Wil-
liams, 2008: 547–548). The contributions to this volume puts less emphasis on
the formal/informal divide and more on how ‘politics and crime, legitimate and
illegitimate agency, endlessly redene each other’ (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2006:
11). Several chapters in this volume are concerned with how the (in)actions of
informal transport workers, transport associations and street-level bureaucrats
constantly transgress normative binaries of the state and the non-state, the legal
and the illegal, the public and the private, and the social and the personal (Ras-
mussen, 2012; Agbiboa, 2016; Roitman, 2006; Lindell, 2008; Gandy, 2006). Such
spatial transgression is facilitated by the ‘generalised informal functioning’ of the
state itself (Blundo & Olivier de Sardan, 2006), which paves the way for non-
state interventions, but also invite mediation and brokerage between formal and
informal actors (Rasmussen, 2012: 416). In this volume, the emphasis is on what
Achille Mbembe (2001: 110) describes as ‘the dynamics of domesticity and famil-
iarity which inscribes the dominant and the dominated within the same episteme.’
Lastly, the volume sheds light on the theorized shift from government to
governance in African cities, whereby the state is increasingly hollowed out as
functions are dispersed to supranational entities, localities and non-state actors
(Davies, 2008; Fergusson, 2006). Governance is understood as the outcome of
complex negotiations between various actors, groups and forces (Rakodi, 2002).
Across urban Africa, understanding governance processes requires a critical focus
on the ‘morass of complex networks and arenas within which power dynamics are
expressed and deployed’ (Healey, 2000: 919), as well as ‘bringing these multiple
networks and arenas of urban governance into view so that more ne-grained
critical research can be conducted’ (Pieterse, 2005: 142). Negotiating this urban
complex necessitates uency in the ‘language of stateness’ (Hansen & Stepputat,
2001), one that is neither hegemonic nor subaltern but a hybrid mix of both (Jaffe,
2013). Such ‘hybrid governance’ (Meagher, 2014) is evident in the organization
of informal modes of transport, where workers and unions exist to ll key func-
tional gaps owing to the lack of regulatory capacity on the part of the govern-
ment (Kumar & Barrett, 2008; Cervero, 2000). For example, across urban Africa,
transport trade unions play a ‘frontier’ role in tax collection (Cheeseman & de
Gramont, 2017). These unions have displayed a remarkable capacity to mobilize
resistance when state policies are perceived as damaging to their interests, creat-
ing a compelling basis for negotiation (Agbiboa, this volume; Heinze, this vol-
ume). In this context, the government becomes a ‘contingent development’ that
undergoes constant reconguration (MacLeavy & Harrison, 2010: 1038).
8 Daniel E. Agbiboa
Overview of chapters
Following this introduction, the volume is organized into four main parts com-
prising a total of seven chapters. The chapters are written by experts with exten-
sive eld experience in, and knowledge of, six major cities across Sub-Saharan
Africa: West Africa (Lagos, Nigeria), East Africa (Nairobi, Kenya; Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania), Central Africa (Kinshasa, DR Congo) and Southern Africa (Harare,
Zimbabwe; Cape Town, South Africa). The volume sheds light on similar and
divergent patterns in the provision and regulation of Africa’s informal transport
(for example, minibus vs. motorcycle taxis, and different degrees of entanglement
with local politics) and why these patterns occur. This breaks down the assump-
tion of a common pattern of informal transport provision among African cities,
and reveals Africa’s informal transport sector as hardly monolithic. Several chap-
ters in this volume draw out the various intricacies of informal transport in Africa,
especially the everyday challenges facing workers, how they socially navigate
these challenges, and ‘the usually ambivalent results they produce for themselves
by being able to use the city in many different ways’ (Simone, 2010: 2).
_____________
Part I focuses analytic attention on the longue durée of informal transport in urban
Africa, providing a comparative historical perspective that is frequently lacking
in many de-historicized studies of informal transport in Africa (notable excep-
tions include Mutongi, 2017; Rizzo, 2017). In chapter 1, the lone chapter in this
part, historian Robert Heinze presents a comparative history of two African cities
(1960s–2000s), namely Nairobi and Kinshasa, notorious for the way their infor-
mal transport systems are regulated by different actors. It looks at how small pri-
vate (often unlicensed) transport operators took over public transport in the 1950s
and 1960s, their efforts at self-regulating and the attempts by informal workers
to organise. It traces problems plaguing the industry – and often attributed to
the (mostly) young men working in the sector – back to colonial urban plan-
ning, which provided few avenues for Africans to move around in the city. The
further development of the industry, it argues, has been hampered by govern-
ment interference, often for political reasons and/or to participate in skimming off
prots from the sector. The chapter is based on documents from unions, NGO and
government reports, newspaper articles and interviews with informal transport
workers from Nairobi and Kinshasa. A focus on historical processuality high-
lights the dynamics of the informal transport sector’s development, which lie in
the interactions between city administrations, workers’ organizations and workers
themselves. Tracing the history of the industry and workers’ struggles through the
last half-century thus provides us with new perspectives on the history of neolib-
eralism, the African city and labour.
_____________
Part II, which consists of chapters 2 and 3, revolves around the thematic con-
cern of power dynamics and patronage politics in the management and control
Introduction 9
of informal transport in Lagos and Harare. Historically, Lagos has suffered an
inadequately coordinated transport network and, until 2007, was the largest city
in the world without any form of state-organized mass transit. Instead, the mil-
lions of passengers seeking to traverse the megacity on a daily basis were served
by 83,000 privately owned minibuses known as danfos (Cheeseman & de Gra-
mont, 2017: 471). In chapter 2, Daniel E. Agbiboa draws on ethnographic evi-
dence gathered ‘hanging out’ on the streets of Lagos to explore the intricacies of
violent extortion, patronage and electoral politics in motor parks, bus terminals,
roadsides and junctions. Serving as strategic entry and exit points in the city, these
transit spaces represent a uid urban environment where miscreants, marauders,
beggars, police and touts converge to exploit all sorts of money-making opportu-
nities, including the collection of illegal levies from motorists, load carriers and
building contractors. Agbiboa’s chapter contributes to our understanding of the
micropolitics of informal transport in African cities through a study of the inuen-
tial roles played by the politicized and violent National Union of Road Transport
Workers (NURTW) and their army of loyal foot soldiers (agberos), whose task
it is to assure that transport workers honour their dues to the unions. Elections in
Lagos, as in many African cities, are times of radical uncertainties that lay bare the
precarious positionality and ‘incompleteness’ (Nyamnjoh, 2017) of a multiplicity
of transport workers who struggle to remain relevant and inuential. Loyalties
shift and mutate and insecurity increases. During electoral periods, the agberos
are typically recruited by urban ‘Big Men’ – the union headship, local politicians
and party ofcials – for the purpose of attacking rivaling political candidates,
coercing members of the public, rigging elections and providing security to their
patrons. Agbiboa’s chapter provides us with rare knowledge about the precarious-
ness of such micropolitics, built on instrumental relations of mutual dependency
and insecurities between patrons and clients.
In chapter 3, Davison Muchadenyika draws on eld research to explore the pol-
itics and power dynamics that congures and destabilizes the operationalization
of informal transport in the city of Harare. The chapter argues that informal public
transport provides an important constituency and resource for political opponents
in Harare through the instrumentality of the city’s informal transport workers
as ‘militia’ to instill fear and garner political support. Muchadenyika’s chapter
sheds light on how oppositional party politics frequently shape the organization
of informal transport in Africa, presenting the informal transport sector in Harare
as ‘mainly a political struggle between the ruling and the opposition party.’ Much
like the agberos in Lagos, Muchadenyika’s contribution shows how a politically
backed ‘maa’ (chipangano) arrogated control of the commuter omnibuses and
termini in Harare, overseeing extreme forms of extortion rackets. The chapter
reveals Harare’s informal transport as ‘a deeply political terrain where actors dis-
played power through violence, extortion and force.’
_____________
Part III, which consists of chapters 4 and 5, explores the dynamics of rhythm
and place-making in informal transport in Cape Town and Lagos. Urban transit
10 Daniel E. Agbiboa
spaces (i.e. bus stations, motor parks and junctions) in Africa are not only primary
sites of political and socioeconomic activities, but also interactive and temporal
places of ows, stillness, conict and conuence. Minibus taxis are a ubiquitous
and popular form of public transportation in South Africa whose movements are
distinguished by their uidity, exibility and the relative lack of traditional moor-
ings (Hannam, Sheller & Urry, 2006) that mediate other forms of public transpor-
tation. The temporalities and operating practices of minibus taxis in Cape Town
require that the vehicles and their drivers wait for passenger demand to re-activate
their mobility from a stand-by mode to an active one. In the moments before re-
activation, drivers and their vehicles are suspended in an animated stillness that
is not neutral, but rather characterized by choreographed rhythms and dynamic
place-making. This animated stillness takes place in taxi ranks that are managed
and mediated by taxi bosses, passenger ows and driver intentions, amongst oth-
ers. In chapter 4, Bradley Rink reclaims the analytic power of David Seamon’s
(1979) concept of ‘place ballet’ to explain the complex nature of movement and
stillness in Cape Town’s Mowbray taxi rank. Through an ethnographic study of
this vibrant mobility interchange, Rink explains the complicated place ballet that
results from the unique mobility practice of minibus taxi transportation services in
South Africa. At the same time, this chapter highlights the roles and subjectivities
of informal transport workers amongst others in the taxi rank who serve as central
characters in the place ballet. Such practices produce a unique space of mobil-
ity and heterotopic alliances that reveals the complex nature of the moments in
between movement and stillness and the role of informal workers amongst others
in the act of place-making, while it also illuminates the precariousness of exist-
ence and social agency of its informal workforce.
In chapter 5 Allen Hai Xiao provides a nuanced ethnographic account of
Chinese migrants’ automobilities on the complicated roads of Lagos. Drawing
on Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis theory, Xiao explains how a particular form of
rhythm – interruption – can be understood in relation to specicities of mobili-
ties and the city on which rhythm is imprinted. In examining rhythms of mobil-
ity, much attention has been paid to repetition and regularity of rhythms, while
very little empirical research engages with irregular intervals in the rhythm,
which, as Xiao argues, epitomizes unequal production and uneven distribution
of power within a particular situation. Xiao’s focus on the automobilities of Chi-
nese migrants in Lagos advances our scant knowledge of the relationship between
automobilities and the particular social roles which migrants (i.e. the Chinese)
increasingly play in African cities. Xiao grounds these relations in the spontane-
ous interactions between Chinese migrants and corrupt policemen on the roads of
Lagos. The chapter depicts roads as a complex space in which Nigerians, Chinese
and other mediators interact with each other and negotiate their urban mobilities.
_____________
Part IV, which consists of chapters 6 and 7, revolves around the pathways of
motorcycle-taxi workers in Dar es Salaam and Lagos, especially how they lever-
age social networks and state laws to reclaim their ‘right to the city’ and insert
Introduction 11
themselves within political and socioeconomic niches of urban society. Unlike
the business of minibus taxi considered so far, the practice of motorcycle taxi is
particularly appealing to less resourceful young men in urban Africa because it
requests relatively little starting capital and maintenance costs, provides a daily
income that meets their priority of survival and gives an amount of personal free-
dom. In Lagos, for example, okada riders (as they are popularly known) pride
themselves in been their own bosses; they decide themselves when they want to
work and their daily takings, if not always much, is theirs to keep. For many youth
in urban Africa, motorcycle taxi business is a self-help opportunity that allevi-
ates the pressing livelihood challenges of city life and mobility needs. Thus, the
motorcycle taxi business signal ‘the intersection of youth social agency, responses
to unemployment, and social transformation’ (Ismail, 2016: 143).
In chapter 6, Daniel Ehebrecht and Barbara Lenz are concerned with the tactics
and strategies employed by motorcycle taxi workers in the capital city of Dar es
Salaam to navigate through the contested ‘eld’ of public transporting and gain
access to ‘social capital’ critical for ‘social uplift.’ For in the often zero-sum poli-
tics of patrimonialism in urban Africa, ‘woe betide the man who knows no one,
either directly or indirectly’ (Olivier de Sardan, 1999: 41). Using insights from in-
depth eldwork in Dar es Salaam (2015 and 2016), the chapter shows how infor-
mal motorcycle-taxi workers ‘enter the profession, gain a position, and struggle
for continued participation, social uplift and reduction of social insecurity against
a background of ever-changing social structures.’ Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s
theory of social practice, Ehebrecht and Lenz systematically guides us through the
hopes, pathways, conditions of labour and struggles of Dar es Salaam’s motorcy-
cle-taxi workers as they ply their trade. Dar es Salaam’s ‘motorcycle-taxi eld’ is
theorized à la Bourdieu as a relational space of constant struggle between various
actors (including workers and owners, unionists and state agents) who compete
within it for status and power. Ehebrecht and Lenz’s chapter brings to light the
complex social networks that underpin the everyday efforts of Dar es Salaam’s
motorcycle taxi workers to get by in an urban life where anything can happen.
Since 1999, Lagos has attracted international attention not for its chaos but
instead as a possible model of effective urban transformation and city govern-
ance in Africa. Buoyant views of Lagos’ transformation conceals a rising tide
of vulnerable and increasingly disaffected labour that presents more of a threat
than an opportunity. A case in point is the corrupt and violent manner in which
the Lagos State Road Trafc Law was reworked by the state to restrict the space
and mobility of informal transport workers in the name of making Lagos a ‘World
Class’ megacity (Agbiboa, 2017b). In chapter 7, Daniel E. Agbiboa draws on in-
depth interviews and extensive analysis of original and mostly unpublished court
records (afdavits and counter-afdavits) to explore how an informal union of
commercial motorcyclists (okada riders) are appealing to state laws as weapons of
resistance against so-called urban renewal policies that threaten their ‘right to the
city,’ especially their right to appropriate space and to be part of decision-making
processes that affects their everyday survival. Such ‘legalism from below’ con-
stitutes a departure from the popular narratives of subaltern resistance as ‘quiet
12 Daniel E. Agbiboa
encroachments,’ which are non-collective, unassuming and illegal in nature. Thus,
Agbiboa’s chapter illuminates our understanding of how informal transport work-
ers exercise agency as they attempt to intervene in unequal processes of neoliberal
urban megaprojects.
Note
1 BRT is ‘a high-quality bus-based transport system that delivers fast, comfortable and
cost-effective urban mobility through the provision of segregated right-of-way infra-
structure, rapid and frequent operations, and excellence in marketing and customer ser-
vice’ (Wright & Hook, 2006: 20).
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16 Daniel E. Agbiboa
Roitman, J. (2006). The Ethics of Illegality in the Chad Basin. In J. Comaroff and J. L.
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